Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Heckathorne turned out to be a terrible embarrassment for Bollinger. His mercurial temper and cruel penchant for jokes at the expense of Africans, insulting them in public restaurants and once threatening a waiter with a loaded pistol, drew attention—and anger. His involvement with pilots of Seven Seas Airlines soon branded Heckathorne—and General Aircraft—as CIA. By the time Montgomery flew Heckathorne to Ethiopia allegedly as part of General Aircraft’s marketing, their reputation had preceded them. African U.N. troops stationed at Addis Ababa’s airport searched and impounded their Courier. Montgomery and Heckathorne were kept prisoners for three days before being expelled with the Courier.

  Trips to other East African capitals produced less spectacular but similar results. No one was buying. Bollinger’s dream of using Washington to establish an African market for Couriers had turned into a nightmare: The CIA affiliation made General Aircraft politically untouchable.

  Still, despite these commercial failures, Montgomery continued to use the notorious Katanga province as his base of operations in Africa. He remained with Heckathorne, even after he found him snapping pictures of company documents with a miniature camera.† Together, they visited Moise Tshombe. Montgomery struck up a warm personal friendship with the dictator, a closeness he would speak proudly of for years.44 But by August Tshombe’s days were numbered. The Kennedy administration was keeping a close watch on the newly independent African governments and their sensitivity to issues of national sovereignty. The administration concluded that it had no choice but to pressure its NATO allies to abandon Belgium’s secessionist Katanga and back a new central government in Leopoldville. In that climate, Montgomery’s presence in Katanga became untenable. Finally, in August, Bollinger ordered Montgomery to return to the United States.

  Arriving home, Montgomery found his services immediately requested by SIL’s Robert Schneider, Cam’s top liaison with the government. Schneider wanted Montgomery’s help for JAARS’s own Helio Courier program, then gearing up for Brazil and Southeast Asia. “If I don’t have to participate, I would prefer not to,” Montgomery wrote Bollinger.45 Bollinger obliged, sending Montgomery to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida on another Helio assignment.

  Eglin was then exploding with activity. It was now the CIA’s special air-warfare center, a massive CIA-directed operation using secret air force units. These same units were involved in support missions for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Montgomery’s work at the base under a secret Helio contract with the air force was merely one cog in a vast clandestine machine directed by a few men in Washington. In just a little over a year, with the crashing of President Eisenhower’s hopes for a successful summit and his eclipse by the rise of John F. Kennedy, these men finally had come to almost absolute power over the nation’s de facto foreign policy.

  And they had a use for missionaries.

  In March 1961, Cameron Townsend’s and Lynn Bollinger’s names were circulating around the Pentagon among counterinsurgency experts. Bollinger had proposed using JAARS’s Peruvian Amazon operation as a model for an expanded foreign-aid program in transportation and communications in Africa: “The JAARS service pattern makes a tremendous contribution,” he noted in a memo to the International Cooperation Administration, “to the political stability and communication network which must exist as a foundation for the civilization of these tribal groups.” Bollinger went on to describe Cameron Townsend.

  Bollinger’s memorandum was boosted in the Pentagon by a companion memorandum prepared by Colonel Fletcher Prouty, entitled “Project Eagle—A Plan for the Development of the Continent of Africa.”

  Prouty’s scheme for development, although focusing exclusively on aviation, was ambitious. Prouty envisioned using the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) to link U.S. embassies across Africa. The MATS network would provide a continent-wide framework for local governments to develop national and regional air transportation services. These services would include, of course, STOL (short take-off and landing) aircraft like the Helio Courier. “Because most of these countries have almost no road or railroad system, they have little national unity,” he wrote. STOLs would enable government officials to travel more widely, incorporate local personnel into the maintenance network, and break down isolation. “It [Project Eagle] will also phase in airfield and air facilities development sufficient to accommodate larger aircraft.” What kind? Commercial airlines. And military aircraft. Here was the final phase of the program: “the establishment of an Air Force. For most of these countries an Air Transport Service sufficient to meet troop carrier and perhaps paratroop requirements should be adequate to assure internal security.”46

  If Prouty’s proposal had only envisioned U.S. control over an entire continent’s future transportation and communication, it would have been audacious. But that was just part of a grand theory of economic and political development formulated most articulately by a member of the Rockefeller Brothers Special Studies Panel, Walt Whitman Rostow.

  It was Rostow who had come up with Kennedy’s campaign phrase, “Let’s get the country moving again.” Having followed McGeorge Bundy to the White House as his deputy, Rostow was also author of the administration’s bible on Third World national developments, The Stages of Economic Growth. He made counterinsurgency seem profound, reasonable, and eminently just. Prouty’s Project Eagle fit right in to the holy war against insurgents. The idea was to prevent them from interfering with the “nation-building” process of economic development offered by Berle’s Modern American Corporation and its “People’s Capitalism.”

  Prouty and Bollinger’s proposals went directly to the NSC’s Special Group. There was a certain historical continuity, therefore, in the fact that the man who authorized their distribution was Edward Lansdale, Nelson Rockefeller’s clandestine associate in Southeast Asian propaganda activities. Lansdale was Prouty’s new superior.

  Actually, he and Prouty were assigned to the new counterinsurgency office headed up by the Defense Department’s representative to the Special Group, Deputy Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, one of the twenty-six men on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund panels who took top positions in the Kennedy administration.47

  Beyond Rostow, Gilpatric, and other members of the Special Group, there was no one to advise the young president on the wisdom and efficacy of such covert operations as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA’s secret war in Indochina, Project Eagle, or Lumumba’s murder.

  According to members of his staff, news of Lumumba’s murder stunned Kennedy. He did not know that the CIA had plotted for Lumumba’s death or that Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon had been involved in the decision to get rid of him.

  Ignorant of these machinations, the new president, faced with rapidly evolving insurgences in the Third World, decided to focus on Cuba, where, during the campaign, he had pledged to do something about communism. But he was growing apprehensive about the CIA’s invasion plan. The CIA’s February offensive against a new military regime in Laos had broken up under fire on the Plain of Jars, and the CIA’s secret army had been smashed.

  Could the CIA also be wrong about the Cuban operation?

  *The top long-range planning assistant to the Army Chief of Staff at that time was Nelson Rockefeller’s former counterinsurgency aide from the CIA, Colonel William Kintner.

  *Cam’s biographers explained Montgomery’s new assignment by claiming that “his support had been dropping,” with Cam noting regretfully that “I don’t blame him for asking for a leave. But it’s a hard blow when a partner, on whom you’ve depended for years, leaves you.” Quoted in James Hefley and Marti Hefley, Uncle Cam (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1974), p. 223.

  According to this 1971 account, Cam learned of Montgomery’s desire to work for Helio sometime after May 1961, when Cam returned to Peru from his visit to Brazil. Thus when Montgomery first flew to Katanga in March 1961, he was still officially serving as JAARS’s chief pilot even though he was on the CIA’s payroll. However, in 1977, a year after the CIA’s involvement
with missionaries and its plot to murder Lumumba became public knowledge through U.S. Senate hearings, JAARS’s attorney sought to dispel the impression of overlapping ties. He claimed that Montgomery took his leave at least three months earlier, on February 27, 1961. Whichever the case, Montgomery would remain JAARS’s superintendent and chief pilot (on leave) for well over another year, not officially resigning until March 15, 1962.

  *The United Nations Commission of Inquiry placed the blame on Katanga officials Tshombe, Munongo, and Jean-Baptiste Kibwe, Tshombe’s finance minister. Reports differ as to who actually executed Lumumba; one report had Munongo knifing Lumumba, followed by a coup de grâce bullet to the head by a Belgian mercenary. Other reports named other Belgian mercenaries at the scene. One U.N. official, Conor Cruise O’Brien, later wrote that it was common belief in Elizabethville that Munongo was believed to have been the most directly responsible for the murders. See O’Brien’s To Katanga and Back: A.U.N. Case History (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1962), p. 129.

  †Whether or not Montgomery knew at that time that he was working for the CIA is unknown. He has denied knowing that Heckathorne was with the CIA. His employer at the time, Helio president Lynn Bollinger, disputes his ignorance of this fact.

  V

  THE DAY OF THE WATCHMAN

  The godly man has perished from the earth, and there is none upright among men; they all lie in wait for blood, and each hunts his brother with a net. Their hands are upon what is evil, to do it diligently; the prince and the judge ask for a bribe, and the great man utters the evil desire of his soul; thus they weave it together. The best of them is like a brier, the most upright of them a thorn hedge. The day of their watchmen, of their punishment, has come; now their confusion is at hand.

  —MICAH 7:2–4

  24

  DEADLY INHERITANCE

  LINING UP THE HEMISPHERE

  On March 28, 1961, John F. Kennedy, looking tired and anxious, emerged from a war-plans briefing in the White House’s ultrasecure Joint War Room. He was troubled by the many fronts on which he was expected to fight: Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba—hot spots in a broader Cold War being fought across most of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. What was left? The next day Kennedy expressed his worry that the CIA’s planned invasion of Cuba might kill the chance for a settlement with the Soviet Union on Laos. He also worried about the invasion’s “noise level”; the whole operation was clandestine in name only.

  “Do you really have to have the air strikes?” he asked CIA’s Richard Bissell, the mastermind of the invasion. Would there really be enough Cubans in the expected uprising? Could not the exiles’ leadership be broadened to include members of the Left opposition who might attract more of a following?

  To reduce the noise level, Kennedy insisted on moving the invasion site from heavily populated Trinidad Beach, just south of the Escambray Mountains, where anti-Castro guerrillas still operated. “This is too much like a World War II invasion,” he protested.1 Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann concurred, but in a way that made eyebrows rise. Noting that he was “gravely concerned” and “exhausted,” Mann angled himself out of responsibilities by taking the ambassador’s post in Mexico. The CIA’s Richard Helms, meanwhile, was reprimanded by his boss, Allen Dulles, for protesting against the conventional amphibious nature of the invasion, now moved east to the more remote Bay of Pigs, a site not exactly optimal for CIA propaganda purposes, as Guatemala coup veteran David Atlee Phillips grimly noted. Helms took it upon himself to advise his friends not to get enmeshed in Bissell’s plans. Bissell, the orchestrator of the CIA’s coup in Guatemala seven years earlier, needed another success in Cuba if he was to succeed Dulles as CIA director; Kennedy had intimated to Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles that he planned to appoint Bissell in July, only three months after the expected victory over Castro.

  As Operation Zapata’s D-Day thundered over the horizon, Kennedy grew more apprehensive. A critical Helms-inspired report complained about the stifling way Bissell had organized the project. The report had originated in the State Department.2 Kennedy, faced with conflicts between the State Department and the CIA and within the CIA itself, was at best confused, at worst, seriously uninformed. There was much that the CIA did not tell him: That Colonel J. C. King, though a CIA officer, had offered $50,000 to the Mafia’s John Roselli and Santos Trafficante to have a Cuban agent poison Castro, that a colleague of King had set up another “Executive Action” capability, and that the arms drops to the Cuban resistance promised by Bissell had been failing for months.3

  Adolf Berle, witnessing Kennedy’s anguish, was sympathetic. Yet, despite his long experience in intelligence matters since setting up the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research during the Roosevelt years, Berle tried to steer the president toward invasion. Berle had been influenced by the opinion of his chief CIA contact, Colonel King, “that much of Latin America is lost: the combination of hotheads with quietly organized Communists waiting to take over may be invincible.” To avoid “a growing catastrophe in foreign affairs,” Berle concluded that the United States should “behave like a great power” and “defend the hemisphere” not only with the Marshall Plan for Latin America that he had championed in the past, but with military interventions he had earlier approached with some trepidation.4

  Berle extended his prescription for the ailing United States—a vigorous flexing of muscles—to the needs of his own career. He had not agreed to become chief of the Latin America Task Force in order to be powerless. Before the inauguration, he had met with Dean Rusk at the Rockefeller Foundation and turned down offers of the ambassadorship to the Organization of American States (OAS) and White House special assistant. “Extraneous jobs, however bespangled with titles, didn’t do the job,” he noted, “and no one knows that better than Latin America. Nelson Rockefeller had that job and it didn’t work.”5

  He knew what had happened to Nelson as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during World War II and special assistant under Eisenhower; although he would enjoy access to the president, real power over foreign policy would remain institutionalized within the State Department.

  Berle therefore pressed Kennedy to upgrade Latin American affairs to the subcabinet level of an undersecretary of state. Kennedy, however, did not want Latin America to upstage other continents, particularly Africa, where matters were sensitive enough. The Latin America Task Force, appointed by the president but formally stationed in the State Department, was the compromise. As the invasion plans were stepped up, the president had turned increasingly to Berle for advice. Berle, as a living symbol of the administration’s continuity of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, could provide the personal touch in lining up hemispheric support for the invasion. It was the kind of mission Berle liked best. A great believer in the power of his own personality, Berle leaped at the chance to display his diplomatic skills. Considering the crisis he believed the United States was in, a successful tour of old haunts would be his greatest challenge, requiring him to draw upon all his diplomatic experience and the network of friendships with the powerful that he had so carefully cultivated over forty years. It could have been his greatest triumph; instead, it became his Waterloo.

  After asking Colonel King for information on “anything communist” in the background of Venezuela’s Rómulo Betancourt, Berle flew to Caracas in February to talk to the ex-radical, now the president of Venezuela. Betancourt was easy to convince. He needed money to rehire 300,000 men who were recently laid off from public works projects. He offered arms and the Venezuelan navy for action against Cuba. Berle, in turn, offered to handle his requests for money.6

  Colombian president Alberto Lleras Camargo had a more pressing shopping list. For years he had been worried about the peasant “red republics” of Marquetalia, Sumapaz, and El Pato that had been set up along the valleys and hills running northeast between Cali and Bogotá. Armed refugees of the decade-long La Violencia civil war had retained the lands they had moved o
nto, set up municipal governments, and been able to turn their territory into experimental “peasant republics” that challenged the legitimacy of the central regime in Bogotá.

  The Eisenhower administration had secretly sent a team of antiguerrilla warfare experts to Colombia. This CIA-Pentagon Survey Team, all veterans of similar programs in areas such as the Philippines and Vietnam, advised Lleras Camargo to develop an antiguerrilla force and “establish effective intelligence and information services” and propaganda operations “to restore popular confidence in the Armed Forces.”7

  But the State Department worried how it could justify giving military aid to attack the peasant republics when such aid was specifically prohibited by law. In an attempt to curtail U.S. support for dictatorships or taking sides in civil wars, the Morse Amendment to the Mutual Securities Act prohibited the United States from granting aid to Latin American countries for internal security purposes. The republics could be denigrated as “outlaw guerrilla bands,” but unless some tie was made to the Soviet Union, the United States could not invoke the Monroe Doctrine or the Act of Chapultepec, especially when even the diplomats at Foggy Bottom admitted that “the remaining guerrilla bands cannot be said as a whole to be Communist controlled.”8 The only solution was for the president to issue a secret “determination” with operations monitored not by Congress, but by Nelson’s legacy to the White House, the National Security Council’s Special Group.