by Gerard Colby
THE RISE OF COUNTERINSURGENCY
On March 31, President Kennedy had given a speech designed, in part, to soften the blow of the impending Bay of Pigs invasion. He outlined a broadened Good Neighbor Policy called the Alliance for Progress. The Alliance pledged liberal economic, social, and political development for the hemisphere that went far beyond the noninterventionist theme of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. To head the Alliance, the next year Kennedy would appoint another former Rockefeller associate from the CIAA days, Puerto Rico’s Teodoro Moscoso, who had overseen Operation Bootstrap as the island’s devlopment undersecretary and then had served on Berle’s Latin America Task Force and been Kennedy’s first ambassador to Venezuela.
After the Bay of Pigs, J. C. King, who had the good fortune of not being directly responsible for the debacle, enjoyed a rebound in baronial power over covert operations in Latin America. But he feared it was only a temporary respite from creeping liberalism. Moreover, the CIA was viewed with unprecedented skepticism.
King liked right-wing liberals like Berle, who understood the blood and thunder behind the Cold War. He had little use for Harvard intellectuals like White House aides Richard Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger, who were insisting on more liberal approaches to Latin America’s mounting economic and social problems.* These do-gooders believed that U.S.-funded government planning was the key to Latin Americas development, not simply the arbitrary decisions of private investment (particularly American investment). That kind of thinking was anathema to a former entrepreneur like King, who had opened Brazil’s first condom factory and risen to become Johnson & Johnson’s top executive in Brazil and Argentina.
King’s people in the Western Hemisphere Division worried that these views on the CIA would gain ascendance in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. They were especially concerned that Cord Meyer’s International Organizations Division in the CIA would throw its labor contacts behind the liberal approach. “I’ve told J.C. that his old crowd has let him down,” a liberal-minded officer said. “The day is over when contact with the police chief can be called a CIA station in our area. We’ve given away all the important contacts with the new leadership group in every country to Cord’s people. Now it looks like the White House will finish the job. If Cord Meyer and they get together on something like this proposal, they’ll put old WH [Western Hemisphere] out of business.”27
King decided he would rise to the challenge. The mysterious Western Hemisphere chief had left his mark on every administration since Truman’s, and the Kennedy administration would be no exception.
At the same time, Kennedy’s commitment to beefing up limited war capabilities deepened. The young president had mistaken Eisenhower’s wisdom and restraint as the inertia of an old man who played too much golf. Eisenhower, questioning the viability of financing endless wars that being the world’s policeman would entail, had resisted the military-industrial complex. Kennedy, lacking Eisenhower’s experience, did not.
After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy felt more vulnerable than ever from pressures from the right. He worried that “if there were another Bay of Pigs … the military would almost feel it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to protect the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”28 Kennedy resented the CIA’s efforts at the Bay of Pigs to manipulate him into launching a U.S. armed-forces attack against Cuba and toyed with the idea of breaking the CIA “into a thousand pieces.” But he held off because of the lure of presidential covert operations. He settled for appointing his brother Robert to the Special Group as his watchdog.
These were the days of the “junior officers of the Second World War finally come to responsibility,”29 as Walt Rostow’s wife put it, young men who saw themselves as superior in substance and style to the New Deal’s supposed sentimentalists. Their tough, pragmatic air would reign over the New Frontier until the missile crisis of October 1962. Then, when confronted by “preemptive first strike” recommendations from their own National Security Council (NSC) for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, the Kennedy brothers were jarred into concluding, as the president whispered to Bobby, “the military is mad.” Until then, the NSC’s Special Group had girded Camelot for an endless series of Armageddons in remote areas of the world, where the Forces of Darkness, it was feared, were busy turning peasants and tribesmen into communist guerrillas.
The importance of covert operations grew after the Bay of Pigs. And as it did, so did the influence of the new counterinsurgency office at the Pentagon. The office was headed by two close allies of Nelson Rockefeller, Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric and General Edward Lansdale.
Quietly and purposefully, Gilpatric emerged as the one member of the Special Group whose covert-operation capacities were enhanced, not diminished. In April, the first Green Beret teams were sent into the Central Highlands of Vietnam to teach Montagnard tribesmen, then learning to read and write from Wycliffe Bible Translators, how to blow up bridges and fire M-16 rifles.30 More than 400 Green Berets were sent in, and Gilpatric wanted to send in 3,000 to 4,000 more U.S. personnel. Kennedy refused. He did agree, however, to send Green Beret teams to Ecuador and Guatemala to teach the local military how to defeat the hit-and-run tactics of revolutionary peasants who were living off the land.31 The Green Berets’ Special Forces Headquarters at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were upgraded to a Special Warfare Center, and their mission was expanded beyond a guerrilla force modeled after OSS teams that had operated behind German lines during World War II; they now became a counter guerrilla force.32
This change meant a whole new kind of warfare. Instead of the traditional concentration of forces and armaments for a push through identifiable enemy lines, counterinsurgency warfare emphasized the use of small mobile units with light arms for decentralized search-and-destroy operations. By dividing a “hostile territory” into smaller sections, surrounding and quarantining the area, and then sending in units to make contact with enemy guerrillas and backing up these antiguerrilla units with heavily armed and concentrated air-mobile reinforcements, Gilpatric hoped to “clean out” sections, one by one. The purported goal of all these actions, of course, was to take people, not territory. “Body counts” of the enemy were to be complemented with Lansdale’s projected victories over the minds and hearts of the people. Rescued from guerrilla terror, the grateful indigenous population was expected to be won over by Philippine-style limited land reform and “civic action” projects by the “native” army, government agencies, and voluntary civilian organizations—domestic and foreign.
MISSION: TOWARD GENOCIDE
Arthur Schlesinger would one day recall Kennedy entertaining his wife on country weekends “by inventing aphorisms in the manner of Mao’s ‘Guerrillas must move among the people as fish swim in the sea.’” By winning over the civilian population—or removing them to fenced-in “strategic hamlets”—allied governments could dam the flow of recruits. The Pentagon’s social engineers hoped to dry up the seas, leaving the guerrillas deprived of supplies and cover. No one asked if Asia’s vast human sea could be dammed like the Colorado River, and no one thought that the Vietnamese sea might prefer the local Communist Party’s Ho Chi Minh to a good Catholic patriot like Diem or one of his pro-U.S. generals.
And no one in Camelot, apparently, thought to consider the implications of counterinsurgency warfare if they were wrong: If the indigenous people could not be won over, the stress on American troops would grow. The line between the enemy and the people, between those who were to be killed and those who were to be rescued, would fade. The “rules of engagement” would become intolerable; “free-fire” zones would become wider and more arbitrarily declared. No one at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence, at the Pentagon, or at the Special Group dared to take the logic of counterinsurgency to its inevitable end: Unless the people were won over, there were really only two options—withdrawal or genocide.
No one conce
ived, much less admitted, these options, even as Fort Bragg’s instructors summoned ghosts from the American Plains to reenact lessons from the Indian Wars. Then, too, the U.S. Army’s cavalry had carried out highly mobile, lightly armed search-and-destroy missions. Then, too, missionaries served as both the well-intentioned vanguard of the coming conquest and later as cultural administrators of the precursor of the strategic hamlet, the reservation. And then, too, the result had been genocidal, notwithstanding survivors.
Nelson Rockefeller’s former NSC aide, William Kintner, grasped the strategic meaning of civilian, including missionary, involvement in the new counterinsurgency. Kintner had moved up the ladder from merely advising Nelson on counterguerrilla strategy; now he implemented the new doctrine as chief of long-range planning for General Lemnitzer, the army chief of staff. He believed in incorporating religious organizations into counterinsurgency strategy.33 Coincidentally, it was during this year that plans moved rapidly ahead for Wycliffe Bible Translators to build a JAARS air base only thirty-five minutes by air from Fort Bragg.
Wycliffe was the fastest growing missionary organization in the United States. In the glow of counterinsurgency planning radiating from Washington, William Cameron Townsend found troubled Latin America warming to his touch. Ecuador’s President José María Velasco Ibarra, who at first criticized the Bay of Pigs and refused to condemn Castro, had triggered a CIA campaign to undermine his government.34 He acquiesced to the demands of his generals to accept Washington’s offer of Green Berets and to expel the Cuban ambassador. CIA agents in Ecuador’s police circulated fake reports charging that guerrillas were being trained in secret sites throughout the country.35 Pro-Castro Cubans, they charged, had been seen visiting “Auca” (Huaorani) Indian territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon.36 Oil had been seen there, too, and two North American companies were asking for a 4.35 million hectare concession.37 Velasco Ibarra now visited Rachel Saint, of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and her Auca wards at SIL’s Limoncocha jungle base, accompanied by Cam. The president stated that he was concerned about the Indians’ welfare.
So was Brazilian president Jânio Quadros when Cam, escorted by Velasco’s ambassador, visited Brasília in May. Cam thought that Quadros’s concern for Indians was genuine. “I know the Terêna tribe,” Quadros said when shown a Terêna language primer. “I lived near them as a boy.”38 Quadros endorsed Cam’s requests for government assistance to SIL’s work among nineteen Amazonian tribes.
Quadros, like his predecessors and like Velasco in Ecuador, was in favor of settling the Amazon and saw SIL as a pacifier of the Indians. But he had been disturbed by reports of invasions of Indian lands by settlers and of murders of Indians. Epidemics brought by road builders and colonists raged through the tribes. SPI’s new military leaders seemed unable or unwilling to stop it. In April, Quadros had established legal boundaries for the first Indian land reserve in Brazil, the 21,600-square-kilometer Xingu National Park.
But unlike Ecuador’s Velasco, Quadros was also fighting the prerogatives of American interests. He began an investigation into how Hanna Mining had gotten control of the iron-mining rights in Minas Gerais during the Kubitschek regime. He also broke his campaign pledge to move the administrative seat of Petrobrás to Bahia. According to Petrobrás’s director of exploration, former Standard Oil geologist Walter Link, the only commercially feasible oil deposits in Brazil were in Bahia.39 Instead, Petrobrás continued its search in the Amazon basin, keeping its headquarters in Rio; worse, it continued Brazil’s growing tendency to swap Soviet crude for unsold Brazilian coffee and to buy Soviet crude for its refineries instead of Creole’s Venezuelan oil. Finally, although Nelson’s friend and business partner, Walther Moreira Salles, had worked out a financial deal with Chase and other banks to help Brazil pay its debt, Quadros’s refusal to condemn Castro still angered Washington. “I think we are right in not letting Brazil go bankrupt irrespective of its current attitude in foreign affairs,” Berle wrote. “It does not buy friendship. But Brazilian politicians can create enmity and this is what they are doing. If they cannot be helpful, they ought to quit.”40
Quadros, hammered by criticism from the right, did just that. In August he made a series of political blunders. First, he introduced a bill to the Brazilian Congress that would tax all corporate earnings by 30 percent. According to this bill, American companies, whose exported profits were already taxed 20 percent, would face a 50 percent total tax on earnings sent back to the United States. Although this rate was far below what American companies then paid in U.S. income taxes at home, the tax won Quadros no new friends on Wall Street or in Washington.
Quadros added insult to injury by awarding Cuba’s foreign minister, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the same Southern Cross medal that had been given to Rockefeller and Berle. Guevara had stopped in Brasília on his way home from the Inter-American Foreign Ministers Conference at Punta del Este, Uruguay. The conference became a turning point in relations between the North American business community and the Kennedy administration.
It was a turn for the worse.
PUNTA DEL ESTE: THE PRICE OF DISLOYALTY
For one week in August 1961, balmy Punta del Este captured the attention of the world by hosting two people whose very appearance symbolized the conflict between the conservative United States and revolutionary Cuba.
On one side stood the dignified, blue-eyed C. Douglas Dillon, in his blue pin-striped suit looking just like the Wall Street banker-turned-treasury-secretary he was. Facing him was the black-bereted Che Guevara, described by the U.S. ambassador to the OAS as “handsome, dashing in his olive green uniform with scarf tied ascot fashion,” with “dark flashing eyes, distinctive black mutton chop beard and an infectious smile.”41 Dillon was surrounded by Washington diplomats and civilian-clothed security officers. Guevara wore combat boots and was accompanied by four comrades who had fought beside him in Cuba’s mountains and served now as his bodyguards.
Guevara mocked Dillon’s offer of $20 billion in U.S. aid for the Alliance for Progress over the next decade. It was the Cuban revolution, he maintained, not Kennedy’s Alliance, that was the hallmark of the coming “new age” and the reason that Washington was offering this money. Suddenly, Guevara startled his audience by holding up classified documents taken from the car of U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Teodoro Moscoso. The documents, he said, were evidence of the administration’s duplicity. The papers showed that the United States had little confidence in Venezuela’s agrarian reformers and technicians. Instead, it viewed the Betancourt government as “corrupt.” Guevara called the United States “that monster of intervention” offering only “schemes to give latrines to the poor.”42 He invited the other Latin American delegates to reassemble in 1980 to compare Cuba’s progress in meeting the needs of its people with that of the rest of Latin America. The Alliance for Progress was doomed, he claimed, by its ties to the “American imperialism” of American banks and corporations. Cuba agreed with many of the Alliance’s goals, but would abstain rather than vote for a doomed program.
Guevara’s challenge infuriated the American businessmen in attendance, a delegation already peeved by Kennedy’s last-minute invitation for them to attend, and then only as observers.
The situation was more delicate for Kennedy. Berle’s Latin American allies had warned Kennedy in March that the Alliance for Progress must not be seen as the spearhead for a new investment drive by American corporations. Only three days before the conference, Kennedy finally decided not to risk corporate ire. He had an aide call Nelson Rockefeller’s cousin, IBEC Vice President Richard Aldrich, for help in organizing an “unofficial business delegation.”43
Kennedy recognized the paramount role of the Rockefellers among American activities in Latin America, which is why he authorized Aldrich to select the American business delegation. Not surprisingly, the delegation was top-heavy with representatives of companies within the Rockefeller sphere of influence. These delegates were dismayed by the way Guevara
stole the media’s limelight. They were also put off by the unwillingness of the Latin American delegates to follow up on their offer to help formulate national-development proposals to the Inter-American Development Bank. Brazil’s and Argentina’s delegations were eager to talk, but not to bargain away their national sovereignty. Smaller nations like Ecuador simply lacked the technical skills required for nationwide developmental planning.
Even so wise a business hand as Dillon had underestimated the businessmen’s negative reaction to Kennedy’s late solicitation of their participation. He also had not appreciated fully their hostility to Kennedy’s recent reversal of the Republican policy of giving aid only through private banks and companies. Kennedy now offered direct government-to-government aid. As Guevara predicted, they flatly rejected the administration’s $20 billion goal for American private investment in the draft charter of the Alliance. The Cuban revolution meant that all bets were off. The businessmen wanted the U.S. government to guarantee their investments from expropriation or undercompensated nationalization. They also wanted guarantees from the Latin American governments that profits or royalties from the Latin American operations would be returned to the United States without currency-exchange restrictions. The businessmen left Punta del Este unsatisfied with the conference—and with Kennedy.
The Rockefellers had cause for alarm. They had lost much in Cuba to the revolution. David sat on the board of Punta Alegre Sugar Corporation, owner of plantations, mills, railroads, shipping ports, barges, and tugboats. Che Guevara had led an attack against Batista’s forces near one of the company’s key ports, Boca Grande, during the revolution. As minister of finance, Che later oversaw the company’s expropriation after the Eisenhower administration (its foreign economic policy at the State Department being overseen by Undersecretary Dillon) imposed a cut in its quota for purchases of Cuban sugar. This cut, in turn, was triggered by the refusal of Standard Oil of New Jersey and other Dutch and American companies to refine low-priced oil that Cuba imported from the Soviet Union, in order to improve its balance of payments. Such outcomes of the Cuban revolution lent a personal, bitter quality to confrontations with Che at Punta del Este.
