THE CIA BY FRED J. COOK

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 48
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 28, 2003
• Sequence Number: 67
• Publication Date: June 24, 1961
• Content Type: MISC

Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
NATION
SPECIAL ISSUE
JUNE 24, 1961 . . 25C
THE
by
Fred J. Cook
Approved For Release 2003/05/27: CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
LETTERS
One Small Act for Peace
Dear Sirs: In a letter in the June 10
issue, re Mary Grooms's article on shel-
ters [May 13], Robert Berkowitz com-
ments: "I am not certain if she re-
gards the United States as the only
warlike agent in the world." Perhaps
Mr. Berkowitz will find it less incon-
ceivable that anyone could so regard
us (or rather, our government) after
he has read Mr. Dreher's eye-opening
article, "Hazards of Civil Defense," in
the same issue in which his letter ap-
peared. But in any case, may I suggest
to him that all that really matters is
whether the United States is one of
the warlike agents in the world. I think
the record clearly shows it is, and that
as such it is one of the parties responsible
for imperiling the very existence of the
human race. I also think that if just
one of the main warlike agents in to-
day's world were to begin acting in
such a way as to further-and not mere-
ly praise-peace, the threat which nu-
clear weapons pose to mankind would
be lessened far out of proportion to the
initial act for peace, because that act
would finally reverse the horrible trend
of the arms race. BLOSSOM D. SEGALOFF
New Haven, Conn.
Familiar Argument?
Dear Sirs: William Gilman, reviewing
The Structure of Science in your June
10 issue, asks: ". . . Can we then ab-
solve the Los Alamos scientists of their
share of responsibility for Hiroshima??"
The answer is Yes, because (a) we were
at war; (h) without Hiroshima, the
war would have continued for two more
years and 2 million more Americans
would have died; (c) far more Japanese
lives, as well as property, would have
been wiped out with a continuation of
the war; (d) a leading Japanese states-
man said if conditions had been reversed,
he would have had no hesitancy in using
the bomb against America.
Chicago, Ill. ROBERT ROSENBLUTII
Regressive Tax?
Dear Sirs: In your May 13 issue, Peter
Dorner presented the case for a tax on
the advertising of large companies. Mr.
Dorner assumes that (1) as wealth
grows, the demand for an increasing
number of consumer goods "reaches a
state of extreme inelasticity" and (2)
firms, by product differentiation and
large advertising expenditures, can pass
Approved
Suninier Schedule
After July 1, and through
August, The Nation will ape
pear on alternate weeks
only, i,e., on July 15 and
29, and August 12 and- 26.
The normal weekly sched-
ule will be resumed with the
Sept. 2 issue.
along cost increases to the consumer.
When demand is in "a state of ex-
treme inelasticity," the firm is in a po-
sition to pass increases in cost along.to
the consumer with the result that prices
are higher and the quantity sold is
about the same.
To the firm, a tax on advertising is
all increase in the cost of doing busi-
ness. If the tax can be forced on the
consumer in the form of higher prices,
then its economic impact is identical
to that of a sales tax. A sales tax is a
regressive tax.
If one grants Mr. Dorner his as-
sumptions, one is confronted with a
tax on advertising that is paid by the
consumer under a system of regressive
taxation. Suppose that the volume of
advertising does decrease. What will
disappear? Will there be less Play of
the Week or will there be less Gun-
smoke?
Most of the effects that Mr. Dorner
is seeking could, perhaps, be better
achieved through a system of grading
and labeling of advertised products and
by a closer look at advertising material
by the FTC. This would not raise the
funds needed for public welfare projects.
If these funds arc to be raised through
taxation, however, progressive taxation
would seem to commend itself.
Evanston, Ill. MORTON SCHNABEL
From the Bosporus
Dear Sirs: Not for pedantry, but be-
cause I like The Nation, I should like
to point out two inaccuracies in your
editorials of April 22:
1. On page 334: ". . . One of these is
Franz Joseph Strauss, his Minister of
Defense, who insists that the NATO
armies, which are mostly German ar-
7nies ..." 'Taint so. On this side of the
ocean, Turkey has the largest military
under NATO.
2. On page 335: "... It should not be
forgotten that Syngman Rhee and
Adnan Menderes, shortly before they
were ousted from office by their irate
countrymen, had also scored `smashing'
electoral victories..... One of the rea-
sons Adnan Menderes was -ousted on
May 27, 1960 (an unforgettable date for
Turkey), was the discontent of the
intellectuals and students over the delay
by Menderes' Democrat Party in sched-
uling elections. The last election in Tur-
key took place back in 1957. Opposi-
tiorr leader Ismet Inonu, just before the
May 27 Revolution, all but promised
civil war if elections weren't held by
October 27 of this year, the constitu-
tional limit of four years since the last
elections. (It is pretty much agreed
that in the 1957 elections, however,
manipulation of the electoral results
"well known to dictators" took place:)
Istanbul FERDINAND DRYLE
In This Issue
by FRED J. COOK
529 ? Editors' Introduction
529 ? Part I: Secret Hand of the
CIA
534 ? II: Allen Dulles:
Beginnings
539 ? III: Dulles and the SS
543 ? IV: Dulles, Peace and
the CIA
547 ? V: With Dulles in Iran
551 ? VI: Just a Little Rev-
olution
556 ? VII: The Road to War
561 ? VIII: Fiasco in Cuba
569 '? IX; A Look at the
Future
Crossword Puzzle (opp. 572)
by FRANK W. LEWIS
Illlllllillllllllillllllllllllllllllllllllllilllllillilll!IilllllllllllllllllllilIlllllllllllllllllllli!IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIti
George G. Kirstein, Publisher
Carey McWilliams, Editor
M Victor H. Bernstein, Managing Editor
Robert Hatch, Books and the Arts
Harold Clunnan, Theatre
Maurice Grosser, Art
M. L. Rosenthal. Poetry
Lester Trimble, Music
Alexander Worth, European
Correspondent
Mary Simon, Advertising Manager
E The Nation, published weekly (except for omis-
Z Sion of four summer issues) by The Nation
Company and copyright 1961 In the U.S.A. by
the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue,
Now York 14, N. N.Y. Second class postage paid
at Now York, N. Y. Tel.: CH 2-3400.
Subscription Price Domestic-One year $8. Two
yes $14, Three years $20. Additional postage
per year: Foreign and Canadian $1.
Change of Address: Three weeks' notice Is re-
quired for change of address, which cannot be
made without the old address as Welt as the new.
Information to Libraries: The Nation is Indexed
in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book
Review Digest, Index to Labor Articles, Public
Affairs, Information Service, Dramatic Index.
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
THE CIA.".. by Fred J. Cook
INTRODUCTION: "The only time the people pay
attention to us," Allen Dulles once said of the CIA,
"is. when we fall flat on our face" - or words to that
effect. But as Mr. Dulles would be the first to concede,
the reason for the default lies not with the people, but
with the CIA itself. The disastrous Bay of Pigs episode
is not the only fiasco that can be laid at the door of the
lavishly financed CIA. But in this latest fiasco more
of the facts came to light than in similar earlier episodes.
Now, therefore, seemed an excellent time, while the
facts of the'Cuban fiasco are fresh in mind, to take a
look at an agency which is of vital concern to national
security and the well-being of the people; but about
which the people know less than about any major
agency of goverlnient. What interested us, as editors,
were not the immed-iate causes of the particular fiasco;
we do .not propose to join the. feverish post-mortem
search for scapegoats. Our concern .waswith the basic
question: horv did this extraordinary agency come into
being? what is known about its record? how does it
fit into the. American constitutional scheme of thins?
On the face of it, an inquiry into an agency dedicated,
as is' the CIA, to secrecy in its planning, its-operations,
its personnel and its budget, presents a difficult journal-
istic undertaking: But a considerable amount of material
has been published about the agency and its operations,
some of it clearly inspired by the CIA with the approval
of its director. Trtic, most of the material is scattered
and disparate, collsisting of small items which, taken
alone, have little meaning. But when put together by
an astute craftsman, they form a significant. pattern.
The easiest. part of our job was to find the craftsman.
Fred J. Cook's special articles for The Nation - "The
FBI," "The Shaine of New York," and "Gambling,
Inc.," have won him important journalism prizes for the
last three years. In giving him the assignment, we told
Mr. Cook to stick to the public record; we did not want
him to attempt to'seek out undisclosed facts or to probe
into possibly sensitive areas. His assignment was simply
to summarize existing published material which, long
since available to potential "enemies," was still not
readily available to the American public.
Mr. Cook has followed our instructions. There is not
a fact hereafter set forth which has not already been
published. Yet, put together, these facts add tip to a
story that proved new. to us, as we are certain it will
prove new to the reader. And. enough 'of the known
facts are presented to warrant an informed judgment
about the agency. For what Mr. _ Cook proves is what
Sir Compton Mackenzie demonstrated for Nation
readers in another connection (see "The Spy Circus:
Parasites with Cloaks and Daggers," December 5, 1959);
namely, that intelligence of the cloak-and-dagger variety
is a two-edged sword, and that the sharper edge is some-
times held toward the throat of the wielder.
And another lesson that Mr. Cook drives home is
this: clearly the CIA must be divested of its "action"
or operational functions. and restricted to the sole func-
tion of gathering information for other agencies operat-
ing under 'customary constitutional safeguards. - ED.
PART I SECRET HAND of the CIA
SHORTLY BEFORE 6 P.M. on.De-
cember 5, 1957, a faceless man drop-
ped a letter into a mail box in New
York. City's Grand Central- Station
area. It was to the editor of The'Naa-
tion. The opening sentence read:
"As an American intelligence officer,
I. feel :duty bound to state my ap-
prehensions as to the future of my
country." What was the basis of these
apprehensions? The threat of a ram-
pant world communism? The menace
of Soviet weaponry? The dangers of
internal subversion? No. The writer,
whose letter bore in almost every line
intrinsic evidence of minute and in-
timate knowledge, was concerned
about just one crucial aspect of the
times -- the mortal-damage America
was inflicting upon itself. This was
a damage, he found, that resulted
directly from the careers and the
power and the misconceptions of two
men: the late John Foster Dulles,
then Secretary of State, and his
younger brother, Allen Welsh Dulles,
then as now head of the vitally im-
portant Central Intelligence Agency,
the official eyes and ears of American
foreign policy, the medium that
gathers and sifts and judges infor-
mation-and so conditions the minds
and predetermines the decisions of
American policy makers on the high-
est levels.
Now, four years later, in the wake
of the Cuban disaster - and other
less publicized but equally significant
disasters - the words of the intel-
ligence agent who unburdened him-
self in that letter read like the most
infallible of prophecies. America was
being pushed along the road to for-
eign policy disasters, he wrote, by
the closed minds of the Dulles broth-
ers - by their refusal to face facts
as facts and their insistence on tortur-
ing facts into the framework of pre-
determined policy.
This is the way the intelligence of-
ficer phrased it:
The following circumstances are
cause for deep concern:
1. United States foreign policy is
not formulated on the basis of an
objective analysis of facts, particu-
larly those made available by In-
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
telligence Service, but is being de-
termined by John Foster Dulles'
personal rash conceptions.
2. The fact that Allen Dulles is
in charge of collection and evalua-
tion of all information makes it pos-
sible for the Secretary of State to
distort the information received as
he sees fit. Facts thus presented
disorientate not only the President
and Congress but also the people of
the United States. (Italics added.)
3. As a consequence, our foreign
policy is not based on the real in-
terests of the United States. It has
suffered one defeat after another
and may eventually draw us into
a nuclear war.
Though John Foster Dulles since
has died, Allen Welsh Dulles still
rules the CIA, and the Cuban de-
bacle that his agency sponsored,
planned and directed has provided
graphic proof that he still retains his
ability to "disorientate not only the
President and Congress but also the
people of the United States.".
Cuba: the Lost Lesson
No issue of our times lies closer to
the core of the decision of war or
peace on which the very survival of
mankind depends. For from our
proper understanding of the facts,
our recognition or denial of com-
plicated and even at times trans-
parent truths, must derive the for-
mulation of our policies and the most
fateful of our decisions. Cuba is only
the most recent and most striking
example. When the CIA spurred on
the abortive invasion under the rose-
ate delusion that Cubans were chaf-
ing to revolt against the tyranny of
Fidel Castro, the United States
achieved only the disgrace and op-
probrium of a British-style Suez on
an even more futile scale. Not only
did the invasion fail ignominiously,
but the attempt helped, if anything,
to solidify the iron rule of Castro.
It enabled hint to pose as the hero
of his people, successfully repelling
a "foreign" invasion. It touched off
a ripple of reaction throughout Latin
America where people, while they
may not want a dictator like Castro,
want no more the gratuitous med-
dling in their internal affairs by the
American giant to the north. It takes
no seer to perceive that all the evil
fruits of the Cuban blunder have not
yet been reaped.
Shockingly in this context come
indications that the U.S. Govern-
ment, instead of 'learning a most
salutary lesson from the Cuban
fiasco, has determined to turn its
back even more resolutely upon facts
and truth. In the last week of April,
after officials on every level should
have had time to digest the moral
of Cuba, some 400 newspaper editors
and columnists were called to Wash-
ington for a background briefing on
foreign policy by the State Depart-
ment. As James Higgins, of the
Gazette and Daily (York, Pa.), later
wrote, "There developed at this con-
ference a very evident tendency on
the part of the government to blame
the press, at least part of the press,
for spoiling the plans of the Central
Intelligence Agency." The govern-
ment theory plainly was, not that
the whole conception was faulty,
but that too much had been print-
ed about the gathering of Cuban in-
vasion forces-and that this had
alerted Castro and ruined an other-
wise promising endeavor. The head-
on collision of this comforting theory
with the most elemental facts about
modern Cuba was ignored with great
determination-with such great de-
termination, indeed, that President
Kennedy, in a speech to a conven-
tion of American newspaper editors,
suggested that the editors, before
they printed a story, ask themselves
not only "Is it news?" but "Is it in
the interest of national security?"
Such a censorship, even if only vol-
untary, would inevitably result in
increasing the blackout of informa-
tion from which the American peo-
ple -have suffered since the end of
World War II. As James Higgins
wrote, "The truth of the story .. .
was not to be considered an impor-
tant measure of its rights to see
print. . .. I got the impression in
Washington of a governmental closed
mind."
This 'is a liability that could be
fatal to all mankind in a world teeter-
ing on the edge of thermonuclear
disaster. What America so obviously
needs is not fewer facts but' more,
not deceptive images that fit our
prejudices and preconceptions, but
truth-however unpalatable. What
America needs is the unvarnished
truth about Chiang Kai-shek, about
Quemoy and Matsu, about Laos,
about Latin America-and especial-
ly about Cuba, the island (as the
President so often has reminded us)
that is just ninety miles from our
shores, the island about which our
secret and public minisformation
has been- demonstrated to be quite
literally colossal.
The Agency Nobody Knows
In this all-pervasive atmosphere
of the shut mind and the distorted
fact, Central Intelligence is the key,
the vital agency. Yet it is the one
agency of government about which
the American people are permitted
to know almost nothing, the one
agency over which their own elected
representatives are permitted to have
virtually no control. CIA is the only
agency whose budget is never dis-
closed, whose director can sign a
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
The Z'he NATION
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
voucher for 'any amount without
checkup or explanation. How many
persons does it employ, how many
agents does it have? Even Congress-
men do not know precisely. Its
Washington headquarters staff alone
is estimated to consist of more than
10,000. employees; in total, it is be-
lieved to have more persons on its
payroll than the State Department.
How much money does it have at its
disposal? Again, even most of the
Congressmen who vote the funds do
not know precisely.. CIA itself says
this "figure is .very tightly held and
is known to not more than five or
six Members in each House." CIA
allotments are hidden. in the budget-
ary requests of various government
departments; estimates vary from' a
lovsr of $500 million annually to the $1
billion mentioned by the conserva-
tive New York Times. A billion dol-
lars- a, year concentrated in the hands
of one man about whose activities
the American people are permitted
to 'know ' virtually nothing- and
about whose activities it appears to
be suggested they should know even
less-represents the kind of power
that, in essence, can well determine
the nation's course and remove from
its people the power of decision.
Two-Beaded Monster
This danger" that CIA may not
just inform, but also determine pol-
icy,' has been enhanced from the
agency's inception by an authorized
split personality. From the start, CIA
has been a two-headed monster. It
is not just a cloak-and-dagger agency
entrusted with the important task
of gathering information concerning
our potential enemies throughout
the world; it also has the authority
to act on its own "information, carry-
ing out in deeds the policies its in-
telligence discoveries help to form.
Though its overt acts arc supposed
to be under the direction of the Na-
tional Security Council, the risk in-
herent in such a dual responsibility
is obvious. With an end in view, can
intelligence be impartial?
The hazards implicit in such. a
?ast, concentrated, 'double-motive
agency were not unforeseen. Harry
Howe Ransom, of Harvard, in his
Central Intelligence and National
Security, describes the reaction of
Admiral Ernest J. King in March,
1945, when the Secretary of the Navy
sought. his views on the formation of
the proposed centralized intelligence
agency. "Ding replied," Ransom
writes, "that while such an arrange-
ment. was perhaps logical, it had in-
herent dangers. He feared that a cen-
tralized intelligence agency might
acquire power'' beyond 'anything in
tended, and questioned whether
such an agency might not threaten
our form of government."
British intelligence, for centuries
considered one of the 'world's most
expert, has long held that the wed-
ding of action to intelligence is a fatal'
flaw in CIA. So have others. In 1948,
Professor Sherman Kent, : of Yale,
himself an intelligence officer in
World War II,, wrote a treatise on
the purposes and the dangers of in-
telligence operations in a book called
Strategic Intelligence for American
World Policy. At the time CIA had
just been formed and its perform-
ance lay entirely' in the future, but
Professor Kent struck out vigorously
at what he called "the disadvantage
of getting intelligence too close to
policy." He added:
This does not necessarily mean
officially accepted high United States
policy, but something far less exalted.
What I am talking of is often ex-
pressed by the words "slant," "lire,"
"position," and "view." Almost any
man or group of men confronted
with the duty of getting something
planned or getting something done
will sooner or later lilt upon what
they consider a single most desirable
course of action. Usually it is sooner;
soinetintes, under duress, it is a. snap
judgmnen-t off the top of the head.... cannot escape the belief that
under the circumstances outlined,
intelligence -Neill find itself right in
the middle of policy, and that upon
occasions it will he the unabashed
apologist for a given policy rather
than its impartial and objective an-
alyst.
It takes no particular insight to
find the seeds of the Cuban fantasy
in that perceptive paragraph.
In the aftermath of so monumental
a blunder as Cuba, however, it seems
pertinent to inquire: Just what is
the record of CIA? Are its successes
overbalanced by its failures? And
does it, in its dual role of secret agent
and activist operative, not merely
inform our foreign policy but, to a
large measure at least, determine it?
Let it be said at once that there
can be no exact score board chalking
up the runs, hits and errors of CIA.
Allen Dulles himself has commented
that the only time his agency makes
the headlines is when it falls flat on
its face in public. Its successes, he
intimates, cannot be publicized for
the obvious reason that to do so
might give away some of the secrets
of his far-flung intelligence network.
This is true, but only partially so.
For CIA, while it refrains from pub-
lic announcements, does not disdain
the discreet and controlled leak. And
some of these leaks have found
their way. into such prominence as
Saturday Evening Post exclusives.
Where the. CIA Succeeds
Despite the secrecy of CIA, there-
fore, there is on the public record,
in the fourteen years since its cre-
ation in 1947, a partial and, indeed,
highly significant record of its deeds.
And by this record it is possible to
judge it. Let's look first at some of
the achievements.
i(In 1955, a CIA communications
expert, studying a detailed map of
Berlin, discovered that at one point
the main Russian telephone lines ran
only 300 yards from a radar station
in the American sector. The CIA
dug. an underground tunnel, tapped
the cables and, for months, before
the Russians got wise, monitored
every telephonic whisper in the So-
viet East Sector.
?In 1956, when Nikita.Khrushchev
delivered his famous secret speech
denouncing the crimes of Josef Stalin
before the Twentieth Communist
Party Congress, a CIA agent man-
aged to get the text and smuggle it
out to the Western world. Washing-
ton was able to reveal the explosive
contents before the Soviets them-
selves had edited the speech for pub-
lic consumption. The blow was.prob-
ably one of the strongest ever struck
at Communist ideology. Communist
parties in the United States and
other Western countries, long taught
by Communist propaganda to regard
Stalin with reverence, felt that the
bedrock of belief had been cut out
from under them.
?The U-2 spy plane operation, a
June 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05127 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 . 531
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
risky procedure that backfired dis-
astrously in the end, was for years
one of the world's most successful
feats in espionage. From fifteen miles
up, this plane took pictures of such
incredible clarity and detail that it
was possible to distinguish between
a cyclist and a pedestrian; its radio
receivers, which monitored all wave
lengths, recorded literally millions of
words. A single flight across Russia
often furnished enough assorted in-
formation to keep several thousand
CIA employees working for weeks,
and the flights lasted for four years
before, at the beginning of May,
1960, on the very eve of the sched-
uled Summit Conference in Paris,
pilot Francis Powers took off on the
mission on which he was shot down.
The. bad. judgment implicit in order-
ing the flight at such a delicate time,
the ridiculous CIA "cover story"
that Powers was gathering weather
data,. the solemn promulgation of
this fairy tale and the swift subse-
quent exposure of the United States
before the world as an arrant liar-
all of this wrecked the Summit,
forced the United States to abandon
the 'U-2. aerial espionage program,
and : inflicted enormous world-wide
damage on American prestige.
Whether, in the ideological war for
men's minds, the ultimate tarnishing
of the American image outweighs the
positive details garnered by the U-2s
in four years of successful espionage
remains a forever unresolved point
of debate. For one thing, the ideo-
logical war goes on, neither finally
won nor irretrievably lost; for an-
other, no , one except on the very
highest and most closely guarded
levels of government can possibly
know just how vitally important
were the details the U-2s gathered.
Though the U-2 program became,
in its catastrophic finale, a fulcrum
of policy, the significant pattern
that emerges from the Berlin wire
tapping, the smuggling of the Khru-
sbehev speech, the years-long earlier
successes of U-2, seems fairly ob-
vious. All dealt with intelligence-
and intelligence only. The intent was
to gather the kind of broad and de-
tailed information on which an in-
telligent foreign policy may be based.
These activities did not in them-
selves constitute active meddling in,
532
or formation of, policy. Unfortunate.
ly, not all CIA activities fall into
this legitimate intelligence role; time
and again, CIA has meddled active-
ly in the internal affairs of foreign
governments. And it is in this field
that some of its most vaunted suc-
cesses raise grave questions about
the drift and intent of our foreign
policy.
Where It Fails
Here are some of the high spots
of CIA in international intrigue:
?In 1953, with Allen Dulles him-
self playing a leading role, CIA
sparked a coup that ousted Moham-
med Mossadegh as Premier of Iran.
Mossadegh, a wealthy landowner,
rose to political power by capitaliz-
ing on popular hatred of the British
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; which
dominated the economy of the na-
tion, exporting Iran's greatest na-
tional resource by payment to the
national treasury of what Mossa-
degh considered a mere pittance.
Mossadegh set out to nationalize the
oil industry in Iran's interest, allied
himself with pro-Communist forces
in Teheran, and virtually usurped
the power of Shah Mohammed Reza
Pahlevi.. When he did, a successful
CIA plot bounced Mossadegh out of
office so fast he hardly knew what
had hit him; the Shah was restored
to power; and a four-nation con-
sortium, in partnership with the
Iranian Government, was given con-
trol over the country's liquid gold.
CIA showed a tendency, if not to
brag, at least to chuckle in public
about this wily and triumphant
coup; but the aftermath has furnish-
ed no cause for unalloyed rejoicing.
The United States poured millions
of dollars into Iran to shore up the
government of the anti-Communist
Shah. A Congressional committee
found in 1957 that, in five years, Iran
had received a quarter of a billion
dollars in American aid. Yet the
Iranian people themselves had not
profited. So many American dollars
had stuck to the fingers of corrupt
officials that Iran was running up
constant deficits, though the Con-
gressional committee found that it
should have been fully capable, with
its oil revenues, of financing its own
national development. Despite the
hundreds of millions of dollars in
American aid, Iran remained so prim-
itive that, in some isolated towns, in
this twentieth century, residents had
yet to see their first wheeled vehicle;
a whole family might live for a year
on the produce of a single walnut
tree; and small children labored all
day at the looms of rug factories for
20 cents or less. Small wonder, as
Time reported in 1960, that Mossa-
degh "is still widely revered"; small
wonder either that a new Premier,
appointed by the Shah in early May,
1961, after a riotous outbreak . in
Teheran, was, described by the Asso-
ciated Press as the Shah's "last hope
of averting bankruptcy and possible
revolution. . . ."
?In 1954, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman
won an election in Guatemala and
achieved supreme power. This demo-
cratic verdict by the Guatemalan
electorate was not pleasing to the
United States. American officials de-
scribed the Arbenz regime as com-
munistic. This has been disputed, but
there is no question that Arbenz was
sufficiently leftist in orientation to
threaten the huge land holdings of
Guatemala's wealthy classes and the
imperial interests of United Fruit
and other large American corpora-
tions. American disenchantment with
Arbenz needed only a spark to be
exploded into action, and the spark
was supplied by Allen Dulles and
CIA. Secret agents abroad spotted
a Polish freighter being loaded with
Czech arms and ammunition; CIA
operatives around the world traced
the peregrinations of the freighter as,
after several mysterious changes of
destination, she finally came to port
and began unloading the munitions
destined for Arbenz. Then CIA, with
the approval of the National Security
Council, struck. Two Globemasters,
loaded with arms and ammunition,
were flown to Honduras and Nica-
ragua. ' There the weapons were
placed in the hands of followers of
an exiled Guatemalan Army officer,
Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. He in-
vaded Guatemala, and the Arbenz
regime collapsed like a pack of cards.
It is perhaps significant that the
Guatemalan blueprint was practical-
ly identical with the one CIA follow-
ed this April in the attempt to over-
throw Castro. Only Castro was no
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 The NATION
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 .
Arbenz. In any event, Guatemala,
like Iran, remains one of the CIA's
most publicly acknowledged coups;
and, like Iran, the sequel raises dis-
turbing doubts about precisely what
was gained. For the promises of the
CIA-backed Castillo forces to insti-
tute social and democratic reforms
have not yet materialized. Half of
.the arable land in the nation of four
million persons still remains in the
hands of 1,100 families. The economy
of the country is dominated by three
large American corporations, topped
June 24, 1961
by United Fruit. Workers in the
vineyards of United Fruit staged a
strike in 1955 trying to get their
wages (if $1.80 a day raised to $3.
They lost. And Guatemala is still a
distressed country-so deeply dis-
tressed that the Kennedy Adminis-
tration feels it must have several
more bushels of American aid.
?In 1954 and again in 1958, the
United States almost went to war
with Communist China over the
rocky islets of Quemoy and Matsu,
squatting less than three miles off
the Chinese coast. When Red Chi-
nese artillery barrages blanketed the
islands, heavily over-populated with
Chiang Kai-shek troops, American
public opinion was conditioned to
react angrily to these aggressive ac-
tions. What hardly any Americans
realized at the time was that the
Red Chinese had been subjected to
considerable provocation. Allen Dul-
les' CIA had established on Formosa
an outfit known as Western Enter-
prises, Inc. This was nothing more
than a blind for CIA; and, as Stewart
Alsop later wrote in the Saturday
Evening Post, CIA agents, operating
from this cover, masterminded "com-
mando-type guerrilla raids on the
mainland ... in battalion strength."
The title to Alsop's article told all:
"The Story Behind Quemoy: How
We Drifted Close to War."
?In 1960 and again in 1961, the
landlocked Indo-China principality
of Laos threatened the peace of the
world in a tug-cif-war between East
and West. Again the American pub-
lic was confronted with glaring head-
lines picturing the menace of an on-
sweeping world communism; it was
given, at the outset at any rate-
and first impressions in international
sensations are almost always the ones
that count--practically no under-
standing of underlying issues. Yet a
Congressional committee in June,
1959, had filed a scathing report on
one of the most disgraceful of Amer-
ican foreign aid. operations. The com-
mittee found. that, in seven years,
we had poured more than. $300 mil-
lion into Laos. This 'indiscriminate
aid had caused runaway inflation
and wrecked the economy of the
country. At our insistence, a 25,000-
man Army that the Laotians didn't
want ar need-and one that wouldn't
fight-had been foisted on the Lao-
tian people. In a completely botched-
up program, American resident gen-
iuses spent some $1.6 million to build
a highway, built no highway, and
wound up giving all Southeast Asia
a vivid demonstration of the most
unlovely aspects of the American
system of bribery, graft and corrup-
tion. As if this wasn't bad enough,
little Laos fairly crawled with CIA
agents. These gentry, in late 1960,
in another of their famous coups,
overthrew the neutralist government
of Prince Souvanna Phouma and in-
stalled a militarist regime headed by
Gen. P'houmi Nosavan. The Phoumi
Army clique had just one qualifica-
tion to recommend it, but it was a
qualification dear to the heart: of
CIA: it was militantly anti-Commu-
nist. Unfortunately, this attitude did
not recommend the new regime as
heartily to the Laotian people as it
did to the CIA; General Phoumi had
almost no popular support,'and when
the Communist Pathet Lao forces
began to gobble up vast chunks of
the nation, there was hardly any re-
sistance. The result was inevitable.
The United States was placed in the
- humiliating position of practically
begging to get the very type of neu-
tralist government its CIA had con-
spired to overthrow. A greater loss
of face in face-conscious Asia could
hardly be imagined.
Revolutions for Hire?
These are just a few of the best-
documented examples of CIA's med-
dling in the internal affairs of other
nations. There are others. There is
the case of Burma, on whom CIA
foisted unwanted thousands of
Chiang Kai-shek's so-called freedom
fighters-warriors who found it much
pleasanter to take over practically an
entire Burmese province and grow
opium than to fight the Red Chinese.
There was this spring's Algerian
Army revolt against Gen. Charles de
Gaulle; an event in which an accus'
ing French press contends the CIA
played an encouraging hand. CIA
categorically denies it, but French
officialdom, suspicious as a result of
previous CIA meddling in French
nuclear-arms program legislation, has
refrained from giving the American
agency a full coat of whitewash,
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
533
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
Such activities obviously range
far beyond the bounds of legitimate
intelligence gathering. No one will
argue today, in the tensions of a
cold war that at almost any moment
might turn hot, against the need for
an expert intelligence-gathering
agency. But does it follow that we
need and must have an agency gear-
ed to the overthrow of governments
in any and all sections of the world?
Have we, who pose (most of its sin-
cerely) as a truly democratic peo-
ple, the right to send our secret
agents to determine for the people
of Iran or Guatemala or Laos what
government shall rule them? We
have never proclaimed this right;
our public officials doubtless would
express pious abhorrence at the
thought. But, in the light of past
events, we can hardly be surprised
if, to the world at large, CIA actions
speak louder than official protesta-
tions.
Nor can we escape the odium of
regimes with which the CIA has sad-
dled us. It follows as inevitably as
day the night that, if CIA conspires
to overthrow a foreign government
on the blind theory that in the war
against communism anything goes,
the American people as a whole are
bitrdened with responsibility for the
regime that CIA has helped to in-
stall. And the record of such regimes
in many remote corners of the world
is decidedly not pretty. In the light
of the past, it should be obvious that
the future is not to be won by prop-
ping up puppets with sticky fingers.
On this whole issue, perhaps the
most perceptive piece of writing was
produced in the aftermath of Cuba
by Walter Lippmann in a column en-
titled "To Ourselves Be True." Lipp-
mann, fresh from recent interviews
with Khrushchev, wrote:
"We :have been forced. to ask our-
selves recently how a free and open
society can compete with a totali-
tarian state. This is a crucial ques-
tion. Can our Western society sur-
vive and flourish if it remains true
to its own faith and principles? Or
must it abandon them in order to
fight fire with fire?" Lippmann's an-
swer to this last question was a ring-
ing, "No." The Cuban adventure
had failed, he wrote, because for us
it was completely out of character-
as out of character as for a cow to
try to fly or a fish to walk. The
United States, of course, must em-
ploy secret agents for its own infor-
mation. "But the United States can-
not successfully conduct large secret
conspiracies," lie wrote. ". . The
American conscience is a reality. It
will make hesitant and ineffectual,
even if it does not prevent, an un-
American policy.... It follows that
in the great struggle with commu-
nism, we must find our strength by
developing and applying our own
principles, not in abandoning them.
Probing more deeply, Lippmann
analyzed Khrushchev's philosophy
and explained the Soviet leader's ab-
solute belief in the ultimate triumph
of communism. The Soviet Premier,
he had found, is sincerely convinced
that capitalism is rigid, static; that it
cannot change, it cannot meet the
needs of the people, the needs of the
future. Only communism can, and
communism will succeed capitalism
as capitalism supplanted feudalism.
This, with Khrushchev, is "absolute
dogma." Having explained this,
Lippmann then wrote:
I venture to argue from this
analysis that the reason we are on
the defensive in so many places is
that for some ten years we have
been doing exactly what Mr. K. ex-
pects us to do. We have used money
and arms in a long, losing attempt
to stabilize native governments which,
in the name of anti-communism, are
opposed to all important social
change. This has been exactly what
Mr. 1K.'s dogma calls for - that
communism should be the only al-
ternative to the status quo with its
immemorial poverty and privilege.
We cannot compete with commu-
nism, Lippmann argued, if we con-
tinue to place "the weak countries
in a dilemma where they must stand
still with us and our client rulers,
or start moving with communism."
We must offer them "a third option,
which is economic development and
social improvement without the to-
talitarian discipline of communism."
Obviously, the philosophy of Wal-
ter Lippmann is 'several aeons re-
moved from that of the CIA man,
whose record shows he has just one
gauge of merit-the rigid right-wing
inflexibility of the anti-communistic
puppet regimes. that CIA has install-
ed and supported. The record sug-
gests that in the CIA lexicon there
is no room for social and economic
reform; such phrases imply a pos-
sibly leftish tendency, and God for-
bid that we should ever back suchl
Let's give 'em, instead, a military
dictatorship. This CIA philosophy-
in-action is the very antithesis of the
American spirit Walter Lippmann
was writing about, and to understand
how we came to be encumbered with
it, one must understand the career
and ties and outlook of one man-
Allen Welsh Dulles.
PART ll ALLEN DULLES: BEGINNINGS
WHEN ALLEN DULLES was eight
years old, he wrote a thirty-one page
essay on the Boer War, an -event
that was then disturbing the con-
science of the world. The last sen-
tence read: "I hope the Boers win
this war because the Boers are in
the right and the british in the
wrong." Questioned in after, life about
that small "b" in "British," Dulles
explained that he wrote it that way
deliberately because he didn't like
the British at. the time and hoped
that small "b" would show just what
he thought of them.
Now, sixty years later, Allen Dul-
les is very much the man foreshad-
owed by 'the boy author. The interest
in foreign affairs that led him to
write a small book on the Boer War
at the age of eight. (it was actually
published by a doting grandfather)
has remained with him throughout
his life. Some would say, too, that
$34 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 The Nnmiox
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27: CIA-RDP86B00269R0005~0005p067-8
f
he retained the strong prejudices, or
the stout convictions (depending on
how you look at it), that led him at
the age of eight to refuse to dignify
the British with a capital letter.
The future master of the CIA was
steeped in the aura of international
affairs from earliest childhood. He
was born on April 7, 1893, in Water-
town, N.Y., where his father, Allen
Macy Dulles, was a Presbyterian
minister. His mother, the former
Edith Foster, was the daughter of
General John Watson Foster, who
in 1892 had become Secretary of
State in the Republican administra-
tion of Benjamin Harrison. Years
later his -mother's brother-in-law,
Robert Lansing, was to serve as Sec-
retary of State in the administration
of Woodrow Wilson.
These family ties were to be in-
,fluential both in the career of Allen
Dulles and in that of his brother,
John Foster, :five years his senior.
Allen graduated from Princeton with
Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1914 and
promptly went off to teach English
for a year in a missionary school at
Allahaba:d, India. Returning to
Princeton, he got his Master of Arts
degree, then followed in the foot-
steps of his older brother by joining
the diplomatic service ruled by his
uncle, Secretary of State Robert
Lansing. On May 16, 1916, when he
was twenty-three, he went off to
'Vienna as an undersecretary in the
American embassy. Though the
young man himself could have had
no inkling at the time, this was where
it was all to begin; here were to be
woven the first permanent strands
into the career of the future boss of
CIA.
Beginnings in Vienna
Vienna was then the capital of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the part-
ner of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany in
the bloody warfare of World War I.
America herself was about to become
involved in this most tragic of wars,
from which- the, world has yet to sal-
vage a formula 'for peace. In the
striped-trouser set and the top-level
society of Vienna, young Dulles, the
nephew of the American Secretary
of State, quickly made his mark; and
when America joined the Allies, he
along with other members of the
Jtcne 24, 1961
American delegation skipped across Bernc, elonging to a director o
the border to Berne in Switzerland. Krupp's. Professor George D. Her-
It was here that Dulles got his first ron, who often carried out secret as-
taste of the secret, high-level in- signments for President Wilson,
trigue that so often determines the headed the American delegation.
fate of empires and of peoples. As Professor Lammasch and industrial-
he later told a visitor: "That's when ist Julius Meinl led the opposing bar-
I learned what a valuable place gain hunters. The Austrians were
Switzerland was for information- ready to promise almost anything
and when I became interested in in- in the hope of preserving the Haps-
telligence work." burg monarchy, and the Americans,
Dulles' interest doubtless was stim- evidently blind to the already tar-
ulated by the heady role he played niched luster of the throne, deluded
in the very kind of top-drawer, be- themselves into the belief that they
hind-the-scenes maneuvering that were really being offered a prize-
was to mark the pattern of his later that the Austrian Emperor might be
life. By the beginning of 1918, the propped up as "a useful force.
creaky Austro-Hungarian Empire, Finding these nice Americans so
exhausted by war, could perceive receptive, Lammasch was effusive in
plainly before it the hideous specter his promises. Austria-Hungary would
of imminent collapse. Naturally, its be positively 'delighted to follow the
Emperor Charles, with a ruler's pri- American lead in everything, espe-
mal instinct for self-preservation, ?cially if (does this sound familiar? )
wanted to salvage as much from the the generous Americans would ex-
ruins as was possible. His negotiator tend financial aid and help to build
in this laudable endeavor was his "a bridge of gold" between Vienna
former tutor, Dr. Heinrich Lam- and Washington. Dulles' immediate
-masch. Lammasch had met the tall superior, Hugh Wilson, was intrigued
and charming Allen Dulles in Vienna; by the prospect, and all of the Amer-
he was perfectly aware that the ican delegation seems to have been
young man was the nephew of the quite enthusiastic. The British, in-
American Secretary of State; and so, formed of the proposal, were far more
with an eye to establishing rapport skeptical and warned against trust-
on the highest possible levels, he ap- ing too much in the performance of
proached Dulles and through him :the Hapsburgs. Events proved the
made arrangements for the salvage British so right. The Austrian mon-
talks the Austrians so much desired. archy collapsed, Charles abdicated,
The secret discussions which Allen and the net result was a fiasco. Yet
Dulles thus played a key role in ar- Time in 1959 could write of this
ranging began on January 31, 1918, 'period that Allen Dulles, in the
in a villa in Grummlingen, near 'Switzerland of 1918, "hatched the
first of the grandiose plots which
were to become his trademark."
Introduction to Germany
After Berne came the great peace
conference at Versailles. Secretary of
State Lansing, second only to Wilson
among the American negotiators, saw
to it that his two nephews had re-
served scats at the great event. John
Foster was given the task of study-
ing such financial problems as repa-
rations and war debts; Allen had an
even more fascinating job as assist-
ant head of the Department of Cur-
rent Political and Economic Corre-
spondence, a key organization that
handled and channeled all corrimuni-
cations to the American delegation.
Allen Dulles' immediate boss was
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
Ells Dressel,-a leading Anieiican ex-
pert on German affairs and a man
who was convinced that the new
Soviet Union represented a world
menace, one that could be dealt with
effectively (shades of 1945!) only
through a partnership between Amer-
ica and a revived Germany.
This was not the prevailing view
in that simpler world of 1918 in
which hatred of militaristic Germany
was the dominating factor. It is sig-
nificant mainly because, for its day,
it was an extreme view and because
Allen Dulles was quite close to
Dressel and shared many of his be-
fiefs. In December, 1918, and again
in early 1919, Allen accompanied his
superior on trips to Germany during
which they conferred with high Ger-
man industrialists. The bent of Dul-
les' own thinking at the time is indi-
cated in a memorandum that he
wrote on December 30, 1918, en-
titled: "Lithuania and Poland, the
Last Barrier between Germany and
the Bolsheviks." It evidently was
based largely on information gath-
ered from Polish and Lithuanian ref-
ugees, and it described the Bolshevik
menace in the strongest terms. Dul-
les even advocated support of Polish-
Lithuanian intervention in Russia,
writing: "The Allies should not be
deterred from a military expedition
because of their fear that it would
require hundreds of thousands of
men."
Peace concluded, Dressel was sent
to Berlin as American charge d'af-
faires in Germany, and Dulles went
with him. Here be was thrown into
contact with a stream of German
politicians, industrialists and Army
officers, many of whom were con-
cerned about the new Communist
menace and talked about the possi-
bility of raising a European army-
spearheaded by German generals, of
course-to fight the radical Bolshe-
viks. Nothing came of these plans,
and Dulles soon was transferred to
Constantinople.
In later years, the stereotyped
portrait of Allen Dulles given the
American people by virtually all of
the large media of information pic-
tures a master spy, a super-sleuth,
who confounded his rivals in inter-
national intrigue from his earliest
days. The image, contrasted with
Drawing by Berger
John Foster Dulles
the reality of what came out of Dul-
les' first "grandiose plot" at Berne,
seems considerably overblown, but it
suffers even greater damage when
one studies the acid pen portrait of
Dulles in action in the Balkans left
by a veteran American intelligence
officer of the period.
Dabbling in Oil
. The disenchanted agent was Rob?
ert Dunn, a veteran and hard-bitten
American newspaper man who had
received his initial training in skep-
ticism at the hands of Lincoln Stef-
fens. Dunn later spent nearly twenty
years in Naval Intelligence. He was
a lieutenant in Turkey in those first
years of the 1920s, when Allen Dul-
les appeared upon the scene. Years
later, in his book World Alive, pub-
lished by Crown in 1956, he wrote
as follows:
And now Mr. Secretary of State
Colby's young men were arriving in
the flesh to whistle at the nymphs
on our office ceiling. Among the
cooky-pushers strange to a naval
staff came one beetle-browed Boston
Brahmin, rich as a dog's insides with
copper stock. . .
One Allen Dulles, freckled, with
toothbrush mustache, was a serious
grad of the Princeton Golf Club,
fresh from Versailles and drawing
the fatal boundaries of Czechoslova-
kia.
Dunn continues by recounting
how a London Times reporter hap-
pened to find in a second-hand book-
stall.an ancient volume from which
anti-Semitic propagandists obvious-
ly hadTilche1 the ideas for the Pro-
tocols of flee Elders of Zion. Neither
the Times reporter nor Dunn was
very much excited by the discovery
because, as Dunn wrote, the Proto-
cols had been well exposed by in-
ternal evidence as forgeries and hard-
ly anyone took them seriously any
more.
But now [Dunn added], while
Stamboul boiled sedition against the
Entente and Kernal chetties threat-
ened siege, Dulles decoded to "See-
state" academic analyses of that stale
forgery. No wonder Roosevelt, later,
was to growl at diplomatic myopia
and the braid-on-cutaway tradition.
Such, on Dunn's testimony at least
-and he soon took the first oppor-
tunity to get out of Naval Intelli-
gence because he couldn't stand
working with Dulles-was the well
coddled young man who, after two
years. in the Balkans, was called back
to Washington to head the State De-
partment's Division of Near Eastern
Affairs.
The Near East, then as now, was
a sensitive area, and for much the
same reason-oil. British interests
had had a hammerlock on the rich
preserves of the entire Mediterranean
;basin and had tried to freeze out
American rivals; but now such com-
panies as Gulf and Standard Oil were
no longer to be denied. The years
during which Dulles headed the key.
Near Eastern Division were, as it so
happened, the very years during
which the Rockefeller interests in
Standard Oil negotiated a toehold
in the Iraq Petroleum Co., and the
very years in which the Mellons of
Gulf were laying the groundwork for
valuable concessions in the Bahrein
Islands. Both of these developments
became public and official in 1927,
the year after Dulles left the State
Department to join the New York
law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell.
His decision was motivated pri-
marily by financial considerations.
The highest salary he had made with
State was some $8,000 a year, and
he was a married man, with a grow-
ing family. Sullivan and Cromwell
(in which older brother John Foster
was already a partner) belonged to
the legal elite of Wall Street-one
of those law firms that have made
themselvies the virtual brains of big
536 Phe NAMN
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 :CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
business, supplying indispensable ad-
vice on almost every financial, indus-
trial and commercial deal. It ad-
vised both the Rockefellers and the
Morgans; it fairly reeked of the kind
of money that solves all a young
married man's most acute financial
problems.
In this plush atmosphere, Allen
Dulles quickly made himself at home.
lie had hardly fitted himself into
his law chair, indeed, before he be-
came involved in the kind of back-
stage masternminding that has come
to seem almost second-nature to him
ever since.
The nation in question was the
South American state of Colombia.
By treaty, Colombia had awarded
the Morgan and Mellon interests the
extremely rich Barco Concession, so-
called, in Notre de Santander Prov-
ince. But in 1926, just as Allen Dul-
les was quitting the State Depart-
ment, Dr. Miguel Abadia-Mendez
was elected President of Colombia.
He quickly proved to be a disturb-
ing element in the placid world of
American oil interests. He threatened
to repudiate the Barco Concession;
he aroused great popular support;
and worried American oil barons de-
cided they would have to act. They
turned naturally to their legal brains.
One such brain was Francis B.
Loomis, a former State Department
official; another, Allen W. Dulles.
Pressure was immediately applied on
Abadia-Mendez, but he, stubborn
man, wouldn't yield. In August, 1928,
he accused the American companies
of refusing to pay Colombia what
they owed it for the years 1923-26
and reaffirmed his intention of re-
voking the Barco Concession. This
led a secretary in the American Em-
bassy in Bogota to write Washington
that he was convinced "the Presi-
dent will not withdraw his annul-
ment of the agreement until he is
forced to do so under the pressure
of a hard and fast demand."
Colombia the Gem
Force was applied. The State De-
partment sent a sharp note to Bo-
gota. Colombia countered by threat-
ening to nationalize all her oil fields.
The United -States served Colombia
with a -formal ultimatum. The Mel-
Ions threatened an economic boycott,
June 24, 1961
Drawing by Berger
Allen Dulles
Angry anti-American demonstrators
paraded in the streets of Bogota.
The full details of their labors
probably never will be revealed, but
the effects became obvious. In 1930,
Colombia got a new President: Dr.
Enrique Olaya Herrera, a former
Colombian ambassador to the United
States and a well-known friend of
Wall Street bankers. Soon after his
election, he visited New York and
was promised a million-dollar loan,
provided the Barco Concession was
honored. It was.
This adventure in the international
diplomacy of oil, revealing in its way,
was actually little more than a minor
vignette in the ascending careers of
Allen Dulles and his older brother,
John Foster. The interests and out-
look of the two were intertwined al-
most inseparably. They were part-
ners in the firm of Sullivan and
Cromwell; - they represented the
,same clients and the same interests;
their two careers moved together in
measured cadence, almost like the
steps of trained dancers. Most im-
portant among their varied interests,
and claiming a major share of their
attention, were some of Germany's
greatest international cartels.
Three of their clients represented
the very top drawer of German in-
dustry. These were the Vereinigte
Stahlwerke (The Thyssen and Flick
trust), IG Farbenindustrie (the
great chemical trust) and the Rob-
ert Bosch concern. The legal wits of
the Dulles brothers aided all three.
At the onset of World War II, the
German masters of American Bosch
Corp. began to fear for the safety of
their holdings, and an elaborate cor-
porate cover up was arranged. The
Wallenberg brothers, Swedish bank-
ers, agreed to take over American
Bosch (with the promise to return
it after the war, of course), but good
American front names were needed
to provide camouflage. Hence it de-
veloped that in August, 1941, just
a few months before Pearl Harbor,
John Foster Dulles became the sole
voting trustee of the majority shares.
In 1942, the U.S. Government seized
the shares, contending Dulles' trus-
teeship was merely a device to cloak
enemy interests.
Equally close and equally signifi-
cant was the role that Allen Dulles
played in the great Schroeder inter-
national banking house. The parent
firm was German and was headed
by Baron Kurt von Schroeder. A
genuine scar-faced Prussian, the
Baron played a key role in the acces-
sion to power of Adolf Hitler. It was
in his villa at Cologne on January
7, 1933, that Hitler and von Papen
met and worked out their deal for
the Nazi seizure of power. In sub-
sequent years, von Schroeder remain-
ed close to the Nazi hierarchy. He
was made SS Gruppenfuehrer (the
equivalent of general), and he was
chairman of the secret "Frenden-
Kreis S," which collected funds from
Ruhr magnates to finance Heinrich
Himmler. Outside Germany, the
Schroeder financial empire stretched
long and powerful tentacles. In Eng-
land, it had J. H. Schroeder Ltd.; in
the United States, . the Schroeder
Trust Company and the J. Henry
Schroeder Corporation. Allen Dulles
sat on the boards of directors of both.
Almost any lawyer would contend,
of course, that there is nothing wrong
with selling his talents where the
money is and that he has a perfect
right to represent any client, no mat-
ter what his pedigree. The Dulles
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
brothers, however, did not just hap-
pen to represent an isolated German
client or two; they represented the
elite of German industry, firms close-
ly tied to the Nazi machinery, over
a long period of time, on the closest
terms and even in directoral capaci-
ties. Granted the complete proprlcly
of the representation, it would he
naive in the extreme to believe that
such multiple, close associations do
not sway political judgn-cnts.
In the long-forgotten records of
the times, there arc indeed some in-
dications that this was so. In April,
1940, for example, Dr. Gerhart A.
W restrich, one of Germany's leading
lawyers, a man who had handled
Fome European affairs for Sullivan
and Cromwell, came to America by
way of Siberia, ostensibly as Hitler's
special emissary to consult with
American businessmen. 11c establish-
ed residence on a swank New York
suburban estate and before long he
was consulting, not just with Amerl-
can oil and industrial tycoons, but
with a strange assortment of factory
workers and mechanics. The New
York Herald Tribune exposed this
suspicious activity and charged that
Westrich had made misrepresenta-
tions in applying for a driver's li-
cense. John Foster Dulles inune-
diately calve to the Nazi agent's de-
fense. "I don't believe he has done
anything wrong," John Foster said.
"I knew him in the old days and I
had a high regard for his integrity."
American agents began an investiga-
tion, however, and in two weeks Dr.
Westrich was on his w;iv to Japan.
The Westrich affair, inconclusive
in itself, assumes greater significance
when one considers the Anglo-Amer-
ican Fellowship and the America
First Committee.
In Britain, the London branch of
the Schrocder banking firm financed
the Fellowship and concentrated nit
selling the Munich brand of appease-
ment to the British people. The I'`cl-
lowship sought as members promi-
nent names in the Conscrvative Par-
ty, big businessmen, bankers. '.hliese
cnunents were given the VIP trcat-
mcnt on conducted tours of Ger-
man)-; they were entertained by
littler and Goering, and von Rib-
bentrop exercised all the, wiles of
propaganda to sell them on the vir-
N1'E D
Baron Kurt V. SCHRODER
PARTY NUMBER: 1475919 ti5 Nt1MBEP 276904
Former residences: K6In: Hollendla Villa, Rheinallee;
Bonn: Rolandseck.
Any information relative to the above mentioned subject should be forwarded immediately tot
JOINT SPECIAL FINANCIAL DETACHMENT
U. S. GROUP CONTROL COUNCIL
CONTROL COMMISSION FOR GERMANY (BRITISH ELEMENT)
D(.lSSELDORF.
?'his "Ilanter!" foster e'as distributed by Rrttish and U.S. Military
Governments inonedlately after the year.
tiles of the Nazi system. There was
no secret about this activity, no
doubt about its aims and purposes.
And so it is intriguing to find pronl-
inently listed as nlenibens of the Fel-
lowship not just the banking house
of 11. Schroeder Ltd. itself, but the
individual names of 11. W. R.
Schroeder and It. F. and F. C.
11,i;n'ks (see Tore .11. 1'. by Simon
I lo,\ey, puhlished in England by Vic-
tor Gollancz). F. C. 'li;irks actually
served on the Fellowship's council,
or tzoverning body, and If. W. R.
Schroeder and the tvvo `I'iarkses sat
with Allen I)ulles oil the board of
the J. henry Schroeder Banking
Corp.
On this side of the Atlantic, the
incorporation papers for the America
FU-St Colmmittee, devoted to persuad-
ing Americans to keep out of World
NV;Ir 11, were drawn tip in John
Foster Dulles' law office, Records of
America First subsequently showed
that John Foster, the more famous
of the rv~ o brothers during most of
their lifetimes, supported America
First financially. In February, 1941,
his wife contributed $250, and in
Mav, I9-I I, another 5200. On Novem-
her 5, 1941, just r,ne month before
Peal i l I harbor, Anicrica First records
listed a 5500 conirihiuion from "John
Foster hulle.s." Oulles himself, when
qucsiioncd ahour thew ties, protest-
ed: "No one who knows me and
what I have done and stood for con-
si.stcntly over thin v-seven years of
active life could reasonably think
that I could be All isolationist or
`America .Firster' in deed or spirit."
Yet the (Iced and the spirit seem-
ed to be implicit in a series of pub-
538 TIt~ NATION
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
lic speeches that' John Foster Dulles
made in the months before Pearl
Harbor. On at least three occasions,
he ridiculed the notion that America
faced any danger from the Axis pow-
ers. These, he said, were simply "dy-
namic peoples" seeking their rightful
place in the sun. In a speech before
the Economic Club of New York in
March, 1939, he said:
There is no reason to believe that
any totalitarian states, separately or
collectively, would attempt to attack
the United States or could do it
successfully. Certainly it is well with-
in our means to make ourselves im-
mune in this respect. Only hysteria
Germany,
Italy or Japan contemplates war upon
us.
There is no public record that Al-
len Dulles shared either his brother's
sanguine world outlook or interest
in America First. But equally there
is no record, public or private, that
he didn't. All one can say is that,
,throughout their careers, the two
brothers displayed a marked
munity of political views.
Then came Pearl Harbor.
When it did, a whole new career
opened up for Allen Dulles. During
his service in the State Department
years before, he had become friendly
with an Assistant Attorney General
named William J. (Wild Bill) Don-
ovan. When Pearl Harbor plunged
us into World War II, Donovan was
picked to head America's first super-
spy outfit, the Office of Strategic
Services. He promptly contacted Al-
len Dulles and urged him to go to
his old familiar stamping grounds in
Berne, Switzerland. There Allen was
to set up a European espionage
headquarters. The reason Donovan
picked him for the task was that he
wanted a man who had high con-
tacts inside Nazi Germany. On this
score, Allen Dulles certainly quali-
fied.
PART III DULLES AND THE SS
render" and vowed to "spare no ef-
fort to bring Germany to her knees."
Their proclamation came at a time
when a witch's brew was already
boiling inside Germany. German
military strategy long had been predi-
cated on avoiding a war on two
fronts. This had been a cardinal prin-
ciple of Hitler himself until the seem-
ingly endless succession of easy vic-
tories unbalanced his judgment and
propelled him into war with the So-
viet Union. The 'limitless void of Rus-
sia quickly began to engulf the Nazi
war machine, and then, on top of the
Eastern struggle, had come the Jap-
anese stroke at Pearl Harbor, a blow
that had surprised Hitler almost as
much as it had the American fleet.
This development had thrown the
tremendous power and resources of
America into the scales against the
Axis powers, and soon both German
generals and the more astute leaders
of the SS saw that ultimate defeat
was inevitable unless some compro-
mise political settlement could be
worked out with the Allies. A num-
ber of top-level conferences were de-
voted to this problem, both in the
camp of the military and the camp
of the SS.
In one of these secret conclaves in
August, 1942, 'SS-Brigadefuehrer
Walter Schellenberg, one of Heinrich
Himmler's brightest proteges and
one of the most dangerous of Nazi
secret agents, proposed a bold solu-
tion to his boss. Himmler, the master
of the secret police for whom Kurt
von Schroeder had raised funds in
the Ruhr, was a cautious man where
his own neck was involved; but he
was extremely ambitious, too-and
so he listened to Schellenberg. Schel-
lenberg argued that the war was lost
unless a "political solution" could be
arranged. Only Him'mler, he contend-
ed, could achieve this. Only Himmler
could intrigue to spread dissension
among the Allies, to split them
apart, to achieve the needed separate
settlement with the West. Himmler
hesitated, caution warring with am-
bition. The argument between him
and Schellenberg lasted until 3:30
A.M., but Himmler finally agreed to
try Schellenberg's idea.
The prize at stake was enormous.
If he succeeded, Himmler could make
himself master of all Germany. The
ruthless SS chief was well aware, as
William L. Shirer makes clear in The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
that military cliques were plotting
.the assassination of Hitler. On occa-
sion Himmler made a great pretense
of activity and sent some of the more
obvious bunglers before execution
squads, but it seems certain he could
have protected the Fuehrer much
more efficiently than he did. It seems
certain also that he gave the plotting
generals loose rein, anticipating the
530
THE OFFICIALLY favored version
of Allen Dulles' exploits in Switzer-
land in World. War II goes like this:
He was the very last American to
slip legally across the French border
in November, 1942, as German troops
came pouring into Vichy France in
swift reaction to the Allied invasion
of North Africa. His assignment in
Switzerland was to find out who in
Germany might be opposed to the
Hitler regime and whether they were
working actively to overthrow it. In
true master-spy tradition, he put out
his feelers and soon the fish were
swimming into his net; soon secret
anti-Nazis were coming to him to
funnel him vital information and to
give him the most intimate details
about the plot to do away with
Hitler.
Some of this happened, but it isn't
all that happened. To understand the
significance of developments in
Berne, one needs to recall the back-
ground of the times. In January,
1943, just as Allen Dulles' intelli-
gence-gathering operation began to
get going, in full swing, Churchill and
Roosevelt were meeting in Casa-
blanca for the first of those Summit
conferences that were to determine
the conduct of the fighting and, more
important, the conditions for ending
it. It was at Casablanca that the
two great Allied leaders proclaimed
the doctrine of "unconditional sur-
June 24, 1961
Approved
For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
situation that would develop if and
when they succeeded in blowing, up
his revered leader. Himmler, with his
iron grip on the machinery of the
secret police, felt fully competent to
deal with the generals; he feared no
other rival in the Nazi party; and if,
in foreign affairs, he could achieve
Schellenberg's "political solution," he
could perpetuate the Nazi system
with himself in Hitler's shoes.
Meet "Mr. Bull"
Such appear to be the compelling
reasons that led Himmler and Schel-
lenberg to send two SS agents to seek
out Allen Dulles in Berne. The - SS
agents were a Dr. Schudekopf and
Prince Maximillian Egon Hohenlohe.
The Nazi version of these negotia-
tions was contained in three docu-
ments written at the time, labeled
"Top Secret," and preserved in the
files of Schellenberg's dreaded De-
partmen't VI of the SS Reich Security
Office. Bob : Edwards, a member of
the British Parliament, cites these
documents and quotes them fully in
a pamphlet written this year, A
Study of a Master Spy (Allen Dul-
le$). In studying his account, upon
which the following section is based,
it must be borne in mind that the
documents represent an enemy ver-
sion of the talks and must therefore
he read with caution; nor should it
be forgotten that in the shadow
world of the secret agency, duplicity
is a common coin and truth most
difficult to determine.
Edwards, who fought with Loyal-
ist forces in Spain during the civil
war in the 1930s, has been general
secretary of the Chemical Workers
Union since 1947. He is a former
member of the Liverpool City Coun-
cil and has served in Parliament,
elected with Labour and Co-opera-
tive backing, since 1955. He attract-
ed considerable attention when he
began protesting in the House of
Commons about the activities of the
Krupps in Bilbao and the danger of
permitting the Germans to establish
bases in Spain. As a result, "from
absolutely reliable sources in Bonn,"
he says, he received a number of
documents, including the three deal-
ing with Dulles and the SS.
The first of these documents is
a- brief covering letter, o'f' which only
one copy was made. It is dated April
30, 1943, and is from SS-Haitpt-
stur7nfuehrer Ahrens to Department
VI, dealing with: "DULLES, Roose-
velt's special representative in
Switzerland." The second is a record
of conversations between Dulles, re-
ferred to throughout the report as
"Mr. Bull," and Prince Hohenlohe,
called "Herr Pauls." The conversa-
tions took place in Switzerland in
mid-February, 1943.
"Immediately on arrival," accord-
ing to the memorandum on the Dul-
les-Hohenlohe talks, "Herr Pauls"
received a call from a "Mr. Roberts,"
a Dulles aid and confidant. Roberts
was anxious to arrange an immediate
meeting with his chief, Allen Dulles.
Hohenlohe stalled until he could
check up on Dulles. From Spanish
diplomats, from the Swiss and from
representatives of some of the Nazi
satellite states in the Balkans, Ho-
henlohe learned that Dulles operated
on the very highest level, apparent-
ly with a direct pipeline into the
White House, by-passing the State
Department. This convinced the SS
agent that-he should, by all means,
see "Mr. Bull."
He was greeted, he reported, by
"a tall, powerfully built, sporting
type of about forty-five, with a
healthy appearance, good teeth and
a lively, unaffected and gracious
manner. Assuredly a man of civic
courage." The conversation was cor-
dial. Hohenlohe and Dulles quickly
established that they had met be-
fore, in 1916 in Vienna and in the
1920s in New York. With these pre-
liminaries out of the way the SS re-
port of the talk between "Herr
Pauls" and "Mr. Bull" continues:
Mr. Bull said . . . he was fed up
with listening all the time to out-
dated politicians, einigres and prej-
udiced Jews. In his view, a peace
had to be made in Europe in the
preservation of which all concerned
would have a real interest. There
must not again be a division into
victor and vanquished, that is, con-
tented and discontented; never again
must nations like Germany be driven
by want and injustice to desperate
experiments and heroism. The Ger-
man state must continue to exist as
a factor of order and progress; there
could be no question of its partition
or the separation of Austria. At the
same time, however, the might of
Prussia in the German state should
be reduced to reasonable proportions,
and the individual regions (Gau)
should be given greater independence
and a uniform measure of influence
within the framework of Greater
Germany. To the Czech question, Mr.
Bull seemed to attach little impor-
tance; at the same time he felt it
necessary to support a cordon sani-
taire against Bolshevism and pan-
Slavism through the eastward en-
largement of Poland and the preser-
vation of Rumania and a strong
Hungary.
German Hegemony
If this view seems hardly in ac-
cord with the publicly avowed Roose-
velt-Churchill program of "uncondi-
tional surrender" and bringing "Ger-
many to' her knees," the rest of the
Dulles philosophy, according to this
SS report, seems to agree even less
with the ideals for which thousands
of Allied soldiers were at that mo-
ment 'dying. "Herr Pauls" reported
that "Mr. Bull seemed quite to rec-
ognize" Germany's claim to indus-
trial leadership in Europe. "Of Rus-
sia he spoke with scant sympathy.
... Herr Pauls had the feeling that
the Americans, including in this case
Mr. Bull, would not hear of Bol-
shevism or Pan-Slavism in Central
Europe, and, unlike the British, on
no account wished to see the Rus-
sians at the Dardenelles or in the oil
areas of Rumania or Asia Minor."
Indeed, as "Herr Pauls" noted later,
Sqp Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 The NATION
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27: CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
"Mr. Bull" made no great secret,
though he did not speak in detail,
about "Anglo-American antago-
nisms."
The conversation now took an
abrupt turn. "Herr Pauls" made what
lie described as "a very sharp thrust
on the Jewish question" and said he
"sometimes actually felt the Ameri-
cans were only going on with the
war so as to be able to get rid of
the Jews and send them back again.
To this `Mr. Bull' replied that in
America things had not quite got
to that point yet and that it was
in general a question whether the
Jews wanted to go back. Herr Pauls
got the impression that America in-
tended rather to send off the Jews
to Africa."
Discussing the reorganization of
postwar Europe, "Mr. Bull" appeared
to reject British ideas "in toto."
Hohenlohe reported:
He agreed more or less to a Europe
organized politically and industrially
on the basis of large territories, and
considered that a Federal Greater
Germany (similar to the United
States), with an associated Danube
Confederation, would be the best
guarantee of 'order and progress in
Central and Eastern Europe. He does
not reject National Socialism in its
basic ideas and deeds so muck as the
"inwardly unbalanced, Inferiority-
complex-ridden Prussian nzilitarisrn."
(Italics added.)
Then Mr. Bull turned to the sub-
ject of National Socialism and the
person of Adolf Hitler and declared
that with all respect to the historical
importance of Adolf Hitler and his
work it was hardly conceivable that
the Anglo-Saxons' worked-up public
opinion could accept Hitler as un-
challenged master of Greater Ger-
many. People had no confidence in
the durability and dependability of
agreements with him. And re-estab-
lishment of mutual confidence was
the most essential thing after the
war. Nevertheless, Herr Pauls did
not get the impression that it was
to be viewed as a dogma of American
prejudice. . . .
The conversation continued with
Hohenlohe trying to get some inkling
of Allied military intentions and with
Dulles fending off his queries. The
American agent did deliver, however,
a pointed warning. He cited Amer-
ica's "expanding production of air-
craft, which will systematically be
brought into action against the Axis
powers." Then:
Mr. Bull is in close touch with the
Vatican. He himself called Herr
Pauls's attention to the importance
of this connection, for the American
Catholics also have a decisive word
to say, and before the conversation
ended he again repeated how greatly
Germany's position in America would
be strengthened if German bishops
were to plead Germany's cause here.
Even the Jews' hatred could not out-
weigh that. It had to be remembered,
after all, that it had been the Ameri-
can Catholics who had forced the
Jewish-American papers to stop their
baiting of Franco Spain.
The. third top-secret Nazi docu-
ment deals with another talk be-
tween "Mr. Roberts," Dulles' right-
hand man, and another SS agent,
identified only as "Bauer." This took
place in Geneva on Sunday, March
21, 1943. It was a long, rambling,
inconclusive rehash of the war and
its issues, but certain strong strands
emerge in the SS report. "Bauer"
quoted Roberts as saying "he [Rob-
erts] did not like the Jews and it
was distasteful to think that they
were now able to adorn their six-
pointed star with an additional
wreath of martyrdom. . . ." The cool-
ness toward the British, the pro-
German warmth was there. "Bauer"
quoted Roberts:
America had no intention of going
to war every twenty years and was
now aiming at a prolonged settle-
ment, in the planning of which she
wished to take a decisive part and
did not wish to leave that again to
Britain,, bearing in mind the bitter
experience of the past. It would be
nothing else but regrettable if Ger-
many excluded herself from this set-
tlement, for that country deserved
every kind of admiration and meant
a great deal more to him than any
other countries.
How Much Truitt?
The impact of these reports, read
eighteen years later, can only be de-
scribed as shocking. The picture that
emerges is of a Duties perfectly will-
ing to throw the Austrians and the
Czechs (whom the Allies then were
publicly pledged to free) to the
wolves; a Dulles who "does not re-
ject National Socialism in its basic
ideas and deeds," despite the smok-
ing furnaces of the Nazi charnel
houses; a Dulles who, blaming all on
Prussian militarism, was looking
forward to seeing a strong and re-
surgent Germany dominating all of
Central Europe; a Dulles who was
concerned primarily (as the Dulles
,of 1918 had been) with using Ger-
many and Poland as buffers against
Russia in the East; a Dulles who was
concerned, as one would expect the
Dulles of the 1920s to be, with keep-
ing Russia out of the oil-rich Near
East; a Dulles who seemed still to'
regard the British with a small "b,"
who looked with equanimity (as the
Dulles who had represented some of
the mightiest German corporations
might be expected to do) upon Ger-
man industrial leadership of Europe
-a Dulles who paid "respect to the
historical importance of Adolf Hitler
and his work," who thought Hitler
would have to go, but who did not
make this seem like "a dogma of
American prejudice."
One finds oneself asking the shock-
ed question: Was this the real Al-
len Dulles?
It is not easy to decide. Always,
in anything that touches upon the
double-dealing shadow world of the
secret agent, one must have more
than normal reservations. This pic-
ture of Dulles is the picture that
emerges from SS reports, but per-
haps SS agents, like a lot of other
secret agents, might have been
tempted to tell headquarters what
they knew headquarters wanted to
hear. Even if the SS reports were
completely accurate, there is no guar-
antee that Dulles actually believed
all that the reports attributed to
him. He was trying to pick the minds
June 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050,067-8 541
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
of his SS callers, as they were trying
to pick his, and in the brain-picking
duel, any agent might be likely to
cloak, to a degree at least, his real
beliefs and intentions and to pretend
to what he did not really feel. Was
this what Dulles was doing? Was he
being extremely cordial and agree-
able to Hohenlohe merely in the hope
of luring information out of him? Or
were at least some of those senti-
ments he expressed really his own?
Whatever the truth, there is no
imputation in these documents that
Allen Dulles was anything but a
patriot seeking to further what he
conceived to be the best interests of
his country. Not his motives, but
his judgments, are called into ques-
tion as one peruses these SS records.
In any case, the SS portrait must
be assessed against some check-
points-iDulles' own known back-
ground and certain future develop-
ments, all of which seem to fall into
a pattern. Dulles certainly played
the master's role in cloak-and-dagger
activities in Europe. He remained
the boss of the Berne nerve center of
intelligence throughout the war, and
he came out of the conflict with an
overpowering reputation as Ameri-
ca's master spy. Under the circum-
stances, It is curious to find that the
pattern of German rapprochement
described in Hohenlohe's report was
repeated again and again in other
secret dealings by American agents.
For a "Soft" Peace
One of these negotiations took
place in October, 1943, when Dr.
Felix Kersten, a Finnish masseur who
had won the confidence of Himmler
himself, went to Sweden to confer
with an unnamed American agent.
They discussed "the danger from the
East" and "a compromise peace."
Tentatively, they agreed on the res-
toration of Germany's 1914 bound-
aries (this would have included
France's Alsace-Lorraine), the end-
ing of the Hitler dictatorship, re-
duction of the German Army, con-
trol over German industry, and an
American pledge to forget about an
enlarged Poland. Still later, in the
spring of 1944, another American
feeler was put out by a secret agent
in Yugoslavia, again for negotiations
that would involve the possibility of
uniting the Western Allies with Ger-
many for the "struggle against Bol-
shevism."
These repeated overtures would
make it seem as if someone some-
where had some pretty determined
ideas about a soft German peace
and the building up of a strong post-
war Germany to combat the Soviet
menace. All of this occurred at a
time when Russia ostensibly was our
Ally and was locked in the fiercest
of death grapples with Germany. If
the Russians, who had their own spy
system, were aware of these secret
machinations-as they may well
have been, for, according to the Ger-
mans, Hungarian agents had broken
the code Dulles was using the seem-
ingly unreasonable Russian distrust
of America would begin to seem less
unreasonable. Such are the penalties
of an intelligence operation that runs
counter to the official policy of the
nation employing it.
Whether Dulles himself had any
responsibility for the persistent pro-
German feelers is not established, but
there is one further strong indication
of his attitude toward Germany in
one of his best-publicized exploits.
Not long after his arrival in Berne,
he received a call from an emissary
connected with the military side of
the crosshatch of plots involving the
destruction of Hitler. His caller was
Hans Bernd Gisevius, German vice
consul in Zurich and a member of
the Abwehr, the secret intelligence.
Gisevius was a huge, 6-foot-4 Ger-
man who had been connected with
anti-Hitler plots in 1938 and 1939,
before the outbreak of the war. He
had close connections with some of
Germany's top military leaders, who
had long been convinced that Hitler
would have to be removed from the
scene. From Dulles, Gisevius and his
fellow plotters wanted just one as-
surance-that, if they killed Hitler,
Washington would support them in
setting up a new and presumably
anti-Nazi government.
The German conspirators did not
just ask for Washington's backing;
they held out a threat. If the West-
ern democracies refused to grant
Germany a decent peace, they warn-
ed, they would be compelled to turn
to Soviet Russia for support. This,
it would seem, was hardly the tone
of men inspired by great ideals. As
Shirer perceptively remarks: "One
marvels at these German resistance
leaders who were so insistent on get-
ting a favorable peace settlement
from the West and so hesitant in
getting rid of Hitler until they got it.
One would have thought that if they
.considered Nazism to be such a
monstrous evil ... they would have
concentrated on trying to overthrow
it regardless of how the West might
treat their new regime." No such re-
flection appears to have occurred to
Dulles. He was inclined to accept
the demands of the plotters and
urged Washington to back the bar-
gain, to promise favorable terms of
peace. In this he failed. Roosevelt in-
sisted on "unconditional surrender."
In the light of what we now know,
the wisdom of the deal proposed by
Dulles appears to be highly dubious.
One thing is certain: Himmler knew
of the plots against Hitler and de-
liberately left enough of the plotters
free to score the near-miss of the
1944 bomb explosion in Hitler's East
Prussian headquarters. Himmler cer-
tainly had every intention of domi-
nating the Germany that would have
survived the loss of the Fuehrer, and
there can be little doubt that, if he
had been successful, the Nazi system
would have been perpetuated. This,
at least, the doctrine of "uncondi-
tional surrender" avoided. The com-
plete crushing of Germany, the free-
ing of the wraiths in its concentra-
tion camps-total victory and its
revelations-made any apologia for
Nazism impossible.
Such an outcome could hardly
have been achieved by the Allen Dul-
les who peeps out at us from the
pages of SS reports or by the Allen
Dulles who was ready, by his own
admission, to deal with the military
plotters.
542 The NATION
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
PART IV D,ULLES, PEACE and the CIA
ALLEN DULLES came back from
Berne with such a reputation as a
cloak-and-dagger mastermind that
his exploits are still spoken of with
awe. He was decorated with the
American Medal of Merit, a Presi-
dential Citation, the Medal of Free-
dom, Belgium's Leopold Cross and
France's Legion of Honor. These
medals represented several triumphs
in espionage.
The greatest feats stemmed from
Dulles' contact with an employee in
the German Foreign Office who has
been identified only as "George
Wood." A :secret anti-Nazi, "Wood"
risked death many times to make
contact with Dulles in Berne. At each
meeting, he delivered to the Amer-
ican -agent copies of ultra-secret Ger-
man documents. The impressive to-
tal of 2,600 documents reportedly
was funneled into Dulles' hands by
"Wood." Some are said to have been
of- such importance that they vitally
affected the course of the war.
According to the Dulles legend,
documents supplied by "Wood" gave
the first clue to German experiments
with the V-1 and V-2 rockets at the
Peenemunde - testing base on the
Baltic. Dulles' information, it is as-
serted, warned the Allies in time, en-
abled them to raid Peenemunde with
their heavy bombers, and set the
rocket program back an all-important
six months.
There is no doubt that the raid on
Peenemunde did just this, but there
is considerable doubt whether Dulles
can claim sole credit for it. Winston
Churchill, in his history of World
War II, writes that German experi-
ments with rockets at Peenemunde
were known even before the war and
that as early as the autumn of 1939
"references to long-range weapons of
various kinds began to appear in our
Intelligence reports." Edwards, the
British M.P., writes categorically:
Finally, it is a well known fact that
it was not Mr. Dulles who distin-
guished himself by discovering the
V-rockets, but unassuming Miss Con-
stance Babbington Smith, the British
expert on aerial reconnaissance pho-
tography, who on June 23, 1943, iden-
tified the launching ramps on an
aerial photograph of Peenemunde.
The British Secret Service had known
about plans for building them ever
since 1939.
Fewer questions have been raised
about some of Dulles' other exploits.
One of these dealt with a mysterious
Nazi spy by the name of."Cicero."
Edwards insists that the full story of
"Cicero" has not yet been told, but
the accepted version goes like this:
From some of the documents given
him by "Wood," Dulles learned that
the British Ambassador in ,Turkey,
Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, had
a valet who was actually a Nazi spy
and who used" the code name of
"Cicero." The tip about "Cicero"
came to Dulles just in time to alter
the route of an American convoy and
save it from a planned U-boat attack.
Even more important than saving
a convoy was the final achievement
credited to Dulles-the surrender of
the German Army in Italy in 1945.
Dulles arranged this through his con-
tacts in the SS, specifically through
negotiations with SS-Obergruppez-
fuehrer Karl Wolff. As a result, the
German surrender in Italy came
earlier than otherwise might have
been the case, and presumably the
lives of thousands of Allied soldiers
were saved.
The Dulles Ambivalence
With war's end, Dulles returned
for a time to his law desk at Sullivan
and Cromwell, but with his glamor-
ous (and glamorized) World War II
masterminding behind him, it was
hardly to be expected that world
events would leave him long alone.
Both he and his older brother, John
Foster, now began to emerge on the
national scene in new and ever more
powerful roles. The build-up for both
was, and was to remain, tremendous.
The nation's largest news media
agreed with virtually a single voice
that John Foster Dulles was the in-
fallible wise man of foreign policy;
his ties to top-level German industry
under the Nazis, his links to America
First, his speeches proclaiming we
had nothing to fear from the Axis,
were all forgotten. Only some mav-
erick columnists like Drew Pearson,
1. F. Stone, Dr. Frank Kingdon and
Harold L. Ickes remembered the past.
And who were they to outshout New
York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey,
who discovered and proclaimed
(years before Eisenhower) that John
Foster Dulles was "the greatest
statesman in the world" and "the
only man in the world' whom the
Russians fear"?
Then - and Since .
Under the cover of such authorita-
tive proclamations of highly disput-
able fact, the American public as ,a
whole completely forgot that the
Dulles brothers had been the high
legal priests and the helpful manip-
ulators of some of the greatest Ger-
man trusts; and little significance
seems to have been attached to the
curious coincidence that, in the im-
mediate postwar era, they became
the spokesmen for a compassionate
German policy. With the adaptabil-
ity of lawyers and politicians, they
seemed at times to ride both sides
of the issue, but in the final analysis
their weight appears to have been
thrown on the pro-German side.
Typical of this ambivalence was
the performance of Allen Dulles in
the days right after the guns were
silenced. In an article he wrote in
Collier's in May, 1946, he based his
lead paragraph on the events of
157 B.C., comparing Berlin with
Carthage. "Berlin remains a monu-
ment to Prussian and Nazi philoso-
phy," he wrote. He suggested it
might be a good idea to leave in the
heart of Berlin a completely devas-
tated area as a perpetual reminder
of what the Nazis and Prussian mili-
tarism had wrought. "The central
area, for example, a half mile radius
around Hitler's Chancellory," he ex-
plained, "might be set aside as a
perpetual memorial to the Nazis and
to Prussia." Berlin should no longer
be the capital of Germany; it should
be relegated to an inconsequential
June 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 541
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
role as a mere railroad and commer-
cial center because "Berlin has lost
its birthright.... It has lost it be-
cause for generations this city has
housed the chief disturbers of world
peace. Hence, as the capital of Ger-
many, Berlin `delenda est."'
Yet, in less than two years' time,
Allen Dulles appeared to be worry-
ing less about the horrors of Nazi
and Prussian militarism and more
about the virtues of a strong Ger-
many. When Congressional commit-
tees began debating the European
Recovery Program, former President
Herbert Hoover, John Foster Dulles
and Allen Dulles were among the
leaders in the drive to rebuild Ger-
man industry-with which the Dul-
leses, at least, had had the strongest
kind of personal and financial ties.
Describing this effort, Helen Fuller
wrote in The New Republic in Feb-
ruary, 1948:
For months, the Herter Committee
on European aid has been passing
for a high-minded, bipartisan group
of Good Samaritans. Actually, the
Herter bill that is being urged as a
substitute for ERP was mainly a
Hoover product. Chairman Christian
A. Herter (R., Mass.), a Hoover
protege, allowed Allen Dulles, inter-
national banker and friend of Hoover,
to do the drafting, called in other
like-minded Wall Streeters to help.
The author went on to describe
the "snail's pace" dismantling of
German industry abroad, the concen-
trated "strong Germany" propa-
ganda drive in the United States.
She quoted John Foster Dulles' tes-
timony, which seemingly straddled
both sides of the issue. John Foster
favored reparations and control; but
he insisted it wouldn't be economical
to duplicate Germany's steel indus-
try in France, and all Western Euro-
pean countries would be positively
"delighted to see Germany restored
and smoke pouring out of the fac-
tories of the Ruhr as rapidly as pos-
sible." Acidly, Helen Fuller wrote:
"The Inter-Allied Reparations Agen-
cy could show Dulles fat official rec-
ords to the contrary. France, Bel-
gium, the Netherlands and many
others want German equipment with
which to rebuild their own devas-
tated economies."
This is the background from which
the "strong Germany" policy of to-
day was to emerge. Whether the Ger-
mans of today are a completely dif-
ferent race from the Germans of the
past who brought two of history's
most horrible wars upon the world,
whether the "strong Germany" pol-
icy represents the acme of wisdom
or a disastrous gamble in power poli-
tics-these are questions that only
the future can decide. What is im-
portant here is to understand some
of the pressures producing the policy.
When one examines these, one finds
the Dulleses advocating a public
policy that coincided neatly with the
dictates of what had been their long-
time, private interests. The Allen
Dulles of 1918, of 1942-45, of 1947-
48, seems the same man, with the
same strong alliances to top-level
Germans regardless of their ideology;
and it is this strong pull of private
ties that becomes so disturbing when
one tries to analyze the public per-
formance of the man who was soon
to become head of CIA.
Birth of the CIA
The agency itself was essentially
the creation of President Harry S.
Truman, and it resulted almost in-
evitably from the painful lessons of
World War II. Pearl Harbor had had
a permanent and understandable ef-
fect upon the thinking of American
leaders. In the post-mortems con-
ducted into that disaster, it had be-
come apparent that ample informa-
tion was available in Washington to
have alerted Army and Navy com-
manders at the Pearl Harbor base
of their danger; but no effective use
had been made of the available in-
telligence, largely because there was
no single agency entrusted with the
accurate and speedy interpretation
of such detail. The emergencies of
war led to the hasty creation of OSS,
but OSS was obviously a stopgap
measure, not a final solution.
On October 1, 1945, immediately
after the cessation of hostilities, Tru-
man abolished OSS. The President
apparently had a personal distaste
for the nasty business of spying, and
he was, in addition, under bureau-
cratic pressures from all sides to de-
capitate OSS as quickly as possible.
The military intelligence services
wanted no such powerful competitor;
the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover long
had felt it should be the sole gather-
er and dispenser of vital information,
both at home and abroad; and the
Department of State and the Bu-
reau of the Budget both had the
knives out for OSS.' With the disso-
lution of the agency, however, a cha-
otic situation quickly arose. Intel-
ligence reports from all the competing
intelligence-gatherers flowed in be-
wildering profusion across the Pres-
ident's desk. Frequently, no two
agencies agreed on anything; fre-
quently, their analyses and predic-
tions flatly contradicted one another.
The result was that the President
was almost as badly off from this
plethora of advice as he would have
been if he had had no advice at all,
and he was left largely to follow his
own hunches.
This obviously was no way to
chart strategy among the perilous
reefs of the cold war, and various
solutions were proposed. Donovan,
as early as 1944, had suggested to
Roosevelt the creation of a central
intelligence agency so powerful it
would dominate the entire field. Op-
position to such a monolithic struc-
ture was led by the Navy, which took
the position that each of the services,
with its own special requirements and
ends in view, needed its own agents.
Admiral King, in addition, foresaw
in a powerful central intelligence a
possible threat to democracy, and in
Congress there were very real fears
lest, in our hunt for intelligence, we
create a potential Gestapo.
Giant Step Forward
The result was a compromise. Tru-
man, by Executive order on January
22, 1946, set up the Central Intelli-
gence Group, the forerunner of the
present CIA. This was to be, as Ran-
som explains in his authoritative
book, primarily "a holding company
coordinating the work of existing de-
partments." It functioned under an
executive council, the National In-
telligence Authority, composed of the
Secretaries of State, War and Navy,
and the President's personal repre-
sentative. Under this setup, the prac-
tice began which continues today of
having central, intelligence provide
for the President's personal eye a
daily, exclusive and unified digest
and summary of all important inter-
544 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 The NATION
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
national intelligence. Truman, un-
derstandably, felt that a great step
forward had been taken. "Here, at
last," he writes in his memoirs, "a
coordinated method had been work-
ed out, and a practical way had been
found for keeping the President in-
formed as to what was known and
what was going on."
The Central Intelligence Group,
however, was only a temporary ex-
pedient, as OSS had been before it;
and Congress, in ordering the semi-
unification of the defense establish-
ment in 1947, abolished CIG and
created the present Central Intelli-
gence Agency, functioning under a
National Security Council, compar-
able to the former National Intelli-
gence Agency. Before final action
was taken, the advice of Allen Dulles
was sought. This he gave in a signifi-
cant memorandum dated April 25,
1947.
Dulles made six principal recom-
mendations. CIA, he thought, should
have absolute control over its own
personnel; its /chief should not have
men foisted upon him for political or
other reasons, but should have full
say in picking his own assistants. The
agency should have its own budget
and the right to supplement this by
drawing funds from the Departments
of State and National Defense. CIA
should have "exclusive jurisdiction
to carry out secret intelligence op-
erations." It should have "access to
all intelligence information relating
to foreign countries." It should be
the "recognized agency for dealing
with the central intelligence agen-
cies of other countries." And, finally,
it should have "its operations and
personnel protected by `official se-
crets' legislation which would pro-
vide adequate penalties for breach
of security."
Principle of Separation
In his comments on the proposed
agency, Dulles made several impor-
tant observations. CIA, he felt,
should be predominantly civilian ra-
ther than military in its high com-
mand, and if a military marl was ap-
pointed to head it, he should become
a civilian while he held the office. Its
h f 1 1 must
n
t
For the home of a secret agency, the new Washington headquarters of the
CIA is on the resplendent side.
be assured of long tenure, like Hoover
in the FBI, "to build up public con-
fidence, and esprit de corps in his
organization, and a high prestige."
He opposed the creation of an agency
that would become "merely a coordi-
nating agency for the military intel-
ligence services" and warned that
this "is not enough.". Most signifi-
cantly, in view of the future course
of events, he recognized the dangers
inherent in wedding information to
policy.
The State Department . . . [he
wrote] will collect and process its own
information as a basis for the day-
to-day conduct of its work. The Arm-
ed Services intelligence agencies will
do likewise. But for the proper judg-
ing of the situation in any foreign
country it is important that the in-
formation should be processed by an
agency whose duty it is to weigh
facts, and to draw conclusions from
those facts, without having either the
facts or the conclusions warped by
the inevitable and even proper preju-
dices of the, men whose duty it is to
determine policy and who, having
once determined policy, are too likely
to be blind to any facts which might
tend to prove the policy to be faulty.
The Central Intelligence Agency
should have nothing to do with pol-
icy. It should try to get at the hard
facts on which others must deter-
mine policy.
virtually every expert on the sub-
ject has always been in complete
agreement. But, unfortunately, this
wasn't the way CIA was to be set
up, and this. wasn't the way that in-
creasingly, under Allen Dulles him-
self in later years, it was to run.
Rumors that this cardinal prin-
ciple of intelligence-the separation
of information from the roles of pol-
icy and action-might be flouted
by the new spy outfit were current
even as it was being created. In the
hearings on the National Security
Act of 1947, Congressman Fred
Busbey sounded an anxious note. "I
wonder," he asked, "if there is any
foundation for the rumors that have
come to me to the effect that through
this Central Intelligence Agency,
they are contemplating operational
activities?"
The question wasn't answered at
the time, but the act in its final form
left the door open and "they" walked
through. The Security Act charged
CIA with -five specific functions: to
advise the National Security Coun-
cil on intelligence matters related to
national security; to make recom-
mendations to the council for coordi-
nation of intelligence activities of
departments and agencies of the gov-
ernment; to correlate and evaluate
intelligence and provide for its ap-
propriate dissemination within the
government; to perform for the bene-
g y,
ro
administration, e e t s
have long-term continuity and pro- The case could not be put better.
fessional status; its director should With this strong, explicit statement,
June 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000590050067-8
 ft f ' ? Appr9yed For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
t o
existing i to igence agencies
such additional service`s as the NSC
might determine could be more ef-
ficiently handled centrally; and fi-
nally, most important, "to perform
other fuinctions and duties" relating
to national security intelligence as
the NSC might direct. It is this
"other functions and duties" clause
that gave CIA broad powers to enter,
not just the field of intelligence, but
tl
fi
ld
f
ic
e
o
overt activiti
es. up around those all-important "other Russia might be expected to deto-
functions and duties" the CIA was nate an atom bomb. All intelligence
The Principle Violated empowered to perform. These were services agreed at the end of World
The concentration of power in the to be embarked upon only at the di- War II that this feat would require
hands of the agency, implicit in its rection of the National Security ten years at least, and all were aston-
organization, was increased tre- Council, presided over by the Pres- fished when the Soviets held their
mendously by revisions of the CIA ident himself. But, as Ransom points first successful A-bomb test in 1949.
statute made in 1949. Three major out, the principal intelligence ad- This shock was succeeded by one
changes placed almost dictatorial wiser of the NSC is the director of even greater, for the Russians in Au-
po~iers in the hands of its director. CIA. The director is "a constant par- gust, 1953, actually beat us to the
He was given the right to hire and ticipant in NSC deliberations," and first workable hydrogen bomb, and
fire without regard to Civil Service this, to Ransom, seems "to suggest we learned some significant details
or other restraints. CIA was exempt- that the scope of CIA operations is of value to ourselves by analyzing
ed from the provisions of any laws to a large extent self-determined.... their fallout. With these blasts, just
that might require publication or dis- Certainly Congress has no voice as as important though less obvious and
closure of the "organization, func- to how and where CIA is to function, less publicized than Sputnik, "mas-
tions, names, official titles, salaries other than prohibiting it to engage sivc retaliation" became an unwork-
or numbers of peci ti
l employed" in domestic security activities." able two-way street.
(even the Bureau of the Budget was This is the powerful and secretive The next flub involved Korea, but
directed specifically to make no re- setup-doubly powerful and insidi- again, at the outset at least, CIA
ports to Congress on any of these ous in its influence because it is so was no more at fault than others.
matters; in other words, CIA be- secretive, so free of any effective All our intelligence services thought
came a completely closed book). At checkrein-that Congress created to it highly improbable that the North
the same time, its director was given protect us against the possibility of Korean Communists would invade
full authority to spend any amount an atomic Pearl Harbor. How has it South Korea and touch off a war-
on his personal voucher, without ac- functioned? but they did. This first wrong guess
counting. "This," as Ransom com_ In the beginning, as was perhaps was followed by others. One of the
ments, "is truly an extraordinary inevitable with a new agency, its great surprises was the appearance
power for, the head of an Executive performance could be described only in the Korean skies of the Russian
agency with thousands of employees as decidedly spotty. Rear Admiral MIG-15, a war plane faster than any-
and annual expenditures in the bun- Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter was the first thing in our arsenal and one that in-
dreds of millions of dollars." director of CIA and guided its des- flicted crushing losses on our B-29
To counterbalance these sweep- tiny through its first three difficult bombers. Yet, even after the MIG-15
ing powers, there were few restraints. years. The Korean War came during appeared, we continued our fatal
Congress, e evidently period, and with it came the underestimation of the Russians. Air
w y with that haunt- first blunders of the new agency Gestapo specter in mind, did in its primary role, the gathering of Force Intelligence other was of the opin-
ing specify that CIA should have no ar- intelligence. ion-and the other intelligence serv-
rest or subpoena powers within the ices seemed to agree-that the Rus-
United States. The FBI's files, while Early Failures sians could turn out no more than
not barred to it, were not exactly For some of these errors in stra- six MIGs a month by hand; actually,
opened either; for, while other agen- tegic foresight, CIA was not alone Russian industry built 10,000 MIGs
cies were required to report their in- at fault; other older and better- with great rapidity.
telligence findings to CIA, the FBI established arms of the intelligence These initial blunders of intelli-
was not. The CIA may obtain what- services, the military and the State gence in the Korean War were mat-
ever specific information the FBI Department, were equally culpable. ters of relatively little moment com-
has if it requests it in writing, but The first miscalculation-and one of pared to the final one that, in. the
this is quite a different affair from the gravest in magnitude, for upon fall of 1950, literally cost the lives
being kept informed as a matter of its accuracy rested the cornerstone of thousands of American soldiers.
routine of what the FBI knows. Fl- of such deterrent policies as "massive United Nations forces, having recov-
nally, a supposed safeguard was set retaliation"-dealt with the date ered from their initial defeats, had
546 The NATION
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved
driven the Red invaders from the
North back across the 38th Parallel,
the dividing line between North and
South Korea. A decision had to be
made whether to continue the at-
tack across the border, conquering
all of Korea. This course was sub-
ject to one paramount danger. If
U.N. forces pressed on into North
Korea, would the Chinese Commu-
nists, with their hordes of manpower,
enter the war?
General Douglas MacArthur was
confident that they would not. All of
our intelligence forces agreed in es-
sence on this forecast. In this, as in
the recent Cuba invasion, our vision
appears to have been blinded by our
desires, and the intelligence for
which we pay literally billions of dol-
lars was abysmally wrong, while the
advice of independent observers,
whose minds were. not chained by
the demands of policy, was plainly
right. In the Korean War, as in the
case of Cuba, there were many clear
and explicit warnings that a blind
intelligence refused to heed.
One of these was delivered by Su-
preme Court Justice William O.
Douglas. An astute world traveler,
Justice Douglas had been roaming
through Southeast Asia during the
late summer of 1950. His pulse-tak-
ings convinced him that, if our troops
crossed the 38th Parallel, the Com-
munist Chinese would enter the war
on a massive scale. He personally
warned President Truman of this. A
similar warning was sounded in
Washington by the Indian represent-
atives to the United States. But these
uncommitted minds could not be ex-
pected to be so persuasive as those
who were supposed to know.
Ransom, in his work on the CIA,
describes the sequel in these words:
Despite the continuous barrage of
propaganda warnings and the care-
fully monitored movement of troops
into Manchuria, intelligence analysts
and the policy makers failed to con-
sider seriously such threats and ap-
parently neglected to read history,
or they would have recognized the
traditional Chinese fear of an enemy
north of the narrow Korean waist.
President Truman records in his
memoirs that "On October 20 (1950),
the CIA delivered a memorandum to
me which said that they had reports
that the Chinese Communists would
move in far enough to safeguard the
Suiho. electric plant and other instal-
lations along the Yalu River which
provided them with power." Actually
the Chinese had begun crossing the
Yalu four days earlier with the ap-
parent intention of throwing the
United Nations forces out of Korea.
The surprise was complete, and
the massive Chinese onslaught
threatened for a time to cut off and
obliterate the U.N. Army. Even
though MacArthur managed to res-
cue the bulk of his forces, he was
driven back in a military debacle.
Criticism of the CIA may have
had something to do with the de-
cision of Admiral Hillenkoetter to
leave his post as its director and re-
turn to naval duty. He was succeed-
ed by General Walter Bedell Smith,
who had been Eisenhower's Chief of
Staff in Europe. One of Smith's first
moves was to telephone Allen Dulles.
Dulles had served on a committee
that in 1948 had examined the CIA
setup and recommended some fifty
administrative changes. Smith had
read the report, and when he got
Dulles on the phone in his New
York law office, he spoke with char-
acteristic bluntness.
As Dulles later recalled it, Smith
growled: "Now that you've written
this damn report, it's up to you to
put it into effect."
Dulles agreed to serve with Smith.
In November, 1950, he left for Wash-
ington. He has been there ever since.
PART V WITH DULLES IN IRAN
"I CAME DOWN here to stay six
months, and now see what has hap-
pened," Allen Dulles remarked to a
friend some years ago, in a happier
time.
A husky six-footer, weighing 200
pounds, the boss of the CIA, with
his bristling mustache and thinning
gray hair, greatly resembles his late
brother, John Foster Dulles, but in
Washington he was generally the
much better liked of the two. He was
less of a Messiah, more relaxed, more
good-humored. A man who seems to
live with a pipe in his mouth, Allen
Dulles looks more like a kindly,
tweedy, college professor than a
mastermind of secret intelligence, and
he and his wife form one of Wash-
ington's most popular party-going
couples. They frequently, however,
June 24, 1961
do little more than put in an appear-
ance and leave early. But even these
fleeting visits cause some eyebrow
raising, for most comparable com-
manders of secret agents, less gre-
garious than Dulles, shun the cock-
tail circuit with its built-in tempta-
tions to wag the tongue. This is a
risk that Dulles assumes with ap-
parent joyousness, and this much
must be said for-him: he has never
yet been accused of dropping the
wrong word into the wrong ear.
As far as personality goes, then,
(and, as everyone knows, it goes
far), Allen Dulles has been and still
is a popular man in Washington. At
sixty-eight, he is still amazingly ac-
tive. He plays a good game of dou-
bles in tennis, still shoots golf at
around ninety when he has a chance
to play. Friends describe him as a
man of "enormous patience," and to
interviewers-he presents the candid
and attractive face of a man who
modestly deprecates his own cloak-
and-dagger roles. "I've never been
shot at," he remarked once, "and I
don't know that anyone ever tried
to kidnap me."
These engaging personal attributes
have helped to carry Allen Dulles far
and probably have helped to blunt
much sharp criticism to which, other-
wise, he might have been subjected.
He became Deputy Director of CIA
under Bedell Smith in August, 1951,
and in January, 1953, with the ad-
vent of the Eisenhower administra-
tion, he was named director even as
his brother became Secretary of
State. Thus, as The New York Times
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
547
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
noted at the time, the nation in a It was, as events were to show, a tionalism in Iran, and he capitalized
most unusual move had placed "in pretty accurate 'assessbient, and it il- on the sentiment of the hour by ex-
the hands of two brothers the direc- lustrates CIA's functioning at its propriating the properties of the
i
f
t
on o
open and secret foreign policy
designed to win the `cold war' against
communism.
best in the intelligence field that British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
should be its primary business. But The company's royalty payments
before many months had passed, CIA
was to give another demonstration
of its prowess, this time on a differ-
ent and far more controversial level.
The development involved strate-
gically important, oil-rich !ran. The
Iranian border runs for 1,000 miles
along that of the Soviet Union, and
the natural resources of the country
include an estimated 13 per cent of
the world's oil reserves. This liquid
treasure, the one great source of true
wealth in Iran, long had been ex-
ploited by British interests. Baron
Reuter, founder of the British news
service that still bears his name, had
received in 1872 a concession that
gave him practically a complete mo-
nopoly over Iranian industry. Inter-
national complications prevented
Reuter from doing much to exercise
the concession for several years, but
ultimately, in the early 1900s, he and
others-including J. Henry Schroe-
der & Co., the international German
banking house with which Allen Dul-
les later was to be connected-form-
ed the Industrial Bank of Persia
(later the Bank of Iran), which in
turn helped to finance the Anglo-
Iranian Oil Co. It seems worthy of
note that Frank C. Tiarks, one of
Allen Dulles' fellow directors in the
Schroeder banking enterprises, served
also as a director of Anglo-Iranian
Oil and that Sullivan and Cromwell,
the New York legal firm in which
the Dulles brothers were such prom-
inent partners, was the long-time
legal counsel of Anglo-Iranian Oil.
These old ties are stressed because
they were lying there among the
stage props in the background when
Allen Dulles, just a few short months
after he became CIA director, pop-
ped upon the international scene in
a new and decidedly spectacular role.
The immediate background was this:
In 1951, a new political force that
threatened old and dominant finan-
cial interests had arisen in Iran. This
force was Mohammed Mossadegh,
himself a wealthy landowner, but a
man driven by a strong anti-British
phobia. Mossadegh rose to power as
Premier during a time of intense na-
had provided a major part of Iran's
foreign exchange earnings; but with
the seizure by Mossadegh, there de-
veloped a bitter international dis-
pute. The huge financial interests of
the West virtually boycotted Iranian
oil. Mossadegh tried to make deals
with smaller, independent American
companies to work the Iranian fields,
but the State Department frowned
upon such free enterprise. The inter-
national oil cartel held firm-and
Iran lost all its oil revenues.
The result became evident almost
at once. Not just intelligence, but
palace coups became the work of
CIA. The intrigue that topples gov-
ernments became increasingly its
trade mark.
Dulles had hardly made himself
comfortable in the CIA director's
chair when a major event abroad
called for prompt and accurate anal-
ysis. In March, 1953, the report of
Joseph Stalin's death flashed over
the wires to a teletype in CIA head-
quarters at 2430 E Street N.W. in
Washington. The dictator's demise
raised immediate and tremendous
questions. Georgi Malenkov appear-
ed to be the No. 2 man in the Krem-
lin. He would probably succeed, for
a time at least, to Stalin's power.
What kind of ruler would he be?
Would Russia be torn by revolution,
by internal power struggles? Would
she be more, or less, warlike?
Upon the answers to these ques-
tions depended America's Posture,
America's preparation to meet the
changed world situation. CIA swung
at once into a "crash" program de-
signed to provide the necessary in-
formation. The instant Dulles got
the word of Stalin's death, he began
sending out orders to CIA agents and
undercover men scattered through-
out the world. He demanded from
them information on what to expect,
.morale behind the iron curtain, arms
shipments, troop movements, purges.
Before long, detailed reports began
to pour in.
Iran : a Tangled Web
While the foreign network was
.supplying overseas data, Dulles and
the experts in his analysis section in
CIA headquarters sifted reports and
studied their voluminous files on
Malenkov and the men most closely
associated with him. From all of
these sources, they compiled a pic-
ture and made an expert guess. A
messenger rushed off to the White
House with this CIA estimate: Rus-
sia was not prepared for war. There
would be no revolution.
Democracy-and Oil
The resulting financial pressures
on the Mossadegh regime were enor-
mous. The United States offset some
of these with foreign aid. In 1951,
$1.6 million was allowed for a tech-
nical rural-improvement program.
The following year, with Iran drain-
ed of all oil revenue, the American
foreign aid grant was raised to $23
million, most of which was used to
make up Iran's foreign exchange
shortages. The Iranian financial
crisis, however, remained desperate,
and on May 28, 1953, Mossadegh
sent a demand to President Eisen-
hower. Iran, he said, would have to
have more American aid, or he would
have to seek help elsewhere through
the conclusion of an economic agree-
ment and mutual defense pact with
Russia.
Foreign analysts were convinced
that Mossadegh had just one asset
he could pledge to guarantee the
safety of Russian investment-the
rich Iranian oil fields and the re-
finery at Abadan, the world's largest,
which Mossadegh had seized from
Anglo-Iranian. It is clear that Anglo-
Iranian had billion-dollar prop-
erty interests at stake, but this un-
derlying factor has hardly ever been
mentioned in discussing the loftier
picture - the stake of democracy:
If Russia were to get Iran's oil,
the Western democracies' position
throughout the Middle East would
be weakened, Soviet prestige would
be greatly enhanced. This, naturally,
was unthinkable, and so the Eisen-
hower administration, already great-
The NATION
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 CI~4QPM9iQ269R(~Q05~QAQ5A41&7-goof Of that
ApprQvgd Forl Release 2003/05/127loma ,.
ly under the influence o f t h e Dtal es secret. agent, i
1` t th it theorem.
a
brothers, decided on a startling new princess would seem to inc Ic
gamble in international intrigue. perhaps wires were being pulled. its
The President stalled Mossadegh suspicion was reinforced when a
for a month, then turned him down fourth mysterious actor began to
with an emphatic "No." Immediate- stroll slowly across the international
ly . afterwards, things began to hap- stage. This was Brig. Gen. H. Nor-
pen. The step-by-step action was de- man Schwarzkopf, best known for
tailed by Richard and Gladys the not entirely brilliant conduct of
Ilarkness in a three-part Saturday the Lindbergh kidnaping case in
Evening Post series, "The Mysterious 1932 when lie had been head of New
Doings of CIA," which appeared in Jersey State Police. Schwarzkopf now
the late fall of 1954. The series bears began to move leisurely around the
intrinsic evidence on almost every Middle East, stopping off in Pakis-
page of having been written with the tan, Syria, Lebanon-and Iran. He
full, if secret, cooperation of CIA, was an old hand in Iran, having
and so its account of the coup in served there from 1942 through 1948
Iran is as authoritative as one can as high-level adviser in the reorgani-
get. Obviously, this was one of those zation of the Shah's national police
occasions when Allen Dulles, in tri- force. He was, he said, just dropping
umph, permitted himself an audible by "to see old friends again." Mossa-
public chuckle-and a discreet leak. degh and the Russian propaganda
press distrusted this pat explanation
Enter the CIA and began to rail nervously at his
This, then, according to the Hark- presence; but Schwarzkopf, undeter-
nesses, is what happened: red, visited with the Shah and had
some intimate talks with his former
On August 10, 1953, Allen Dulles colleague on the national police force,
packed his bags and flew to Europe, Maj Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi. Almost
ostensibly to join his wife for a quiet at once, like cause and effect, a new
vacation in the Swiss Alps. His de- and tougher attitude toward Mossa-
parture coincided almost precisely
Iranian pressure-cooker. Mossadegh
was threatening to run Shah Mo-
hammed Riza Pahlevi right off the
throne and out of the country. The
Premier had allied himself with the
Communist Tudeh Party in Teheran
and had acquired almost dictatorial
powers. He was at this very moment
conferring 'with a Russian diplomatic-
economic mission. These conferences
were a clear sign that the hour of
supreme decision approached; yet,
strangely enough, Loy Henderson,
the American Ambassador to Iran,
seemed to feel free to leave his vital
post for a short "holiday" in the
company of Allen Dulles in Switzer-
land. Another visitor who seemed to
be drawn as if by a magnet to Dul-
les' picturesque hostelry in the Alps
at precisely this critical juncture was
Princess Ashraf, the attractive and
strong-willed brunette twin sister of
the Shah, who, according to the
Harknesscs, "had had a stormy ses-
sion with her brother in his pink-
marble palace, because of his vacil-
lation in facing up to Mossadegh."
The Alpine rendezvous of master
June 24, 1961
Triumph fot' the West
On Thursday, August 13, the Shah
acted. By royal decree he deposed
Mossadegh as Premier and installed
in his stead General Zahedi. A colonel
of the Imperial Guards was sent to
serve the notice on Mossadegh, but
Mossadegh wasn't ready to quit. He
massed tanks, jeeps and troops
around his -residence, and at mid-
night of Saturday, August 15, he
seized the colonel of the Imperial
Guards, clapped him in jail and pro-
claimed that the "revolt" had been
crushed. The Shah and his Queen,
taking Mossadegh at his word,
promptly fled to Rome by way of
Iraq.
Some ` hardier souls, including
Schwarzkopf, remained upon the
Iranian scene. The manipulations in
which they now engaged never have
been spelled, out in detail, but it is
understood that CIA cash flowed in
copious quantities. The amount re-
liably reported is $19 million-and
$19 million can influence a lot of
men. What happened next in Iran
On Wednesday, August 19, with
the Army standing close guard around
the uneasy capital [the Harknesses
wrote], a grotesque procession made
its way along the street leading to
the heart of Teheran. There were
tumblers turning handsprings, weight-
lifters twirling iron bars and wrestlers
flexing their biceps. As spectators
grew in number, the bizarre assort-
ment of performers began shouting
pro-Sliali slogans in unison. The crowd
took up the chant and there, after
one precarious moment, the balance
of psychology swung against Mossa-
degh.
Upon signal, it seemed, Army forces
on the Shah's side began an attack,
The fighting lasted a bitter nine hours.
By nightfall, following American-style
military strategy and logistics, loyalist
troops drove Mossadegh's elements
into a tight cordon around the Pre-
mier's palace. They surrendered, and
Mossadegh was captured as he lay
weeping in his bed, clad in striped
silk pajamas. In Rome, a bewildered
young Shah prepared to fly home and
install Zahedi as Premier, and to give
Iran a pro-Western regime.
Triumph for our side! In the Hark-
ness account, there is of course no
hint of the years-long legal tie be-
tween the Dulles brothers and Anglo-
Iranian Oil, nor is it emphasized that
one of the major accomplishments of
the coup in Iran was to save the bil-
lion-dollar scalp of Anglo-Iranian.
The picture presented, obviously the
CIA's flattering version of itself, was
$49
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067=8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
that the overthrow of Mossadegh
had been accomplished "by the
Iranians themselves" and that Iran
was the showcase of a new method
by which CIA would develop and
nurture "freedom legions among cap-
tive or threatened people who stand
ready to take personal risks for their
own liberty."
This sounds fine if one doesn't
analyze it too closely, but the hard
sequel of events, unfortunately, has
refused to reflect the lofty image. In
the harsh a-fterlight, it has become
abundantly apparent that all CIA
accomplished in Iran was an old-
style palace coup, with money in
bountiful quantities and skillful
press agentry pulling emotional
heartstrings at a pivotal moment and
achieving a much-desired end. But
did this represent a great triumph
for Western democracy in the ideo-
logical battle against communism?
True, a new regime, oriented toward
"our side," had been installed. But
was this new regime motivated by
any loftier concept than the idea that
what was good for Anglo-Iranian
Oil was good for Western democracy?
Events seem to say that it was not.
$5 Million a Month
Much of the sorry story is told in
the 1957 report of the Committee on
Government Operations of the House
of Representatives. The report makes
clear that in August, 1953, immedi-
ately after the overthrow of Mossa-
degh, a delighted United States be-
gan to pour mutual security funds
into Iran at an average rate of $5
million a month and that this went
on for three years "to make up def-
icits in Iran's government budget."
The committee found that, in five
years from 1951 to 1956, the United
States had donated a quarter of a
billion dollars to Iran and that (the
committee did not phrase it in pre-
cisely these terms, of course) all we
had accomplished was to furnish the
entire Middle East with a king-size
example of graft and corruption. The
committee was convinced that Iran,
with some $300 million a year fat-
tening its treasury from restored oil
revenues, should have been fully ca-
pable. of financing itself and provid-
ing for its own national development
without any U.S. aid. Yet, despite
550
its heavy oil revenues, despite the
hundreds of millions of dollars in
American aid, Iran's CIA-installed
government was so corrupt that the
national treasury constantly teeter-
ed on the brink of bankruptcy and
reported ever-mounting deficits.
No Triumph for the People
Here are some of the exact words
of the House committee. The quar-
ter-billion dollars in American aid
was administered in such "a loose,
slipshod, and unbusinesslike manner"
that "it is now impossible-with any
accuracy-to tell what became of
these funds." Amounts requested for
American aid to Iran "seem to have
been picked out of the air." The
American aid mission to Iran was
concerned only with spending as fast
as possible regardless of what the
money was spent for, and members
who objected to this "were either
disciplined or labeled as incompe-
tent." Improvement projects were. so
riddled with graft and corruption
that, after four years, most still were
not finished. A major undertaking
was the construction of a multi-mil-
lion-dollar dam on the Karadj River,
but this project "has resulted in vir-
tually nothing but the relocation, at
a cost to the United States Govern-
ment of nearly $3 million, of a road
around the proposed 'site." Not only
had no construction been started on
the dam, there wasn't even a con-
tract!
The effect of this type of Ameri-
can aid has been to make a bad situa-
tion worse. It is a hard thing to say,
but true, that the American taxpay-
ers have been milked of hundreds of
millions of dollars only to provide
the Communist system, on a gold-
plated platter, with a priceless propa-
ganda item. Our hundreds of millions
of dollars have done virtually noth-
ing for the people of Iran; they have
enriched only the grafters and widen-
ed the gulf between the very rich
and the abysmally poor. The Con-
gressional committee in 1957 found
literacy so low in Iran that, even in
the cities, some estimates placed it
at not more than 7 per cent. Time,
magazine, certainly not one of the
world's ultra-liberal organs, report-
ed in 1960 that some families were
still living on the produce of a single
walnut tree, that tiny children work-
ed all day at the looms of rug fac-
tories for 20 cents or less. 7'ime, up-
dating its report in May, 1961, found
that Iran, under the pressure of the
flood of American dollars, was suf-
fering from runaway inflation. Prices
were jumping at the rate of 10 per
cent a year; a pound of meat in
Teheran cost $1.15; wages remained
so low that teachers were earning
only $25 a month. The economy of
the country was being strained to
maintain a 200,000-man Army, larger
than the armies of either Western
Germany or Japan. Elections had
been so blatantly rigged that the
Shah had been forced to cancel two
of them and fire three key men in his
immediate entourage. One of these
was the chief of the secret police,
who had built himself an ostenta-
tious mansion near the Shah's own
palace; another was General Ali Kia,
chief of army intelligence, who, said
Time, had "built a block of luxury
apartments that Teheranis had taken
to calling the Where-Did-You-Get-
It-From Building."
This is what we have bought in
Iran with our millions. The result
we reap by such extravaganzas be-
came clear this past May when 5,000
teachers rioted in the streets of Te-
heran in front of the Parliament
building. A police major lost his
head, fired his revolver and killed
one teacher, wounded three others.
Teachers and students then fought
bloody hand-to-hand skirmishes with
police, paraded the dead teacher's
coffin through the streets and forced
the resignation of the Premier. The
Shah hastily installed Ali Amini, a
wealthy, French-educated landowner
with liberal political views. Amini,
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 The NATION
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R00050005006T-8 or in
n
concededly, the last hope of avoiding
revolution,' took over a nation so
badly looted that its government
debt, only $10 million in 1955, had
soared to $500 million. He took swift
stock of the situation and reported:
"There is no life left in the economic
and financial agencies of the govern-
ment." To striking teachers, he con-
fessed: "The treasury is empty, and
the nation faces a crisis-I dare not
speak more openly lest I create a
panic."
Yet some persons in Iran still were
f its
d
ers o
not worried. The comman
propaganda , more pur- it must offer both freedom and hope,
police man Army t and its massive ft for Kh ucould slic be more ap not oil profits offer
and graft.
force felt fully capable of poses. Here, in most graphic form,
h. poses.
handling anything and e eververytthing
VI JUST A LITTLE REVOLUTION
IN MARCH, 1954, Allen Dulles was
r d
W
or
interviewed by U.S. News and
ac-
Report on the cloak-and-dagger
tivities of CIA behind the iron cur-
tain. The question-and-answer se-
quence went like this:
n It is often reported in the papers
up revolution in the satellite coun- 1116 n =~ nw11L11a a.. .
will study
tries. What truth is there in that? equivocal to anyone who i
the record. It has been given in a of hundreds of Soviet-hating Ger-
Dulles: I only wish we had ac- mans.
complished all that the Soviets at- number of places-in East Germany, The significance of this counter
tribute to us.... in Poland, in Hungary, in the Mid- arent on November
Q. Is that part of your function- die East. Behind many of the erup- drive became app
tions that in recent years have 17, 1953 , when The New York Times
to stir up revolution in these coun-
tries? shaken the peace of an uncertain reported that the East German Gov-
tries? We would be foolish if we world, close examination will reveal ernment had accused scores of its
did not cooperate with our friends `` the fine, scheming hand of CIA. And prisoners with being Nazi provoca-
abroad to help them do everything teu. Th East Germans expose and counter this it will reveal, too,that tCI ti 1 e fir and ( one musts always regard these laCom-e C mm canto without any regard for the long- munist claims with caution, of course,
Communist subversive movement. again b.-,,,q stirred up
Tacitly, then, Dulles acknowledged but then in the secret war of CIA
range consequences.
one has no other information on
that the CIA was fomenting violence which to judge) that these Western
and revolution behind the iron cur- East Germany, 1953 w plans
tain, but he was putting it in the the East Ger- agents had been caught with p
uprising On June 17, to blast railroad bridges and stations,
gentlest possible way and on the most Take, for example, o 1 government build
ossible plane. We ,were man g burn factories and g
acceptable p just two months before Allen Dulles' ings and assassinate officials. Faked
"cooperating with our j
simply -
friends; we were simply helping them startling coup in Iran, a series of food stamps and counterfeit bank
to upset food ration-
t*-Communist riots broke, out in drafts stamps
mm st and c movements" It Cm- an all the1 S viet_dom pat d East Zone. In ing and bank credits were found in
unist sub versive of the prisoners' pockets, the
ogical America, his was taken as an en-
seemed very mild
ut t but revolution couraging sign that all was not rosy some East Germans asserted.
the way Dulles put communistic millennium and The Cin the East Zone
t never mild, nor flkilling an appeal in perhaps the East Germans were incensed Communists these discoveries,
might throw off the yoke of tyranny. e by these Yorkers
les' logic. A little reflection inevitably about Dul- that
statement leads nevitably to timism was quickly disci- but then p
serious questions. Is it all really so Such op 551
wne 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
A.
Hubert Humphrey (D., is a demonstration o t e man
mann found,
Senator enator reported with a sense of which, as Walter Lipp
Minn.) shock: "Do you know what the head we have been doing exactly what
of the Iranian Army told one of our Khrushchev expecs us to do; we
people? He said the Army was in have been propping dictatorial,
d so s-an good shape, thanks to U.S. aid - it corrupt, rigbt-wing dg his case for
was now capable of coping with the we him. Ite shobeen uld be obgious that the
civilian population. That Army isn't l, i
it is e going to fight the Russians. It's plan- American art if ever tover to be
persuasive, ity,
ning to fight the Iranian people."
must
e chief
loftier Such, in the final cl corrupt Iranian re- than the gun ofi he secret poexlpression
the CIA and the clas ed in fingers stained by many, a
gime that followed in n its coup-mak- p
ing footsteps have wrought in Iran. dirty buck. It with rulers; it mitself
ust
simple? Just what is involved in
stirring up a little revolution behind
the iron curtain? Do such brush fires
simply flare and burn themselves out,
causing the Russians some well-de-
served embarrassment, or do they in
a very direct way involve the pre
s?
t
d S
e
ta
tige and policy of the Unite
pated. Though some of the anti-
e
Communists were well-armed n, the
revolt was quickly, p
though great numbers of refugees
fled across the border into West Ger-
many, not all of the leaders of the
rebellion were so lucky. The Eastern
SSD (State Security Service) began
d for
a reprisal campaign that laste
 would be a 4pr9,y fprf Rel as a 2,003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
of Russian saboteurs shou
a ld be tying alllthe tl readsr.t getha>?a just aigia atdio phis weird, recent-enemy
caught with plans to blow up the one place-the top. His thread-tying its own thinking, knowledge Croton reservoir. In any event, a headquarters were located re on Ameri- d7tYin safety. The secret ia~ g, responsibility for
number of the accused aents ve ge and
g pro- can-requisitioned property near Mu- which seems to have ohadrmany pow-
1 vocatcurs were brought to tral. Tes- nick in Bavaria, and were sealed erful advocates in the highest Amer-
said, showed, the East Germans off with barbed high
wire and guarded ican circles even during the horrors
said, that these agents belonged to by armed state police like an atomic of World War II, had indeed mysterious organization headed by
,i myster Reinhold Gehlen, a former Lieuten- us full-circle. brought secret ant General in command of counter- uateGthleifindings~of his costly anti- Plots-and More Plots
intelligence on the Eastern front un- Soviet espionage program operating Yet t the American public as a
der Hitler. The East German trials as far beyond the Iron Curtain as whole remained
resulted in the execution of four of Siberia, much of American defense unaware. Few major newspapers
these Gehlen agents and life im ris- almost completely
onment for eleven others, but not
p planning admittedly depends today," St. Louis Post_Dispatch was an( ex-
even these hars sentences stirred De Luce wrote.
ception) paid any attention to De
The p
up as much controversy as one other on the fantastic. American n kno vl- many. 's John revealing dioster sp Dulles' es' from
-
much uch
charge the East Germans made. They edge and security were being made trumpeted policy that we
-
contended that, on some of the dependent, to a vital degree, on men to liberate the captive peoples ---
agents, they had found lists of names who were our recent enemies-men advanced ng
, as events were to intended
of prominent West German anti- who had fought to the last gasp for without givi the most elementary
Nazis who had been marked for ulti- a system that we had believed rep- consideration to how this show,
mate liquidation, i
resented one of history's most moil- end was. to be achieved short eof all-
Though it would seem extremely strous evils. It is certainly ' question- out American aid and another world
illogical for East German saboteurs able enough to have American war-rolled like an avalanche down-
.to be carrying such lists around in foreign policy tugged d and hauled all hill to fresh international fiascoes
their pockets, there can be no goes- over the map by ~e super-secret tion that the F,ttst Germans, in jab- activities of CIA loakanddagger tional tensions. l lime andaaeainterna-
bing an accusing finger at the. Rein- boys, o eratintr t~ f CIA n the me of the lotting,
with
hold Gehlen spy organization, touch- restraint or control; buticlearlytiin aidedifrequentlycby its Gehln pro-
ed a sensitive nerve. Gehlen at the its relations with Gehlen, CIA had teges, futile revolts and short-sighted
time was a mystery figure, virtually taken one further gigantic stride in- intervention marked the con en pro-
unknown to the 48 million citizens to the realin of dubiousness. Without reckless course of American foreign
of the Bonn Republic; unknown to the knowledge or consent of the sistently
American Congressmen because his American people or their representa- policy. name had never been mentioned on tives, it had placed some $6 million Here, in capsule form, are some of
the floor of Congress. Yet Gehlen worth of annual reliance in the good the the well troussmbetirees hthatighligh saw ts the
and the private cloak-and-dagger faith of a recent enemy, command-
disastrou
e
army he headed were indisputably ing an unofficial army of foreign whittling away, not just of American
real.
real. In fact, Gehlen was America's agents (many of them a g power, but of America's moral pres-
1 spy in Europe, he had literal- former Nazis at that), and itehad tiger
ly thousands of agents on his pin and he was being is on d payroll,
tune he
the Egypt reportedly ?Tye on 1952. of King Farouk
between $5 million and the pt Communists inside
million a year with CIA-channeled oeTaH08NA were making im-
funds. mense capital from the antics of the
Daniel De Luce, one of the Asso- STOP lime
whviousosee epprinrincipf al interest
arch in life
d
spondents, in ated Press's veteran foreign corre- Army revate r ' an article some appeared revolt be was belly dancers. An
months after the East German reve- Ger Mohammed _ organized wnd
moons, after a corner of the veil e- Generals del ass er in Naguib
and
CVO
leading
secrecy that for so long had shrouded roles. . The e HNassarknesses, in their r Sat-
Sat-
Gehlen. Gehlen's organization, De
Luce said, included the elite of the urday Evening Post revelations,
old German Army's counterintelli- straight from the horse's mouth,
gence corps and agents of diverse o GQC stated flatly: "Skilled American po_
nationalities scattered through East- litical operatives were available to
Qo advise leaders of a pro-American
ern Europe and the Balkans. Gehlen p ~c 1 gyptian militar
operated on' the old secret-service and they Y junta when the f
principle
principle of never letting one agent Q p time seemed ripe ot ha ow coup,
4 ?~ indicated or
such devi
-
matters were best arranged." It
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 The NATION
 Approved For Release 2093/05/27 :, C A-RIIP86 0269 0 0 090
was another signal triumph for "our - and Knew precisely - dust w at a ou awn t y 4. He promptly
side." The-coup came off on' schedule, was going to' happen before it 'hap, went into action: He got his brother,
Farouk fled - and then we got Ga- pened. According to CIA, American Secretary of State John Foster, out
mal Abdel Nasser. intelligence agents in Israel had noted of bed, and he summoned the chair-
The Egyptian strong man whom and reported the mobilization of the man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to an
we had helped to install apparently Israeli Army; agents on Cyprus had emergency conference. With both
long remained a favorite of CIA - watched and reported British and Dulles brothers urging drastic action,
such a favorite, indeed, that in Sep- French activity in loading combat the panic button was pressed loud
tember, 1955, a CIA agent took it craft and marshaling war planes and and long. The American Sixth Fleet
upon himself to advise Nasser to paratroopers; they had even reported was ordered to Lebanon; marines
ignore a forthcoming State Depart- that the French had given combat went charging ashore in a full-scale
ment note. The note was an attempt briefings to newspaper correspond- invasion. For a moment, world peace
to limit Nasser's purchase of arms eats attached to their invasion units. seemed to hang in the balance. Yet,
from Communist Czechoslovakia to Twenty-four hours before the attack, in the calm of retrospect, this "crisis"
a one-shot deal. It was considered the White House had a specific warn- action seemed to have almost farci-
important enough for Washington to ing from CIA that the Israelis would cal aspects. Riots, a little gunfire, the
send George Allen, then Assistant invade Egypt, that the French and coups that overthrow governments
Secretary of State for Middle Fast British would attack Suez. are no particular novelty to the
Affairs, on :a_ special trip to Cairo to Bearing all this in -mind, let's listen Lebanese. They seemed to have had
deliver the message in person. The to the insider's vie~; contained. ip the no understanding, those simple folk,
CIA evidently was disturbed by this letter written to The, Nation by an that:thefate of the entire cold war
attempt to pressure Nasser, and be- intelligence agent in 1.957, a full year depended 'upon events in Lebanon.
fore Allen arrived, it effectively cut before Whitehead's disclosures: Indeed, they regarded the landing of
the ground out from under him by I know that ... Intelligence Serv- the marines more as an amusing and
advising Nasser he could safely ignore ice received information through vari- colorful sideshow; it was an event
the warning - a sequence that leads ous channels about the planned ac- that turned an ordinary day into a
inevitably to the question: Who was tion. This information was duly fete day, and crowds lined the harbor
running foreign policy, the State Dc- transmitted to the State Department. front to watch the fun. Needless to
partment or the CIA? Mr. [John FFoster] Dulles knew the say, a powerful nation does not look
day and hour of the attack. Under well in the robes of a circus clown,
We Knew All Along these circumstances it was quite ob- and it was freely predicted at the
?T/te Suez crisis in October, 1956. vious that we should have dissuaded time that the hasty and ill-advised
This might be described as the final our allies from such a rash step.. ? invasion would boomerang against
flowering of our earlier intrigues with Those in the know were surprised American prestige. It did just that.
Nasser, and even the most charitable by the behavior of our Secretary of Afro-Asian countries joined the Sot
view must produce a blush or two at State at the time. Mr. Dulles' reply Afro-Asian r Union in countries joined
a United Na-
what can only be described as Amer to a comment from a State Depart- vict ment official was that in our posi- tions resolution demanding that
jean duplicity. First, of course, we e tion, the best thing to do is to shut American troops get out of Lebanon;
precipitated the crisis by offering our eyes and see nothing. We shall on October 31, the marines left-and
Nasser heavy financial aid and then win in any case. Both the defeat of Chamoun's government, which they
practically slapping his face by re- the Arabs as well as the loss of pies- had been sent to prop up, promptly
neging on the offer. This touched off tige by the United Kingdom and fell. Chamoun remains bitter at the
a chain reaction whose consequences France will benefit us. The moral Americans, who, he feels, went back
would appear not to have been fore- prestige of the West in Arab coun- on promises they had made to him
seen. Nasser seized the Suez Canal. tries has suffered untold harm by the to support his regime at whatever
And the British, French and Israelis attack on Egypt, The case speaks for
' itself. cost. In the end, at great risk, we had
undertook the invasion of Egypt. pleased nobody; we had won our-
When this happened, we held up liThe invasion of Lebanon in 1958. selves another loss.
i
ng
our hands in righteous horror at the If the CIA was not caught napp
warlike action of our Allies and pro- in the Suez crisis but was made to
tested that we had been taken com- look bad for devious reasons of policy,
pletely by surprise. John Foster Dul- there seems to be no question that
les testified: "We had no advance in- it had not the slightest forewarning
formation of any kind [regarding the of the military coup by a group of
Israeli attack on Egypt]. The Brit- pro-Nasser Army officers in Iraq on
ish-French participation also came July 14, 1958. King Faisal and
as a complete surprise to us." This Premier Nuri es-Said, pro-Western
supply was not true. Two years later, rulers of Iraq, were slain. Simultane-
in 1958, the CIA leaked to Don ously, riots and insurrection shook
Whitehead, of the New York Herald the pro-Western government of
Tribune, a version so detailed that Premier Chamoun in Lebanon. News
it leaves little doubt that we knew of these events reached Allen Dulles.
June 24t 1961
CIA on the Danube
TiThe Hungarian revolt of 1956.
The CIA's role in promoting and en-
couraging this abortive and tragic
uprising, which we were not prepared
to support after we had instigated it,
remains shrouded in top-level, cloak-
and=dagger secrecy. It seems well
established, however, that arms were
smuggled into both Poland and Hun-
gary, either by the CIA or its Gehlen
collaborators. When the Polish and
Hungarian rebellions broke out in
5-3
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
October, 1956, both American offi- one large item of unfinished business gime, Gehlen saw to it that he got
cial and public opinion appeared to that may be more important than all captured by the Americans. Here
be caught off base, and there were the rest-its long-term, enduring re- there appears to be a significant gap
charges that CIA had been sleeping lationship with the Gehlen secret in the story. There is no hint of the
at the switch again. Not so, the service and the possible influence of nature of the contacts or negotia-
agency said in self-defense. It had that relationship in coloring our of- tions that preceded his surrender,
accurately predicted the outbreaks ficial attitudes toward such vital is- but one is confronted, out of the blue
in both Poland and Hungary; its only sues as Berlin and the equipment of as it were, with the picture of a pris-
error, a minor one, had consisted in the German Army with nuclear arms. oner of war being treated from the
estimatin
th
t th
P
li
h
g
a
e
o
s
revolt
would come first. More important
than the unresolved issues of arms-
smuggling and CIA alertness is still
another unresolved matter-the re-
sponsibility of CIA in whipping up
the Hungarian rebels to fanatic self-
sacrifice in a hopeless cause. Al-
though the fact cannot, of course, be
verified, it has been charged that
Radio Free Europe works closely with
CIA. RFE's propaganda broadcasts
during the bloody Hungarian revolt
prolonged the struggle after it was
hopeless and led to needless sacrifice,
according to Leslie Bain, Budapest
correspondent for The Reporter.
"America will not fail you ... Amer-
ica will not fail you," he quoted the
propaganda radio as repeating over
and over, after it had become appar-
ent to all the rest of the world that
America would. The ruthless sup-
pression of the Hungarian revolt by
Soviet tanks and troops was certain-
ly a grim chapter that served to
strip off before the eyes of the world
the mask of Russian false preten-
sions. But let's not forget that Amer-
ican luster was tarnished, too. We
had been exposed as a nation that
talked big, but that had no plan; we
had been exposed as a nation that
had let those who trusted in our
words go down to death, prison and
disillusionment.
Classic Meddling
Such is the record of some of the
CIA's more classic meddling in the
internal affairs of Europe and the
Middle East. It shows that even the
agency's successes (as in the case of
Farouk) have a tendency to turn
into long-run disasters, and it indi-
cates strongly that America is hard-
ly qualified, by anti-communistic en-
thusiasm alone, to run the internal
affairs of other nations all over the
world. The record in these cases, such
as it is, has been written; but there
remains in CIA's behind-the-scenes
jnasterminding of European affairs
Clearly these are matters on which start almost like a Very Im
ortant
p
the peace of the world ultimately Personage. Gehlen, we are told,
may hinge, and so it seems pertinent brought with him an imposing mass
to inquire: Just who is this man of secret information on Russia, and
Reinhold Gehlen to whom, largely this presumably was a direct pass-
without the knowledge of the Amer- port to American good. graces. In
ican people or the American Con- any event, he was employed for
gress, we so swiftly and so complete- eighteen months combing through
ly entrusted our safety after the end his own voluminous files and putting
f W
ld] JJT__ I
o
or
I?
Herr Reinhold Gehlen
Gehlen is a product of the German
Reichswehr, a life-long professional
soldier and, according to official as-
surances at least, no Nazi. A smallish,
thin-faced man, he has a high fore-
head, receding fair hair and light blue
eyes. The son of a publisher, he is
quiet and scholarly in manner, but
he speaks in the terse, clipped tones
of a man long accustomed to com-
mand. He joined the Reichswehr in
1920; he fought in the invasions of
Poland and France; and when the
Russian war broke out, he was trans-
ferred to the Eastern Front where, in
April, 1942, he was selected to head
the German Army's key new intel-
ligence section.
He quickly became convinced that
the Soviet Union could not be over-
whelmed by military means alone,
and he was, De Luce says, "one of
the lost voices that urged the Nazi
regime ... to win over the Russian
people by generosity while rooting
out the Communist system." Instead,
some two million Soviet war prison-
ers were reduced to sub-human mis-
ery in Nazi extermination camps.
The official recital of Gehlen's vir-
tues continues by stressing the
pessimistic accuracy with which he
forecast events on the Eastern Front.
His grim view of the war, it is said,
almost earned him execution as a
dangerous defeatist, but recurrent
disasters so consistently fulfilled his
dire predictions that he wound up
being promoted to Lieutenant Gen-
g
era] at the age of forty-three. cance to trace further the career and
With the collapse of the Hitler re- the influent o e' Gehlen
them in order for American intelli-
gence. Then he was rewarded with
as juicy an assignment as a war
prisoner ever got; he was given au-
tonomous command of his own army
of private agents, with, as De Luce
wrote, "a personally chosen German
staff to organize cold-war espionage
in the Soviet Zone for the United
States."
De Luce continued: "Gehlen's pri-
mary mission is to identify and locate
at all times the forward Soviet and
satellite armed forces. This is funda-
mental to allied security, including
400,000 American, British and
French troops outposting West Ger-
many."
The British Are Shocked
Though the American public even
today remains almost totally un-
aware of what we did or of its pos-
sible significance, our relations with
Gehlen long have represented one of
the most controversial aspects of our
secret cold-war policies. Quite ob-
viously, our whole attitude toward
Germany, toward France and Britain,
toward all of Europe, must have been
conditioned by what for long years
we were told-or not told-by the
multi-million-dollar espionage ring of
former German agents whom we had
made our principal eyes and ears in
Europe. This pivotal trust on such
crucial matters has shocked our
closest allies, the British, who do not
play the game of intelligence that
way; and since the past record would
seem to indicate they play it pretty
well, it is perhaps of some si
nifi-
$54 Approved For Release 2003/05/27: CIA-RDP86B00269R00050005006Y8"
The NATION
 Approved
The Affair of Otto John
It must have been clear from the
start that Gehlen's private army
would have a highly equivocal status
inside West Germany, where official
security matters were in the hands
of Dr. Otto John. All signs indicate
that a fine, throat-cutting due] was
waged between Gehlen and John,
with Gehlen doing his best to get
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on his
side. He and Adenauer held a num-
ber of secret meetings in a house
across the Rhine River from Bonn,
and Dr. John, who later revealed
these assignations, apparently was
perfectly aware that the ground was
being cut from under him. CIA os-
tensibly was working closely with
John's security forces, but its money
in multi-million-dollar amounts was
riding on Gehlen. The private strug-
gle between the two West German
security chiefs came to a head in
early July, 1954, when Dr. John
visited the United States. He went
to Washington and had lunch with
Allen Dulles. Outwardly, the two
men gave every appearance of cor-
diality, but no one knows what went
on between them, for on this matter
CIA has never peeped a word. Dr.
John returned to Bonn, and then on
July 20, 1954, came an event that
rattled official eyeteeth. Dr. John
deserted to the Communists in East
Germany, presumably taking with
him a privately hoarded store of
valuable state secrets.
This turncoat performance by
West Germany's official intelligence
June 24, 1961
master was an embarrassing episode,
but it could hardly have broken the
heart of Gehlen. He was left with a
clear field-almost. One other poten-
tial rival, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz,
who headed the intelligence section
of the Defense Ministry in Bonn, re-
mained in the running, but he quick-
ly proved no match for Gelilen. Tile
result was reported in The New York
Times on July 20, 1955, in a dispatch
from Bonn. The German Govern-
ment had just announced that it had
decided to take over Gehlen's organi-
zation, then estimated to include
3,000 agents. The Times credited re-
ports that "the main stream of East
European information received by
the United States Central Intelli-
gence Agency originates with the
Gehlen organization." Of Gehlen, it
commented that he was inaccessible
and "something of a legendary fig-
ure." The Times added: "He has
been credited by some with great in-
telligence and denounced by others
as a sinister figure."
Just a few months later, on Sept.
1, 1955, the name of the mysterious
Gehlen figured startlingly, if only
momentarily, in an unusual upheaval
in American intelligence. The Army
announced in Washington that Maj.
Gen. Arthur Gilbert Trudeau, who
had headed the Army's G-2 (Intel-
ligence Corps), was being transferred
to a Far East post. The announce-
ment was made to appear routine,
but John O'Donnell of the New York
Daily News apparently was fed an
earful by irate Pentagon brass. For
O'Donnell disclosed that Trudeau's
scalp had been demanded by Allen
Dulles personally. According to
O'Donnell, Dulles spelled out his case
in a letter to the Secretary of De-
fense, and the feud was carried all
the way to President Eisenhower
himself for final decision.
In Dulles' official letter, O'Donnell
wrote, the CIA head
... charged that the Army's top in-
telligence officer, "without consulting
the Central Intelligence Agency," had
talked with West Germany's Chancel-
lor Adenauer here last June in "an
effort" to "undermine" the confidence
of Adenauer in a hush-hush CIA-
bankrolled setup in Germany, headed
by the mysterious keinhart von [sic]
Gehlen. Furthermore, said Dulles, the
General has expressed doubts about
the reliability of Gehlen as an in-
dividual and the security safeguards
of the mystery organization.
The Pentagon denied quite vocif-
erously that Trudeau, one of its fa-
vorite generals, the commander who
had spearheaded MacArthur 's drive
to recapture Manila at the end of
World War 11, had ever committed
such a breach of protocol as to ques-
tion Gehlen's reliability. All he had
clone, said the Pentagon, was to ex-
press some doubts about Gehlen's se-
curity safeguards. Whatever the
truth about the extent of Trudeau's
criticism, the bare bones of the case
boil clown, it would seem, quite sig-
nificantly to this: Reinhold Gehlen,
just ten years earlier the master of
Hitler's intelligence on the Eastern
Front, had sufficient influence
through Allen Dulles to cost even
the Army's G-2 chief his
Our German Ally
Against this background, let's turn
once more for an insider's view to
the intelligence officer who wrote The
Nation in 1957. His at least is not the
conventional, official view, and un-
der the circumstances, it may seem
worth serious thought. He wrote:
Our Intelligence Service in West
Germany collected much reliable in-
telligence which should have led the
State Department to reconsider its
point of view on Dr. Adenauer's
policy. Americans serving in Fontaine-
bleau and in West Germany are very
much aware that the Germans under
the guise of "friendship" are only in-
tent on recovering their military
might by using the United States as
a springboard. Contacts with German
military and other officials have con-
vinced me that the Germans hate
and despise Americans. They cannot
forget that the United States was
their enemy in the Second World
War. Adenauer's assertion of friend-
ship serves as a smoke screen which
enables West Germany to mark time.
Eventually Germany will spurn Amer-
ican tutelage and proceed with her
owii ambitious plans. These plans,
i.e., annexation of East Germany, res-
toration of eastern borders, etc., can
be achieved only by a world war.
The United States may find that in-
stead of using Germany for its own
purposes it would be bound to a
German policy. . . .
The Germans are indeed playing
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
the game their own way, nurturing
plans for the future. This is corrobo-
rated by the fact that Gehlen's In-
telligence Service in West Germany
frequently conceals important intel-
ligence and deliberately issues mis-
leading information, regardless of
our agreement for exchange of infor-
mation. Nevertheless, during this
postwar period, Gehlen has been con-
sidered a most loyal ally and his
Service has been financed with Amer-
ican dollars.
Communist propaganda refers to
Adenauer's West Germany as a pup-
pet of the United States. We prefer
to regard her as our most "reliable"
ally. Both conceptions are wrong.
Germany is our "most dangerous"
ally. Our friendship with her may
have disastrous consequences for the
United States.
Under these circumstances, our
preference of West Germany over our
old and tried allies is unpardonable.
British and French officers have often
expressed themselves in my presence
with an obvious feeling of resentment
and bitterness over the United States
policy of making yesterday's enemies
today's principal partners.
With this attitude, Edwards, the
British Labour M.P. and skeptic of
German intentions, fully agrees. In
his pamphlet on Allen Dulles, he
has written:
It is particularly worrying that Mr.
Dulles and his agency should be
maintaining close contacts with Gen-
eral Reinhold Gehlen's West German
secret service. Though it can be count-
ed as a NATO intelligence organiza-
tion, we think there is great need for
caution in our dealings with it. It is
extremely unlikely that General Geh-
len has any very warm feelings for
us. As for Mr. Dulles, he actually
advertises his friendship with the
General and after a recent visit to
London went straight off to Bonn.
But we have reason to believe that
General Gehlen does not confine his
interests to the East. The German
secret service never has done so. So
much the worse for us. . . . Beware
the Germans, when they come bear-
ing gifts!
An extreme view, possibly, but
valuable for all of that as a caution,
a warning, a reminder that there is
another side to the German question.
We are never told that any more,
but then we have never been told
about Reinhold Gehlen and his or-
ganization either-or about how we
goat where we are.
PART vii THE ROAD TO WAR
ONE OF THE most significant in-
formal conferences of the postwar era
was held in Allen Dulles' CIA office
on a cold and dreary morning in
March, 1952. His brother, John Fos-
ter, had just returned from the Far
East, where he had added to his
prestige by helping the Truman ad-
ministration draft the Japanese peace
treaty. John Foster was now about
to become one of the most caustic
critics of the administration that had
employed him. He was full of very
positive ideas about exactly what
should be done to right the situation
in the world.
Participating in this conference
that was to forecast much of the
global strategy of the Eisenhower ad-
ministration before Eisenhower had
even been nominated or elected were
a number of important second-eche-
lon officials-Allen Dulles, then the
No. 2 man in CIA; Charles Bohlen,
State Department Counselor; John
Allison, then Assistant Secretary of
State for-the Far East; General Mer-
rill, of Merrill's Marauders fame;
John Ferguson and C. Burton Mar-
shall, of the State Department Plan-
ning Staff.
John Foster Dulles opened the con-
ference by expounding his views-
and quite positive views they were.
He sharply criticized Truman's order
interposing the Seventh Fleet be-
tween Formosa and mainland China.
This, John Foster said, was really
"protecting" the Chinese Commu-
nists, then battling us in Korea, from
counterattack by the Nationalist
forces of Chiang Kai-shek. He had
discussed this "anomalous" situation
with Chiang, he said, and Chiang, as
was hardly surprising, fully agreed
with him. Now, there were "certain
islands" close to the mainland still
held by Chiang's warriors, and
Chiang, if given a "warrant" by the
United States to insure him against
the risks involved, could strengthen
his already considerable forces on the
islands and play merry hob with the
Communists on the mainland. This,
John Foster said positively, is what
we should do: we should in effect,
though he did not use the precise
term, "unleash" Chiang; we should
adopt a bold "forward" policy against
the Chinese aggressors.
According to Stewart Alsop, who
six years later revealed the details of
this meeting in his Saturday Eve-
ning Post article, "The Story Behind
Quemoy: How We Drifted Close to
War," John Foster Dulles' proposal
was received at first with tepid po-
liteness. Allen Dulles asked a couple
of deferential questions. Nobody
seemed to challenge John Foster's
thesis until suddenly C. B. Marshall,
"a big, articulate, irascible man,"
blew his top. The course Dulles pro-
posed, he said flatly, would mean di-
rect American intervention in the
Chinese civil war. Worse, if we gave
Chiang a "warrant" on the offshore
islands, we would by this action "con-
vey to a foreign entity the power to
involve the United States in war."
Marshall denounced Chiang's "men-
dicant and necessitous regime" and
branded any "warrant" that would
permit such a regime to drag the
United States into war "an act of
supreme folly."
John Foster Dulles [Alsop wrotel
looked at Marshall as though he did
not exist-a feat Dulles can perform
brilliantly-and said not a word.
There was an unhappy silence. Then
Bohlen, the able diplomat, took over,
asking Dulles questions which were
politely phrased, but which neverthe-
less pointed up the risks involved in
the course Dulles proposed. The
meeting then broke up, on a strained
and inconclusive note.
The islands under discussion were,
6 . i Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 The NATION
 Approved
of .course, Quemoy and Matsu, hud-
dling almost on the doorstep of the
Chinese mainland. Small, rocky nub-
bins of land, they were of absolutely
no strategic value, as such eminent
authorities as Dwight D. Eisenhow-
er and Douglas MacArthur agreed;
Yet twice in succeeding years, due to.
the "supreme folly" of Dulles' policy,
they almost dragged the United
States into war, almost touched off
the third world conflagration which
everyone so dreads.
Islands of Folly
For John Foster Dulles wasn't to
be deterred from his "bold forward"
plan by the logical objections of men
like Marshall and Bohlen. Almost as
isn't at all what we have deluded our-
selves into believing. Chiang has
never been anything but a Chinese
warlord with one guiding principle
-the interests of Chiang. In his rise
to power, he played footsie with the
Communists, and not until he had
won and wanted the big apple all for
himself did he really break with
them. The corruptness of his re-
gime was one of the least-hushed
World War II scandals. It offered the
people of China nothing; American
Army leaders in China found it al-
most most impossible to get Chiang
"tigers" to fight, and the Japanese
soon as he became Secretary of State,
he loudly proclaimed what the news-
papers dubbed the "unleashing" of
Chiang. He did not go quite so far
as to give Chiang a public "warrant,"
but the effect was the same. With
our active encouragement, Chiang
poured thousands more troops into
the offshore islands, creating a situa-
tion in which he could claim that he
had committed the very flower of his
Army there and so, when trouble
arose, we were committed to sup-
port him. The situation has over-
tones reminiscent of those in Ger-
many where, as the letter-writing
intelligence agent remarked, we are
so wedded to German policy that, if
the Germans ever determine to re-
unite their country, we almost cer-
tainly will be dragged into war to
help them.
In the Far East, time and again,
cy
American o
a tinder-box situation has been cre- the Soon s" and
o "the rotten Chinese p
ated by the fatuity of the American w g ready to drop of its own arm and equip these Nationalist
obsession with Chiang Kai-shek. apple troo s for a reinvasion of Yunnan
Powerful American business inter- accord." Although Chiang had bil- p
es-ts, in alliance with many of the lions of dollars' worth of American Province. From Formosa, CIA al-
power lords who dominate the larger military equipment for his 3-million- legedly masterminded the operation.
Arms, munitions, supplies were air- - Army, these - media of iviewingion, long have one of po ed of conscriptsf whosh drnoclove lifted into Burma, but despite this
grenat vewng Chiang as one of p support, there is little evidence that
the sted in
man of nobility and stature, a leader pay went into the pockets of grafting Chiang's gallant warriors ever wreak-
who of his age, a states- for Chiang; money for its food and Com who may one day win back China officers. Aledsure thent oa munists ed much damage on the Chinese
didn't Reds. Ihe Ndis-
finer
from h the Communists if we only give pressure '
p im our help. This view has been so so fight-they either surrendered or covered Instead, t more ,th easily b could Nationalists achieve ation by gthe opium,
em pie
diwidely sold to the American people joined up. and a reeat easily br growing
pro-
that it is considered virtually an act Chiang fled to Formosa, taking the and in Northern Burma and tld
now, Chiang's ceeded to do just that.
lenge it. treason in many circles to chat- him 11 For the years national
peoplee,Bwereurmese,nota rwithnthis
Yet challenged it must be. The Formosan regime has been
in glowing l-
record is clear and explicit, and it in t 557
June 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
ors as a Western-style democracy.
Actually, nothing could be further
from the truth. As Lederer writes,
Chiang's warriors, when they first
arrived, "pillaged and robbed For-
mosa." They killed thousands of pro-
testing Formosans with machine-gun
fire; and ever since, having taught
the Formosans a democratic lesson
by this process, Chiang's 2 million
Chinese Nationalists have ruled
some 9 million Formosans with an
iron, dictatorial hand. According to
Lederer, some 70 per cent of Chiang's
Army is now composed of Formosan
conscripts, who might fight to pro-
tect their home island but have no
burning compulsion to help Chiang
reconquer China. The Formosans
themselves would like to be rid of
the Nationalist monkey on their
backs; and they have no love for the
United States, which continues to
prop up Chiang's discredited regime
with some three-quarters of a billion
dollars in annual aid.
Yet America's arch right-wing
policy makers and its equally arch
right-wing CIA under Allen Dulles
continue to invest Chiang with a
halo and to push him forward as
our answer to communism in Asia.
It is an infatuation that has brought
us repeatedly into widespread disre-
pute.
almost tore the country apart while Consider the case of Chiang's Bur-
Chiang and his inner circle waxed fat mese opium growers. In 1951, follow-
on the resources of the national ing the collapse of Chiang's regime
treasury. As William J. Lederer on the mainland, several thousands
writes in A Nation of Sheep, the Chi- of his followers fled across the Yun-
},nrrlar into Northern Burma.
nese people became "sicK or mm anu
ed to
makers decid
li
Chiang Kai-shek
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
ideal, CIA-created A-created situation. For backfiring plots of our. own cloak- blast targets far inland in China. if
some inexplicable reason, they seem- and-dagger boys.
ed to resent the presence of this for- the Chinese Reds responded with
eign army on their soil; and when The "Spooks" of the Islands an all-out attack on Quemoy, we.
This,
Chiang', fighters, showing no regard Destructive as such incidents are mwould ake no em snue takerabout it,apons. would
for Burmese sovereignty, practically to America's image, they do not men- have been World War III. Only
took over the state of Kengtung and ace the peace of the world like the
established Matthew Ridgway dissented their own government, more grandiose CIA endeavors that fought with all his power against
the Burmese actually filed a vigorous led directly to the crises of Quemoy such an "unwarranted and tragic
protest with the United States. As and Matsu. In the early 1950s, the course." Ridgway found an ally gn
Charles Edmondson, former Wash- CIA established on Formosa an out- Gen.' Walter Bedell Smith, who had
ington editor of Toy tune and a for- fit known as Western Enterprises, been moved over from CIA and made
nier foreign service expert, wrote in Inc. This was a thinly disguised Under Secretary of State when the
The Nation (Nov. 7, 1957), 'the "cover" for CIA, whose agents, an in- Dulleses took charge. Smith shared
American Ambassador in Burma communicative lot, became known Ridgway's horror-of the prospect and
hadn't been let in on the secret of on the island as "the spooks." These telephoned his former chief, Presi-
what the CIA and the Chinese Na- "spooks" played an active role in the dent Eisenhower, then vacationing
tionalists were up to. The Ambassa- build-up of Chiang's forces on the off- in Denver. Eisenhower listened and
dor, William J..Sebald, therefore shore islands and the raids that were scotched the reckless plan of the
denied in perfect good faith that launched from there. As Stewart Joint Chiefs.
America had anything to do with Alsop wrote, the CIA was "respon-
supporting Chiang's guerrillas in sible for organizing and equipping The 1954 crisis, given a chance,
Burma. Burmese Prime Minister U the Nationalist guerrillas who raided finally died down, and the policy as ."relbng" of Nu knew better and became so in- the mainland from the offshore is- known U
ntil the 1954, s lsop rte, thensed he suspended all U.S. Point lands." These "commando-type offshore islands s had A been een almost lmost the
e
Four activities and almost broke off rilla raids" were "sometimesmounted <
the
relations entirely.. Eventually, our in battalion strength," Alsop related. exctheive playground" os CIA; buy
own Ambassador resigned his past In addition, the offshore islands were crisis, CIAs thin "cover" of
in protest against our own program, used for reconnaissance, leaflet drop. by the time of the ?irst Quemoy
Western
rtt
and American prestige throughout ping, occasional bombing forays, and well `prises, " Inc. had been pretty
Southeast Asia sported a couple of for blockading such Chinese ports as well blown and control had been
very unlovely black eyes. Amoy, on the mainland Opposite Advisory sory over largely to the Micitary
A four-power conference finally Quemoy. Group. Th e presence of
reached an agreement about Chiang's These offensive gestures apparent- the ieseslanundifs represented, tinted, i advisers he
opium-happy warriors. Some 7,000 ly nettled the Chinese Reds, a very public "warrant" John in
Foster , the
were evacuated to Formosa. But even unreasonable and touchy folk, and in had ori inallhFter Dulles
this didn't solve the entire problem. the first week of September, 1954 g y proposed we give and n Corn-
Sizable remnants of the Nationalist they became so incensed that they munit Chiang; Chin when, in 1 hell the Corn-aga force continued to squat in their blasted Quemoy with heavy artillery lands, our restige oncemlore was an
poppy fields, and as of this spring barrages. Two American officers of the line, and once more we were ai-
the Burmese Army was still fighting the Military Advisory Group station- most involved in war. Only a broad
a guerrilla war in its own country ed on the island were killed, and the promise that we wouldn't permit
in an effort -to wipe them out. In this American public, in its shock at such Chiang to use the islands for any
most recent fighting, the Burmese unprovoked aggression, was whipped worth-while purpose, not even leaflet
contended they had seized American up to the point where it might very dropping, smoothed over the situa-
arms and supplies only recently air- easily have plunged into Chiang's tion.
lifted into . Burma. Such charges, war. In fact, Alsop wrote that "al-
skillfully exploited by Communist though no more than a tiny handful And Now Laos
propaganda, sparked riots that re- of people knew it at the time, the
sulted in the stoning and wrecking American government came ver Th
y f Burriend m into crisis that cu but e all f of U.S. Embassy buildings in down- close to responding with a condi- turned nto and Matsu, vividly
town Rangoon. When such outbreaks tional decision to go to war with crises on Qhemoya 1Vn which vvdly
occur, the widespread impression Red China." illustrate
and militant manner vi wthe
given the American people in glaring Alsop cited chapter and verse of create for us a foreign policy all their
headlines is that we have been most the story. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, own. They illustrate the way the CIA
foully attacked again as a result of under the leadership of that old tail wags the American dog and how
Communist machinations; hardly is there any appreciation y China hand, Admiral Arthur such wagging can quite easily plunge
y of the Radford, voted overwhelmingly for the whole animal-and all his breth-
fact that the Communists might find war. They backed a policy, not just ren-into the most horrible of his-
it impossible to get the people on to launch bombing raids on military tory's wars. But Burma and Quemoy
their side without the help of the objectives opposite Quemoy, but to were ' }, les in Asia
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269OD500"--~
The NhTiox
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
"
of what is wrought by CIA. To these
there 'must be added another exam-
ple, and one of current crisis signifi-
cance-Laos.
American blunders in Laos go back
a full six years, and they are not by
any means all of CIA's making,
though it was reserved for CIA to
write the final, climactic chapter. To
understand. how CIA masterminded
us into the hole in which we now
find ourselves, one has to appreciate
the background. Laos became a na-
tion in 1955 as a result of the Geneva
agreement that split the former
French Indo-China into its compo-
nent parts. Laos was the interior
principality, primitive, landlocked,
with a 1,000-mile border with Red
China. The Geneva agreement pro-
vided it was to have a neutralist gov-
ernment, but the evidence is abun-
dant that we, no more than the Com-
munists, wanted a neutral Laos. We
wanted a Laos committed irrevo-
cably to our side.
This becomes clear if one studies
the findings of the House Commit-
tee on Government Operations which
delved deeply into the Laotian mud-
dle in 1958 and, on June 15, 1959,
filed a scathing report of what it
found. What the committee discov-
ered was that all sound military ad-
vice had been disregarded by the
State Department in its determina-
tion to build up an anti-Communist
Laos. The committee remarked- acidly
that Congress 'had always been as-
sured that "force objectives"-the
number of foreign troops the United
States will support-are established
on the basis of the military judgment
of the Joint 'Chiefs of Staff. In Laos
this simply was not true.
The Joint Chiefs, in fact, consid-
ered Laos militarily worthless and
repeatedly told the Eisenhower ad-
ministration so. The House commit-
tee wrote: "U.S. support of a 25,000-
man Army, of the entire military
budget, and of segments of the civil-
ian economy is, in fact, based on a
political determination made by .the
Department of State contrary to the
recommendations of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff." It pointed out that the
Joint Chiefs, even after they had
been asked to reconsider their views,
had refused to budge. In a memo-
randum, they had said, the House
mutual se-
committee wrote, that
curity support of Laotian forces
could not be recommended `from the
military point of view,' but acqui-
esced in the provision of such sup-
port `should political considerations
be overriding."'
This, then, was the beginning. The
House committee's findings make it
clear that, for political considerations
alone, we imposed upon Laos a huge
and militarily unjustified standing
Army. We did this with no regard
for either the characteristics or the
desires of the Laotian people.. The
Laotians are Buddhists; they are,
not in pretense but in actuality, a
deeply peaceful people. As Keyes
Beech wrote in the April 22, 1961,
Saturday Evening Post: "In Laos
not even the fighting cocks are blood-
thirsty. They wear no spurs and do
not fight to kill. As good Buddhists,
Laotian soldiers were no less reluc-
tant. They generally aimed high and
expected the other fellow to return
the favor."
The Cocktail Circuit
In Laos, as in so many other of
the world's trouble spots, the right-
wingers it} our own State Depart-
ment and CIA dealt only with their
right-wing counterparts, a small and
wealthy ruling class and this class's
military cohorts. As Newsweek re-
ported last May: "Our allies, the tra-
ditional ruling class, had little in-
terest in reform. The political meth-
ods they used-stuffing ballot boxes
and intimidating neutralist voters-
succeeded only in driving the mod-
erates to the Left. . . . The worst
thing perhaps was that U.S. policy
makers never came to terms with any
elements in Laos other than those
they considered to be militantly anti-
Communist."
Tied to such interests, with view-
point constricted to the cocktail cir-
cuits of Vientiane, we plunged head-
long into Laos, apparently with no
philosophy except that if we spent
enough money, no matter how, we
could buy ourselves an anti-Com ?
munist ally. As. the House commit-
tee found, we repeated, on an even
more flagrant scale, all the ghastly
mistakes which it had criticized so
strongly years previously in Iran.
Laos is about 99 per cent agricul-
tural. Its economy is primitive. The
Laotian farmer usually grows what
lie needs, barters off his surplus to
supply his other wants. Money, in
much of Laos, is virtually nonexist-
ent. Into such an economy, with
evidently no regard for its disrup-
tive effects, the United States in just
six years poured $310 million. The
result was almost inevitable. The
wildest currency speculation took
place; the Laotian economy was all
but wrecked; and the cost of living
doubled between 1953 and 1958.
Cooperative Graft
As in Iran, corruption flourished
like jungle growth in the tropics.
The House committee found clear
evidence that both the Americans
who were channeling the aid dollars
to Laos, and the Laotian government
officials who were, dispensing them,
dipped greedy paws into the golden
stream. The committee flatly ac-
cused one American public-works of-
ficer of accepting "bribes totaling at
least $13,000." It recounted the sor-
did story of a former U.S. Operations
Mission Director who extracted a
fantastic price for his decrepit 1947
Cadillac from an official of the Uni-
versal Construction Co., to whom
he was awarding a contract. "Un-
controverted evidence," the commit-
tee wrote, "indicates that the vehicle
was at that time inoperable, and
that shortly thereafter it was cut
tip and the pieces dropped down an
abandoned well. In the interim, it
had stood rusting in front of Uni-
versal's main office, where it was the
subject of scornful amusement by
Laotians and Americans alike."
'One honest American who tried to
do something about the mess was
"railroaded out of Laos by his su-
periors." The railroading was sanq-
tioned by Ambassador J. Graham
Parsons, who presided over our aid
efforts in Laos at their corrupt worst,
and Parsons was rewarded for his
watchfulness by being called back
to Washington and made Assistant
Secretary of State for Far Eastern
Affairs. In all of this time, the bulk
of the American taxpayers' $310 mil-
lion was used mainly to enrich an
inner circle of palace thieves; hardly
any of it was used to help the Lao-
tian people. Not until the elections
June 24, 1961 559
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
of 1958 were imminent did the Amer-
icans distributing aid in Laos sud-
denly come up with a crash program
that they labeled "'Operation Boost-
er Shot" to try to buy some good
will on the mass level.
In one acid paragraph, the House
committee summed up the operation-
al mess:
The concentration of the benefits
of the aid program to the area around
Vientiane and other centers of popu-
lation, and the enrichment of, and
speculation by, Lao merchants and
public officials which attended the
aid program, tended to lend credence
to the Communist allegation that the
Royal Lao Government was "corrupt"
and "indifferent" to the needs of
the people.
The People's Voice
Even an idiot, it might be pre-
sumed, should have foreseen the in-
evitable consequences, but our CIA
and our State Department remained
blind to them right up to the last
moment of inescapable truth. Ex-
Ambassador Parsons was testifying
before the House committee just as
the Laotian elections were being held
in 1958. He insisted that he had re-
liable, "official" information that the
results would be wonderful for our
side. The Communist Pathet Lao, he
predicted, would will only two of
fifteen contested seats, and this
would mean that "the integrity and
independence of Laos in the free
world" would have been preserved
intact.
Then the votes were counted. The
Communists, instead of being crush-
ed, won a crushing victory. The
House committee later reported that
the Communists had won nine seats,
and their sympathizers an additional
four. The Royal Cabinet, indeed,
had to install the pro-Red leader as
the minister who, in the future,
would control U.S. Foreign Aid
Funds in Laos; it had to agree that,
henceforth, two battalions of pro-
Communist troops actually would be
supported by U.S. funds. This was
victory? This was assuring "the in-
tegrity and independence of Laos in
the free world"?
In obvious disgust, the House com-
mittee wrote:
In summai,v, the decision to sup-
port a 25,000-man Army-motivated
by a Department of State desire to
promote political stability-seems to
have been `the foundation for a series
of developments which detract from
that stability. . . .
The aid program has not prevented
the spread of communism in Laos.
In fact, the Communist victory in
last year's election, based on the
slogans of "Government corruption"
and "Government indifference" might
lead one to conclude that the U.S.
aid program has contributed to an
atmosphere in which the ordinary
people, of Laos question the value
of friendship with the United States.
When You Can't Euy-
It might, indeed. But what the
House committee found wasn't the
last, or the worst, of the debacle.: The
final chapter, an epic in blindness
and futility, was yet to be written.
For the simple truth is that, having
failed to buy ourselves an ally in
Laos, we next tried to procure one
through the CIA's favorite device-
the military coup. Allen Dulles'
eager beavers engineered this with
cavalier disregard of any superior
strategy of the State Department or
the desires of the new American Am-
bassador on the scene, Horace I-I.
Smith. Keyes Beech in his Saturday
Evening Post account describes the
conflict between CIA and Smith in
these words:
On the political level, Smith's job
wasn't made any easier by the fact
that during most of his tour in Laos
he was being crossed by Central In-
telligence Agency operatives nesting
in his own embassy. As Smith saw
it, the question was: Who was going
to administer American policy in
Laos-CIA or the embassy?
'How many CIA agents were
wandering around Laos during this
period only the CIL. could know.
One of the more flamboyant, who
blossomed everywhere, affected a
copybook cover that included a
manufactured British accent, a luxu-
riant mustache, elaborately casual
but expensive clothes, and a cane
with a secret compartment that held
-not a sword, but brandy....
As Ambassador, Smith favored a
conservative coalition government
which offered a little of something
to all factions. CIA activists made
no secret of their preference for a
group of army "Young Turks."
CIA's favorite boy was Gen. Phou=
mi Nosavan, the forty-one-year-old
Minister of Defense, who was later
to emerge as the government "strong
man." Phoumi was strongly anti-
Communist. He was also -fervently
pro-Minister of Defense, because
that's where the -money was. .. .
The first blowup came in August,
1960, when a paratroop captain
named Kong Le, whose troops hadn't
been paid in three months because
his superiors were looting the till,
became fed up with the state of af-
fairs and led a coup. Successful, he
raced all around Vientiane in a jeep
bearing legends demanding the Amer-
icans go home. The CIA boys and
the brains of the American military
mission on the scene were stunned.
Until Kong Le suddenly went off
the deep' end, they had considered
him -one of their very own fair-haired
boys, and they couldn't understand
what the devil had gotten into him.
Nor did they like or understand any
better what Kong Le did with his
new-found power.
Neutralism: a Dirty Word
lie called on Prince Souvanna
Phowna to take over as Premier.
Souvanna was a neutralist. Depend-
ing on how you look at it, he was a
sincere neutralist, hoping to bring
some kind of peace to his unsettled
country, or he was just a weak-kneed
tool of the Communists. The Amer-
icans, to most of whom neutralism
was a dirty word anyway, took the
second view. Ex-Ambassador Par-
sons, by this time promoted to the
post of supreme authority for Far
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8,,,L_ N.TI
ON
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
Eastern Affairs, flew to Laos to try
to get some understanding with Sou-
vanna; but he and Souvanna had
never wasted any affection on each
other when Parsons was Ambassador,
and so it was almost inevitable that
they wouldn't achieve any meeting
of minds now. They didn't. The
American chips went down on the
CIA's . boy, General Phoumi. Given
the green light, Phoumi in Decem-
ber, 1960, actually fought a battle
and captured Vientiane. Souvanna
and Kong Le were chased out, and
having no place else to go, they join-
ed the Communist Pathet Lao. With
him in retreat, Kong Le thought-
fully took 9,000 American rifles with
which he armed the Communist
forces.
Premature Celebration
In Vientiane, General Phoumi and
the CIA . celebrated their victory.
"The celebration was premature,"
Keyes Beech writes. "Looked at from
a cold-blooded, cold-war viewpoint,
the bloodshed might have been jus-
tified if, as the CIA argued, blood-
shed.was necessary to `polarize' Com-
munist and anti-Communist factions.
It might have been justified if strong
and effective leadership had emerged
from the smoke of battle. Unfortu-
nately, neither of these things hap-
pened. `Polarization' took place only
at the top, between the same tired,
familiar faces."
Souvanna and Kong Le, backed
now by Communist manpower, be-
gan to carve up Laos. Phoumi, hav-
ing distributed the best financial
plums in the government among his
relatives, seemed to have lost all in-
terest iii the dreary business of fight-
ing. Everywhere the Pathet Lao
forces were victorious. The puppet
government we had installed was too
corrupt and inefficient to oppose
them; the 25,000-man Army for
which we had been paying for five
years had never wanted to fight in
the first place and wanted to fight
even less in a corrupt cause; the
Laotian people whom we had not
helped,.but had only helped to ruin,
could hardly be expected to feel that
we were worthy of their ultimate sac-
rifice. So there we were, having made
one of history's most colossal botches
of everything.
The new Kennedy Administration
was bequeathed this little sweet-
heart of a problem. There the Com-
munists were, overrunning all of
northern Laos, gobbling up another
country, and we were faced with just
two unlovely choices. We could either
go to war in defense of freedom
against the Communist menace, or
we could humbly sue for the reinsti-
tution of the very kind of neutralist
government (only it would be worse
now because the Communists were
stronger) that we had conspired to
kick out.
Boxed into this dead-end street,
President Kennedy at first talked
tough and acted as if he would like
to fight. But it quickly became ap-
parent that the Congressional lead-
ership of his own party would have
no part of such folly, and the result
was the only result really possible-
long-drawn-out, largely futile nego-
tiations for a cease-fire in Laos and
the return of "neutralism," even if
it meant the return of Souvanna.
No defeat that CIA has ever earn-
ed us has been more complete, more
devastating. In face-conscious South-
east Asia, we had lost all the face
there was to lose, and even Thai-
land, long considered a staunch part-
ner of the West, began to flirt with
neutralist ideas. In such manner had
CIA intriguing come home to roost.
As Marquis Childs wrote from
Geneva, where he was dancing at-
tendance on the Laos peace talks, if
CIA was to be thoroughly investi-
gated in the aftermath of Cuba, "the
role played by that agency in the
mess in Laos is perhaps more relevant
than the share of responsibility
which CIA must bear for the Cuban
fiasco."
PART VIII FIASCO IN CUBA
IN DECEMBER, 1960, U.S. Sena-
tor-elect Claiborne Pell (D., R.I.)
made a quiet visit to Fidel Castro's
Cuba. A former Foreign Service of-
ficer in World War II, Senator Pell
was no novice in pulse-taking, and
when he went among the Cuban
people, he was surprised at what he
found. He later capsuled his dis-
coveries for the New York Herald
Tribune in these words:
The people of Cuba that I saw
and spoke to during three or four
days of quiet observation were not
sullen or unhappy or dissatisfied. I
am afraid that it is only true that
they were still tasting the satisfac-
tion of Castro's land reform, of his
nationalization of United States com-
panies and of the other much-touted
reforms put into effect by Castro.
The dispossessed and disgruntled
were in jail or in exile.
Senator Pell returned to Washing-
ton and explicitly warned high of-
ficials of the Kennedy Administra-
tion that the time for action against
Castro was not yet.
During the same December, two
other visitors to Cuba saw the same
sights, cane to the same conclusions,
and wrote an article about them.
These observers were Gen. Hugh B.
Hester, U.S.A. (Ret.), holder of the
Distinguished Service Medal for serv-
ices in the southwest Pacific in
World War II, and Jesse Gordon,
June 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 561
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
public-relations consultant. In an ar-
ticle, "A New Look at Cuba-The
Challenge to Kennedy," published by
New World Review, General Hester
and Gordon wrote:
It must be pointed out that a
Princeton poll, taken [in Cuba] last
year, revealed 86 per cent of the
people in support of Castro....
Most observers would agree that
if elections were held tomorrow,
Castro would be overwhelmingly re-
turned to power....
The morale of Cuban workers and
the militia is high....
There is no doubt about the peo-
ple's spirit or their courage, tenacity
and determination to hold onto the
gains under the revolution....
The U. S. military high command
has plans for an invasion of Cuba.
Should the Kennedy Administration
decide to continue along the reckless
path of the previous Administration,
we fear disaster will result.
No prophecy was ever better jus-
tified by the event. No prophecy
was ever less hidden under a bushel.
At the end of March, Gordon per-
sonally mailed reprints of the article
to the White House, the State De-
partment and members of Congress.
But about 1:30 A.M. on Monday,
April 17, some 1,500 Cuban exiles-
trained, financed and masterminded
by the CIA-stormed ashore at the
Bay of Pigs on Cuba's south coast.
The. CIA, the agency that is sup-
posed to know all, had insisted that
Cuba was ripe for revolution.
Never perhaps was an intelligence
estimate more disastrously wrong. In
a few hours, it became apparent that
the Cuban invaders had not the
slightest chance. They were over-
whelmed, killed, captured. The CIA-
planned coup, almost a year in the
making, backfired so tragically that
Fidel Castro was presented with an
hour of triumph in which to. strut.
Instead of being overthrown, the
power of his regime, thanks to CIA,
was solidified in all of Cuba.
Commenting on the consequences
almost a month later, Richard H.
Rovere wrote:
can leadership, the revelations of
Central Intelligence "operating" pro-
cedures and of the bureau's mam-
moth incompetence. What is more
painful, though, is the awareness that
intelligence (as a quality of mind,
not as data), and the best staff a
twentieth-century President has had,
offered so little protection against
enormous error....
As it turned out, the non-profes-
sionals were mostly right, and the
professionals were almost wholly
wrong.
This, needless to say, is not the
result that an annual $1 billion in-
vestment in intelligence is expected
to achieve-especially on an island
just ninety miles from our shores,
an island on which we have a huge
naval base, where there are many
long-time American residents, where
presumably we should have the most
solid contacts. This wasn't Laos,
thousands of miles away in another
and remote corner of the world-
but Cuba, on our doorstep.
Operatives on Parade
How could it happen? How could
our master intelligence agency, CIA,
be so completely wrong? These ques-
tions have been only partly answer-
ed, but even the partial answers
throw the book at CIA. Let's look
at one eyewitness account of the CIA
in action. It was written by Thayer
Waldo in the San Francisco Chroni-
cle.
This reporter [Waldo wrote] spent
the first half of last year in Cuba.
At that time, with the U. S. Embassy
still in operation and fully staffed,
eight of its personnel were CIA
agents, three worked for the FBI,
and each of the Armed Services had
from one to five operatives assigned
to intelligence work.
No special effort was required to
learn these facts or to identify the
individuals so engaged. Within
thirty days of arrival in Havana,
their names and agency affiliations
were made known to me, without
solicitation, by other correspondents
or Embassy employees.
The latter included one CIA man
The passage of time does not re- who volunteered the identities of all
duce the magnitude of the folly in three persons accredited to the FBI;
Cuba. The more it is examined, the and a Cuban receptionist, outspoken-
worse the whole affair looks. The ly pro-Castro, who ticked off the
immediate consequences are bad names of six CIA agents-with en-
enough: Castro's tightened grip on tire accuracy, a later check con-
Cuba, the growing distrust of Ameri- firmed.
562
In addition to Embassy staffers,
the CIA had a number of operatives
(I knew fourteen, but am satisfied
there were more) among the large
colony of resident U. S. businessmen.
One of these, a roofing and installa-
tion contractor, had lived in Cuba
from the age of six, except for service
with the Army during World War
II-as a master sergeant in G-2, mili-
tary intelligence. Predictably, that
known background made the man a
prime target for observation by
Castro's people when U. S: Cuban
relations began to deteriorate seri-
ously. He was shadowed day and.
night, his every contact reported.
Yet the CIA made him its chief
civilian. agent in Havana.
Unintelligent Intelligence
Quite obviously, this wasn't a very
efficient way for a super-intelligence
agency to run a secret intelligence
network. But then, according to
Waldo, Naval Intelligence was no
more efficient. During most of 1960
and into 1961, it ran a major in-
telligence-gathering project at the
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Some
3,800 Cubans are employed on the
base, but they live outside govern-
ment property, most of them in or
Guantanamo City, twenty-
seven miles north. It occurred to
Naval Intelligence that here, among
these Cubans going back and forth
every day, was a mass of raw human
material from which could be culled
significant data about the prevailing
mood in Cuba. Naval Intelligence,
as a result, ran about 140 interviews
a day, questioning the Cuban work-
ers about the attitudes of Cuban
civilians toward Castro. Almost to
a man, apparently, the workers as-
sured the Americans that the Cuban
people were very, very unhappy
with Castro.
Waldo points out that naval-base
workers are paid about 60 per cent
more than comparable workers in
private industry, that the suffering
Cuban economy offers few job op-
portunities to any man who might
lose the naval-base plum he had-
that, in a word, it should have been
expected the Cuban workers would
tell Naval Intelligence only what
they knew Naval Intelligence wanted
to hear. Waldo quotes a South
American diplomat making this wry
comment on this strange intelligence
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
The NATION
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
operation-- "If I denounce my neigli-
bor as my mortal enemy and then
ask nay servants their opinion, they
are pretty apt to tell me that every-
one else hates him, too-particularly
if they like their jobs."
From such sources and from CIA's
close contacts with emigre Cubans
(who were convinced, naturally, like
all emigres, that great numbers of
the Cuban people hated Castro as
fervently as they did), American
opinions appear to have been form-
ed. It is necessary: to use such qualify-
ing words as "appear" and "seem,"
for it must be emphasized that any
synthesis of the Cuba misadventure
must be. based on incomplete infor-
mation-the kind that has become
available by sweeping out from un-
der official rugs.
Up to this point, the American
people have been given no chance
to find out for themselves what hap-
pened, what went wrong, who was
responsible. Investigations have been
held in secret, as if we were safe-
guarding the formula of some new
miracle weapon; and when the Chair-
man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
testifies behind closed doors, one
Senator shouts that he has been
shocked out of his britches and all.
the chiefs should be fired-others
insist blandly that they weren't
shocked, and nobody should be fired.
Such are the baffling cross-currents
in the world of secrecy we have
substituted for the world of infor-
mation. If, therefore, any officials
would quarrel with this account of
the Cuban fiasco, let them first
quarrel with themselves - behind
closed doors.
can Republic, Haiti; he would have headed by Manolo Antonio Ray,
to go. Castro's former Minister of Public
The strongest initial proponent of Works.
the "Castro must go" line appears The CIA, with its pronounced
to have been Republican Vice Presi- right-wing proclivities which always
dent Richard M. Nixon. He, it is seem.to orientate it toward ruling
said, argued strongly that we must shahs and military dictators, had to
support armed intervention in Cuba pick "its boys" from this divided
to get rid of Castro, and he finally pack; and its choice fell, where its
won Eisenhower's consent. Once this choices always have seemed to fall,
basic decision had been made, our on the representatives of the Right.
fate was in the hands of CIA, for Only in this case its choice was more
CIA was supposed to know precisely unfortunate even than usual, for in
how to run such delicate affairs. Cuba the forces of the Right were
This official misconception of
CIA's omniscience and omnipotence
quite obviously was based upon
CIA's vaunted successes in over-
throwing Mossadegh in Iran and Ar-
benz in Guatemala. Castro, we de-
cided, was to be another Arbenz,
and the Guatemala script that had
worked so well was the one CIA
elected to follow. In some ways, the
situation seemed made to order for
it. Castro's increasingly iron dictator-
ship, his merciless execution of dissi-
dents were sending increasing hordes
of refugees to our shores. The Miami
area was swarming with them. All
that CIA had to do was to train
them, arm them and mold them into
an invasion force.
Simple as this basic conception
seemed, it required considerable do-
ing. The anti-Castro Cubans were
a gaggle of warring factions, ranging
over all the hues of the political
spectrum. They included brutal ex-
cops who had served Fulgencio Ba-
tista without a qualm, arch conserv-
atives who wanted their lands and
money back, left-wing reformers who
wanted to preserve Castro's land
policy and Castro's nationalization
of vital industry, but without Cas-
tro's dictatorship. These groups were
personalized in their leadership. On
the far Right were ex-Batista hench-
men like Rolando Masferrer. Also
far over to the Right, but free of
the Batista taint, was the Movement
for Revolutionary Recovery (MRR),
headed by Captain Manuel Artime,
who had been only briefly associated
with Castro. On the Left-reformers,
but strongly anti-Communist -
were the followers of the People's
Revolutionary Movement (MRP),
almost powerless to help it.
The Choice that Wasn't Made
Virtually all sources seem to agree
that there was just one effective
resistance movement inside Cuba:
the MRP headed by Manolo An-
tonio Ray. A quiet, soft-spoken ar-
chitect and civil engineer, Ray had
been one of Castro's most effective
resistance leaders. For some two
years during the precarious course
of the Castro revolution, he had di-
rected sabotage inside Havana; and
when Castro came to power, Ray
had been rewarded by appointment
as Minister of Public Works. He
served just eight months, then he
broke with Castro. He realized by
that time, he says, that Castro did
not intend to live up to his demo-
cratic promises, that his regime was
becoming increasingly dictatorial, in-
creasingly communistic. So Ray once
more went underground, setting up
his own clandestine organization to
fight the new dictatorship.
He managed to evade Castro's
police and to work for eight months
inside Cuba. In that time, he per-
fected-an underground network that
spanned the island state. Each
province had its seven-man execu-
tive council, and in each province
similar organizations reached down
into the separate counties. Ray kept
contacts between these underground
groups to a minimum, tying the
threads together only at the top, and
soon the effectiveness of his grow-
ing organization was demonstrated
by increasing incidents of sabotage.
Ray was certainly an effective
leader, not much doubt about that.
But, let's whisper it, he was "left-
wing." The man still had faith in
the original Castro program; he
Beginning of the Plot
It seems, then, to. be well-establish-
ed that in the spring of 1960, prob-
ably in late April or early May, the
Eisenhower administration made a
fateful decision. Castro, it felt, was
moving steadily into the Communist
orbit. CIA had information that some
eighty Cuban fliers had been sent
to Czechoslovakia to train on Rus-
sian jets; there were reports of con-
struction projects inside Cuba that
looked to CIA as if they might be
designed to launch missiles. Castro,
in addition, seemed to be stirring
up trouble in Panama, the Domini-
Jwna 21, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
56
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
thought that land and, industrial
reforms were long overdue and es-
sential to Cuba's ultimate prosper-
ity. Those who want Cuba returned
to its pre-Castro state seem to over-
look the vital fact that this state
was so bad it made Castro possible.
Castro clambered to power over the
ruins of a corrupt and brutal system.
He had made great capital (see his
program as he himself explained it
in The Nation, Nov. 30, 1957) out
of the fact that 85 per cent. of Cuba's
small-scale farmers did not own their
land; out of the fact that more than
half of the arable land in the nation
was in foreign hands; out of the
fact that more than 200,000 rural
families had not a square foot of
land on which,A support themselves
while almost 10 million acres "of un-
touched arable land remain in the
hands of powerful interests." One of
Castro's first and most popular acts
had been to's.plit up these baronial
holdings. Ray believed that these
objectives had been right, but he
wanted them achieved in a frame-
work of freedom. He explained his
philosophy to the New York Post
in these words:
Our movement doesn't allow poli-
ticians to come in on the backs of
the people just so they can get back
into power and get money. for them-
selves. [Ray did not explain how
he would prevent this.] We've had
enough of that. What we want is a
continuation of social reform-not a
government by the rich or the ex-
ploiters. We believe in a mixed
economy of private enterprise-be-
cause it is effective and efficient-
and government ownership of utili-
ties and monopolies-because these
things belong to the whole people.
And there must be freedom. This,
Castro has destroyed.
Such a program could not fail to
be anathema to rigid, right-wing
minds, or to those powerful Amer-
ican interests whose primary con-
cern was the repossession of their
vast, Castro-sequestered holdings in
Cuba. With such a program, CIA
would have no truck. Though Ray's
underground organization was the
only effective one, he had. to go it
alone. He got virtually no money,
no supplies, no help of any kind
from CIA. He established his own
training camps and financed them
by selling one-peso stamps.. each
month to sympathizers inside Cuba.
Indicative of the support he had in-
side the country we were trying to
liberate was the fact that his collec-
tions ultimately reached 60,000 pesos
a month. CIA evidently drew no
conclusions from this. All the time
Ray was struggling to maintain him-
self and his underground organiza-
tion, CIA was pouring a huge flow
of cash (the total finally came to
$45 million) into the promotion of
its right-wing invasion.
Prying Open the Plot
Over-all direction of the Cuban
endeavor was in the 'hands of one
of CIA's deputy directors, Richard
Richard M. Bissell, Jr.
M. Bissell, Jr., a former economics
instructor at Yale. Under Bissell was
a large corps of CIA agents and in-
structors, some Spanish-speaking
North Americans, at least - one Fili-
pino, and _ surprisingly - quite a
number of Eastern Europeans who
couldn't communicate with their
Cuban proteges at all except through
interpreters. This was the staff that
directed the training of the invasion
troops in a number of camps carved
out of the Guatemalan jungle. The
first recruits, thirty-two in number,
were flown to Guatemala in May,
1960. They were put to work hack-
ing out a training base on jungle
acres donated for the purpose by
Robert Alejos, a wealthy Guatemalan
landlord. Later airstrips were built
on wasteland along the fringes of
Alejos' coffee plantation, and Ameri-
can jet pilots, in civilian clothes,
were sent to Guatamala.to trainthe
Cuban fliers.
All of this activity was conducted
for months without anyone in the
United States outside of the. highest
official circles having any inkling of
what was afoot. But a large-scale
invasion cannot be kept hidden from
public view forever, and in this case,
in any eveht, secrecy arrangements
were not of the best. Some of the
Guatemalan airstrips were operated
in full sight of travelers on the Pan
American highway and the Guate-
malan railroad, and in time the word
began to get around. The Nation
called public attention to what was
going on last November, but the
large wire services and major media
of information continued to play
blind, deaf and dumb fornearly two
months. It was not until early Janu-
ary that Time finally used a short
article on the Guatemalan airstrips,
followed within a few days by a much
more detailed story in The New
York Times. With these news pieces,
the American public at large, for
the first time and still only in a
tentative fashion, began to acquire
information about the plot we were
brewing in the Caribbean.
Picking the Leader
The publication of these first news
stories almost coincided with a de-
velopment of major importance in
the Guatemalan camps. There CIA
had picked its "fair-haired boy":
twenty-nine-year-old Manuel Artime,
regarded by some of- Ray's followers
as a Franco Falangist. By January,
1961, Artime was in solid with Frank
Bender, the CIA area chief in Guate-
mala. Drew Pearson asserts that Ar-
time was helped along the path to
rank and glory by Bender's secretary,
Macho Barker, whom Artime had
promised to make sports czar of
liberated Cuba. If true, this report
would seem to indicate that Artime
expected to dominate the govern-
ment of the new Cuba and to pass
out the rewards. - There are some
other tenuous indications pointing
in the same direction. The Chat-
tanooga . Times -Washington corres-
pondent, Charles Bartlett, later was
to reveal the existence of a super-
secret unit, known as Operation 40,
apparently organized to act after the
564 Approved For. Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 The NATION
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27: CIA-RDP86B00269R0005900; 067-8
invasion, seizing' control of' the new Theirs was supposed to be a free men holdrnn Thompson submachine
government and establishing a dic-
tatorship, possibly under Artime.
With these machinations stirring
in the background, the youthful Ar-
time made his move at the end of
January. With the full backing of
CIA, he staged a coup in the train-
ing camps. He made fiery speeches
to some 1,500 freedom fighters then
in training. In some instances, he
changed their commanders, installing
his own men, and he appealed to all
to join his banner. Most did, but
the 200 balked.
Those "Democratic" Rebels
Artime didn't stand for any non-
sense from these recalcitrants. Back-
ed up by CIA all the way, he' had
the 200 arrested and isolated tinder
guard. Some managed to escape
through the jungles and make their
way back across Mexico to Miami.
Others were talked into joining up.
But there remained a hard core who
stood by their convictions and re-
fused to support Artime's budding
junta. What happened to these stub-
born ones should be an object lesson
to a nation that has permitted its
cloak-and-dagger boys to run their
own private little dictatorships.
Long weeks later, after the Cuban
invasion had failed, the story was
told to The New York Times by Dr.
Rodolfo Nodal Tarafa, a young law-
yer who had been in the training
camp at Trax, Guatemala, when Ar-
time staged his coup. On January
31, Dr. Nodal said, the senior mil-
itary adviser in the Trax camp,
known to the Cubans only as
"Frank," mustered the 300 training
freedom fighters and told them their
two commanding Cuban officers had
been sent.away for "playing politics."
They would be commanded hence-
forth, "Frank" said, by Captain San
Roman. This choice was distinctly
unpopular with the Cubans in camp.
Captain San Roman had been an
officer of Fulgencio Batista and was
reported to have fought against
Castro in the Sierra Maestra. In San
Roman, the freedom fighters smell=
ed the stench of the old, brutal
Batista dictatorship; and since this
wasn't the kind of "cause" for which
they were prepared to die, 230 of
the 300 asked to resign.
volunteer array,' but of course such
insubordination could not be per-
mitted. Another agent by the name
of "Bernie" was summoned to deal
with the trouble. He charged the
230 recalcitrants with being Com-
munists. He declared he had author-
ity from the Democratic. Revolution-
ary Front to name commanders, and
he had picked Captain San Roman
for them. That was that. But the
Cubans didn't seem to see the logic
in this clear, democratic reasoning.
It seemed to them that they were
the ones who had been elected to do
the fighting and the dying, and they
should have sorrtething to say about
the cause for which they were pre-
pay-c.4 to make st}ch ,'sacr'ifices. They
demanded that their case be heard
by the Front within seventy-two
hours. Otherwise, they wanted to be
discharged and returned home.
A committee of five was selected
to present this protest. "Bernie" re-
fused to receive the delegation. He
agreed finally to talk to a single
spokesman, and Dr. Nodal was
chosen. The lawyer explained to
"Bernie" that the freedom fighters
were neither mercenaries nor con-
scripts, and that they could not ac-
cept commanders who represented
the very antithesis of the ideals for
which they were fighting. "Bernie"
suggested that the troops agree to
train for five days more.while they
waited for a representative from the
Democratic Revolutionary Front to
arrive. They agreed. But seven days
passed, and nothing happened. The
troops again went on strike.
Iron Beneath Velvet
Now CIA took off 'the silken
gloves of deceit. Threats and prom-
ises were freely employed. Gradu-
ally, the protesting troops were
browbeaten into submission-all but
twenty. These twenty were obdu-
rate. On February 11, while the rest
of the men were on field exercises,
one of the advisers asked eight of
the twenty to go with him. They
thought, Dr. Nodal says, that there
was to be another conference. Not
until they had been led along a jun-
gle track to a canvas-covered truck
did they discover their error. There
they were suddenly covered by three
guns.
The eight were driven to La Suiza,
an estate where there was a Guate-
malan Army cariip. There they were
surrounded by eight or ten men with
automatic weapons. Each of the
eight was taken separately from the
truck; each was taken into a small
room, forced to empty his pockets,
forced to strip off all his clothes.
"I felt sure this was it," Dr. Nodal
said. "I was sure we were going to
be murdered."
But not even CIA was quite equal
to that. The men, deprived of "even
our love letters," as Dr. Nodal says,
were permitted to dress again. They
were taken to a shed 15 feet by 30,
with concrete floor and galvanized
iron roof-a furnace by day, an icy
igloo by night. Here they were im-
prisoned. For twelve days, they
were not permitted to bathe or
shave, to have clean clothes or to
eat a really edible meal. Periodical-
ly, they were questioned by another
CIA mystery man, known to them
only as "Pat," the chief security
guard. They were given lie-detector
tests, virtually at gunpoint. The ob-
ject was to make them confess that
they were Communists, for obvi-
ously such stubborn and disagreeable
characters simply had to be Corn-
munists. Naturally, they wouldn't
admit it, and strangely enough, as
far as can be learned, the lie-detector
tests didn't show it. In frustration,
the CIA finally flew the stubborn
holdouts, now seventeen in number,
to a jungle prison in remote Peten
Province in northern Guatemala.
Here they were held under armed
guard and warned they would be
shot if they tried to escape. They
were warned, too, that when the
revolution succeeded they would be
turned over to the new Cuban gov-
ernment to face trial and, probably,
execution.
This fate they were spared by
the failure of the invasion for which,
originally, they had trained so ar-
dently. With that unexpected col-
lapse of all its plans, CIA acquired,
if not a change of heart, at least a
twinge of discretion. It released the
seventeen "freedom fighters" it had
held in cruel jungle imprisonment
for eleven weeks, flew them back
7z 24, 1961 565
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved
to Miami and dumped them out.
There Dr. Nodal and the others
started their own resistance move-
ment. It has one primary, over-rid-
ing principle: it will have nothing
to' do with CIA.
Kennedy's Dilemma
Such is the background against
which the CIA set out to insure
the "liberation" of Cuba from Cas-
tro. No one in Washington, of course,
had any idea of the manner in which
CIA was indoctrinating the prin-
ciples of democracy into its "freedom
fighters" in the Guatemalan jungles.
It has become obvious that no one
on any level of government, not the
Congress, not the President, had any
clear conception of what CIA was
up to or how it was running the
store; yet it was in such a miasma
of misinformation and non-informa-
tion that President Kennedy had
to make a crucial decision.
It is not clear just when he first
learned of the invasion plans set
on foot by Nixon and Eisenhower.
One version has pictured him as
learning about the project for the
first time shortly after the election.
According to this version, the inva-
sion had been scheduled for the late
fall, but Kennedy was so shocked
by the Idea. that the stroke was
postponed to let him make the de-
cision. Against the background of
what is known, all of this appears
unlikely; for Kennedy himself, in
his television debates with Nixon,
had proposed just such drastic action
as the Eisenhower administration
contemplated-and Nixon, it should
be noted parenthetically, had held
up his hands in pious horror at the
thought. In any event, in January,
Kennedy began to get detailed re-
ports on the Cuban invasion project
from CIA and from the State and
Defense Departments. He was con-
fronted with an evil dilemma.
The Cuban rebels had spent
months in the training camps; they
were ready to go; they could not
be held in leash forever. Futher-
more, the publicity so belatedly
given about the Guatemalan train-
ing bases had stripped the mask
from our CIA-overrun puppet state;
embarrassed, Guatemalan officials
yielded to public outcry and inform-
ed the United States we would soon
have to get out. CIA further intensi-
fied the pressure on the President.
Castro, it reported, was getting So-
viet tanks and MIGs; he was step-
ping up his counterintelligence ac-
tivities throughout the nation. It
was now or never.
Such were the strong pressures
for action-for a decision, as Sher-
man Kent once wrote, "off the top
of the head." Yet even so, inside
the Kennedy Administration, there
was much soul-searching and a quite
definite tug of war. The President
himself, aware that the contemplated
American-backed invasion would
violate every provision of the 1948
Pact of Bogota, prohibiting the use
of force against the governments of
American states, frowned on any
direct American participation. Sec-
retary of State Dean Rusk apparent-
ly doubted the wisdom of the entire
venture, but he was not a strong
enough man to fight for his con-
victions. Chester Bowles disliked the
whole idea, leaked his dislike to the
press, but apparently wasn't con-
sulted in the final decision. Senator
William Fulbright, chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee, was
the one man with convictions who
fought stoutly for them, but his pro-
tests were ignored. Determinative in
making up the President's mind for
him, it appears, was the information
supplied by CIA, backed up by Navy
Intelligence. This insisted that Cas-
tro's island empire was ripe for revo-
lution. Independent analyses , by
amateurs that pointed to a directly
opposite conclusion were ignored. It
was decided to strike.
Shotgun Wedding
Before the actual invasion, there
was a CIA-arranged, shotgun wed-
ding. CIA, a great togetherness out-
fit, wanted to get all the anti-Castro
groups together pulling in harness
behind Manuel Artime, the field
commander it had already selected
for them. With Bissell wielding the
whip, it was announced on March 22
that a Revolutionary Council had
been formed two days previously
in Miami. The provisional president
of the council was Jose Miro Car-
dona, who had been Castro's first
Premier, but had quickly broken
with the dictator. Manolo Ray was
a member of the council, but its
overwhelming complexion was con-
servative. It was understood that
Cardona would become Provisional
President as soon as the invading
troops had carved out a foothold on
Cuban soil. Later there would be
free elections. Just what trust should
have been placed in these promises
in view of CIA's action in investing
full military power in Artime, in view
of the murky Operation 40, remains
a matter of conjecture.
Political control established, the
next consideration was CIA's inva-
sion plan. Originally, the cloak-and-
dagger agency wanted to hurl all
the available invasion forces ashore
at one point in one all-out assault.
From the first, it appears, Manolo
Ray's MRP doubted the wisdom of
CIA's military conceptions. Ray felt
that the only way to overthrow Cas-
tro was to use Castro's own formula
against him-to infiltrate Cuba with
small guerrilla groups, to build up
the program of sabotage and re-
sistance within the country to the
bursting point. So strongly did Ray
feel about this that it appears he
even contemplated taking his MRP
out of the Revolutionary Front; but,
in the end, he went along because,
as be later said, "we did not want
to give the slightest aid to the Com-
munists."
Dubious Military Tactic
CIA's tactical plan raised other
doubts. The invasion beach it select-
ed was in the swampy, isolated Bay
of Pigs, ninety miles southeast of
Havana. The idea apparently shock-
ed Colonel Ramon Barquin, an Army
officer who had been imprisoned by
Batista, one of the most respected
military figures among the emnigres
and the man who almost certainly
would have been Ray's choice to
command the invasion had Ray had
a choice. Colonel Barquin pointed
out that only. two narrow, easily de-
fended paths led inland from the
Bay of Pigs. One was a narrow road,
the other a narrow railroad bed. On
either side of these defiles, for a
distance of twenty-four miles inland,
stretched impenetrable, mosquito-
infested swamps. "This swamp of-
fers some advantages-you can't be
The NATION
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
San-. FraXnei co Chronicle St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Times-Mirror Syndicate
Oakland Tribune
Some U. S. Press Comment
On the Cuban Invasion and the CIA
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Oakland Tribune
&Swr
"Ps-s-st -- smell something burning?"
inwZ4, 1961 567
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
flanked," Colonel Barquin conceded.
"But it makes no difference; you
can be stopped easily enough." All
that Castro would have to do would
be to concentrate tanks and troops
at the mouths of the two funnels
opening onto the central Cuban
plain; his task would be like putting
a cork in the mouth of a bottle.
The ways to. disaster had now been
greased by CIA decisions that, it
would seem, had erred at each and
every "step along the way; the in-
vasion ship was about to be launch-
ed. On March 29, after making some
changes in plan, President Kennedy
flashed the green light from the
White House. One of the President's
modifications banned U.S. aerial
strikes in support of the invaders;
the Cubans must do it on their own.
Another dealt with the cleaning out
of Batista supporters in the invasion
army. The President himself, it is
said, ordered the arrest of Rolando
Masferrer, the best-known Batista
henchman; but, while this order was
carried out, CIA heeded imperfectly
the President's intent. Other Batista
luminaries like Captain San Roman
sailed from Guatemala in command
of their troops.
The attack began with surprise
raids by B-26s on Castro's airfields.
They wrought some damage, but,
as events were to show, not enough.
This was the first failure, but it
wasn't the most serious. For a stra-
tegic move that reads like something
out of Gilbert and. Sullivan, one has
to thank the masterminds of CIA.
On some level-on just what level
and on just whose authority the
American public, presumably, will
never be permitted to know-the
brilliant decision was reached that
the Cuban leaders of the Revolution-
ary Front were not to be permitted
to have anything to say, or to do,
with their own invasion.
Climax to a Nightmare
On April 16, the day before the
actual invasion, Dr. Jose Miro Car-
dona and the members of his Revo-
lutionary Council were in New York.
They received word to go to Phila-
delphia. There they were met and
flown to Miami. The instant they
arrived, they were conducted to a
small, isolated house on the out-
skirts. Here they were held virtual
prisoners. They were not permitted
to use the telephone. They were not
permitted to communicate with any-
one. They were allowed only to listen
to radio reports of how their invasion
was being managed for them.
Here, perhaps, is the most fantastic
episode of the entire fantastic night-
mare. The success of the invasion
from the outset clearly depended on
a mass uprising of the Cuban people
in its support. But Ray, the under-
ground commander, the only leader
who could have been effective in
marshaling such support, was muz-
zled. Obviously, he was too left-wing,
too dangerous a man. Obviously,
too, CIA wasn't trusting any of the
other members of the Revolutionary
Council; it was making certain that
they didn't interfere with CIA's
invasion.
Some genius in CIA evidently de-
cided that the Cuban people would
arise en masse if a message was
beamed to them from our Swan Is-
land radio station off the Honduran
coast. And so this message was con-
cocted:
Alert! Alert! Look well at the
rainbow. The first will rise very
soon. Chico is in the house. Visit
him. The sky is blue. Place notice
in the tree. The tree is green and
brown. The letters arrived well. The
letters are white. The fish will not
take much time to rise. The fish is
red. Look well at the rainbow....
This gibberish, as far as can be
learned, was the, only notice the
Cuban people ever got. Ray's under-
ground, so assiduously kept in the
dark by CIA, didn't even know an
invasion was coming off-and so did
nothing. The Cuban people apparent-
ly didn't make much sense out of
that fish and rainbow business-and
so did nothing. The invasion troops
stormed ashore and found Castro,
much better informed. than the
underground, waiting for them.
The debacle was, swift. The in-
vaders stabbed inland along the one
narrow road, the one narrow railroad
bed. They penetrated for twenty
miles, and then they were hit by
tanks, by artillery fire, by strafing
from the air. American papers carried
glaring headlines about Russian
MIGs turning the tide, but less
hysterical reports later showed that
there wasn't a MIG in the air. Cas-
tro had armed some old jet-trainer
planes, and these were enough. An
ammunition ship, carrying practical-'
ly all of the reserve supplies for the
expedition, was sunk. The narrow
road and railroad track were smother-
ed by fire. On either side the jungles
hemmed in the invaders. They could
not advance, they could not escape;
they could only surrender.
Post-Mortem Debacle
Now, to compound the military
disaster, came other disasters, the
full effects of which almost certainly
have not yet been totaled. First,
there was the lying. As in the U-2
disaster, we tried to deny the self-
evident truth. In a world that we
expect to accept America's word as
its bond, we deliberately set out to
demonstrate again that this word
was worthless. Rep. William Fitts
Ryan (D., N.Y.) writes that, after
the invasion had been under way for
twenty-four hours, "an official repre-
sentative of the State Department
stood in the 20th Congressional Dis-
trict Office in Washington and said
that neither the CIA, the State De-
partment nor any other government
agency was involved `in any way."
Worse, far worse, was the spectacle
in the United Nations.
There Adlai Stevenson, our Am-
bassador to the U.N., a man of tre-
mendous personal prestige not only
among Americans but among the
peoples of the world, put his prestige
on the line in a lost and tarnished
cause. Apparently, he hadn't been
told the truth by his own govern-
ment; and so, replying to charges
of American intervention made by
the Cuban delegate, Stevenson de-
nied categorically that the United
States had had any hand-any hand
at all-in the attempt to overthrow
Castro. Such charges, he said, were
a tissue of lies delivered "in the
jargon of communism." He added:
"If the Castro regime has hostility
to fear, it is the hostility of Cubans,
not of Americans. . . . If the. Castro
regime is overthrown, it will be over-
thrown by Cubans, not Americans.
I do not see that it is the obligation
of the United States to protect Dr.
Castro from the consequences of his
568/L6 NATION
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
 Approved For lelease 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
treason to the promises of his revo-
lution."
To turn Stevenson's own phrase
back upon him, what kind of "jar-
gon" is this?
Even though television viewers
who had venerated Stevenson turned
away sick at the sight, American
officials still were not willing to em-
brace truth. A determined effort was
made, with the help of the Madison
Avenue public relations firm that
had been hired to handle pronounce-
ments for the Cubans, to picture
the invasion as no invasion at all-
just a little guerrilla operation in-
volving no more than 200 or 300
men, many of whom had succeeded
in making contact with rebel forces
in the interior of Cuba. This myth
quickly was exploded by Castro.
He paraded some 1,200 captives
for all the world to see. He even
had them tell their stories on tele-
vision. There; in the full glare of
the klieg lights, some were identified
as former Batista thugs; and all,
almost to a man, pleaded they bad
been deceived by the CIA.
Catastrophic as all this was, it
was not the end of the catastrophe.
Castro's police and Army put on a
nation-wide hunt for subversives. It
is estimated that 100,000 suspects
were rounded up. Though many
.were finally released, hardly a single
leader in Ray's underground escaped.
Resistance leaders denounced CIA
bitterly. Their organization, they
said, had been wrecked, and some
wondered out loud whether this had
been part of CIA's intention. In a
Cuban prison, Associated Press cor-
respondent Robert Berrellez met a
twenty-two-year-old Cuban who had
been one of Ray's principal lieu-
tenants in the Cuban underground.
This Cuban complained bitterly that,
a month before the invasion, the
CIA radio station on Swan Island
had actually broadcast his name to
Castro's police. "This station paid
tribute to me by name for helping
exiles get out of Cuba clandestinely,"
the resistance leader said. "That
tipped off G-2 and I was finally
trapped."
In the light of such stories, can
one wonder that many Cubans refuse
to trust CIA any more? The extent
of the distrust was clearly indicated
in Miami on May 23, when Ray
finally took his MRP out of the
Cuban Revolutionary Council. The
move, he said bluntly, was in pro-
test against the CIA's continued
domination of the Cuban resistance,
its continued playing of Cuban poli-
tics, its continued refusal to support
MRP and its continued recruitment
of former Batista officials for a new
"national army." This would seem
to indicate that not even a disaster
of the magnitude of Cuba can change
the rigid mentality of CIA, can drag
it-to use an old Stevenson phrase-
"kicking and screaming into the
twentieth century."
Cuba, and CIA's infatuation with
Batista bravos and authoritarians of
the far Right, are merely the final
chapter in a book in which the plots,
whatever else may be said of them,
are all consistent. Iran, Guatemala,
Laos, Cuba: in all of them, the
CIA's fondest affection has been re-
served for militarists with nineteenth-
century social outlooks, for small and
wealthy ruling cliques that have no
sincere interest in the welfare of the
millions whom they govern. The im-
position of such governments merely
stalls the future and gives Khrush-
chev his talking points. As Stuart
Novins wrote in a perceptive final
paragraph in his account of the
Cuban fiasco in The Reporter:
The tragic episode ... raises a
number of obvious questions about
the activities of the Central Intelli-
gence Agency. But beyond that,
there is reason to doubt that even
if the attack had been successful, it
could have produced a viable politi-
cal resolution for the bloody turmoil
of Cuba's recent history. To liberate
Cuba from the outside, with ?a gov-
ernment to be imposed from the
outside, is not the most promising
way to promote a stable democracy
in Cuba and to advance the social
and economic welfare of its people.
Not only does Cuba know this, but
far more important, the rest of Latin
America knows it too.
PART IX A LOOK AT THE FUTURE
If it is true that the agency 1CIA1
mapped the invasion plan, herded
the Cuban resistance leaders around
like redheaded stepchildren and con-
ducted military operations in their.
stead, then we have trusted a Gov-
ernment agency to make all but war
without the consent of Congress.-
Rep. Paul G. Rogers (D., Fla.) in
the House of Representatives, May
1, 1961.
I want my position to be crystal
clear. The Pentagon, the military
services, and the intelligence services
of the nation are to be the servants
of the policymakers. They are not
to be policymakers in themselves....
If we have learned anything in
recent months ... it is that the pre-
ponderance of the emphasis ... on
the part of the military, the Central
Intelligence Agency, and the other
intelligence services was overwhelm-
ingly involved in the policymaking
functions of the Government, to the
point where the actions of the mili-
tary and the CIA made policy
through their preemption of the
field.-Senator Hubert D. Humphrey
(D., Minn.) in the Senate, May 3,
1961.
THESE TWO quotes pose an issue
that, in its depth and dimensions,
appears still not to have been fully
realized by the American people. This
is no issue of internal organization.
This is no technical issue, involving
the combination of intelligence and
action functions in one agency, the
CIA, though that is part of it. This
is an issue that goes to the very
guts of the democratic processes. In-
volved here is the question of whether
the "black" arts (-sabotage, revolu-
tion, invasion) are to dominate all
American democratic functions and
to determine for our people willy-
nilly, without debate, without knowl-
edge even of what is at stake, the
course their nation is to take in
June 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 569
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B002691k000500050067-8
the world. No lesser issue amounts
to a tinker's damn here.
Congress alone, under our Con-
stitution, is supposed to have the
right to declare war. This safeguard
was devised by the Founding Fathers
with the wise intent of insuring that
no Executive with a mania for power
could ever determine for the people
whether they were to live in peace,
or to fight and die. Only the people
through their representatives in; Con-
gress were to decide their own fate
on this most crucial of all issues.
Today, with intercontinental ballistic
missiles and nuclear warheads cast-
ing a dread shadow over the. world,
there is more need than'ever before
in history for an intelligent and in-
formed electorate to exercise-the re-
straints and the powers of decision
guaranteed in, the Constitution. Yet
today we practice the "black" arts
an such a far-flung,. billion-dollar
scale, we throw around them such
a mantle of spurious patriotic secrecy,
that neither the people not their
watchdogs in. Congress. have the
faintest idea what- is happening un-
til it has happened-until it is too
late. In essence,' CIA, . which is at
the root of the evil, has become a
Frankenstein monster dominating
the Congress that created : it.
Free to WRITERS
seeking a book publisher
Two fact-filled, illustrated brochures
tell how to publish your -book, get 40ry7, royalties, national advertislug,
publicity and promotion.-, Free edi-
torial appraisal. Write Dept. N3
Exposition Press, 386 Park Av.P.S.,M.Y.16
A
CANADIAN
REVIEW
of
Politics ? Science
Foreign Affairs
Arts and Letters
.QUEEN'S QUARTERLY
QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
The result is a twofold tragedy.
Abroad; CIA destroys our prestige
and undermines our influence. At
home we do not even know what
is happening.
Actions Belie Words
Our Presidents-Eisenhower was
notable for this and was motivated,
nearly everyone would agree, by a
deep sincerity-proclaim our peace-
ful intentions, our devotion to the
ideals of democracy and good will
and world peace. The American
people sincerely believe that this is
what we stand for and cannot com-
prebend why the world at large does
not believe in our so obviously good
intentions. Qur.people do not under-
stand that, even as our Presidents
speak, the.actions of CIA frequently
invest their words with. every ap-
pearance of the most arrant hypoc-
risy. The Presidents speak peace;
but the CIA overthrows regimes,
plots internal sabotage and revolu-
tion, foists -opium-growers on a
friendly nation, directs military in-
vasions, backs right-wing militarists.
These are not the actions of a demo-
cratic, peace-loving nation devoted
to the high ideals we profess. These
are the actions of the Comintern
in right-wing robes. America, no
more than the USSR, can speak out
of both sides of its mouth and ex-
pect the peoples of the world. to
trust in its sincerity.
All of this goes on abroad, but at
home the American public does not
know for long months, if ever, what
CIA has brewed. The power of a
billion-dollar, secret agency operating
as a law unto itself. is almost `in-
calculable, not just in molding the
image of America in foreign lands,
but in molding at home the image
Americans have of the world around
them. Time and again American
public opinion has been whiplashed
into a warlike frenzy by glaring head-
lines picturing a callous Communist
aggressor when, all the time, the
CIA was the secret provocative
agent. The crisis over Quemoy was
a glaring example. The U-2 incident,
in which our government lied to
"cover" CIA and pictured to the
public a Russian bear reaching out
with bloody paw to down our in-
another. 'Less' well known, ' but ' per-
haps . of greater long-range impor-
tance, is the manner in which our
whole attitude toward: Communist
China has_been deliberately colored,
as Charles Edmundson has written,
by "the State Department's repeated
and sometimes incendiary statements
that all Americans; held prisoner in
Communist China are held illegally
and in violation of international law.
Every well-informed correspondent
and editor in Washington knows that
many of the prisoners have been
U.S. intelligence agents, whom China
has as much right to hold as the
United States has to imprison Ru-
dolph Ivanovich Abel, the Soviet
`master spy."' By such tactics, Ed-
mundson writes, the American pub-
lic has been bamboozled "to the
point where a rational China policy
has become a political impossibility."
Making Peace Difficult
It may even be that a rational
policy of any kind has become a
political impossibility, Cyrus Eaton,
the multi-millionaire Cleveland in-
dustrialist who has long championed
a policy of coexistence with China
and the Soviet Union, pointedly
suggests that either CIA or some
of its secretive governmental col-
laborators is indulging, within the
United States, in propaganda activi-
ties designed to make any peaceful
solution impossible. In a letter to
Senator FuIbright, Eaton charges
that federal funds are being funneled
secretly into the promotion of
demonstrations designed to inflame
public opinion against visiting iron-
curtain diplomats. Eaton writes:
An interesting ' question is, who
supplies the funds to hire the pro-
fessionals who surround the embas-
sies and follow foreign -visitors with
insulting signs and shouted epithets?'
I find it hard to believe,' but I am
informed that substantial funds for
such undesirable activities come from
federal appropriations, under a dis-
guised name.
After the Soviet Deputy Premier,
Mr. Mikoyan, visited me in Cleve-
land, I made a point of investigating
the group of Hungarians who en-
deavoured to molest him in Cleve-
land, Detroit and Chicago. It turned
out that the identical people had
gone into all three cities by car and
elease 2003/05/27 : atlier CIA-RDP$6B00269R0'd0506~g0b67- hired and fi-
570- The NATION
 Approved F64-Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
nanced by someone with ample funds,
reputedly Uncle Saot. In Cleveland,
representatives of the State Depart-
ment gave every evidence of con-
niving with the Hungarian hecklers
by putting at their disposal the
routes and locations most advan-
tageous for their hostile demonstra-
tions against the Mikoyan party.
I have also looked carefully into
the background of the so-called Hun-
garian Freedom Fighters. Many of
them turn out to be former officers
of the Nazi Army that invaded Hun-
gary; they were, of course, obliged
to flee the country when Hitler was
defeated. (Italics added.)
This is a truly sensational charge.
Eaton's very name, of course, is
anathema to right-wingers, but Con-
gressional attempts to investigate
him have proved largely futile and
he remains a powerful and influential
man. Whether investigation would
establish the validity of his charge
remains uncertain; but in consider-
ing it, two 'facts perhaps should be
borne in mind-the long love af-
fair of CIA with the Gehlen agency,
which included former Nazi officers
and operated in Hungary, and the
Cuban freedom fighters' recollections
of the number of "East European"
CIA agents who, with the aid of in-
terpreters, directed their drills in
Guatemala. If these should ever turn
out to be true straws in the wind,
if Eaton's charge should ever be
substantiated, an entire new field of
secret CIA activity might be ex-
posed-one more pernicious than any
other in its underhanded influence
on American public opinion.
What Kind of Probe?
CIA is, of course; now being in-
vestigated. It is being investigated
now just as it has already been in-
vestigated four times in the past-
in private, in secret. Each investiga-
tion found flaws. Each reported CIA
was working to correct them. Each
succeeding probe found some of the
same flaws and reported that CIA
was working to correct them. And
now, in 1961, we have come to our
present pass.
In 1956, a Congressional Joint
Committee called futilely for the
appointment of a watchdog com-
mission to put a checkrein on CIA.
The committee took some round-
house swings at CIA's most precious
forte, its ironclad secrecy. "Once
secrecy becomes sacrosanct, it in-
vites abuse," the committee wrote.
"Secrecy now beclouds everything
about CIA. . ." The committee
quoted with approbation the com-
ment of Hanson Baldwin of The
New York Times that CIA "engages
in activities that, unless carefully
balanced and well executed, could
lead to political, psychological, and
even military defeats, and even to
changes in our form of government."
The first part of that prediction has
certainly come to pass. As for the
second, the committee itself wrote:
",Our form of government . . . is
based on a system of checks and
balances. If this system gets serious-
ly out of balance at any point, the
whole system is jeopardized and the
way is open for the growth of
tyranny."
The way is still open. For the
Congress of 1956 did nothing. And
we reaped the whirlwind in Laos
and in Cuba.
The new, Executive-style investi-
gation ordered by President Ken-
nedy can hardly be expected to meet
the full need, the full right, of the
American people to know. Gen.
Maxwell Taylor heads the President's
new investigating hoard; the Presi-
dent's brother, Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, sits upon it. So
does Allen Dulles, the man being
investigated. It may be noted that
? Each file holds a
full year's copies.
0 Jesse Jones Volume
Files for every publi-
cation.
? Covered in 'durable
leather like Kivar, title
embossed in 16 Kt.
gold.
SAVE YOUR
COPIES OF
THE
NATION
Attractive and
practical for your
home or office
8 for $7.00
6 for $18.00
ORDER NOW send
check or money order
Magazine File Co.
520 Fifth Avenue
New York 36, N.Y.
FREE UPON DESCRIPTIVE EST
This Week and Every Week
If you liked this week's issue of The Nation, you will like
it every week. Regular issue or special, The Nation is a
magnet for the independent, questioning mind. The formula
is no secret: The Nation is always heading for controversy
and more often than not champions the minority side. If
today The Nation concentrates on the CIA, tomorrow it
may be revealing the absurdity of an economic, political
or cultural cliche.
The best way to get The Nation is by subscription. You
save money week in and week out. Fill out the coupon.
-----------------------------------
THE NATION
333 Sixth Avenue, New York 14
^ One Year, $8 ^ Three Years, $20
^ Two Years, $14 ^ 6 Months, $4
ri Bill Me ^ Payment Enclosed
(Foreign and Canadian Postage $1 a year extra)
........>>>.
ADDRESS .................................................................>........ .>>. , >.
CITY.............................. ..............................>............................... ZONE .......... .... > STATE.
6-24-61
June 24, 1961 Approved For Release 2003/05/27: CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8 571
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R,%00500050067-8
it is rare indeed when the defendant
turns star prosecutor at his own
inquest.
The record of the past few years
seems to say clearly that the colossal
mesa CIA has created demands
nothing less than a full-scale Con-
gressional investigation. It is not
enough just to lop off CIA's opera-
tional arm and give its "black arts"
intriguers
?
some other secret
RESORTS
Beautiful 8 mile lake. Golf at
a magnificent Country Club.
Dancing. Entertainment. Su-
perb Cuisine. Fireproof Bldg.
Elevator. Special "single"'
weekends. Group facilities. In
New York City call at local rate.
FAirbanks $-7227
M:Ahopao 8-3449
agency; we need to examine in detail
just what the "black arts" have
brought us, we need to consider
whether they can ever be reconciled
with the principles of ~ democracy-
the principles we profess. It is not
enough just to give Congress finally,
at long last, a watchdog committee
(a move, incidentally, that is still
by no means certain); we need to
examine publicly, in detail, the
qualities of mind and the kind of
hidden interests that have placed
our prestige unreservedly behind
wealthy oligarchies and right-wing
militarists in a world in which the
growing clamor on every side is for
social and economic justice, social
and economic change. We need to
discover how and why, as Walter
Lippmann wrote, we are doing just
what Khrushchev expects us to do,
why we are doing 1 is propagandizing
for him. Only if , we make basic de-
terminations of this kind can we
hope for the future. And we cannot
make them if we do not first learn
the who and the how and the why
that have so often placed us on
the wrong and losing side-if we
do not clean out the forces that put
us there. This, only an aroused Con-
gress could hope to accomplish.
tarists. M. Soustelle, at a luncheon
in Washington last December 7, is
said to have talked long and earnest-
ly to CIA Deputy Director Richard
Bissell, Jr., on the proposition that de
Gaulle's program in Algeria could
lead only to communism. CIA is
said. to have been impressed; Gen-
eral Challe, who led the revolt, is
said to have had several meetings
with CIA agents; he is reported to
have been given the,impression that
he would have the support of the
United States.
All of this Mr. Dulles and the CIA
categorically deny. But Walter Lipp-
mann reported from Paris that it is,
known that CIA agents meddled in
France's internal affairs during the
French debate oil the nuclear-arias
program. And the highest French
officials, pleased by. President Ken-
nedy's prompt and whole-hearted
support of de Gaulle, have called,
the Algerian incident closed-but
they have not, pointedly they have
not, given a ftill and . clean bill of
health to CIA. It is a sequence that
leaves a foul taste in the mouth. As
The New Republic's. Washington cor-
respondent wrote, commenting on
the French charges and recalling the
background incidents of. U-2 and
Cuba: "Preposterous-? Certainly!
CO STk IA- L
0LAKE 'MAHOPAC, N.Y.
WINDY HILL ON ORANGE LAKE
A pleasantly informal vacation in friendly at-
mosphere Swimming, Boating, Fishing on Nat-
ural Lake. Badminton, Volley Ball, Ping-pong,
other sports. Records, books. Summer Theatre,
Golf nearby. good of excellent quality in gen-
erous quantity. $55.00 Weekly; $8.00 Daily;
Weekend: Fri. Supper tllru Sun. Dinner $16.
Tel. Newburgh: JO 2-1238
Jane C. Arenz, R.D. Box 160, Walden, N.Y.
M E R R I E W 0 0 D E
HIGHLAND LAKE, STODDARD, N. H.
Suggest that if you must have intelligent
companionship, great beauty of environ.
ment, good food and plentiful, and
things to do, M.7E,BRIEWOODE Alas them
all to give.
We pledge all our facilities which include
just about everything, to the success of
your most important holiday.
Opens July 1 S Non-sectarian
OLIVE "HATTIE" BARON. Director
Marlow-Hilltop 3349
VACATION ON THE FAItH.. Relax on 100
beautifyl acres .. Wholesome foot) In abun-
dance. . Lake on ?prernise.s.. Animals for
children. . Perfect for families . Meet 1o
other- nice people. Adults ,,$10, Children $2A
per week. Y. Schwartz, SPRING 1LT. HOUSE,
Jeffersonville, N. Y. 1'hone: Jeff. 2811.
PINECRESTIN THEBERKSHIREB
W. Cornwall, Conn.: On Housatonic River
A delightful vacation resort near Music Mt.,
Summer Theatres. Sandy beach, swimming, fish-
ing, boating; tennis, badminton, ping-pong.
Lovely lawns for relaxing. Delicious food. Cab-
ins with private showers and fireplaces.
Diana & Abe Berman BIO 2-3003
At Stake: the ' World's' Faith And yet . , and yet. . It is
Both the faith of foreign nations
in its and our own faith in ourselves
are at stake, for both have been
deeply compromised by the shady
activities and the secrecy surround-
ing the shadiness that have become
the twin hallmarks of CIA. When,
hard on the heels Of Cuba, the
French generals in Algeria tried to
overthrow Charles de Gaulle, we
were confronted by all-but-official
charges in the French press that CIA
once more had egged on the mili-
Enjoy a Vacation Plus at World Fellowship Center
Combine Recreation, Fellowship with, Friendly People,
and Discussion of World Problems at our
Forest-Mountain-Lake Estate - - near Conway, N. H.
Summer Theme: CROSSING NEW FRONTIERS: June 30-Sept. 4
Conferences on Youth in Action; The Need to Dissent; New Farces in
the- Integration Struggle; Labor's New Responsibility; Cuba, Latin
America and the U. S. A.: Africa in World Affairs; China and World
Peace; the Socialist Countries; World Peace Movements.
Meet People of Various Rases, Faiths, Nationalities aaid Political. I'hnosophies.
Dr. Willard Uphaus, Director
SW[3IJI[NO, THIUNG. FISHING, St11Pthit THEATRE, MOUNTAIN TRIPS.
Generous Family Style MIeals. Board, Room & Program $5.10 to i^r3.60 Daily. For
full information on speakers and dates of conferences, address:
WORLD FELLOWSHIP Conway. New Hampshire
572
not that we think for a minute that
the French charge is true, but that
now we are suspicious of everything."
So We are. L'.xpress, with pointed
intent, quotes Allen Dulles: "The
countries which are the most power-
ful to resist Communist subversion
are those where the military are in
power." We recall this hard kernel
of Dulles' philosophy acting itself
out in Egypt, in lean, in Guatemala,
in Laos, in Cuba. Why not in France?
Could it be possible in so large, a
power, one of our oldest Allies? Well
-why not? In the secret world of
CIA anything is possible-and no
one knows. We can only Wonder and
doubt. And doubt does not inspire
confidence abroad or fervor at home.
It's time to clean house.
BULK COPIES AVAILABLE
This special issue of The Nation
is available for orders in bulk. See
buck cover for reduced rates and
order blank. Supplies are limited, so
act now.
The NATION
 Approved Fo Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8
Advertising Rates
CLASSIFIED
74c a line (6 words)
Three-line minimum
CLASSIFIED DISPLAY
$7.42 per inch (minimum)
The NATION
333 Sixth Ave., New York 14, N. Y.
CHelsea 2-8400
BUCKS CO. Stone house, furnished. Beauti-
ful view - acreage - 3 bedrooms - bath
- kitchen - living-roomy fireplace. Ideal for
artist or writer.- Reasonable. Box 139, New
Hope, Pal.
MOVING? Professional moving at competi-
tive rates. Anytime, anywhere. Licensed, in-
sured, experienced. THE COVERED WAG-
ON, Algonquin 5-1788 (N.Y.C.).
WE MOVE YOU WITHOUT TEARS
Economical, insured moving and storage.
Vans, Wagons-NYC, resorts, long distance.
The Padded Wagon, Inc., Al 5-8343 (NYC).
569 Hudson Street, New York 14.
IMPORTED TYPEWRITER, deluxe features
including front tabulator key. Regular value
$149.95 - SPECIAL $67.50, plus federal tae.
'Standard Brand Dist.; 113 Fourth Ave. (nr.
z4,th St.), N.Y. GB- 3-78:19. 1 hour free
parking.
"L'I XUR.ESS- the leading liberal paper in
France today. Send 10c for your sample
copy. Howard Publications, 1475 Broadway,
New York 36.
"APRIQUE-ACTION,' the liberal voice of
emerging. Africa. - Edited in Tunis, in French.
Free copy on request. Howard Publications,
1475 Broadway, New York 36.
By FRANK W. LEWIS
ACROSS:
1 Not a very restrained person, con-
sidering one is rather pale, and put-
ting on weight. (6)
5 and 2 down Proper speech to sign,
though they're rather wordy. (12)
10 Drumheads should be things Kit
made. (9)
11 Is to win wrong, when under one's
influence? (2, 3)
12 -A small- animal with a soft heart
to examine in detail. (7)
13 The part of the mollusc- our genera-
tion found troublesome. (7)
14 The Village Blacksmith does what-
e'er-he can. (5),
16 A sort of eye can let you burn it,
perhaps. (9)
18 Dread arrest, understand.! (9)
20 Shelters the outside coverings, ac-
cording to what one hears. (5)
22 The direction of the carriage? (7)
24 A way to the heights? One should
have wings! (7)
26 In Hamlet, they say an old. man is
such a child! (5)
27 Send to the office again checks
which get big. (9)
28 A planner is sometimes far along
with this, and digs the difference!
29 In return, the revolutionary scold
one that might fly. (6)
DOWN:
2 See 5 across
3 Those who make lace out of rags?
4 Get a,toe-in job, and arrange things
rd Puzzle. No. 921
this way. (9) -
5 Man takes these occasions to make
laws. (5)
6 The root of psychic or youthful
problems? (7)
7 Its center is cut with a cross. (9)
8 Presently on board, but yet not in
place. (7)
9 Did Cleopatra have to rouse it at
last? We hope so! (6)
15 Making double-talk? (The? fabric
needs taking in.) (9)
1.7 Such words as 22 do, making pre-
cious sense. (9)
18 A trailer in Technicolor? (7)
19 What's happening around the prim-
itive force of the plain? (7)
20 Coins, as changed by one that evi-
dently rolls over and over. (7)
21 Go along with a canonized list. (6)
23 Skirts and matadors might be. (5)
25 When "Mr. William Shakespear"
was a boy he exercised his father's,
according to John Aubrey. (5)
SOLUTION TO PUZZLE; NO. 920
ACROSS: 1 and 5 Standing orders; 10
Catch; 11 Seahorses; 12 Earning; 13
Acolyte; 14 Marshy; 15 Husband; 18
Overbid; 21 Starch; 24 Silence; 26 Open
end; 27 Pamphlets; 28 Gayer; 29 Gasp-
ed; 30 Usurpers. DOWN: 1 Sachem; 2
Alternate; 3 Dahlias; 4 Nosegay; 6
Riotous; 7 Essay; 8 Suspends; -9 Cal-
ash; 16 Archetype; 17 Roast pig; 19
Banshee; 20 Deemed; 21 Spouses; 22
Avenger; 23 Adorns; 25 Lambs.
Atheists! Agnostics!
THE SECULARIST
Leading, dynamic monthly magazine for
you. Send $1 for 6 mos. trial (or $2 for
yr.) to: American Secularist Association,
Box 91-N, Newark 1, N. J.
THE PAPER TRAIN, a novel by George
Kauffman, $1. L-S Distr., 690 Harrison,
San Francisco 7, Calif.
Read "A NEW LOOK AT CUBA:
The Challenge to Kennedy"
by JESSE GORDON &
Brig. Gen. HUGH B. HESTER
(U.S.A., Ret.)
Send 10c for copy to:
Box 499 c/o The Nation
A STUDENT MOVEMENT?
Yes. Freedom Rides, Peace Marches,
Sit-ins, Pickets of H.U.A.C.
The NEW FREEDOM
Get your bi-weekly report from the in-
side of the student movement - yearly
subscription 13.50. Also, prospectus on
request for purchase of common stock.
The NEW FREEDOM
Box 66-1, Ithaca, New York
I enclose $....__..._........_...... for sub-
scriptions to THE NEW FREEDOM.
Name _ ._ _.. _., w.-...._ ...._.._~-._.. -
-_~a-..._ ...-.._..._.~_ _...~ _ _ _.
Address
City _. _ ......~..._._~._ Zone --- State
0 Send Prospectus.
June 24, 1961 Approved or Release J CIA-RU m
 Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B002694000500050067-8
"The CIA" by Fred J. Co
Low Prices for Bulk Orders
This special issue of The Nation carries a message for
every American citizen. But the message must be broad-
cast to be effective.
That is why we suggest, if you are a member of any club
or organization involved with civic affairs, that you un-
dertake the widest possible distribution of this issue.
To help you do this, we have greatly enlarged our print
order-and copies of "The CIA" are available at special
low prices in bulk orders.
The coupon below will enable you to take advantage of
t'h'e low bulk prices. It will also enable you to order in-
dividual copies, at the usual 25c rate, if your newsstand
doesn't carry The Nation or runs out of copies.
Use
This
Coupon
For Your
Order
^ THE NATION, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York 14. N. Y.
Please send me copies of the special issue, "The CIA," as indicated below. I en.
close payment in the sum of $_ ...
^
^ 1 copy for 25c ^ 50 copies for $7.50
^ 10 copies for $2.00 ^ 100 copies for $12.00
^
^
^ NAME ..........................,;
^ ADDRESS ............... .................. .... ..........................,,...................... ......... ..................... .......................................,...............>,,.......>
^
^ CITY ... .................................
^ ....,. ...................................... ZONE
....... .................. STATE ............................_....,..._..._....
Approved For Release 2003/05/27 : CIA-RDP86B00269R000500050067-8