Fifties (58 page)

During those years he changed the very prototype of the modern airman. The pilots of World War Two had been glory boys of a kind, dashing and heroic, eager to fight, drink, and love, quick to break regulations, often on the verge of a court-martial, it seemed, until at the last minute they gained reprieves by shooting down more Japanese fighters or taking on more dangerous bombing runs over Germany. The old-timers regarded LeMay’s new breed with disdain—as straight-arrows who went to bed early every night, who worked with slide rules and briefcases, and whose ability to do math was better than their talent for picking up an enemy fighter coming out of the sun. There was an element of truth in this, for the new planes were increasingly complicated pieces of machinery, demanding ever more sophisticated mathematical skills. The new pilots were flying ever higher, and their relationship to their targets was increasingly computerized. In addition to bombing runs, they went on humdrum practice missions that included fourteen or fifteen hours of flying; these were exhausting and they assumed a pilot who had slept well the night before and who was in prime physical condition.

But if there were criticisms of LeMay and his new breed, they
were never spoken to his face. He was too formidable a figure for that. In World War Two, he had sharply improved the accuracy of bombing raids on Germany by having his men spend more time studying photographic re-creations of the cities before their missions. He became famous for his low-altitude nighttime incendiary raids on Tokyo and other Japanese cities, using stripped-down planes without guns or gunners. The low-altitude bombing, he was sure, would increase accuracy, increase the range of the lighter planes, and reduce stress on the engines. Warned by aides that he would lose 70 percent of his planes at so low a level, LeMay nevertheless went ahead; he suspected that the rate of loss would be no higher than 5 percent.

The first mission was staggeringly successful. If it was not a date of which many Americans made note, then in Japan it was a night that a generation remembered. It was as if a great hand had torched an entire city. Tokyo, constructed as it was of thousands of little wooden shacks, had burst into flame. Fires jumped the narrow streets and grew larger and larger. Some 83,000 people died and another 40,000 were injured. Later it was reported that half the casualties were from suffocation as the terrible fire sucked the oxygen out of the air. The flak greeting LeMay’s planes had been light, fighter resistance negligible, and some seventeen square miles of Tokyo had been destroyed. It was one of the most complete acts of devastation ever visited upon a city; as LeMay’s biographer Thomas Coffey wrote, “at the cost of only 14 B-29s, LeMay had found out how to destroy Japan’s capacity to make war.” Other equally devastating raids on other Japanese industrial centers followed.

No one did what he did better, and no one was more quickly out of place in situations demanding complex political analysis. Not everyone in the Air Force liked him; to many of his fellow officers he was a crude man with no social graces, incapable of conversation, a man who insisted on smoking cigars right through a meal. He saw the world in the most simplistic terms imaginable. There were two sides in a struggle and the people on his side tried to kill the people on the other side. He made most politicians extremely nervous. His ironic nickname, which even his fellow Air Force officers used, was The Diplomat. On his first trip to Omaha to look at the prospective headquarters for his command, a local reporter, thinking of what this might mean for Omaha’s economy, asked him, “General, don’t you think this will be a great thing for Omaha?” LeMay answered, “It doesn’t mean a damned thing for Omaha and it doesn’t mean a damned thing to me.”

He was not a man for an age of complicated, sometimes delicate, relations between the government and the military. In 1952 he voted for the first time, choosing Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson, but Ike quickly disappointed him. He was not nearly as conservative as LeMay had hoped, not nearly as worried about the red menace.

As he succeeded in making American air superiority so complete, LeMay seemed to long for the chance to use it, to take out the Soviet military machinery with one terrible strike. He believed, right up until the mid-fifties, that SAC “could have destroyed all of Russia (I mean by that Russia’s capability to wage war) without losing a man to their defenses.” He did not advocate this policy to his superiors, but he still regretted their inability to formulate it for themselves. “Some of us,” he would add, “thought it might be better to do so then than to wait until later.”

He feared a first strike by the Russians, more than anything else. It was his ultimate nightmare. He worked to make sure that all SAC plans called for an adequate number of bombers to be in the air if there was a strike, so that there would be immediate retaliation. To him the Third World War was not an unthinkable idea; SAC was on perpetual red alert, but even if he had not commanded SAC, Curtis LeMay would have been on guard against potential enemies, and particularly Communist ones. If Joseph McCarthy ever had a fellow traveler in the American armed services, it was Curtis LeMay. No one serving at so high a level in the U.S. government or military in those days was probably more virulently anti-Communist. He did not, he liked to say, worry about the threat from Russia itself. That could be leveled with one strike. What worried him was the threat of domestic subversion, and he was convinced that if the secret Communist cells ever made a move against any American institution, it would be SAC. He thought the base security protecting his planes was virtually worthless. “The stupidest people we had in the Air Force were put in the Military Police,” he said. So he upgraded his Air Police. They would wear berets, white belts, and revolvers. That was good for morale, he believed. Soon all SAC men and officers, at the very least, wore their side arms at all times. The Air Police always carried loaded carbines. When ground crews worked on planes, they carried their handguns with them. Once, LeMay toured a SAC base and found a maintenance man who had taken a lunch break and put aside his weapon while he ate. LeMay immediately summoned all the ground crews on the base. “This afternoon,” he told them, “I found a man guarding a hangar with a ham sandwich. There will be no
more of that.” He decided his people should have antisabotage training. This soon featured security games—attempts by trained Air Force people to test security. Carefully disguised teams would arrive at a SAC base and try to slip in and kidnap high officers, or at the very least to plant fake bombs. One team—whose passes were issued in the names, among others, of Mickey Mouse and Joseph Stalin—penetrated base security rather easily and handed an officer a coffee container that turned out to be a simulated bomb; at the same time, other members of the team were stringing rolls of toilet paper from SAC bombers, each one bearing the message that it was a bomb and would go off in fifteen minutes. LeMay was furious. The wing commander was fired, and the entire unit was ordered to take special security training for five days, starting at 5
A.M.

There were even simulated attempts to “capture” LeMay himself, one that he foiled after noticing that a telephone repairman was wearing fatigue pants. LeMay quickly pulled a revolver on him. On another occasion Mrs. LeMay was working in her backyard when the enlisted man assigned to guard the house demanded to see her identification. She said that she did not carry it every time she went out the back door. In that case, said the guard, clearly a good deal more afraid of her husband than of her, he would have to take her to the guardhouse. A very heated exchange took place, at which point Helen LeMay finally went into the house and got her identification.

TWENTY-FIVE

T
HE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD WAS
turning out to be a more difficult and complicated place than Eisenhower’s policymakers had ever imagined. In the 1952 campaign, the Republicans had criticized the Democrats for losing so much of the world to the Communists. But now that the Republicans were in office, they found they had inherited a world filled with trouble spots that might easily go Communist on their watch. In Indochina, the French were fighting a colonial war against an indigenous Communist-nationalist force, and despite optimism from French military headquarters, the war was obviously not going well. The French public was tiring of it, and French politicians were beginning to ask America for increasing amounts of aid. As the colonial order collapsed in other parts of the world, a process much accelerated by World War Two, which had significantly weakened the traditional
colonial powers, Marxism found fertile new ground. The Republicans found themselves facing a real dilemma; they did not want to “lose” any countries to Communism, but there were obvious limits to American military and political power abroad. In addition, as the Korean War proved, there were certain domestic restraints on American military involvement in the third world. The Eisenhower administration quickly found a solution in the Central Intelligence Agency, which had developed a covert-operations capability in addition to its mandated role of gathering intelligence. This willingness to use the CIA for paramilitary and other clandestine operations was a marked contrast from the policies of the Truman years, and the first break came in June 1953, just five months after Eisenhower took office.

The final meeting on whether to topple Mohammed Mossadegh, the legally constituted but left-leaning prime minister of Iran, was held in the office of the secretary of state on June 22, 1953. Everyone there knew it was a done deal: The men in charge had already decided to go ahead, and the meeting was really a last-minute review. But Secretary of State Foster Dulles signaled his importance by remaining busily engaged on the phone while the group arrived in his office. In fact, he remained busily engaged on
two
phones. That showed clearly he was the most important person in the room.

Even as he hung up one phone, he switched to the other, while the other senior officials bided their time. They included Foster’s brother, Allen, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; the undersecretary of state; and the secretary of defense. Kermit Roosevelt, the young CIA operative who was explaining the plans for the coup and who would be in charge of it in Teheran, may have been, like almost everyone else in Washington in those days, unimpressed with Foster Dulles’s manners, but at the same time he was secretly pleased that Foster was the dominating figure on this particular team. For Foster Dulles was not only a hard-liner in public, he was an enthusiastic supporter on this touchy issue—the overthrow of a seemingly legitimate government. So was his brother Allen, Roosevelt’s boss. That meant that no State Department underling was likely to oppose Roosevelt that day or point out that the United States was moving into new and uncharted territory to fight international Communism—for the Dulles brothers were an imposing team, able to bypass on an issue like this the slow and tedious processes of government. “A word from one [brother] to the other substituted for weeks of inter- and intra-agency debate,” Howard Hunt, the former CIA man later caught in the Watergate case, once said.

A third strong supporter of the coup was Walter Bedell (Beetle) Smith, far less well known to the general public than the Dulles brothers. His influence was belied by his title: undersecretary of state. He had served Dwight Eisenhower as chief of staff during World War Two, and in the view of many of their contemporaries, it was Beetle Smith’s unbending, steely nature that had enabled Ike to withstand the constant pressures on him from all sides. “The general manager of the war,” Ike had called him. When, at one point, Field Marshall Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the British General Staff, had tried to have Ike removed, it was Beetle Smith who had taken on Brooke, telling him, “Goddamnit, let’s have it out here and now.” Perhaps only Al Gruenther, another of Ike’s wartime associates, was closer to the President. No man admired Ike more than Beetle Smith: “I love that man ... the sun rises and sets on him for me,” he once said. It was Smith’s job to be Ike’s son of a bitch, to represent his rough and meaner side. Kim Philby, the British double agent, described Smith as a man with a “cold fishy eye and a precision tool brain.” Smith alone among Ike’s top aides had not been to West Point, but instead had come from the Indiana National Guard. He took over the CIA at Truman’s request in 1950, understanding instinctively the high expectations for the fledgling intelligence organization. “America’s people expect you to be on a communing level with God and Joe Stalin,” he told his staff at an early meeting. “They expect you to say that a war will start next Tuesday at 5:32
P.M.
” Always irascible, he became downright belligerent in the years after World War Two, when he developed terrible ulcers. An operation was performed to remove half of his stomach, but the pain never went away. In no small part because he served as ambassador to Moscow from 1947 to 1950, the worst period of the Cold War, he became a true hard-liner. It was said that he considered Nelson Rockefeller something of a radical leftist, because Rockefeller had once said something in favor of labor unions.

Kermit Roosevelt, the young CIA operative in charge of the coup in Iran, did not personally like Beetle Smith; as far as he was concerned, he was a small man with a sour face and a personality to match. They were neighbors, and a year earlier Roosevelt’s beagles had dug up Smith’s lawn. Smith, then Roosevelt’s boss at the CIA, had fixed his subordinate with a hard look and said, “Roosevelt, if you can’t keep your goddamn dogs out of my garden, I’ll shoot them.” Roosevelt thought that Smith might as well have added he would shoot Roosevelt as well.

At a meeting such as this, Smith was Eisenhower’s proxy. Foster Dulles, both of his phone calls finally completed, held up the report
Kermit Roosevelt had prepared and signaled the meeting had begun by saying, “So this is how we get rid of that madman Mossadegh!” The plan was based on a simple premise: If the Iranian people had to choose between the Shah and Mossadegh, they would prefer their historical leader over a mere politician. Therefore, the plan called for the Shah to fire Mossadegh and replace him with a man acceptable to the West. At a critical moment, the CIA intended to fill the streets with a pro-Shah mob in order to block any retaliatory demonstrations by Mossadegh and his allies in the Tudeh, or Communist party. Roosevelt had outlined the increasing Soviet influence in the area and the growing potential for a Soviet coup, like the one that had taken place in Czechoslovakia in 1948, within the country. The stakes were high: the immense reserves of Iranian oil and the critical strategic location of the country. Roosevelt thought the risk of failure negligible. He doubted the depth and strength of Mossadegh’s power or that of the Tudeh. In addition, the coup would cost relatively little—perhaps $200,000—most of it for renting the mob. As the Dulles brothers had intended, there was virtually no dissent. Loy Henderson, the American ambassador to Iran (“one of a small band of distinguished foreign service officers of that era who understood the realities of the world we live in,” in Roosevelt’s phrase), did not particularly like operations of this kind but said that we had no choice. Henderson had decided Mossadegh was unbalanced and perhaps a maniac. “As I listened to him,” Henderson wrote, “I could not but be discouraged that a person so lacking in stability and clearly dominated by emotions and prejudices should represent the only bulwark between Iran and Communism.” The key representative from the Defense Department, Charlie Wilson (“inarticulate as usual but enthusiastic,” in Roosevelt’s disdainful words), was on board. Beetle Smith was downright eager: “We should proceed. Of course!” he said. Allen Dulles was almost paternalistic about the performance of his young agent, and Foster was particularly pleased by the tone of the meeting. “That’s that then; let’s get going!” he had said.