Fifties (60 page)

It was a triumphant moment for Roosevelt. On August 23, the Shah received him. “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army—and to you!” By that, Roosevelt thought, he did not mean Roosevelt personally but the intervention of both America and the British. With that the Shah gave him a golden cigarette case, “as a souvenir of our recent adventure.” A cable, apparently from Roosevelt, was sent back to Beetle Smith and passed on to Eisenhower. It was, given the intervention by Western powers, not without its irony: “The Shah is a new man. For the first time he believes in himself because he feels that he is King by his people’s choice and not by arbitrary decision of a foreign power.” Everyone connected with the operation was delighted: It had been done quickly, cleanly, and on the cheap. (Nine years later, Allen Dulles made a rare appearance on a CBS television show and was asked about the Iranian coup and whether it was true that we had spent millions of dollars toppling Mossadegh. “Well,” he answered, “I can say that the statement that we spent many dollars doing that is utterly false.”)

Kim Roosevelt flew to London, where he met Churchill. “Young man, if I had been but a few years younger, I would have loved nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture!” the aging prime minister told him. On September 23, 1953, Dwight Eisenhower, in a private ceremony, pinned the National Security Medal on Roosevelt. Two weeks later Ike noted in his diary: “Our agent there, a member of the C.I.A., worked intelligently, courageously, and tirelessly! I listened to his detailed report and it seemed more like a dime novel than an historical fact.”

In the meantime the British were back in business: Under the new charter the Anglo-Iranian (later known as British Petroleum) retained 40 percent of the Iranian oil and an American syndicate composed of Jersey Standard, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and Standard of California got the rights to 40 percent. Mohammed Mossadegh was tried by a military court on a series of charges: that he had not been loyal to the Shah, that he had tolerated the rise of the Tudeh, and that he had weakened the Shah’s relationship with the military. He was sentenced to three years in prison, and served two and a half of them.

In the years that followed, the Shah became increasingly grandiose in his view of Iran’s geopolitical importance and its military might; in that he was encouraged by Washington, which generally offered him the latest in American military hardware. But he was perceived by many in his own country as a mere pawn of the West, and his government finally collapsed in 1979. Though he had spent billions to create an army and air force loyal to himself, barely a shot would be fired in his defense.

The easy success of the coup in Iran was a powerful inducement to the Eisenhower administration to run more covert operations. If the Cold War was at a stalemate in Europe, then third world countries, with their vulnerable political institutions and comparatively strong military organizations, became irresistible targets for American policymakers, thereby offering an expanded role for the CIA.

TWENTY-SIX

K
IM ROOSEVELT SENSED THE
problem created by his success the moment he returned home in triumph. He was asked to brief the original group, plus Eisenhower (who had been shielded from the planning meetings, so if the coup was botched he could deny his involvement in the whole thing). Roosevelt’s report was well received by everyone in the room; in fact if anything, he thought it was
too
well received. Foster Dulles was leaning back in his chair, “his eyes ... gleaming; ... he was not only enjoying what he was hearing, but my instincts told me that he was planning ahead as well. What was in his mind I could not guess. Would it be a future employment of the same counterrevolutionary—or revolutionary—approach?”

In fact, Foster Dulles’s enthusiasm made Roosevelt so uneasy that he ended the briefing on a cautionary note: The endeavor had
gone so smoothly, he pointed out, because local conditions were favorable—the Shah’s historical legitimacy had proved far more compelling than Mossadegh’s popularity, which was shaky at best. But Roosevelt sensed that Dulles was not terribly interested in
that
part of his report.

In fact, even as Roosevelt was briefing the top national security people about Iran, planning was going ahead on the next coup—one that they hoped would topple the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. In fact, soon after Roosevelt’s return, he was offered the job of running the new covert operation, which confirmed his earlier suspicions about Foster Dulles’s eagerness to proceed in this sphere. The success of the coup in Iran, Roosevelt sensed, had provided an irresistible inducement for the Eisenhower administration: It had been quick, painless, and inexpensive. A potential adversary had been taken out with almost ridiculous ease. American newspapers had all carried the cover story, although the press elsewhere and the Iranian people talked openly about the CIA role.

Administration officials had few moral qualms either about their role or about deceiving the American press and people. They saw themselves in an apocalyptic struggle with Communism in which normal rules of fair play did not apply. The Soviet Union was run by a dictator, and its newspapers were controlled by the government; there was no free speech or public debate as it existed in the West. To allow such democratic scrutiny of clandestine operations in America could put the country at a considerable disadvantage. The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington—the transition from an isolationist America to America the international superpower; from Jeffersonian democracy to imperial colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did. As America’s international reach and sense of obligation increased, so decreased the instinct to adhere to traditional democratic procedures among the inner circle of Washington policymakers. Our new role in the world had put us in conflict not only with the Communists but with our own traditions. What was evolving was a closed state within an open state.

The Guatemala plan, Roosevelt found, was already well advanced. He checked around a bit on his own and decided that the conditions for success in Guatemala were not so favorable as in Iran. He turned down the offer and eventually resigned from the
CIA—just before the Bay of Pigs disaster, which, he liked to say, was compelling proof that his earlier warnings had been justified.

What was happening at this moment, as the coup against Arbenz gradually took shape, was that American foreign policy was changing. It was doing so very quietly, with very little debate taking place—in fact almost no public debate, for that was seen as something that aided the enemy. The President himself, and many of the men around him, like those who had served Truman earlier, believed they were operating in a period that was, in any true sense, a continuation of the wartime period, when America had struggled against totalitarian governments in both Germany and Japan; now, they believed, the same struggle continued against Soviet expansionism. Because the enemy was cruel and totalitarian, we were justified in responding in kind. Our survival demanded it. There were no restraints on the other side; therefore there should be no restraints on us.

The men who were the driving forces of this new philosophy, the Dulles brothers, Beetle Smith, and their various deputies, as well as the President himself, were from a generation profoundly affected by the vulnerability of an isolationist America to attack by foreign powers—as Pearl Harbor had proved. They worried endlessly that the very nature of a democracy, the need for the consent of the governed, made this nation vulnerable to a totalitarian adversary. Therefore, in order to combat the enemy, the leaders of the democracies would have to sacrifice some of their nation’s freedoms and emulate their adversary. The national security apparatus in Washington was, in effect, created so America could compete with the Communist world and do so without the unwanted clumsy scrutiny of the Congress and the press.

Given the nature of the Cold War and domestic political anxieties, the national security apparatus gradually grew richer and more powerful, operating under a separate set of laws (on occasion, it would become clear, under no laws at all). In any crisis, if there was an element of doubt about legality, it was best to press ahead because that was what the other side would do. The laws for the secret regime were being set by our sworn adversaries, who, we were sure, followed no laws at all.

The key men of this world, the real insiders from the CIA and the other semicovert parts of the government, soon developed their own culture and customs: They might be more or less invisible in terms of the ongoing public debate about foreign policy, but that simply made them all the more powerful. They were the real players
in a real world as opposed to the world that newspapers wrote about and Congress debated. They might be pleasant and affable and did not lightly boast of their power, but it was always there—to make or break kings and prime ministers and strongman generals if need be. At one State Department meeting on Nasser of Egypt, Allen Dulles reportedly told a colleague, “If that colonel of yours pushes us too far, we’ll break him in half.” A man who could talk like that had real power. When, during the planning for the Guatemalan coup, one State Department official questioned the wisdom of a CIA-sponsored coup to Beetle Smith, the latter brought him up quickly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Forget those stupid ideas and let’s get on with our work.”

Nor, in those earlier years, did the Congress or the press push the secret government very hard to know what was going on; they accepted the governing rationale that there were things one should know and things best kept secret. “I’ll tell the truth to Dick [Russell]. I always do,” Dulles once said before an appearance before Russell’s Senate Armed Services Committee. “That is, if Dick wants to know!” So the temptation to do things covertly grew; it was easier, less messy. In this netherworld of power and secrecy it was particularly comforting to the more established figures of Washington to have a man like Allen Dulles as head of the CIA. His job so readily lent itself to the abuse of power, but he was a comforting figure in the Washington of the fifties, a kind of shadow secretary of state, he once joked, “for unfriendly countries.” He was as affable as his brother, Foster, was not. Even more importantly, he lacked Foster’s dogmatism and righteousness and rigid certitudes. If anything, he seemed more a figure from academe than one from the world of espionage. He was tall, attractive, craggy. He smoked a pipe, wore tweeds, and played tennis, the game of choice in Washington’s clubby circles. No one in Washington was better connected socially. A friend once said to him, “Allen, can’t I ever mention a name that you haven’t played tennis with?” His book on his experiences in the CIA was typically titled
The
Craft
of Intelligence
(written in collaboration with E. Howard Hunt, a key operator in the Arbenz coup; later, a key organizer in the clandestine Bay of Pigs assault; and ending up as one of the key operatives in the clandestine Watergate burglary). Dulles was gregarious and he loved good food, good wine, and attractive women. He was a regular on the A-list Georgetown dinner circuit, a Washington hostess’s delight. Indeed he was a bit of a flirt. (Someone once asked Rebecca West, the writer, if she had been Allen Dulles’s mistress, and she had answered, “Alas no, but I
wish I had been.”) “He refueled himself on parties after an exhausting day at the office,” one CIA aide said of him. That very visibility helped his image and seemed to diminish the idea that he could be a sinister figure from the clandestine world; a man that accessible, that open and gregarious, could hardly be a part of a world of invisible men with false identities who worked in the darkness. Rather, he seemed a thoughtful, fairminded, humane public servant, who seemed to offer reassurance that whatever things his men were doing, they were the kind of things that everyone at the party would approve of. He was not only the head of the closed society, he was its ambassador to the open one.

The two brothers were different emotionally, their sister, Eleanor, thought: Foster, righteous and unbending, as if always on a mission for God; Allen, a charmer of men and women alike. (His affairs were so notorious that whenever he had one, his wife, Clover, simply went to Cartier’s and bought herself an expensive gift. It was her compensation, she liked to say.) Sometimes Eleanor Dulles felt that Allen remained religious only for the “delicious sense of sin” when he broke a Commandment or two. Allen was more shrewd, some believed, than intelligent. By contrast with Beetle Smith, Kim Philby thought, there was a certain sluggishness to Dulles, when he had to discuss broader intellectual subjects—except, of course, when he was talking about covert operations, a subject which excited him, so that he might talk long into the night about it. Allen Dulles, Philby thought, was guilty of intellectual carelessness. He tended to answer certain questions by saying, “‘I can make an educated guess,’ which Philby thought, usually meant, ‘I don’t know but ...’”

His happiest years had been those during World War Two, when he was posted with the OSS in Geneva, a city filled with intrigue—of Americans and Germans watching each other, of Germans watching Germans. After the war he had gone back into private legal practice but was brought back to the Agency by Beetle Smith. Smith promised Dulles that he would succeed him at the Agency, but in 1953, when Smith, somewhat bored, was about to switch and go over to State as number two to Foster Dulles, he apparently had doubts as to whether Allen Dulles should succeed him. Smith apparently thought Dulles too caught up in the love of covert operations for the job—the real substance of which was long hours spent working on research and analysis.

By the early fifties, Allen Dulles was so popular and respected that there was a broad general perception in Washington that the CIA was something of a liberal institution. That view existed, in part, because
there were a significant number of bright people working there who had been to elite colleges and had liberal friends, and because Allen Dulles, unlike Foster, had protected his people from Joe McCarthy. But how deep that liberalism really went is another question.