Chapter 18
Defense, Containment, and Anti-Communism
A DECADE HAD PASSED SINCE JACKSON, DULLES, AND Correa had
submitted their report to President Truman. Allen Dulles, a lawyer
trained in the ways and traditions of the law, may well have been
familiar with the famous concept of Dicey on "Law and Opinion".
"The opinion," according to Dicey, "which changes the law is in
one sense the opinion of the time when the law is actually
altered; in another sense it has often been in England the
opinion prevalent some twenty or thirty years before that time;
it has been as often as not in reality the opinion not of today
but of yesterday."
With a simple twist that quotation can be made to apply to the
eventual outcome of the Dulles report. What he wanted and what he
planned to do as a result of his work and his study in 1948 --
fully expecting that Thomas E. Dewey would be elected President
and that he would then become the DCI -- had all come about anyhow
by 1959. The opinion and hopes of yesterday had all but become the
law of the day. If this was not entirely true as early as 1959, it
was under way in the glacier-like movement of covert events, as we
shall see in the next chapter, and by the winter of 1961 the new
Kennedy Administration thought that the methods being used and
exploited by Allen Dulles and the ST were, in fact and in
practice, the law.
Dulles was the DCI, and his agency had grown to great strength
and great power and influence in the Government. As a result of
the intelligence oversight at the start of the Korean War, we have
seen how his immediate predecessor had been able to turn that
gross mistake into an advantage and to establish the concept of
the Current Intelligence Estimate, and following that success, to
develop the practice of the daily report to the President.
Exploited as it was during the following seven years, this device
became a most effective tool in the hands of Allen Dulles. By
playing on what he called "security", he had been able to limit
the National Security Council's working control of the CIA to a
small, friendly, and hand-picked Special Group, which instead of
"directing" the CIA from "time to time", had easily fallen into
the practice of convening its meetings simply to put the stamp of
approval on proposals made by the CIA for almost any Secret
Intelligence-generated Peace-time Clandestine Operation. By 1959
there were almost no restraints. This permitted the CIA to avoid
entirely the scrutiny of the OCB and to work outside the
continuing monitorship of that board. In effect, by 1959 the
Agency was able to run operations itself as it saw fit.
During this same decade Allen Dulles had been able to
accomplish his goal to join within one organization the two
power-packed elements of Secret Intelligence and Secret
Operations. Dulles knew that when he could combine Secret
Intelligence and Secret Operations, he could bring them together
under conditions of his own choosing to create a force of
unequaled power. By the time he had created an agency, which by
bypassing all of the barriers of the law and of the NSC, and with
the men, the money, and materials sufficient to carry out any
operation anywhere in the world, he knew that he had succeeded in
turning the tables completely. He was, for all intents and
purposes, in control of the foreign policy and clandestine
military operational power of the United States for combat in the
Cold War. In this sense the vast military establishment, including
much of its industrial supporting complex, had become his
orchestra. By 1960, after Eisenhower had seen his hopes and dreams
of peace crushed by the untimely disaster of the U-2 flight, he
warned of this power and of its abuse.
During this formative decade Dulles had positioned CIA
personnel and Agency-oriented disciples inconspicuously through
out the Government and in many instances had positioned the CIA
throughout the business world and the academic community as well.
It will be recalled that many of the new Kennedy team came from
some of these founts of power, such as The Center for
International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. In fact, there were few places where the CIA had not
taken advantage of covert positions, at home and abroad, for the
ostensible purpose of gathering intelligence, and for the
undercover purpose of making it possible for the CIA to mount any
operation it chose to direct.
As in the case of the wayward C-118, the support of the
rebellion in Indonesia, the paramilitary activities in Laos, and
other such activities in Tibet, by the time the Agency had reached
this position of power it had become somewhat insensitive to the
usual and ordinary restraints that normally apply to covert
operations. The Agency lost a plane, compromised a crew and the
U-2 operations, and exposed its hand in Indonesia. But instead of
halting such risky and fruitless operations, it ordered more
planes and looked for more "subversive insurgents to counter". It
was this attitude and this type of activity that led to many
controversial events that have plagued this Government during the
second decade of the CIA.
To understand why the CIA has become so controversial, one
must understand its motivations and one must understand what
happens when things are done clandestinely -- and by this we mean
clandestinely within the Government of the United States. Recall
that we pointed out how World War II ended with Truman's
abolishing the OSS and demobilizing the military as fast as
possible. Recall what is more important, that the great war
against Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo had been won with the help of
the Russians. No matter how anyone may feel about the ideological
distinction between the Soviet Government and the United States,
the incontrovertible fact is that the Russian people fought the
might of Germany on their doorstep, and those people, with our
material help as a factor, utterly destroyed the great German war
machine. Those of us who have seen the destruction and havoc
caused in Russia by that war can vouch for the fact that no
conflict in history has ever been so massive and so total.
Then, with victory it was only realistic to have some feeling
still for the people of Russia who had given so much to the common
cause during that war. And from this feeling there arose in our
Government the official view, stated on many occasions by the
Secretary of State, among others, that we must establish peace in
this world with the Russians and with all people, and that we must
not do anything that would divide the world into armed camps and
divisive forces. While the official spokesmen of this Government
were pledging their faith in the United Nations and in the "one
world" of 1946, only one short week passed until the aging Lion of
Britain stood up on that platform in Missouri with President
Truman beside him and uttered the great cry of the weak, "Beware!"
Here in the greatest country on earth, with the greatest victory
ever achieved in a major war, with armed forces equipped with the
most advanced technology and production know-how, and with all of
this increased by an unbelievable order of magnitude because of
the possession of the atomic bomb and the proven means to deliver
and detonate it, we were being told to beware of that other ally
whose ideology we did not like, but certainly whose strength and
even whose intentions could scarcely have been dangerous in that
era.
But with that cry others were given heart. General Donovan,
the Dulles brothers, and many others, including Clark Clifford,
preached the doctrine of containment. Even in those days they saw
the Soviet danger as a military threat against the United States.
How could they support that openly? Even George F. Kennan, then in
Moscow, warned of the Soviet danger; but the great distinction
was that he saw Russia as a political threat; and the threat
that he saw was, more correctly, that the Marxists expected that
the United States would crumble in spite of itself. Their threat
was not so much what Communism would do to us as what they
expected we would do to ourselves. In other words, the Marxists
felt that all they had to do was maintain the political pressure,
and we would crumble under the weight of our own weaknesses.
Then, behind the curtain of secrecy, the Donovan, Dulles, and
Clifford element began to win the day. No longer did the President
stand behind his Secretary of State on that declaration that "we
shall do nothing to divide the world into blocs." But now he
listened to the counsels of the frightened and the weak as they
rigged first the Iron Curtain, then the Truman Doctrine, with its
shield over NATO, Greece and Turkey, on to the Northern Tier, and
then to the Bamboo Curtain. By the end of 1947 the entire military
establishment of this great country was technically, semantically,
and philosophically reduced to an uncertain and cowering defensive
posture. From this position it became dependent upon the eyes and
ears and mentality of the intelligence community to tell it what
was going on in the rest of the world and where the next threat
was coming from. From that day to this, this country has been
engaged in the most massive war of attrition ever fought.
By now, the terrifying truth of the matter is that in this
last great total war we have been wiped out in every battle. There
is no sense in trying to rate the intangibles such as, "We have
made friends in Greece" or "We did pretty well in the Congo." The
facts are that even though we say that we are engaged in a war
with Communism, which at some point inevitably must mean Russia,
we have paid all the losses in tens of thousands of men, hundreds
of billions of dollars, and prestige beyond measure. On the other
side, the Russians have done exactly what Kennan said they would
do -- preside over our own demise and demoralization. In a war of
attrition, the winner is he who holds his own position while his
adversary wastes away. Whether the loser wastes away as a result
of strategic moves on the part of the winner, or as a result of
his own miscues is of no concern to the historian. All the
historian will note is that like the dinosaur, the loser will
become extinct in spite of the fact that he seems at the time to
rule the world.
The shocking fact is the growth of the power of secret and
clandestine actions. The legislators and the Administration that
passed into law the National Security Act of 1947, and with it
created the CIA, were the same men who most staunchly protested
against and denied to the Agency the right to become involved in
clandestine operations. Yet it was patently inevitable that the
creation of such an agency would lead to its exploitation for just
such purposes.
As the National Security Act visualized, the NSC might "from
time to time direct" the Agency to carry out a clandestine
operation and no more. Congress expected that there would be
clandestine operations; but they saw them only as those
operations which the highest echelon of the Government would plan
and direct. On the other hand, as General Donovan and Allen Dulles
had proposed, the very success of Secret Intelligence would from
time to time create its own requirements for subsequent
clandestine operations for no more reason than that the
intelligence input had detected something somewhere. The
legislators knew that clandestine operations would grow out of the
findings of Secret Intelligence whether or not there was any
national plan or policy to carry out in the first place. This is
why the Donovan-Dulles-Clifford school of thought requires the
existence, real or imagined, of a constant enemy -- Communism.
With the constant enemy, every bit of Secret Intelligence that
reveals the existence of Communism is its own reason for the
development of an operation. Then the counterpunch becomes the
action of a machine, not of minds.
Recall the area covered with sprung and set mousetraps we have
mentioned before. The traps are there, covering every inch of the
floor and every avenue of entree. All the master of the house has
to do is wait until a trap has snapped. Then when one trap snaps
it most likely activates others, which in turn activate others
until all the traps go off. While all of this is going on, the
master of the house comes to one preordained conclusion -- there
are mice in the house and at least one of those mice has just
entered his domain. His "machine" is ready to do the rest.
Throughout this period these were two opposing views. The 1st
saw requirements for clandestine operations arising only after and
as a result of planning and policy -- in other words, from a
position of confidence and strength; the second saw such
requirements as an inevitable result of and response to the
product of Secret Intelligence -- or from a position of weakness
uncertainty, and re-action. In either case, the resort to the use
of clandestine operations would be an extremely serious business.
By 1959 there had taken place a rather sinister refocusing of
such operations themselves. As we have said earlier, the impetus
behind the creation of the CIA came from concern over the gross
failures of intelligence during World War II and worry over the
possibility that the Soviet Union might acquire the atomic bomb.
When the CIA first started, it concentrated its limited efforts in
those primary areas of interest in the heartland and contiguous
periphery of the Soviet Union. The CIA in those days worked right
along with the military as the military establishment developed
its "new generation" war plans. As a result, all early targeting
of the CIA was directed upon the Soviet Union as a military
adversary and on the Iron Curtain countries as part of the primary
target area. In other words, the CIA and the military were deeply
committed to the "containment" philosophy and dedicated to the
encirclement of the Soviet Union and the Communist world.
This action on a continuing basis taxes the counterpuncher
severely. He must be always on the alert, always geared for
maximum action, and unhesitatingly diligent lest the enemy make a
move. The war of attrition was already beginning to take its toll,
even in those early years. It would be impossible to maintain a
posture of massive retaliation day after day, forever, and then to
maintain an alert air defense force, as well as a total
intelligence effort supporting both. The whole "defensive-posture
system" needed to find some way to maintain its apparent
vigilance, but in such a manner that would permit it to relax now
and then.
By the end of the decade of the fifties the CIA had found a
way to do this and at the same time to make it appear that it was
as much in the center of the fray as ever. It began to find
Communism in other areas. Rather than devoting all of its time and
energies to the Soviet Union and its neighbors, the CIA began to
see "problems" in the territories of our friends. By that time the
CIA had spread itself all over Africa, Europe (that part that is
in the Free World sector), Latin America, and Asia (again the part
that is Free World). The CIA spent less and less time
concentrating on Russia and its zone of influence and more and
more time looking for the influence of Russia and the influence of
Communism in our own back yard. As the host nations, among them
most of our friends, became increasingly aware of this intrusion,
often an unwitting one, they became more and more concerned over
the foreign policy and activity of the United States because it
was clothed almost everywhere in the black cloak of espionage and
clandestine operations. This had become a serious problem. In time
this intrusion looked as ominous and sinister as the possibility
of Communist intrusion itself.
The change in the very character and traditional nature of
this country bothered our friends. Historically, the United States
has always professed to be an open society. This government is of
the people, and since the power was in the hands of the people,
there has always been a majority who believe there is no need for
limiting that power. Even as Franklin D. Roosevelt had assumed
more and more power, first to fight a terrible depression and then
to fight the greatest war in history, few people believed that
this usurpation of power by the President was anything more than
evidence of the fact that this power was after all being used for
the good of the public. Certainly, the American Dream in the minds
of most foreigners, at least until 1960, seemed to mean that we
lived in an open society and that the power in the hands of the
Government was limited to that which could best be used for the
good of all citizens.
But with the advent of the Truman Doctrine we heard the new
voice of those who had taken the defensive. "The language of
military power is the only language," it said in part, and "the
main deterrent to Soviet attack on the United States, or to attack
on areas of the world . . . vital to our security, will be the
military power of this country." This was something Americans had
always believed, whether they had in mind Russians, the Red Coats
of the British, or the Blitzkrieg forces of Hitler. But then this
traditional policy changed: "In addition to maintaining our own
strength the United States should support and assist all
democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by
the USSR." And then, "as long as the Soviet Government adheres to
its present policy the United States should maintain military
forces powerful enough to restrain the Soviet Union and to confine
Soviet influence to its present area."
In 1947, as a part of the Truman Doctrine, this was the way
the idea of containment was planted as a seed in the minds of the
American people. This was followed by such things as the Marshall
Plan and then the worldwide Military Assistance Programs of
various kinds. What had begun as a plan to contain Russia and
Communism with strong military force became not a barrier against
Russia itself, but a creeping encroachment upon the sovereignty
and territory of our own friends. Whether they wanted them or not,
we have kept military forces on the soil of our friends for more
than thirty years, and there is no end in sight. But even more
important, we have developed in more than forty countries strong
clandestine and paramilitary forces far more dangerous to the
internal welfare of those countries than encroachment of
Communism, which is supposed to be the reason for the existence of
such action. And these covert forces exist. The "Communism" they
are there to guard against is for the most part no more than an
interpretation of intent.
Whether one believes in the inviolability of national
sovereignty as the supreme power among nations -- unlimited,
inalienable, indivisible, absolute, and the very essence of a
state -- or whether one believes that sovereignty is an antiquated
idea, its great importance in the community of nations cannot be
disregarded. If the whole concept of sovereignty were to be
abandoned, we would of necessity have to fill the void. We would
then face the fact that we are dealing with raw power, and what is
important in the nature of power is the end it seeks to serve and
the way it serves that end. Whether we accept the concept of
absolute sovereignty or whether we see a complex world riddled
throughout with power centers and other binding, uncontrollable
forms of human relationships, we must realize that these rights,
in no matter what form, imply certain duties, such as the duty of
non-intervention in the affairs of other nations and the duty to
respect the rules and customs of international law. Forcible
intervention, which was in less civilized times rather common in
the relations of states, is now no longer either condoned or
justified and is almost always met with violent condemnation,
except where crimes have been committed or where international
interests of great importance are endangered.
As this nation turned to a broad though quiet and generally
covert campaign of worldwide anti-Communism, it pressed its
military forces, economic forces, and its intelligence arm upon
this group of more than forty countries. At the same time, it
turned from the real Communist states such as Poland, Hungary, and
others on the periphery, not to mention the heartlands of Russia
and China. Thus the struggle took place in remote areas of the
rim-land along the traces of the Iron Curtain. The struggle was
hidden from the view of most Americans and from those countries
where there was no activity at that time; but not from the
countries that were active, such as the Philippines, Thailand,
Pakistan, or Iran -- and certainly these actions were not hidden
from the awareness of the Soviet Union. Although we may have
cloaked an activity on the border of India in deepest secrecy, who
in India and who in Russia would believe that such activity was
being supported and directed by anyone else than the covert
peacetime operational forces of the United States?
If the Dalai Lama is spirited out of Tibet in the face of an
overwhelming Chinese army of conquerors, are the Chinese going to
think he found his support in heaven? If the disorganized rebels
on the scattered islands of vast Indonesia are suddenly armed with
great quantities of modern and effective weapons, including
transport aircraft to airdrop such weapons and the bombers to
support their attacks, are the Indonesians and the Soviets going
to be fooled for even one day by "secrecy" that is supposed to
keep them from knowing where this all came from?
The entire position and policy of the United States Government
turned to the defensive. It abandoned its position of real
leadership in favor of creating a vast intelligence organization
and the mightiest peacetime armed force of all time to react to
and respond to the activity, real and imagined, of the men in the
Kremlin. And we became totally dependent upon the inputs of
intelligence from any and all sources, generally quite random, to
activate this great force in what, by the time the Kennedy
Administration came upon the scene, had come to be called
"counterinsurgency".
By this time the entire might of the U.S. military had become
a reservoir and magazine operating in support of the operational
machinations of the ST and its paramount force, the CIA. Even
though at first impact this may appear to be a totally unrealistic
picture in terms of the disproportionate ratio of strength of the
two organizations, it comes into focus when we consider the
analysis by Colonel DuPicq. That is, the only forces that are in
combat are those actually on the perimeter -- even on the
three-dimensional perimeter as was Gary Powers in his U-2 and
these forces not only bear the brunt of the action, but they make
the victory or the defeat.
Now a small CIA operation in Laos, for example, involving only
a few hundred CIA personnel, real and contract, and a few hundred
more or a few thousand U.S. military in support, may seem too
small an effort to support the statement that the entire might of
the U.S. military existed in support of the ST. But if the ST
activity becomes a runaway action, such as it did in Indochina, it
is inevitable that the few hundred, and then a few thousand, all
too easily became five hundred thousand.
Thus, in those crucial ten years, the clandestine activities
of the CIA were redirected from those originally aimed at the
Soviet Union and its neighboring states to the many nations of our
friends, in which we saw the "rampant", dangerous forces of
"subversive insurgency". And today they have been even further
directed, along with other powerful arms of secret power, to seek
the sources of subversive insurgency within this country itself.
All during this refocusing of direction, the ST has increased its
utilization of secrecy in order to keep the host nation from
knowing what was gong on. Throughout this complex series of
operations the Agency went out of its way to keep this information
from the Congress and from the people of the United States. There
is no doubt that the people of Taiwan, of the Philippines, of
France, and of many other countries know more about what the CIA
has been doing during the past twenty years than we do here in the
United States.
Even as Congress debates whether or not it should be given
more intelligence information by the CIA it can be seen that those
august men are again being misled by the turn of events. Should
Congress rule that the CIA must brief it on current intelligence
matters, it will find itself more and more enslaved by the system,
just as the President has been by the current intelligence
briefings which are his frequent diet. Not only will the CIA then
take over the daily indoctrination of key members of Congress, but
it will also place them under the "magic" of its security wraps.
Every day it briefs the Congress, in whole or in part, it will
warn that what they are hearing is Super Red-Hot, Top Secret and
that now that they have heard it, they must not mention it to
anyone. Then, to provide them with a reasonable alibi, since most
of those men have an occupational proclivity for free and easy
speech, the CIA will provide them with suitable cover stories. Day
after day they will hear about happenings around the world, as the
ST wants them to hear about them, and day after day they will have
less and less time to hear about real world events from any other
source. Thus their own ideas and knowledge of the outside world
will decrease from day to day. Then to finish what this process
does not accomplish, consider what the day-by-day pabulum of cover
story after cover story can do to otherwise intelligent and wholly
rational men.
The record is full of the names of men appointed to high
office who have come under the influence of the daily dosage of
current intelligence. Look what it has done to them. At whose
doorstep did men like Robert McNamara, John McCone, Earle Wheeler,
Maxwell Taylor, and countless others learn about Vietnam. Their
briefings came directly, or at the most once removed, from CIA
sources, whether they were "in house" CIA men like Tracy Barnes
and Desmond Fitzgerald, or "across the river" CIA men like Bill
Bundy, Ed Lansdale, and Bill Rosson.
The course of these events did not just happen as a random or
natural development. It was guided, sometimes quite deliberately,
by the early work of Clark Clifford, or later by such relatively
chance events as those that took place during the latter part of
the fifties. It may be worthwhile to trace a course of events that
played quite a role in this period just before the election of
John F. Kennedy to the office of President.
In 1956, just before the Arab-Israeli War, the British, with
Selwyn Lloyd in the Foreign Office, and the French, with Guy
Mollet, had made covert plans to help the Israelis against Nasser
for their own interests. Naturally, General Dayan wanted to defeat
and roll back the Egyptians, and the British and French were more
than willing to help re-establish some form of control over the
Suez and to relieve Arab pressures on Algeria. These three
interested partners planned in secret to strike at Egypt, defeat
the Egyptian army, and depose Nasser. A French undercover unit of
navy commandos disguised as Arabs was in Cairo for the express
purpose of killing Nasser. All of this hinged upon careful timing
and secrecy. Neither Britain nor France informed John Foster
Dulles, the American Secretary of State, of their plans. As events
progressed, Dulles played on this lack of formal coordination
heavily, assuming the role of an unwitting and appalled outsider.
However, Allen Dulles was providing Foster with all the
information he needed in the form of regular and most revealing
high-altitude U-2 pictures and other ferret-type intelligence.
These revealed the arrival and off-loading of the French and
British shipping in Haifa and the subsequent removal of these
ships to pick up allied forces in Cyprus for the next phase of the
operation.
As is frequently the case in such pressure situations, the
partners got concerned about one another's sincerity and
reliability, and they all knew that the CIA has long eyes and
ears. Or perhaps Dayan had been tipped off that Dulles knew what
was going on. For whatever reasons, Dayan jumped off against the
Egyptians with crushing air attacks about forty-eight hours ahead
of the joint plans. This locked the British and French into the
action and called their hands. Dayan swept across the desert.
Since the Egyptian air force had been utterly destroyed on the
ground, he received little opposition from the unprotected
Egyptian ground forces. The French navy commando elements
operating under the skillful direction of the youngest admiral in
France, Admiral Ponchardier, moved in swiftly to do away with
Nasser. French and British forces steamed across the Mediterranean
at top speed to join the action. It was certain that Nasser would
be knocked out in a short time.
At this point several strange things happened. John Foster
Dulles, seeing all this before him and knowing, despite his
technical protestations, exactly what was taking place, demanded
that the British and French stop where they were and ordered Dayan
to a halt. Over the other horizon, Krushchev thundered that if the
attack did not stop he would hurl missiles at all hostile targets
in Europe. With pressure from Dulles, from Krushchev, and with the
vociferous opposition of the Labor Party in England to contend
with also, Selwyn Lloyd and Guy Mollet submitted. They called
their troops to a halt. The magnificent plan, which might have
done much to change the course of history during the past fifteen
years, was shattered. This Suez affair has perhaps been one of the
most unfortunate episodes of the past twenty-five years. It
prevented the British from re-establishing an enlightened control
over the Canal, and it created a situation that made further
French action in North Africa untenable. And it has led to fifteen
years of unrest on the Arab-Israeli border, not to mention what
the weight of its failure had upon events in the Far East. One
other thing that came out of this odd situation had a tremendous
impact upon the United States.
The United States Army at that time had been going downhill
since its glorious days in World War II and its slight though
unsatisfactory resurgence in Korea. Then, in the pre-Sputnik era
the Army had assembled a team around Werner von Braun in an
attempt to regain some of its lost glory in space. Just at this
time, Maxwell Taylor, the Army Chief of Staff, heard Krushchev's
threat to hurl rockets across Europe, loud and clear. He and his
staff sat down without delay and computed that this meant that the
Russians must have in operational weapons delivery system that
could deliver a warhead effectively about 1,750 miles. This was
derived from the computation of the average distance from Russian
launching sites to all European capitals. Using this as their
battle cry, they set up a great clamor for an Intermediate-Range
Ballistic Missile with about l,800 miles range. The IRBM battle
was under way to win supremacy for the Army over the Air Force and
the Navy in the new missile and space era.
In the clamor of this battle the Suez crisis was nearly
forgotten while the U.S. Army and the Air Force fought it out in
the halls of Congress and before the eyes of the unwary public.
The Army came up suddenly with an IRBM called the Jupiter and the
Air Force with its own Thor. Actually there was very little
difference between the two. In fact, they both utilized the same
rocket motor and many other common components. However, the battle
was on not only for the Jupiter or the Thor; but to determine
which service would have the primary responsibility for IRBM
warfare. Behind the scenes those who were in the know were aware
that the Army and the Air Force were puppets for much more serious
contenders.
All of the services were joined in a struggle that really
involved the most powerful segments of the vast
military-industrial combine. The war was not so much about which
service would be supreme in the missile business; but it was
about whether the great American automobile industry would get the
majority of missile contracts or whether the powerful aviation
industry would get these contracts. The Navy joined in the fray
later and quietly, on the coattails of the steel industry and the
conventional munitions makers, with its Polaris system. (The prime
contract was through Lockheed for the missile structure; but the
whole system was dependent upon submarines and submarine base
support and with a solid propellant system that would utilize vast
quantities of explosives, which would mean huge contracts for the
munitions industries.) Forces were joined, and Maxwell Taylor was
at the forefront, leading his Army contenders and fronting for the
automobile industry. At that time the Secretary of Defense was the
former president of General Motors, Charles Wilson. The ensuing
decision from which there could be no escape was not for him to
avoid or to make. How could a pre-eminent auto maker rule against
his industry? On the other hand, how could he rule against
aviation and its powerful industry? With every practice missile
shot, the tensions mounted, and Maxwell Taylor was demanding a
decision. He saw this as essential to the automobile industry,
which had always been the friend of the Army; but he saw it more
as a chance to spur his old commanding general, now his Commander
in Chief, into making a decision in favor of the Army. This was
something Eisenhower had not done for a long time.
Finally Eisenhower finessed the decision by accepting the
resignation of Secretary of Defense Wilson and appointing a man
from the soap industry, Neil McElroy of Proctor and Gamble, to
make this decision. After more study and after working out a more
or less acceptable compromise on the business front, McElroy ruled
against Maxwell Taylor and his Jupiter crowd. This, along with
other decisions that had made the Army the least of the three
armed forces, weighed heavily on General Taylor. By 1959 he
announced that he would resign from the Army before the expected
termination of his assignment as Chief of Staff. On the first of
July 1959 General Lyman L. Lemnitzer succeeded Maxwell Taylor as
Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.
This was a most important time. We have discussed how the
Agency had grown in size and in capacity so that it had become
involved in a really major campaign in Indonesia and in the U-2
global operation. While the CIA grew the Army declined in strength
as John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower shaped the world for a grand
move toward lasting peace based upon the recognition of the power
of nuclear weapons and upon the realization that because they were
so powerful no reasonable nation would employ them. Even this was
not enough. President Eisenhower was embarked upon a crusade for
peace. He had mobilized his Administration with but one objective:
to leave as a lasting monument enduring peace. However, there
were many small clouds on the horizon.
Castro had come to power in Cuba, and he posed a threat to
Latin America. Eisenhower went to Acapulco to meet with the
President of Mexico and to win assurance that Mexico understood
the Castro menace. De Gaulle had become President of France and
had embarked upon a new era, with the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle
was occupied with Algeria, which was then a losing cause as a
result of the failure to defeat Nasser, and he had little time to
work on matters other than French problems. There was continuing
trouble in Laos; and each time it flared up the country would
authorize more CIA activity and little else.
Early in 1959 the Dalai Lama had been forced to leave Tibet as
the Chinese Communists swept across that barren country. This
fantastic escape and its major significance have been buried in
the lore of the CIA as one of those successes that are not talked
about. The Dalai Lama would never have been saved without the CIA.
In the spring of 1959, John Foster Dulles resigned, and
shortly thereafter he died of cancer. His successor was Christian
Herter, who became Eisenhower's greatest ally in the quest for a
permanent peace. At the same time, the Chinese Nationalists and
the Chinese Communists worked each other over with aircraft and
artillery in a contest for the offshore islands of Matsu and
Quemoy. But even this sporadic hostility forecast no real problems
for the peace offensive.
President Eisenhower sent his Vice President, Richard Nixon,
to Russia to meet with Krushchev and to make arrangements for the
impending summit meeting. It was at this time that Nixon and
Krushchev engaged in the now famous "Kitchen Debate". Then
Eisenhower himself went to London and Paris, and by late September
he and Krushchev reported that they had "reached an understanding
designed to relieve world tensions." Not long after that
Eisenhower further reduced the role of the Army by ordering the
transfer of all remaining Army ballistic missile programs to NASA.
During November, the United States and the USSR announced "a joint
nuclear research program", and a few days later, another joint
announcement, this time by the United States, United Kingdom, and
the USSR confirmed an agreement "on details of a control
organization to be set up, with the signing of the nuclear
test-ban treaty".
Then, in December President Eisenhower left on an eleven
nation, three-week trip to Europe, Asia, and Africa. For a man of
his age, who had suffered through a series of near-fatal heart
attacks, this was a major undertaking designed to carry him
further toward the pinnacle of his lifelong goal of lasting peace.
Everywhere he went he was widely acclaimed. He drew the biggest
crowd ever assembled in New Delhi, India. Looking back at such
events in the light of present times and conditions makes one
realize how far the situation has deteriorated since that time. In
those halcyon days, whenever the President of the United States
visited a foreign capital tremendous crowds of friendly people
gathered to do him honor. Now, fourteen years later, this is not
the case. The Vietnam war has done much to destroy the American
Dream.
When Eisenhower returned, the Government announced in a most
unusual and significant move a planned series of summit talks to
be convened in Paris in late April and early May of 1960. Summit
talks have seldom if ever been announced so far in advance, at
least not in public and with so much prospect for real success. On
Christmas Day of 1959, Krushchev accepted the invitation, and on
New Year's Eve the date for the greatest summit meeting of all was
set for May 16, 1960.
Since the collapse of the Indonesian campaign and the serious
compromise brought about by the loss of the CIA C-118 aircraft,
Allen Dulles had kept the Agency at a low profile. He had lost one
of his closest lieutenants with the departure of Frank Wisner in
the aftermath of the Indonesian effort. Although neither the
Indonesian incident nor the C-118 loss had broken through security
bounds enough to expose the CIA, as the Bay of Pigs episode was to
do a few years later, he knew and President Eisenhower knew that
the Agency had survived two close calls by the slimmest of
margins. However, 1959 and 1960 were not quiet years. The CIA and
Allen Dulles had a way of surmounting disaster and coming up
ahead.
As 1960 began, two great pressure groups collided. President
Eisenhower was steering his Administration to the climax of its
final term in office. Everything done during the early months of
1960 was dedicated to the task of establishing a foundation for an
era of peace and prosperity. The ultimate summit meeting was to be
the prelude to his tour, his visit to Moscow and to other capitals
of the world on his crusade for peace.
Although all mankind hoped for peace and few would oppose the
noble objectives of the aging President, there were still those of
the 'fear Communism' school who believed that the Kremlin could
never be trusted, in spite of its public willingness to join with
President Eisenhower and other leaders. Elements of this
underground faction not only raised the banner of anti-Communism,
but lived by it and traded upon its power. They played upon the
baser motivation of fear that is in all elements of human society.
For them it is easier to move men by that method than to attempt
it by more noble means. This under ground faction gained strength
from three major areas. The Maxwell Taylor school of Army
dissidents, along with their powerful industry collaborators,
openly opposed the Eisenhower doctrine of military and foreign
policy supported by "massive retaliation", and they distrusted the
peace offensive.
Another group -- ostensibly Army, Air Force, high-level Office
of the Secretary of Defense and Executive Office Building (White
House) personnel -- was working quietly on a vast education and
reorientation program of civic action, nation-building, and such
other ideas, which were in reality a cover for the extension of
covert activities of the ST into the countries served by the
Mutual Security Program and such other assistance projects. The
regular military assistance program countries were the primary
targets. The military cover personnel and their civilian disciples
worked on this project with the zeal and energy of dedicated
missionaries in support of a new and vital religion. (This is the
subject of the following chapter.)
The third group was made up of the hard-core CIA and ST elite
activists who were increasingly prepared and able to wage
clandestine counterinsurgency anywhere in the world with forces of
any size, at any time, and in response to intelligence inputs of
all kinds and characteristics. For example, the inputs did not
have to be anti-Communist when it did not suit the team. They
could see danger to this country in almost any situation. The
sudden dislike of the Latin dictator Trujillo certainly had
nothing to do with anti-Communism, but he went the way of all
"enemies" on charges of a special nature, just as Ngo Dinh Diem
did in 1963.
Over the years this group had begun by defining the Soviet
Union and World Communism as the enemy. Then it had pressed the
idea of global containment of the world of Communism. Having built
the wall from Norway on the North Sea to Turkey on the Black Sea,
and from Iran on the northeast slopes of the Gordian Knot to India
and Pakistan on the high Himalayas, and then on along the tenuous
northern borders of Burma, Laos, and the 17th parallel in Vietnam,
it began the cultivation and indoctrination of the idea that the
real danger lay in the spread of Communism into the peripheral
countries by means of subversive insurgency and support of wars of
national liberation. To complete this fear-of-Communism syndrome,
this movement contained a strong element that saw Communism and
Communist subversion seeping into and permeating almost every area
of the United States.
One of the greatest non-elective, non-ruling power forces of
all time is this anti-Communist fanatic group, which rips through
to the very heart and soul of the nation, playing upon fear and
ignorance for its own selfish and in many cases ignorant, fear
crazed interests. More harm has been done from l947 through 1972
to the United States and the world by this rabid and ruthless
element than the Kremlin could have hoped to have accomplished
itself by any other means short of nuclear war.
This combination of power elites did win its tremendous
underground struggle against the peacemakers led by President
Eisenhower when the U-2 reconnaissance spy-plane flown by Francis
Gary Powers crash-landed in the heart of the Soviet Union only two
weeks before the Paris summit conference. Powers' flight was a
most unusual event. It was not part of the regularly scheduled
series of routine U-2 operations. It was launched and directed by
a small cell of inner elite for reasons which may never be
possible for anyone to determine. If by any chance the thought had
ever occurred to the four men who launched it that the failure of
this relatively unimportant flight would completely wreck and
vitiate all of the hopes and plans of the Eisenhower Crusade for
Peace, they could not have chosen a more effective method or time
to have done it. The very fact that what was done could have been
done so easily according to a sinister plan, not an accident or
Soviet act, serves only to fuel the thought that it might have
been done on purpose. Such a simple thing as failure to supply the
plane with sufficient hydrogen for the flight could have resulted,
just as it did, in the certain flame-out of the engine and the
subsequent failure of the mission -- or success of the mission,
depending upon the secret intent of those who dispatched it.
This trend of thought is intriguing, because scarcely had the
U-2 crashed into the daisy fields of central Russia than all three
power groups mentioned above leaped into the void created by the
demise of the Eisenhower initiative, to power a ground-swell upon
which the Nixon campaign foundered and the Kennedy team rode to
victory. The interesting part of all of this, even the ominous
part, was that the ground-swell had started even before the
collapse of the peace crusade and the summit conference. It would
lead an observer, at least one who was very close to the inside
activity, almost to believe that there is a great force somewhere
that does not want to see a peace crusade succeed; or, to put it
in active terms, that wants to promote professional anti-Communism
and all that the term has come to mean during the past inglorious
decade in Vietnam.