On May 23 the navy received orders to conduct surveillance of shipping near Guatemalan ports. The next day Ike told a party of congressional leaders he was ordering the navy to stop “suspicious” foreign-flag vessels on the high seas. Thus began Hardrock Baker. Alfhem herself was intercepted on the return voyage and escorted to Key West for a thorough search. The Dutch government lodged an official protest after a Dutch ship was boarded on June 4 at San Juan, Puerto Rico. Later it was decided that no more ships would be boarded without specific State Department authorization. James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s press secretary, wrote in his diary on June 19, “I think the State Department made a bad mistake, particularly with the British, in attempting to search ships going to Guatemala. . . . As a matter of fact, we were at war with the British in 1812 over the same principle.”

  Project Success was already in its final phase. Howard Hunt’s propaganda featured cartoons, posters, pamphlets, and more than two hundred articles based on CIA materials placed in the Latin press by the United States Information Agency. The military plan had to be changed at the last moment when Salvadoran officials refused to allow the invasion to be mounted from their country. At the beginning of June, Tracy Barnes argued that the paramilitary plan as originally conceived could no longer be carried out. As late as June 16 a meeting at CIA headquarters considered cancellation or postponement of Project Success, with Wisner willing to entertain a hiatus for reevaluation if moving forward seemed to invite catastrophe.

  The final plan based the rebels in Honduras. Castillo-Armas made his invasion two days later, riding in an old station wagon accompanied by a few trucks. Only about 140 soldiers were with him, though several additional forces entered Guatemala at other points. The same day Arbenz held a mass rally at a stadium in Guatemala City, which CIA aircraft buzzed and leafleted. One rebel patrol tried to hook through El Salvador, but the soldiers were arrested by Salvadoran border guards and freed only with difficulty by CIA-inspired corruption. In all there were perhaps 400 rebel troops. Castillo-Armas advanced to a church six miles into Guatemala, then halted. He awaited the popular revolution that was supposed to support him. From there the main force would march overland and capture the railroad station at Zacapa, a Guatemalan military garrison, while several boatloads of men made for the Caribbean port of Puerto Barrios. Both places, plus Guatemala City, would be bombed by the CIA air force.

  But no popular uprising appeared. Castillo-Armas did not march even the few miles to Zacapa. Another of his units was defeated in a small skirmish, and the biggest action of the campaign, also an insignificant battle, proved no better than a standoff. The seaborne force sent to capture Puerto Barrios also failed. The CIA, myopically optimistic, reported to President Eisenhower on June 20 that Castillo-Armas had taken in as many soldiers as had joined him, for a total of more than six hundred armed men.

  All now depended on Whiting Willauer’s rebel air force. It had run a number of bombing and leafleting missions since the first day of the invasion. A raid that caused some damage at Puerto Barrios involved a hand grenade and a stick of dynamite. Another pilot missed his target and ran out of gas, crash landing across the Mexican border. The CIA operation could have been exposed right there, as it was an American national, William Beall, taken into custody. But the agency managed to get him released quietly, and Project Success survived the flap. Two more planes were hit by small-arms fire and could not be repaired. The CIA air force seemed no more effective than the “liberation army.”

  Allen Dulles got the bad news on June 20 from Al Haney. The rebel air force could not operate more than four planes at a time. Losses made the difficulty greater; the supply of high-explosive bombs was limited, so pilots resorted to dropping smoke bombs, leaflets, even empty Coca-Cola bottles, which made a noise much like the explosion of a bomb.

  Haney reported that Nicaragua’s Somoza had offered two of his own P-51 fighter-bombers to make up rebel losses, but only if the United States replaced his aircraft. This sounded simple until State’s assistant secretary for Latin America insisted on a presidential decision.

  On the afternoon of June 22, Eisenhower met Allen and Foster Dulles at the White House. Henry Holland entered the office carrying several legal tomes. But legality had ceased to be the issue.

  The president turned to Allen Dulles. “What do you think Castillo’s chances would be without the aircraft?”

  Dulles replied without hesitation. “About zero.”

  “Suppose we supply the aircraft,” Eisenhower pressed, “what would be the chances then?”

  “About twenty percent.”

  Mainly because of the important psychological impact of air support, Ike agreed to the request. The Somoza “rebel” planes were in action the next day, and air attacks became the CIA’s main activity.

  The bombing led to the worst scare of Project Success. The British were angered over American boarding and search of ships at sea. Then the CIA bombed and sank a British merchant vessel. The ship was the Springfjord, which had sailed from the Nicaraguan Pacific port of San Jose. Tacho Somoza feared the vessel carried gasoline, with which the Guatemalans might fuel their trucks and airplanes to attack Nicaragua and exact retribution for Somoza’s help to the CIA.

  Somoza turned to Rip Robertson, top CIA officer at the airfield, and demanded the ship be stopped. Robertson asked Lincoln for orders, but his cable arrived at two in the morning. Al Haney and Tracy Barnes refused. They told Robertson to use another method—frogmen or a commando raid.

  This infuriated Somoza, who thundered, “If you use my airfields, you take my orders!”

  Robertson, also disappointed by the orders to desist, ordered up one of the fighter-bombers. Fifteen minutes out of base, the plane found Springfjord and hit her with a five-hundred-pound bomb. Fortunately no one was hurt, and the ship sank slowly enough for officers and crew to abandon her. Springfjord, it was later learned, had carried only coffee and cotton.

  When news of the sinking reached Washington it destroyed the cordial atmosphere Ike sought for a summit conference he was hosting for British leaders. Frank Wisner left immediately for the British embassy to offer personal apologies. The agency investigated circumstances of the incident in October 1954 and confirmed the ship had been sunk on Robertson’s orders without authorization from either Lincoln or CIA headquarters, by one of the air arm’s American pilots. The British allowed themselves to be mollified, and the CIA later quietly reimbursed Lloyd’s of London, insurers of the Springfjord, the $1.5 million they had paid out on the ship. Colonel King of the agency continued meeting Assistant Secretary Holland on this matter as late as the spring of 1956.

  In the heat of action, however, Springfjord’s sinking had a significant psychological impact on the Guatemalans. The bombing broke the political situation wide open. Apparently the Guatemalan military began thinking the CIA would stop at nothing to oust Arbenz. The army began to consider a coup. Arbenz received an ultimatum and resigned before the day was out, taking refuge at the Mexican embassy and asking for political asylum. Project Success achieved its aim after all.

  Despite the success of this unintended strike, the Springfjord incident had a rather different effect for CIA. It convinced Eisenhower of the need for more rigorous control over covert action, leading to establishment of a senior review group similar to Truman’s 10/2 panel. The final price tag for Guatemala—though the CIA has only admitted to the original $3 million budget expense—came in considerably higher. That figure does not include the money paid out on the Springfjord incident, the cost of replacing Somoza’s aircraft, hardware taken from CIA stockpiles, or subsidies that followed the coup d’état. The actual number is probably at least double the projected cost.

  Al Haney’s era in covert operations came to an end; no further major assignments came his way. Rip Robertson, branded a “cowboy” after Springfjord, saw Allen Dulles, who fired him. In a 1966 interview with New York Times reporters, Richard Bissell conceded that the action “went beyond the established limits of policy.” Frank Wisner and Tracy Barnes celebrated. Barnes would be rewarded with stewardship of the station in West Germany, one of the CIA’s front-line jobs. Howard Hunt’s services were considered necessary for CIA’s political action efforts in Japan. Dave Phillips, who believed the PB/Success psywar effort had been the engine of victory, went on to greater things in the WH Division.

  In retrospect, and with more of the true record now open to view, it seems perplexing that the Central Intelligence Agency, and indeed secret warriors in many places, for decades held out Iran and Guatemala as models of successful covert action. The inner stories reveal that both Projects Ajax and Success skirted with failure. At some point in each case the CIA came close to canceling the operation. The projects may be said to have succeeded despite themselves, not marched forward according to meticulous plans. Gaps in CIA knowledge of local conditions, unrealistic expectations, fixation on a certain worldview, the personal weaknesses of CIA allies, the competing interests of groups working with the secret warriors, the physical properties of weapons and equipment, and the limitations of tradecraft all number among the reasons why success hovered at the edge of failure. The deep secrecy in which CIA held the stories of the covert actions served to disguise this characteristic and to hinder, even long afterward, careful evaluation of the strategy.

  At the time CIA thought it had done rather nicely with the Iranian and Guatemalan operations, so well, in fact, that within months the agency was deliberately leaking certain details of both to the writers Richard and Gladys Harkness for a series of favorable articles. Eisenhower’s memoirs employ only the thinnest of linguistic disguises in discussing these two crises, calling CIA agents in Teheran “representatives” of the United States government, and saying of Guatemala that the United States had to do something. Allen Dulles is even more forthright in his book The Craft of Intelligence:

  In Iran, a Mossadegh, and in Guatemala, an Arbenz had come to power through the usual processes of government and not by any Communist coup as in Czechoslovakia. Neither man at the time disclosed the intention of creating a Communist state. When this purpose became clear, support from outside was given to loyal anti-Communist elements in the respective countries, in the one case to the Shah’s supporters; in the other, to a group of Guatemalan patriots. In each case the danger was successfully met.

  But was the danger met, or did it ever exist? In the Cold War vision of a two-camp world, there was little room for indigenous nationalisms. Not only did the United States act readily against nations like Iran and Guatemala, those ventures were initiated regardless of the countries’ efforts to maintain friendly relations with the United States. The CIA operations made a mockery of the oft-reiterated American principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of states.

  The Central Intelligence Agency, unleashed in the name of democracy—democracy as defined by American foreign policy, which came to mean governments that assumed pro-American stances—actually encouraged the opposite. No elections occurred in Iran between the 1953 CIA operation and 1960; thereafter parliament existed at the pleasure of the shah. In Guatemala after 1954 the republic was abolished. A new constitution was adopted only in 1965, but that was soon suspended by military rulers. In fact the excesses of the ruling oligarchy became such that the United States itself, under the Carter administration, finally halted virtually all foreign aid to the country. Over the long haul the covert actions did not produce the results advertised.

  In both Iran and Guatemala the United States received credit from world public opinion for creating dictatorships, not democracies. In the short term, though, these covert operations seemed to be shining successes. So while the fruit might prove bitter in the long run, Eisenhower felt encouraged to try more of the same.

  7

  Adventures in Asia

  CHOOSING SIDES may have been a dilemma for people in Europe, but in the Far East that quandary was multiplied a thousandfold. In China cooperation between Nationalist and Communist parties broke down soon after the defeat of Japan; Jiang Jieshi and Mao Zedong merely resumed their interrupted competition for power. All over Asia the Cold War proved especially pernicious. Religious and nationalist movements recast China, India, and Southeast Asia as actors in a global ideological struggle; dominion hung in the balance.

  The United States participated in the struggle from the beginning. After abortive efforts to mediate between Chinese factions, President Truman aligned the United States with Jiang Jieshi against the Communists. Mao Zedong’s field armies nevertheless swept through mainland China. The Nationalist collapse climaxed in 1949 when the Chinese Communists overran Beijing and south China despite American military and economic aid to Jiang, and at precisely the time when U.S. covert action capabilities were coalescing within the CIA and the Pentagon.

  Washington soon considered exploiting the still tenuous Communist control of the mainland, using new Nationalist bases on islands off the coast. The Korean War injected tremendous momentum into the program; in turn this expansion eventually created a headache for the secret war managers. But, aside from their policy implications, the clandestine campaigns enjoyed only indifferent success. More important, the intelligence buildup that occurred greatly expanded CIA capability for, and interest in, covert actions of all sorts.

  Driven from the mainland, Jiang Jieshi’s* nationalist forces established themselves on the islands offshore, chiefly Taiwan. The Chinese Communists had no navy to speak of and no experience with amphibious war. Only small vessels, mostly junks, were even available to be commandeered. Mao’s armies made one great effort, in early 1950, to fight their way onto Hainan, the next-largest island to Taiwan. They succeeded after ten invasions and considerable casualties when, as had so often happened on the mainland, the morale of the Nationalist troops broke. Superior force was no guarantee against defeat; Jiang ordered the Nationalist survivors back to Taiwan. Although there were fears the Communists would follow, an invasion of Taiwan was a much more difficult proposition and was not attempted.

  Proposals for covert action predated Nationalist defeat in the civil war. Jiang had gone to Taiwan in early 1949, resigning the presidency in favor of his vice president, General Li Tsung-jen, who tried to negotiate with Mao. That spring Claire Chennault, a retired American officer who had commanded the Flying Tigers during the Sino-Japanese war and afterward organized the private airline called Civil Air Transport (CAT), which initially operated in China, went to Washington with a proposal for U.S. support to a Nationalist bastion in southern China plus covert aid to guerrilla forces loyal to Li Tsung-jen. Chennault’s airline had fallen on hard times, and he sought help for it as well.

  The State Department was not much interested in the Chennault plan, so the former general pursued his other agenda. Chennault went to Thomas Corcoran, his business partner in Civil Air Transport. Corcoran put Chennault in contact with CIA officers, culminating in a series of meetings during the summer of 1949. By August Chennault was talking to Col. Richard G. Stilwell, chief of the Far East Division of OPC. Wisner’s Wurlitzer thought an airline like Civil Air Transport could provide an important covert asset, and it had an interest in military aid as well. President Truman simultaneously directed the State Department to reexamine the feasibility of Chennault’s plan.

  Before these deliberations could be completed, Nationalist resistance on the mainland disintegrated, forcing a shift to operations mounted from outside China. Civil Air Transport acquired greater prominence. In early October the CIA received an analysis of the Chennault plan from George Kennan which took no position on the project but nevertheless allowed Wisner to contend that State had approved it. Civil Air Transport was enlisted in the secret war, flying its first CIA mission on October 10, 1949. Tommy Corcoran, on behalf of CAT, and Emmet D. Echols of CIA’s Office of Finances signed a formal agreement on the 1st of November.

  Meanwhile, on October 28 a detailed proposal for covert operations in China from Gen. John Magruder went to the secretary of defense. Magruder, citing his experience as chief of the Strategic Services Unit, advocated active operations. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson forwarded the proposal and an accompanying memorandum from Wisner to the president. Harry Truman expressed interest, but the collapse of resistance on the mainland temporarily halted the project.

  This became a defining moment for Civil Air Transport. Founded in 1946 by Chennault and Whiting Willauer, CAT had made its living flying troops, supplies, and dignitaries in the Chinese civil war. The airline’s performance in 1948 was impressive: 34 million ton-miles; almost a quarter-million passengers carried; about 90,000 tons of cargo consigned. By mid-1949, however, runaway inflation in China plus the Nationalist disintegration brought CAT face-to-face with disaster. The CIA put a half-million dollars in hard currency into CAT, $200,000 of it up front. The airline used the cash to relocate to Taiwan with corporate headquarters in Hong Kong, ending the chaos of existence on the mainland. (Chennault’s friendship with Jiang Jieshi meant the end of CAT domestic air service once the Communists took over.) But CIA money did not solve the underlying market problems for Civil Air Transport, which would be forced to go back to the agency again and again until the spooks virtually owned the airline.

  Access to a fleet of transport aircraft became a great boon for the CIA. In Europe air missions had to be run ad hoc or through the U.S. and British air forces. Missions required delicate interagency discussion, sometimes a little horse trading too. In Asia with CAT, the Office of Policy Coordination could dispense with politics. Occasionally there came a question whether CAT crews would volunteer for flights, but since Willauer’s pilots flaunted their skills and can-do attitude, this rarely became a problem.