Unfamiliar with the chain of command, the CIA officer, Wilbur C. Eveland, thought

  That plans to undertake a coup in Syria were centered in the Department of State struck me as highly unusual. I’d expected to see papers referring to NSC policy decisions and instructions that the OCB coordinate carrying them out. Instead, it seemed, the decision had been made by the Secretary of State, and the Omega planners were in charge of following through.

  Kermit Roosevelt completed the scheme with George Young in London in April. Foster Dulles considered the final Omega paper on May 23. Shortly thereafter Eveland, an experienced Middle East hand, got orders to scout possibilities on the ground. He had two months. In July Roosevelt flew to Jordan on an assignment related to the project.

  American secret warriors had been operating in the Middle East since before the creation of the CIA. In Syria specifically, Stephen Meade, a military attaché and soon-to-be CIA detailee, helped Syrian officers plan an early military coup. Miles Copeland, among the original CIA political action specialists, assisted. But the officers they backed held power for barely a few months, after which the secret warriors forged an alliance with a new regime. That group, in turn, was overthrown by a left-wing military coup in 1954. Copeland, meanwhile, had been diverted to a private consulting company, though he returned to head the DO political action staff. In Egypt, Nasser’s increasing power, steadfast Arab nationalism, and progressively radical reforms soured Washington. When the Egyptian leader went on to advocate Third World neutralism, declare a pan-Arab United Arab Republic, and make arms and aid deals with the Communist bloc, he incurred the wrath of John Foster Dulles. Kim Roosevelt tried and failed to induce Nasser to change course. As Syrian leaders showed signs of moving toward the Egyptian orbit, especially interest in joining the United Arab Republic, their nation went back on the CIA hit list.

  Before the end of 1954 the agency was in touch with the officer who assassinated Syria’s leader the following year. Although there is no evidence of Washington’s complicity in this regime change, the Syrian public linked the United States to these events and moved closer to Nasser. Thus arose Plan Alpha, an Anglo-American design. By late 1955, Foster Dulles had set his mind on new leadership in Damascus but wanted it to appear to have come from within. That, of course, meant covert action. President Eisenhower and Dulles took up the matter with British leaders early in 1956, leading to the general Middle East plan Omega and its Syrian component, Project Wakeful.

  All this happened before Suez, a crisis that would be exceedingly uncomfortable for Eisenhower. In July 1956 Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The CIA’s Cairo station under James Eichelberger had no advance warning. The Egyptian move brought outrage in Britain. France saw Nasser as allied to the revolutionaries it was fighting in Algeria, and joined with the British in a military scheme to invade Egypt and retake the canal. To provide the excuse, the French enlisted Israel to make its own attack, permitting Anglo-French invaders to pose as arbiters separating the warring sides. The maneuver, patently colonialist in its aim of restoring British dominion over the canal, would conflict directly with America’s rhetoric of democracy and self-determination.

  Unlike Hungary, which erupted suddenly and took place simultaneously, the Suez dilemma confronted Eisenhower throughout the summer and fall of 1956. While his administration plotted coups with the British in Syria, the connection threatened to associate the United States with British neocolonialism. Ike strove to avert a British military action by negotiations, but neither the British nor the Egyptians were mollified. By September 1956 U.S. intelligence believed an Anglo-French military move likely if negotiations failed. Kim Roosevelt picked up more hints from British officials at the United Nations. On September 12 the CIA created a special interagency group, code-named the Paramount Committee, to track Middle East developments full time. Agency U-2 aircraft flew over Anglo-French bases, returning photos of invasion preparations. Later the U-2s by chance captured the very moment of the British bombing of Egyptian airfields. The war began with the Israeli attack on October 29, with the Anglo-French intervention a few days later. Equipped with the CIA’s intelligence, Eisenhower felt obliged to veto the Anglo-French resolution at the UN Security Council that would have given legal justification for the intervention.

  Operation Wakeful, known to the British SIS as Straggle, led to a complete disaster. The basic idea had been to trigger a coup by Syrian officers and forestall the leftist Ba’ath Party. Scattered evidence indicates the plan centered on encouraging a revolt among Druze tribesmen, combined with a border crisis with Turkey. The British manipulated the CIA into timing the operation for precisely the time of Suez. At the end of October the CIA paid out $165,000 to one Syrian agent, but there could be no question of moving ahead once the British invaded Egypt. The Syrian and Iraqi agents became convinced the Americans were merely assisting the action against Nasser’s Egypt.

  Howard (“Rocky”) Stone resurrected the Syrian coup in 1957 as Operation Wappen. The CIA in Beirut coordinated a covert working group composed of representatives of SIS plus Iraqi, Jordanian, and Lebanese intelligence services. Rocky, one of the officers who had worked with Kim Roosevelt on Ajax, had spent a year at headquarters and then gone to the Sudan, where he helped right a sour relationship with its military dictator. Arriving at Damascus in April 1957, Stone found Washington demanding fresh action. He relied on deputy Arthur Close and subordinate Frank Jetton. The plot involved suborning the commander of the Syrian armor school, who would position his tanks around Damascus, after which other units should side with the plotters. There were meetings at a CIA safe house and at Stone’s home, and a reported $3 million changed hands. The agency talked to former Syrian president Adib Shishakli, considered an unacceptable ally in the 1956 coup plan. At the key moment, a summer night that August, Stone invited a couple of embassy secretaries to accompany the group at his house so the gathering would look like a party.

  This time Syrian security had been on to the plot from the beginning. Stone’s agents simply walked up to the desk of intelligence chief Lt. Col. Abdul Hamid Sarraj, named the CIA officers, and turned in their agency money. Rocky Stone and Frank Jetton, caught red-handed, were exposed in the Syrian press and expelled from the country. In its August 26, 1957, issue, Time magazine nevertheless dismissed reports of the U.S.-sponsored coup as Soviet propaganda.

  Questions remain regarding CIA participation in Iraq. In 1958 the Iraqi monarchy fell to yet another military coup. A few days before, Frank Wisner confidently told a State Department colleague that the Iraqi public might not like the government but there were few activists to do anything about it. Ike’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, agrees that the agency gave no warning of the coup. Washington saw the officers who took control as Soviet clients.

  In April 1959 Eisenhower set up an interagency group to consider covert options to prevent a Communist takeover of Iraq. British documents have John Foster Dulles on record from a year earlier speculating that the “Mossadegh example” might be the way to handle the Iraq situation. Six months later came an attempted assassination of the Iraqi leader, Abdul Karim Qasim.

  This maneuver became a step in the rise of Saddam Hussein, then a junior officer in the Iraqi army, a participant in the attempted murder. Some versions picture Saddam as a CIA agent, others as an Egyptian one, yet others as a last-minute hire and simply a Ba’ath activist. More conspiratorial views hold that Saddam took payments from an Egyptian attaché, or that his CIA contact, an Iraqi dentist, had parallel ties to the Egyptians. Unlike the 1958 coup, which took the CIA by surprise, the agency knew of the attempted murder. Saddam, who failed, fled to Egypt and only returned years later. By one account it would only be in Egypt that Saddam got in touch with the CIA. Collusion reached everywhere. Iraqi exiles in Beirut bragged of their CIA connections—one told anyone who would listen that he had Allen Dulles’s private telephone number. Other evidence suggests the CIA again took measures to incapacitate or eliminate Qasim in 1960, and that it was involved in the coup that overthrew him in 1963. James Critchfield has been cited as making the initial recruitments for the 1963 coup. A senior Iraqi official in the successor government openly averred, “We came to power on a CIA train.”

  “I spent most of my time,” recalls Miles Copeland, “helping Kim Roosevelt to pick up the pieces after collisions with Egypt and other Middle Eastern governments caused by Secretary Dulles’ insistence on policies and lines of action that both State and CIA field people knew would be disastrous.” Indeed Foster pursued the secret war with the same zeal and energy he displayed in covering distances heading for diplomatic meetings, making himself the most-traveled secretary of state in American history to that time. Of course Foster kept close tabs on covert action through brother Allen, the DCI. His role has yet to be fully appreciated. The Suez and Hungary crises brought a hiatus when Foster, suffering acute abdominal pain, was found to have colon cancer. He had surgery at Walter Reed Medical Center, then convalesced at his Hobe Sound vacation home in Florida. But by 1957 Dulles had returned to the fray.

  On many fronts the State Department now cooperated closely with the secret warriors. Psychological warfare particularly was pursued covertly by State through its United States Information Agency, including Voice of America radio (and later television) broadcasting, working in tandem with the CIA Radios. The USIA also had libraries in many countries, field offices, and sponsored cultural events and speakers.

  In Japan, for example, Psychological Strategy Board plans dictated support for the center-right Liberal Democratic Party. The USIA quietly invested in Japanese movies and television. By 1955 unattributed USIA money had financed six feature films and supported open broadcasts of more than eighteen thousand hours of radio, the equivalent of beaming on two frequencies twenty-four hours a day for a year. The USIA effort tried to influence, or at least neutralize, progressive tendencies among the Japanese intelligentsia. The CIA supplemented and extended these programs, with psywar experts like Howard Hunt crafting seductive scripts for Radio Free Asia. The agency-funded Asia Foundation sponsored its own Japanese commentators, and there were labor operations plus political payoffs—made easier in Japan where it was a social custom to pay citizens for their votes. Agency funding of the Liberal Democrats has been acknowledged by Al Ulmer, the FE Division baron of the time. The extent of CIA activity remains shrouded in secrecy even decades later, but the acting CIA director, in a 1995 letter to the New York Times, did not even attempt to deny the support, retreating to the threadbare argument that the CIA needed to keep faith with recipients of the covert aid.

  The agencies marched together in many places. In Italy, where CIA political action built toward a May 1958 election, the USIA operation grew as large as that of the secret warriors. Tracy Barnes and then Miles Copeland headed the CIA political action staff, their projects as unusual as attempting to insert astrologers into the entourages of foreign leaders known to rely on the occult, or forging links with such cultural movements as moral rearmament.

  John Foster Dulles kept the State Department out of the more exotic chicanery but turned a benign eye toward the whole endeavor. Dulles remained an abrasive, rigid figure in an administration that accentuated pragmatism, his advantage mainly the outlook he shared with President Eisenhower. The secretary of state had already gone into physical decline—he would die of cancer in January 1959—and continuing crises took a great toll on Foster’s remaining strength. But before that happened Dulles would become the prime mover in a major CIA covert operation, one, for that matter, not very far from Japan.

  In his own recollections of the presidency, Dwight Eisenhower mentions Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia exactly once: Eisenhower remarks that he had not seen Sukarno in years. This comment, in describing why Ike felt justified in rejecting a 1960 plea by Sukarno and other leaders for talks between the United States and the Soviet Union, reveals nothing about how the president used the CIA to get rid of the Indonesian leader. In fact, Ike’s general dissatisfaction with Indonesia led to a paramilitary operation designed to overthrow the government, much as in Iran or Guatemala. In his 1960 appeal for superpower detente, Sukarno spoke from the experience of having been caught between the adversaries.

  Son of a minister, John Foster Dulles behaved as if choosing one of the Cold War camps was the moral duty of nations. Sukarno’s unpardonable offense had been to reject this division of the world into camps, espousing another way—neutralism—an association of “nonaligned” nations. Dulles steadfastly opposed nonalignment. The People’s Republic of China had had a big role at the 1955 conference in Bandung, at which Sukarno launched the nonaligned movement, and China’s emergence from diplomatic isolation here especially galled Foster. At the Geneva conference a year earlier, after all, Dulles refused even to shake hands with Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai. His disposition blinded Dulles to real opportunities for improving relations. When another of the nonaligned leaders, Premier U Nu of Burma, visited Beijing in 1957, for example, he offered to intercede for the Americans. The Chinese indicated they would be willing to release the imprisoned CIA officers John Downey and Richard Fecteau in exchange for nothing more than permitting journalists to visit the People’s Republic and report on the “New China.” But Dulles refused, and the CIA men languished for decades. Worse, Dulles turned on Sukarno and leaped at suggestions for a covert operation aimed at the Indonesian.

  The cultural and geographic nature of his land made Sukarno vulnerable. A Dutch colony for almost four centuries, Indonesia was a mélange of Muslim, tribal animistic, and Buddhist influences. The different social groups were isolated by geography—Indonesia being a vast archipelago of six big and about three thousand small islands forming an arc from the tip of the Malay Peninsula to the Philippines. Independence came in the rush of decolonization after World War II. For Indonesians, the problem lay in transforming this kaleidoscopic society into a unified nation-state.

  Sukarno had been a prominent wartime nationalist, then active in the postwar resistance to the Dutch. The natural choice for president, at once pragmatic and visionary, Sukarno was no Communist. Indeed he outlawed the Indonesian Communist Party following an abortive coup attempt in 1949. Sukarno turned away from the armed forces too after a political play by army leader Col. Abdul Haris Nasution three years later. He walked a tightrope among the many political factions. Economic chaos reigned amid political struggle. Rubber, tin, and oil were major export products, but prices for the first two fluctuated widely in the early 1950s while oil production fell. Factionalism grew so rampant that by 1956 parliament had not yet ratified government budgets for the first years of the decade.

  For its initial project the CIA tried political action. Indonesian elections were scheduled for September 1955. Kermit Roosevelt approved a program memorandum requesting a million dollars. The memorandum, just a few paragraphs long, completely lacked the detail of need, plan, and expected results required under Eisenhower’s 5412 system. Yet the project sailed through and the money went to benefit the progressive Muslim Masjumi Party. Exchanging the dollars for Indonesian rupiah on the Hong Kong black market, the CIA quadrupled its money. But in the elections the Communists, who received more than six million votes, almost a fifth of the total cast, far outstripped the Masjumi. Sukarno then appeared to confirm American fears by making official visits to China, Russia, and other Eastern European countries. The CIA cast about for ideas.

  Again Frank Wisner set the pace. One day toward the end of 1956, he said to the chief of the DO’s Far East Division, “I think it’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire.”

  Wisner’s subordinate, Al Ulmer, returned to his office with word that new arrangements for Sukarno were a priority. One officer with the Indonesia branch, FE/5, recalls being told that “if some plan for doing this were not forthcoming, Santa might fill our stockings with assignments to far worse jobs.” The Far East Division was the biggest in the DO at the time, so Ulmer had plenty of choices in the matter.

  As it happened, Alfred C. Ulmer, Jr., knew paramilitary operations but little about Asia. Ulmer had begun with the navy, transferred to OSS, earned the Bronze Star, and stayed on with intelligence even before the advent of CIA. His work as station chief in Greece impressed Wisner, who had brought Ulmer to headquarters in 1955 and promoted him to chief of the division.

  Ulmer depended on FE/5 to develop a plan. At just this juncture opportunity seemed to blossom. Military commanders in western and northern Sumatra, Indonesia’s largest island, frustrated by changes, declared themselves independent and not bound to the national military command. The colonels who began this revolt in December 1956 used their troops to smuggle goods through Singapore. The revolt widened in March 1957 when the commander at Manado, in South Sulawesi province, declared a state of emergency and replaced the civilian government. There, on Celebes Island, a Charter of Common Struggle (Piagam Perjuangan Semesta) or, in the Indonesian acronym, PERMESTA, emerged as the rebel alliance. This term soon identified the entire movement. PERMESTA became an open rebellion after April 6, 1957, when twenty-nine army soldiers died in a clash on Celebes.

  The CIA had several avenues to reach the plotters. Richard Bissell, still special assistant to Allen Dulles, recalls that some Indonesians had approached the agency at least two years earlier. He observes, “I think it’s fair to say all the people the Agency dealt with eventually ended up as opponents of Sukarno.” These contacts may have come through the Indonesian military attaché in Washington, who later defected. In addition, CIA officer James Smith, Jr., went to Sumatra to contact the colonels. The United States also conducted training for the Indonesian national police, in the course of which came quiet attempts to recruit promising candidates.

  A contact in April 1957 through a local channel from two of the more prominent colonels intrigued the CIA. Ahmad Husein of central Sumatra was one. The other, Maludin Simbolon, passed over for army chief of staff in favor of Nasution in 1954, now commanded northern Sumatra. The colonels wished to meet with a CIA man. The desk officer took the cable from Djakarta station chief Valentine Goodell to Ulmer’s home one Sunday morning. Ulmer immediately imposed top security, restricting knowledge to just nine persons at the CIA.