The object was, as Arthur Schlesinger put it, to ensure that the government of an independent Guyana took the coloration that Washington desired, right down to who was in charge of it. To make that happen the CIA used agents of influence to create propaganda and place news that it wanted, labor agents to produce a visible opposition, and political agents to oppose those who the CIA decided were enemies of its desired outcome. Guyana would be a full-spectrum political action.

  The Central Intelligence Agency suffered through tumult even as it began to focus on Guyana, for these were the months after its disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. There had been investigations, postmortems, a National Security Council policy review—every kind of inquiry. A generation of CIA leadership had been swept away, except, oddly enough, the agency’s Western Hemisphere chief, the man who would have ultimate command of the Guyana project. Col. Joseph Caldwell King would be the go-to guy. King had spent his entire career in Latin America, doing studies on the Amazon water basin for Nelson D. Rockefeller before and into World War II, as an entrepreneur, and as a special agent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. As entrepreneur, spurning contrary advice, King had opened a condom factory in ultra-Catholic Brazil, and made a considerable profit. Later he sold the plant to Johnson & Johnson and acquired stock that became ever more valuable as the company’s stake in Latin America mushroomed. King became its vice president, selling in Argentina and Brazil. His military rank seems to have been honorific. In the early postwar period, when the FBI had been in charge of intelligence on Latin America, King joined the Bureau. In the late forties that role had been taken over by the new CIA, and King transferred to the agency. He soon became chief of its Western Hemisphere Division. When the agency overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954, King was there. Wags called him “Jesus Christ,” and he styled himself “JC,” perhaps to assuage his anxiety at showing poorly next to the corps of Ivy Leaguers who dominated the CIA. King presided over the early part of the U.S. imbroglio in Cuba, when in fact the United States had been “taken in” the first time, as the Kennedy people kept telling the British. King escaped blame for the Bay of Pigs because it had been managed at a level above his pay grade, leaving him out of the loop. Some recall that officials feared his strongly conservative politics might skew the project. The Colonel had nonetheless been an advocate for ousting Castro, and in 1962 he saw Guyana as an opportunity to build a wall against fidelista influence extended into South America.

  King’s branch chief for this venture, a capable lieutenant, was Virginia H. Hall Goillot, among the most senior women in CIA’s clandestine service. She had to be at that time, an era exceedingly difficult for women at the agency. Hall had lost a leg in World War II, then parachuted into France to work with the resistance, her prosthesis strapped to her body. She won the Distinguished Service Cross for that. In 1950 she married Paul Goillot, an OSS comrade with the resistance. She joined the CIA in 1951, originally as a branch officer for Western Europe, designing stay-behind networks for France. On the paramilitary staff in 1954 she too had worked on the Guatemala operation and had gone on to plan projects for Southeast Asia. Despite her experience and her medals, the legendary Hall had needed eleven years to obtain a one-level promotion to field grade. For the Guyana project she would have an important role.

  On Guyana, Hall wrestled with the need to build capabilities inside the country. In early 1962 the CIA had no station in Georgetown and lacked direct contact with Jagan’s opponent, Forbes Burnham. Hall recruited a Guyanese psychiatrist whose brother was an aide to Burnham. She sent CIA officer Joseph B. Smith to Barbados one weekend that February to meet the agent and his brother. Smith instructed the aide in tradecraft, including secret writing skills that Burnham’s assistant could use to pass information. The Burnham link was made.

  For this project there could be no question of resorting to a quasi-military operation or mounting a coup d’état. Guyana had no armed forces to draw into the game, and Cheddi Jagan’s popularity remained such that, even after the Georgetown riots, no possibility existed for armed resistance, which in any case the British army would be bound to fight. The broad strategy was evident from the beginning: require an election, carry out a political maneuver to reduce Jagan’s chances, then do everything possible to influence the outcome. The CIA had appropriate resources, including labor and international organizations. These took the lead in the scheme.

  The Directorate for Operations* controlled the CIA’s clandestine service and had the twin missions of espionage and covert operations. The Western Hemisphere Division and J. C. King worked for the Directorate for Operations (DO). So did the Covert Action Staff, locus of the agency’s political warfare experts and its labor activists. By early 1962 the DO had a new boss, as did the CIA itself. The deputy director for operations, a professional intelligence officer, was Richard M. Helms, also not tarred by the Bay of Pigs because he had been careful to stay out of it. At one of their first meetings, new CIA director John McCone told Helms he would be the “man for Cuba.” Because Cuba, by then seen as a dangerous exporter of revolution throughout Latin America, monopolized CIA effort, McCone’s remark became shorthand for special attention to the hemisphere. Helms readily conceded that Central America and the Caribbean had been neglected ever since the creation of the agency. The demand for a Guyana covert action lay squarely within that framework, alongside a more ambitious project pursued directly against Cuba. These were among Helms’s first projects as director of the DO.

  Planning for Guyana depended upon a fresh Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) prepared by CIA analysts in April 1962. This study looked at the Georgetown riots and concluded that racial conflict was likely to continue as the basic factor in Guyanese politics. That offered DO operators an obvious cleavage to exploit. The British were not about to resume direct rule, which estimators projected might triple their expenditures for the Commonwealth country. The analysis found L. Forbes Burnham, leader of the opposition PNC party, to be an “advocate of extremist measures in government.” Jagan himself could not be determined to be a Marxist, and the SNIE assessed he would probably follow a policy of nonalignment in a postindependent Guyana. Both conclusions flew in the face of Washington’s rationale for this operation, and both attracted little attention. Also ignored were the SNIE’s warnings about Burnham’s leadership weaknesses and the potential dangers of a government under his control. But the judgment that Burnham’s party had “virtually no following” other than among “Negro ranks” held key importance. In the 1961 elections Burnham had polled 41 percent of the votes.

  From an operational viewpoint the problem was to increase Burnham’s attractiveness, cooperate with third-party movements such as the United Front, induce them into coalition with his PNC, and thus create possibilities for overcoming Jagan’s popularity among the majority East Indian population. A measure that could substantially improve this picture would be to persuade the British to create an electoral system based upon proportional representation, in which minority votes in districts that would otherwise be won by Jagan’s PPP would still count toward seating the opposition.

  In June 1962 the Directorate for Operations hatched a plan. A CIA memorandum to the Special Group and the NSC staff director for intelligence, William H. Brubeck, summarized the concept. Aide Arthur Schlesinger, favorably impressed with Burnham on a Washington visit in May, told JFK in a June 21 memo, a week after the CIA paper, “I agree that the evidence shows increasingly that Jagan’s heart is with the Communist world.” On July 12 Dean Rusk recommended a program to Kennedy premised on the Jagan-as-Communist thesis.

  In a covering note forwarding Rusk’s memo, plus intelligence reports to the president, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy commented that a case against supporting Jagan existed, but the proposed tactics were murkier. “In particular,” Bundy noted, “I think it is unproven that the CIA knows how to manipulate an election in British Guiana without a backfire.” Schlesinger too joined the chorus, telling JFK the plan made him nervous, especially with prospects rated at less than fifty-fifty, asking, “Does CIA think they can carry out a really covert operation—i.e., an operation which, whatever suspicions Jagan might have, will leave no visible traces which he can cite before the world, whether he wins or loses, as evidence of U.S. intervention?” John McCone answered in a short paper on July 20, satisfying President Kennedy. Resistance evaporated.

  But the British hurdle had yet to be surmounted. Kennedy met British ambassador Sir David Ormsby-Gore at Hyannis, Massachusetts, on July 21 and 22. He raised the Guyana question, telling the Crown’s representative he wanted to know if Britain envisaged new elections, which “would provide opportunity for [a] government of different complexion to come to power through democratic process.” On July 25 CIA director John McCone saw the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board for a general review of the agency’s covert financial support to political parties. McCone not only touched on the CIA’s thoughts regarding Guyana, immediately afterward he discussed CIA labor operations and their relationship to American union groups, which would furnish the shock troops for the Guyana project.

  Meanwhile Mac Bundy followed up Kennedy’s sally with his own British counterpart, cabinet secretary Lord Hood, on August 6. Bundy emphasized urgency and warned against bogging down in endless talks. Kennedy accepted a proposal for a team of four officers from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to come to Washington a week later. On August 8 CIA’s Helms and State’s Alex Johnson agreed to bring matters to a head, forcing consideration of Guyanese political factors. Great Britain ultimately accepted the CIA project proposal and consented to provide SIS support.

  London’s most important contribution came in the fall of 1962 when the British set the date for a preindependence election in Guyana, later inducing the political parties to accept a formula for proportional representation in the national assembly. This improved Washington’s odds for a favorable outcome. When NSC staffer Carl Kaysen told Mac Bundy the latest news on October 5, he noted about Guyana, “I think you know about the most interesting development here.”

  Now it was up to the CIA and SIS to get the ball rolling. The agency had longstanding ties to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), had played a central role in the 1949 creation of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Inter-American Regional Labor Organization (Organización regional inter-Americano de trajabadores or ORIT) in 1951, and the AFL’s American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). During the fifties ORIT had been the most active in Guyana, encouraging that land’s Trades Union Council to follow an anti-Communist line. But something more was needed. The ICFTU had a London-based affiliate, a secretariat for unions of government workers called the Public Services International (PSI). From 1958 the CIA had also had a relationship with the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the PSI’s U.S. member, and the following year AFSCME set up a Latin American office for PSI. That unit became the cover for, and was headed by, CIA officer William H. McCabe, who liked to hand out cigarette lighters bearing the PSI logo and had photos of himself distributing food to Latin American peasants. McCabe had three years invested in labor work in Latin America, including in Guyana, where the CIA tried to sustain the labor unions opposed to Jagan. McCabe had been in Georgetown throughout the 1962 riots. Those who wondered at his apparent lack of union background were told McCabe was a PSI favorite. The PSI began offering advice to the Guyanese Trades Union Council, headed by East Indian Richard Ishmael, attendee of an AIFLD training course in Front Royal, Virginia. As a percentage of unionists, in the years before these events more Guyanese went through the AIFLD program—which included lectures on the dangers of communism—than citizens of any other Latin American nation.

  With the British-mandated elections still far in the future, the CIA and SIS could build their project patiently. Records indicate expenditures for Guyana began in November 1962. That coincides with a program begun by AIFLD to build more than five hundred houses for Ishmael’s Trades Union Council at a cost of $2 million. The agency’s progress report circulated in mid-January 1963. Sending this to Kennedy for his weekend reading on January 26, Mac Bundy noted, in his precise handwriting, “It moves, moderately.” Consular representatives reported that Jagan had the upper hand. But Burnham’s party conducted almost no organizational activity.

  Efforts to discredit Jagan included the United Front surfacing a document, the text of his “secret address” to a 1956 party conference. In the speech Jagan denounced associates just as Khrushchev had done in his secret talk to a Soviet party congress that year. The maneuver was designed to characterize Jagan as a Stalinist. Dissension among the ranks pleased the CIA and the United Front. At the international level the United States and the British acted to complicate economic difficulties by closing markets for Guyanese exports, primarily rice. By April 1963 Jagan’s financial distress had become so serious that he wrote to Kennedy asking about the U.S. aid (promised as early as 1958) for road, drainage, and irrigation projects.

  On April 15 Cord Meyer, responsible for CIA labor operations, briefed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, including Guyana among his subjects. The centerpiece would be the general strike begun by the Trades Union Council with CIA support. Triggered by Jagan’s introduction of a labor bill that would have given the government some powers over the unions, the strike continued for eighty days and became the biggest in Guyanese history.

  Prime Minister Jagan calculated that the Trades Union Council would exhaust its strike fund in a month, after which the government could have its way. But Richard Ishmael met secretly with AFL-CIO officials, almost certainly including William McCabe, before declaring the strike. The foreigners promised help. The historians Robert Waters and Gordon Daniels have uncovered a sheaf of cables from McCabe and others reporting in great detail, and AIFLD paid salaries of eight Guyanese labor “interns” throughout the strike. The AFL-CIO alone spent $800,000. American documents reported by Waters and Daniels identify this as Operation Flypast.

  Later investigations by British journalists concluded the CIA had furnished strike pay for the workers, distress funds, travel expenses for leaders, plus money for propaganda and a daily fifteen-minute radio broadcast. The agency funneled the money through the Gotham Foundation, which provided grants to AFSCME, McCabe’s parent organization. Gene Meakins, a labor specialist, worked directly for the Trades Union Council, providing advice and editing radio scripts and a weekly newspaper. (Ex-agency officer Phillip Agee maintains that Meakins was a CIA man, though Meakins denies it. On the other hand, Meakins also claims that McCabe, well established as a CIA employee, had been nothing more than a dedicated labor organizer.) A CIA officer, perhaps Meakins, actually participated in talks between dockworkers and the government.

  There were physical attacks on government officials, including Janet Jagan, minister of the interior. Richard Ishmael was identified in police reports as a member of a terror ring that plotted arson and bombings at government buildings (Forbes Burnham, also named in police reports, was acquitted when placed on trial). Troops of the elite British Coldstream Guards had to be called out to protect the unloading of Cuban freighters bearing food and a Russian merchant vessel loading export merchandise. Trying to maintain an image of evenhandedness, the British could not deny this assistance.

  On June 21 President Kennedy reviewed the state of play. John McCone and Richard Helms attended for CIA, and Helms took notes. According to the notes, Helms opened with a briefing on the strike, commenting on Jagan’s tough position with the Trades Union Council. Kennedy would provide aid to Guyana if it helped the CIA project, and anticipated another conversation with Prime Minister Macmillan. “It was clear,” Helms wrote, “that the President regards British Guiana as the most important topic he has to discuss with the Prime Minister.”

  Dean Rusk flew to London in advance of the meeting, his goal to make clear that the British must not leave behind “a country with a Communist government in control,” that London must unseat Jagan before independence. On June 30 Kennedy and Macmillan met at Birch Grove, England. Kennedy warned—twice—that the effect of having a Communist Guyana in addition to Cuba “would create irresistible pressures in the United States to strike militarily against Cuba.”

  This is astonishing. Barely seven months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had brought the world close to nuclear war, a massive World War III between the United States and Russia, John Kennedy was threatening to start that war after all and place the onus for it on the British Crown. The United States had made a public pledge not to invade Cuba as a consequence of the Missile Crisis. Aggressive overt action of this sort would reactivate the Russian guarantees to Castro that had made the crisis so dangerous. To do that on the excuse of the existence of the Jagan government in Guyana would have been both disproportionate and foolish.