The British could have seen through the subterfuge and turned Kennedy down. Instead they played straight, and the meeting concentrated on how to put a Forbes Burnham–led coalition in power. Intriguingly, William McCabe met with the Guyanese unionists within a day of the Kennedy-Macmillan decisions.

  The first piece in the new maneuver was for London to provide that proportional representation would be the guiding formula in the upcoming Guyanese election. The British took that action in the fall of 1963. Cheddi Jagan’s letter to Kennedy having gone unanswered, Jagan called in the American consul in Georgetown to say that he had seen Washington shift to a policy of “Jagan must go.” The prime minister warned that his ouster could lead to a takeover by the extremists within his own party, saddling the United States with precisely the sort of Castroite situation it feared. Jagan then went to New York for the opening of the UN General Assembly and tried without success to meet with Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. No doubt Jagan understood the snub.

  Meanwhile Washington conceived a fresh idea to dilute ethnic support for Jagan. In November, barely a week before President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the State Department asked about the potential for a new East Indian–based political party, one different from Jagan’s. The CIA replied on November 26 that the most suitable candidates to lead such a movement were reluctant to do so. In early December the agency followed up with a report that Burnham’s PNC would favor such a party but do nothing to support it. If Great Britain resumed direct rule, there would be more scope for the new party. On December 6 Mac Bundy convened Helms and others and determined to pressure British and Canadian diplomats on the direct rule question. This endeavor failed.

  In Georgetown, Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party saw its main chance in strong showings of public support. Continuing PPP marches and demonstrations coincided with the early 1964 Panamanian revolt against the U.S. authority in the Panama Canal Zone. That too led Washington to fear for the security of Guyana. Mac Bundy advised President Lyndon B. Johnson to tell the visiting British foreign secretary that he remained as concerned about Guyana as JFK had been. In February the Joint Chiefs of Staff reviewed U.S. contingency planning for military intervention in Guyana. The Chiefs expected that a battle group of ground troops could be inserted in twelve to twenty-seven hours, depending upon whether a situation involved no notice or a previous alert to U.S. forces.

  By March pro-Jagan strikes had idled an estimated 30 percent of sugar plantation workers. The CIA reported Richard Ishmael’s bitter complaints that his own organizers, with no protection, were unwilling to hold rallies. But on March 18 the CIA reported that Jagan’s police were acting vigorously against intimidation and demonstrations. Violence increased again. By the end of April thirteen persons had died in strike-related incidents, most attributed to Jagan’s PPP or its associated Guyana Agricultural Workers’ Union. One of the dead was a British citizen.

  Meanwhile the new-party initiative moved forward. On March 8 a group announced formation of a United Muslim Party. A week later came creation of the All-Indian League, an organization the CIA reported as “actually testing for support for the eventual formation of an anti-Jagan Hindu party.” Agency undercover advisers were assigned to each party to encourage them to join forces. The CIA action achieved something of an undesired coup in early June when Forbes Burnham stood up in the assembly to propose a three-party coalition government. When the United Front refused to participate, the initiative collapsed (Jagan himself had made a counteroffer, not rejecting the proposal).

  British authorities announced voting districts in mid-April, and voter registration took place in May. The CIA provided advice and support to the non-Jagan parties. In June the British monitor of the election certified the voter lists. The list for Georgetown contained fewer names (95 percent) than in the previous election. Other irregularities eventually turned up. There would be more absentee ballots cast by Guyanese overseas—votes more open to manipulation—than there were voters on the rolls.

  Continuing violence frightened Guyanese and affected registrations. The CIA explored military training for some anti-Jagan activists and had a contingency plan to distribute arms. McGeorge Bundy approved it by telephone on May 7, a week after Helms proposed it. Caches of alleged PPP weapons were discovered by police, but it remains unclear whether this represented another CIA ploy. In late June, Jagan had to take his daughter out of school because of harassment from classmates. Five or ten homes were burning every day, and already sixty people had died. American diplomats in Georgetown believed that even troops could not now end the violence—they were too few and it was too widespread.

  “No matter what I try to do,” Cheddi Jagan told U.S. consul Delmar Carlson on May 25, “I can get nowhere. I am opposed by everyone, including the CIA which I suppose is the American Government. I laid my cards on the table to President Kennedy [in 1961], and he gave me to understand that he would help me but he didn’t and I can only conclude that he was a liar or that he was influenced to change his decision.”

  The Guyanese leader made yet another bid for reconciliation. He called in Carlson several times over the last days of June. Jagan worried about Forbes Burnham.

  “You don’t know Burnham,” Cheddi pleaded. “He’ll cut my throat.”

  Prime Minister Jagan again suggested a coalition. He offered to sign an international treaty to neutralize Guyana in much the same fashion as Austria from 1945 to 1955. Jagan wanted to send an emissary to Washington to discuss the proposal, but his overture would not even be considered. The standard working group on Guyana convened at the State Department on June 30. It included Mac Bundy, Richard Helms from CIA, William R. Tyler of the State Department, and Bundy’s special assistant, Gordon Chase. The officials agreed that “a dialogue with Jagan might conceivably cool down the . . . security problem” but doubted that Jagan would make important concessions. Washington rejected the approach in early July. In Georgetown, Carlson proved reluctant to inform Jagan. The same group plus additional officials, including NSC staff director for intelligence matters Peter Jessup, rejected an emissary again several weeks later. Finally Washington induced the British to tell the Guyanese that talks with the Americans had established that the United States saw no useful purpose in receiving an emissary.

  The British themselves now pressed the issue of a national unity coalition of the three parties. When Gordon Chase approached him on the matter at the end of July, Mac Bundy returned the memo with his handwritten reply: “I’d stonewall for now.”

  When a Jagan political opponent came to Washington toward the end of August, Gordon Chase advised Bundy that to avoid the impression of being an American stooge, the Guyanese should not be accorded a meeting with the president.

  By this time the British governor anticipated that even with proportional representation Cheddi Jagan’s PPP might emerge with a small majority of the assembly. Washington told the British this would be unacceptable. By late August the CIA pronounced itself cautiously optimistic about the election, but in truth its political analysis fell short. A State-CIA meeting on Guyana took place on September 8, again optimistic. Several days later, with Desmond FitzGerald sitting in for the agency, this discussion continued. Bundy pressed for a contingency paper on measures if Jagan won. The CIA drafted a paper not long after, and Bundy discussed it with Helms and the State Department on September 17.

  Meanwhile in Georgetown, after months of encouragement from CIA political action officers, Indian politician Balram Singh Rai decided to form a new Justice Party. For a month or so Rai appeared to do well, but then his effort sputtered to a halt. An internal document from Jagan’s PPP, which the CIA acquired and reported late in August, declared that local elements hostile to the PPP had “secured international assistance in their efforts to overthrow the government,” and that the “unity” of opposition forces “would not have availed were it not for U.S. intervention.” The document recommended defusing such opposition elements as the Portuguese Roman Catholics plus overtures to the United States through Canada.

  Forbes Burnham continued to plague all houses. He antagonized the British, remained in conflict with other opposition parties, and had a difficult time with the Americans as well. The U.S. consul in Georgetown reported to the Bundy-Helms-Tyler group on September 11 that he had tried to forge amicable relations with Burnham, but “it is tough to do so.” Said the official, “Burnham, a racist and probably anti-white, remembers slights and repays them; at the same time, he takes advantage of people who treat him softly.”

  In short, by the fall of 1964, Cheddi Jagan had offered concessions, CIA’s third-force movement had stalled, Burnham stood revealed as a treacherous ally, and the British worried that Jagan would win after all. Washington still had an opportunity to call off the CIA. It did not do so. Senior officials remained upbeat on the prospects for electoral victory.

  Burnham campaign buttons produced in the United States and doubtless paid for by the agency now appeared in Georgetown. Gordon Chase told Mac Bundy that the CIA, “in a deniable and discreet way,” had begun paying party workers. Violence escalated on all sides. A Justice Party station wagon was blown up, PNC meetings were fired upon, Jagan activists were roughed up or killed. In all, the campaign season brought with it almost 200 murders, a thousand persons injured, and about 15,000 people (more than 2,600 families) forced from their homes.

  The December elections did not turn out as advertised. Cheddi Jagan won 47 percent of the vote, more than either the Americans or the British expected. Burnham trailed by almost thirteen thousand votes in spite of overseas ballots overwhelmingly favoring him. But because Jagan did not obtain an outright majority, a coalition would have to follow. The British governor simply refused Jagan the opportunity to put one together. A CIA officer elsewhere in South America noted in his diary on December 18, “a new victory for the station in British Guiana . . . largely due to CIA operations over the last five years to strengthen the anti-Jagan trade unions.”

  The British turned to Forbes Burnham to form the government. Burnham went on to rule like a dictator until he died in office, as racist and imperious as many had feared. Guyana’s export industries of sugar, rice, and bauxite atrophied. By 1984 the wheel had come full circle and Burnham publicly accused Washington of trying to undermine his government by encouraging striking bauxite workers—shades of the CIA in 1963. Guyana did not have another free election until 1992. When it did, the nation elected Cheddi Jagan. Washington still had trouble coming up with a reasonable policy—Jagan had to reject an American nominated for ambassador who had been one of the labor leaders the CIA had arrayed against him. Ironically Cheddi Jagan would die in Washington, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in 1997, while still in office. Arthur Schlesinger said in retrospect, “We misunderstood the whole struggle down there. He wasn’t a Communist. The British thought we were overreacting and indeed we were. The CIA decided that this was some great menace, and they got the bit between their teeth. But even if British Guiana had gone Communist, it’s hard to see how it would be a threat.”

  The universe of covert operations only begins with political action. What the Central Intelligence Agency did in Guyana represents one kind of activity. Although the coordination and analysis of intelligence was the reason for the creation of the CIA, the agency derived its other identity—America’s “Cold War agency”—from these covert projects. The political action in Guyana lay at about the halfway point on a spectrum from propaganda and influence peddling to violence (quasi-war), paramilitary operations, and support for military operations at the upper boundary. Many within the CIA and outside it saw covert operations as a third option between doing nothing and engaging in full-scale warfare. The story of covert operations is the saga of the third option, of these kinds of initiatives, though all cannot be treated in equal detail over the broad span of the CIA’s history. The tale involves the men and women who made the operations happen; what was accomplished and what not; the impact of these activities on America’s global quest for democracy—on its foreign policy, national security, and standing in the world; and the tension between the CIA’s operations and the agency’s accountability under a democratic form of government. This set of concerns will remain whether or not the Central Intelligence Agency survives as an entity in the post–September 11 world, because the perceived needs for and function of covert operations will continue.

  Guyana was not the only CIA political action of its kind. Indeed it is among the least known. Of much greater renown is the agency’s political action in Italy after World War II and over the decades afterward. There were many more such efforts. Political action involves all forms of activity that might contribute to a given outcome. Mechanisms include propaganda; subsidizing political parties, labor organizations, cultural groups, print and broadcast media, and other agents of influence; and sowing disinformation to discredit contrary messages. Political action may be viewed as the bread and butter of covert operations.

  Some of these kinds of activities were also employed individually in long-term operations, such as the CIA’s efforts to broadcast freedom, as it were, into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during much of the Cold War. Such efforts comprise the lowest end of the covert action spectrum.

  Propaganda and psychological warfare remain at the heart of much that happens in political action. Often several of these types of projects are melded into a given operational initiative. The radio operations, for example, served a variety of different ends, simultaneously supporting various specific activities. At the global level, campaigns of several sorts may be in progress at the same time.

  An intermediate form of initiative is the enlistment of officials or military officers in the target country to overthrow their government and install individuals more favorable to the covert actor. This fomenting of military coups d’état may involve aspects of political action as well as economic pressures and other more conventional foreign policy initiatives.

  At the upper end of the spectrum are paramilitary operations, the use of armed force secretly supported by the covert actor to affect events in other nations. These operations may be full-scale wars and may also feature any or all of the other tools in the covert action kit. Paramilitary operations are the most significant variety of covert action and bear the greatest risks. Over time the character of this kind of activity has changed. Today the CIA often functions as a sort of middleman, or comprador, engaging the services of third parties, whether they be governments, security services, ethnic or political movements, or individuals. Military special operations forces have assumed increasing importance and supplanted the CIA in roles traditionally played by agency officers. The CIA nevertheless still supports these operations, as the next case study shows.

  Purists might say that support of military operations is not paramilitary action, but the latter subsumes the former. Especially with the changing character of the world into the age of terrorism, military special operations have increasingly substituted for paramilitary action and must fall within the scope of this book. The growing predominance of nonstate actors today makes this element of the spectrum inescapable.

  Other forms of activity have shaped covert action. Espionage provides key inputs for the secret warriors as, again, will be apparent from the next case. Intelligence analysis also provides guidance for operators. The CIA’s “Great White Case Officer,” Allen Dulles, once cited analysis as a check and balance on covert action. Strictly speaking this is not accurate, but the general point is that analysis establishes the dimensions of operational problems and indicates avenues of approach, as evident in the Guyana action. Parameters for covert activities are also set by congressional overseers in a process that has steadily grown more important.

  Even at the lower end of the spectrum, covert action remains fraught with consequence for the peoples and nations involved. Covert operations have frequently involved transnational alliances with foreign intelligence services. These vital ties have proved critical in many instances, enough so that the saga of American covert operations provides a window on a number of companion intelligence services.

  Time has transformed covert operations. Technological developments have changed the ways information moves, ideas are influenced, plans developed, spies operate. Devices have become more subtle, weapons more lethal, aircraft more capable, and so on. But there will always be room for error. The unanticipated, the unexpected event has great weight, the more so since the secrecy of these activities makes it difficult to apply conventional techniques when secret warriors get in trouble. That is what happened in the Iranian hostage rescue attempt of 1980.

  The news came after the party broke up—in Georgia, near Fort Stewart, unwinding at the conclusion of a difficult military maneuver, one that certified the readiness of the recently created Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta. Modeled on an earlier maneuver conducted in the southwestern United States, Delta did so well it earned a commendation from the White House, which had monitored the entire affair. Delta’s commander, Col. Charlie Beckwith, his top officers, FBI agents who had played terrorists in the drill, and CIA officers who had handled the intelligence side, celebrated over beers with Defense Intelligence Agency chief Gen. Samuel V. Wilson. After the liquor the group repaired to an all-night restaurant for a sumptuous breakfast. Beckwith finally stumbled into bed. He had hardly gotten to sleep when an aide phoned him—Iranian student radicals had taken over the U.S. embassy in Teheran, capturing the entire staff. It was November 4, 1979, the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis.

  Outside Washington another middle-of-the-night phone call awakened the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Adm. Stansfield Turner. He was certain he was dreaming—Turner had gotten a similar call from the CIA duty officer seven months earlier when another Teheran demonstration had overrun the embassy. But this was no dream. In February the Iranian revolutionary government had ejected demonstrators and restored the embassy and the freedom of the U.S. diplomatic delegation. This time they did not. The former Shah of Iran had just been permitted to come to the United States for medical treatment, and tempers in Teheran were white hot. Admiral Turner went to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, to prepare for a White House meeting. To his surprise, President Jimmy Carter waited a day before gathering his top officials in the White House Situation Room. After that three-hour skull session, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski ordered preparations for a rescue mission.