PART
TWO
"A Strange Kind of Genius"
Allen Dulles had been director of central intelligence for one week when, on March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin died. "We have no reliable inside intelligence on thinking inside the Kremlin," the agency lamented a few days later. "Our estimates of Soviet long-range plans and intentions are speculations drawn from inadequate evidence." The new president of the United States was not pleased. "Ever since 1946," Eisenhower fumed, "all the so-called experts have been yapping about what would happen when Stalin dies and what we as a nation should do about it. Well, he's dead. And you can turn the files of our government inside out--in vain--looking for any plans laid. We have no plan. We are not even sure what difference his death makes."
Stalin's death intensified American fears about Soviet intentions. The question for the CIA was whether Stalin's successors--whoever they might be--would launch a preemptive war. But the agency's speculations about the Soviets were reflections in a funhouse mirror. Stalin never had a master plan for world domination, nor the means to pursue it. The man who eventually took control of the Soviet Union after his death, Nikita Khrushchev, recalled that Stalin "trembled" and "quivered" at the prospect of a global combat with America. "He was afraid of war," Khrushchev said. "Stalin never did anything to provoke a war with the nited States. He knew his weakness."
One of the fundamental failings of the Soviet state was that every facet of daily life was subordinated to national security. Stalin and his successors were pathological about their frontiers. Napoleon had invaded from Paris, and then Hitler from Berlin. Stalin's only coherent postwar foreign policy had been to turn Eastern Europe into an enormous human shield. While he devoted his energies to murdering his internal enemies, the Soviet people stood in endless lines waiting to buy a sack of potatoes. Americans were about to enjoy eight years of peace and prosperity under Eisenhower. But that peace came at the cost of a skyrocketing arms race, political witch hunts, and a permanent war economy.
Eisenhower's challenge was to confront the Soviet Union without starting World War III or subverting American democracy. He feared that the costs of the cold war could cripple the United States; if his generals and admirals had their way, they would consume the treasury. He decided to base his strategy on secret weapons: nuclear bombs and covert action. They were far cheaper than multibillion-dollar fleets of fighter jets and flotillas of aircraft carriers. With enough nuclear firepower, the United States could deter the Soviets from starting a new world war--or win the war if it came. With a global campaign of covert action, the United States could stop the spread of communism--or, as was Eisenhower's publicly proclaimed policy, roll back the Russians.
Ike bet the fate of the nation on his nuclear arsenal and his spy service. Questions about their best use arose at almost every meeting of the National Security Council early in his presidency. The NSC, created in 1947 to govern the use of American power abroad, had been rarely convened under Truman. Eisenhower revived it and ran it as a good general runs his staff. Every week, Allen Dulles left the slightly shabby confines of his offices and stepped into his black limousine; drove past the crumbling Temporaries, where Wisner and his covert operators worked; and entered the gates of the White House. He took his seat at the great oval desk in the Cabinet Room, facing his brother Foster, the secretary of state, along with the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and the president. Allen typically opened each meeting with a tour of the world's hot spots. Then the talk turned to the strategies of secret war.
"WE COULD LICK THE WHOLE WORLD"
Eisenhower worried endlessly about a nuclear Pearl Harbor, and the CIA could not ease his mind. At the June 5, 1953, meeting of the National Security Council, Allen Dulles told him that the agency could not give him "any prior warning through intelligence channels of a Soviet sneak attack." A few months later, the CIA ventured a guess that the Soviets would be incapable of launching an intercontinental ballistic missile at the United States before 1969. The estimate proved to be off by a dozen years.
In August 1953, when the Soviet Union tested its first weapon of mass destruction--not quite a thermonuclear bomb, but near enough--the agency had no clue and gave no warning. Six weeks later, when Allen Dulles briefed the president on the Soviet test, Eisenhower wondered whether he should launch an all-out nuclear strike on Moscow before it was too late. He said it looked "as though the hour of decision were at hand, and that we should presently have to really face the question of whether or not we would have to throw everything at once against the enemy," say the NSC's declassified minutes. "He had raised this terrible question because there was no sense in our now merely shuddering at the enemy's capability," especially when the United States could not know if Moscow had one nuclear weapon or one thousand. "We were engaged in the defense of a way of life, and the great danger was that in defending this way of life we would find ourselves resorting to methods that endangered this way of life. The real problem, as the President saw it, was to devise methods of meeting the Soviet threat and of adopting controls, if necessary, that would not result in our transformation into a garrison state. The whole thing, said the President, was a paradox."
When Dulles warned the president that "the Russians could launch an atomic attack on the United States tomorrow," Eisenhower replied that "he didn't think anyone here thought the cost of winning a global war against the Soviet Union was a cost too high to pay." But the price of victory might be the destruction of American democracy. The president noted that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told him, "we should do what was necessary even if the result was to change the American way of life. We could lick the whole world...if we were willing to adopt the system of Adolph Hitler."
Eisenhower had thought he could confront the paradox with covert action. But a bitter battle in East Berlin had revealed the CIA's inability to confront communism head-on. On June 16 and 17, 1953, nearly 370,000 East Germans took to the streets. Thousands of students and workers struck violently at their oppressors, burning Soviet and East German Communist Party buildings, trashing police cars, and trying to stop the Soviet tanks that crushed their spirits. The uprising was far larger than the CIA first realized, but the agency could do nothing to save the rebels. Though Frank Wisner weighed the risks of trying to arm the East Berliners, he balked. His liberation armies proved worthless. On June 18, he said that the CIA "should do nothing at this time to incite East Germans to further actions." The uprising was crushed.
The next week, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to "train and equip underground organizations capable of launching large-scale raids or sustained warfare" in East Germany and the other Soviet satellites. The order also called upon the CIA to "encourage elimination of key puppet officials" in the captive states. Elimination meant what it said. But the order was an empty gesture. The president was learning the limits of the CIA's abilities. That summer, in the White House Solarium, Eisenhower convened the men he trusted most in the realm of national security--among them Walter Bedell Smith, George Kennan, Foster Dulles, and retired air force lieutenant general James R. Doolittle, the pilot who had led the bombing of Tokyo in 1942--and asked them to redefine American national strategy toward the Soviets. By the end of the Solarium project, the idea of rolling back Russia through covert action was pronounced dead at age five.
The president began trying to redirect the agency. The CIA would fight the enemy in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America--and wherever colonial empires crumbled. Under Eisenhower, the agency undertook 170 new major covert actions in 48 nations--political, psychological, and paramilitary warfare missions in countries where American spies knew little of the culture or the language or the history of the people.
Eisenhower often made his initial decisions on covert action in private conversations with the Dulles brothers. Typically, Allen spoke to Foster with a proposal for an operation, and Foster spoke to the president over a cocktail in the Oval Office. Foster went back to Allen with the president's approval and an admonition: don't get caught. The brothers steered the course of covert action in private conversations at their respective headquarters, on the telephone, or on Sundays by the swimming pool with their sister, Eleanor, a State Department officer herself. Foster firmly believed that the United States should do everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America. Allen wholeheartedly agreed. With Eisenhower's blessings, they set out to remake the map of the world.
"A RAPIDLY DETERIORATING SITUATION"
From his first days in power, Allen Dulles polished the public image of the CIA, cultivating America's most powerful publishers and broadcasters, charming senators and congressmen, courting newspaper columnists. He found dignified publicity far more suitable than discreet silence.
Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation's leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time's Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek's man in Tokyo. It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government's wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information, once part of Wild Bill Donovan's domain. The men who responded to the CIA's call included Henry Luce and his editors at Time, Look, and Fortune; popular magazines such as Parade, the Saturday Review, and Reader's Digest;and the most powerful executives at CBS News. Dulles built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany's most powerful press baron.
Dulles wanted to be seen as the subtle master of a professional spy service. The press dutifully reflected that image. But the archives of the CIA tell a different story.
The minutes of the daily meetings of Dulles and his deputies depict an agency lurching from international crisis to internal calamities--rampant alcoholism, financial malfeasance, mass resignations. What should be done about a CIA officer who had killed a British colleague and faced trial for manslaughter? Why had the former station chief in Switzerland committed suicide? What could be done about the lack of talent in the clandestine service? The agency's new inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, became a constant bearer of bad tidings about the caliber of the CIA's personnel, training, and performance. He warned Dulles that hundreds of the skilled military officers that the CIA had hired during the Korean War were quitting, and "it was most evident that a too-high percentage were leaving with an unfriendly attitude toward the CIA."
At the end of the war, a group of junior and midlevel CIA officers, appalled at the poor morale at headquarters, demanded and received permission to conduct an internal poll of their peers. They interviewed 115 CIA personnel and wrote a long, detailed report, completed at the end of Dulles's first year as director. They described "a rapidly deteriorating situation": widespread frustration, confusion, and purposelessness. Bright and patriotic people had been recruited with promises of exciting overseas service--"a completely false impression"--and then stuck in dead-end posts as typists and messengers. Hundreds of officers returned from foreign assignments to wander through headquarters for months, looking for new assignments without success. "The harm accruing to the Agency from inert personnel practices mounts in geometric, not arithmetic progression," they reported. "For every capable officer that the Agency loses through discontent or frustration, there may well be two or three more competent men (sharing the same educational, professional or social background) that the Agency will never have the opportunity to employ.... The harm done may be irreparable."
The CIA's young officers worked for "too many people in responsible positions who apparently don't know what they're doing." They watched "a shocking amount of money" going to waste on failed missions overseas. One of Frank Wisner's case officers wrote that the operations he worked on were "largely ineffectual and quite expensive. Some are directed at targets that are hardly logical--let alone legitimate. Thus, to protect jobs and prestige, both here and in the field, Headquarters' mission is to whitewash operational budget and programming justifications with, to say the least, exaggerated statements." They concluded that "the Agency is shot through with mediocrity and less."
These young officers had seen an intelligence service that was lying to itself. They described a CIA in which incompetent people were given great power and capable recruits were stacked like cordwood in the corridors.
Allen Dulles suppressed their report. Nothing changed. Forty-three years later, in 1996, a congressional investigation concluded that the CIA "continues to face a major personnel crisis that it has, thus far, not addressed in any coherent way.... Today the CIA still does not have enough qualified case officers to staff many of its stations around the world."
"SOMEBODY TO DO THE DIRTY WORK"
Eisenhower wanted to shape the CIA into an efficient instrument of presidential power. He tried to impose a command structure on the agency through Walter Bedell Smith. In the days after Eisenhower's election, the general had expected to be named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was devastated by Eisenhower's decision to make him the undersecretary of state. Bedell Smith did not want to be second-in-command to Foster Dulles, a man he regarded as a pompous blowhard. But Ike wanted him--and needed him--to serve as an honest broker between himself and the Dulles brothers.
Bedell Smith vented his anger to Vice President Nixon, his neighbor in Washington. From time to time the general would drop in for a visit, Nixon remembered, and "a couple of drinks would loosen his tongue a bit in an uncharacteristic way.... And I remember one night we were sitting having scotch and soda, and Bedell got very emotional, and he said, 'I want to tell you something about Ike.... I was just Ike's prat boy.... Ike has to have somebody to do the dirty work that he doesn't want to do so that he can look like the good guy.'"
Bedell Smith did that work as Ike's overseer of covert action. He served as the crucial link between the White House and the CIA's secret operations. As the driving force of the newly created Operations Coordinating Board, he carried out the secret directives from the president and the National Security Council, and he oversaw the CIA's execution of those orders. His handpicked ambassadors played central roles in carrying out these missions.
During the nineteen months that Bedell Smith served as the president's proconsul for covert action, the agency carried out the only two victorious coups in its history. The declassified records of those coups show that they succeeded by bribery and coercion and brute force, not secrecy and stealth and cunning. But they created the legend that the CIA was a silver bullet in the arsenal of democracy. They gave the agency the aura that Dulles coveted.