The Dulles brothers took the lead in the brutal overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran.
"The Eisenhower-Dulles era was a Pax Americana enforced by terror." Eisenhower hoped that the combination of nuclear weapons and a brutal, covert, ruthless CIA would scare enemies and avoid the need to send troops overseas. "He once said that he feared his own 'boys' in the military more than he did a sneak attack from the Soviets, who, as he observed, had suffered so devastatingly during World War II that they would be deeply reluctant to risk World War III."
Secretary of State Foster Dulles often pushed Eisenhower to use nuclear weapons tactically. Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that he observed Dulles handing notes to Eisenhower at summits, as if Dulles was in charge. Talbot writes, "Foster succeeded in undermining or deflecting every tentative step that the president made towards detente with the Soviet Union." In the words of Randolph Bourne, "War is the health of the state." Talbot wrote, "It was this permanent war fever that empowered the country's political and military hierarchies and enriched the increasingly militarized corporate sector. It was the very lifeblood of this ruling group's existence -- even if, in the atomic age, it threatened the existence of humanity."
The chapter on the CIA-backed coup against Guatemalan coup against democratically elected President Jacobo ????rben was particularly painful to read. Arben was a decent, idealistic man -- think of Hubert Humphrey or Robert Kennedy -- who wanted to help peasants suffering under crushing inequality and exploitation of the United Fruit Company. Arben was not a communist. But the CIA poured arms and money into opposition groups, filled media with lies about his government, and humiliated Arben by forcing him to disrobe in front of cameras when he was leaving the country. Even after he left, his opponents harassed him. His government was replaced with a brutal regime that murdered, tortured and imprisoned its opponents.
This is an example of the sort of mind-blowing revelation that made me angry:
In 1952, West German police discovered that the CIA was supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy. Police investigators revealed that the CIA-backed group had compiled a blacklist of people to be "liquidated" as "unreliable" in case of a conflict with the Soviet Union. Included on the list were not just West German Communists but leaders pf the Social Democratic Party serving in the Bundestag, as well as other left-leaning government officials. There were cries of outrage in the German parliament over the revelations, but the State Department worked strenuously behind the scenes to suppress the story, and similar alarming measures continued to be quietly contemplated throughout the Cold War.
Frank Olson was a bacteriologist who worked on the CIA's MKUltra mind-control program, which used LSD and other chemicals on unwitting victims (e.g, prisoners). When Olson started having moral qualms about his work, he was poisoned with LSD, and he later jumped out of a window to his death. The CIA alleged he had committed suicide, but they had taken over the investigation from the NY City police, and there is evidence that he was murdered by the CIA because he was deemed a security risk.
In 1957 then Senator John F. Kennedy said in a speech on the Senate floor:
The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile - it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism - and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism.
Thus the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man's desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this Nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.
That speech upset Eisenhower and Dulles, who thought JFK was naive.
By the end of his presidency, Eisenhower was furious at Allen Dulles and complained that he had been unable to rein him in. Various foreign policy groups had made recommendations to take control of the CIA, but Eisenhower was unable to implement the recommendations and complained that he would leave a "legacy of ashes" for his successor. One of the triggers for Eisenhower's anger at Dulles was the shooting down of a U-2 spy plane days before a peace summit with Krushchev; many people suspected the CIA of intentionally setting up the incident to sabotage chances for peace with Russia. Dulles had promised him that the aircraft was safe from Soviet anti-aircraft missiles.
Another target of CIA brutality was Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected leader of Congo. Lumbumba wanted to liberate his people from exploitation by Belgium and U.S. colonialism. He explicitly aimed to avoid subservience to either the U.S. or the USSR, but he still fell victim to Cold War hysteria and to the opposition of mining interests. President Eisenhower, who by the end of his presidency was "sick, tired, and cranky" gave direct approval to "eliminate" Lumumba. The New York Times and other publications denounced Lumbumba as being corrupt and unstable. (One of the NY Times reporters who covered Congo was Paul Hofmann, who had been a top aid to notorious Nazi general and convicted mass murderer Kurt Malzer. Hofmann was associated with CIA operative Jim Angleton.) The CIA worked with Beligan intelligence to engineer a coup. But removing him from office was not enough. The CIA "recruited two cutthroats from the European underworld .. such loathsome mercenaries that even their CIA handlers found them 'unsavory.'" Lumumba ended up being beaten on camera. (The section is painful to read.) Later, he was beaten to death, apparently by order of the CIA. When President Kennedy heard the news -- over a month after the fact -- he was heart-broken. The scandal caused world-wide condemnation but the CIA denied responsibility. Talbot writes:
With one of Africa's brightest lights extinguished, the Congo slid into an endless nightmare of tyranny and corruption. Propped up by the United States, Mobutu began a thirty-year dictatorship that looted the country of its wealth and left the nation in ruins."
Both Alan Dulles and CIA operative Larry Devlin (who had been partly responsible for the coup and assassination) later admitted that the CIA had over-reacted in the Congo.
The Bay of Pigs disaster humiliated the CIA and hardened JFK's opposition to the agency. Investigations revealed that the invasion was poorly planned, with mediocre people in charge. Dulles and the CIA tried to suppress the facts. The CIA had been counting on JFK to send in troops to back up the invaders, but JFK refused.
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