The CIA's Holy

The CIA’s Holy War No espionage operation or covert action was deemed too extreme by a CIA that saw only friends or enemies By Stephen Kinzer s the Cold War entered tem,” he recalled. “As it turned out, the image itsA hottest phase in the early 1950s, a hard- was an illusion. The specter of a power- line CIA officer named Harry Rositzke was ful Russia was remote from the reality of a given one of America’s most urgent jobs. country weakened by war, with a shattered From a base in Munich he coordinated a economy, an overtaxed civilian and military staggering array of covert operations aimed bureaucracy, and large areas of civil unrest. at weakening the Soviet Union. He ran spies, The illusory image was at least partly due to directed sabotage operations, and sent many a failure of intelligence.” operatives to their deaths on missions behind American covert operations during the the Iron Curtain. It was the hardest and most Cold War, run mainly by the Central Intel- brutal kind of work, but Rositzke, his supe- ligence Agency, were breathtaking in scope riors, and their bosses in the White House and ambition. They aimed not only to bleed believed it was urgently necessary to prevent the Soviet Union, but also to impose govern- MAGES the very extermination of the United States. ments subservient to the United States wher- I ETTY Decades later, looking back over his ever possible, overthrow defiant ones, and G TION/ C career, Rositzke concluded that it had all punish anyone in the world who questioned E been pointless and even counter-productive. America’s foreign policy. Even more aston- LL MAGES CO MAGES The central effort in CIA history—the secret ishing is how misbegotten most of these I E F war against the Soviet Union—was motivat- operations look from the perspective of his- I HE L HE ed not by reality, he wrote in a memoir, but tory. They not only devastated many of the T by “hysteria and paranoia.” target countries, but also spread anti-Ameri- “The Cold War became a holy war against can passion, weakening the national security the infidels, a defense of free God-fearing of the United States. Their origin lay not in men against the atheistic Communist sys- sober assessments of the world, but in what WHITMORE/ JAMES BY PHOTO MORE DOES THE WHERE USE THEY HERE GOES CREDIT PHOTO MORE DOES THE WHERE USE THEY HERE GOES CREDIT PHOTO 46 AMERICAN HISTORY Hurrah for Shah Iranians cheer the Shah’s return to Tehran in August 1953 after a CIA- backed coup took down freely elected Prime Minister Mossadegh. PHOTO CREDIT GOES HERE THEY USE WHERE THE DOES MORE DOES THE WHERE USE THEY HERE GOES CREDIT PHOTO MORE DOES THE WHERE USE THEY HERE GOES CREDIT PHOTO JUNE 2016 47 Rositzke called “emotional excitability” and as the OSS had during wartime—engaged Global Ambition “systematic delusions of persecution.” not simply in espionage but also subversion, Allen Dulles, in America’s approach to intelligence after bribery, intimidation, sabotage, violence and his CIA office in World War II was shaped by two coinciding “regime change.” The appointment of Dulles 1954, served in realities. First was the excruciating boredom was also ominous in another way. Eisenhow- the OSS in World that spread through the corps of former spies er had appointed John Foster Dulles, Allen’s War II and was and covert operatives who had served in the older brother, as Secretary of State. This was CIA chief from wartime Office of Strategic Services, Ameri- the only time in history that siblings directed 1953 to 1961. ca’s first true intelligence agency. After years the overt and covert sides of American for- of death-defying derring-do, running opera- eign policy. Under other circumstances, the tions against Axis powers that placed them State Department might have served as a and their agents on the edge of death every check on the CIA’s wildest impulses. Instead, day, they found themselves back in their for most of the 1950s the Dulles brothers jobs as Wall Street lawyers, stockbrokers and forged them into a single blunt instrument. investment bankers. Many of them—includ- Although the two brothers saw the ing Allen Dulles, who had been chief of the world in precisely the same way and worked OSS station in Switzerland during the war— intimately together, all who knew them spent long hours reminiscing about their remarked on how different they were in adventures and dreaming of ways to return personality. The elder, John Foster, was sol- to the cloak-and-dagger world. itary, imperious, dour, unfriendly, self-righ- The second reality that shaped Ameri- teous and socially awkward. Allen was can intelligence in the post-war era was the the opposite: a sparkling personality and emergence of a hostile Soviet Union. It quick- charming storyteller who had dozens of ly came to be seen not simply as a rival or mistresses ranging from Clare Booth Luce adversary, but a barbaric and evil force bent to Queen Frederika of Greece. The brothers on destroying the United States and free life lived profoundly different lives while work- everywhere. Against such an enemy, any and ing together to shape the world. all forms of resistance seemed justified. This Communism was the Dulles brothers’ gave OSS veterans their chance to return to central enemy, but directly attacking its the field of battle they so deeply missed. main centers—the Soviet Union and “Red China”—was out of the question. Recogniz- ing that fact, the CIA sought other enemies. It found them in countries that proclaimed themselves neutrals in the Cold War. “America’s policy is global,” Secretary of n 1947 Dulles helped draft the State Dulles told President Sukarno of Indo- National Security Act, which nesia, one of the neutralist leaders he and created the Central Intelligence his brother abhorred. “You must be on one IAgency. This CIA was radically different side or another. Neutralism is immoral.” from other Western secret services, especially Two perceptions shaped the Dulles those of Great Britain, widely considered the brothers’ approach to the world. First, they world’s best. Those services were shaped considered neutralist leaders to be enemies around the principle that intelligence gather- who were secretly in league with the Krem- ing and analysis must be kept strictly separate lin. Second, they believed that the Soviet from covert action, to avoid the temptation of threat—and by extension the threat from skewing intelligence reports so they would neutralist countries—was so great that it lead to the conclusion that covert action was justified any counter-operations, no matter necessary. The CIA was created without this how violent or extreme. firewall. Indeed, Dulles conceived it as an “It is now clear that we are facing an agency designed not to help American leaders implacable enemy whose avowed objective MORE DOES THE HERE MORE DOES THE HERE understand the world, but to help them change is world domination by whatever means and W W it—by any means necessary. at whatever cost,” General James Doolittle Soon after his inauguration in 1953, Pres- wrote in a secret 1954 report to President ident Dwight Eisenhower named Dulles to Eisenhower. “If the United States is to sur- REDIT GOES HERE THEY USE USE THEY HERE GOES REDIT USE THEY HERE GOES REDIT direct the agency he had helped create. This vive, longstanding concepts of ‘fair play’ C C HOTO HOTO HOTO guaranteed that the CIA would behave much must be reconsidered…It may be necessary MORE DOES THE WHERE USE THEY HERE GOES CREDIT PHOTO P MORE DOES THE WHERE USE THEY HERE GOES CREDIT PHOTO P 48 AMERICAN HISTORY PHOTO CREDIT GOES HERE THEY USE WHERE THE DOES MORE PHOTO CREDIT GOES HERE THEY USE WHERE THE DOES MORE CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ASSOCIATED PRESS (2); EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ITAR-TASS PHOTO AGENCY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO Khrushchev. leader Soviet with dealing for favor outof fell 1956, in the White House at feted Sukarno, Indonesia’s No! Sukarno coup. CIA-backed a in died Diem 1963 In 1957. in Dulles Foster John and meets Ike Vietnam of South President Diem Dilemma Diem JUNE 2016 49 PHOTO CREDIT GOES HERE THEY USE WHERE THE DOES MORE DOES THE WHERE USE THEY HERE GOES CREDIT PHOTO MORE DOES THE WHERE USE THEY HERE GOES CREDIT PHOTO that the American people be made acquaint- ed with, understand and support this funda- mentally repugnant philosophy.” Eisenhower agreed. “I have come to the conclusion that some of our traditional ideas of international sportsmanship are scarcely applicable in the morass in which the world now flounders,” he wrote. No one knew it at the time, but Eisenhow- er was an enthusiastic supporter of the CIA’s most radical schemes. Like the Dulles brothers, he had been shaped by his World War II experience. He saw covert action as a kind of peace project—a way the United States could work, short of war, its will in the world. President Truman used the CIA for covert action, including against Communist labor unions in France and influencing Italy’s 1948 election. He refused, however, to approve any proposal aimed at overthrowing a govern- ment. Eisenhower had no such scruple. The first two foreign leaders the CIA set out to overthrow after Eisenhower’s inauguration had both tormented the Dulles brothers when they were lawyers at the legendary Geneva Jitters firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. The first, Prime With the French Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, had been under siege at instrumental in killing a huge contract Allen Dien Bien Phu in Dulles had negotiated between Iran and one August 1954 John of his clients, an engineering consortium Foster Dulles and called Overseas Consultants Inc.

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