H-Diplo Article Review 20 17 Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Web and Production Editor: George Fujii @HDiplo Article Review No. 716 28 September 2017 Piero Gleijeses. “The CIA’s Paramilitary Operations during the Cold War: An Assessment.” Cold War History 16:3 (2016): 291-306. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2016.1177513. URL: http://tiny.cc/AR716 Review by David Johnson Lee, Temple University he work of Piero Gleijeses spans continents, asking broad questions in a manner any historian should envy. His work on Guatemala has given scholars greater insight into the early Cold-War activity of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the perspective of both policymakers and Guatemalan T1 actors. His more recent books on Cuba, the United States, and Southern Africa are a landmark in writing the history of the Cold War outside of the Cold-War frame, showing the foreign policy of Cuba as a truly revolutionary force pivotal in undermining apartheid.2 His recent article in Cold War History, “The CIA’s Paramilitary Operations during the Cold War: An Assessment,” spans the trajectory of his work from the beginning to the end of the Cold War. The article’s mission is bold: to address the “meaning of success and failure” of the CIA’s operations in terms of the “national interest” of the United States (291). Gleijeses chooses to focus on paramilitary operations instead of economic or political intervention as these “tend to be the most intrusive and controversial” (291). He defines his analysis of the success of paramilitary operations on narrow grounds—whether they met the objectives set by the president—as well as broad ones—whether they served the national interest of the United States. He begins with the operation to foment anti-Communist rebellion in Albania during the Truman administration, controverting the “cliché” that Harry S. Truman opposed paramilitary force. This operation, a “foolhardy endeavor,” lasted six years with little other effect than costing hundreds of Albanian lives (293). Curiously, this is the only operation that Gleijeses allows may have been morally if not operationally justified, thanks to the Albanian government’s brutality (305). Next he discusses Operation Paper, an operation based in northern Burma and led by general 1 Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 2 Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). H-Diplo Article Review Li Mi, designed to force Chinese troop diversion during the Korean War. This too proved unsuccessful, as the Chinese nationalist forces were more interested in protecting poppy fields and looting Burmese villages than in invading China. After these failed operations, Gleijeses turns to Guatemala, one of the most successful CIA operations in terms of short-term objectives and disastrous in terms of its long-term effects. He writes that the CIA overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz not because of fear of a Communist takeover, but rather because “the cost of destroying the Arbenz government was so low” (295). Analysis then turns to Cuba and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which he describes as “the only operation in which the agency was disloyal to the president of the United States” (296). For President John F. Kennedy, the fallback plan for the Bay of Pigs invaders was a guerrilla war. For the CIA under Allen Dulles, it was a full-scale U.S. invasion. The Cuban exiles’ invasion proved too short-lived to launch either guerrilla war or a U.S. invasion, and so was succeeded by the economic and political sabotage of Operation Mongoose as a means of punishing Cuba’s Fidel Castro in lieu of regime change. In the case of Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana, Gleijeses argues that Kennedy was less concerned about Jagan’s potential Communist sympathies per se, than with his desire for Cold-War neutrality, which was tantamount to Communism in the heated atmosphere of the time. There too, the low costs of regime change trumped any calls for more nuanced strategy of negotiation or accommodation. The 1970s marked the beginning of a new era, when Congressional and public concern began to call into question the role of the CIA. Thanks to the the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment mandating CIA reporting of covert operations and the 1975 Church Committee investigating previous operations, the previous executive blank check was rescinded and Congressional oversight tightened the reins on operations. This became a major sticking point in Angola, where 36,000 Cuban soldiers intervened following the collapse of the Portuguese empire. The Senate’s refusal to endorse the proposed paramilitary response sprang from fears of U.S. involvement in another Vietnam, but also an increased cost consciousness: Senator Jesse Helms asserted that the operation would simply be “throwing good money after bad” (300). With the Ronald Reagan presidency, the CIA experienced a “second golden age” (301). In discussing the Reagan presidency, the article examines the changed political circumstances in which Reagan carried out his anti-Communist crusade. A true believer in anti-Communism and covert operations, Reagan was willing to ignore public opinion that rejected U.S. intervention in Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan. The U.S. press, however, was for the first time ready and willing to report on covert activities abroad, discarding its docile and compliant role of decades past. This proved most consequential in Central America, according to Gleijeses, as the Iran-Contra scandal that was widely disseminated in the media may well have prevented a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. The Contras in Nicaragua, Gleijeses asserts, counted on the imminence of a U.S. invasion that would never come. Their ranks swelled based on a belief “that the United States would win the war for them” (304). Though Gleijeses is right to emphasize the importance of public opinion in constraining Reagan, he oversimplifies the nature of Nicaraguan support for the Contras, which grew out of local causes more than desire for U.S. intervention. Here as elsewhere in the article, he focuses on U.S. perspectives over those of other actors, unlike in much of his other scholarship. In attempting to evaluate the ultimate success or failure of U.S. paramilitary operations, Gleijeses repeatedly emphasizes their relatively low monetary cost as source of appeal for policymakers. Even failed operations had very low political or diplomatic costs, which discouraged politicians from learning from prior mishaps. They also cost very few American lives, as no more than a dozen Americans died in the numerous operations over the 50-year period analyzed in the essay (304). Gleijeses hints at but does not directly consider other costs H-Diplo Article Review beyond lives and treasure in these operations, for instance the growth of the imperial presidency or the loss of trust in government concomitant with the expansion of secrecy CIA operations required. After thus chalking up a rough balance sheet, Gleijeses delivers his conclusion: “Success—achieving the goals set by U.S. policymakers – was often more costly than failure” (305). This was most salient in the case of Iran, where the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammaed Mosaddeq earned the enmity of nationalists and Islamic revolutionaries, eventually bringing about the American hostage crisis and decades of hostility toward the United States. Even more devastating was ‘collateral damage’ from ostensibly successful operations. This includes death tolls in Guatemala following the decades-long civil war that the Arbenz coup helped initiate, as well as the depredations of a “monster” such as rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in Angola (307). Gleijeses’s analysis paints in broad strokes a damning picture of U.S. paramilitary options, which were successful only in short-term financial savings, and devastating in terms of their long-term effects. He points to other intangible but real consequences to the reliance on paramilitary operations, such as the way they undercut the more complicated option of negotiating with Third World nationalists that might have contributed to rather than undermined global peace and stability. In considering consequences, further consideration should be given to the long-term effects on the building of international institutions of covert operations, as they tended to undermine the atmosphere of trust and cooperation that was necessary for such institutions to grow. Ultimately, the questions Gleijeses raises are far broader than his short piece can answer, but his other work provides a model for how historians can consider such questions with scholarly rigor. David Johnson Lee teaches U.S. and Latin American history at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is completing a book about post-1960s development, human rights, and democratization in Nicaragua. © 2017 The Authors | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License .