A CIA officer who called himself Abe was one of the first people David Atlee Phillips met after he reported for duty at Langley, Virginia, in the autumn of 1970. Phillips, a veteran covert operative, had been chosen to help run the CIA’s subversive campaign against President-elect Salvador Allende of Chile. Abe briefed him on the plan, which was to sow chaos for a few weeks in the hope of setting off a revolution or military coup. Phillips, who had edited a newspaper in Chile and knew the country well, said he doubted the wisdom of trying to block Allende’s rise to power and, besides that, didn’t think it could be done. To his surprise, Abe agreed with him.
“I don’t understand,” Phillips said. “Why should we be doing this, especially when we believe it won’t work?”
“Understand?” Abe mused in reply, taking off his bifocals and polishing them. “Some time ago, I returned with Dick Helms from a meeting downtown. On the way back the car was tied up in traffic almost half an hour, and Helms and I talked about the assignment he had just been given. I ended by saying to Helms, ‘I don’t understand.’ Well, you know what Helms said? He looked at me and said, ’Abe, there’s something I’ve had to learn to understand. I’ve had to learn to understand presidents.’ So I guess you don’t really need to understand, as long as you understand what the President ordered.”
The coups in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were all “what the President ordered.” They were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them, authorized by the 1947 law that created the CIA and assigned it “duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws of the United States.
“The finger should have been pointed at presidents, and not the intelligence group,” Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona complained after the CIA was vilified for fomenting these coups.
Their second common feature is that in all four cases, the United States played the decisive role in a regime’s fall. It did not simply give insurgents tacit encouragement or discreet advice. American agents engaged in complex, well-financed campaigns to bring down the governments of Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile. None would have fallen—certainly not in the same way or at the same time—if Washington had not acted as it did.
Each of these four coups was launched against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the arguable exception of South Vietnam), and each ultimately led to the installation of a repressive dictatorship. They could be seen as at least temporary Cold War victories for the United States, which at the time seemed quite significant. Beyond that, however, it is hard to see them as successful. Part of the reason is that after the Americans won their victories, they proved unable or unwilling to control the regimes they helped install. The United States devoted enormous amounts of time, energy, and money to plots against elected governments but very little to ensuring that the new regimes were democratic or responsive to the needs of their people. Whatever else these operations may have been, they were not victories for democracy. They led to the fall of leaders who embraced American ideals, and the imposition of others who detested everything Americans hold dear.
The reason was straightforward. When people in countries like Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were free to speak, many criticized the United States and supported political movements that placed their own national interests ahead of those of outside powers. Once these critical voices were forcibly silenced, Americans were able to believe that anti-American feelings had disappeared. The truth was quite different. Those feelings festered and became steadily more intense.
Soon after the coup in Guatemala, Ambassador John Peurifoy appeared before a congressional committee in Washington. In a single pithy sentence, he explained why the United States so resolutely opposed nationalist regimes in developing countries. “Communism is directed by the Kremlin all over the world,” he said, “and anyone who thinks differently doesn’t know what he is talking about.”
That conviction was widely shared in Washington during the Cold War. Presidents and others had no doubt the Soviets were manipulating Mossadegh, Arbenz, and Allende. That turned out to have been wrong. The three leaders had differing views of Marxism—Mossadegh detested it, Arbenz sympathized with it, Allende embraced it—but they were nationalists above all. Each was driven mainly by a desire to recover control over natural resources, not to serve world Communism, as Americans believed. Why did the United States so misjudge them?
The experiences of the first half of the twentieth century deeply shaped generations of American leaders. Bolshevism triumphed in Russia, and then the Nazis tried to conquer the world. Once Nazism was defeated, the Soviet Union began subduing countries in Eastern Europe. In the minds of many Americans, Soviet Communism assumed the role Nazism had played, that of a fanatic ideology bent relentlessly on world domination.
Also still vivid in the Western imagination was the disastrous policy of appeasement that European powers had used during the 1930s in an effort to avoid conflict with the Nazis. Appeasement gave a deceitful enemy time to prepare for an aggressive war. Its failure taught Americans of the World War II generation that some enemies must be ruthlessly opposed. That was certainly true of the Nazis. It may even have been true of international Communism. The great error Americans made was not in overestimating the Soviet threat but in assuming that nationalist challenges were part of it.
“There is a graveyard smell to Chile, the fumes of democracy in decomposition,” Ambassador Edward Korry, who as a young journalist had covered Soviet takeovers in Eastern Europe, wrote in a cable as Allende was taking power. “They stank in my nostrils in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and they are no less sickening today.”
American leaders were convinced that the Soviets were plotting to take over Asia and Latin America the way they had taken over Eastern Europe. That has proven wrong. Shattered by war, the Soviets had strategic reasons to want buffer states in Eastern Europe. They were less interested in dominating faraway places. No historical evidence has ever emerged to support the Americans’ conviction that they were planning to subvert or seize Iran in the 1950s. They were not manipulating or even paying attention to the Arbenz government in Guatemala. The North Vietnamese regime and the National Liberation Front were not their puppets. In Chile, far from goading Allende toward radicalism, they and the Chinese repeatedly urged him to act more moderately.
American leaders might be forgiven for intervening in countries about which they were so ignorant. What is harder to justify is their refusal to listen to their own intelligence agents. The chiefs of the CIA stations in Tehran, Guatemala City, Saigon, and Santiago explicitly warned against staging the coups. Officials in Washington paid no heed. They rejected or ignored all intelligence reports that contradicted what they instinctively believed.
Americans who think about and make foreign policy have traditionally been Eurocentric. Most of what they understand about the world comes from their knowledge of European history and diplomatic tradition. They grasp the nature of alliances, big-power rivalries, and wars of conquest. The passionate desire of people in poor countries to assert control over their natural resources, however, has never been an issue in Europe. This hugely powerful phenomenon, which pushed developing countries into conflict with the United States during the Cold War, lay completely outside the experience of most American leaders. Henry Kissinger spoke for them, eloquently as always, after Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés accused him of knowing nothing about the Southern Hemisphere.
“No, and I don’t care,” Kissinger replied. “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”
This attitude made it easy for powerful Americans to misunderstand why nationalist movements arose in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile. Behind these movements, they saw only the hand of Moscow. That made intervention seem almost a form of self-defense.
In 1954, President Eisenhower secretly named James Doolittle, a celebrated air force general who had retired and become a Shell Oil executive, to conduct “a comprehensive study of covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency.” In his confidential report, Doolittle concluded that because the Soviet threat was so profound, the United States must fight back with no quarter.
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counter-espionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.
Doolittle’s view of the Soviet threat was not more extreme than that of many others in Washington. It had an eminently rational basis. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviets brazenly intervened to impose pro-Moscow regimes on unwilling nations in Eastern Europe. At the same time, nationalist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America began challenging the power of Western corporations and governments. American leaders had no doubt that these two developments were part of a single plan devised by the Soviets. They saw upheaval in the developing world through the lens of their European experiences.
John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and others who shaped United States foreign policy during the Cold War were utterly uninterested in the details of life in individual countries, and cared not the slightest whether the regimes that ruled them were dictatorships, democracies, or something in between. Their world was defined by a single fact, the Cold War confrontation between Moscow and Washington. Nations existed for them not as entities with unique histories, cultures, and challenges but as battlegrounds in a global life-or-death struggle. All that mattered was how vigorously each country supported the United States and opposed the Soviet Union.
Dulles was tragically mistaken in his view that the Kremlin lay behind the emergence of nationalism in the developing world. He could at least, however, claim consistency in his uncompromising opposition to every nationalist, leftist, or Marxist regime on earth. Nixon and Kissinger could not. While they were working obsessively to force Salvador Allende from power—and while they supported anti-Communist dictators from Paraguay to Bangladesh—they were building realistic, cooperative relationships with the Soviet Union and China. The sophisticated pragmatism that guided them in their policy of detente did not extend to countries that were far less threatening to the United States. When they faced challenges from weak, vulnerable nations like Chile, they reacted with blind emotion rather than the cool assessment of longterm interest that guided their approach to Moscow and Beijing.
AFTER THE 1953 COUP IN IRAN, THE TRIUMPHANT SHAH ORDERED THE execution of several dozen military officers and student leaders who had been closely associated with Mohammad Mossadegh, and also of Hussein Fatemi, Mossadegh’s foreign minister. Soon afterward, with help from the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, the shah created a secret police force called Savak, which became infamous for its brutality. Among its most notorious directors was General Nematollah Nassiri, who as a colonel had played an important role in Operation Ajax.
It would have been too risky for the shah to order Mossadegh executed. Instead he arranged for the old man to be tried for treason and found guilty. Mossadegh was sentenced to three years in prison and the rest of his life under house arrest in his home village of Ahmad Abad. He served his sentence in full and died in 1967, at the age of eighty-five.
Once the shah was back on his throne, he moved to consolidate his power. The first obstacle he faced was Prime Minister Fazlollah Zahedi. Like Mossadegh, Zahedi was a strong figure who believed that prime ministers, not kings, should run Iran. He clashed repeatedly with the shah. Ultimately he lost their confrontation, and took a diplomatic post in Switzerland. From that moment, the shah was free to shape Iran as he wished.
He did so in close cooperation with the United States, which became Iran’s most important political, economic, and military partner. This alliance greatly strengthened his government, but it also embittered many Iranians who had long considered the United States a beacon of democracy. The role of the United States in overthrowing Mossadegh and its long, uncritical embrace of the shah led to the rise of anti-Americanism, a new phenomenon in Iran.
“When Mossadegh and Persia started basic reforms, we became alarmed,” wrote Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who visited Iran both before and after the coup. “We united with the British to destroy him; we succeeded; and ever since, our name has not been an honored one in the Middle East.”
One of the first tangible benefits the United States reaped from Operation Ajax was a share of Iran’s oil wealth. The British expected that once Mossadegh was gone, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which they renamed British Petroleum, would resume its old monopoly. To John Foster Dulles, though, that seemed unfair. Americans had, after all, done the dirty work in Iran, and he believed they deserved some compensation.
Dulles commissioned his old law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, to work out a new arrangement. Under its provisions, British Petroleum ended up with 40 percent of the shares in the new National Iranian Oil Company, American companies received 40 percent, and the remainder was divided among European companies. This consortium agreed to share its profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis. In the end, then, the British wound up with considerably less than they would have had if they had accepted Iran’s demand for an equal share of oil profits in the late 1940s.
The main results of the 1953 coup were the end of democracy in Iran and the emergence, in its place, of a royal dictatorship that, a quarter of a century later, set off a bitterly anti-American revolution. “Operation Ajax locked the United States into a special relationship with the Shah and signaled the powerful entrance of American intelligence and military activity into Iran,” the historian James A. Bill concluded. “The US intervention alienated important generations of Iranians from America, and was the first fundamental step in the eventual rupture of Iranian-American relations in the revolution of 1978-79.”
The shah did not tolerate dissent and repressed opposition newspapers, political parties, trade unions, and civic groups. As a result, the only place Iranian dissidents could find a home was in mosques and religious schools, many of which were controlled by obscurantist clerics. Through their uncompromising resistance to the regime, these clerics won the popular support that secular figures never achieved. That made it all but inevitable that when revolution finally broke out in Iran, clerics would lead it.
After the 1953 coup, diplomats and intelligence agents at the American embassy in Tehran fell into the habit of relying for information almost exclusively on the royal court. As a result, they were blind to the growing threat in Iran. In the summer of 1977, as a broad coalition of antishah groups launched its historic challenge to his regime, the CIA predicted, in a confidential assessment, that “the Shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s. . . and there will be no radical changes in Iranian political behavior in the near future.”
John F. Kennedy had prodded the shah to change his ways, but the shah outlasted him. Subsequent presidents were happy to take his money and encourage his excesses. Richard Nixon, who with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger developed a strategy of cooperating with dictators who allowed their countries to be used as platforms for the projection of American power, made him an ally. In 1975 Gerald Ford and Kissinger received him in the White House. Two years later, Jimmy Carter did the same.
“If ever there was a country which has blossomed forth under enlightened leadership,” Carter said in his banquet toast to the shah, “it would be the ancient empire of Persia.”
Soon after that banquet, angry crowds began surging through the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities crying “Death to the American shah!” That amazed many in the United States. Worse shocks lay ahead. The cleric who emerged as the revolution’s guiding figure, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, turned out to be bitterly anti-Western. His movement became so powerful that at the beginning of 1979, it forced the shah to flee into exile. A few months later, the new Khomeini regime sanctioned the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran and the taking of American diplomats as hostage.
The hostage crisis deeply humiliated the United States, destroyed Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and turned millions of Americans into Iran haters. Because most Americans did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953, few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they called “the great Satan.”
Years later, one of the Iranian militants involved in the embassy takeover wrote an article explaining why he and his comrades had carried it out. It was, he said, a delayed reaction to Operation Ajax, when CIA agents working inside the American embassy staged a coup that brought the shah back to power after he had fled the country.
“Such was to be our fate again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible,” the former militant recalled. “We now had to reverse the irreversible.”
Like many American “regime change” operations, Operation Ajax seemed like a success at first. The United States rid itself of a government it did not like and imposed one that it did. Mohammad Reza Shah, the restored ruler, was loyally pro-American and warmly welcomed Gulf, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Texaco, and Mobil to Iran.
From the vantage point of history, however, this operation had tragic long-term results. It brought Iran under the shah’s harsh rule for a quarter of a century. His repression ultimately set off a revolution that brought radical fundamentalists to power. Not satisfied with the humiliation they visited on the United States by holding fifty-four American diplomats hostage for fourteen months, these radicals sponsored deadly acts of terror against Western targets, among them a United States Marines barracks in Saudi Arabia and a Jewish community center in Argentina. Their example inspired Muslim fanatics around the world, including in neighboring Afghanistan, where the Taliban gave sanctuary to militants who carried out devastating attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. None of this, as one Iranian diplomat wrote half a century after Operation Ajax, might have happened if Mossadegh had not been overthrown.
It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup’s legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the US embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran. . . .
The 1953 coup and its consequences [were] the starting point for the political alignments in today’s Middle East and inner Asia. With hindsight, can anyone say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953?
GUATEMALA IS A FAR SMALLER, WEAKER, AND MORE ISOLATED COUNTRY THAN Iran, but the leader the United States imposed after the 1954 coup, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, followed a repressive course much like the shah’s. During his first weeks in power, he abolished the banana workers’ federation, revoked the Agrarian Reform Law, banned all political parties and peasant groups, and ordered the arrest of thousands of suspected leftists. His secret police chief, who had held the same office under the former dictator Jorge Ubico, outlawed subversive literature, specifically including all works by Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo. With this burst of repression, the foundation was laid for a police state that plunged Guatemala into bloody tragedy over the following decades.
On October 10, 1954, Castillo Armas summoned Guatemalan voters to the polls. There was one question on the ballot: “Are you in favor of Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas continuing in the Presidency of the Republic for a term to be fixed by the Constituent Assembly?” According to official results, there were 485,531 votes in favor and just 393 opposed.
Castillo Armas was not an especially bright or honest man, and in the years after the coup he became enmeshed in webs of corruption and intrigue. On the evening of July 27, 1957, as he walked down a corridor toward dinner at his official residence, he was shot dead. Seconds later, someone killed the assassin. There was no serious investigation.
An even sadder end awaited Jacobo Arbenz. The man who directed his overthrow, John Foster Dulles, was determined to convince the world that Arbenz had been a Communist all along, and wished him to settle in a Soviet-bloc country. He did everything he could to push Arbenz to that choice. First he arranged for Mexico to send the former president packing. From there Arbenz traveled to Switzerland, where as the son of a Swiss emigrant he was entitled to citizenship. Under American pressure, however, the Swiss found a way to deny him his birthright. Then he moved to Paris, where in a newspaper interview he mused about a possible return to power. His French visa was not renewed. Finally he landed in Prague, just the kind of place Dulles wanted him to choose. He was unhappy there. In the years that followed, ever more depressed, he drifted to Uruguay, Cuba, and back to Mexico. On January 27, 1971, he drowned in a bathtub at his apartment in Mexico City. He was fifty-eight years old.
Despite what Dulles and his comrades believed, American security in no way required Arbenz’s overthrow. He was universally expected to step down at the end of his term, in 1957, and several candidates—all more moderate—were already maneuvering to succeed him. Yet he was a passionate reformer, and he fell because his reforms, in the historian Richard Immerman’s words, “could not be translated into the Cold War vocabulary of absolutes.”
Dulles concluded that he had to destroy the Arbenz government for two reasons: because it was molesting United Fruit and because it seemed to be leading Guatemala out of the American orbit and toward Communism. Historians have argued over which of these motives was more important. The most likely truth is that they merged completely in Dulles’s mind. Each reinforced and proved the other.
Four decades after the coup, the CIA hired an independent historian, Nick Cullather, to examine long-secret documents about Operation Success and write a full account of it. After an exhaustive investigation, Cullather concluded that the United States had overthrown the government of a country about which it knew almost nothing.
[American] officials had only a dim idea of what had occurred in Guatemala before Jacobo Arbenz Guzman came to power in 1950. Historians regard the events of the 1940s and 1950s as following a centuriesold cycle of progressive change and conservative reaction, but officers in the [CIA] Directorate of Plans believed they were witnessing something new. For the first time, Communists had targeted a country “in America’s backyard” for subversion and transformation into a “denied area.” When comparing what they saw to past experience, they were more apt to draw parallels to Korea, Russia or Eastern Europe than to Central America. They saw events not in a Guatemalan context, but as part of a global pattern of Communist activity.
Many Guatemalans were naturally outraged by the coup, and after it became clear that democracy would not return to their country on its own, some turned to revolution. In 1960, groups of soldiers and young officers seized two mid-size barracks in a coordinated uprising. Government forces suppressed it, but some rebel officers took to the hills and joined with peasants to form guerrilla bands. Later a general who had been Arbenz’s defense minister formed another rebel group. In the heady months and years after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, thousands of Guatemalans took up arms against their government.
To combat this threat, the Guatemalan army used such brutal tactics that all normal political life in the country ceased. Death squads roamed with impunity, chasing down and murdering politicians, union organizers, student activists, and peasant leaders. Thousands of people were kidnapped by what newspapers called “unknown men dressed in civilian clothes” and never seen again. Many were tortured to death on military bases. In the countryside, soldiers rampaged through villages, massacring Mayan Indians by the hundreds. This repression raged for three decades, and during that period, soldiers killed more civilians in Guatemala than in the rest of the hemisphere combined.
Between 1960 and 1990, the United States provided Guatemala with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid. Americans trained and armed the Guatemalan army and police, sent Green Beret teams to accompany soldiers on antiguerrilla missions, and dispatched planes from the Panama Canal Zone to drop napalm on suspected guerrilla hideouts. In 1968, guerrillas responded by killing two American military advisers and the United States ambassador to Guatemala, John Gordon Mein.
This bloodiest of all modern Latin American wars would not have broken out if not for Operation Success. During the decade when Guatemalans lived under democratic rule, they had legal and political ways to resolve national conflicts. After dictatorship settled over the country, all space for political debate was closed. Tensions that would have been manageable in a democratic society exploded into civil war.
The coup in Guatemala had another effect that, like many consequences of “regime change” operations, did not become clear until years later. During the Arbenz years, scores of curious Latin American leftists gravitated to Guatemala. One of them was a young Argentine doctor named Che Guevara. After the coup, Guevara flew to Mexico. There he met the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro. They discussed the events in Guatemala at great length, and from them drew a lesson that has reverberated through all of subsequent Latin America history.
Operation Success taught Cuban revolutionaries—and those from many other countries—that the United States would not accept democratic nationalism in Latin America. It gave them a decisive push toward radicalism. They resolved that once in power, they would not work with existing institutions, as Arbenz had done. Instead they would abolish the army, close Congress, decapitate the landholding class, and expel foreign-owned corporations.
“Cuba is not Guatemala!” Castro liked to shout when he taunted the United States for its inability to overthrow him during the 1960s.
Oddly enough, one of the losers in Operation Success was United Fruit, the company that had drawn Americans into Guatemala in the first place. Sam Zemurray, the visionary who dominated United Fruit for so long, was ailing—he died in 1961—and without him, the company seemed to lose its edge. Its profits fell and it became mired in antitrust litigation, which it finally resolved by surrendering some of its holdings in Guatemala. In 1972, after shifting many of its banana interests to other countries, it sold what remained to Del Monte. By then United Fruit had become part of the United Brands conglomerate, and when United Brands president and board chairman Eli Black killed himself in 1975 as federal prosecutors prepared to indict him for fraud and other crimes, his act mirrored the violence that was part of the company’s legacy in Guatemala.
In 1996, under the auspices of the United Nations, Guatemalan military commanders and guerrilla leaders signed a peace treaty. That did little to resolve the huge inequalities of life in Guatemala, where two percent of the people still own half the arable land, but it did end a long, horrific wave of government repression. It also led to the establishment of a Commission on Historical Clarification that was assigned to study the violence and its causes. The commission’s report put the number of dead at over 200,000, and said soldiers had killed 93 percent of them.
“Until the mid-1980s, the United States government and U.S. private companies exercised pressure to maintain the country’s archaic and unjust socioeconomic structure,” the report concluded. They had done that and more. One who seemed to grasp the dimensions of American responsibility for the horror that enveloped Guatemala was President Bill Clinton, who visited the country a few days after the historical commission issued its report.
“For the United States,” Clinton told a gathering of civic leaders in Guatemala City, “it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and wide-spread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”
THE 1963 COUP IN SOUTH VIETNAM HAD A PROFOUND EFFECT IN WASHINGton. It led many policy makers to believe that the United States had assumed a new level of responsibility for South Vietnam. If the idea of pulling American troops out had seemed crazy before the coup, it was even more so afterward. No one, Undersecretary of Defense William Bundy said, could now consider “withdrawing with the task unfinished.”
Several of the men involved in planning the coup later came to consider it tragically misbegotten. General Maxwell Taylor wrote in his memoir that from the perspective of history, it could only be seen as “a disaster, a national disaster.” Edward Landsdale said it was “a terrible, stupid thing.” William Colby, chief of CIA covert actions in East Asia and later director of the agency, called it the “worst mistake of the Vietnam War.”
The Americans who approved Diem’s overthrow did so because they were determined to win the Vietnam War, and concluded that Diem was an obstacle to victory. After all, some of them told themselves, Diem was an American creation in the first place, and since the United States had installed him in power, it should have the right to depose him when he proved unmanageable. Distasteful as that course was, it saved Kennedy and his aides from having to face the deeper question of whether the war was winnable at all.
This does not, however, explain how the coup plot took on such momentum in the late summer and fall of 1963. Even some of the men who allowed it to go forward admitted later that they could not understand how it happened. “Nobody was behind it,” Robert Kennedy marveled in 1965. “Nobody knew what we were going to do. Nobody knew what our policy was. It hadn’t been discussed.”
President Kennedy told several of his friends that if he was reelected in 1964, he would pull American troops out of South Vietnam. Whether he would have done so must remain forever unknown. On November 22, just twenty days after Diem was assassinated, Kennedy suffered the same fate. Later that week in Washington, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, showed Senator Hubert Humphrey a portrait of Diem that was hanging on his wall.
“We had a hand in killing him,” Johnson said. “Now it’s happening here.”
General Duong Van Minh, who carried out the coup, succeeded Diem as president of South Vietnam, with General Tran Van Don as minister of defense. Their government was torn by internecine feuds, many of them stemming from anger over the executions of Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu. It never managed to consolidate itself. After holding power for just three months, it was overthrown in another coup. After that, a succession of military strongmen ruled South Vietnam. Two of them, Generals Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, had played important roles in the 1963 coup.
During the mid-1960s, President Johnson escalated the American commitment to South Vietnam until more than half a million American soldiers were on duty there. The Vietnam War destroyed Johnson’s presidency and profoundly shook American society. It ended on April 30, 1975, with ignominious defeat for the United States. A total of 58,168 Americans lost their lives waging it. The Vietnamese toll was far heavier.
Diem’s overthrow was a key turning point in the Vietnam War because it drew the United States across a line of commitment. It gave powerful Americans the sense that they had developed a blood bond with South Vietnam, or incurred a debt they needed to repay. “America’s responsibility for Diem’s death haunted U.S. leaders during the years ahead, prompting them to assume a larger burden in Vietnam,” Stanley Karnow wrote. Another historian, Howard Jones, called the coup “President Kennedy’s central tragedy.”
His action set the administration on a path that tied the United States more closely to Vietnam, furthered the Communists’ revolutionary war strategy by igniting political chaos in Saigon, and obstructed his plan to bring the troops home. . . . Kennedy’s legacy was a highly volatile situation in Vietnam that, in the hands of a new leader seeking victory, lay open to full-scale military escalation. President Johnson soon Americanized the war that resulted in the death of a generation.
One intriguing question the coup raises is whether it was simply a step toward the inevitable doom of the American project in Vietnam, or whether it could have been a turning point. With Diem gone, the United States might have encouraged the formation of a broad-based civilian government. Instead, it kept strongmen in power and charged ahead with its war effort. Robert Shaplen, who covered Vietnam for The New Yorker, is among those who have wondered what might have been.
I have always blamed the Americans in part for the failure of the November 1-2 coup d’etat to be anything more than just that—it certainly did not lead to a legitimate revolution and it lacked any direction. The Americans had supported the violent change, but neither Washington nor the embassy had any sound ideas about fostering a strong new government that, in the time-worn phrase, would “capture the hearts and minds” of the people. The big war was still ahead, and the United States, having missed an opportunity after the fall of Diem either to get out of Vietnam or to help establish a firmer civilian political structure and a more broadly based economy, became more and more deeply embroiled in an unfolding tragedy.
John Foster Dulles was long dead by the time the United States suffered its final humiliation in Vietnam, but he had had a hand in it. His refusal to negotiate at Geneva in 1954, based on his mistaken view of world Communism, set the tragedy in motion. According to one biography, this was “the most bizarre performance of his Secretaryship. . . . It created consternation in Paris and London and contributed anew to the growing public image of Dulles as a maladroit, intuitive cold warrior.”
It was at Dulles’s urging that the United States had blocked the unification of Vietnam in 1956, adopted the Diem regime, and resolved to defend South Vietnam indefinitely. He bequeathed that commitment to the Kennedy administration. It led inevitably to the Diem coup, since Diem was clearly not the right partner for the United States as long as leaders in Washington wanted to fight on until victory.
After propping up Diem for so long and then discarding him so violently, Americans sank into a war that caused incalculable harm to their interests around the world. The coup bound the United States to South Vietnam in an embrace that proved disastrous to them both. In a very real sense, it was Dulles’s final legacy.
“Our American friends are remarkable organizers, brilliant technicians and excellent soldiers,” Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia observed as the Southeast Asian war reached its peak. “But their incontestable realism stops short of the realm of politics, where the attitude of the ostrich seems to them to conform best to their interests.”
AFTER THE COUP IN CHILE ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1973, GENERAL AUGUSTO Pinochet and the other officers who seized power with him moved quickly to consolidate their power. Pinochet soon became the ruling junta’s dominant figure. Several of his military rivals died unexpectedly, most notably his minister of defense, General Oscar Bonilla, who was killed in a helicopter crash in 1975. Others chose early retirement. Thus strengthened, Pinochet declared himself president of the junta and then president of the republic.
One of Pinochet’s first acts after the coup was to order a nationwide series of raids on leftists and other supporters of the deposed regime. The harshness with which this campaign was conducted, the tens of thousands of people who were arrested, the conditions under which they were held, and the fact that many were never seen again set the tone for what would be years of repression. The regime ordered summary executions for scores of leftist leaders. Many more died at the hands of soldiers and rightist thugs who swept through pro-Allende slums, called poblaciones, beating and killing as they rampaged. On October 8, Newsweek reported that city morgues in Santiago had received a total of 2,796 corpses since the coup, most with either crushed skulls or execution-style bullet wounds. Four days later, the New York Times also placed the death toll in the thousands.
Officials of the Allende government were rounded up and sent to a prison on desolate Dawson Island, in Chile’s extreme south. The junta abolished the country’s largest labor federation, which had 800,000 members; banned all political parties that had supported Allende; declared Congress in “indefinite recess”; summarily dismissed hundreds of university professors; removed all mayors and city councillors from office; and decreed a new legal code that forbade any appeal of decisions by military courts. Gleeful militiamen made bonfires of leftist books.
A long controversy surrounded the question of whether Allende was killed by rebel soldiers or committed suicide. Some who sympathized with him felt driven to promote the death-in-battle version. As the passage of time allowed a more dispassionate review of the evidence, however, most came to accept the suicide hypothesis. Allende was sixty-five years old when he died. He had been president of Chile for 1,042 days.
Pinochet moved quickly to resolve the conflicts with American companies that had contributed so decisively to hostility between Washington and Santiago. Less than a year after the coup, his government announced an agreement with Anaconda Copper under which the company would receive $253 million in cash and promissory notes for its expropriated assets. Kennecott Copper received $66.9 million. Chile also settled with ITT, paying the company $125.2 million for its interest in the Chilean Telephone Company.
In 1976, Henry Kissinger traveled to Santiago to deliver a speech to the Organization of American States. The day before his public appearance, he met privately with Pinochet to assure him that although his speech would include a few perfunctory references to human rights, it was “not aimed at Chile.”
“My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going communist,” Kissinger told Pinochet. “We welcomed the overthrow of the communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.”
Several weeks later, on September 21, 1976, a squad organized by the Chilean secret police assassinated Orlando Letelier, who had been Allende’s ambassador to the United States and foreign minister, by detonating a bomb in his car as he drove near Dupont Circle in Washington. His American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, was also killed. No such act of political terror had ever been committed in Washington, and it set off long and bitter condemnation of Pinochet’s regime. Later it became clear that Letelier’s murder was part of a wider plan, called Operation Condor, to kill opponents of Pinochet who were active outside Chile.
In 1988, after fifteen years as Chile’s dictator, Pinochet submitted to a constitutionally mandated plebiscite in which Chileans were asked whether he should remain in power for another decade. The vote was negative. Instead of giving him a legal basis to remain in power, the plebiscite set off a nationwide clamor for change. Pinochet responded by imposing a series of decrees intended to guarantee the permanent power of the military, and then allowed a presidential election. A Christian Democrat, Patricio Aylwin, won. On the day he was inaugurated, January 6, 1990, Chile entered a new era.
One of the new government’s first acts was to create the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation. In 1991 the commission produced a long and thoughtful report. Chile’s fall toward dictatorship, it concluded, began when the country found itself caught up in world politics.
Starting in the 1950s, Chile, like many countries in Latin America, saw the insertion of its domestic politics into the superpower struggle, the socalled “Cold War.” . . .
The victory of Popular Unity and President Allende in 1970 was regarded as the triumph of one of the contending superpowers, the USSR, and as a defeat for and threat to the other, the United States. Hence the United States immediately planned and engaged in a twofold policy of intervention in Chile’s internal affairs. . . . These developments are directly related to the devastating economic crisis Chile underwent starting in 1972, and were an integral and very important part of the broader crisis that broke out in 1973.
Chile slowly returned to its once-hallowed role as a beacon of democracy in South America. La Moneda, heavily damaged by bombing during the coup, was lovingly restored during the Pinochet years. Later an imposing statue of Allende was placed in front.
While Pinochet was visiting Britain in 1998, he was detained under a warrant issued by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. Courts in France, Switzerland, and Belgium also asked for his extradition. He spent 503 days under house arrest at a villa near London before the British government finally allowed him to return home. Soon after he arrived, he was stripped of the immunity he had enjoyed as a senator-for-life, and faced an array of kidnapping, torture, and murder charges.
In Washington, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence conducted an exhaustive investigation of the coup against Allende. It praised the CIA for producing accurate reports about Chile, and said the coup became possible because these reports “were either, at best, selectively used or, at worst, disregarded by policy makers when the time came to make decisions regarding U.S. covert involvement in Chile.”
The more extreme fears about the effects of Allende’s election were ill-founded; there never was a significant threat of a Soviet military presence; the “export” of Allende’s revolution was limited, and its value as a model more restricted still; and Allende was little more hospitable to activist exiles from other Latin American countries than his predecessor has been. . . . Chile was charting an independent, nationalist course.
Thirty-one years after the coup, a government-appointed commission in Chile concluded that during the years of dictatorship, “torture was a state policy, meant to repress and terrorize the population.” It identified 27,255 people who were tortured during the years of military rule, and President Ricardo Lagos announced that each of them would receive a lifetime pension. Soon afterward, a judge ordered Pinochet, then eighty-nine years old, placed under house arrest pending trial on charges of kidnapping and murder. The commander of the Chilean army, General Juan Emilio Cheyre, then made a historic admission.
“The Army of Chile has taken the difficult but irreversible decision to assume the responsibility for all punishable and morally unacceptable acts in the past that fall on it as an institution,” General Cheyre said. “Never and for no one can there be any ethical justification for human rights violations.”
What would have happened in Chile if the United States had not intervened? The Nixon administration’s nightmarish prediction—that Allende would have imposed dictatorial rule and led his country into alliance with the Soviet Union—might have materialized, but given the power of the innately conservative military and Allende’s own democratic credentials, it was highly unlikely. Civil war, which Pinochet later said he had acted to prevent, was an even more remote possibility. Chile’s long political tradition suggests that the country would have found a less violent, more constitutional way out of its conundrum. Whatever happened, the number of people arrested, tortured, and killed for political reasons during the following years would almost certainly have been far smaller.
“Left to their own devices, the Chileans just might have found the good sense to resolve their own deep-seated problems,” the historian Kenneth Maxwell wrote in a review of declassified documents related to the coup. “Allende might have fallen by his own weight, victim of his own incompetence, and not become a tragic martyr to a lost cause.”
Despite its remarkable success in reinventing its democracy, Chile remains a shattered nation. The 1973 intervention and the long period of dictatorship that followed have deeply scarred its collective psyche. Many Chileans, like many Americans and others around the world, ultimately came to believe that this was another in a line of American coups that turned out badly for almost everyone involved. Three decades afterward, Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed this consensus when he answered a question about the overthrow of Allende.
“It is not a part of American history that we are proud of,” he said.
THE COUPS IN IRAN, GUATEMALA, AND CHILE HAD MUCH IN COMMON. ALL three countries were blessed with rich natural resources, but those resources fell under foreign control. When nationalist leaders tried to take them back, the United States responded by turning their countries into bloody battlegrounds. Iran, Guatemala, and Chile were brought back into the American orbit, but at a staggering human and social cost.
In important ways, the coup in South Vietnam was unlike the other three. It was staged in a country where the United States was at war, rather than in one where it faced only a theoretical threat. The control of no great natural resource was at stake. Most poignant, the operation in Vietnam was the only time the United States helped overthrow a leader who was a friend rather than a perceived enemy.
The covert coups of the Cold War era were carried out quite differently from the invasions and stagemanaged revolutions that the United States used in deposing regimes in the period around 1900. Much of what motivated them, however, was the same. Each country whose government the United States overthrew had something Americans wanted—in most cases, either a valuable natural resource, a large consumer market, or a strategic location that would allow access to resources and markets elsewhere. Powerful businesses played just as great a role in pushing the United States to intervene abroad during the Cold War as they did during the first burst of American imperialism.
Their influence alone, however, was never enough. Americans overthrew governments only when economic interests coincided with ideological ones. In Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the American ideology was that of Christian improvement and “manifest destiny.” Decades later, in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile, it was anti-Communism. During both eras, Americans came to believe it was their right, and even their historical obligation, to lead the forces of good against those of iniquity.
“For us there are two sorts of people in the world,” John Foster Dulles once asserted. “There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others.”
Dulles spoke for American leaders from Benjamin Harrison to Richard Nixon. All believed that the twin goals of United States foreign policy should be to secure strategic advantage, for both political and commercial reasons, and to impose, promote, or encourage an ideology. The regimes they marked for death were those they considered both economically and ideologically hostile.
These coups might never have been launched, and great damage to four nations as well as to the United States might have been averted, if the White House had not been so vulnerable to the herd mentality, or “groupthink.” In each case, the president of the United States and one or two senior advisers made clear that they wished a certain government overthrown. Their determination set the tone for all that followed. Advisers and planners quibbled over operational details, but rarely over the larger question of whether overthrowing a particular government was a good idea. Everyone thought and spoke within understood limits. No one questioned the premise on which these coups were based: that regimes in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were either tools of the Kremlin or in imminent danger of falling under Soviet control.
This was the easy way out, an extreme form of intellectual laziness. The rise of nationalism in the developing world was a complex phenomenon. It had a variety of causes, and for Americans to devise a sophisticated, long-term strategy for dealing with it would have been challenging and difficult. Far easier was to categorize nationalism as simply a disguised form of Commxmist aggression, and seek to crush it wherever it reared its head.
Some of those who directed Cold War interventions, like John Foster Dulles, devoted their lives to the service of American corporate power. Others, like Henry Kissinger, had no real interest in business and even regarded it with disdain. All of them, however, believed that only malicious regimes would try to restrict or nationalize foreign companies.
Directors of large corporations were the first to wish Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador Allende overthrown. They persuaded leaders in Washington, who had somewhat different interests, to depose them. In each case, government stepped in to lead a parade that had already formed for other reasons. Ideology and economic interest combined to drive the United States to intervention.
The Americans who conceived, authorized, and carried out covert plots against the governments of Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile considered them to have been great victories. From the perspective of history, they do not look that way. In all four countries, they led to increased repression and reduced freedom. Beyond their borders, they also had profound effects. They intensified and prolonged the Cold War by polarizing the world and choking off possibilities for peaceful change. They undermined Americans’ faith in the CIA, thereby making the agency less effective. Around the world, they led millions of people to conclude that the United States was a hypocritical nation, as cynical as any other, that acted brutally to replace incipient democracies with cruel dictatorships.
“Until recently, American foreign policy had been seen as morally steadied,” Nathaniel Davis, the U.S. ambassador to Chile in 1973, wrote after the coup. “Then came a series of jolts, starting with Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Vietnam. . . . The Chilean story produced still another bump in our fall from grace.”