TWENTY-TWO

Dien Bien Phu

You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years.

—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,
May 1, 1954

While Eisenhower struggled with Bricker and McCarthy, and sought to make peace in Korea, the French position in Indochina deteriorated. The French had acquired Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) in the nineteenth century during a period of European colonial expansion. Following the fall of France in 1940, the Japanese occupied the area and remained there until Japan’s surrender in August 1945. When the French sought to reassert control, they found themselves in conflict with a wartime resistance coalition of Vietnamese nationalists and Communists under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Known as the Viet Minh, the resistance movement had been supported by the United States during the war, and had wrested control of the countryside from the Japanese.

In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. At that point the French returned in force, and bitter fighting ensued. The French Army regained control of Vietnam’s major cities, but the Viet Minh continued to dominate the countryside. In 1950, Ho again proclaimed independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and this time was recognized by the Communist governments of China and the Soviet Union. The battle for Vietnamese independence played out in the context of the Cold War.

For the French, the struggle in Indochina was a colonial war—“La guerre sale,” as it was called back in France, “the dirty war”—and the longer it went on, the less popular it became. Just as American public opinion turned against the war in Korea, the French public wanted out of Vietnam. As early as 1950, the National Assembly voted against sending draftees to fight there, and the government kept a tight rein on expenditures. The United States picked up the slack. Even before the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, the Truman administration had begun to finance French forces in Vietnam. By 1953, America had spent more than $2.6 billion ($21.2 billion currently) in military aid and had converted the war into part of the larger struggle of democracy against Communism. When Eisenhower took office, the United States appeared to have more interest in continuing the war than the French did.¹

The fact is, the French Expeditionary Force in Vietnam, some five hundred thousand men, was swallowed up in rice paddies and jungles fighting a guerrilla war against an elusive enemy who held the initiative. Commanded by the resourceful General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Viet Minh struck the French only when they were vulnerable, usually in well-prepared ambushes, and preferably at night. The cost to the French Army was high. Every year at least a third of the graduating class at Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, were killed in Vietnam. By early 1953 it was clear that France was on the defensive, and that the continued hemorrhaging of French forces could not be sustained.

Into this quagmire the government of the Fourth Republic sent General Henri Navarre with orders to reach a settlement with the Viet Minh. But Navarre was not ready to admit defeat. He switched from defense to offense, determined to lure the Viet Minh into a fixed battle in which French artillery and airpower would prove decisive. On September 28, 1953, Time magazine featured Navarre on its cover. “A year ago none of us could see victory,” an aide was quoted as saying. “Now we can see it clearly—like light at the end of a tunnel.”²

The site for Navarre’s set-piece battle would be Dien Bien Phu—a small outpost on the Laotian border. General Navarre believed he was setting a trap. The Viet Minh would be lured into attacking the well-fortified French position and would be worn down by superior firepower. There were three problems Navarre failed to anticipate: First, the fighting quality of the Viet Minh, who, like the Chinese veterans the U.S. Army encountered in Korea, were first-class soldiers, well trained, well equipped, and fighting for their country against French colonialism. Second, the ability of General Giap to concentrate his forces. Navarre assumed he would be fighting one Viet Minh division at most. As the battle developed, Giap brought more than fifty thousand soldiers into action supported by an additional one hundred thousand Vietnamese peasants to supply the combat troops. Most important, however, was the location. Dien Bien Phu (which in Vietnamese means “large administrative center on the frontier”) was a cluster of villages eight miles long and five miles wide on the floor of a valley surrounded by rough mountainous terrain. It was remote, difficult to resupply except by air, and had no strategic importance. One high-ranking French defense official likened it to a chamber pot (vase de nuit), with the French garrison on the bottom and the Viet Minh sitting on the rim above.³

In late 1953, when Eisenhower learned of Navarre’s plan to lure the enemy into battle at Dien Bien Phu, he was appalled. “You cannot do this,” he told Henri Bonnet, the French ambassador in Washington. “The fate of troops invested in an isolated fortress is almost inevitable.”⁴ Eisenhower instructed both the State and Defense departments to communicate his concern to their French counterparts, but the French took no notice. “We cannot find them [the Viet Minh] in the jungle,” Ike was told. “This will draw them out where we can then win.”⁵

Eisenhower was caught betwixt and between. On the one hand he saw the fighting in Vietnam as part of the global struggle against Communism. On the other, he deplored France’s unwillingness to grant independence to the Vietnamese. “I wholeheartedly agree,” he wrote Republican senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, “that France should announce a firm intention of establishing self-government and independence in the associated states of Indochina [Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos]. I have personally urged this upon the French authorities and secured their agreement in principle. So far the trouble has been that they have made such announcements only in an obscure and round-about fashion—instead of boldly, forthrightly, and repeatedly.”⁶

On March 13, 1954, the siege of Dien Bien Phu began. “Hell in a very small place,” French writer Bernard Fall called it.⁷ Within two days perimeter strongpoints were overrun and French airstrips immobilized by Viet Minh artillery. General Giap did not deploy his fieldpieces on the reverse slope, as is common practice in the artillery, but placed them in well-entrenched positions on the forward slope firing directly into the French position. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. The battle was over almost before it started. The fifteen-thousand-man French garrison could be supplied only by dropping supplies from aircraft flying at high altitudes, and relief columns were unable to break through. As casualties mounted and supplies dwindled, it was evident that the only hope for Dien Bien Phu—and it was a slender hope at best—was some form of American intervention.

In January the French had asked for twenty-five bombers and four hundred mechanics to maintain them. Eisenhower gave them ten planes and two hundred mechanics. Even then, Congress was skeptical. “First we give them planes, then we send men,” Senator John Stennis of Mississippi warned.⁸ Richard Russell of Georgia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, voiced similar doubts. Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, who chaired the committee, asked Ike directly: Was another president going to take the country into yet another war by the back door?⁹ Eisenhower admitted that he was “frightened about getting ground forces tied up in Indochina” and promised that the mechanics would not be in the combat zone and that he would withdraw them by June 15, 1954.¹⁰

In late March, as the French position at Dien Bien Phu eroded, General Paul Ely, the French chief of staff, came to Washington to seek additional assistance. Ely was highly regarded in American defense circles and had served as France’s representative on the NATO Standing Group when Eisenhower commanded NATO forces. Ike knew Ely well, and during a meeting at the White House agreed to provide additional C-119 Flying Boxcars that could drop napalm, “which would burn out a considerable area and help to reveal enemy artillery positions.” But he declined to offer additional support and pressed Ely for a definite statement on Vietnamese independence.¹¹

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were more forthcoming than Eisenhower. Meeting with the JCS at the Pentagon, Ely, together with Admiral Arthur Radford, who had succeeded Omar Bradley as chairman, devised a plan for massive American air support for Dien Bien Phu. Known as Operation VULTURE, the JCS plan, which quickly obtained French approval, would involve carpet bombing of the Viet Minh position by 60 B-29 bombers stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines, supported by 150 fighter-bombers from the carriers of the Seventh Fleet (Essex and Boxer) on station in the Gulf of Tonkin. Three so-called tactical atomic bombs would be used. General Nathan Twining, Air Force chief of staff, thought one would be sufficient. “You could take all day to drop a bomb, make sure you put it in the right place … and clean those Commies out of there and the band would play the ‘Marseillaise’ and the French would come marching out … in great shape.”¹²

Publicly, Eisenhower kept American options open. As Ike saw it, there was no reason to foreclose U.S. intervention, and that uncertainty might help dissuade China and the Soviet Union from becoming involved. On April 4, Eisenhower wrote Churchill (who was serving his final term as prime minister) seeking British support. “We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time,” said Eisenhower.¹³ Churchill was unimpressed. The British had given up India and were fighting guerrilla wars in Malaya and Kenya. The last thing they wanted was to be involved in another Korean-type conflict on behalf of the French.

Nevertheless, Eisenhower pressed on. At his news conference on April 7, Ike invoked what he called the “falling domino” principle. “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” By implication, if Indochina fell, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and Indonesia would follow.^{14 a}

Privately, Eisenhower was setting out the conditions for American involvement in such a way so as to ensure that it did not happen. It was typical of Ike at his best. Feint in one direction publicly, move privately in another. First, there must be an ironclad commitment by France to grant independence to the countries of Indochina. Second, the United States must be part of an international coalition, including not only Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, but Thailand and the Philippines as well. Third, the allied forces would assume direction of the war and not operate under French command. Finally, and most significantly, the United States would not send ground forces into combat without specific congressional authorization.¹⁵ There was little likelihood that any of these, let alone all four, would occur.

In addition to his own doubts, Eisenhower received reinforcement from the field. General Matthew Ridgway, who had succeeded Mac-Arthur in Korea and was now Army chief of staff, weighed in heavily against intervention. On his own authority, Ridgway dispatched a blue-ribbon team of staff officers to Vietnam to determine what intervention would involve. Their report was devastating: at least five infantry divisions, possibly ten, plus fifty-five engineering companies. (There had been six divisions in Korea.) Altogether, that meant between five hundred thousand and a million men. Draft calls would be far greater than those for Korea. In addition, local political conditions in Vietnam were much worse than in Korea, where the local population had supported American intervention. In Vietnam, because of French colonialism, that would not be the case.¹⁶ As for airpower, Ridgway told the president it was like a high-tech aspirin. It provided some immediate relief but did not cure the underlying problem.¹⁷ Eisenhower respected Ridgway’s judgment. In 1943, Ridgway had resisted Ike’s order to drop an airborne division on Rome, and Ridgway had been right. There was no reason to believe he was wrong now.

On April 26, Eisenhower wrote to his old friend General Alfred Gruenther, who now held Ike’s position at SHAPE. Gruenther had written to warn Ike against intervening in Vietnam. “Your adverse opinion exactly parallels mine,” Eisenhower replied. “As you know, you and I started more than three years ago to convince the French that they could not win in the Indochina War.” Ike told Gruenther that his administration had repeatedly advised the French that no Western power could intervene in Asia except as part of a coalition that included Asian people. “To contemplate anything else is to lay ourselves open to the charge of imperialism and colonialism or—at the very least—of objectionable paternalism. Even if we could by some sudden stroke assure the saving of the Dien Bien Phu garrison, I think that under the conditions proposed by the French, the free world would lose more than it would gain.”¹⁸

Later that day, addressing the annual meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eisenhower spoke of the necessity of achieving a modus vivendi in Vietnam. “We would hope that the logic of today’s situation would appeal to all peoples,” said Ike, “regardless of their ruthlessness, so that they see the futility of depending upon war, or the threat of war, as a means of settling international difficulty.”¹⁹ At his press conference three days later, the president was asked about his use of the term “modus vivendi” in Vietnam. “You are steering a course between two extremes,” Eisenhower responded. “One of which, I would say, would be unattainable, and the other unacceptable.” A French victory was most likely unattainable, and a total Communist victory would be unacceptable. “The most you can work out is a practical way of getting along.” He then referred to the situation in Berlin as an example.²⁰

At the meeting of the National Security Council on April 29, 1954, Eisenhower laid down the law. There would be no intervention in Vietnam. Dulles, who was in Geneva, had cabled that strong American leadership was required. Eisenhower rejected that advice. “In spite of the views of the Secretary of State,” he told the NSC, for the United States to intervene unilaterally seemed “quite beyond his comprehension.” For almost two hours Eisenhower waged a one-man battle against the statutory members of the NSC, all of whom advocated coming to France’s rescue. Admiral Radford, Vice President Nixon, Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith (on Dulles’s behalf), and Harold Stassen, the director of foreign aid, placed the issue in the Cold War context. As Stassen put it, Congress and the American people would support intervention “if the Commander-in-Chief made it clear to them that it was necessary to save Southeast Asia from Communism.”

Eisenhower remained unmoved. “It was all well and good to state that if the French collapsed the United States must move in to save Southeast Asia,” he told Stassen. “But if the French indeed collapsed and the United States moved in, we would in the eyes of many Asiatic peoples merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism.” The president noted that the Vietnamese people had no interest in fighting for the French, and as a practical matter, where would the United States find the troops to intervene? It would require a general mobilization, said Eisenhower.

Ike then upped the ante. If the United States intervened, China and perhaps the Soviet Union would come in as well. Were his advisers ready for a general war? “To go in unilaterally in Indochina or other areas of the world which were endangered, amounted to an attempt to police the entire world. If we attempted such a course of action, using our armed forces and going into areas whether we were wanted or not, we would lose all our significant support in the free world.” Unless we had reliable allies who joined us, said Ike, “the leader is just an adventurer like Genghis Khan.”

Nixon and Bedell Smith countered that American air support would encourage the French to fight on. Eisenhower would have none of it. “The cause of the free world could never win, and the United States could never survive, if we frittered away our resources in local engagements.” The discussion closed. Eisenhower did not explicitly say that the United States would not intervene, but his decision was obvious.²¹

By the beginning of May it was clear that the French position at Dien Bien Phu was hopeless. The garrison’s defensive perimeter had shrunk to an area fifteen hundred yards in diameter and there were fewer than ten thousand men available for duty—against a Viet Minh force five times that size. On May 1, Robert Cutler, the president’s national security assistant, presented Eisenhower with the Joint Chiefs’ plan for Operation VULTURE. Ike dismissed it out of hand. “I certainly do not think that the atomic bomb can be used by the United States unilaterally,” he told Cutler. “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.”²²

Eisenhower had made the final crucial decision. At any time during the last few weeks at Dien Bien Phu he could have ordered an air strike, but he refused to do so. As at D-Day, it was his decision. And in many respects, it was of far greater import. The landing on D-Day was a purely military matter. If not June 6, then sometime later. At Dien Bien Phu it was a matter of war and peace. Eisenhower overruled the highest national security officials in his administration and chose peace.

On May 7, 1954, Dien Bien Phu surrendered. The garrison numbered fewer than five thousand effectives, and the final position had been reduced to the size of a baseball field. French premier Joseph Laniel, barely able to control his voice, broke the news to the National Assembly.²³ That night all French television and radio programming was canceled in favor of the Berlioz “Requiem.” Shortly thereafter, meeting at Geneva, the foreign ministers of China, the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France worked out a settlement. The French left the scene, and Vietnam was divided. North Vietnam became a Communist state under Ho Chi Minh; in South Vietnam, an anti-Communist state was formed under Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic mandarin who had sat out World War II in the United States and was vigorously supported by American officials on the scene. As Eisenhower had hinted in his address to the Chamber of Commerce, the United States preferred partition to free elections. If the Vietnamese had been given a choice, it was clear that Ho Chi Minh would have won decisively.

Writing about Dien Bien Phu years later, Eisenhower said that he had been moved by public opinion, which was clearly opposed to American intervention, but that this factor was not decisive. Far more serious were the consequences that would have resulted from sending the American Army into Vietnam. “The presence of ever more numbers of white men in uniform would have aggravated rather than assuaged Asiatic resentments,” Ike wrote. “Among all the powerful nations of the world the United States is the only one with a tradition of anti-colonialism.” That was an asset of incalculable value. “It means our counsel is trusted where that of others may not be. It is essential to our position of leadership in a world wherein the majority of the nations have at some time or another felt the yoke of colonialism.” As Ike saw it, “the moral position of the United States was more to be guarded than the Tonkin Delta, indeed than all of Indochina.”

Eisenhower throwing out the first pitch at Griffith Stadium, April 13, 1954, with Bucky Harris and Casey Stengel standing by. (illustration credit 22.1)

Eisenhower wrote those words in 1963 for the chapter on Indochina in his memoir Mandate for Change. Whether because of space requirements, or out of deference to the Kennedy-Johnson administration, which was slowly building an American presence in Vietnam, he deleted them from the final version.²⁴ Unlike his successors, Eisenhower had served four years in the Philippines. He understood the issue of colonialism far better than they—and far better than Dulles, Radford, and Nixon for that matter. He had also seen the terror of war firsthand and was not going to lead the country into another one. “That may not have been bold leadership,” one scholar has written, “but it was wisdom.”²⁵

Eisenhower was less sure-footed when it came to dealing with Iran. In Vietnam, Ike took the lead and kept the United States out of war. In Iran, he listened to the advice that bubbled up from below and authorized the CIA-directed coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s legitimately elected prime minister, terminating democratic government in Teheran and installing what became the twenty-five-year dictatorship of the shah. That dictatorship spawned the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power the passionately anti-American Iranian theocracy that has bedeviled world politics since.²⁶ Eisenhower had served much of his military career in Europe and Asia, and understood the elemental forces at work there. The Middle East was terra incognita, and Ike initially accepted the advice of diplomatic and intelligence professionals who tended to see Communists lurking on every street corner. In Vietnam, the president had refused to bail out French colonialism; in Iran he was only too happy to rescue British commercial interests under the guise of fighting Communism. The Eisenhower administration, and Ike himself, bear heavy responsibility for snuffing out responsible government in Iran.

The issue was oil. In 1933, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s father, granted the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum—BP) an exclusive sixty-year concession to extract oil from Iran. Under the terms of the concession, Iran would receive 16 percent of the proceeds. Accounting was spotty, Iranian workers lived in deplorable conditions, and payoffs to the royal family were routine. For Britain, on the other hand, the concession proved a bonanza. The British government owned 52 percent of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), and after World War II effectively balanced its budget through the sale of Iranian oil. By the late 1940s, Iran had become the world’s fourth largest oil exporter, supplying 90 percent of Europe’s petroleum.²⁷

Given the lopsided distribution of benefits, Iranian public opinion clamored for a renegotiation of the 1933 concession, and there were precedents for doing so. In 1948, the Venezuelan government of Romulo Gallegos and Creole Petroleum agreed to a fifty-fifty compromise on profits, and in 1950 the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) reached a similar accord with the Saudi government. But AIOC refused to negotiate. The oil was theirs for sixty years (until 1993), and the British insisted the agreement was binding.

AIOC’s refusal to renegotiate the concession produced growing popular sentiment in Iran to nationalize the company. Led by the elderly European-educated Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s most popular political figure, the nationalization movement won overwhelming control of the Iranian parliament (Majlis), and on March 15, 1951, adopted a resolution accepting “the principle that oil should be nationalized throughout Iran.” In Britain, Clement Att-lee’s Labour government appeared ready to compromise. “What argument can I advance against anyone claiming the right to nationalize the resources of their country?” asked Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. “We are doing the same thing here in coal, electricity, railways, transport, and steel.”²⁸

On May 1, 1951, the Iranian Majlis voted unanimously to revoke the 1933 concession and nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. On May 6, the shah named Mossadegh prime minister. “Since nationalization is an accomplished fact,” Henry Grady, the U.S. ambassador in Teheran, told The Wall Street Journal, “it would be wise for Britain to adopt a conciliatory attitude. Mossadegh’s National Front Party is the closest thing to a moderate and stable element in the national parliament.”²⁹

But the British position had hardened. Bevin died in April and had been replaced as foreign minister by Herbert Morrison, one of the leading war hawks in London. Instead of negotiating, Morrison advocated sending the 16th Parachute Brigade, stationed in Cyprus, to retake AIOC’s massive Abadan refinery. When British plans for military intervention arrived in Washington, President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson objected strongly. The United States was resolutely opposed to “the use of force or the threat of the use of force” against Iran, Acheson told Sir Oliver Franks, His Majesty’s ambassador. Truman said “no situation should be allowed to develop into an armed conflict between British and Persian forces.”³⁰ Confronted with strenuous American objections, the Attlee government backed down.

Throughout the summer of 1951, the Truman administration pressed the British to negotiate. Acheson told Franks that Mossadegh represented “a very deep revolution, national in character, which was sweeping not only Iran but the entire Middle East.”³¹ President Truman wrote Attlee that “negotiations should be entered into at once” to prevent a worsening of “the explosive situation in Iran.”³²

Despite American efforts the British position stiffened further. Churchill, scarcely a friend of decolonialization, defeated Attlee in the October 1951 general election, and his Conservative government was in no mood to compromise with Mossadegh. The British were fighting alongside the United States in Korea, Churchill reminded Truman, and he expected American support in Iran.

When the British protested AIOC’s nationalization to the UN Security Council, Mossadegh flew to New York, presented Iran’s case, and won a smashing victory when the Security Council agreed it had no jurisdiction. President Truman invited Mossadegh to Washington, installed him in Blair House, across the street from the White House, and attempted to work out a compromise but with no success. On his return to Teheran, Mossadegh stopped in Egypt, received a hero’s welcome, and signed a friendship treaty with the government of King Farouk. Time magazine chose Mossadegh as its “Man of the Year” for 1951. “The British position in the whole Middle East is hopeless,” said Time. “They are hated and distrusted everywhere. The old colonial relationship is finished.”³³

The situation worsened in 1952. The British imposed an economic embargo on Iran, attempted a palace coup against Mossadegh, and brought suit in the World Court at The Hague on Anglo-Iranian’s behalf. The coup failed, the World Court dismissed Britain’s claim, and world opinion, particularly in the Middle East, turned against Britain because of the embargo. On October 16, 1952, Iran broke diplomatic relations with Great Britain and expelled all British diplomats. “We tried to get the blockheaded British to have their oil company make a fair deal with Iran,” wrote President Truman. “No, no, they couldn’t do that. They knew all about how to handle it—we didn’t according to them.”³⁴

Less than three weeks after Iran broke diplomatic relations with Britain, Eisenhower was elected president. The political climate in Washington changed, and the British were quick to take advantage. Whereas Truman and Acheson had discouraged intervention in Iran, Eisenhower and Dulles proved receptive, particularly if the issue was framed in terms of anti-Communism. In late November, senior British intelligence officials (MI6) visited their counterparts in the CIA and floated their plan to topple Mossadegh. “Not wishing to be accused of trying to use the Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire,” said senior agent Christopher Montague Woodhouse, “I decided to emphasize the Communist threat to Iran rather than the need to recover control of the oil industry.”³⁵ Iran had a one-thousand-mile border with the Soviet Union, it possessed the world’s largest known oil reserves, and had an active Communist (Tudeh) Party. The possibility that Iran might become Communist provided a tailor-made opportunity for the new administration to demonstrate its prowess. Bedell Smith, then director of the CIA, and his deputy Allen Dulles quickly signed on to the British scheme. When Ike took office, Smith moved on to become undersecretary of state, and Allen Dulles succeeded him at the CIA. Smith, Allen Dulles, and John Foster Dulles, the new secretary of state, became the principal advocates in the administration for moving against Mossadegh.

Eisenhower initially took little interest. When he met with President Truman at the White House two weeks after the election, Dean Acheson had mentioned the crisis in Iran and said “both sides were being unreasonable.” Acheson told Ike that he was planning to prod the British to hasten a settlement and warned that this might cause “some ill feeling in London.”³⁶ In early January, Eisenhower met with Churchill in New York and pushed him to reach a settlement. “All that he [Churchill] did,” Ike confided to his diary, “was to get Mossadegh to accuse us of being a partner of the British in ‘browbeating a weak nation.’ ”

Eisenhower’s efforts had little effect. “Winston is trying to relive the days of World War II,” Ike lamented.

In the present international complexities, any hope of establishing such a relationship is completely fatuous.…
The two strongest Western powers must not appear before the world as a combination of forces to compel adherence to the status quo. The free world’s hope of defeating the Communist aims does not include objecting to national aspirations.… Winston does not by any means propose to resort to power politics and disregard legitimate aspirations of weaker peoples. But he does take the rather old-fashioned, paternalistic approach.… I wish that he would turn over leadership of the British Conservative Party to younger men.³⁷

Insofar as Iranian national aspirations were concerned, Eisenhower was sympathetic. But he had a blind spot. He worried about the shutoff of Iranian oil to the West. Writing to his childhood friend Swede Hazlett from SHAPE the year before, Ike said the situation in Iran was tragic.

A stream of visitors goes through my office, and some of the individuals concerned consider themselves authorities on the Iranian question. Numbers of them attach as much blame to Western stupidity as to Iranian fanaticism and Communist intrigue in bringing about all the trouble. Frankly, I’ve gotten to the point that I am concerned primarily, and almost solely, in some scheme or plan that will permit that oil to keep flowing to the westward. We cannot ignore the tremendous importance of 675,000 barrels of oil a day.

Eisenhower told Swede that the West had failed in China. “I most certainly hope that this calamity does not repeat in the case of Iran.”³⁸

While Eisenhower settled into the White House, Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles stepped up planning for the coup. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt who headed CIA activities in the Middle East, was given operational control (Operation AJAX), and Dulles turned on the agency’s cash spigot to provide whatever funding was required to set events in motion. “Pull up your socks and get going,” Smith instructed Roosevelt.³⁹ Mobs were bought and paid for, and rioting in the streets of Teheran became commonplace. The object was to create an impression of instability. On March 1, 1953, the CIA provided Eisenhower with a national estimate on Iran suggesting the situation was getting out of hand. “The result has been a steady decrease in the power and influence of the Western democracies and the building up of a situation where a Communist takeover is becoming more and more of a possibility.”⁴⁰

At the regular meeting of the National Security Council on March 4, Eisenhower asked plaintively if it wasn’t possible “to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us?” Secretary of State Dulles responded with a summary of recent events in Iran. Dulles said that Mossadegh would likely remain in power, but that if he were assassinated “a power vacuum might occur and the Communists might easily take over. Not only would the free world be deprived of the enormous assets represented by Iranian oil production and reserves, but the Russians would secure these assets and thus henceforth be free of any anxiety about their petroleum situation.”

Treasury Secretary George Humphrey asked Dulles if he was convinced Russia would ultimately secure Iran. According to the official record of the meeting, “Secretary Dulles replied in the affirmative, and Mr. [Robert] Cutler pointed out that this, of course, meant that with the loss of Iran we would lose the neighboring countries of the Middle East and that loss would be terribly serious.”

Eisenhower allowed that if the Soviets did move against Iran, the United States would have to act quickly. “If I had $500,000,000 of money to spend in secret, I would get $100,000,000 of it to Iran right now.”⁴¹

British foreign secretary Anthony Eden arrived in Washington the next day for a series of high-level conferences on the Middle East. When he broached the subject of Iran and the proposed coup, he found everyone supportive except Eisenhower. Ike told Eden he considered Mossadegh “the only hope for the West in Iran,” and was greatly concerned about the possibility of a Communist takeover if Mossadegh fell. “I would like to give the guy ten million bucks,” said Ike. In the discussions that followed, Eden did his best to discredit Mossadegh, arguing that the longer he stayed in power, the more harm he could do to the West. “We should be better occupied looking for alternatives to Mossadegh rather than trying to buy him off,” he told Eisenhower.⁴² Later, Eden cabled Churchill, saying that “the President seemed obsessed by the fear of a Communist Iran. [His] experts had told him that a pipeline could be built from Abadan to the Caucasus in a matter of a couple of years.”⁴³

Eden’s intervention evidently shook Eisenhower’s resolve. At the next meeting of the National Security Council, on March 11, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson asked whether the United States might not negotiate directly with Iran concerning their oil. Ike replied he had “very real doubts whether … we could make a successful deal with Mossadegh. It would not be worth the paper it was written on, and the example might have very grave effects on United States oil concessions in other parts of the world.”⁴⁴

As the violence escalated on the streets of Teheran, Eisenhower swung more and more against Mossadegh. By late spring Ike had come to the conclusion that Iran was collapsing and that the collapse could not be prevented so long as Mossadegh remained in power.⁴⁵ Eden’s suggestion that they find an alternative looked increasingly attractive. As one biographer put it, “Eisenhower and Foster Dulles spent many a cocktail hour together,” and over drinks in the evening Ike was brought around to accept a coup, providing America’s hand would not be visible. With Eisenhower’s tacit approval, the CIA and British MI6 accelerated plans for taking action in Teheran.⁴⁶

On May 28 Mossadegh appealed to Eisenhower for American aid to offset the effects of the British economic embargo. “The Iranian people,” said Mossadegh, were “suffering financial hardships and struggling with political intrigues carried on by the former oil company and the British government.”⁴⁷ Eisenhower did not reply immediately. Instead, on June 14, Allen Dulles went to the White House to brief Ike on Operation AJAX. Sensing that the president did not want to know too much, Dulles gave him what Kermit Roosevelt called only a “broad brush outline of what was proposed.” Eisenhower signed on, and shortly afterward Churchill gave his much more enthusiastic approval.⁴⁸

On June 25 Kermit Roosevelt returned to Washington to brief officials on the details of AJAX. The meeting was held in the Foggy Bottom office of Secretary of State Dulles. Eisenhower did not attend. When Roosevelt finished, Dulles asked the others what they thought. Allen Dulles, Bedell Smith, and Defense Secretary Wilson endorsed the plan for the coup without reservation. Loy Henderson, who had succeeded Henry Grady as American ambassador in Teheran, said, “We have no choice.” Secretary of State Dulles agreed. “That’s that, then. Let’s get going.”⁴⁹

On June 30, after the coup had been agreed to, Eisenhower dispatched his belated reply to Mossadegh. The president told the Iranian leader that American help would not be forthcoming. Instead, Mossadegh should settle with the British. “There is a strong feeling in the United States,” said Ike, “that it would not be fair to the American taxpayers for the United States Government to extend any considerable amount of economic aid to Iran so long as Iran could have access to funds derived from the sale of its oil.” American policy toward Iran had undergone a sea change. “I refused to pour more American money into a country in turmoil in order to bail Mossadegh out of troubles rooted in his refusal to work out an agreement with the British,” Ike wrote later.⁵⁰

Secretary Dulles monitored the planning for the coup closely. After a high-level meeting on the Middle East in late July, he became concerned when Iran was discussed and no mention was made of AJAX. The next morning he called his brother at the CIA to ask if something had gone wrong. According to Allen Dulles’s phone log, “The Secy [JFD] called and said in your talk about Iran yesterday you did not mention the other matter. Is it off? A[llen] W[.] D[ulles] said he doesn’t talk about it, it was cleared directly with the President, and is still active.”⁵¹

At his press conference the following week, Dulles began to set the stage for American intervention. “Recent developments in Iran, especially the efforts of the illegal Communist party, which appears to be tolerated by the Iranian Government, have caused us concern,” said Secretary Dulles. “These developments make it difficult for the United States to give assistance to Iran so long as its government tolerates this sort of activity.”⁵²

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the one hand, Kermit Roosevelt and his agents in Teheran were fomenting ever higher levels of violence; on the other, Secretary Dulles was criticizing the Iranian government for not arresting the violence Roosevelt was creating.

With the country aflame, Mossadegh chose to hold a referendum, which he thought might solidify his power. The blatantly tainted result showed 99.4 percent for Mossadegh. That convinced Eisenhower that a Communist takeover was imminent. “Iran’s downhill course toward Communist-supported dictatorship was picking up momentum,” said Ike afterward.⁵³

The shah’s cooperation was crucial for the coup’s success. To make the initial overture to Pahlavi, Allen Dulles dispatched retired major general H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of Desert Storm’s “Stormin’ Norman,” to Teheran.^b The elder Schwarzkopf had spent most of the 1940s in Iran commanding the constabulary and training the twenty-thousand-man Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie, the country’s national police force. The shah was deeply indebted to Schwarzkopf, and had every reason to trust whatever assurances he gave. Schwarzkopf also had many friends among the senior officers of the Iranian Army and police force. He arrived in Teheran on August 1 “armed with a diplomatic passport and a couple of large bags containing millions of dollars.”⁵⁴ Later that day he called on the shah at the Saad Abad Palace, explained the details of the coup, and assured him that the United States would give him full support if he cooperated. Schwarzkopf then put the shah in contact with Roosevelt and stepped aside.

By mid-August, Roosevelt had his team in place and was ready to strike. Protests and riots organized by his operatives had turned the streets of Teheran into battlegrounds. Newspapers and religious leaders were screaming for Mossadegh’s head. According to Donald Wilbur, who headed CIA planning for AJAX in Washington, “anti-government propaganda poured off the Agency’s presses and was rushed by air to Teheran.”⁵⁵

On August 15, 1953, the coup commenced. By the nineteenth, after a crescendo of street violence, Mossadegh had been removed from office and was under arrest.^c In his Memoirs, Eisenhower hailed the coup as a spontaneous uprising of the shah’s supporters against Mossadegh and the Communists.⁵⁶ No mention was made of the CIA’s involvement or American complicity. A month later in Denver, Eisenhower met privately with Kermit Roosevelt and awarded him the National Security Medal in a closed-door ceremony. In his diary Ike wrote, “The things we did were covert,” and he acknowledged that the United States would be embarrassed if the CIA’s role ever became known. Eisenhower said that Kermit Roosevelt “worked intelligently, courageously, and tirelessly. I listened to his detailed report and it seemed more like a dime novel than an historical fact.”^{57 d}

​In the coup’s aftermath, the United States generously provided the emergency financial aid to Iran that had been denied Mossadegh. The new Iranian government responded by agreeing to a new oil concession with an international consortium, with Iran receiving 50 percent of the proceeds. British Petroleum retained 40 percent of the shares in the consortium, five American companies held another 40 percent, and the remainder were divided between Royal Dutch Shell and the Compagnie Française des Pétroles.⁵⁸ The consortium retained the name Mossadegh gave it—the National Iranian Oil Company—to preserve the façade of nationalization, but its books were not opened to Iranian auditors, nor were Iranians allowed to serve on its board of directors.⁵⁹

On March 17, 2000—forty-seven years later—the United States officially acknowledged its involvement in the coup. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speaking before the American-Iranian Council in Washington, delivered what amounted to an apology. “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons. But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”⁶⁰

The success of Operation AJAX encouraged the Eisenhower administration to intervene elsewhere. Under Eisenhower the Central Intelligence Agency became a major instrument of American foreign policy. Its budget increased exponentially, and the overthrow of objectionable regimes became an accepted tool of statecraft. As one biographer put it, “the CIA offered the President a quick fix for his problems,”⁶¹ and Latin America had many problems that needed to be fixed—at least as the Eisenhower administration saw it.

The first target was Guatemala. In October 1944, the country’s fledgling middle class had overthrown the long, brutal dictatorship of General Jorge Ubico, who was closely identified with the United Fruit Company (UFCO), and began an experiment in democracy inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company (known as “El Pulpo,” the octopus) played an analogous role to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran. It owned 42 percent of the arable land, was exempt from all taxes and duties, controlled the country’s only port as well as its electrical and transportation systems, and owned the telephone and telegraph facilities. The company’s annual profits amounted to twice the total revenue of the Guatemalan government. Most of its vast acreage was kept idle in order not to flood the market with bananas and bring the price down.⁶²

Mount Eisenhower, a 9,400-foot massif in the Canadian Rockies, midway between Banff and Lake Louise. (illustration credit 22.2)

Guatemala’s new democratic government soon clashed with United Fruit. The labor reforms instituted by the government, including minimum wage legislation and the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, most of which were patterned on the New Deal, were predictably assailed by UFCO as “Communistic.” Education reforms to combat widespread illiteracy were equally suspect. But the new government struck deep popular roots. In March 1951, when the revolution was seven years old, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the former defense minister, was elected president, winning more than twice the number of votes of all other candidates combined. Arbenz ran on a platform of land reform, and in June 1952, the Guatemalan national assembly enacted legislation providing for the redistribution of idle land held by large landowners. Owners were compensated with twenty-five-year government bonds at 3 percent interest, the value of the property determined by the owner’s own tax declaration for 1952.⁶³

In March 1953, the Arbenz government expropriated 234,000 acres of fallow land on the Pacific slope belonging to the United Fruit Company. In February 1954, it took an additional 173,000 acres of idle land from United Fruit on the Caribbean coast. From that point on the days of the Arbenz government were numbered. As Kenneth Redmond, president of United Fruit, put it, “From here on out it’s not a matter of the people of Guatemala against the United Fruit Company; the question is going to be Communism against the right of property, the life and security of the Western Hemisphere.”⁶⁴

Land reform was a red flag in Washington, and Redmond’s prediction fell on fertile ground. Like the reach of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in London, the tentacles of United Fruit stretched to the highest levels of American government. Both John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had managed the legal affairs of United Fruit at Sullivan and Cromwell.^e Ann Whitman, Eisenhower’s personal secretary, was married to Ed Whitman, the head of United Fruit’s public relations department. Robert Cutler, Ike’s national security assistant, was United Fruit’s banker in Boston. (UFCO was based in Boston.) And Bedell Smith longed to work for the company after he left government service.⁶⁵ Most important, however, was Thomas G. Corcoran—“Tommy the Cork”—the legendary Washington insider and FDR confidant who was United Fruit’s longtime lobbyist in Washington. E. Howard Hunt, the CIA soldier of fortune who directed the action on the ground inside Guatemala, and who later spent thirty-three months in federal prison for his role in the Watergate break-in, credits Corcoran with winning Eisenhower’s support for the coup.⁶⁶

Eisenhower was open to Corcoran’s persuasion. In the spring of 1953—shortly after the Arbenz government had expropriated the land of United Fruit—Ike sent his brother Milton to Latin America to report on conditions. Milton Eisenhower did not visit Central America on his ten-nation tour. His report nevertheless alluded to Guatemala, and emphasized the importance of timely American action “to prevent Communism from spreading seriously beyond Guatemala.” As Milton put it: “The possible conquest of a Latin American nation today would not be by direct assault. It would come, rather, through the insidious process of infiltration, conspiracy, spreading of lies, and the undermining of free institutions.… One [Latin] American nation has succumbed to Communist infiltration.”⁶⁷

Milton Eisenhower did not set foot in Guatemala, but he accepted the premise that the land reform of the Arbenz government was the entering wedge of a Communist takeover. Milton’s message was reinforced by the Dulles brothers and Bedell Smith. The precise date when Ike signed on to the coup is unclear. But when Kermit Roosevelt made his report to the White House on Operation AJAX in September 1953, planning was already well advanced. Roosevelt reports that Allen Dulles offered him the assignment leading the coup in Guatemala, but he declined.⁶⁸

In one of the early planning sessions, Eisenhower asked Allen Dulles about the chances of success. “Better than forty percent,” said Dulles, “but less than even.” That was sufficient for Ike. He gave Dulles the go-ahead, but reserved the right to cancel the operation if it did not feel right.⁶⁹

The coup was code-named PBSUCCESS. Howard Hunt was given operational control while Richard Bissell, the CIA director of operations, managed affairs from Washington. The agency enlisted scores of recruits, primarily mercenaries from Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, while putting together a small air force for what was euphemistically called the “national liberation force.” The mercenaries were paid three hundred dollars a month—ten times the going wage for United Fruit workers in Guatemala. Training took place at a CIA camp in Opa-locka, Florida, and in Honduras. As with Operation AJAX, Eisenhower remained officially aloof, discussing the matter casually over cocktails or at the Sunday brunch that Eleanor Dulles hosted for her two brothers each week.⁷⁰

By mid-June 1954, all of the pieces of PBSUCCESS were in place: the mini air force of three planes was ready; additional CIA pilots were standing by in Managua, Nicaragua; a Voice of Liberation radio station was set up in Honduras to broadcast on the rebels’ behalf; and a leader, Castillo Armas, stood ready to command the expedition. Armas had been personally selected by Hunt because, among other things, he had “that good Indian look about him … which was great for the people.”⁷¹

On June 16, 1954, Eisenhower gave his final approval for the coup. At a breakfast meeting with his principal national security officials in the family quarters of the White House, the president listened intently as Allen Dulles laid out the plan. “Are you sure this is going to succeed?” Ike asked. The Dulles brothers, the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, and Robert Cutler all agreed that it would.

“I want all of you to be damn good and sure you succeed,” said Eisenhower. “I’m prepared to take any steps that are necessary to see that it succeeds. When you commit the flag, you commit it to win.”⁷²

Operation PBSUCCESS commenced on June 18, 1954, when Castillo Armas’s ragtag “national liberation force” of 150 men crossed the border from Honduras and moved six miles into Guatemala. revolt launched in guatemala: land-air-sea invasion reported: risings under way in key cities, bannered The New York Times.⁷³ The Times was reporting from a CIA handout. American journalists were excluded from the area lest they find out how puny the effort was.⁷⁴ Armas’s men settled down in a local church and waited for the Arbenz regime to collapse, but nothing happened. The Guatemalan Army remained in its barracks, and the capital city showed no sign of unrest despite occasional bombing runs by the liberation air force. Soon two of Armas’s three planes were out of action. At an emergency meeting in the White House on June 22, Allen Dulles reported that without additional air support the rebellion would collapse. Dulles said that Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza had offered to give Armas two P-51 fighter-bombers if the United States agreed to replace them.⁷⁵

“What do you think Castillo’s chances would be without the aircraft?” Eisenhower asked Dulles.

“About zero,” Dulles replied.

“Suppose we supply the aircraft? What would the chances be then?”

“About twenty percent.”

Eisenhower was convinced. Later he wrote that he knew from his experience in Europe “the important psychological impact of even a small amount of air support.… My duty was clear to me. We would replace the airplanes.”⁷⁶

Eisenhower to Somoza to Armas: The national liberation force got its airplanes. Bombing runs over Guatemala City resumed, CIA pilots stationed at Managua’s international airport joined in, the Guatemalan Army continued to remain in its barracks, and by June 27, Arbenz had agreed to resign. He was replaced by a military dictatorship. Aside from the air support, the key to the coup was the CIA’s radio station based in Honduras. The agency had jammed the government station and created a fictional war over the airwaves in which liberation troops were relentlessly moving forward. Arbenz’s defeat was made to appear inevitable.⁷⁷ The CIA snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

Eisenhower had recognized the problem of French colonialism in Indochina. He was less cognizant of British commercial imperialism in Iran or American in Latin America. The United States was in an apocalyptic struggle with Communism, and the normal rules of fair play did not apply. Iran and Guatemala were not isolated phenomena. The role of the United States in world affairs was changing. As America’s international reach and sense of obligation increased, the instinct to adhere to traditional democratic procedures diminished. Eisenhower was a leading player in that process.⁷⁸

Wartime presidents are not perfect. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. Eisenhower’s Cold War use of the CIA to topple the legitimately elected governments of Iran and Guatemala represents a similar reaction.

In Guatemala, Ike listened to the advice of Tommy Corcoran, the Dulles brothers, Bedell Smith, and Robert Cutler and convinced himself that a full-fledged Communist takeover was in the offing. He would have been better advised to heed the message he received from his old friend William Prescott Allen, Texas publisher of The Laredo Times, who visited Guatemala in June 1954. “Yes,” Allen cabled Ike, “Guatemala has a very small minority of Communists, but not as many as San Francisco.”⁷⁹

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^a On April 16, 1954, Vice President Nixon, whether speaking on his own or with administration sanction, added to the perception of possible American intervention when he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that he “hoped the United States will not have to send troops there [Vietnam], but if this Government cannot avoid it, the Administration must face up to the situation and dispatch forces. I personally would support such a position.” RN 152–53.

^b A 1917 graduate of West Point, the senior Schwarzkopf fought at the Second Battle of the Marne in World War I, resigned from the Army in the 1920s, and became the first superintendent of the New Jersey State Police (with the rank of colonel). He acquired celebrity status directing the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping and later spent several years as the narrator of the popular weekly radio drama Gang Busters. When World War II broke out, Schwarzkopf returned to active duty and was assigned to Iran. See H. Norman Schwarzkopf [Jr.], It Doesn’t Take a Hero: General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Autobiography 1–40 (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).

^c Mossadegh was tried before a military tribunal for having resisted the shah’s order dismissing him and for “inciting the people to armed insurrection.” Mossadegh defended himself, pointing out among other things that the shah lacked the constitutional authority to dismiss a prime minister unless the Majlis had voted no confidence—which it had not done. “My only crime is that I nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism … of the greatest empire on earth.” Mossadegh was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, followed by house arrest for life. He died on March 5, 1967, at the age of eighty-five. No public funeral was permitted. Musaddig’s Memoirs 74, Homa Katouzian, ed. (London: JEBHE, 1988).

^d Eisenhower’s diary entry (October 8, 1953) was revealed by Stephen Ambrose in 1984 in the second volume of his biography of Ike. As an associate editor of the Eisenhower Papers, Ambrose had access to the diary and saw no reason not to publish what he found. But when the relevant volume of the Eisenhower Papers was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1998, all reference to the coup in Iran was deleted from Ike’s October 8 diary entry. “The NSC deleted a portion of this document,” according to the relevant note. When Robert H. Ferrell published The Eisenhower Diaries in 1981, the October 8 entry is omitted in its entirety. The diary entry was not declassified until May 10, 2010. It reads as Ambrose cited it.

Stephen E. Ambrose, 2 Eisenhower 129 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984); The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 14, The Presidency 564–73n26; Robert H. Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: Norton, 1981); Box 4, DDE Diary Series, EL.

^e In 1936, as executive partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, John Foster Dulles had supervised the drafting of the agreement with the Ubico government of Guatemala that gave the United Fruit Company a tax-free status for ninety-nine years as well as control of the country’s only port, Puerto Barrios. Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention 124 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Thomas McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit, Henry Scammell, ed. 13, 56 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1976).