THREE DECADES LATER, Jack Kennedy’s man apologized. What had happened at the time had been deadly serious, so serious that, in order to get an ally to go along, the United States had threatened an invasion of another enemy that would have led to nuclear war. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not quite kill Cheddi Jagan but did its best to put him out of business. Jagan, the prime minister of British Guiana, headed for independence as the nation of Guyana, had raised hackles in Washington. The CIA had orders to get rid of him.
In the early 1960s this attempt at regime change, filtered through America’s Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, was the latest in a long series of CIA covert operations. Jagan became both victim and exemplar. “We misunderstood the whole struggle down there,” Arthur M. Schlesinger reminisced in 1994. President John F. Kennedy’s court historian and private adviser had made Latin America one of his special interests. Guyana became Schlesinger’s special mistake.
Of course Schlesinger had help. In fact he had initially held a relatively relaxed view of Jagan as Guyanese leader. The CIA seemed more pessimistic. In an intelligence estimate issued in March 1961, the agency, looking ahead to elections in the South American country, concluded that Jagan’s political party “will probably succeed in winning the right to form the next government.” The CIA further concluded: “Jagan himself is not an acknowledged Communist, but his statements and actions over the years bear the marks of the introduction and advice the Communists have given him.” Further, “Jagan’s US-born wife, who exercises very strong influence over him, is an acknowledged Communist.” The only bright elements lay in the U.S. intelligence belief that Jagan, to preclude interference in Guyana’s move toward full independence, would not immediately lead the country toward the left and would hesitate to do so later.
President Kennedy’s National Security Council (NSC) assessed the Guyana situation a few weeks after the disastrous CIA failure in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, a covert attempt to invade Cuba. They feared Guyana succumbing to the same dark forces as Fidel Castro. Significantly, the task of figuring out what to do about Guyana rested with the same officials responsible for U.S. policy on Cuba. Guyana began as a British rather than an American problem. Unable to sustain its empire following World War II, Great Britain responded to rising nationalism by granting increasing self-government and then independence to many of its colonies, Guyana among them. Europeans had arrived there about 1620, settling on the coast and leaving indigenous peoples in the interior. The Dutch West India Company held on to the territory until 1796 when it fell to the English during the Napoleonic wars. In 1814 Guyana was ceded to England by treaty. The Dutch, Portuguese, and English brought in African slaves, and in the 1830s the British also introduced indentured workers from India. By the 1950s the “East Indians,” as they were called, had become the dominant population at about 46 percent of the total, with Africans the next largest group at 36 percent. Cheddi Jagan came from East Indian stock.
Sugar and rice were Guyana’s main products. The country had a classic plantation economy, with large British corporations controlling most of the production, and plantation workers poorly paid and restive. Their energy fueled Guyanese politics. Born in 1918, the eldest of eleven children of a cane cutter, then a driver, from a village outside the capital, Georgetown, Cheddi Jagan saw the depredations of Big Sugar through his father’s eyes. Cheddi graduated from Northwestern University in the United States and became a dentist. He used his income to put other family members through college. Attracted even then to progressive causes, Cheddi met Janet Rosenberg at a political event in Chicago. In 1943 they married. Once a member of the Young Communist League, Janet Jagan had, if anything, stronger views than Cheddi’s. When the Jagans returned to Guyana they thought themselves destined to organize the workers. In 1947 Cheddi Jagan won election to a consultative council advising the British governor. Three years later he and Janet were founders of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), the first mass political party in the country and for a time the multiracial exponent of Guyanese nationalism.
Cheddi Jagan campaigned constantly for better working conditions and wage increases from the Sugar Producers Association, representing the corporations that controlled the plantations. The corporations’ efforts to keep Jagan off their plantations only increased his appeal to the workers.
Great Britain, committed to fostering self-government in Guyana, in 1953 permitted an election for an assembly and cabinet. British officials convinced themselves during this early period that Cheddi Jagan was a Communist. When he won, Jagan formed a government; Janet Jagan, also elected, became deputy speaker in the assembly. Cheddi argued that British measures were insufficient and pressed for full autonomy. After barely four months in office, the British dismissed Jagan’s cabinet and in 1954 imprisoned both Cheddi and Janet for half a year. That merely increased their popularity.
British hopes of dampening Guyanese sympathy for Cheddi Jagan hinged on creating alternative political movements. One materialized in 1955 when Forbes Burnham, another founder of the People’s Progressive Party and its former vice chairman, formed a new People’s National Congress (PNC). The PNC drew mostly African Guyanese support and ended the former PPP monopoly. In new elections in 1957, however, Jagan’s party won the most votes and returned him to the cabinet, though not as prime minister. Business interests formed another political party in 1960, the United Front (UF), but this stood primarily for minority Portuguese and had little chance for electoral success.
The next election occurred in August 1961. Washington wanted to employ the CIA to forestall a Jagan victory. By now the British were less convinced that Cheddi Jagan was a political extremist and acquiesced in his participation. In late May, U.S. officials met with the British to agree on a program of action, but London refused either a joint operation or unilateral American action. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, wrote to his British colleague Lord Hume, “We are not inclined to give people like Jagan the same benefit of doubt which was given two or three years ago to Castro.” The British foreign secretary replied that any action would only make things worse, that London had no grounds to resume direct rule as it had done in 1953, and that Jagan had not been so difficult since his return to government in 1957. In the 1961 election the PPP won eighteen of the twenty-four seats in the assembly; there was now no alternative to Cheddi Jagan’s becoming prime minister.
In writing about not giving the Guyanese leader any benefit of the doubt, Dean Rusk referred subtly to a CIA initiative. In August 1961, within days of the election, the State Department sent President Kennedy a proposal that involved two tracks: open cooperation with the Guyanese in hopes of inducing Prime Minister Jagan to align with the West, but a CIA covert political action against Jagan if he did not. Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles figured prominently in the group who hammered out this strategy. At this early stage, Arthur Schlesinger actually helped keep the CIA out of the act, objecting that the covert initiative could easily get in the way of the overt policy of assistance. President Kennedy sided with Schlesinger.
A second round of talks with the British took place in London in early September. Ambassador David Bruce led the American team, with CIA, technical assistance, and State Department officers to help. Among them sat William C. Burdett, Washington’s point man on Guyana policy. The CIA’s senior officer in London at the time, station chief Frank G. Wisner, the agency’s former director of operations, also participated. Bruce received instructions to minimize the importance of the covert track if necessary, telling the British the project was only a plan, that any specific move would be subject to high-level U.S. consideration—but to get British approval. Secretary Rusk told Bruce, “We should keep in mind [the] possibility Jagan is [a] Communist-controlled ‘sleeper’ who will move to establish Castro or Communist regime upon independence.” The British again rejected a secret operation.
Arthur Schlesinger saw Dean Rusk’s cable to Ambassador Bruce and objected—the term “sleeper” had very specific meaning in the spy business, he told one of Rusk’s top aides, and no one, Schlesinger noted, had suggested that Cheddi Jagan was a disciplined agent or pretending to be someone else.
Prime Minister Jagan, perfectly aware that American officials viewed him with suspicion, knew Guyana needed foreign aid. Jagan sought a meeting with Kennedy to plead his case directly. He traveled to Washington and saw JFK in the Oval Office on October 25, seeking to allay U.S. fears. Cheddi Jagan described himself as a socialist who believed in state planning but political freedom for all Guyanese. Then Jagan made his pitch for aid. Kennedy avoided talk of dollar numbers. The American record notes that Jagan “was evasive on all ideological and doctrinal issues.” In his biography of Kennedy, Schlesinger adds that Jagan made a serious faux pas, saying he admired the Marxist journal Monthly Review, and further raised JFK’s hackles with a television appearance in which he refused to criticize the Soviet Union, leaving “an impression of either wooliness or fellow-travelling.”
In the wake of Cheddi’s visit there would be no new help for his country. The policy of overt cooperation languished until January 1962, when President Kennedy ordered the State Department to send a survey mission to Guyana to prepare an expanded technical assistance effort, an extension of a program begun under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But Kennedy took no action on another initiative, a road-building project that represented by far the largest element of contemplated U.S. aid.
A month later violent riots erupted in Georgetown. Starved of funds, Jagan’s government had proposed tax increases plus tight spending controls. Protests ensued. A general strike began on February 12, degenerating into vandalism and looting. Four days later, when police fired on rioters, killing two, all hell broke loose. The situation assumed a racial character as rioters aimed at stores owned by East Indians in the center of Georgetown, while the opposition parties and those trade unions that catered to the African population maneuvered to take advantage. Jagan could have mobilized East Indian laborers from the plantations to fight the brawlers but instead asked the British governor for security assistance. London deployed a battalion of troops, some flown from Jamaica, about half direct from the United Kingdom, reinforcing the company normally on duty in Guyana.
From the prime minister’s residence, Red House, a beautiful nineteenth-century structure in the colonial style, Jagan could see the devastation. Whole blocks of downtown Georgetown burned to the ground. Jagan later told a British diplomat, as relayed to the Americans, that he thought leaders of the United force and CIA officers had fomented the riots. Prime Minister Jagan asked for a United Nations inquiry but ultimately settled for an investigation by British Commonwealth officials.
Jagan’s charges that the CIA fomented the 1962 riots have been widely repeated but on balance should be rejected. Over the succeeding weeks assurances were given—by the CIA to President Kennedy, by the State Department to other officials, and by the United States to Great Britain—that the spooks had had nothing to do with this tragedy. It is suggestive that Edward Lansdale, a political action expert monitoring CIA operations simultaneously under way against Cuba, asked agency officers a few months later why they figured they could provoke a general strike in Cuba when the CIA itself admitted its inability to carry off labor actions elsewhere in Latin America. The CIA had some influence over Guyanese trade unions as a result of its early work in this area (about which more in a moment) and had given a little money to anti-Jagan unions, but the covert action project for Guyana had yet to be approved and there is no other indication of U.S. activity at this time.
What is true is that U.S. officials used the Georgetown riots as an excuse to write off Cheddi Jagan. On February 19, with smoke still rising from the ruins in Georgetown, Dean Rusk sent a strong demarche to the British foreign secretary declaring it “mandatory” that “we concert on remedial steps.” Rusk thundered, “I must tell you now that I have reached the conclusion that it is not possible for us to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan.” Rusk saw the Guyanese leader as espousing a “Marxist-Leninist policy” paralleling Castro’s. Ominously, Rusk ended, “It seems to me clear that new elections should now be scheduled, and I hope we can agree that Jagan should not be allowed to accede to power again.”
There remained dissenting voices within the Kennedy administration, however. One was Adlai E. Stevenson, Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations. When Stevenson learned of the Rusk letter to Lord Home he wrote the secretary—and sent a copy to JFK—that British stalling on Guyanese independence would simply strengthen Jagan. American involvement would be impossible to conceal over time, Stevenson argued, while disclosure would substantially damage the U.S. position in Latin America and its carefully nurtured reputation for anti-colonialism. What was more, “the damaging effect of such disclosure would be magnified if the U.S. involvement were of the character which might be inferred from the last sentence of your letter.” Stevenson ended by asking to be briefed on CIA plans for Guyana.
Lord Alec Hume was no more persuaded. The foreign secretary’s reply to Rusk declared that Great Britain would not go back upon its course of bringing the colonies to independence, and certainly could not gain from failing to pursue that course in the single case of Guyana. Hume met Rusk’s declaration head on: “You say that it is not possible for you ‘to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan’ and that ‘Jagan should not accede to power again.’ How would you suggest that this can be done in a democracy?”
Even within the CIA there were sometimes less hysterical voices. Participants at the CIA director’s morning staff meeting on February 26 listened as officials reported three Cuban merchant vessels en route to Guyana laden with weapons. Within a day CIA analysts were able to prove the report false. No evidence of Cuban arms shipments anywhere in Latin America would emerge for another year.
At the White House, Arthur Schlesinger warned JFK that both the CIA and the State Department had the notion that the president had made a firm decision to get rid of Jagan. On March 8, 1962, President Kennedy signed a directive, a National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM), explicitly stating that no final decision would be taken on Guyana policy until after a British survey mission, conversations with London, and answers to Kennedy’s specific questions. The NSAM was unusual in that the White House addressed it directly to CIA Director John McCone, Rusk, and so on, not as a single document circulated to the entire top level of the U.S. bureaucracy. It was also striking in that where NSAMs typically ordered action, this one mandated inaction. Also, many Kennedy-era NSAMs were signed in his name by national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, but the president signed this one himself.
A week later Secretary Rusk talked with the British in Geneva. In his report Rusk noted that London did not exclude action but was not willing to go down that road until overt possibilities were exhausted. “For [the] present,” Rusk admitted, “I do not believe covert action with or without [the] British is indicated.” Rusk ended by asking the department to use diplomatic channels to ask the CIA’s Frank Wisner to desist for the time being.
One thing President Kennedy demanded as a prerequisite for his decision had been an analysis of the possibilities and limitations of action. On March 15 the State Department completed an extensive policy paper. Its third option specified “a program designed to bring about the removal of Cheddi Jagan.” Analysis in the paper indicates the project clearly envisioned “covert U.S. political action” and that British acquiescence (at a minimum) would be necessary. State recognized negative factors, conceding Adlai Stevenson’s point that the United States must be prepared to pay heavily in world public opinion “if evidence were presented showing any U.S. covert activities.” Even without such evidence, Russia and Cuba could be expected to make the most of allusions to earlier CIA operations in Latin America to diminish U.S. “credibility as a supporter of the principle of nonintervention.”
The Guyana paper framed Anglo-American conversations in Washington, where the British survey mission reported its results. At the March 17 meeting, Deputy Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson took pains to say the United States feared chaos and a Communist government, insisting on the need to work closely to avert catastrophe—code words to convince London to acquiesce in U.S. action if not rise to the occasion themselves. Reprising Dean Rusk’s cautions of a month earlier, Johnson indicated that Washington saw Cheddi Jagan in the same light as Fidel Castro, saying, “We do not intend to be taken in twice.” The British, on the other hand, reported that Guyana’s large sugar corporations were not worried and mentioned that two of the biggest had no wish to become involved politically. One, the Bookers Group, “probably considered Jagan to be the best leader of the lot.”
The State paper and the Washington talks became the basis for the deliberations of a shadowy unit called the Special Group, the highest U.S. government unit dealing with covert operations. When the Special Group met on March 20, Guyana was the third item on its agenda. The Group refined a CIA project proposal next sent to the British.
London’s resistance to covert action weakened over time. When President Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met in May 1962, the British agreed to special arrangements for consultations with Washington on Guyana. At informal secret talks the Americans presented their action program. Macmillan still rejected the most energetic measures but decided he could abide some CIA efforts to manipulate Guyanese politics. By June, Arthur Schlesinger had told President Kennedy that “an independent British Guiana under Burnham (if Burnham will commit himself to a multiracial policy) would cause us many fewer problems than an independent British Guiana under Jagan.”
Schlesinger intended his policy advice to guide Kennedy’s decision on the covert action that Washington spooks advocated. The Central Intelligence Agency carried out many kinds of activities. Ones that aimed to influence the domestic affairs of other states were known as “political action.” The Guyana project would be a political action. A variety of tactics might contribute to this kind of operation. The most obvious was to recruit—usually for pay—persons of influence in the target nation. Such opinion makers could include politicians, businessmen, labor leaders, and journalists—especially the latter two: labor leaders because they could put bodies in the street on demand, journalists because their stories in the print or broadcast media could sway people’s beliefs. Barrages of such press coverage could be targeted to shape opinion, and if intelligence operatives had good enough connections, they could concoct the stories themselves, taking CIA’s carefully crafted lines of argument and drumming them in by repetition. Judicious dollops of CIA money could help form or advance political parties and finance candidates at election time.
When subjects were aware of the role of American intelligence, they could be said to be “witting.” Unwitting persons were those deliberately kept in the dark about the CIA role in what they were being asked to do. American intelligence operatives could pretend to be of other nationalities—a “false-flag” approach. But even if they revealed their true colors they would usually not identify themselves as CIA officers—they would be under “cover.” The CIA command center in any country was called a “station,” located within the U.S. embassy and headed by a station chief. An important station, or one with far-flung activities, would direct “bases” in other places within the country. Stations were typically staffed by officers under “light” cover—people supposed to be diplomats, commercial officials, or military rather than spies. Even deeper cover, undercover, were officers who pretended to have no connection with the U.S. government whatsoever. These persons were under “nonofficial cover.” The Guyana operation would be conducted primarily by officers under nonofficial cover. The persons they recruited, agents or assets, evidently were mostly aware of the CIA origins of the plots they were carrying out. Agents were always left unwitting of CIA purposes, of course, but in a political action like Guyana, over time these became rather transparent.
The object was, as Arthur Schlesinger put it, to ensure that the government of an independent Guyana took the coloration that Washington desired, right down to who was in charge of it. To make that happen the CIA used agents of influence to create propaganda and place news that it wanted, labor agents to produce a visible opposition, and political agents to oppose those who the CIA decided were enemies of its desired outcome. Guyana would be a full-spectrum political action.
The Central Intelligence Agency suffered through tumult even as it began to focus on Guyana, for these were the months after its disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. There had been investigations, postmortems, a National Security Council policy review—every kind of inquiry. A generation of CIA leadership had been swept away, except, oddly enough, the agency’s Western Hemisphere chief, the man who would have ultimate command of the Guyana project. Col. Joseph Caldwell King would be the go-to guy. King had spent his entire career in Latin America, doing studies on the Amazon water basin for Nelson D. Rockefeller before and into World War II, as an entrepreneur, and as a special agent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. As entrepreneur, spurning contrary advice, King had opened a condom factory in ultra-Catholic Brazil, and made a considerable profit. Later he sold the plant to Johnson & Johnson and acquired stock that became ever more valuable as the company’s stake in Latin America mushroomed. King became its vice president, selling in Argentina and Brazil. His military rank seems to have been honorific. In the early postwar period, when the FBI had been in charge of intelligence on Latin America, King joined the Bureau. In the late forties that role had been taken over by the new CIA, and King transferred to the agency. He soon became chief of its Western Hemisphere Division. When the agency overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954, King was there. Wags called him “Jesus Christ,” and he styled himself “JC,” perhaps to assuage his anxiety at showing poorly next to the corps of Ivy Leaguers who dominated the CIA. King presided over the early part of the U.S. imbroglio in Cuba, when in fact the United States had been “taken in” the first time, as the Kennedy people kept telling the British. King escaped blame for the Bay of Pigs because it had been managed at a level above his pay grade, leaving him out of the loop. Some recall that officials feared his strongly conservative politics might skew the project. The Colonel had nonetheless been an advocate for ousting Castro, and in 1962 he saw Guyana as an opportunity to build a wall against fidelista influence extended into South America.
King’s branch chief for this venture, a capable lieutenant, was Virginia H. Hall Goillot, among the most senior women in CIA’s clandestine service. She had to be at that time, an era exceedingly difficult for women at the agency. Hall had lost a leg in World War II, then parachuted into France to work with the resistance, her prosthesis strapped to her body. She won the Distinguished Service Cross for that. In 1950 she married Paul Goillot, an OSS comrade with the resistance. She joined the CIA in 1951, originally as a branch officer for Western Europe, designing stay-behind networks for France. On the paramilitary staff in 1954 she too had worked on the Guatemala operation and had gone on to plan projects for Southeast Asia. Despite her experience and her medals, the legendary Hall had needed eleven years to obtain a one-level promotion to field grade. For the Guyana project she would have an important role.
On Guyana, Hall wrestled with the need to build capabilities inside the country. In early 1962 the CIA had no station in Georgetown and lacked direct contact with Jagan’s opponent, Forbes Burnham. Hall recruited a Guyanese psychiatrist whose brother was an aide to Burnham. She sent CIA officer Joseph B. Smith to Barbados one weekend that February to meet the agent and his brother. Smith instructed the aide in tradecraft, including secret writing skills that Burnham’s assistant could use to pass information. The Burnham link was made.
For this project there could be no question of resorting to a quasi-military operation or mounting a coup d’état. Guyana had no armed forces to draw into the game, and Cheddi Jagan’s popularity remained such that, even after the Georgetown riots, no possibility existed for armed resistance, which in any case the British army would be bound to fight. The broad strategy was evident from the beginning: require an election, carry out a political maneuver to reduce Jagan’s chances, then do everything possible to influence the outcome. The CIA had appropriate resources, including labor and international organizations. These took the lead in the scheme.
The Directorate for Operations* controlled the CIA’s clandestine service and had the twin missions of espionage and covert operations. The Western Hemisphere Division and J. C. King worked for the Directorate for Operations (DO). So did the Covert Action Staff, locus of the agency’s political warfare experts and its labor activists. By early 1962 the DO had a new boss, as did the CIA itself. The deputy director for operations, a professional intelligence officer, was Richard M. Helms, also not tarred by the Bay of Pigs because he had been careful to stay out of it. At one of their first meetings, new CIA director John McCone told Helms he would be the “man for Cuba.” Because Cuba, by then seen as a dangerous exporter of revolution throughout Latin America, monopolized CIA effort, McCone’s remark became shorthand for special attention to the hemisphere. Helms readily conceded that Central America and the Caribbean had been neglected ever since the creation of the agency. The demand for a Guyana covert action lay squarely within that framework, alongside a more ambitious project pursued directly against Cuba. These were among Helms’s first projects as director of the DO.
Planning for Guyana depended upon a fresh Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) prepared by CIA analysts in April 1962. This study looked at the Georgetown riots and concluded that racial conflict was likely to continue as the basic factor in Guyanese politics. That offered DO operators an obvious cleavage to exploit. The British were not about to resume direct rule, which estimators projected might triple their expenditures for the Commonwealth country. The analysis found L. Forbes Burnham, leader of the opposition PNC party, to be an “advocate of extremist measures in government.” Jagan himself could not be determined to be a Marxist, and the SNIE assessed he would probably follow a policy of nonalignment in a postindependent Guyana. Both conclusions flew in the face of Washington’s rationale for this operation, and both attracted little attention. Also ignored were the SNIE’s warnings about Burnham’s leadership weaknesses and the potential dangers of a government under his control. But the judgment that Burnham’s party had “virtually no following” other than among “Negro ranks” held key importance. In the 1961 elections Burnham had polled 41 percent of the votes.
From an operational viewpoint the problem was to increase Burnham’s attractiveness, cooperate with third-party movements such as the United Front, induce them into coalition with his PNC, and thus create possibilities for overcoming Jagan’s popularity among the majority East Indian population. A measure that could substantially improve this picture would be to persuade the British to create an electoral system based upon proportional representation, in which minority votes in districts that would otherwise be won by Jagan’s PPP would still count toward seating the opposition.
In June 1962 the Directorate for Operations hatched a plan. A CIA memorandum to the Special Group and the NSC staff director for intelligence, William H. Brubeck, summarized the concept. Aide Arthur Schlesinger, favorably impressed with Burnham on a Washington visit in May, told JFK in a June 21 memo, a week after the CIA paper, “I agree that the evidence shows increasingly that Jagan’s heart is with the Communist world.” On July 12 Dean Rusk recommended a program to Kennedy premised on the Jagan-as-Communist thesis.
In a covering note forwarding Rusk’s memo, plus intelligence reports to the president, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy commented that a case against supporting Jagan existed, but the proposed tactics were murkier. “In particular,” Bundy noted, “I think it is unproven that the CIA knows how to manipulate an election in British Guiana without a backfire.” Schlesinger too joined the chorus, telling JFK the plan made him nervous, especially with prospects rated at less than fifty-fifty, asking, “Does CIA think they can carry out a really covert operation—i.e., an operation which, whatever suspicions Jagan might have, will leave no visible traces which he can cite before the world, whether he wins or loses, as evidence of U.S. intervention?” John McCone answered in a short paper on July 20, satisfying President Kennedy. Resistance evaporated.
But the British hurdle had yet to be surmounted. Kennedy met British ambassador Sir David Ormsby-Gore at Hyannis, Massachusetts, on July 21 and 22. He raised the Guyana question, telling the Crown’s representative he wanted to know if Britain envisaged new elections, which “would provide opportunity for [a] government of different complexion to come to power through democratic process.” On July 25 CIA director John McCone saw the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board for a general review of the agency’s covert financial support to political parties. McCone not only touched on the CIA’s thoughts regarding Guyana, immediately afterward he discussed CIA labor operations and their relationship to American union groups, which would furnish the shock troops for the Guyana project.
Meanwhile Mac Bundy followed up Kennedy’s sally with his own British counterpart, cabinet secretary Lord Hood, on August 6. Bundy emphasized urgency and warned against bogging down in endless talks. Kennedy accepted a proposal for a team of four officers from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to come to Washington a week later. On August 8 CIA’s Helms and State’s Alex Johnson agreed to bring matters to a head, forcing consideration of Guyanese political factors. Great Britain ultimately accepted the CIA project proposal and consented to provide SIS support.
London’s most important contribution came in the fall of 1962 when the British set the date for a preindependence election in Guyana, later inducing the political parties to accept a formula for proportional representation in the national assembly. This improved Washington’s odds for a favorable outcome. When NSC staffer Carl Kaysen told Mac Bundy the latest news on October 5, he noted about Guyana, “I think you know about the most interesting development here.”
Now it was up to the CIA and SIS to get the ball rolling. The agency had longstanding ties to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), had played a central role in the 1949 creation of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Inter-American Regional Labor Organization (Organización regional inter-Americano de trajabadores or ORIT) in 1951, and the AFL’s American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). During the fifties ORIT had been the most active in Guyana, encouraging that land’s Trades Union Council to follow an anti-Communist line. But something more was needed. The ICFTU had a London-based affiliate, a secretariat for unions of government workers called the Public Services International (PSI). From 1958 the CIA had also had a relationship with the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the PSI’s U.S. member, and the following year AFSCME set up a Latin American office for PSI. That unit became the cover for, and was headed by, CIA officer William H. McCabe, who liked to hand out cigarette lighters bearing the PSI logo and had photos of himself distributing food to Latin American peasants. McCabe had three years invested in labor work in Latin America, including in Guyana, where the CIA tried to sustain the labor unions opposed to Jagan. McCabe had been in Georgetown throughout the 1962 riots. Those who wondered at his apparent lack of union background were told McCabe was a PSI favorite. The PSI began offering advice to the Guyanese Trades Union Council, headed by East Indian Richard Ishmael, attendee of an AIFLD training course in Front Royal, Virginia. As a percentage of unionists, in the years before these events more Guyanese went through the AIFLD program—which included lectures on the dangers of communism—than citizens of any other Latin American nation.
With the British-mandated elections still far in the future, the CIA and SIS could build their project patiently. Records indicate expenditures for Guyana began in November 1962. That coincides with a program begun by AIFLD to build more than five hundred houses for Ishmael’s Trades Union Council at a cost of $2 million. The agency’s progress report circulated in mid-January 1963. Sending this to Kennedy for his weekend reading on January 26, Mac Bundy noted, in his precise handwriting, “It moves, moderately.” Consular representatives reported that Jagan had the upper hand. But Burnham’s party conducted almost no organizational activity.
Efforts to discredit Jagan included the United Front surfacing a document, the text of his “secret address” to a 1956 party conference. In the speech Jagan denounced associates just as Khrushchev had done in his secret talk to a Soviet party congress that year. The maneuver was designed to characterize Jagan as a Stalinist. Dissension among the ranks pleased the CIA and the United Front. At the international level the United States and the British acted to complicate economic difficulties by closing markets for Guyanese exports, primarily rice. By April 1963 Jagan’s financial distress had become so serious that he wrote to Kennedy asking about the U.S. aid (promised as early as 1958) for road, drainage, and irrigation projects.
On April 15 Cord Meyer, responsible for CIA labor operations, briefed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, including Guyana among his subjects. The centerpiece would be the general strike begun by the Trades Union Council with CIA support. Triggered by Jagan’s introduction of a labor bill that would have given the government some powers over the unions, the strike continued for eighty days and became the biggest in Guyanese history.
Prime Minister Jagan calculated that the Trades Union Council would exhaust its strike fund in a month, after which the government could have its way. But Richard Ishmael met secretly with AFL-CIO officials, almost certainly including William McCabe, before declaring the strike. The foreigners promised help. The historians Robert Waters and Gordon Daniels have uncovered a sheaf of cables from McCabe and others reporting in great detail, and AIFLD paid salaries of eight Guyanese labor “interns” throughout the strike. The AFL-CIO alone spent $800,000. American documents reported by Waters and Daniels identify this as Operation Flypast.
Later investigations by British journalists concluded the CIA had furnished strike pay for the workers, distress funds, travel expenses for leaders, plus money for propaganda and a daily fifteen-minute radio broadcast. The agency funneled the money through the Gotham Foundation, which provided grants to AFSCME, McCabe’s parent organization. Gene Meakins, a labor specialist, worked directly for the Trades Union Council, providing advice and editing radio scripts and a weekly newspaper. (Ex-agency officer Phillip Agee maintains that Meakins was a CIA man, though Meakins denies it. On the other hand, Meakins also claims that McCabe, well established as a CIA employee, had been nothing more than a dedicated labor organizer.) A CIA officer, perhaps Meakins, actually participated in talks between dockworkers and the government.
There were physical attacks on government officials, including Janet Jagan, minister of the interior. Richard Ishmael was identified in police reports as a member of a terror ring that plotted arson and bombings at government buildings (Forbes Burnham, also named in police reports, was acquitted when placed on trial). Troops of the elite British Coldstream Guards had to be called out to protect the unloading of Cuban freighters bearing food and a Russian merchant vessel loading export merchandise. Trying to maintain an image of evenhandedness, the British could not deny this assistance.
On June 21 President Kennedy reviewed the state of play. John McCone and Richard Helms attended for CIA, and Helms took notes. According to the notes, Helms opened with a briefing on the strike, commenting on Jagan’s tough position with the Trades Union Council. Kennedy would provide aid to Guyana if it helped the CIA project, and anticipated another conversation with Prime Minister Macmillan. “It was clear,” Helms wrote, “that the President regards British Guiana as the most important topic he has to discuss with the Prime Minister.”
Dean Rusk flew to London in advance of the meeting, his goal to make clear that the British must not leave behind “a country with a Communist government in control,” that London must unseat Jagan before independence. On June 30 Kennedy and Macmillan met at Birch Grove, England. Kennedy warned—twice—that the effect of having a Communist Guyana in addition to Cuba “would create irresistible pressures in the United States to strike militarily against Cuba.”
This is astonishing. Barely seven months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had brought the world close to nuclear war, a massive World War III between the United States and Russia, John Kennedy was threatening to start that war after all and place the onus for it on the British Crown. The United States had made a public pledge not to invade Cuba as a consequence of the Missile Crisis. Aggressive overt action of this sort would reactivate the Russian guarantees to Castro that had made the crisis so dangerous. To do that on the excuse of the existence of the Jagan government in Guyana would have been both disproportionate and foolish.
The British could have seen through the subterfuge and turned Kennedy down. Instead they played straight, and the meeting concentrated on how to put a Forbes Burnham–led coalition in power. Intriguingly, William McCabe met with the Guyanese unionists within a day of the Kennedy-Macmillan decisions.
The first piece in the new maneuver was for London to provide that proportional representation would be the guiding formula in the upcoming Guyanese election. The British took that action in the fall of 1963. Cheddi Jagan’s letter to Kennedy having gone unanswered, Jagan called in the American consul in Georgetown to say that he had seen Washington shift to a policy of “Jagan must go.” The prime minister warned that his ouster could lead to a takeover by the extremists within his own party, saddling the United States with precisely the sort of Castroite situation it feared. Jagan then went to New York for the opening of the UN General Assembly and tried without success to meet with Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. No doubt Jagan understood the snub.
Meanwhile Washington conceived a fresh idea to dilute ethnic support for Jagan. In November, barely a week before President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the State Department asked about the potential for a new East Indian–based political party, one different from Jagan’s. The CIA replied on November 26 that the most suitable candidates to lead such a movement were reluctant to do so. In early December the agency followed up with a report that Burnham’s PNC would favor such a party but do nothing to support it. If Great Britain resumed direct rule, there would be more scope for the new party. On December 6 Mac Bundy convened Helms and others and determined to pressure British and Canadian diplomats on the direct rule question. This endeavor failed.
In Georgetown, Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party saw its main chance in strong showings of public support. Continuing PPP marches and demonstrations coincided with the early 1964 Panamanian revolt against the U.S. authority in the Panama Canal Zone. That too led Washington to fear for the security of Guyana. Mac Bundy advised President Lyndon B. Johnson to tell the visiting British foreign secretary that he remained as concerned about Guyana as JFK had been. In February the Joint Chiefs of Staff reviewed U.S. contingency planning for military intervention in Guyana. The Chiefs expected that a battle group of ground troops could be inserted in twelve to twenty-seven hours, depending upon whether a situation involved no notice or a previous alert to U.S. forces.
By March pro-Jagan strikes had idled an estimated 30 percent of sugar plantation workers. The CIA reported Richard Ishmael’s bitter complaints that his own organizers, with no protection, were unwilling to hold rallies. But on March 18 the CIA reported that Jagan’s police were acting vigorously against intimidation and demonstrations. Violence increased again. By the end of April thirteen persons had died in strike-related incidents, most attributed to Jagan’s PPP or its associated Guyana Agricultural Workers’ Union. One of the dead was a British citizen.
Meanwhile the new-party initiative moved forward. On March 8 a group announced formation of a United Muslim Party. A week later came creation of the All-Indian League, an organization the CIA reported as “actually testing for support for the eventual formation of an anti-Jagan Hindu party.” Agency undercover advisers were assigned to each party to encourage them to join forces. The CIA action achieved something of an undesired coup in early June when Forbes Burnham stood up in the assembly to propose a three-party coalition government. When the United Front refused to participate, the initiative collapsed (Jagan himself had made a counteroffer, not rejecting the proposal).
British authorities announced voting districts in mid-April, and voter registration took place in May. The CIA provided advice and support to the non-Jagan parties. In June the British monitor of the election certified the voter lists. The list for Georgetown contained fewer names (95 percent) than in the previous election. Other irregularities eventually turned up. There would be more absentee ballots cast by Guyanese overseas—votes more open to manipulation—than there were voters on the rolls.
Continuing violence frightened Guyanese and affected registrations. The CIA explored military training for some anti-Jagan activists and had a contingency plan to distribute arms. McGeorge Bundy approved it by telephone on May 7, a week after Helms proposed it. Caches of alleged PPP weapons were discovered by police, but it remains unclear whether this represented another CIA ploy. In late June, Jagan had to take his daughter out of school because of harassment from classmates. Five or ten homes were burning every day, and already sixty people had died. American diplomats in Georgetown believed that even troops could not now end the violence—they were too few and it was too widespread.
“No matter what I try to do,” Cheddi Jagan told U.S. consul Delmar Carlson on May 25, “I can get nowhere. I am opposed by everyone, including the CIA which I suppose is the American Government. I laid my cards on the table to President Kennedy [in 1961], and he gave me to understand that he would help me but he didn’t and I can only conclude that he was a liar or that he was influenced to change his decision.”
The Guyanese leader made yet another bid for reconciliation. He called in Carlson several times over the last days of June. Jagan worried about Forbes Burnham.
“You don’t know Burnham,” Cheddi pleaded. “He’ll cut my throat.”
Prime Minister Jagan again suggested a coalition. He offered to sign an international treaty to neutralize Guyana in much the same fashion as Austria from 1945 to 1955. Jagan wanted to send an emissary to Washington to discuss the proposal, but his overture would not even be considered. The standard working group on Guyana convened at the State Department on June 30. It included Mac Bundy, Richard Helms from CIA, William R. Tyler of the State Department, and Bundy’s special assistant, Gordon Chase. The officials agreed that “a dialogue with Jagan might conceivably cool down the . . . security problem” but doubted that Jagan would make important concessions. Washington rejected the approach in early July. In Georgetown, Carlson proved reluctant to inform Jagan. The same group plus additional officials, including NSC staff director for intelligence matters Peter Jessup, rejected an emissary again several weeks later. Finally Washington induced the British to tell the Guyanese that talks with the Americans had established that the United States saw no useful purpose in receiving an emissary.
The British themselves now pressed the issue of a national unity coalition of the three parties. When Gordon Chase approached him on the matter at the end of July, Mac Bundy returned the memo with his handwritten reply: “I’d stonewall for now.”
When a Jagan political opponent came to Washington toward the end of August, Gordon Chase advised Bundy that to avoid the impression of being an American stooge, the Guyanese should not be accorded a meeting with the president.
By this time the British governor anticipated that even with proportional representation Cheddi Jagan’s PPP might emerge with a small majority of the assembly. Washington told the British this would be unacceptable. By late August the CIA pronounced itself cautiously optimistic about the election, but in truth its political analysis fell short. A State-CIA meeting on Guyana took place on September 8, again optimistic. Several days later, with Desmond FitzGerald sitting in for the agency, this discussion continued. Bundy pressed for a contingency paper on measures if Jagan won. The CIA drafted a paper not long after, and Bundy discussed it with Helms and the State Department on September 17.
Meanwhile in Georgetown, after months of encouragement from CIA political action officers, Indian politician Balram Singh Rai decided to form a new Justice Party. For a month or so Rai appeared to do well, but then his effort sputtered to a halt. An internal document from Jagan’s PPP, which the CIA acquired and reported late in August, declared that local elements hostile to the PPP had “secured international assistance in their efforts to overthrow the government,” and that the “unity” of opposition forces “would not have availed were it not for U.S. intervention.” The document recommended defusing such opposition elements as the Portuguese Roman Catholics plus overtures to the United States through Canada.
Forbes Burnham continued to plague all houses. He antagonized the British, remained in conflict with other opposition parties, and had a difficult time with the Americans as well. The U.S. consul in Georgetown reported to the Bundy-Helms-Tyler group on September 11 that he had tried to forge amicable relations with Burnham, but “it is tough to do so.” Said the official, “Burnham, a racist and probably anti-white, remembers slights and repays them; at the same time, he takes advantage of people who treat him softly.”
In short, by the fall of 1964, Cheddi Jagan had offered concessions, CIA’s third-force movement had stalled, Burnham stood revealed as a treacherous ally, and the British worried that Jagan would win after all. Washington still had an opportunity to call off the CIA. It did not do so. Senior officials remained upbeat on the prospects for electoral victory.
Burnham campaign buttons produced in the United States and doubtless paid for by the agency now appeared in Georgetown. Gordon Chase told Mac Bundy that the CIA, “in a deniable and discreet way,” had begun paying party workers. Violence escalated on all sides. A Justice Party station wagon was blown up, PNC meetings were fired upon, Jagan activists were roughed up or killed. In all, the campaign season brought with it almost 200 murders, a thousand persons injured, and about 15,000 people (more than 2,600 families) forced from their homes.
The December elections did not turn out as advertised. Cheddi Jagan won 47 percent of the vote, more than either the Americans or the British expected. Burnham trailed by almost thirteen thousand votes in spite of overseas ballots overwhelmingly favoring him. But because Jagan did not obtain an outright majority, a coalition would have to follow. The British governor simply refused Jagan the opportunity to put one together. A CIA officer elsewhere in South America noted in his diary on December 18, “a new victory for the station in British Guiana . . . largely due to CIA operations over the last five years to strengthen the anti-Jagan trade unions.”
The British turned to Forbes Burnham to form the government. Burnham went on to rule like a dictator until he died in office, as racist and imperious as many had feared. Guyana’s export industries of sugar, rice, and bauxite atrophied. By 1984 the wheel had come full circle and Burnham publicly accused Washington of trying to undermine his government by encouraging striking bauxite workers—shades of the CIA in 1963. Guyana did not have another free election until 1992. When it did, the nation elected Cheddi Jagan. Washington still had trouble coming up with a reasonable policy—Jagan had to reject an American nominated for ambassador who had been one of the labor leaders the CIA had arrayed against him. Ironically Cheddi Jagan would die in Washington, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in 1997, while still in office. Arthur Schlesinger said in retrospect, “We misunderstood the whole struggle down there. He wasn’t a Communist. The British thought we were overreacting and indeed we were. The CIA decided that this was some great menace, and they got the bit between their teeth. But even if British Guiana had gone Communist, it’s hard to see how it would be a threat.”
The universe of covert operations only begins with political action. What the Central Intelligence Agency did in Guyana represents one kind of activity. Although the coordination and analysis of intelligence was the reason for the creation of the CIA, the agency derived its other identity—America’s “Cold War agency”—from these covert projects. The political action in Guyana lay at about the halfway point on a spectrum from propaganda and influence peddling to violence (quasi-war), paramilitary operations, and support for military operations at the upper boundary. Many within the CIA and outside it saw covert operations as a third option between doing nothing and engaging in full-scale warfare. The story of covert operations is the saga of the third option, of these kinds of initiatives, though all cannot be treated in equal detail over the broad span of the CIA’s history. The tale involves the men and women who made the operations happen; what was accomplished and what not; the impact of these activities on America’s global quest for democracy—on its foreign policy, national security, and standing in the world; and the tension between the CIA’s operations and the agency’s accountability under a democratic form of government. This set of concerns will remain whether or not the Central Intelligence Agency survives as an entity in the post–September 11 world, because the perceived needs for and function of covert operations will continue.
Guyana was not the only CIA political action of its kind. Indeed it is among the least known. Of much greater renown is the agency’s political action in Italy after World War II and over the decades afterward. There were many more such efforts. Political action involves all forms of activity that might contribute to a given outcome. Mechanisms include propaganda; subsidizing political parties, labor organizations, cultural groups, print and broadcast media, and other agents of influence; and sowing disinformation to discredit contrary messages. Political action may be viewed as the bread and butter of covert operations.
Some of these kinds of activities were also employed individually in long-term operations, such as the CIA’s efforts to broadcast freedom, as it were, into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during much of the Cold War. Such efforts comprise the lowest end of the covert action spectrum.
Propaganda and psychological warfare remain at the heart of much that happens in political action. Often several of these types of projects are melded into a given operational initiative. The radio operations, for example, served a variety of different ends, simultaneously supporting various specific activities. At the global level, campaigns of several sorts may be in progress at the same time.
An intermediate form of initiative is the enlistment of officials or military officers in the target country to overthrow their government and install individuals more favorable to the covert actor. This fomenting of military coups d’état may involve aspects of political action as well as economic pressures and other more conventional foreign policy initiatives.
At the upper end of the spectrum are paramilitary operations, the use of armed force secretly supported by the covert actor to affect events in other nations. These operations may be full-scale wars and may also feature any or all of the other tools in the covert action kit. Paramilitary operations are the most significant variety of covert action and bear the greatest risks. Over time the character of this kind of activity has changed. Today the CIA often functions as a sort of middleman, or comprador, engaging the services of third parties, whether they be governments, security services, ethnic or political movements, or individuals. Military special operations forces have assumed increasing importance and supplanted the CIA in roles traditionally played by agency officers. The CIA nevertheless still supports these operations, as the next case study shows.
Purists might say that support of military operations is not paramilitary action, but the latter subsumes the former. Especially with the changing character of the world into the age of terrorism, military special operations have increasingly substituted for paramilitary action and must fall within the scope of this book. The growing predominance of nonstate actors today makes this element of the spectrum inescapable.
Other forms of activity have shaped covert action. Espionage provides key inputs for the secret warriors as, again, will be apparent from the next case. Intelligence analysis also provides guidance for operators. The CIA’s “Great White Case Officer,” Allen Dulles, once cited analysis as a check and balance on covert action. Strictly speaking this is not accurate, but the general point is that analysis establishes the dimensions of operational problems and indicates avenues of approach, as evident in the Guyana action. Parameters for covert activities are also set by congressional overseers in a process that has steadily grown more important.
Even at the lower end of the spectrum, covert action remains fraught with consequence for the peoples and nations involved. Covert operations have frequently involved transnational alliances with foreign intelligence services. These vital ties have proved critical in many instances, enough so that the saga of American covert operations provides a window on a number of companion intelligence services.
Time has transformed covert operations. Technological developments have changed the ways information moves, ideas are influenced, plans developed, spies operate. Devices have become more subtle, weapons more lethal, aircraft more capable, and so on. But there will always be room for error. The unanticipated, the unexpected event has great weight, the more so since the secrecy of these activities makes it difficult to apply conventional techniques when secret warriors get in trouble. That is what happened in the Iranian hostage rescue attempt of 1980.
The news came after the party broke up—in Georgia, near Fort Stewart, unwinding at the conclusion of a difficult military maneuver, one that certified the readiness of the recently created Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta. Modeled on an earlier maneuver conducted in the southwestern United States, Delta did so well it earned a commendation from the White House, which had monitored the entire affair. Delta’s commander, Col. Charlie Beckwith, his top officers, FBI agents who had played terrorists in the drill, and CIA officers who had handled the intelligence side, celebrated over beers with Defense Intelligence Agency chief Gen. Samuel V. Wilson. After the liquor the group repaired to an all-night restaurant for a sumptuous breakfast. Beckwith finally stumbled into bed. He had hardly gotten to sleep when an aide phoned him—Iranian student radicals had taken over the U.S. embassy in Teheran, capturing the entire staff. It was November 4, 1979, the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis.
Outside Washington another middle-of-the-night phone call awakened the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Adm. Stansfield Turner. He was certain he was dreaming—Turner had gotten a similar call from the CIA duty officer seven months earlier when another Teheran demonstration had overrun the embassy. But this was no dream. In February the Iranian revolutionary government had ejected demonstrators and restored the embassy and the freedom of the U.S. diplomatic delegation. This time they did not. The former Shah of Iran had just been permitted to come to the United States for medical treatment, and tempers in Teheran were white hot. Admiral Turner went to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, to prepare for a White House meeting. To his surprise, President Jimmy Carter waited a day before gathering his top officials in the White House Situation Room. After that three-hour skull session, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski ordered preparations for a rescue mission.
Colonel Beckwith’s unit would have the lead role. He sent his deputy, Maj. “Bucky” Burruss, plus a top planner to Washington to report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). There they were told to obtain the latest information on the situation and present the concept for the mission. Moving a rescue force to Teheran posed obvious problems. The place lay far from any U.S. base, and a small American force would find it difficult to move among a teeming Iranian population, many of whom hated America as the “Great Satan.”
At the White House, security adviser Brzezinski began holding daily sessions among top-level officials to deliberate on the proper course. For several months these continued without respite. Both he and President Carter kept close tabs on the progress of the rescue plan, which they kept out of the situation room brainstorming. Admiral Turner began every meeting by briefing the intelligence, then talk turned to diplomacy or coercion. After a week Turner noticed that certain officials stayed behind after the sessions and realized there were private discussions about what must be a rescue plan. Returning to his office on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters at Langley, Turner called Brzezinski, angrily objecting to being left out of the rescue planning, asking where the rescuers were going to get their intelligence if not from the CIA. Only then was the agency admitted to the inner sanctum of the rescue mission.
Neither JCS chairman Gen. David C. Jones nor Colonel Beckwith liked the initial plan. Both wanted more striking power. Delta had only 120 troopers. Yet every man and pound of equipment planners inserted to give the force more depth would have to be gotten to Teheran, where the hostages would have to be freed and evacuated. The constraints were tight indeed.
Just a week after the embassy seizure an air force special operations expert, Col. James H. Kyle, was summoned from his post in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to plan the air side of the mission, at first called Rice Bowl to suggest an Asian locale. Kyle became deputy commander of a joint task force cobbled together to carry out the operation under army Maj. Gen. James B. Vaught. Kyle thought Major Burruss, with his lock of unruly hair, looked like the cartoon character Dennis the Menace. Beckwith himself saw Burruss like the actor Robert Redford, handsome and rugged. Burruss emphasized that Delta needed to arrive in Teheran as a coherent unit, which ruled out any kind of parachute drop. A long-range helicopter flight soon emerged as the best option. Delta Force would furnish the muscle on the ground.
Colonel Beckwith moved his unit to a secure training ground, the same place used to marshal his earlier validation exercise. To execute this move secretly, Beckwith resorted to hiring rental cars.
President Jimmy Carter remained preoccupied with the hostages and the mission’s success. The president’s concern was well founded. An airline identified with the CIA had furnished the aircraft that flew the shah from Cairo to New York City. Although there were humanitarian reasons for Carter’s action, the former Iranian dictator remained anathema to those who had become the new government of Iran. Brzezinski had conducted back-channel talks with moderate elements in the Teheran government, but the revelation of these contacts only added to the anger in Teheran. Among the consequences would be the demise of the moderate Iranian government and its replacement with one dominated by religious extremists.
The CIA had worries of its own. Even as controversy swirled over whether U.S. intelligence had failed to understand the revolutionary upheaval in Iran, the agency had the problem of the loss of its own people in Teheran as well as other official Americans and its offices, equipment, and records in the U.S. embassy. Beyond that the CIA faced the need to provide support for the rescue mission.
The agency had played a major role in the shah’s Iran. Its station in Teheran when he fell had 125 persons assigned, a large contingent (though dwarfed by the 10,000 U.S. military personnel in Iran at the time). Americans had been evacuated, and only a tiny staff returned afterward. During the interval between the shah’s fall and the embassy takeover, the CIA resorted to unusual tactics, using both official and undercover stations. The CIA station at the embassy, led by Thomas Ahearn, comprised just three operations officers and five persons overall. Howard Hart, with four agents, shuttled among CIA safe houses in Teheran, not so much a station as a clandestine network. Among their notable achievements was the exfiltration of “Raptor,” a senior Iranian military officer, CIA’s top spy in the shah’s government. In the embassy takeover Ahearn and his people were captured, but Hart and his agents remained at large. They escaped and eventually turned up at agency headquarters where Hart became branch chief for Iran in the Near East Division of the Directorate for Operations.
Adm. Stansfield Turner, director of central intelligence under Carter, had a different headache in the form of six other Americans. Five of them, led by Consul General Robert Anders, had been in a building at the rear of the embassy when Iranian students began climbing the front wall, and had managed to escape. A sixth, agricultural attaché Lee Schatz, had an office outside the compound. These Americans took refuge at the Canadian embassy, shielded by Canadian ambassador Kenneth Taylor. Getting the six out of Iran posed critical questions for DCI Turner even as Ambassador Taylor and other brave Canadian diplomats hid the Americans in their homes. The Canadians offered to help in an escape attempt. In mid-December Turner approved participation by the Graphics and Authentication Branch of the CIA’s Office of Technical Support, which had also been vital in the “Raptor” exfiltration. To test the difficulty of moving in and out of Teheran, branch chief Antonio J. Mendez carried out a covert operation of his own, creating a fake movie production company supposedly to film a motion picture in Iran. Others scouted out overland escape routes while Mendez focused on open travel through Teheran’s Mehrabad airport. Even as Mendez set up his Hollywood company, “Studio Six Productions,” his unit aided agency officers moving in and out of Teheran to prepare for the hostage rescue. Studio Six advertised in Hollywood trade publications, designed a logo, and solicited scripts (including one from Steven Spielberg) for a science fiction film set in the Middle East. Mehrabad, considered the quickest way out, became the route of choice, and Mendez and another officer flew into Teheran and prepared false passports for the escapees. They and their families left on January 28, 1980. To preclude reprisals, Ambassador Taylor left too, and Canada closed its embassy, evacuating all officials from Iran.
As final preparations for the escape proceeded, Admiral Turner reviewed the main rescue plan. Based upon seizing an airfield where helicopters could be refueled before heading to Teheran, the plan required holding that base for the duration of the mission, during which the Iranians might easily discover the operation and respond. Turner thought this far too risky and claims credit for the CIA in evolving the final rescue concept. Special operations experts advised simply landing in the Iranian desert to establish a refueling site and launching Rice Bowl from there. “Chuck Gilbert,” a CIA aviation expert with extensive experience in Laos during the Southeast Asian war, spearheaded this effort. He had been assigned to the Iran task force as early as November 14. Within days the CIA had identified a site and prepared to fly a small aircraft into it to take soil samples that would establish whether the desert floor was hard enough to support the weight of all the participating aircraft. Turner ordered the plane pre-positioned at Rome and went to the White House, where he sold the concept to Carter and Brzezinski. The code name for the operation changed to Eagle Claw.
Intelligence remained a major sticking point. Special operations veterans of Eagle Claw condemn the intelligence as inferior and Turner as having been lukewarm at best. Turner disputes that. He later told Colonel Kyle that from the beginning of the crisis he spent most of his time on it. Charles G. Cogan, chief of the Near East Division, and Howard Hart would also have disputed complaints. The truth was, the CIA lacked sources in Teheran after the takeover, as Hart told the joint task force leaders. Creating fresh networks would be difficult.
Admiral Turner recalled former Teheran station chief George W. Cave from retirement to lead the advance team. Much of the work focused on trying to learn about Teheran from the outside, interviewing Iranians who had left or were traveling, combing their accounts for anything that would shed light on the hostages. In Rome, officer Floyd Paseman saw as many as a hundred Iranians a day to mine data. Out of all that he came up with just one who had real knowledge, developed during visits home, that could be used in the rescue mission.
Langley had reason to want the hostages freed—the Iranians had captured the CIA station in Teheran. They quickly identified Thomas Ahearn as its chief and kept him in solitary confinement. Although CIA records in Teheran had been evacuated when the shah fell, some were returned during the summer and fall, and new papers had gone into the files, which were supposed to have been destroyed or sent out after no more than three months. But they had accumulated anyway. When the embassy fell, station efforts to destroy its files were defeated by failure of a machine that reduced paper to pulp. Officers shredded documents, but the Iranian captors painstakingly reassembled them. They used these to single out William J. Daugherty, a case officer on his first tour, as another CIA person. Danger mounted daily.
The Iranians were an odd mix of student neophytes, fundamentalists, and anti-shah activists. Their slogans about the “Great Satan” were ubiquitous. Having captured sixty-six Americans in November, the Iranians released thirteen women and minority-group diplomats. But once the Iranians found Daugherty and charged two others, Malcolm Kalp and Phillip R. Ward, as CIA, the releases stopped.
By then Americans had begun actual rehearsals of Eagle Claw. Navy RH-53D helicopters were to be used for the movement, but these lacked sufficiently precise navigational gear, a failing remedied by the efforts of CIA’s Chuck Gilbert. Marine pilots were to fly the craft because navy airmen lacked experience in long-distance flights over land. Delta Force, a separate unit of Rangers for airstrip security, and gasoline to fuel eight helicopters for their final stage of flight were to be delivered by MC-130 transport aircraft that met them at the remote desert site. The site soon became known as Desert One. The copters would fly Delta to Desert Two, a staging base fifty miles from Teheran, then hide while the rescue took place. Colonel Beckwith and Delta Force would proceed into Teheran in trucks, free the hostages, escape in the helicopters to a third airfield to be taken over by U.S. Rangers, and the whole command would leave aboard MC-130s that returned to pick them up. Eagle Claw remained an extremely long-range mission, with the big MC-130s to fly from Egypt and the helicopters from the aircraft carrier Nimitz in the Indian Ocean.
The work in Iran to make all this feasible fell to the CIA. Admiral Turner’s retiree, “Bob,” was to be the inside man. Assisted by a fake identity crafted by Mendez’s shop, Bob arrived in late December (the ease with which he transited through Mehrabad airport dictated the choice of that route for the Canadian exfiltration). Short, compact, and rugged-looking, Bob spoke a number of languages, though not Farsi, the language of Iran. He functioned effectively as a businessman starting a construction company. In meeting Colonel Beckwith, Bob’s deliberate speech and mannerisms reminded the Delta commander of Anthony Quinn playing Zorba the Greek. Through Bob the CIA bought half a dozen English and two Mazda trucks and acquired a warehouse on the edge of Teheran to house them. The trucks were to be driven by Iranian agents the CIA recruited elsewhere and sent back home. One wealthy Iranian volunteer drove to Langley headquarters in a Mercedes but had no knowledge of the standard gearshifts of trucks and had to be trained stateside. Bob scouted out the Delta hide site (Desert Two) as well as the recovery airstrip to be used later. He left Teheran repeatedly to brief CIA officials in Rome or Athens. Bob personally advised Charlie Beckwith, but Beckwith wanted all the data rechecked by someone he trusted.
After the CIA rejected several Delta Force volunteers for a fresh Teheran scouting expedition, Maj. Richard Meadows asked for the assignment. Meadows became involved in the planning just a few days after the embassy seizure when Beckwith sent him to Washington to strengthen Delta’s hand. A legendary Special Forces figure from the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Meadows now struck the CIA as an amateur with insufficient support and training—he could not master Portuguese for his cover identity. Admiral Turner, who saw the mission as a manifestation of distrust of the CIA, relented when Meadows threatened to go anyway. Strictly speaking, the Meadows mission was an egregious security error—he possessed detailed knowledge of the Eagle Claw plan. But Delta’s previous lead candidate for the reconnaissance had been Major Burruss.
On March 10 Turner’s deputy, Frank Carlucci, met task force chief General Vaught with the latest CIA data. There was also the problem of whether the Desert One strip, chosen from satellite photos, could bear the weight of the big MC-130s. That could only be verified on the spot. A reconnaissance mission would also install infrared runway lights that could be remotely activated to guide the aircraft landings. These were created by the CIA at the behest of Chuck Gilbert. At least three times JCS chairman Gen. David Jones, Admiral Turner, and security adviser Brzezinski appealed to President Carter to approve this preliminary mission.
At Camp David on March 22 the president received his first detailed briefing on the rescue plan. General Jones emphasized that Eagle Claw would be a highly complex operation. Carter preferred to await diplomatic developments but knew preparations were necessary. Stansfield Turner had pressed for permission to make the Desert One reconnaissance since January, and now Carter approved.
At Langley when he planned this expedition, Admiral Turner had been astonished to learn that his lead pilot, James Rhyne, had a peg leg, having lost one flying for the agency in Laos. Assured Rhyne was far and away the finest CIA airman, Turner scored this in the believe-it-or-not category and moved on. Copilot Bud McBroom was also a Southeast Asia veteran. They rendezvoused in Athens with air force Maj. John Carney and picked up a DeHavilland DH-6 Twin Otter modified for long range, taking it to Rome to load the CIA-designed strip lights. They went through Cairo and Masirah to Desert One, landing the night of March 31. Carney took soil samples and, aided by McBroom, installed the remote lighting. His worst problem would be orienting himself to the planned layout of the airstrip. While they were on the ground, no fewer than six vehicles drove past on the nearby highway. This was a bad omen. A second omen came at London’s Heathrow airport while Carney waited with his samples for a Concorde flight home—two CIA officers appeared in the lounge and called out his real name, not his alias.
The scout mission confirmed that Desert One could be used. On April 7 President Carter held a meeting of the National Security Council. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had opposed the foray for months, favoring UN mediation, but Carter brooked no further delay. The next day NSC staffer Gary Sick prepared a memo for Brzezinski picturing Eagle Claw as preferable to any other option. After a redraft, Brzezinski gave it to the president. As the exhausted Vance vacationed in Florida, Carter held a further NSC session on April 11 and approved the rescue. Vance demanded a hearing on his return. Unable to dissuade the president at their encounter, the secretary resigned effective after the Eagle Claw operation.
Meanwhile Major Meadows set out on the last-minute reconnaissance. He was given an Irish passport and identity as “Richard Keith.” A Virginian, Meadows’s Southern accent apparently struck the Iranians as Irish enough. He arrived in Teheran on April 21, three days before the scheduled start of Eagle Claw, just as Delta Force flew across the Atlantic to a staging base at Wadi Kena in southern Egypt. Meadows linked up with two Green Berets who had relatives in Teheran and were familiar with the region. They entered Iran separately and would be his drivers. There were tough moments, as when one of the men failed to stop at a roadblock and they had to talk their way past an enraged Iranian sergeant. But Meadows rechecked the Desert Two site, modified the planned hiding place, and used a satellite phone to tell Washington. At the last minute some workers showed up outside CIA’s warehouse and began to dig up the street. Suitable bribes induced them to delay the work and fill the trench in again. The Iranian agent who had originally rented the garage now fled the country—a third bad omen.
The biggest question still remained—the exact location of the hostages. Just two days ahead of the operation, that was solved: the U.S. embassy chef, a Pakistani who had taught the Iranian occupiers to cook dishes suitable for the hostages, was suddenly allowed to leave the country. Flying out of Mehrabad, by chance the man sat next to a CIA undercover officer, who connected with him and got the cook to tell what he knew, instantly conveyed through CIA channels. Three hostages, including chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen, were being held at the Iranian foreign ministry. The remaining fifty Americans were in the chancellery building in the U.S. compound. Howard Hart briefed the intelligence to Beckwith at Wadi Kena just four hours before Delta was to leave for Desert One. Hart was going on the rescue mission too.
Beckwith asked his air officer, the born-again Christian Maj. William Boykin, to say a prayer as troopers gathered. The blessing proved insufficient to overcome negative factors that determined the outcome. Despite the best efforts of CIA’s Chuck Gilbert, who had gone with a senior airman to Diego Garcia and then to the Nimitz to check on the helicopters, one of the RH-53D choppers encountered navigational problems. Two more suffered mechanical failures in an intense dust storm during the flight to Desert One. There innocent Iranian passersby in a bus and trucks blundered into Delta on the ground, opening the door to a breach in Eagle Claw’s security. Following the third helicopter abort, Colonel Beckwith considered that he no longer had enough ships to proceed. The joint task force commanders decided to terminate the operation. Then, in a horrible accident, one of the remaining choppers collided with an MC-130 aircraft. The fire that ensued, visible for miles in every direction, destroyed both craft and killed eight Americans. Losses would have been higher except for heroic efforts by several participants to save their comrades.
The hostage rescue had failed.
Iranian authorities quickly dispersed the American hostages, who would not again be together. Although Washington prepared plans for Operation Honey Bear, an expanded rescue mission, the Carter administration never again thought the intelligence good enough and did not overcome its uncertainties regarding a military special operation carried out at such long range. Meanwhile quiet negotiations with the Iranian government led to the release of the hostages on January 20, 1981, the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President of the United States.
* Created in 1951, this part of the CIA was known until 1973 as the Directorate for Plans in order to disguise its true function. Further, the unit’s abbreviation followed the job title of its chief, the deputy director for plans (DDP). In 1973 this unit was retitled the Directorate for Operations (DO), the identity it retains today, and is headed by the CIA’s deputy director for operations. To avoid confusion in this book, this element of the CIA will be called the Directorate for Operations throughout.