MOST OFTEN the jangling telephone in the office of the president’s appointments secretary brought new problems, the minor crises that made up a routine day. No doubt this was what was anticipated that early spring day in 1955 when John Earman, a special assistant to the director of central intelligence, came on the line. But Earman had a question, not a problem. It concerned an appointment with the president set for 9:50 A.M. on March 24. The meeting had been arranged to award the National Security Medal, the highest decoration given by the United States for intelligence work. A few months earlier, on December 15, 1954, President Eisenhower had signed a memorandum awarding the medal to CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt for the latter’s role in a prime covert operation, the toppling of a legally constituted government in Iran.
Everything about the ceremony would be held very closely. The National Security Medal, itself a secret, could be awarded by the president at his discretion, unlike the military Medal of Honor, approved by Congress. Award citations and the medals are secret, kept in CIA vaults for the duration of an intelligence officer’s career. The National Security Medal was not only secret, it was special. Kermit Roosevelt was only the fourth person to receive it.
It would not be the first time Roosevelt came to the White House, nor indeed his first brush with exotic adventures. The grandson of Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt, some of Teddy’s venturesomeness clearly had rubbed off on his progeny. In 1938, with rising danger of war, “Kim,” as he was known, accompanied President Franklin Roosevelt’s crony Vincent Astor on a Pacific island cruise-cum-spy mission in which they used a yachting expedition to survey Japanese docks, fuel depots, and airfields in the Marshall Islands. Astor had reported to FDR personally, and Kim went along for the evening with his cousin the president. Living in London a year later, Roosevelt felt so outraged at the Soviet Union’s invasion of tiny Finland in the 1939–1940 “Winter War” that he recruited a Spanish Civil War–style international brigade—too late to help the Finns but a fine adventure all the same.
Months before Pearl Harbor, Kim joined the war information office that Wild Bill Donovan would turn into the OSS. Roosevelt’s Ph.D. dissertation, on propaganda techniques in England’s Glorious Revolution, had been just the thing to pique Donovan, who snapped Kim up from his job as a newly minted history instructor. One day Wild Bill asked Roosevelt what he thought about Iran, effectively giving Kim a portfolio he kept up through his career. He went to the Eastern Mediterranean with OSS boss Stephen Penrose, serving as a top intelligence evaluator. Roosevelt, then twenty-nine, first visited Palestine in 1944 and then went on to Iran. His cousin and fellow OSS/CIA stalwart, Archie Roosevelt, followed Kermit to northern Iran at the end of the war, affording a secondhand but still close look at the immediate postwar crisis in Iran, where the imperial government of Reza Shah Pahlavi survived as a constitutional monarchy.
Kermit Roosevelt served as a lead writer on the official history of the OSS, and he retreated to writing and academe afterward, returning to Iran repeatedly beginning in 1947, when he went back to research a book on Arabs and oil. Three years later Frank Wisner recruited Kim away from Harvard University. Roosevelt thought Wisner a scattershot, lacking depth and judgment, but he got on better with Tracy Barnes, a fellow Groton alumnus, or Miles Copeland, former Dixieland musician and CIC veteran from the war. Through Barnes, Kim quickly opened his own channel to Allen Dulles, the agency’s new deputy director for operations.
It became clear to everyone that the Middle East would be Roosevelt’s private preserve after a startling performance in Egypt. Kim knew Farouk, the king of semi-independent Egypt, from dealings during the war. The CIA sent him back. There Roosevelt reminded himself of his low opinion of Farouk, soon denigrated among agency insiders as the “Fat Fucker,” and broadened his contacts to include the Free Officers’ Movement, a revolutionary group whose reformist goals encompassed Farouk’s overthrow. Chief among the officers was one Gamal Abdel Nasser. Project FF became the action against Farouk. In March 1952, Miles Copeland, acting for Kim, told several of the Free Officers that the United States was worried about increasing discontent in Egypt. The seed thus planted blossomed into a coup that summer. Nasser became a member of the resulting junta from which he emerged as Egyptian leader. Kim Roosevelt became Nasser’s grey eminence, extending quiet CIA help and giving advice. Estimates are that the agency funneled $3 million into the Egyptian venture. Kim attempted to harness Arab nationalism to the American wagon of democracy but prudently faded into the background in the months after the coup to hide CIA’s tracks. Agency operators understood the reasons for the anti-American rhetoric Nasser used with his public, but the State Department and White House did not, and the relationship soured. At least Roosevelt had tried. He would try again in Iran with results that, at least in the short run, turned out differently.
The award ceremony at the White House came off without a hitch. Roosevelt, his wife, and two children, entered the West Wing through a side entrance, avoiding press speculation. The appointment itself, just ten minutes before a session of the NSC, made it convenient for DCI Allen Dulles, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Ambassador to Iran Loy Henderson to be present when President Eisenhower strung the ribbon around Roosevelt’s neck. The presentation indicated the esteem in which Ike held the intelligence community.
Iran had been a covert action writ large, solving a problem Eisenhower inherited from the Truman administration. The Iran problem arose from oil, though it had a Cold War overlay, specifically from British interest in Iranian oil. The CIA covert action represented the end result of an Anglo-Iranian oil crisis that had endured for two bitter years, drawing in the British government, the Royal Navy, the SIS, and then the United States. Great Britain had total control over the pumping, refining, and shipping of oil in southern Iran through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). Under an agreement to expire in 1993, AIOC paid Iran rents and taxes plus salaries for Iranian employees. The money accounted for half of Iran’s budget, but in fact AIOC paid more taxes to the British government than to the nation whose oil it pumped, and AIOC itself earned ten times what it paid Iran. Sure of their position, the British offered only cosmetic changes in a supplement to the agreement when it came up for renegotiation. Tensions heightened when the United States signed its own agreement with neighboring Saudi Arabia that recognized Saudi ownership of the oil and the corporation.
British suspicions of American interests in Iran persisted as a subtext in this affair, but were presumably swallowed by London and AIOC as the price for U.S. diplomatic support and for the covert operation that would follow. Nevertheless, as early as 1948 a group of American oil speculators formed Overseas Consultants in an effort to get control of oil production in northern Iran, where the AIOC had not sewn up its concession. Their legal counsel, interestingly enough, was Allen Dulles of Sullivan & Cromwell in his pre-CIA days. Kermit Roosevelt, who began traveling the Middle East for the CIA in 1950, was perfectly aware of American penetrations, British sensitivities, and Iranian politics.
Meanwhile the British contrived to have an Iranian parliamentary commission report nationalization of AIOC as completely infeasible. The prime minister presenting this conclusion to the Majlis read a statement that had clearly been inadequately translated from English into the Iranian language Farsi, and this linked him to British interests. He was shouted down and several weeks later, on March 7, 1951, shot dead as he knelt to pray in a mosque. Thus came to power a popular nationalist leader, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who immediately presented a bill for government absorption of Anglo-Iranian. The bill became law, and on May 2 AIOC was taken over.
Because of its global interests, AIOC had a working relationship with SIS and soon demanded political action to change the government in Teheran to one willing to settle on favorable terms. Monty Woodhouse, the SIS station chief, arrived on the Teheran scene in August 1951, only a few weeks after Mossadegh’s security service shut down AIOC’s private intelligence net. Both Woodhouse and the Secret Service’s controller for the Middle East, George K. Young, were amenable to action. They initiated schemes to discredit Mossadegh’s leadership through psychological warfare, though without accomplishing much more than to make the Iranian prime minister aware of the British play. In mid-1952, when the Royal Navy actually seized a tanker carrying Iranian oil in violation of the British embargo, tensions reached fever pitch. Some weeks later Iran’s monarch, the shah, responded by attempting to dismiss Mossadegh, appointing instead an elder politician in touch with British figures, including former SIS secret warrior Julian Amery. This maneuver failed. The Majlis reelected Mossadegh as prime minister, tying the shah’s hands. The prime minister’s National Front seemed to have overwhelming support.
London now shifted its stance on covert action. Young ginned up a plan to overthrow Mossadegh by means of a coup d’état. The SIS station began working actively with Iranian agents and arming tribes in the north like the Kurds. Suddenly in October the Mossadegh government cut diplomatic relations with Great Britain, closing down the SIS. Mossadegh’s police also pursued key British agents and pro-shah figures in the armed forces. The SIS retreated to Cyprus and set up a rump Teheran station to observe as best they could. Norman Darbyshire took charge of the Cyprus/Iraq SIS detachment. Monty Woodhouse returned to London where he prepared a new plan, Operation Boot, that would finally be implemented. In November 1952 an SIS delegation showed the proposal to the CIA in Washington. Kim Roosevelt, traveling the Middle East as he often did, learned of Boot while stopping in London on his way home. “What they had in mind,” Roosevelt would later write, “was nothing less than the overthrow of Mossadegh. . . . They wanted to start immediately. I had to explain that the project would require considerable clearance from my government.”
While the Truman administration remained in office, official U.S. policy favored an amicable resolution of the AIOC matter. Thus nothing happened with the British proposal. But Truman had already become a lame duck and Eisenhower, working on his transition to the presidency, favored much more energetic covert operations. CIA director Walter Bedell Smith knew of British interest. Smith had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff during the war. Not averse to exploring this British notion, Smith discussed it at a meeting in Washington that December even though Iran had not been on the agenda. The session brought together key CIA officers and SIS proponents. Agency participants included Kim Roosevelt, John H. Leavitt, chief of his Iran branch, Leavitt’s deputy John W. Pendleton, and James A. Darling, chief of the Near East Division’s paramilitary staff. Monty Woodhouse headed the British group.
Meanwhile Bedell Smith’s days at the CIA came to an end. Eisenhower selected General Smith to serve as undersecretary of state, most likely to be the president’s eyes and ears at the department. Ike replaced him at the agency, choosing Allen Dulles to be the new director of central intelligence. John Foster Dulles became secretary of state. The Iran covert action project began to move ahead.
Although Gordon Gray may have been disappointed he wasn’t asked to head the agency, the truth was that Allen Dulles had had the inside track all along. As brother of the secretary of state, Dulles could avoid the squabbles endemic to Washington bureaucrats establishing a pecking order. As the deputy director he remained current on all matters related to the CIA. Dulles also had impeccable credentials in both diplomacy and intelligence, having served with the State Department from 1916 to 1926 and with OSS during World War II. With his ever-present pipe and professorial air, Dulles projected the perfect image for America’s chief spy.
Allen Dulles’s era began when he took an oath of office on February 23, 1953. Another SIS delegation, this one headed by British intelligence chief Sir John Sinclair, was in Washington at the time, its mission to plan a joint Iran operation. Allen Dulles had headed the Near East Division during his time at the State Department, and Sullivan & Cromwell represented AIOC’s parent firm in the United States. Although he maintained a casual and noncommittal posture to the British, Dulles favored the idea of a joint operation.
Mossadegh appealed to the incoming administration for aid, not to settle with the “former oil company” but to develop resources. In 1952 the United States had provided $23.4 million in economic aid. But President Eisenhower’s response on June 29, 1953, was that “it would be unfair 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 and oil products if a reasonable settlement were reached.” Only military funds were offered.
In fact, however, four days before Ike’s letter, Kim Roosevelt carried a twenty-two-page paper outlining objectives for an operation in Iran to a meeting in the office of the secretary of state. The paper condensed the much more detailed British plan left by SIS chief Sinclair. John Foster Dulles asked a few questions. Some State Department officers—for instance, Ambassador Loy Henderson—opposed the plan but now said nothing or made pro forma comments. Some CIA officers also thought little of it, notably Teheran station chief Roger Goiran, but they were not present and their views were not presented by Allen Dulles or Kermit Roosevelt. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, who knew only about those parts concerning the Iranian military, Kim described as “appropriately enthusiastic.”
Allen Dulles asked Roosevelt to be sure to cover two items in his briefing, the prospective cost of the project and its “flap potential,” or ability to cause controversy. Roosevelt estimated the price at no more than a couple hundred thousand dollars. On the flap potential, he proved ambiguous: if the spooks seriously miscalculated, the result could be disastrous in the Middle East, but on the other hand, the CIA division chief declared, if Project Ajax got the required support he did not see how it could fail.
The project amounted to a scheme frantically put together in Cyprus and Beirut. A few months earlier the CIA station in Teheran had reported inquiries from a senior Iranian general as to whether the United States might support a coup d’état against Prime Minister Mossadegh. In mid-March DO chief Frank Wisner had sent SIS a message informing the British that the agency now stood ready. As an interim measure the Iranian general received mild encouragement while headquarters and CIA station personnel brainstormed how to proceed. Donald N. Wilber, a part-time contract officer and Princeton archaeologist, and Miles Copeland, a veteran of the CIA’s Egyptian adventure with Nasser, were the lead planners. Both were psychological warfare officers. Wilber had spent much of the preceding year in Iran running efforts against the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh.
On April 4 Allen Dulles approved a $1 million fund that the Teheran station could use to weaken Mossadegh. In Washington the first move came from the Art Staff, a unit of the DO’s Paramilitary-Psychological Staff, which concocted a variety of anti-Mossadegh leaflets to be distributed in Iran. Planners traveled to Cyprus where, starting on May 13, they teamed up with SIS station chief Darbyshire to compile a paper describing the operation. They finished at the end of the month. The most delicate part came when the two intelligence agencies had to reveal exactly who their assets were in Iran. The British spooks were miffed that CIA’s resources and money were so much greater and agency personnel more numerous, but they sat back to allow the Americans to take the lead.
Project Ajax envisioned a “quasi-legal overthrow” in which the CIA would manipulate public opinion into opposition and suborn members of the armed forces, the Majlis, religious figures, and businessmen. To induce the shah to dismiss Mossadegh, a series of emissaries would proceed to Teheran to persuade him to issue the appropriate decree, called a firman. At that point the agency would put crowds into the street to back up the shah’s action and further pressure any wavering members of the Majlis. The Tudeh would be neutralized. The CIA would work through Iranian agents developed by the SIS plus its own people.
To support the plan the CIA had its analysts do an intelligence estimate, “Factors Involved in the Overthrow of Mossadegh,” completed on April 16, which concluded that the project could work.
Wilber and Copeland carried the Ajax paper to Beirut. They met on June 10 with Kim Roosevelt, in from Washington, senior representative George Carroll, and CIA Teheran staff. The maitre d’ at the St. George Hotel grille, a friend of Carroll’s from his OSS days in Nice, gave them a quiet table and kept people away. Roosevelt took the paper on to London with only minor changes. On his last evening in Beirut he dined with the chief of the Lebanese security service, who tried hard to find out whether Kim would be going to Teheran, and had Pan American hold its London flight to have more time to ply Roosevelt with wine and questions.
British government and senior SIS officials approved. Roosevelt then went to Washington, where the agency circulated the plan on June 19. When the key interagency meeting took place six days later, John Foster Dulles’s major concerns were not with the covert operation but whether the British government would agree on oil rights with the successor regime, and whether Washington would offer foreign aid in the aftermath. Ajax won approval. Kermit Roosevelt took charge of a CIA task force to carry out the project. This would be the real answer to Mossadegh’s pleas for foreign assistance.
Compared to the protracted period of planning approval, Ajax’s execution took place quickly. It was the struggle for control of the armed forces and police, together amounting to some 250,000 Iranians, that triggered the actual Iranian coup. In the spring of 1953 Mossadegh assumed the position of defense minister in his own cabinet and moved to supplant the shah as commander-in-chief. He appointed his own people to head the police and as chief of staff of the army. Quite likely these actions steeled the shah, who had failed to act decisively throughout the AIOC crisis, in his determination to rid himself of Mossadegh. In this case the Majlis refused Mossadegh’s request for extended powers, leading the premier to dissolve parliament on July 19. A few days later major street demonstrations occurred in Teheran, said to be carried out by the Tudeh, against the Majlis.
The first emissary of the CIA/SIS consortium was the shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf. Unpopular in Iran, she had gone to France, there to be contacted in mid-July by intelligence officers Darbyshire of SIS and Stephen Meade for CIA. The princess returned to Teheran without clearance from either the shah or the Mossadegh government, triggering a storm of controversy when she arrived on July 25. The shah refused to see her initially, but they met four days later. Ashraf told the Iranian chief of state that an emissary would come from London. That would be Asadollah Rashidian, one of several brothers of a wealthy Iranian shipping clan who were on the SIS payroll. To prove his bona fides, Rashidian asked the shah to select a phrase, those words to be broadcast over the BBC, a classic open code communication. The shah did so, and the British Broadcasting Corporation duly radioed the message. Rashidian, in turn, informed the shah that there would be an American emissary, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, known to the shah as trainer of his police a few years earlier. He had been recruited by DO Iran branch chief John Waller at the end of June. The general would give the shah the same assurances as had London’s emissary, then ask him to issue the firman on Mossadegh, another ordering the army to remain loyal, and a letter declaring confidence in Gen. Fazollah Zahedi, the CIA/SIS candidate for Mossadegh’s replacement. Schwarzkopf left for Teheran through Beirut on July 21, using the cover of a round-the-world tour. He met with the shah about ten days later. Reza Pahlavi still could not bring himself to do what had been asked. In fact the shah was so frightened of surveillance that he took the American general to a vast hall in the palace and pulled a table into the center of the room, whereupon both sat on top of it to talk.
Kim Roosevelt preceded Schwarzkopf by a few days. He entered under a false identity, making the road trip from Baghdad, crossing the border on July 19 at a dusty frontier station manned by a barely literate guard. Roosevelt stayed with a senior CIA man whose home had a swimming pool Kim found a great joy. He lay in the sun between sallies for meetings with CIA operatives and the shah. At the office the agent, Joseph Goodwin, laid in an inexhaustible supply of vodka. This was spy work with panache. To intensify tensions, the United States began deliberately avoiding meetings between its representatives and Iranian government officials. Ambassador Loy Henderson stayed away, in Salzberg, Austria, awaiting developments. Gen. Robert McClure, America’s guru of military psychological warfare, who now headed the Teheran military mission, cooperated with Roosevelt quite pleasantly.
Meanwhile division baron Roosevelt replaced Roger Goiran. The bushy-haired station chief had long service in Teheran and had recruited quite an agent network, plus he had a good sense of the place. But Goiran all along had warned that the shah would be hesitant to move against Mossadegh. Kim Roosevelt saw him as a fanatic, a professorial type with a high-pitched voice who passionately backed Mossadegh out of a sense of guilt. Why that should be so, instead of a straight-line analysis from the CIA’s most experienced man on the scene, is not evident. Roosevelt replaced him with Joe Goodwin. The Goiran recall was spun as an escalation of the confrontation with the Mossadegh government. Goiran left on August 2.
Just hours earlier Roosevelt had met the shah. The palace sent a car to pick Kim up at his vacation spa, bringing him to the palace at midnight. In the dead of night, through the gates the CIA man crouched down in the vehicle, pulling a blanket over his head. Kim had thought carefully about what to wear—grey oxford slacks, dark turtleneck, and Iranian-style sandals. The meeting went well enough and became the first of a series between the CIA and the shah, with a British agent sometimes alternating. Roosevelt assured the shah of both Eisenhower and Winston Churchill’s personal support if he dismissed Mossadegh. They met again on August 3. The shah said he had never been an adventurer and would take no chances. He wanted more assurances from President Eisenhower. Ike made a last-minute insert into a speech he gave in Seattle and declared that the United States could not stand idly by while Iran fell to communism. Reassured, the shah still did nothing.
Working with a core of just a few CIA officers, Roosevelt activated SIS agent networks and those already serving the CIA. He used SIS communications through Cyprus for cables to Washington. Mossadegh’s own schemes ran into trouble. His candidate for police chief bragged that he had a list of all British spies on the force. By the next morning the man had been gunned down. In desperation Mossadegh, a populist nationalist and in no sense a Communist, on August 8 opened trade talks with the Soviet Union. This news led President Eisenhower to issue the final go-ahead for Project Ajax.
The shah finally signed the firmans that fired Mossadegh, and appointed Zahedi as premier, but here there is some confusion as to the record. Kim Roosevelt recounts that the shah left with Queen Soraya for Ramsar, a resort town on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, without approving the decrees. The chief of the palace guard, Col. Nematollah Nasiri, went after him and finally induced the shah to sign. This is also the version in the CIA history. By some accounts Queen Soraya played a crucial last-minute role in stiffening the shah’s resolve.
There is another account, however, by Prince Manucher Farmanfarmaian, an intimate of the Iranian ruler whose sister was Soraya’s lady-in-waiting and who the shah customarily invited for hard-played volleyball games (which the prince detested). One such weekend at Ramsar, for example, the prince referred to as his Dien Bien Phu. In any case, on the afternoon of Sunday, August 9, Farmanfarmaian remembers, the shah and his intimates were enjoying tea and shade after volleyball, the emperor reading the newspaper, when the butler announced a visitor and the shah said to show him in. Dressed in a dark suit, the man offered the shah a document, and the Iranian emperor asked if anyone had a pen. Prince Farmanfarmaian offered his. Reza Pahlavi signed the papers, handed back the pen, pronounced it a good one, and told the prince his pen would now be worth a lot of money, hoping it would bring them good luck as well. The document had been the decree appointing General Zahedi as prime minister, the stranger a CIA emissary. The prince then recalls the dinner conversation that day, clearly timing these events after the shah’s departure for Ramsar.
The prince’s story may be the weavings of a courtier or perhaps only part of a larger tapestry. In any case, the advance schedules prepared by Ajax planners supposed that August 14 would be the critical day. Allen Dulles and his wife Clover materialized in Rome. Dulles spent the night in the communications vault of the CIA’s Rome station, hosted by station chief Gerry Miller. They were limited to talking Italian operations, however, because nothing happened in Iran.
Almost the only development of consequence in Teheran on the day of the long-anticipated coup was not an event but a demand—by the local plotters working with the CIA—that they would need $5 million immediately after acting. Kim Roosevelt and Joe Goodwin, already nervous about delays, were also told that nothing could be done until the night of the 15th. “The pool was no solace,” Roosevelt records, “cigarettes and vodka-limes tasted awful.”
Late in the afternoon of action-day, someone ratted out the plot. Mossadegh’s chief of staff, Gen. Taghi Riahi, learned of the impending firmans. He alerted the First Armored Brigade to move that night and threw a cordon of troops around Mossadegh’s house. By then Colonel Nasiri’s Imperial Guard had sent squads to arrest prominent Mossadegh supporters, but they missed Riahi who had already gone to headquarters. Nasiri was arrested himself when he attempted to serve the first decree. In the morning Mossadegh went on the radio to announce that there had been an attempted coup but the government retained control.
The fat was in the fire. General Zahedi, having fled to a hideout outside Teheran, had put himself out of play. The general’s son, Ardeshir Zahedi, later a top aide to the shah, stood beside the general throughout these days and denies Zahedi engaged in any foreign intrigues. Ardeshir took out an ad in the New York Times in May 2000 when the CIA history of Ajax was finally opened and the newspaper published a feature article based on it. Not only does the son deny Fazollah Zahedi’s CIA connection, he insists no agency operation put his father into power, that in fact if there was such an operation, it failed. The CIA history shows that on August 16 a senior CIA officer spent much of the day in search of Ardeshir Zahedi to contact the general, who hid at the estate of a friend. Kim Roosevelt collected the general from his hideaway and brought him to the home of a CIA officer in Teheran. Later the CIA station compiled a public statement purportedly from Zahedi based on the direct advice of Ardeshir. The CIA’s agents fabricated an interview with Zahedi as well. Donald Wilber’s CIA account notes that Ardeshir Zahedi stayed with agency officers from August 16 on and his father from the next morning.
Mossadegh’s National Front, plus the Tudeh, now began something of a psywar competition with the CIA, the object being to convince Iranians that their side had the upper hand. The government put out press bulletins and held news conferences to insist that the plot had been broken up. Mossadegh had some success—at least one senior officer working with the CIA went to a foreign embassy to plead for asylum, believing Ajax had crashed. For its part the agency circulated cartoons and leaflets drawn up at headquarters, organized press coverage undermining Mossadegh’s claims, and called in chits from anyone who owed the Americans—for example, one newspaper publisher who had been advanced the sum of $45,000. In one case CIA officers took two international journalists, including the New York Times’s Kennett Love, to an interview with General Zahedi. Joe Goodwin used the CIA station’s radio to relay a message to the Associated Press in New York which asserted that “unofficial reports” acknowledged the anti-Mossadegh forces were armed with official decrees from the shah firing the prime minister and appointing General Zahedi in his place. Roosevelt and CIA officers ran around organizing street demonstrations of their own against Mossadegh.
Street protests by nationalists and by the Tudeh persisted. Up to six thousand pro-shah rioters recruited by the CIA then took to the streets as well. Eisenhower perceived Mossadegh’s failure to suppress Tudeh demonstrations as coddling of Communists, as Mossadegh moving into the Soviet orbit. Ambassador Henderson arrived from Beirut on the 17th. He complained to Mossadegh, who answered by calling out the police. The next days brought lows and highs: CIA headquarters cabled regrets on the failure and advised Kim Roosevelt to leave Iran for his own safety. Instead Kim and George Carroll held a council of war, improvising a fresh plan. London rejected continuing appeals from SIS/Nicosia to permit its officers to proceed to Teheran. The shah secretly left the country for Rome the next morning. There he stayed at the same hotel as Allen Dulles, with obvious potential for direct contact.
Full-scale rioting broke out in Teheran on August 18 and 19. Several hundred people died in the violence. A friendly newspaper published the text of the shah’s firman appointing Zahedi. Late on the 18th a CIA headquarters dispatch actually called off Ajax, and the SIS dispatched a similar instruction. But the tide had already begun to turn. Roosevelt got the Rashidian brothers and other agents to mobilize mobs in the streets while Iranians and CIA officers contacted army units throughout Iran to rally them to Zahedi. On the second day pro-shah tank units, informed by reporter Kennett Love of weak guard forces at the premier’s house, attacked Mossadegh’s residence. That morning Chief of Staff Riahi reluctantly informed Mossadegh he no longer controlled the army, and in fact pro-shah troops began to appear all over Teheran. Throughout the afternoon the CIA-backed forces consolidated their hold on the city. The shah returned from Italy and paraded in triumph through the streets of Teheran.
So ended Project Ajax, the first apparent U.S. covert victory. Kim Roosevelt received personal thanks from both Churchill and Eisenhower as well as the medal already noted. Aside from its direct cost, estimated at $10 million to $20 million—far more than the $100,000 or $200,000 originally estimated—Ajax had unfolded in a fashion following a scenario if not a precise plan.
The big winners were the shah and his henchmen, who gained absolute power, which they held for twenty-six years until swept away by a religious conservatism even more potent than the populism of Mossadegh. The United States, by participating in the coup, broke with its own tradition—and its declaratory policy—of unconditional support for democracy around the globe. Through support of the shah, the United States also committed itself irrevocably to his regime in a way that blinded Washington later when it should have recognized rising opposition. As for the cost to American taxpayers, Eisenhower approved $45 million in new funds soon after the Zahedi cabinet took office. The flow neared a billion dollars before the end of Ike’s administration. The losers were the Iranian people; Mohammad Mossadegh, who was eventually captured and placed on trial; and, ironically, AIOC. Although Iranian oil production resumed in August 1954, the “former oil company’s” claims were never fully resolved.
After the Iranian project, Kim Roosevelt returned to headquarters as assistant deputy director of the Directorate for Operations. Under Frank Wisner, Roosevelt led the political action staff and supervised that component’s field operations. He tried to use a White House debriefing to critique Project Ajax.
“If we, the CIA, are ever going to try something like this again, we must be absolutely sure that the people and army want what we want.
“If not, you had better give the job to the Marines.”
Roosevelt wrote later that John Foster Dulles did not want to hear such advice. This was true. Within weeks of that occasion, Roosevelt was offered command of a similar covert action being planned for Central America, in Guatemala.
Kim Roosevelt turned down this offer: inquiries showed that his criteria were not likely to be met in Guatemala. But he would not escape—instead, as a senior official of the DO he became a frequent participant in meetings held to consider the new plan. The Psychological Strategy Board, in its capacity as arbiter of America’s secret war, approved the concept on August 12, 1953. Two weeks later a PSB luncheon further decided to give Guatemala the highest priority among U.S. initiatives.
Guatemala became the showcase for one of Allen Dulles’s favorites, C. Tracy Barnes. A spook from the annals of the law, Barnes was a lot like Frank Wisner, another of those young hires by Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. Tracy had other social sacraments as well—Law Review at Harvard, Groton a year behind Dick Bissell. His undergraduate degree, from Yale, made Barnes a full-spectrum member of CIA’s Ivy League clique. He had also married into money, which did not hurt, though his own family could hardly be described as poor.
The connection with Allen Dulles came with the Big War, which for Barnes embodied glory eternal. Commissioned and assigned to London, to the U.S. air attaché, Barnes strove to get into the field and transferred to Lord Mountbatten’s Special Forces headquarters, then the OSS. He made parachute drops over British air bases for sport. Barnes twice dropped into France to work with the resistance. The second time he made it to Switzerland just ahead of German pursuers. There Allen Dulles reigned as OSS station chief. For the rest of the war Barnes did odd jobs for Dulles, most especially helping arrange the surrender of German troops in northern Italy, involving some pretty dangerous forays to meet undercover with Nazi officers who above ground were still fighting the war. The highlight was probably smuggling out the widow of Mussolini’s foreign minister and the manuscript of his diaries. Dulles told others that Tracy Barnes was the bravest fellow he knew, and Barnes had a Silver Star and two French Croix de Guerres (one with Palm, the other with Star) to prove it.
With the peace, Barnes worked for a time with the National Labor Relations Board (preceding Bill Colby at that institution), then came home, as it were, spending three years with a Providence, Rhode Island law firm. It was Gordon Gray who brought Barnes back to Washington in 1950 as a special assistant to the secretary of the army. Gray left his position as secretary just as Barnes arrived, but Barnes stayed on under Clifford Alexander. A year later Gray reappeared as director of the Psychological Strategy Board and pulled Barnes in as deputy. By then Allen Dulles’s star, rising meteorically over the agency, shone so bright that Barnes sought out the CIA official soon to be its boss. Tracy could see that the Strategy Board led nowhere in terms of power and influence. The nation’s premier Cold War agency beckoned. Barnes moved over to CIA. A few months before TP/Ajax in Iran, Director Dulles put Barnes in charge of a new unit within the DO, the Paramilitary and Psychological Operations Staff, to coordinate the agency’s most muscular Cold War activities.
The first key meeting on the Guatemala project took place in Frank Wisner’s office around Labor Day 1953. Barnes and J. C. King of the Western Hemisphere (WH) Division went over the existing networks and operations in Central America. The agency already had a recruit for “our man in Guatemala,” but his position remained weak, his assets outside the country negligible and those inside nonexistent, and his plan depended entirely upon anticipated popular support the CIA judged remote. Wisner could see formidable challenges.
The government in Guatemala, of a social democratic bent, had been elected in November 1950 with more than half the vote in a free election. President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman thereafter acquired even greater popularity. Peasants fully supported his ardent efforts to reform Guatemala’s agriculture and economy.
Like the Iranian affair, the Guatemalan operation had its economic angle. This time an American firm, United Fruit, was involved. It too had used the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. United Fruit, the largest landowner in Guatemala, owned some 550,000 acres plus a controlling share of the country’s only railroad. La frutera, as it was known, trembled at the Guatemalan government’s land redistribution program. Beginning in February 1953 Arbenz expropriated almost 400,000 acres of land to parcel out to peasants. The Guatemalans offered compensation—twenty-five-year bonds at 3 percent guaranteed interest for the exact book value of the assets la frutera claimed for tax purposes. United Fruit rejected this settlement out of hand and, like AIOC, went to its home government for relief.
The lawyer Thomas G. Corcoran had been a lobbyist for Civil Air Transport and also for United Fruit. Tommy “The Cork” acted as intermediary now, selling la frutera’s scheme to the CIA. He met with Undersecretary Walter Bedell Smith that summer. Smith already knew of CIA’s efforts and had no difficulty hearing out the lobbyist. A key difference would be that United Fruit, a principal purveyor of the charge that Jacobo Arbenz Guzman constituted a Communist threat to the Americas, and a participant in earlier plots, this time wanted nothing to do with the action itself.
Allen Dulles became the executive agent for Project PB/Success. He kept in close touch with the planning through personal assistants. Jim Hunt was Dulles’s man for field operations, much as Tom Braden had been for international organizations. By the fall, definite action impended. The plan for Success, embodied in a September 11 paper, went right to Director Dulles. Based on the premise that the Guatemalan army, a poorly trained, indifferently equipped force of fewer than seven thousand troops, functioned as arbiter of the country’s politics, Success aimed to inundate Guatemala with propaganda undermining loyalty to President Arbenz. At the same time the CIA would provide its own alternative, an ostensibly independent force under a former army officer, Col. Carlos Castillo-Armas. A CIA air force would bomb as necessary and drop leaflets while a CIA radio station purporting to be the voice of the rebels would convey the impression the movement had mass support. The concept envisioned the army defecting to Castillo-Armas as his rebel force entered Guatemala. In effect, the DO paper argued, “the task headed by the CIA calls for a general, over-all plan of combined overt and covert action of major proportions.” The Directorate for Operations estimated the money required at $2.735 million. Dulles read the paper, as did the deputy director of central intelligence, air force General Charles P. Cabell. On September 15 he asked DDO Wisner for a brief memorandum to use with the Bureau of the Budget to obtain the necessary money.
The key conversations took place in Allen Dulles’s own office. In mid-afternoon of Friday, September 18, the DCI brought together the players and many of the concerned observers. Those present, besides Dulles, included General Cabell, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, Kermit Roosevelt, and J. C. King. Also on hand were Sherman Kent, the CIA’s senior analyst, and Hans V. Tofte, returned from Korea to become Barnes’s chief of operations. Allen Dulles told the group the basic plan seemed sound, and he’d already discussed it with several of the group.
Colonel King offered a detailed prospectus on the ground Project Success would need to traverse, commenting on CIA’s stations in Central America, action needed to build up networks, psywar requirements, and personnel shifts. King advised that diplomatic measures could put pressure on Arbenz. The group agreed to press for State Department action. The colonel said he needed $50,000 right away. Allen Dulles replied he could have it at once. Washington planned to change some ambassadors in the area, and the group also talked about that. For Guatemala the CIA preferred a strong ambassador to work with the agency. Some also thought CIA station chief Birch O’Neil too cautious for a swashbuckling covert action, so pressure developed to transfer him also. Criticized as too ready to accept the ambassador’s dictates, objecting to the use of propaganda created elsewhere, deficient in reporting on labor, and tolerating poor security, O’Neil’s days were numbered. He would be replaced by John Doherty, cryptonym “Tranger.” For Honduras, where the agency would locate some of its forward bases, especially a “black” radio station and certain air bases, the readiness of diplomats to work with the spooks was even more crucial. The CIA-State relationship also lay at the heart of the project where Nicaragua was concerned—there the CIA would have both ground and air bases and needed to move in tandem with the Nicaraguan government. Castillo-Armas, the Guatemalan rebel chief, had long been in touch with Nicaraguan leaders about their “friends to the North.”
General Cabell advised Dulles to double the skimpy $300,000 programmed for unexpected developments (“contingencies”). Director Dulles, fine with that, rounded off the CIA project budget to a cool $3 million when he went to the White House to ask for the money.
Frank Wisner had the task of selecting the field commander for Project Success. Once Roosevelt turned the job down, Wisner got Allen Dulles to recall the Korea station chief, former army colonel Albert Haney. Haney had set up CIA guerrilla units in Korea, and Guatemala was to have a paramilitary component. The provenance of the appointment remains unclear: Hans Tofte, who became a Barnes protégé at CIA, had worked under Haney in Korea. Tofte himself had recently come on board and thus could have been pulling Haney in after him. Briefed in late October, Haney accepted on the spot. A few weeks later he proceeded to Opa Locka, Florida, to begin setting up a forward base code-named Lincoln. Haney exercised general supervision over CIA chiefs in the nations surrounding Guatemala plus direct control of forces assembled for Success. He took the pseudonym “Jerome B. Dunbar,” and at a certain point Allen Dulles ordered that all cable traffic be sent to Lincoln for Dunbar, rather than to headquarters to be repeated to Opa Locka.
Al Haney had lots of problems. Many were with the CIA’s own Western Hemisphere Division. Its director, like Haney, was a counterintelligence man, but from the FBI, not the army. Within the DO, Joseph Caldwell King’s division had formal control over the stations Haney needed to use. King privately thought Project Success daffy and anyway did not want some task force poaching on his turf. Haney’s deputy, Jacob Esterline, proved more equable and tried to play buffer between the two. Haney, soon endowed with his own nickname, “Brainy Haney,” also raised hackles with Tracy Barnes, who tried to be decent and civilized where Haney threw himself around like a loose cannon. Within his own task force, Haney quickly won the enmity of psywar chief Howard Hunt, with the two baiting each other over who drove the better car, for longer, or had achieved more (Haney claimed to have been the youngest bank vice president in America). To compensate, Frank Wisner devoted much time to Success, leaving a great deal of business in the hands of Dick Helms. Allen Dulles soon decided that Al Haney had to be insulated and his opportunities to rankle the top echelon limited. Dulles began flying Haney up for weekly private meetings at his Georgetown home. Richard Bissell, whom Dulles had brought in as a special assistant, also found himself acting as go-between, shuttling among Tracy Barnes, J. C. King, and Haney. Bissell soon concluded that Haney was doing a lot of the right things, he just rubbed people the wrong way.
More familiar with the area than Al Haney, whose experience had been in the Far East, King called in the task force chief one day to suggest a meeting with Tommy Corcoran. La frutera had plans and weapons CIA could use.
Haney did not like the idea and was blunt about it.
“If you think you can run this operation without United Fruit,” King rasped, “you’re crazy!”
Wisner and Allen Dulles, however, backed Haney and gave him a free hand.
In the end, United Fruit decided not to take part in Project Success. If the operation failed, the company would be grievously damaged, not only in Guatemala but globally. Agency representatives met with United Fruit officials in New York and elsewhere as the project revved up but found la frutera reluctant. It did wish to be informed, though, and Corcoran retained a liaison role, keeping la frutera executives up to date.
Despite United Fruit’s preferences, in at least one respect the agency was carrying on with its program. That is, there had already been one CIA effort aimed at Guatemala, and that one had involved la frutera. Under a project code-named PB/Fortune in the waning months of the Truman administration, CIA had passed weapons to United Fruit for anti-Arbenz rebels. Project Fortune proved abortive, but the cast of PB/Success—Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Honduran officials, and so forth—was almost identical. The main CIA operative would have been Colonel Castillo-Armas, and the CIA had been meeting with him since November 1951 and had had a contact officer assigned to him from the next year. Truman’s secretary of state at the time, Dean Acheson, had objected, and the initiative had been put on hold. When the agency resumed the project the following summer, it changed the code name to Success.
By early October the Eisenhower administration had reached final agreement on dispatching John Peurifoy to Guatemala as ambassador. Whiting Willauer’s name had already been entered on the list for a security clearance investigation, so he could be sent to Honduras as ambassador there. Peurifoy assumed his post late in 1953.
In November the CIA task force prepared an outline plan divided into five phases. The first stage would be staffing and assessment, by then well along. The Guatemala station had been strengthened to almost a dozen, with three case officers under the station chief in the embassy and two undercover outside it. Honduras had only a pair of DO people in place, but seven were sent from Washington, Caracas, or Panama, and a couple more were awaiting approval by headquarters. Stage Two provided for “Preliminary Conditioning” of the target, with efforts to discredit Arbenz internationally and sow dissension at home, inducing defections. Project headquarters would move to the field, and cooperation agreements would be reached with Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. The initial delivery of fifteen tons of equipment for Castillo-Armas had already been prepared. Stage Three, to begin seventy-five days before D-Day, envisioned buildup of the mission forces and continued softening of the Guatemalan target. Stage Four, beginning at minus twenty-five days, CIA planners considered critical. Maximum economic pressure and an intensive rumor campaign were to sharpen divisions in the target, passive sabotage would become evident, and the CIA-backed paramilitary force would attain readiness. Stage Five would be the “Showdown.” The plan enumerated a sixth stage, but that was to be the initial actions by the CIA-installed successor regime (to be “dramatic”) and the termination of the project.
Reviewing the plans, Frank Wisner told Dulles they were vague, but this posed no difficulty since detailed plans would inevitably need to be modified later. Wisner recommended that Dulles approve PB/Success for execution. Director Dulles did just that. Eisenhower completed the circle on November 11, approving the money for the CIA operation.
Allen Dulles had the agency senior leadership in his office for one of those late-afternoon sessions he seems to have preferred for sensitive business. It was November 16, 1953. Present were General Cabell, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, Kermit Roosevelt, and J. C. King. Dulles worried that President Eisenhower wanted quick results. The historians Richard Immerman and David Barrett have shown that the White House itself was being pressed by Congress. “This is a top priority operation for the whole agency and is the most important thing we are doing,” the CIA director exhorted. Then Dulles averred, “I am under pressure by others to get on with this.”
Success moved forward, though not without developments portending an outcome different from its name. The CIA organization for the project, which Richard Helms confirmed in mid-November, still had not completely filled out. Some doubted the fealty of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and J. C. King wanted to use the first arms delivery to Castillo-Armas, based in Nicaragua, to deepen Somoza’s commitment. Another part of the plan involved using U.S. military assistance officers from several Central American countries, but the Pentagon resisted—the assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations refused to permit CIA to bring the military into the plan. Hans Tofte took that frustration to Tracy Barnes, but the PP Staff chief could do no better. One of the oil companies told the CIA it would be feasible secretly and gradually to reduce stocks of fuel in Guatemala to a point where an oil crisis would result, but company executives refused to proceed without cooperation from competitors. Later the State Department refused to intervene, fearing any multicorporation move would be identified as U.S.-inspired.
Just before Christmas command post Lincoln went operational at Opa Locka. Al Haney covered several walls of his operations center with a complex flow chart tracking the many distinct parts of Success, showing current status and what needed doing before other portions of the project could move ahead. The charts impressed Richard Bissell when Dulles’s man went to Florida on his ever-more-numerous visits. In mounting fury, King complained that Haney considered himself directly under the DCI and that psychological warfare had been critically slowed by obstructions, such as a two-month delay in moving mimeograph machines to Castillo-Armas, as well as Lincoln’s intention to craft its own psywar plan regardless of what had already been arranged.
In late January 1954 there occurred an enormous security breach. Arbenz police recruited a Panamanian diplomat, Jorge Delgado, an associate of Castillo-Armas who had functioned as a courier. Delgado gave the government copies of correspondence between the rebel leader and others, including Somoza, and for several months he acted as a double agent, furnishing the Arbenz people even more data. Delgado was present, for example on January 12, 1954, when the first CIA “black” aircraft landed in Nicaragua with weapons. Based on the Delgado material, the Guatemalans arrested an individual who was the principal link between Castillo-Armas and the supposed internal opposition. This internal front happened to be notional, essentially nonexistent, but the agent network was real. The Arbenz government presented the Delgado material to the Organization of American States, to other Central American governments, and turned it into a white paper released to condemn American intervention.
The CIA went into high gear to neutralize these developments, attempting to paint Delgado as a known fabricator. Meanwhile Castillo-Armas, pulled in to meet with CIA officers at an Opa Locka safe house, responded indignantly to suggestions that his own organization might have been the source. He denied any need for a security review.
The U.S. embassy in Guatemala City kept up unremitting pressure on Arbenz throughout these events. Ambassador Peurifoy set the tone in January 1954 when he told a reporter for Time magazine that “public opinion” in the United States might “force” actions “to prevent Guatemala from falling into the lap of international Communism.” The CIA prepared the groundwork as quietly as possible. Henry Heckscher, a key operative from Berlin, posed as a European coffee buyer to move covertly inside the country. Later his role expanded to inducing defections from the local military.
Project Success became the first real CIA covert operation for David Atlee Phillips, brought in after a harrowing brush with Florida police (who arrested him for trying to spend an allegedly bogus check) that almost broke his CIA cover and ended his clandestine career. He came before Tracy Barnes and E. Howard Hunt for vetting. Phillips, an amateur actor as well as a journalist, originally recruited in Chile four years earlier, had a flair for colorful language but was no dummy. He put the key question to Tracy Barnes at their first meeting: “But Arbenz became president in a free election,” Phillips pointed out. “What right do we have to help someone topple his government?” Barnes evaded the question.
Project Success political action kicked off after the Arbenz white paper. Chief political operator E. Howard Hunt masterminded this aspect. Dave Phillips was assigned to run the “black” radio station. Phillips began with a field trip where he contrived to meet Henry Heckscher. The coffee buyer’s professionalism and skill were legendary at CIA, but when Phillips checked, not much of Heckscher’s information proved useful. In April, Phillips and several Guatemalan acolytes prepared a dilapidated dairy barn at Santa Fe in rural Honduras as the clandestine “Voice of Liberation” radio, CIA code name Sherwood. In Guatemala City an anti-Communist student newspaper, El Rebelde, began publishing weekly, “supported and partially controlled by CIA,” as agency documents acknowledge. An agent network code-named Essence waged a political handbill and poster war against the Arbenz government. The most successful endeavor, the “32” campaign, involved planting stickers or painting walls with this number, a reference to an article of the Guatemalan constitution prohibiting foreign political parties—thus an attack on the Guatemalan Communists. In El Salvador a Castillo-Armas-directed emigré publication also received CIA money. Agency press assets throughout Central America began planting stories designed to further the political-psychological program.
In Washington, Whiting Willauer received his CIA briefings on February 8, the bulk of the time devoted to the DO programs. Soon the newly minted ambassador, his appointment encouraged by Tommy Corcoran, was in Honduras arranging for the “rebel” air force. Willauer, until then a senior manager with CIA’s Civil Air Transport, reported to Claire Chennault in a letter that he worked day and night to arrange training sites and instructors plus air crews for the rebel air force, and to keep the Honduran government “in line so they would allow this revolutionary activity to continue.” Later, participants acknowledged that if some of the Guatemalan rebel aircraft had been shot down, surviving pilots would have been found speaking Chinese. The lead pilot, a former navy ace, seconded by another navy vet, were backed by a variety of aircrew. A total of about a dozen aircraft were assembled, including three bombers plus P-47 and P-51 fighter-bombers.
Willauer gave the CIA advice on airmen, on the timing of increasingly frequent “black” flights (night was best), and on which local officials were or needed to be apprised of the American activity. Visiting home on two occasions, Willauer went to CIA headquarters to convey his views directly. The ambassador spoke of Project Success with Honduran officials ranging from the president to the air force chief of staff. By mid-April CIA officials were concerned, admitting they had never thought Willauer “would be projected into first-hand discussion of details of this operation.”
The State Department publicly termed the charge that Americans had a role in the Castillo-Armas plans “ridiculous.” At that very moment Guatemalan exiles, assorted Latin Americans, and American soldiers of fortune were training in CIA camps in Nicaragua and the Panama Canal Zone. Arms and equipment now arrived in a steady stream aboard huge U.S. Air Force C-124 transports borrowed by the CIA, their markings painted out. Colonel Castillo-Armas himself lived in a house in Managua directly across the street from the first secretary of the U.S. embassy. On February 10 Al Haney held a conference at Lincoln to check all aspects. While those things the CIA could control proceeded relatively smoothly, denunciations by Arbenz posed a major problem, as did the loss of agent networks swept up by Guatemalan security. Communications traffic brought another headache—Project Success had resulted in a fivefold increase in priority messages sent from the United States to American missions in Central and South America. Anyone with a competent radio watch on the CIA could detect the swell. Little could be done other than to try to send more messages by courier or pouch, not possible in an urgent situation. That eventuality arose almost immediately. Leaving his apartment one day, a Castillo-Armas lieutenant left behind a batch of secret messages. Compromised were all the basic cryptonyms and pseudonyms, not just for Success but for the CIA at large. Two of the cables had been from CIA headquarters, the rest from Haney. Fortunately for the secret warriors the leak did not reach the ears of the Guatemalan government.
The big attraction in March 1954 was diplomatic—the conference of the Organization of American States, where the United States pushed for a condemnation of Communist penetration of the hemisphere and the Guatemalans decried American intervention. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles delivered a speech prepared in consultation with his brother, the CIA director.
Beneath the surface the plot boiled. Agency progress reports noted that the logistics arrangements were on track, far enough advanced that one of two C-124s CIA had borrowed from the air force could be returned. Eventually 433 tons of arms and equipment were delivered by airlift. Agency officers, increasingly mistrustful of Castillo-Armas, explored an anti-Communist “structure” that excluded him. Cost estimates for the Sherwood radio project had firmed up to the degree that Al Haney decided to base the Guatemalan announcers and scriptwriters in Florida instead of Honduras, sending prerecorded tapes that would then be broadcast. Sherwood’s radio equipment arrived aboard a late March black flight. Meanwhile the State Department developed cold feet about direct U.S. involvement. Jake Esterline of the task force believed the diplomats had dug in to defend the principle of noninterference in internal affairs of states, and told Lincoln to watch out. On March 16 Frank Wisner met with Dick Helms, Tracy Barnes, J. C. King, and others for a high-level review. Haney warned that delaying D-Day would cause morale problems and weather difficulties. Wisner saw no need to change the tempo. What mattered was not to get caught.
One Project Success preparation with sinister connotations was the creation of a list of Guatemalans “for disposal by [the] Junta Group,” evidently requested by Al Haney. A similar list had been compiled for Project Fortune, and this, renewed, formed the basis for the draft list of March 1954. “Rip” Robertson took it to Opa Locka to be checked against CIA biographic data. Decades later agency researchers established that no one had actually been assassinated on the basis of these lists, but they would have eerie echoes for the CIA in Indonesia and Vietnam.
Director Dulles visited Station Lincoln on March 31. The spy chieftain expressed himself much impressed with the briefings he received on the operation and apparent competence of the personnel.
“Continue the good work and give ’em hell!” Allen Dulles exhorted.
Toward the end Dulles turned to Lincoln’s chief of security and asked him to tell Haney, who was absent, that the DCI “meant exactly what he said when he referred to this project as the most vitally important one in the Agency.”
In April the public who paid attention to Central America were diverted by a plot to assassinate Nicaraguan leader Somoza. This would be attributed to the “Caribbean Legion,” a loosely organized leftist anti-totalitarian entity. As a movement the Legion had peaked in the late 1940s and had never enjoyed the regimented structure implied in its name. It had, however, received some support from Arbenz’s predecessor as president of Guatemala. The CIA propagandists now made strenuous efforts to pin the attempted assassination on Arbenz. Behind the scenes, Rip Robertson’s paramilitary boys began smuggling packets of CIA equipment across the Guatemalan border to four anti-Arbenz sabotage teams. Frank Wisner also approved the final timetable for the attack phase, plus a fresh psywar initiative to help justify the operation: the CIA would configure a phony Soviet bloc arms shipment to Guatemala and contrive to make the world believe the weapons had been landed from a Soviet submarine.
A tiff between the CIA and State Department now endangered Project Success: DDCI General Cabell assured senior diplomats on April 10 that no black flights into Honduras would occur until State studied the situation. The agency, which had already scheduled fifteen such flights, made one the following night anyway. Investigation showed that Al Haney had instructed his air officer to disregard the DCI’s nogo cable. Secretary of State Dulles could not then protect his brother’s agency from the fury of diplomats scorned; within days the CIA was told to report on the impact that postponement or cancellation of PB/Success might have. Wisner’s defense combined elements that would be employed once again when the identical question arose during the CIA’s operation against Cuba: cancellation entailed the danger of open recrimination from the CIA’s Guatemalans, effectively exposing the CIA’s hand; it would worsen U.S. relations with Nicaragua and Honduras (and lend comfort to Arbenz); it would leave Washington with “the $64-question”—what to do about Guatemala; and have adverse morale effects to boot.
While this impasse continued, the CIA resumed black flights at a rate of two per day. Where Wisner, King, Esterline, and others had been furious at the earlier violation of the flight ban, the absence of protest this time suggests that headquarters supported Haney’s resumption of deliveries. If the CIA irrevocably committed, the State Department would have that much more trouble shutting it down. For his part, on April 24 DDO Wisner mounted a full defense of the project in a paper refocusing the operation. In retrospect his handiwork is notable for its utter misappreciation of Guatemalans’ willingness to rise against Arbenz (while rightly rejecting Castillo-Armas estimates of forty thousand adherents, Wisner projected somewhere between six thousand and nineteen thousand partisans; in reality no Guatemalans would rebel). At this point the State Department backed off.
A few days later a full headquarters delegation visited Opa Locka in triumph. Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, and Richard Bissell all went on this trip to Lincoln. The DDO hastened to give the bottom line: “We have the full green light and the go-ahead,” Wisner declared.
The god of operations cautioned that the approval relieved no one of the responsibility to conduct Success so as to minimize any chance of attribution to the United States. False trails had not been sufficiently developed—for example, provision had been made for a minor arms purchase from Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which could be used later as an answer to the question of where Castillo-Armas had gotten all those guns. Wisner wanted more of the same. He also wanted to see Lincoln’s documentation on the strength of the anti-Arbenz opposition—despite what he had written a few days earlier, “Headquarters had never received a clear and concise statement of what the plans are with respect to what takes place on D-Day.” Referring to Allen Dulles, or perhaps even to President Eisenhower, Wisner remarked, “The boss has to be satisfied that we have what it takes.”
Among themselves, Wisner talked with Barnes about a paper for Assistant Secretary Henry Holland at the State Department to illustrate what Project Success had accomplished other than those aspects that concerned the diplomat. At a meeting once they were back in Washington, Dick Bissell spoke of a different paper, one that might show how much time had been wasted as a result of the fight with the State Department. Helms, King, and Kermit Roosevelt sat silently around the table.
The CIA’s big psywar victory came soon afterward. Project Washtub, the attempt to plant a cache of arms and make it seem like the work of the Russians, carefully surfaced in early May. Reporting cables crowed that when Somoza called in the diplomats and reporters to look at the weapons, conveniently marked with hammer and sickle, even the U.S. ambassador was taken in. The French ambassador, who had been in Greece during the civil war there, readily confirmed the weapons as being of Soviet bloc manufacture. In early May Tracy Barnes, who had begun spending most of his time at Lincoln or making the rounds of other forward bases, returned to headquarters for consultations. The meetings in the DDO’s office that followed included Dick Helms, Dick Bissell, Kim Roosevelt, J. C. King, and Jake Esterline, among others. Wisner hammered home the dictum that black flights into Honduras would go only with the okay of Allen Dulles or General Cabell. Barnes described the status of the various PB/Success elements. The CIA project seemed to be moving ahead smartly.
One action by the Arbenz government did play into the preparations for Success. The Guatemalans turned to Czechoslovakia to buy 2,000 tons of arms from the Skoda works. Washington learned of the move when an agent in Poland reported the loading of the weapons aboard a freighter at Szczecin. The ship turned out to be the 4,900-ton Swedish vessel Alfhem, which eluded several attempts at interception and reached Puerto Barrios on May 15, 1954. The phony Washtub weapons and the real ones from Alfhem permitted the United States to argue that the Russians were indeed penetrating Latin America. President Eisenhower promptly initiated Operation Hardrock Baker, a naval blockade of Guatemala. The blockade was illegal under international law, but no one had standing to oppose it. The Alfhem affair brought a windfall for Howard Hunt’s propaganda experts. Radio Sherwood went on the air on May 1 and went to town on the arms cache and the freighter. Then, in the only real defection sparked by the CIA, former Guatemalan air force chief Rodolfo Mendoza left the country with the former U.S. air attaché who had been at CIA the day before departing for Central America. The supposed defection became grist for Dave Phillips’s radio mill. The Arbenz government made a significant error, taking the government radio station off the air for installation of a new antenna. For several weeks the “Voice of Liberation” became the only show in town.
Later, Guatemalan police made a series of arrests. Eisenhower refers to these in his memoirs as a “reign of terror,” and government killings of the opposition. At the time CIA reported that the wave of arrests probably resulted from Guatemalan search of the home of CIA’s agent “Semantic” on May 30. Piero Gleijeses, the foremost historian of Guatemalan politics in this period, concludes that several hundred were arrested and at least seventy-five killed, including persons who had nothing to do with the CIA conspiracy. But, equally deplorable, Eisenhower made out the Arbenz government as “agents of international Communism in Guatemala [who] continued their efforts to penetrate and subvert their neighboring Central American states, using consular agents for their political purposes and fomenting political assassinations and strikes.” Aside from individual arrests of opposition figures, and the ambiguous role of Guatemala in the alleged assassination plot against Somoza, there is no evidence to sustain the charges.
The Alfhem affair led to the first military action of the project. Headquarters ordered a sabotage action; CIA paramilitary man Rip Robertson wanted to go into Puerto Barrios with frogmen to sink the Swedish ship with explosives. Washington turned him down. Instead Robertson got orders to send saboteurs from the CIA-backed “liberation army” to blow up trains carrying the equipment. Robertson led the team despite orders that no Americans were to be involved. The saboteurs laid explosives on the railroad track, but the detonators, drenched in a downpour, fizzled. The CIA team then shot at one of the trains. They could not stop the ten-train convoy. One anti-Arbenz soldier died, as did one of Robertson’s strikers. Two later commando attacks also failed. With the gloves off came increasing pressure, from Haney and others, for air missions. Lincoln wanted to mix some bombing with leaflet drops. Barnes preferred to smuggle leaflets into the country and have them distributed by anti-Arbenz activists, giving the impression of a widespread rebellion.
After all this trouble, the Czech weapons proved of little use to the Guatemalan army. They included large-caliber cannon designed to be mounted on railway carriages, of limited value on Guatemala’s nominal railroad network. The Alfhem had carried anti-tank guns, though there were no tanks in Central American armies. Only a small fraction of the World War II–vintage British and German small arms arrived in working order. Eisenhower might think Arbenz a Communist, but clearly the real Communists were no friends to Guatemala. The Czechs took the government’s cash and delivered useless weapons. In a supreme irony, the arms enabled Eisenhower to declare that Guatemala had become an “outpost” of “the Communist dictatorship” on the American continent.
On May 23 the navy received orders to conduct surveillance of shipping near Guatemalan ports. The next day Ike told a party of congressional leaders he was ordering the navy to stop “suspicious” foreign-flag vessels on the high seas. Thus began Hardrock Baker. Alfhem herself was intercepted on the return voyage and escorted to Key West for a thorough search. The Dutch government lodged an official protest after a Dutch ship was boarded on June 4 at San Juan, Puerto Rico. Later it was decided that no more ships would be boarded without specific State Department authorization. James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s press secretary, wrote in his diary on June 19, “I think the State Department made a bad mistake, particularly with the British, in attempting to search ships going to Guatemala. . . . As a matter of fact, we were at war with the British in 1812 over the same principle.”
Project Success was already in its final phase. Howard Hunt’s propaganda featured cartoons, posters, pamphlets, and more than two hundred articles based on CIA materials placed in the Latin press by the United States Information Agency. The military plan had to be changed at the last moment when Salvadoran officials refused to allow the invasion to be mounted from their country. At the beginning of June, Tracy Barnes argued that the paramilitary plan as originally conceived could no longer be carried out. As late as June 16 a meeting at CIA headquarters considered cancellation or postponement of Project Success, with Wisner willing to entertain a hiatus for reevaluation if moving forward seemed to invite catastrophe.
The final plan based the rebels in Honduras. Castillo-Armas made his invasion two days later, riding in an old station wagon accompanied by a few trucks. Only about 140 soldiers were with him, though several additional forces entered Guatemala at other points. The same day Arbenz held a mass rally at a stadium in Guatemala City, which CIA aircraft buzzed and leafleted. One rebel patrol tried to hook through El Salvador, but the soldiers were arrested by Salvadoran border guards and freed only with difficulty by CIA-inspired corruption. In all there were perhaps 400 rebel troops. Castillo-Armas advanced to a church six miles into Guatemala, then halted. He awaited the popular revolution that was supposed to support him. From there the main force would march overland and capture the railroad station at Zacapa, a Guatemalan military garrison, while several boatloads of men made for the Caribbean port of Puerto Barrios. Both places, plus Guatemala City, would be bombed by the CIA air force.
But no popular uprising appeared. Castillo-Armas did not march even the few miles to Zacapa. Another of his units was defeated in a small skirmish, and the biggest action of the campaign, also an insignificant battle, proved no better than a standoff. The seaborne force sent to capture Puerto Barrios also failed. The CIA, myopically optimistic, reported to President Eisenhower on June 20 that Castillo-Armas had taken in as many soldiers as had joined him, for a total of more than six hundred armed men.
All now depended on Whiting Willauer’s rebel air force. It had run a number of bombing and leafleting missions since the first day of the invasion. A raid that caused some damage at Puerto Barrios involved a hand grenade and a stick of dynamite. Another pilot missed his target and ran out of gas, crash landing across the Mexican border. The CIA operation could have been exposed right there, as it was an American national, William Beall, taken into custody. But the agency managed to get him released quietly, and Project Success survived the flap. Two more planes were hit by small-arms fire and could not be repaired. The CIA air force seemed no more effective than the “liberation army.”
Allen Dulles got the bad news on June 20 from Al Haney. The rebel air force could not operate more than four planes at a time. Losses made the difficulty greater; the supply of high-explosive bombs was limited, so pilots resorted to dropping smoke bombs, leaflets, even empty Coca-Cola bottles, which made a noise much like the explosion of a bomb.
Haney reported that Nicaragua’s Somoza had offered two of his own P-51 fighter-bombers to make up rebel losses, but only if the United States replaced his aircraft. This sounded simple until State’s assistant secretary for Latin America insisted on a presidential decision.
On the afternoon of June 22, Eisenhower met Allen and Foster Dulles at the White House. Henry Holland entered the office carrying several legal tomes. But legality had ceased to be the issue.
The president turned to Allen Dulles. “What do you think Castillo’s chances would be without the aircraft?”
Dulles replied without hesitation. “About zero.”
“Suppose we supply the aircraft,” Eisenhower pressed, “what would be the chances then?”
“About twenty percent.”
Mainly because of the important psychological impact of air support, Ike agreed to the request. The Somoza “rebel” planes were in action the next day, and air attacks became the CIA’s main activity.
The bombing led to the worst scare of Project Success. The British were angered over American boarding and search of ships at sea. Then the CIA bombed and sank a British merchant vessel. The ship was the Springfjord, which had sailed from the Nicaraguan Pacific port of San Jose. Tacho Somoza feared the vessel carried gasoline, with which the Guatemalans might fuel their trucks and airplanes to attack Nicaragua and exact retribution for Somoza’s help to the CIA.
Somoza turned to Rip Robertson, top CIA officer at the airfield, and demanded the ship be stopped. Robertson asked Lincoln for orders, but his cable arrived at two in the morning. Al Haney and Tracy Barnes refused. They told Robertson to use another method—frogmen or a commando raid.
This infuriated Somoza, who thundered, “If you use my airfields, you take my orders!”
Robertson, also disappointed by the orders to desist, ordered up one of the fighter-bombers. Fifteen minutes out of base, the plane found Springfjord and hit her with a five-hundred-pound bomb. Fortunately no one was hurt, and the ship sank slowly enough for officers and crew to abandon her. Springfjord, it was later learned, had carried only coffee and cotton.
When news of the sinking reached Washington it destroyed the cordial atmosphere Ike sought for a summit conference he was hosting for British leaders. Frank Wisner left immediately for the British embassy to offer personal apologies. The agency investigated circumstances of the incident in October 1954 and confirmed the ship had been sunk on Robertson’s orders without authorization from either Lincoln or CIA headquarters, by one of the air arm’s American pilots. The British allowed themselves to be mollified, and the CIA later quietly reimbursed Lloyd’s of London, insurers of the Springfjord, the $1.5 million they had paid out on the ship. Colonel King of the agency continued meeting Assistant Secretary Holland on this matter as late as the spring of 1956.
In the heat of action, however, Springfjord’s sinking had a significant psychological impact on the Guatemalans. The bombing broke the political situation wide open. Apparently the Guatemalan military began thinking the CIA would stop at nothing to oust Arbenz. The army began to consider a coup. Arbenz received an ultimatum and resigned before the day was out, taking refuge at the Mexican embassy and asking for political asylum. Project Success achieved its aim after all.
Despite the success of this unintended strike, the Springfjord incident had a rather different effect for CIA. It convinced Eisenhower of the need for more rigorous control over covert action, leading to establishment of a senior review group similar to Truman’s 10/2 panel. The final price tag for Guatemala—though the CIA has only admitted to the original $3 million budget expense—came in considerably higher. That figure does not include the money paid out on the Springfjord incident, the cost of replacing Somoza’s aircraft, hardware taken from CIA stockpiles, or subsidies that followed the coup d’état. The actual number is probably at least double the projected cost.
Al Haney’s era in covert operations came to an end; no further major assignments came his way. Rip Robertson, branded a “cowboy” after Springfjord, saw Allen Dulles, who fired him. In a 1966 interview with New York Times reporters, Richard Bissell conceded that the action “went beyond the established limits of policy.” Frank Wisner and Tracy Barnes celebrated. Barnes would be rewarded with stewardship of the station in West Germany, one of the CIA’s front-line jobs. Howard Hunt’s services were considered necessary for CIA’s political action efforts in Japan. Dave Phillips, who believed the PB/Success psywar effort had been the engine of victory, went on to greater things in the WH Division.
In retrospect, and with more of the true record now open to view, it seems perplexing that the Central Intelligence Agency, and indeed secret warriors in many places, for decades held out Iran and Guatemala as models of successful covert action. The inner stories reveal that both Projects Ajax and Success skirted with failure. At some point in each case the CIA came close to canceling the operation. The projects may be said to have succeeded despite themselves, not marched forward according to meticulous plans. Gaps in CIA knowledge of local conditions, unrealistic expectations, fixation on a certain worldview, the personal weaknesses of CIA allies, the competing interests of groups working with the secret warriors, the physical properties of weapons and equipment, and the limitations of tradecraft all number among the reasons why success hovered at the edge of failure. The deep secrecy in which CIA held the stories of the covert actions served to disguise this characteristic and to hinder, even long afterward, careful evaluation of the strategy.
At the time CIA thought it had done rather nicely with the Iranian and Guatemalan operations, so well, in fact, that within months the agency was deliberately leaking certain details of both to the writers Richard and Gladys Harkness for a series of favorable articles. Eisenhower’s memoirs employ only the thinnest of linguistic disguises in discussing these two crises, calling CIA agents in Teheran “representatives” of the United States government, and saying of Guatemala that the United States had to do something. Allen Dulles is even more forthright in his book The Craft of Intelligence:
In Iran, a Mossadegh, and in Guatemala, an Arbenz had come to power through the usual processes of government and not by any Communist coup as in Czechoslovakia. Neither man at the time disclosed the intention of creating a Communist state. When this purpose became clear, support from outside was given to loyal anti-Communist elements in the respective countries, in the one case to the Shah’s supporters; in the other, to a group of Guatemalan patriots. In each case the danger was successfully met.
But was the danger met, or did it ever exist? In the Cold War vision of a two-camp world, there was little room for indigenous nationalisms. Not only did the United States act readily against nations like Iran and Guatemala, those ventures were initiated regardless of the countries’ efforts to maintain friendly relations with the United States. The CIA operations made a mockery of the oft-reiterated American principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of states.
The Central Intelligence Agency, unleashed in the name of democracy—democracy as defined by American foreign policy, which came to mean governments that assumed pro-American stances—actually encouraged the opposite. No elections occurred in Iran between the 1953 CIA operation and 1960; thereafter parliament existed at the pleasure of the shah. In Guatemala after 1954 the republic was abolished. A new constitution was adopted only in 1965, but that was soon suspended by military rulers. In fact the excesses of the ruling oligarchy became such that the United States itself, under the Carter administration, finally halted virtually all foreign aid to the country. Over the long haul the covert actions did not produce the results advertised.
In both Iran and Guatemala the United States received credit from world public opinion for creating dictatorships, not democracies. In the short term, though, these covert operations seemed to be shining successes. So while the fruit might prove bitter in the long run, Eisenhower felt encouraged to try more of the same.