Ike's Spies (35 page)

“We met at your cousin Franklin's, did we not?” Churchill asked. Roosevelt nodded. “I thought so. Well, you have an exciting story to tell. I'm anxious to hear it.”

When Roosevelt finished his tale, Churchill smiled. “Young
man,” he said, “if I had been but a few years younger, I would have loved nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture.”

A few days later, Roosevelt reported in Washington to the Dulles brothers, Secretary of Defense Wilson, Admiral Arthur Radford, and General Andrew Goodpaster. In the best
CIA
fashion, he had an easel, maps, a chart, the works. He went into great detail. His audience, he later wrote, “seemed almost alarmingly enthusiastic. John Foster Dulles was leaning back in his chair.… His eyes were gleaming; he seemed to be purring like a giant cat.”
²³

Then, and later, Eisenhower and his associates were extremely coy about Roosevelt's role in the coup. Ike did admit in his memoirs: “Throughout this crisis the United States government had done everything it possibly could to back up the Shah.” Eisenhower was on vacation in Colorado when Kim Roosevelt returned. He was careful not to meet with Roosevelt or have any direct connection with
AJAX
. In his memoirs Ike did quote a portion of Roosevelt's report, but only that part that dealt with the aftermath (“The Shah is a new man. For the first time, he believes in himself …” etc.), and he stated flatly that the report was prepared by “an American in Iran, unidentified to me.”
²⁴

In a private interview two decades later, when Loy Henderson was asked if he could identify this “unknown” American, he replied, “Yes, I think I know, but I'm not at liberty to tell you.”
²⁵
Over the following decades rumors flew, myths grew, until in 1979 Kim Roosevelt decided to set the record straight and wrote his own account of the coup.
^*

THE RECKONING IN IRAN
went as follows: Mossadegh was tried, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to three years solitary confinement. Colonel Nassiry became Brigadier General Nassiry. Prime Minister Zahedi reestablished diplomatic relations with the British. An international consortium of Western oil companies signed a twenty-five-year pact with Iran for its oil. The old Anglo-Persian Oil Company got 40 percent, Royal Dutch Shell got 14 percent, the Compagnie Française des Petroles got 6 percent, and the Americans (Gulf, Standard of New Jersey, Texaco, and Socony-Mobil) got 40 percent. Under a special ruling by the Department
of Justice, the American oil companies participated in the consortium without fear of prosecution under the antitrust laws.

So the British had failed to stop the inevitable—they lost their monopoly—while the Americans had managed to prevent the improbable, a Communist takeover in Iran.

In September 1953, President Eisenhower announced an immediate allocation of $45 million in emergency economic aid to Iran, with another $40 million to follow. On October 8, Ike wrote in his diary, “Now if the British will be conciliatory … if the Shah and his new premier, General Zahedi, will be only a little bit flexible, and the United States will stand by to help both financially and with wise counsel, we may really give a serious defeat to Russian intentions and plans in that area.

“Of course, it will not be so easy for the Iranian economy to be restored, even if her refineries again begin to operate. This is due to the fact that during the long period of shutdown of her oil fields, world buyers have gone to other sources of supply.… Iran really has no ready market for her vast oil production. However, this is a problem that we should be able to help solve.”
²⁶

SIX YEARS AFTER THE COUP
, President Eisenhower visited Iran. An American observer said that the drive from the airport to the Shah's palace was a tremendous triumph—the streets were packed with cheering throngs (the people were paid ten-rial notes to be there, or so the observer was given to understand). The entire distance, five or six miles, was covered with Persian rugs over which the limousine drove. Tens of thousands of Persian rugs. Whatever else might be said of the Shah, he was no cheapskate when it came to showing his gratitude.
²⁷

RETURNING TO HIS APARTMENT
, the bird watcher—who was in reality a
CIA
agent—wrote a seemingly innocuous letter to a French automobile parts concern in Paris. To it he attached a small microfilm dot. The agent in Paris translated the microfilm message into code—the message started with the twenty-second prayer of David in the Book of Psalms, which begins, “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?” He sent it via radio to Washington. That evening in Washington another agent decoded the message, then reported to Allen Dulles. A shipment of Communist-block arms was on its way to Guatemala.

Dulles instructed still another agent to check out the report as the
Alfhem
passed through the Kiel Canal. He discovered that although
the
Alfhem
's manifest listed her cargo as optical glass and laboratory supplies, and her destination as Dakar, Africa, in fact the freighter was carrying two thousand tons of small arms, ammunition, and light artillery pieces from the famous Skoda arms factory in Czechoslovakia. Her real destination was Puerto Barrios, Guatemala.
¹

On May 15, 1954, the
Alfhem
, after changing course several times in an effort to confuse the
CIA
, tied up at Puerto Barrios. Two days later, as she was being unloaded, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called a press conference, where he announced that a shipment of arms from behind the Iron Curtain had arrived in the western hemisphere, in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. Immediately, Washington was in an uproar. Senator Alexander Wiley of the Foreign Relations Committee called the shipment “part of the master plan of world communism,” and President Eisenhower asserted that this “quantity of arms far exceeded any legitimate, normal requirements for the Guatemalan armed forces.”
²

Ike was right, but the arms were not intended for the armed forces. Instead, the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, intended to distribute them to his supporters in order to create a people's militia, free of any control by the regular army officer corps. Arbenz no longer trusted the American-equipped and -trained Guatemalan armed forces.
³

The American public response was swift. The Eisenhower administration announced that it was airlifting fifty tons of rifles, pistols, machine guns, and ammunition (“hardly enough to create apprehension” in Guatemala, Ike later wrote) to Guatemala's neighbors, Nicaragua and Honduras. In addition, Eisenhower declared a blockade of Guatemala, and called for a meeting of the Organization of American States to consider further steps.
⁴

Those acts were backed up by a far more important decision, made at a secret, emergency session of the National Security Council, presided over by the President himself. Allen Dulles presented the
CIA'S
assessment of the situation. It was, essentially, that the Communists were trying to establish a foothold in Central America as a base for operations throughout the New World, in blatant disregard of the Monroe Doctrine. He indicated that the
CIA
had not been caught unawares, that it was ready to move. Eisenhower
approved the program Dulles outlined. The
CIA
-sponsored invasion of Guatemala was on.

LIKE VIRTUALLY EVERY ADMINISTRATION
since Teddy Roosevelt's, Eisenhower's had come into power promising a new policy toward Latin America. No more gunboat diplomacy, no more big-bully tactics, no more Marines landing the moment a government to the south displeased Washington. In addition, Eisenhower's chief adviser on Latin America was his younger brother Milton, one of America's foremost experts on the area, a highly intelligent, keenly sensitive man who was well aware of Latin resentment of any American intervention for any reason into their internal affairs. How then could it be that Ike would approve—and enthusiastically at that—a clandestine operation designed to overthrow a democratically elected government in favor of a military regime?

To friendly observers, the answer was clear and straightforward. The threat of international communism overrode all other considerations. Ike was simply not going to allow the Communists to establish a base in Central America, a base from which they could subvert the governments of their neighbors.

To critics of the Eisenhower administration, the answer was also clear and straightforward. The Arbenz regime represented a threat to the financial interests of the United Fruit Company; the United Fruit Company had powerful friends in high places (including the Secretary of State and the director of the
CIA
); Eisenhower therefore acted to protect United Fruit.

The first view was stated in official form in October 1954 by the American ambassador to Guatemala, John E. Peurifoy, in testimony before the Subcommittee on Latin America of the House Select Committee on Communist Aggression: “The Arbenz government, beyond any question, was controlled and dominated by Communists. Those Communists were directed from Moscow. The Guatemalan government and the Communist leaders of that country did continuously and actively intervene in the internal affairs of neighboring countries in an effort to create disorder and overthrow established governments. And the Communist conspiracy in Guatemala did represent a very real and very serious menace to the security of the United States.”
⁵

The second view was expressed in an interview in December
1977 by the
CIA'S
political director of the operation designed to overthrow Arbenz, E. Howard Hunt. Hunt declared, “I've often said of that project [Guatemala] that we did the right thing for the wrong reason. And I always felt a sense of distaste over that. I wasn't a mercenary worker for United Fruit. If we had a foreign policy objective which was to assure the observance of the Monroe Doctrine in the hemisphere then fine, that is one thing; but because United Fruit or some other American enterprise had its interests confiscated or threatened, that is to me no reason at all.”
⁶

UNITED FRUIT'S INVOLVEMENT
in Guatemala began shortly after the turn of the century when, because the fertile country offered “an ideal investment climate,” it became the site of the company's largest development activity. The quaint little banana republic, in which all but the few enjoyed what Mexicans used to call
la paz de la tumba
(the peace of the tomb), was safe for foreign companies, foreign merchants, wandering foreign students, scholars of Mayan antiquities, and missionaries. The company was the dominant economic institution in Guatemalan life.
⁷

In 1931, as the Depression hit Guatemala, a new
caudillo
(dictator), Jorge Ubico, took power. Four years later the law firm that represented United Fruit, Sullivan and Cromwell, negotiated a ninety-nine-year contract with Ubico that improved the company's already favorable position. First, United Fruit got more land, bringing its total possession to more than the combined holdings of half of Guatemala's landowning population, including the Catholic Church. Second, the contract exempted United Fruit from virtually all taxes and duties; even the export tax on its major commodity, bananas, was insignificant. Additional concessions included unlimited profit remittances and a monopoly of the communication and transportation networks.

The Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer who negotiated the deal for United Fruit was John Foster Dulles.
⁸

In 1944 a military junta overthrew the Ubico dictatorship. In October of that year, in Guatemala's first free election, Juan José Arévalo was elected President. Arévalo was an educator and an intellectual with leftist tendencies; he called his program “spiritual socialism,” a concept which caused much derision. United Fruit agents made it synonymous with fuzzy political thinking and softness toward communism. His nickname was “
Sandia
,” or the
watermelon, which everyone knows is green on the outside and red inside.
⁹

Arévalo introduced reforms that were modeled, in part, on the New Deal, including health care, worker's compensation bills, and a social security system. He gave women the right to vote. He started a massive Indian literacy campaign. He allowed a completely free press and tolerated all political activity. The Catholic Church took advantage of this freedom to agitate against him, sending in anti-Communist priests from other Central American countries who adopted a bitterly anti-government line. Communists also flocked to the country, both previously exiled Guatemalans and foreign-born. The Communists had a flourishing newspaper, became increasingly active in the government, and began organizing labor unions.
¹⁰