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Washington was a city, after all, where it was true that the more powerful the man, the greater his sense of entitlement. In a city of powerful men whose lives were filled with more than the normal indiscretions of the human species—sexual, alcoholic, and financial—the mere threat of the existence of files was enough. There was, Hoover believed, a certain amount of scandal to almost everyone. He might have fancied himself the guardian of the greatness, strength, and moral decency of the American system, but his true power came from the very human deviations from morality on the part of the men
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When he read his mail, it was deliberately arranged so that the letters he saw would be those that most fulsomely praised his activities. He was, in fact, surprisingly like the chief of a totalitarian state. He fit perfectly, Victor Navasky once noted, the authoritarian personality as defined by Fred Greenstein. He was obsequious to superiors, absolutely domineering to subordinates. He was director for life.
The middleman between Eisenhower and the Republican right was apparently Richard Nixon.
Borden put his material into a letter and on November 7, 1953, he mailed a copy to J. Edgar Hoover and one to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. In the copy to Hoover, he wrote “more probably than not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” Hoover forwarded his copy to the White House. Eisenhower’s position was fairly simple and essentially defensive: He wanted to separate himself from Oppenheimer as quickly as possible. He did not want a major investigation led by someone like McCarthy, and he did not want a scandal that might tear apart the nation’s nuclear-weapon
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On December 21, 1953, Lewis Strauss summoned J. Robert Oppenheimer to tell him that the AEC believed he was a security risk. Strauss gave him twenty-four hours either to challenge the AEC charge or to concur in his own repudiation. Oppenheimer, for all his awareness of the growing resentment of him in high places, was stunned. He sat that first day with his two lawyers (with the FBI listening in on electronic bugs), shaking his head and saying, “I can’t believe what is happening to me!”
There was a curious duality to events now. As America was moving ahead to test the Super, lawyers hired by the Atomic Energy Commission were preparing to put J. Robert Oppenheimer on trial as a security risk.
The men controlling the explosion believed that it would detonate 7 megatons of explosion. Instead, it was twice as powerful, with a yield of 15 megatons. That made it a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Not everyone was so lucky. Three tiny islands some hundred miles to the east of Bikini were hit hard. On the island of Rongerik, twenty-six American sailors stationed to make weather observations knew enough to wash immediately, put on extra clothes, and stay inside their tents. But no one had bothered to tell the Marshall Islanders about their vulnerability to the most terrible of modern weapons. American medical teams were rushed to all three islands. Luckily on Rongerik, the worst radiation occurred in unpopulated areas.
On March 13, the AEC issued a quiet announcement of the test, not notable for its candor (“during the course of a routine atomic test in the Marshall Islands”) and mentioning briefly that twenty-eight Americans and 236 Marshall Island residents had been treated for radiation (“The individuals were unexpectedly exposed to some radiation. There were no burns. All are reported well ...”). The story made page-one news in Japan, though it was of no help to the Dragon’s crew who pulled into port the next day.
When the fishermen were eventually asked if they wanted to be examined by a team of American medical experts, they, led by Kuboyama, rejected the offer, because they felt the Americans were far more interested in studying them like guinea pigs than in helping them.
Lewis Strauss and others suspect this boat was a Red spy outfit. Here are the reasons (1) The fish, supposedly radioactivized, were in refrigerators when the fallout occurred. (2) The Japanese government has refused to let our people examine the fishermen. (3) Their reported blood count same as those of our own weather station personnel who were also caught in fallout, and who were not burned. (4) The ‘captain’ is twenty-two years old, with no known background of seamanship. Suspect this part of Russian espionage system, but we don’t want to say so publicly. Would tip our hand on other stuff
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But it was to no avail. Quite possibly no American public figure had been bugged and shadowed by the FBI more relentlessly than Robert Oppenheimer. There were wiretaps of Oppenheimer going back some fourteen years. Gone was the context in which things were said. Gone, as well, was any sense of his years at Los Alamos, during which he had sacrificed so much for his country. It was as if he was caught in a maze from which he could not escape. Asked why he had told a minor lie to a security officer a decade earlier, he answered, “Because I was an idiot.” On certain questions Oppenheimer’s lawyers
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When Robb asked Teller whether he wanted to suggest that Oppenheimer was disloyal to the United States, Teller answered quickly, “I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume that he is loyal to the United States. I believe this and I shall continue to believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite.”
Finally came the denouement: Teller said that while Oppenheimer would never deliberately intend to do anything against the safety of the country, “if it is a question of wisdom and judgment as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.”
The testimony was devastating to both men. The board ruled two to one against Oppenheimer. Northwestern University scientist Ward Evans was the dissenter. Considered a solid anti-Oppenheimer vote at the hearing’s beginning, he became a defender after sampling opinion in the academic world. When Oppenheimer had been asked to run the Manhattan Project, Evans said, “They cleared him. They took a chance on him because of his special talents and he continued to do a good job. Now when the job is done, we are asked to investigate him for
His name was Wernher von Braun, and at the time of Oppenheimer’s supposed security lapses, he had been working for Nazi Germany. What a strange country America was, he thought; in England, Oppenheimer surely would have been knighted for his scientific achievements. Harold Green, the young AEC security lawyer who had drawn up the security charges, was enraged by Teller’s testimony. You double-dealing, lying son of a bitch, he thought to himself. You don’t have the guts to say for the record what you said to the FBI, the words I helped base this procedure on.
He did not, he liked to say, worry about the threat from Russia itself. That could be leveled with one strike. What worried him was the threat of domestic subversion, and he was convinced that if the secret Communist cells ever made a move against any American institution, it would be SAC. He thought the base security protecting his planes was virtually worthless. “The stupidest people we had in the Air Force were put in the Military Police,” he said. So he upgraded his Air Police.
THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD WAS turning out to be a more difficult and complicated place than Eisenhower’s policymakers had ever imagined. In the 1952 campaign, the Republicans had criticized the Democrats for losing so much of the world to the Communists. But now that the Republicans were in office, they found they had inherited a world filled with trouble spots that might easily go Communist on their watch. In Indochina, the French were fighting a colonial war against an indigenous Communist-nationalist force, and despite optimism from French military headquarters, the war was obviously not
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As the colonial order collapsed in other parts of the world, a process much accelerated by World War Two, which had significantly weakened the traditional colonial powers, Marxism found fertile new ground. The Republicans found themselves facing a real dilemma; they did not want to “lose” any countries to Communism, but there were obvious limits to American military and political power abroad. In addition, as the Korean War proved, there were certain domestic restraints on American military involvement in the third world.
This willingness to use the CIA for paramilitary and other clandestine operations was a marked contrast from the policies of the Truman years, and the first break came in June 1953, just five months after Eisenhower took office.
Philby even had a nickname for him, “the quiet American,” which Graham Greene would later use as the title of a novel about an innocent but dangerous young CIA man in Vietnam.
Acheson interrupted him to note that his country had, just like Texas, sand and oil. But being called on so obvious a ploy had seemed only to delight Mossadegh.
When the pro-Shah forces made their move, the army remained loyal to the Shah and Mossadegh fled. It had all seemed so easy: Roosevelt, who was hardly an area expert and did not speak Farsi, had had only five American agents and a handful of Iranian organizers working for him.
Everyone connected with the operation was delighted: It had been done quickly, cleanly, and on the cheap. (Nine years later, Allen Dulles made a rare appearance on a CBS television show and was asked about the Iranian coup and whether it was true that we had spent millions of dollars toppling Mossadegh. “Well,” he answered, “I can say that the statement that we spent many dollars doing that is utterly false.”)
In the years that followed, the Shah became increasingly grandiose in his view of Iran’s geopolitical importance and its military might; in that he was encouraged by Washington, which generally offered him the latest in American military hardware. But he was perceived by many in his own country as a mere pawn of the West, and his government finally collapsed in 1979. Though he had spent billions to create an army and air force loyal to himself, barely a shot would be fired in his defense. The easy success of the coup in Iran was a powerful inducement to the Eisenhower administration to run
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KIM ROOSEVELT SENSED THE problem created by his success the moment he returned home in triumph. He was asked to brief the original group, plus Eisenhower (who had been shielded from the planning meetings, so if the coup was botched he could deny his involvement in the whole thing). Roosevelt’s report was well received by everyone in the room; in fact if anything, he thought it was too well received.
the Shah’s historical legitimacy had proved far more compelling than Mossadegh’s popularity, which was shaky at best. But Roosevelt sensed that Dulles was not terribly interested in that part of his report. In fact, even as Roosevelt was briefing the top national security people about Iran, planning was going ahead on the next coup—one that they hoped would topple the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. In fact, soon after Roosevelt’s return, he was offered the job of running the new covert operation, which confirmed his earlier suspicions about Foster Dulles’s eagerness to
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Administration officials had few moral qualms either about their role or about deceiving the American press and people. They saw themselves in an apocalyptic struggle with Communism in which normal rules of fair play did not apply. The Soviet Union was run by a dictator, and its newspapers were controlled by the government; there was no free speech or public debate as it existed in the West. To allow such democratic scrutiny of clandestine operations in America could put the country at a considerable disadvantage.
Our new role in the world had put us in conflict not only with the Communists but with our own traditions. What was evolving was a closed state within an open state. The Guatemala plan, Roosevelt found, was already well advanced. He checked around a bit on his own and decided that the conditions for success in Guatemala were not so favorable as in Iran. He turned down the offer and eventually resigned from the CIA—just before the Bay of Pigs disaster, which, he liked to say, was compelling proof that his earlier warnings had been justified.
It was doing so very quietly, with very little debate taking place—in fact almost no public debate, for that was seen as something that aided the enemy. The President himself, and many of the men around him, like those who had served Truman earlier, believed they were operating in a period that was, in any true sense, a continuation of the wartime period, when America had struggled against totalitarian governments in both Germany and Japan; now, they believed, the same struggle continued against Soviet expansionism. Because the enemy was cruel and totalitarian, we were justified in responding
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They worried endlessly that the very nature of a democracy, the need for the consent of the governed, made this nation vulnerable to a totalitarian adversary. Therefore, in order to combat the enemy, the leaders of the democracies would have to sacrifice some of their nation’s freedoms and emulate their adversary. The national security apparatus in Washington was, in effect, created so America could compete with the Communist world and do so without the unwanted clumsy scrutiny of the Congress and the press. Given the nature of the Cold War and domestic political anxieties, the national
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At one State Department meeting on Nasser of Egypt, Allen Dulles reportedly told a colleague, “If that colonel of yours pushes us too far, we’ll break him in half.” A man who could talk like that had real power. When, during the planning for the Guatemalan coup, one State Department official questioned the wisdom of a CIA-sponsored coup to Beetle Smith, the latter brought him up quickly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Forget those stupid ideas and let’s get on with our work.”
He was as affable as his brother, Foster, was not. Even more importantly, he lacked Foster’s dogmatism and righteousness and rigid certitudes. If anything, he seemed more a figure from academe than one from the world of espionage. He was tall, attractive, craggy. He
No one in Washington was better connected socially. A friend once said to him, “Allen, can’t I ever mention a name that you haven’t played tennis with?”
(Someone once asked Rebecca West, the writer, if she had been Allen Dulles’s mistress, and she had answered, “Alas no, but I wish I had been.”)
The two brothers were different emotionally, their sister, Eleanor, thought: Foster, righteous and unbending, as if always on a mission for God; Allen, a charmer of men and women alike.
(His affairs were so notorious that whenever he had one, his wife, Clover, simply went to Cartier’s and bought herself an expensive gift. It was her compensation, she liked to say.)
Allen Dulles, Philby thought, was guilty of intellectual carelessness. He tended to answer certain questions by saying, “‘I can make an educated guess,’ which Philby thought, usually meant, ‘I don’t know but ...’”
others called it el pulpo—the octopus. In a country that was poor and weak, United Fruit was rich and strong—the largest employer in the entire country.
liberation force.” By mid-June 1954, all the pieces of the coup were in place:
and United Fruit, with the help of bribes and payoffs, controlled the political process of the country. It also controlled, either directly or indirectly, as Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer note in their book Bitter Fruit, some 40,000 jobs in Guatemala, and its investment there was valued at $60 million.
But in 1954, however, the administration hit a snag with the press when it barred a talented New York Times reporter from the venue. Sydney Gruson was then thirty-eight years old and he was based in Mexico City, which meant that his beat included Guatemala. Gruson had no particular ideological bent:
In New York, Arthur Hays Sulzberger was not happy about the way his paper had been used and the fact that he had kept one of his best people away from a legitimate story. He wrote Allen Dulles that he had kept Gruson out of Guatemala, “because of
IN YEARS TO COME, students of American foreign policy would have considerable difficulty deciding which secretary of state had been more militantly anti-Communist—Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles. But in the era of Dulles’s reign at the State Department, anyone could have told who was more self-righteous and who more prone to bombastic rhetoric about the justness of the American cause. As Reinhold Niebuhr said of him, “Mr. Dulles’s moral universe makes everything quite clear, too clear.... Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.”
It was projected as an interview with the new secretary of state-designate. When Dewey lost, Schoenbrun asked if Dulles would still appear on the show. Yes, said Dulles—and he added in a rare burst of humor—if Schoenbrun would introduce him as “a former future secretary of state.”
After that, if a Republican was ever elected President, Dulles seemed to come with the territory as secretary of state; in fact, he had been apprenticing for some thirty years. He might be the prototype of a powerful Eastern establishment lawyer, but he had always been able to convince the conservatives of his own intense partisanship. After Eisenhower’s election there were reports that at the last minute, Eisenhower had considered John J. McCloy, an Eastern establishment insider, for the job, but he decided against it, fearing the reaction of the Taft wing, which still needed to be appeased.
Eisenhower was cautious, pragmatic, modest, and given to understatement; Dulles, bombastic, arrogant, and self-important. He tended to underestimate even the intelligence of the President he served, and there was no doubt among his aides that on occasion he believed his principal job was to save the President from his more trusting self, that is, the side that might be exploited by the Soviets, on occasion. He complained to close aides of Ike’s lack of a sense of crisis. Still, he honored Eisenhower for the wise choice of himself: “With my understanding of the intricate relationships between
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Eisenhower, on the other hand, tended to view the nuclear force as a quietly unassailable backdrop, whose relation to policy should be more subtly communicated.” Dulles’s version of American foreign policy was an ongoing sermon, which exhausted friend and foe alike. “Mr. Dulles makes a speech every day, holds a press conference every other day and preaches on Sunday,” Winston Churchill once noted. “All of this tends to rob his utterances of real significance.” Even in a town known for its stuffiness, sanctimony, deviousness, and partisanship, Foster Dulles stood out. The
There was, Hughes noted, much talk about liberation of Europe, all of it curiously vague. “What are you proposing that we do?” Hughes kept asking Dulles. Hughes noted drily in his memoir that it was “extraordinarily difficult to persuade him to give clarity and substance to his critiques of ‘containment’ or to his exhortations on ‘liberation.’” The writer came away, as many had before him, with the belief that Dulles was both the most righteous and the most relentlessly devious man he had ever met in his life.
“You should have read it a third time,” Dulles said. “I did,” Harriman said. “I still didn’t understand it.” At that point Cronkite noted, “Mr. Harriman, being impartial, we don’t know whether Mr. Dulles can’t write or you can’t read.”
