Ike's Spies (39 page)

The next question was, what to do with it? Cline wanted to release it at once, on the grounds that “it was a rare opportunity to have all the critical things we had said for years about the Soviet dictatorship confirmed by the principal leader of the Soviet Politburo. The world would be treated to the spectacle of a totalitarian nation indicted by its own leadership.”

To Cline's amazement, Wisner and Angleton demurred. They were in charge of an operation, code name
RED SOX/RED CAP
, which involved training refugees from Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia for covert and paramilitary operations inside their homelands. Angleton and Wisner wanted to hold the secret speech until the
RED SOX/RED CAP
forces were “up to snuff,” then release it to promote national uprisings.
⁶
But they could not convince Cline, and he could not convince them.

Shortly thereafter, on a Saturday, June 2, 1956, Cline was alone with Allen Dulles, working on a speech. Suddenly, Dulles swung his chair around, peered at Cline, and said, “Wisner says you think we ought to release the secret Khrushchev speech.”

Cline said that he did and gave his reasons. As Cline later
recalled the scene, “The old man, with a twinkle in his eye, said, ‘By golly, I am going to make a policy decision!' He buzzed Wisner on the intercom, told him he had given a lot of thought to the matter, and wanted to get the speech printed.”
⁷

Dulles then phoned his brother at the State Department. Foster Dulles concurred. Together, the Dulles brothers went to the Oval Office. Ike was enthusiastic and ordered it done. State sent a copy of the speech to the New York
Times
, which printed it on Monday, June 4, in its entirety.
⁸

Publication of the speech caused tremendous excitement throughout East Europe. Riots in Poland led to the disbanding of the old Stalinist Politburo in Warsaw. Wladyslaw Gomulka, an independent Communist, took power. Poland remained Communist and a member of the Warsaw Pact, but it won substantial independence and set an example for the other satellites.

The excitement spread to Hungary. On October 23, 1956, Hungarian students took to the streets to demand that the Stalinist rulers be replaced with Imre Nagy, a Hungarian nationalist. The
CIA
sent
RED SOX/RED CAP
groups in Budapest into action to join the Freedom Fighters and to help organize them.

Hungarian workers joined with students to demonstrate against the Russian occupation forces. Khrushchev agreed to give power to Nagy, but that was no longer enough to satisfy the Hungarians, who now demanded the removal of the Russians and an end to communism. Radio Free Europe, and the
RED SOX/RED CAP
groups, encouraged the rebels. So did John Foster Dulles, who promised economic assistance to those countries that broke with the Kremlin.

On October 31, Nagy announced that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev, furious, decided to invade. He sent 200,000 troops with 2,500 tanks and armored cars to crush the revolt. Bitter street fighting in Budapest left 7,000 Russians and 30,000 Hungarians dead.
⁹

Those radio pleas for help from Budapest made the tragedy even more painful, but Ike did not even consider giving overt military support to the Hungarians. When Milton asked him about it, Ike merely pointed to a map and said, “Look for yourself. Hungary is landlocked. We can't possibly fight there.”
¹⁰

Liberation was a sham. It had always been a sham. All Hungary did was to expose it to the world, and to the
CIA
, which was
furious at Ike for backing off. William Colby, at the time a junior
CIA
officer, later remarked that “there can be no doubt that Wisner and other top officials of his Directorate of Plans, especially those on the covert-action side, were fully prepared with arms, communications stocks and air resupply, to come to the aid of the freedom fighters. This was exactly the end for which the Agency's paramilitary capability was designed.”

But Ike said no. “Whatever doubts may have existed in the Agency about Washington's policy in matters like this vanished,” Colby wrote. “It was established, once and for all, that the U.S., while firmly committed to the containment of the Soviets … was not going to attempt to liberate any of the areas within their sphere.”
¹¹

However deep Ike's hatred of communism, his fear of World War III was deeper. Even had this not been so, the armed forces of the United States were not capable of driving 200,000 Red Army combat soldiers out of Hungary, except through a nuclear offensive that would have left most of Hungary and Europe devastated. In the face of Russian tanks, the
RED SOX/RED CAP
groups were pitifully inadequate. The Hungarians, and the other East European peoples, learned that there would be no liberation, that they would have to make the best deal they could with the Russians. The Soviet capture and execution of Nagy made the point brutally clear.

Many ex-agents today believe that Frank Wisner's tragic mental breakdown and subsequent suicide date from the failure of the
RED SOX/RED CAP
program.
¹²

After the event, President Eisenhower and General Lucian Truscott conducted a thorough review of the entire liberation policy. Truscott questioned the
CIA'S RED SOX/RED CAP
operators to find out what they had told the freedom fighters about American intentions and promises of support. In Truscott's view the results of his investigation showed a basic failure on the part of the
CIA
to distinguish between insurrectional violence, mass uprisings, revolutionary action, and true guerrilla warfare in the twentieth century. To his horror, he discovered that the
CIA
was still pushing
RED SOX/RED CAP
. The agency wanted to try again, in Czechoslovakia. But as a result of his report to the President, Ike ordered
RED SOX/RED CAP
terminated.
¹³

Eisenhower himself, however, was the man most responsible for the debacle. Not only had he given his approval to
RED SOX/RED
CAP
, it was his Administration, acting under his orders, that had made liberation “a major goal of American foreign policy.” Liberation was good for domestic politics, but a disaster for the Hungarians. They ended up with 30,000 of their best and most courageous young people dead, and a tighter Soviet control than ever before.

SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH THE HUNGARIAN UPRISING
came the Suez crisis. Britain and France, acting in conjunction with Israel, invaded Egypt in an attempt to recover control of the Suez Canal from Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser. Ike was angry at the British and French for acting without consulting him, and furious at Allen Dulles for having failed to warn him in advance. He eventually forced the British and French to give the Canal back to Egypt.

Still, Ike was no friend of Nasser's. At one Oval Office conference, he listened to various suggestions on ways the
CIA
might “topple Nasser.” Finally, according to the minutes of the meeting, “The President said that an action of this kind could not be taken when there is as much active hostility as at present. For a thing like this to be done without inflaming the Arab world, a time free from heated stress holding the world's attention as at present would have to be chosen.”
¹⁴

In that instance, the President himself said no to the
CIA
. In other cases, it was the 5412 Committee, chaired by Gordon Gray. Gray had been Truman's Secretary of the Army and then Eisenhower's Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization. In 1955 he became Ike's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. He was the liaison between the White House and the State and Defense Departments, as well as Chairman of the 5412 Committee.

That committee (often referred to as the “Special Group”) consisted of Gray, the Secretaries of Defense and of State, and the Director of Central Intelligence. Created in March of 1955 by the National Security Council, in Paper number 5412/1, it was the most secret committee of the U. S. Government. No covert action could be undertaken without the prior approval of the committee.
¹⁵

The major function of the special group, according to Gray, was “to protect the President.” It would scrutinize proposed
CIA
actions, policies, and programs to make certain they did not get the President or the country into trouble. The committee dealt with issues too sensitive to be discussed before the whole National Security
Council, a large group that debated issues but never set policy.
¹⁶

Richard Bissell explained how the committee worked. “When an operation was about to be undertaken, it would be written up within the clandestine service, and approved up the line, up to and including Allen, and then Allen himself almost always attended the 5412 and then he would present it.” At that point the State Department, usually represented by Robert Murphy, Foster Dulles' deputy, would give its approval. When Bissell was asked if an operation, once approved by 5412, would go before the National Security Council, he replied, “No. These were much too sensitive. Remember that under Eisenhower the
NSC
was a whole big roomful of people.”

Gordon Gray would bring the 5412 decision privately and informally to the President. Then, a day or two later, Gray would get back to Allen Dulles and say, “Look, my boss has this or that reaction to this operation.” Only then would the
CIA
spring into action.
¹⁷

During the early years of 5412, the
CIA
had tremendous confidence in itself, and Ike had tremendous confidence in it. It seemed that the agency could manipulate events anywhere in the world to suit the United States. Iran and Guatemala were the proof.

But Iran and Guatemala, if realistically assessed, would have indicated the unwelcome truth that there were limits on what the United States and the
CIA
could accomplish. Instead, as Ray Cline noted, “romantic gossip about the coup in Iran spread around Washington like wildfire. Allen Dulles basked in the glory of the exploit wtihout ever confirming or denying the extravagant impression of
CIA'S
power that it created.”

The trouble was, as Kim Roosevelt was the first to admit, “the
CIA
did not have to do very much to topple Mossadegh, who was an eccentric and weak political figure.” Iran did not prove that the
CIA
could overthrow governments when and where it wished; rather “it was a unique case of supplying just the right bit of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time.”
¹⁸

In Guatemala “the legend of
CIA'S
invincibility was confirmed in the minds of many by a covert action project that inched one step further toward paramilitary intervention.” Again, however, as Cline insists, Guatemala was a unique situation. It required little use of actual force and succeeded mainly because of a shrewd exploitation
of favorable local political circumstances. Nevertheless, the “mystique of
CIA'S
secret power was well established by the tales from Teheran and Guatemala City,” not least in the mind of Allen Dulles himself.
¹⁹

The major result was that the
CIA
became even more of an action-oriented agency, which was certainly in accord with the Donovan-
OSS
legacy but which was, according to such well-informed critics as Cline and Morton Halperin, detrimental to the conduct of American foreign policy.
²⁰
Detrimental because the covert operations backfired, as in Hungary in 1956 and later in Indonesia and Cuba, and because the emphasis on action meant that the
CIA
, under Dulles, failed to provide the President with the information he needed, when he needed it, as in the Suez crisis of 1956 or in Cuba in 1959.

Ike was painfully aware of these shortcomings. He wanted Dulles to serve him as General Strong had served him during the war, to be in fact as well as in name his chief intelligence officer, the man who would give him an overview, to be sure the President got the information he needed to act, while screening him from petty detail. He did not want Dulles wasting his time on minor clandestine operations. Ike had Gordon Gray talk to Dulles about these points, but it did little good.
²¹

Dulles continued to spend most of his time on covert operations and remained hesitant to make intelligence summaries or judgments. Rather than come down on one side or the other on whether the French could hold out in Vietnam, for example, or whether Fidel Castro was a Communist, Dulles preferred to present vast amounts of raw intelligence material to the President and let him decide, while he directed his agents in their paramilitary activities. The trouble was twofold: the raw intelligence was usually contradictory, and always terribly bulky. The President simply did not have the time to read it and evaluate it.

In January 1956, Ike created the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (
PBCFIA
), composed of retired senior government officials, to provide the President with advice on intelligence matters in general, and to recommend appropriate changes in the
CIA
. Omar Bradley, General Doolittle, and David Bruce were among the members. The
PBCFIA
recommended that Dulles separate himself from the
CIA
altogether and serve as the President's intelligence adviser by coordinating intelligence
gathered from all sources, including the
FBI
, the military, and the State Department. In brief, Dulles would be to President Eisenhower what Strong had been to General Eisenhower.

But Dulles would not change. Despite the
PBCFIA
, and despite Ike's own pressure (the Church Committee found that “President Eisenhower himself repeatedly pressed Dulles to exert more initiative” in intelligence gathering and summary), Dulles held to his own concepts and methods. He could not or would not shake the Donovan legacy.
²²