INDONESIA 1957-1958

War and pornography

“I think it’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire,” said Frank Wisner, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans (covert operations), one day in autumn 1956.{1} Wisner was speaking of the man who had led Indonesia since its struggle for independence from the Dutch following the war. A few months earlier, in May, Sukarno had made an impassioned speech before the US Congress asking for more understanding of the problems and needs of developing nations like his own.{2}
The ensuing American campaign to unseat the flamboyant leader of the fifth most populous nation in the world was to run the gamut from large-scale military maneuvers to seedy sexual intrigue.
The previous year, Sukarno had organized the Bandung Conference as an answer to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the US-created political-military alliance of area states to “contain communism”. In the Indonesian city of Bandung, the doctrine of neutralism had been proclaimed as the faith of the underdeveloped world. To the men of the CIA station in Indonesia the conference was heresy, so much so that their thoughts turned toward assassination as a means of sabotaging it.
In 1975, the Senate committee which was investigating the CIA heard testimony that Agency officers stationed in an East Asian country had suggested that an East Asian leader be assassinated “to disrupt an impending Communist [sic] Conference in 1955″.{3} (In all likelihood, the leader referred to was either Sukarno or Chou En-lai of China.) But, said the committee, cooler heads prevailed at CIA headquarters in Washington and the suggestion was firmly rejected.
Nevertheless, a plane carrying eight members of the Chinese delegation, a Vietnamese, and two European journalists to the Bandung Conference crashed under mysterious circumstances. The Chinese government claimed that it was an act of sabotage carried out by the US and Taiwan, a misfired effort to murder Chou En-lai. The chartered Air India plane had taken off from Hong Kong on 11 April 1955 and crashed in the South China Sea. Chou En-lai was scheduled to be on another chartered Air India flight a day or two later. The Chinese government, citing what it said were press reports from the Times of India, stated that the crash was caused by two time bombs apparently placed aboard the plane in Hong Kong. A clockwork mechanism was later recovered from the wrecked airliner and the Hong Kong police called it a case of “carefully planned mass murder”. Months later, British police in Hong Kong announced that they were seeking a Chinese Nationalist for conspiracy to cause the crash, but that he had fled to Taiwan.{4}
In 1967 a curious little book appeared in India, entitled I Was a CIA Agent in India, by John Discoe Smith, an American. Published by the Communist Party of India, it was based on articles written by Smith for Literaturnaya Gazeta in Moscow after he had defected to the Soviet Union around 1960. Smith, born in Quincy, Mass. in 1926, wrote that he had been a communications technician and code clerk at the US Embassy in New Delhi in 1955, performing tasks for the CIA as well. One of these tasks was to deliver a package to a Chinese Nationalist which Smith later learned, he claimed, contained the two time bombs used to blow up the Air India plane. The veracity of Smith’s account cannot be determined, although his employment at the US Embassy in New Delhi from 1954 to 1959 is confirmed by the State Department Biographic Register.{5}
Elsewhere the Senate committee reported that it had “received some evidence of CIA involvement in plans to assassinate President Sukarno of Indonesia”, and that the planning had proceeded to the point of identifying an agent whom it was believed might be recruited for the job.{6} (The committee noted that at one time, those at the CIA who were concerned with possible assassinations and appropriate methods were known internally as the “Health Alteration Committee”.)
To add to the concern of American leaders, Sukarno had made trips to the Soviet Union and China (though to the White House as well), he had purchased arms from Eastern European countries (but only after being turned down by the United States),{7} he had nationalized many private holdings of the Dutch, and, perhaps most disturbing of all, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had made impressive gains electorally and in union-organizing, thus earning an important role in the coalition government.
It was a familiar Third World scenario, and the reaction of Washington policy-makers was equally familiar. Once again, they were unable, or unwilling, to distinguish nationalism from pro-communism, neutralism from wickedness. By any definition of the word, Sukarno was no communist. He was an Indonesian nationalist and a “Sukarnoist” who had crushed the PKI forces in 1948 after the independence struggle had been won.{8} He ran what was largely his own show by granting concessions to both the PKI and the Army, balancing one against the other. As to excluding the PKI, with its more than one million members, from the government, Sukarno declared: “I can’t and won’t ride a three-legged horse.”{9}
To the United States, however, Sukarno’s balancing act was too precarious to be left to the vagaries of the Indonesian political process. It mattered not to Washington that the Communist Party was walking the legal, peaceful road, or that there was no particular “crisis” or “chaos” in Indonesia, so favored as an excuse for intervention. Intervention there would be.
It would not be the first. In 1955, during the national election campaign in Indonesia, the CIA had given a million dollars to the Masjumi party, a centrist coalition of Muslim organizations, in a losing bid to thwart Sukarno’s Nationalist Party as well as the PKI. According to former CIA officer Joseph Burkholder Smith, the project “provided for complete write-off of the funds, that is, no demand for a detailed accounting of how the funds were spent was required. I could find no clue as to what the Masjumi did with the million dollars.”{10}
In 1957, the CIA decided that the situation called for more direct action. It was not difficult to find Indonesian colleagues-in-arms for there already existed a clique of army officers and others who, for personal ambitions and because they disliked the influential position of the PKI, wanted Sukarno out, or at least out of their particular islands. (Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago, consisting of some 3,000 islands.)
The military operation the CIA was opting for was of a scale that necessitated significant assistance from the Pentagon, which could be secured for a political action mission only if approved by the National Security Council’s “Special Group” (the small group of top NSC officials who acted in the president’s name, to protect him and the country by evaluating proposed covert actions and making certain that the CIA did not go off the deep end; known at other times as the 5412 Committee, the 303 Committee, the 40 Committee, or the Operations Advisory Group).
The manner in which the Agency went about obtaining this approval is a textbook example of how the CIA sometimes determines American foreign policy. Joseph Burkholder Smith, who was in charge of the Agency’s Indonesian desk in Washington from mid-1956 to early 1958, has described the process in his memoirs: Instead of first proposing the plan to Washington for approval, where “premature mention … might get it shot down” …

we began to feed the State and Defense departments intelligence that no one could deny was a useful contribution to understanding Indonesia. When they had read enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the suggestion we should support the colonels’ plans to reduce Sukarno’s power. This was a method of operation which became the basis of many of the political action adventures of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, the statement is false that CIA undertook to intervene in the affairs of countries like Chile only after being ordered to do so by … the Special Group. … In many instances, we made the action programs up ourselves after we had collected enough intelligence to make them appear required by the circumstances. Our activity in Indonesia in 1957-1958 was one such instance.{11}

When the Communist Party did well again in local elections held in July, the CIA viewed it as “a great help to us in convincing Washington authorities how serious the Indonesian situation was. The only person who did not seem terribly alarmed at the PKI victories was Ambassador Allison. This was all we needed to convince John Foster Dulles finally that he had the wrong man in Indonesia. The wheels began to turn to remove this last stumbling block in the way of our operation.”{12} John Allison, wrote Smith, was not a great admirer of the CIA to begin with. And in early 1958, after less than a year in the post, he was replaced as ambassador by Howard Jones, whose selection “pleased” the CIA Indonesia staff.{13}                         go to notes
On 30 November 1957, several hand grenades were tossed at Sukarno as he was leaving a school. He escaped injury, but 10 people were killed and 48 children injured. The CIA in Indonesia had no idea who was responsible, but it quickly put out the story that the PKI was behind it “at the suggestion of their Soviet contacts in order to make it appear that Sukarno’s opponents were wild and desperate men”. As it turned out, the culprits were a Muslim group not associated with the PKI or with the Agency’s military plotters.{14}
The issue of Sukarno’s supposed hand-in-glove relationship with Communists was pushed at every opportunity. The CIA decided to make capital of reports that a good-looking blonde stewardess had been aboard Sukarno’s aircraft everywhere he went during his trip in the Soviet Union and that the same woman had come to Indonesia with Soviet President Kliment Voroshilov and had been seen several times in the company of Sukarno. The idea was that Sukarno’s well-known womanizing had trapped him in the spell of a Soviet female agent. He had succumbed to Soviet control, CIA reports implied, as a result of her influence or blackmail, or both. ”
This formed the foundation of our flights of fancy,” wrote Smith. “We had as a matter of fact, considerable success with this theme. It appeared in the press around the world, and when Round Table, the serious British quarterly of international affairs, came to analyze the Indonesian revolt in its March 1958 issue, it listed Sukarno’s being blackmailed by a Soviet female spy as one of the reasons that caused the uprising.”
Seemingly, the success of this operation inspired CIA officers in Washington to carry the theme one step further. A substantial effort was made to come up with a pornographic film or at least some still photographs that could pass for Sukarno and his Russian girl friend engaged in “his favorite activity”. When scrutiny of available porno films (supplied by the Chief of Police of Los Angeles) failed to turn up a couple who could pass for Sukarno (dark and bald) and a beautiful blonde Russian woman, the CIA undertook to produce its own films, “the very films with which the Soviets were blackmailing Sukarno”. The Agency developed a full-face mask of the Indonesian leader which was to be sent to Los Angeles where the police were to pay some porno-film actor to wear it during his big scene. This project resulted in at least some photographs, although they apparently were never used.{15}
Another outcome of the blackmail effort was a film produced for the CIA by Robert Maheu, former FBI agent and intimate of Howard Hughes. Maheu’s film starred an actor who resembled Sukarno. The ultimate fate of the film, which was entitled “Happy Days”, has not been reported.{16}
In other parts of the world, at other times, the CIA has done better in this line of work, having produced sex films of target subjects caught in flagrante delicto who had been lured to Agency safe-houses by female agents.
In 1960, Col. Truman Smith, US Army Ret., writing in Reader’s Digest about the KGB, declared: “It is difficult for most of us to appreciate its menace, as its methods are so debased as to be all but beyond the comprehension of any normal person with a sense of right and wrong.” One of the KGB methods the good colonel found so debased was the making of sex films to be used as blackmail. “People depraved enough to employ such methods,” he wrote, “find nothing distasteful in more violent methods.”{17}
Sex could be used at home as well to further the goals of American foreign policy. Under the cover of the US foreign aid program, at that time called the Economic Cooperation Administration, Indonesian policemen were trained and then recruited to provide information on Soviet, Chinese and PKI activities in their country. Some of the men singled out as good prospects for this work were sent to Washington for special training and to be softened up for recruitment. Like Sukarno, reportedly, these police officers invariably had an obsessive desire to sleep with a white woman. Accordingly, during their stay they were taken to Baltimore’s shabby sex district to indulge themselves.{18}

The Special Group’s approval of the political action mission was forthcoming in November 1957{19}, and the CIA’s paramilitary machine was put into gear. In this undertaking, as in others, the Agency enjoyed the advantage of the United States’ far-flung military empire. Headquarters for the operation were established in neighboring Singapore, courtesy of the British; training bases set up in the Philippines; airstrips laid out in various parts of the Pacific to prepare for bomber and transport missions; Indonesians, along with Filipinos, Taiwanese, Americans, and other “soldiers of fortune” were assembled in Okinawa and the Philippines along with vast quantities of arms and equipment.
For this, the CIA’s most ambitious military operation to date, tens of thousands of rebels were armed, equipped and trained by the US Army. US Navy submarines, patrolling off the coast of Sumatra, the main island, put over-the-beach parties ashore along with supplies and communications equipment. The US Air Force set up a considerable Air Transport force which air-dropped many thousands of weapons deep into Indonesian territory. And a fleet of 15 B-26 bombers was made available for the conflict after being “sanitized” to ensure that they were “non-attributable” and that all airborne equipment was “deniable”.
In the early months of 1958, rebellion began to break out in one part of the Indonesian island chain, then another. CIA pilots took to the air to carry out bombing and strafing missions in support of the rebels. In Washington, Col. Alex Kawilarung, the Indonesian military attach®, was persuaded by the Agency to “defect”. He soon showed up in Indonesia to take charge of the rebel forces. Yet, as the fighting dragged on into spring, the insurgents proved unable to win decisive victories or take the offensive, although the CIA bombing raids were taking their toll. Sukarno later claimed that on a Sunday morning in April, a plane bombed a ship in the harbor of the island of Ambon — all those aboard losing their lives — as well as hitting a church, which demolished the building and killed everyone inside. He stated that 700 casualties had resulted from this single run.
On 15 May, a CIA plane bombed the Ambon marketplace, killing a large number of civilians on their way to church on Ascension Thursday. The Indonesian government had to act to suppress public demonstrations.
Three days later, during another bombing run over Ambon, a CIA pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, was shot down and captured. Thirty years old, from Perrine, Florida, Pope had flown 55 night missions over Communist lines in Korea for the Air Force. Later he spent two months flying through Communist flak for the CIA to drop supplies to the French at Dien Bien Phu. Now his luck had run out. He was to spend four years as a prisoner in Indonesia before Sukarno acceded to a request from Robert Kennedy for his release.
Pope was captured carrying a set of incriminating documents, including those which established him as a pilot for the US Air Force and the CIA airline CAT. Like all men flying clandestine missions, Pope had gone through an elaborate procedure before taking off to “sanitize” him, as well as his aircraft. But he had apparently smuggled the papers aboard the plane, for he knew that to be captured as an “anonymous, stateless civilian” meant having virtually no legal rights and running the risk of being shot as a spy in accordance with custom. A captured US military man, however, becomes a commodity of value for his captors while he remains alive.
The lndonesian government derived immediate material concessions from the United States as a result of the incident. Whether the Indonesians thereby agreed to keep silent about Pope is not known, but on 27 May the pilot and his documents were presented to the world at a news conference, thus contradicting several recent statements by high American officials.{20} Notable amongst these was President Eisenhower’s declaration on 30 April concerning Indonesia: “Our policy is one of careful neutrality and proper deportment all the way through so as not to be taking sides where it is none of our business.”{21}
And on 9 May, an editorial in the New York Times had stated:

It is unfortunate that high officials of the Indonesian Government have given further circulation to the false report that the United States Government was sanctioning aid to Indonesia’s rebels. The position of the United States Government has been made plain, again and again. Our Secretary of State was emphatic in his declaration that this country would not deviate from a correct neutrality … the United States is not ready … to step in to help overthrow a constituted government. Those are the hard facts. Jakarta does not help its case, here, by ignoring them.

With the exposure of Pope and the lack of rebel success in the field, the CIA decided that the light was no longer worth the candle, and began to curtail its support. By the end of June, Indonesian army troops loyal to Sukarno had effectively crushed the dissident military revolt.
The Indonesian leader continued his adroit balancing act between the Communists and the army until 1965, when the latter, likely with the help of the CIA, finally overthrew his regime. 

NOTES

   return to mid-text
1. Joseph Burkholder Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1976) p. 205.

2. New York Times, 18 May 1956.

3. Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book 4, Final Report of The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (U.S. Senate), April 1976, p. 133.

4. New York Times, 12, 30 April 1955; 3, 4 August 1955; 3 September 1955; 22 November 1967, p. 23.

5. John Discoe Smith, I Was a CIA Agent in India (India, 1967) passim; New York Times, 25 October 1967, p. 17; 22 November, p. 23; 5 December, p. 12; Harry Rositzke, The KGB: The Eyes of Russia (New York, 1981), p. 164.

6. lnterim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (U.S. Senate), 20 November 1975, p. 4, note.

7. David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government (New York, 1965, paperback edition) pp. 149-50.

8. Julie Southwood and Patrick Flanagan, Indonesia: Law, Propaganda and Terror (London, 1983) pp. 26-7.

9. Wise and Ross, p. 148.

10. J.B. Smith, pp. 210-11.

11. Ibid., pp. 228-9.

12. Ibid., p. 240.

13. Ibid., pp. 229, 246.

14. Ibid., p. 243.

15. Sex-blackmail operations: ibid., pp. 238-40, 248. Smith errs somewhat in his comment about Round Table. The article’s only (apparent) reference to the Soviet woman is in the comment on p. 133: “Other and more scandalous reasons have been put forward for the President’s leaning towards the Communist Party.”

16. New York Times, 26 January 1976.

17. Truman Smith, “The Infamous Record of Soviet Espionage”, Reader’s Digest, August 1960.

18. J.B. Smith, pp. 220-1.

19. Referred to in a memorandum from Allen Dulles to the White House, 7 April 1961; the memo briefly summarizes the main points of the US intervention:Declassified Documents Reference System (Arlington, Va.) released 18 December 1974.

20. The military operation and the Pope affair:
a) Wise and Ross, pp. 145-56.
b) Christopher Robbins, Air America (US, 1979), pp. 88-94.
c) Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, US Air Force, Ret., The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the World (New York, 1974) pp. 155, 308, 363-6.
d) New York Times, 23 March 1958, p. 2; 19 April; 28 May, p. 9.
e) Sukarno, An Autobiography, as told to Cindy Adams (Hong Kong, 1966) pp. 267-71; first printed in the US in 1965; although a poor piece of writing, the book is worth reading for Sukarno’s views on why it is foolish to call him a Communist; how he, as a Third-Worlder who didn’t toe the line, was repeatedly snubbed and humiliated by the Eisenhower administration, apart from the intervention; and how American sex magazines contrived to make him look ridiculous.
f) J. B. Smith, pp. 246-7. There appears to be some confusion about the bombing of the church. Smith states that it was Pope who did it on 18 May before being shot down. Either he or other chroniclers have mixed up the events of April and May.

21. Wise and Ross, p. 145.

ECUADOR 1960 to 1963: A Textbook of Dirty Tricks

If the Guinness Book of World Records included a category for “cynicism”, one could suggest the CIA’s creation of “leftist” organizations which condemned poverty, disease, illiteracy, capitalism, and the United States in order to attract committed militants and their money away from legitimate leftist organizations.
The tiny nation of Ecuador in the early 1960s was, as it remains today, a classic of banana-republic underdevelopment; virtually at the bottom of the economic heap in South America; a society in which one percent of the population received an income comparable to United States upper-class standards, while two-thirds of the people had an average family income of about ten dollars per month — people simply outside the money economy, with little social integration or participation in the national life; a tale told many times in Latin America.
In September 1960, a new government headed by José María Velasco Ibarra came to power. Velasco had won a decisive electoral victory, running on a vaguely liberal, populist, something-for- everyone platform. He was no Fidel Castro, he was not even a socialist, but he earned the wrath of the US State Department and the CIA by his unyielding opposition to the two stated priorities of American policy in Ecuador: breaking relations with Cuba, and clamping down hard on activists of the Communist Party and those to their left.
Over the next three years, in pursuit of those goals, the CIA left as little as possible to chance. A veritable textbook on covert subversion techniques unfolded. In its pages could be found the following, based upon the experiences of Philip Agee, a CIA officer who spent this period in Ecuador.{1}
Almost all political organizations of significance, from the far left to the far right, were infiltrated, often at the highest levels. Amongst other reasons, the left was infiltrated to channel young radicals away from support to Cuba and from anti-Americanism; the right, to instigate and co-ordinate activities along the lines of CIA priorities. If, at a point in time, there was no organization that appeared well-suited to serve a particular need, then one would be created.
Or a new group of “concerned citizens” would appear, fronted with noted personalities, which might place a series of notices in leading newspapers denouncing the penetration of the government by the extreme left and demanding a break with Cuba. Or one of the noted personalities would deliver a speech prepared by the CIA, and then a newspaper editor, or a well-known columnist, would praise it, both gentlemen being on the CIA payroll.
Some of these fronts had an actual existence; for others, even their existence was phoney. On one occasion, the CIA Officer who had created the non-existent “Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Front” was surprised to read in his morning paper that a real organization with that name had been founded. He changed the name of his organization to “Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Action”.
Wooing the working class came in for special emphasis. An alphabet-soup of labor organizations, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created, altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attempt to find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and take national leadership away from them. Union leaders were invited to attend various classes conducted by the CIA in Ecuador or in the United States, all expenses paid, in order to impart to them the dangers of communism to the union movement and to select potential agents.
This effort was not without its irony either. CIA agents would sometimes jealously vie with each other for the best positions in these CIA-created labor organizations; and at times Ecuadorean organizations would meet in “international conferences” with CIA labor fronts from other countries, with almost all of the participants blissfully unaware of who was who or what was what.
In Ecuador, as throughout most of Latin America, the Agency planted phoney anti-communist news items in co-operating newspapers. These items would then be picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America and disseminated through a CIA-owned news agency, a CIA- owned radio station, or through countless journalists being paid on a piece-work basis, in addition to the item being picked up unwittingly by other media, including those in the United States. Anti-communist propaganda and news distortion (often of the most far-fetched variety) written in CIA offices would also appear in Latin American newspapers as unsigned editorials of the papers themselves.
In virtually every department of the Ecuadorean government could be found men occupying positions, high and low, who collaborated with the CIA for money and/or their own particular motivation. At one point, the Agency could count amongst this number the men who were second and third in power in the country.
These government agents would receive the benefits of information obtained by the CIA through electronic eavesdropping or other means, enabling them to gain prestige and promotion, or consolidate their current position in the rough-and-tumble of Ecuadorean politics. A high-ranking minister of leftist tendencies, on the other hand, would be the target of a steady stream of negative propaganda from any or all sources in the CIA arsenal; staged demonstrations against him would further increase the pressure on the president to replace him.
The Postmaster-General, along with other post office employees, all members in good standing of the CIA Payroll Club, regularly sent mail arriving from Cuba and the Soviet bloc to the Agency for its perusal, while customs officials and the Director of Immigration kept the Agency posted on who went to or came from Cuba. When a particularly suitable target returned from Cuba, he would be searched at the airport and documents prepared by the CIA would be “found” on him. These documents, publicized as much as possible, might include instructions on “how to intensify hatred between classes”, or some provocative language designed to cause a split in Communist Party ranks. Generally, the documents “verified” the worst fears of the public about communist plans to take over Ecuador under the masterminding of Cuba or the Soviet Union; at the same time, perhaps, implicating an important Ecuadorean leftist whose head the Agency was after. Similar revelations, staged by CIA stations elsewhere in Latin America, would be publicized in Ecuador as a warning that Ecuador was next.
Agency financing of conservative groups in a quasi-religious campaign against Cuba and “atheistic communism” helped to seriously weaken President Velasco’s power among the poor, primarily Indians, who had voted overwhelmingly for him, but who were even more deeply committed to their religion. If the CIA wished to know how the president was reacting to this campaign it need only turn to his physician, its agent, Dr. Felipe Ovalle, who would report that his patient was feeling considerable strain as a result.
CIA agents would bomb churches or right-wing organizations and make it appear to be the work of leftists. They would march in left-wing parades displaying signs and shouting slogans of a very provocative anti-military nature, designed to antagonize the armed forces and hasten a coup.
The Agency did not always get away clean with its dirty tricks. During the election campaign, on 19 March 1960, two senior colonels who were the CIA’s main liaison agents within the National Police participated in a riot aimed at disrupting a Velasco demonstration. Agency officer Bob Weatherwax was in the forefront directing the police during the riot in which five Velasco supporters were killed and many wounded. When Velasco took office, he had the two colonels arrested and Weatherwax was asked to leave the country.
CIA-supported activities were carried out without the knowledge of the American ambassador. When the Cuban Embassy publicly charged the Agency with involvement in various anti-Cuban activities, the American ambassador issued a statement that “had everyone in the [CIA] station smiling”. Stated the ambassador: “The only agents in Ecuador who are paid by the United States are the technicians invited by the Ecuadorean government to contribute to raising the living standards of the Ecuadorean people.”
Finally, in November 1961, the military acted. Velasco was forced to resign and was replaced by Vice-President Carlos Julio Arosemana. There were at this time two prime candidates for the vice-presidency. One was the vice-president of the Senate, a CIA agent. The other was the rector of Central University, a political moderate. The day that Congress convened to make their choice, a notice appeared in a morning paper announcing support for the rector by the Communist Party and a militant leftist youth organization. The notice had been placed by a columnist for the newspaper who was the principal propaganda agent for the CIA’s Quito station. The rector was compromised rather badly, the denials came too late, and the CIA man won. His Agency salary was increased from $700 to $1,000 a month.
Arosemana soon proved no more acceptable to the CIA than Velasco. All operations continued, particularly the campaign to break relations with Cuba, which Arosemana steadfastly refused to do. The deadlock was broken in March 1962 when a military garrison, led by Col. Aurelio Naranjo, gave Arosemana 72 hours to send the Cubans packing and fire the leftist Minister of Labor. (There is no need to point out here who Naranjo’s financial benefactor was.) Arosemana complied with the ultimatum, booting out the Czech and Polish delegations as well at the behest of the new cabinet which had been forced upon him.
At the CIA station in Quito there was a champagne victory celebration. Elsewhere in Ecuador, people angry about the military’s domination and desperate about their own lives, took to arms. But on this occasion, like others, it amounted to naught … a small band of people, poorly armed and trained, infiltrated by agents, their every move known in advance — confronted by a battalion of paratroopers, superbly armed and trained by the United States. That was in the field. In press reports, the small band grew to hundreds; armed not only to the teeth, but with weapons from “outside the country” (read Cuba), and the whole operation very carefully planned at the Communist Party Congress the month before.
On 11 July 1963 the Presidential Palace in Quito was surrounded by tanks and troops. Arosemana was out, a junta was in. Their first act was to outlaw communism; “communists” and other “extreme” leftists were rounded up and jailed, the arrests campaign being facilitated by data from the CIA’s Subversive Control Watch List. (Standard at many Agency stations, this list would include not only the subject’s name, but the names and addresses of his relatives and friends and the places he frequented — anything to aid in tracking him down when the time came.)
Civil liberties were suspended; the 1964 elections canceled; another tale told many times in Latin America.

And during these three years, what were the American people told about this witch’s brew of covert actions carried out, supposedly, in their name? Very little, if anything, if the New York Times is any index. Not once during the entire period, up to and including the coup, was any indication given in any article or editorial on Ecuador that the CIA or any other arm of the US government had played any role whatever in any event which had occurred in that country. This is the way the writings read even if one looks back at them with the advantage of knowledge and hindsight and reads between the lines.
There is a solitary exception. Following the coup, we find a tiny announcement on the very bottom of page 20 that Havana radio had accused the United States of instigating the military takeover.{2} The Cuban government had been making public charges about American activities in Ecuador regularly, but this was the first one to make the New York Times. The question must be asked: Why were these charges deemed unworthy of reporting or comment, let alone investigation?

NOTES

1. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York, 1975) pp. 106-316, passim. Agee’s book made him Public Enemy No. One of the CIA. In a review of the book, however, former Agency official Miles Copeland — while not concealing his distaste for Agee’s “betrayal” — stated that “The book is interesting as an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British `case officer’ operates … As a spy handler in Quito, Montevideo and Mexico City, he has first-hand information … All of it, just as his publisher claims, is presented `with deadly accuracy’.” (The Spectator, London, 11 January 1975, p. 40.)

2. New York Times, 14 July 1963, p. 20. For an interesting and concise discussion of the political leanings of Velasco and Arosemana, see John Gerassi, The Great Fear in Latin America (New York, 1965, revised edition) pp. 141-8.

CUBA 1959 to 1980s The unforgivable revolution 
The existence of a revolutionary socialist government with
growing ties to the Soviet Union only 90 miles away, insisted
the United States Government, was a situation which no self-
respecting superpower should tolerate, and in 1961 it undertook
an invasion of Cuba.
 But less than 50 miles from the Soviet Union sat Pakistan, a
close ally of the United States, a member since 1955 of the
South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the US-created
anti-communist alliance. On the very border of the Soviet Union
was Iran, an even closer ally of the United States, with its
relentless electronic listening posts, aerial surveillance,
and infiltration into Russian territory by American agents. 
And alongside Iran, also bordering the Soviet Union, was Turkey,
a member of the Russians' mortal enemy, NATO, since 1951.
 In 1962 during the "Cuban Missile Crisis", Washington,
seemingly in a state of near-panic, informed the world that
the Russians were installing "offensive" missiles in Cuba. The
US promptly instituted a "quarantine" of the island -- a
powerful show of naval and marine forces in the Caribbean would
stop and search all vessels heading towards Cuba; any found to
contain military cargo would be forced to turn back. 
 The United States, however, had missiles and bomber bases
already in place in Turkey and other missiles in Western Europe
pointed toward the Soviet Union. Russian leader Nikita
Khrushchev later wrote: 

The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us
with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy
missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their
own medicine. … After all, the United States had no moral or legal quarrel with us. We
hadn’t given the Cubans anything more than the Americans were giving to their allies.
We had the same rights and opportunities as the Americans. Our conduct in the
international arena was governed by the same rules and limits as the Americans.{1}

 
 Lest anyone misunderstand, as Khrushchev apparently did, the
rules under which Washington was operating, Time magazine
was quick to explain. "On the part of the Communists," the
magazine declared, "this equating [referring to Khrushchev's
offer to mutually remove missiles and bombers from Cuba and
Turkey] had obvious tactical motives. On the part of neutralists
and pacifists [who welcomed Khrushchev's offer] it betrayed
intellectual and moral confusion." The confusion lay, it seems,
in not seeing clearly who were the good guys and who were the bad
guys, for "The purpose of the U.S. bases [in Turkey] was not to
blackmail Russia but to strengthen the defense system of NATO,
which had been created as a safeguard against Russian aggression.
As a member of NATO, Turkey welcomed the bases as a contribution
to her own defense." Cuba, which had been invaded only the year
before, could have, it seems, no such concern. Time continued its
sermon: 

Beyond these differences between the two cases, there is an enormous moral difference
between U.S. and Russian objectives … To equate U.S. and Russian bases is in effect to
equate U.S. and Russian purposes … The U.S. bases, such as those in Turkey, have helped
keep the peace since World War II, while the Russian bases in Cuba threatened to upset
the peace. The Russian bases were intended to further conquest and domination, while
U.S. bases were erected to preserve freedom. The difference should have been obvious to all.{2}

 
 Equally obvious was the right of the United States to
maintain a military base on Cuban soil -- Guantánamo Naval
Base by name, a vestige of colonialism staring down the throats
of the Cuban people, which the US, to this day, refuses to vacate
despite the vehement protest of the Castro government. 
 In the American lexicon, in addition to good and bad bases
and missiles, there are good and bad revolutions. The American
and French Revolutions were good. The Cuban Revolution is bad. 
It must be bad because so many people have left Cuba as a result
of it. 
 But at least 100,000 people left the British colonies in
America during and after the American Revolution. These Tories
could not abide by the political and social changes, both actual
and feared, particularly that change which attends all
revolutions worthy of the name: Those looked down upon as
inferiors no longer know their place. (Or as the US Secretary of
State put it after the Russian Revolution: The Bolsheviks sought
"to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominant in
the earth."){3} 
 The Tories fled to Nova Scotia and Britain carrying tales of
the godless, dissolute, barbaric American revolutionaries. Those
who remained and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new
state governments were denied virtually all civil liberties. 
Many were jailed, murdered, or forced into exile. After the
American Civil War, thousands more fled to South America and
other points, again disturbed by the social upheaval. How much
more is such an exodus to be expected following the Cuban
Revolution? -- a true social revolution, giving rise to changes
much more profound than anything in the American experience. How
many more would have left the United States if 90 miles away lay
the world's wealthiest nation welcoming their residence and
promising all manner of benefits and rewards? 
After the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, we learned that there 
are also good and bad hijackings. On several occasions Cuban planes 
and boats were hijacked to the United States but they were not returned 
to Cuba, nor were the hijackers punished. Instead, some of the
planes and boats were seized by US authorities for non-payment of
debts claimed by American firms against the Cuban government.{4} 
But then there were the bad hijackings -- planes forced to fly
from the United States to Cuba. When there began to be more of
these than flights in the opposite direction, Washington was
obliged to reconsider its policy. 
 It appears that there are as well good and bad terrorists. 
When the Israelis bombed PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985, Ronald 
Reagan expressed his approval. The president asserted that nations 
have the right to retaliate against terrorist attacks "as long as you 
pick out the people responsible".{5} 
 But if Cuba had dropped bombs on any of the headquarters of the 
anti-Castro exiles in Miami or New Jersey, Ronald Reagan would likely 
have gone to war, though for 25 years the Castro government had been 
on the receiving end of an extraordinary series of terrorist attacks 
carried out in Cuba, in the United States, and in other countries by the 
exiles and their CIA mentors. (We shall not discuss the consequences of
Cuba bombing CIA headquarters.) 
 Bombing and strafing attacks of Cuba by planes based in the United 
States began in October 1959, if not before.{6} In early 1960, there 
were several fire-bomb air raids on Cuban cane fields and sugar mills, in
which American pilots also took part -- at least three of whom
died in crashes, while two others were captured. The State
Department acknowledged that one plane which crashed, killing two
Americans, had taken off from Florida, but insisted that it was
against the wishes of the US government.{7} 
 In March a French freighter unloading munitions from Belgium 
exploded in Havana taking 75 lives and injuring 200, some of whom
subsequently died. The United States denied Cuba's accusation of
sabotage but admitted that it had sought to prevent the shipment.{8} 
 And so it went ... reaching a high point in April of the following 
year in the infamous CIA-organized invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. 
Over 100 exiles died in the attack. Close to 1,200 others were taken 
prisoner by the Cubans. It was later revealed that four American pilots 
flying for the CIA had lost their lives as well.{9} 
 The Bay of Pigs assault had relied heavily on the Cuban people 
rising up to join the invaders,{10} but this was not to be the case. 
As it was, the leadership and ranks of the exile forces were riddled 
with former supporters and henchmen of Fulgencio Batista, the dictator
overthrown by Castro, and would not have been welcomed back by
the Cuban people under any circumstances. 
 Despite the fact that the Kennedy administration was acutely 
embarrassed by the unmitigated defeat -- indeed, because of it -- a 
campaign of smaller-scale attacks upon Cuba was initiated almost
immediately, under the rubric of Operation Mongoose. Throughout
the 1960s, the Caribbean island was subjected to countless sea
and air commando raids by exiles, at times accompanied by their
CIA supervisors, inflicting damage upon oil refineries, chemical
plants and railroad bridges, cane fields, sugar mills and sugar
warehouses; infiltrating spies, saboteurs and assassins ...
anything to damage the Cuban economy, promote disaffection, or
make the revolution look bad ... taking the lives of Cuban
militia members and others in the process ... pirate attacks on
Cuban fishing boats and merchant ships, bombardments of Soviet
vessels docked in Cuba, an assault upon a Soviet army camp with
12 Russian soldiers reported wounded ... a hotel and a theatre
shelled from offshore because Russians and East Europeans were
supposed to be present there ...{11}
 These actions were not always carried out on the direct order 
of the CIA or with its foreknowledge, but the Agency could hardly 
plead "rogue elephant". It had created Operation Mongoose headquarters in
Miami that was truly a state within a city -- over, above, and
outside the laws of the United States, not to mention
international law, with a staff of several hundred Americans
directing many more Cuban agents in just such types of actions,
with a budget in excess of $50 million a year, and an arrangement
with the local press to keep operations in Florida secret except
when the CIA wanted something publicized.{12}
 Title 18 of the US Code declares it to be a crime to launch a 
"military or naval expedition or enterprise" from the United States 
against a country with which the United States is not (officially) at war. 
Although US authorities now and then aborted an exile plot or
impounded a boat -- sometimes because the Coast Guard or other
officials had not been properly clued in -- no Cubans were
prosecuted under this act. This was no more than to be expected
inasmuch as Attorney General Robert Kennedy had determined after
the Bay of Pigs that the invasion did not constitute a military
expedition.{13}
 The commando raids were combined with a total US trade and credit 
embargo, which continues to this day, and which genuinely hurt the 
Cuban economy and chipped away at the society's standard of living. 
So unyielding has the embargo been that when Cuba was hard hit by a 
hurricane in October 1963, and Casa Cuba, a New York social club, 
raised a large quantity of clothing for relief, the United States 
refused to grant it an export license on the grounds that such shipment 
was "contrary to the national interest".{14} 
 Moreover, pressure was brought to bear upon other countries to 
conform to the embargo, and goods destined for Cuba were sabotaged: 
machinery damaged, chemicals added to lubricating fluids to cause rapid 
wear on diesel engines, a manufacturer in West Germany paid to produce
ball-bearings off-center, another to do the same with balanced
wheel gears -- "You're talking about big money," said a CIA
officer involved in the sabotage efforts, "when you ask a
manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project because
he has to reset his whole mold. And he is probably going to
worry about the effect on future business. You might have to pay
him several hundred thousand dollars or more."{15}
 One manufacturer who defied the embargo was the British Leyland
Company, which sold a large number of buses to Cuba in 1964. 
Repeated expressions of criticism and protest by Washington
officials and Congressmen failed to stem deliveries of some of
the buses. Then, in October, an East German cargo ship carrying
another 42 buses to Cuba collided in thick fog with a Japanese
vessel in the Thames. The Japanese ship was able to continue on,
but the cargo ship was beached on its side; the buses would have
to be "written off", said the Leyland company. In the leading
British newspapers it was just an accident story.{16} In the
New York Times it was not even reported. A decade was to
pass before the American columnist Jack Anderson disclosed that
his CIA and National Security Agency sources had confirmed that
the collision had been arranged by the CIA with the cooperation
of British intelligence.{17} Subsequently, another CIA officer
stated that he was skeptical about the collision story, although
admitting that "it is true that we were sabotaging the Leyland
buses going to Cuba from England, and that was pretty sensitive
business."{18} 
What undoubtedly was an even more sensitive venture was the use
of chemical and biological weapons against Cuba by the United States. 
It is a remarkable record.
 In August 1962, a British freighter under Soviet lease, having
damaged its propeller on a reef, crept into the harbor at San
Juan, Puerto Rico for repairs. It was bound for a Soviet port
with 80,000 bags of Cuban sugar. The ship was put into dry dock
and 14,135 sacks of sugar were unloaded to a warehouse to
facilitate the repairs. While in the warehouse, the sugar was
contaminated by CIA agents with a substance that was allegedly
harmless but unpalatable. When President Kennedy learned of the
operation he was furious because it had taken place in US
territory and if discovered could provide the Soviet Union with a
propaganda field-day and could set a terrible precedent for
chemical sabotage in the cold war. He directed that the sugar
not be returned to the Russians, although what explanation was
given to them is not publicly known.{19} Similar undertakings
were apparently not canceled. The CIA official who helped direct
worldwide sabotage efforts, referred to above, later revealed
that "There was lots of sugar being sent out from Cuba, and we
were putting a lot of contaminants in it."{20}
 The same year, a Canadian agricultural technician working
 as an adviser to the Cuban government was paid $5,000 by "an American 
military intelligence agent" to infect Cuban turkeys with a virus which
would produce the fatal Newcastle disease. Subsequently, 8,000
turkeys died. The technician later claimed that although he had
been to the farm where the turkeys had died, he had not actually
administered the virus, but had instead pocketed the money, and
that the turkeys had died from neglect and other causes unrelated
to the virus. This may have been a self-serving statement. The
Washington Post reported that "According to U.S.
intelligence reports, the Cubans -- and some Americans -- believe
the turkeys died as the result of espionage."{21} Authors
Warren Hinckle and William Turner, citing a participant in the
project, have reported in their book on Cuba that: 

During 1969 and 1970, the CIA deployed futuristic weather modification technology to
ravage Cuba’s sugar crop and undermine the economy. Planes from the China Lake
Naval Weapons Center in the California desert, where hi tech was developed, overflew
the island, seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains over
non-agricultural areas and left the cane fields arid (the downpours caused killer flash
floods in some areas).{22}

In 1971, also according to participants, the CIA turned over to Cuban 
exiles a virus which causes African swine fever. Six weeks later, an 
outbreak of the disease in Cuba forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to 
prevent a nationwide animal epidemic. The outbreak, the first ever 
in the Western hemisphere, was called the "most alarming event" of the
year by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.{23}
 Ten years later, the target may well have been human beings, 
as an epidemic of dengue fever swept the Cuban island. Transmitted
by blood-eating insects, usually mosquitos, the disease produces 
severe flu symptoms and incapacitating bone pain. Between May and 
October 1981, over 300,000 cases were reported in Cuba with 158 
fatalities, 101 of which were children under 15.{24} In 1956 and 1958, 
declassified documents have revealed, the US Army loosed swarms of 
specially bred mosquitos in Georgia and Florida to see whether 
disease-carrying insects could be weapons in a biological war. The 
mosquitos bred for the tests were of the Aedes Aegypti type, the 
precise carrier of dengue fever as well as other diseases.{25} In 
1967 it was reported by Science magazine that at the US government
center in Fort Detrick, Maryland, dengue fever was amongst those
"diseases that are at least the objects of considerable research
and that appear to be among those regarded as potential BW
[biological warfare] agents."{26} Then, in 1984, a Cuban exile
on trial in New York testified that in the latter part of 1980 a
ship travelled from Florida to Cuba with 

a mission to carry some germs to introduce them in Cuba to be used against the Soviets
and against the Cuban economy, to begin what was called chemical war, which later on
produced results that were not what we had expected, because we thought that it was
going to be used against the Soviet forces, and it was used against our own people,
and with that we did not agree.{27}

 It's not clear from the testimony whether the Cuban man thought 
that the germs would somehow be able to confine their actions to only 
Russians, or whether he had been misled by the people behind the 
operation. 
 The full extent of American chemical and biological warfare
against Cuba will never be known. Over the years, the Castro
government has in fact blamed the United States for a number of
other plagues which afflicted various animals and crops.{28} And
in 1977, newly-released CIA documents disclosed that the Agency
"maintained a clandestine anti-crop warfare research program
targeted during the 1960s at a number of countries throughout the
world."{29}It came to pass that the United States felt the need to put some 
of its chemical and biological warfare (CBW)expertise into the 
hands of other nations. As of 1969, some 550 students, from 36 
countries, had completed courses at the US Army's Chemical School 
at Fort McClellan, Alabama. The CBW instruction was provided to 
the students under the guise of "defense" against such weapons -- 
just as in Vietnam, as we have seen, torture was taught. As will 
be described in the chapter on Uruguay, the manufacture and use of 
bombs was taught under the cover of combating terrorist bombings.{30} 
go to notes
  The ingenuity which went into the chemical and
biological warfare against Cuba was apparent in some of the
dozens of plans to assassinate or humiliate Fidel Castro. 
Devised by the CIA or Cuban exiles, with the cooperation of
American mafiosi, the plans ranged from poisoning Castro's cigars
and food to a chemical designed to make his hair and beard fall
off and LSD to be administered just before a public speech. 
There were also of course the more traditional approaches of gun
and bomb, one being an attempt to drop bombs on a baseball
stadium while Castro was speaking; the B-26 bomber was driven
away by anti-aircraft fire before it could reach the stadium.{31} 
It is a combination of such Cuban security measures, informers,
incompetence, and luck which has served to keep the bearded one
alive to the present day.
 Attempts were also made on the lives of Castro's brother Raul 
and Che Guevara. The latter was the target of a bazooka fired at the 
United Nations building in New York in December 1964.{32} Various Cuban 
exile groups have engaged in violence on a regular basis in the United 
States with relative impunity for decades. One of them, going by the 
name of Omega 7 and headquartered in Union City, New Jersey, was
characterized by the FBI in 1980 as "the most dangerous terrorist
organization in the United States".{33} Attacks against Cuba
itself began to lessen around the end of the 1960s, due probably
to a lack of satisfying results combined with ageing warriors,
and exile groups turned to targets in the United States and
elsewhere in the world.
 During the next decade, while the CIA continued to pour money 
into the exile community, more than 100 serious "incidents" took place 
in the United States for which Omega 7 and other groups claimed 
responsibility. (Within the community, the distinction between a 
terrorist and a non-terrorist group is not especially precise; there is 
much overlapping identity and frequent creation of new names.) There
occurred repeated bombings of the Soviet UN Mission, its
Washington embassy, its automobiles, a Soviet ship docked in New
Jersey, the offices of the Soviet airline Aeroflot, with a number
of American policemen and Russians injured in these attacks;
several bombings of the Cuban UN Mission and its Interests
Section in Washington, many attacks upon Cuban diplomats,
including at least one murder; a bomb discovered at New York's
Academy of Music in 1976 shortly before a celebration of the
Cuban Revolution was to begin; a bombing two years later of the
Lincoln Center after the Cuban ballet had performed; three
bombings in a single night in 1979: the office of a New Jersey
Cuban refugee program, a New Jersey pharmacy that sent medical
supplies to Cuba, and a suitcase that exploded at JFK Airport,
injuring four luggage handlers, minutes before it was to be
placed aboard a TWA flight to Los Angeles.{34}
 The single most violent act of this period was the blowing up
of a Cubana Airlines plane shortly after it took off from Barbados on 6
October 1976, which took the lives of 73 people including the
entire Cuban championship fencing team. CIA documents later
revealed that on 22 June, a CIA officer abroad had cabled a
report to Agency headquarters that he had learned from a source
that a Cuban exile group planned to bomb a Cubana airliner flying
between Panama and Havana. The group's leader was a baby doctor
named Orlando Bosch. After the plane crashed in the sea in
October, it was Bosch's network of exiles that claimed
responsibility. The cable showed that the CIA had the means to
penetrate the Bosch organization, but there's no indication in
any of the documents that the Agency undertook any special
monitoring of Bosch and his group because of their plans, or that
the CIA warned Havana.{35}
 In 1983, while Orlando Bosch sat in a Venezuelan prison charged 
with masterminding the plane bombing, the City Commission of Miami 
proclaimed a "Dr. Orlando Bosch Day".{36} In 1968, Bosch had been 
convicted of a bazooka attack on a Polish ship in Miami.
 Cuban exiles themselves have often come in for harsh treatment. 
Those who have visited Cuba for any reason whatever, or publicly 
suggested, however timidly, a rapprochement with the homeland, they 
too have been the victims of bombings and shootings in Florida and 
New Jersey. American groups advocating a resumption of diplomatic 
relations or an end to the embargo have been similarly attacked, as 
have travel agencies handling trips to Cuba and a pharmaceutical
company in New Jersey which shipped medicines to the island. 
Dissent in Miami has been effectively silenced, while the police,
city officials, and the media look the other way, when not
actually demonstrating support for the exiles' campaign of
intimidation.{37} In Miami and elsewhere, the CIA -- ostensibly
to uncover Castro agents -- has employed exiles to spy on their
countrymen, to keep files on them, as well as on Americans who
associate with them.{38}
 Although there has always been the extreme lunatic fringe in 
the Cuban exile community (as opposed to the normal lunatic fringe) 
insisting that Washington has sold out their cause, over the years 
there has been only the occasional arrest and conviction of an exile 
for a terrorist attack in the United States, so occasional that the 
exiles can only assume that Washington's heart is not wholly in it. The
exile groups and their key members are well known to the
authorities, for the anti-Castroites have not excessively shied
away from publicity. At least as late as the early 1980s, they
were training openly in southern Florida and southern California;
pictures of them flaunting their weapons appeared in the
press.{39} The CIA, with its countless contacts-cum-informers
amongst the exiles, could fill in many of the missing pieces for
the FBI and the police, if it wished to. In 1980, in a detailed
report on Cuban-exile terrorism, The Village Voice of New
York reported: 

Two stories were squeezed out of New York police officials … “You know, it’s funny,” said
one cautiously, “there have been one or two things … but let’s put it this way. You get just
so far on a case and suddenly the dust is blown away. Case closed. You ask the CIA to help,
and they say they aren’t really interested. You get the message.” Another investigator said
he was working on a narcotics case involving Cuban exiles a couple of years ago, and
telephone records he obtained showed a frequently dialed number in Miami. He said he
traced the number to a company called Zodiac, “which turned out to be a CIA front.” He
dropped his investigation.{40}

 The Cuban exiles in the United States, collectively, may well 
constitute the longest lasting and most prolific terrorist group in 
the world. It is thus the height of irony, not to mention hypocrisy, 
that for many years up to the present time in the 1990s, the State 
Department has included Cuba amongst those nations that "sponsor 
terrorism", not because of any terrorist acts committed by the Cuban 
government, but solely because they "harbor terrorists". 
In 1961, amid much fanfare, the Kennedy administration unveiled its 
showpiece program, the Alliance for Progress. Conceived as a direct
response to Castro's Cuba, it was meant to prove that genuine
social change could take place in Latin America without resort to
revolution or socialism. "If the only alternatives for the
people of Latin America are the status quo and communism," said
John F. Kennedy, "then they will inevitably choose
communism."{41}
 The multi-billion dollar Alliance program established for 
itself an ambitious set of goals which it hoped to achieve by the 
end of the decade. These had to do with economic growth, more 
equitable distribution of national income, reduced unemployment, 
agrarian reform, education, housing, health, etc. In 1970, the 
Twentieth Century Fund of New York -- whose list of officers reads 
like a Who's Who in the government/industry revolving-door world -- 
undertook a study to evaluate how close the Alliance had come to 
realizing its objectives. One of the study's conclusions was that Cuba, 
which was not one of the recipient countries, had 

come closer to some of the Alliance objectives than most Alliance members. In education
and public health, no country in Latin America has carried out such ambitious and
nationally comprehensive programs. Cuba’s centrally planned economy has done more
to integrate the rural and urban sectors (through a national income distribution policy)
than the market economies of the other Latin American countries.{42}

 Cuba's agrarian reform program as well was recognized
as having been more widesweeping than that of any other Latin
American country, although the study took a wait-and-see attitude
towards its results.{43}
 These and other economic and social gains were achieved despite 
the US embargo and the inordinate amount of resources and labor Cuba 
was obliged to devote to defense and security because of the hovering 
giant to the north. Moreover, though not amongst the stated objectives 
of the Alliance, there was another area of universal importance in which
Cuba stood apart from many of its Latin neighbors: there were no
legions of desaparecidos, no death squads, no systematic,
routine torture.
 Cuba had become what Washington had always feared from the 
Third World -- a good example.
Parallel to the military and economic belligerence, the United 
States has long maintained a relentless propaganda offensive against 
Cuba. A number of examples of this occurring in other countries can be
found in other chapters of this book. In addition to its vast
overseas journalistic empire, the CIA has maintained anti-Castro
news-article factories in the United States for decades. The
Agency has reportedly subsidized at times such publications in
Miami as Avance, El Mundo, El Prensa Libre, Bohemia and El Diario 
de Las Americas, as well as AIP, a radio news agency that produced 
programs sent free of charge to more than 100 small stations in Latin 
America. Two CIA fronts in New York, Foreign Publications, Inc, and 
Editors Press Service, also served as part of the propaganda network.{44}
Was it inevitable that the United States would attempt to topple the
Cuban government? Could relations between the two neighboring
countries have taken a different path? Based on the American
record of invariable hostility towards even moderately leftist
governments, the answer would appear to be that there's no reason
to believe that Cuba's revolutionary government could have been
an exception. Washington officials, however, were not
immediately ill-disposed towards the Cuban Revolution. There
were those who even expressed their tentative approval or
optimism. This was evidently based on the belief that what had
taken place in Cuba was little more than another Latin American
change in government, the kind which had occurred with monotonous
regularity for over a century, where the names and faces change
but subservience to the United States remains fixed. (The fact
that John Foster Dulles was dying of cancer at this time could
only contribute to the atmosphere of tolerance. Dulles left the
State Department in early February 1959, a month after the
revolution. One of his last acts was to withdraw the US military
mission from Cuba.)
 Then Castro revealed himself to be cut from a wholly different
cloth. It was not to be business as usual in the Caribbean. He soon
became outspoken in his criticism of the United States. He referred 
acrimoniously to the 60 years of American control of Cuba; how, at the 
end of those 60 years, the masses of Cubans found themselves 
impoverished; how the United States used the sugar quota as a threat. 
He spoke of the unacceptable presence of the Guantánamo base; and he
made it clear enough to Washington that Cuba would pursue a
policy of independence and neutralism in the cold war. It was
for just such reasons that Castro and Che Guevara had forsaken
the prosperous bourgeois careers awaiting them in law and
medicine to lead the revolution in the first place. Serious
compromise was not on their agenda; nor on Washington's, which
was not prepared to live with such men and such a government. 
Soon, Castro and his regime were consigned to the "communist"
slot, a word known to instantly cut off the flow of blood to the
brain cells of the user.
 A National Security Council meeting of 10 March 1959 
included on its agenda the feasibility of bringing "another 
government to power in Cuba".{45} This was before Castro had 
nationalized any US property. The following month, after meeting 
with Castro in Washington, Vice President Richard Nixon wrote a memo 
in which he stated that he was convinced that Castro was "either 
incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline" and 
that the Cuban leader would have to be treated and dealt with 
accordingly. Nixon later wrote that his opinion at this time was a 
minority one within the Eisenhower administration.{46} But before the
year was over, CIA Director Allen Dulles had decided that an
invasion of Cuba was necessary. In March of 1960, it was
approved by President Eisenhower.{47} Then came the embargo,
leaving Castro no alternative but to turn more and more to the
Soviet Union, thus confirming in the minds of Washington
officials that Castro was indeed a communist. Some speculated
that he had been a covert Red all along.
 In this context, it's interesting to note that the Cuban 
Communist Party had long supported Batista, had served in his cabinet, 
and had been unsupportive of Castro and his followers until their 
accession to power appeared imminent.{48} To add to the irony, during 
1957-58 the CIA was channeling funds to Castro's movement; this while the
US continued to support Batista with weapons to counter the
rebels; in all likelihood, another example of the Agency hedging
its bets.{49}
 If Castro had toned down his early rhetoric and observed
the usual diplomatic niceties, but still pursued the
policies of self-determination and socialism which he felt were
best for Cuba (or inescapable if certain changes were to be
realized), he could only have postponed the day of reckoning, and
that not for long. Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, Mossadegh of
Iran, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana, and other Third World
leaders have gone out of their way to avoid stepping on
Washington's very sensitive toes unnecessarily, and were much
less radical in their programs and in their stance toward the
United States than Castro; nonetheless, all of them fell under
the CIA axe.
 We now know that in August, 1961, four months after
the Bay of Pigs, Che Guevara met with Richard Goodwin,
President Kennedy's assistant special counsel, at an
international gathering in Uruguay. Guevara had a message for
Kennedy. Cuba was prepared to forswear any political alliance
with the Soviet bloc, pay for confiscated American properties in
trade, and consider curbing Cuba's support for leftist 
insurgencies in other countries. In return, the United States
would cease all hostile actions against Cuba. Back in
Washington, Goodwin's advice to the president was to "quietly
intensify" economic pressure on Cuba. In November, Kennedy
authorized Operation Mongoose. {50} 

return to mid-text
 NOTES 
1. Khrushchev Remembers (London, 1971) pp. 494, 496.  2. Time, 2 November 1962.  3. Cited by William Appleman Williams, "American Intervention in Russia:
1917-20", in David Horowitz, ed., Containment and Revolution
(Boston, 1967). Written in a letter to President Wilson by
Secretary of State Robert Lansing, uncle of John Foster and Allen
Dulles.  4. Facts on File, Cuba, the U.S. & Russia, 1960-63 (New York, 1964) 
pp. 56-8.  5. International Herald Tribune (Paris), 2 October 1985, p. 1. 6. New York Times, 23 October 1959, p. 1.  7. Facts on File, op. cit., pp. 7-8; New York Times, 19, 20 February 
1960; 22 March 1960. 8. New York Times, 5, 6 March 1960. 9. David Wise, "Colby of CIA -- CIA of Colby", New
York Times Magazine, 1 July 1973, p. 9.  10. A report about the post-invasion inquiry ordered by Kennedy 
disclosed that "It was never intended, the planners testified, that 
the invasion itself would topple Castro. The hope was that an initial 
success would spur an uprising by thousands of anti-Castro Cubans. 
Ships in the invasion fleet carried 15,000 weapons to be distributed to
the expected volunteers." U.S. News & World Report, 13 August 1979, 
p. 82. Some CIA officials, including Allen Dulles,
later denied that an uprising was expected, but this may be no
more than an attempt to mask their ideological embarrassment that
people living under a "communist tyranny" did not respond at all
to the call of "The Free World".  11. Attacks on Cuba: 
a) Taylor Branch and George Crile III, "The Kennedy Vendetta",
Harper's magazine (New York), August 1975, pp. 49-63 
b) Facts on File, op. cit., passim 
c) New York Times, 26 August 1962, p. 1;21 March 1963, p. 3; 
Washington Post, 1 June 1966; 30 September 1966; plus many other
articles in both newspapers during the 1960s 
d) Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish is Red:
The Story of the Secret War Against Castro (Harper & Row, New
York, 1981) passim. 12. Branch and Crile, op. cit., pp. 49-63. 
The article states that there were in excess of 300 Americans
involved in the operation, but in "CBS Reports: The CIA's Secret
Army", broadcast 10 June 1977, written by Bill Moyers and the
same George Crile III, former CIA official Ray Cline states that
there were between 600 and 700 American staff officers. 13. New York Times, 26 August 1962, p. 1.  14. John Gerassi, The Great Fear in Latin America (New York, 1965, 
revised edition) p. 278. 15. Branch and Crile, op. cit., p. 52.  16. The Times (London), 8, 10 January 1964; 12 May, p. 10; 21 July, 
p. 10; 28, 29 October; The Guardian (London), 28, 29 October 1964.  17. Washington Post, 14 February 1975, p. C31; Anderson's story
stated that there were only 24 buses involved and that they were
dried and used in England.  18. Branch and Crile, op. cit., p. 52 19. New York Times, 28 April 1966, p. 1. 20. Branch and Crile, op. cit., p. 52 21. Washington Post, 21 March 1977, p.A18. 22. Hinckle and Turner, p. 293, based on their interview
with the participant in Ridgecrest, California, 27 September
1975. 23. San Francisco Chronicle, 10 January 1977.  24. Bill Schaap, "The 1981 Cuba Dengue Epidemic", Covert Action
Information Bulletin (Washington), No. 17, Summer 1982, pp. 28-31. 25. San Francisco Chronicle, 29 October 1980, p.15.  26. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Washington), 13 January 1967, p. 176.  27. Covert Action Information Bulletin (Washington), No. 22, 
Fall 1984, p. 35; the trial of Eduardo Victor Arocena Perez, 
Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, 
transcript of 10 September 1984, pp. 2187-89. 28. See, e.g., San Francisco Chronicle, 27 July 1981. 29. Washington Post, 16 September 1977, p. A2. 30. Ibid., 25 October 1969, column by Jack Anderson. 31. Reports of the assassination attempts have been disclosed in 
many places; see Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots 
Involving Foreign Leaders, The Select Committee to Study Governmental 
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate), 
20 November 1975, pp. 71-180, for a detailed, although not complete, 
account. Stadium bombing attempt: New York Times, 22 November 1964, p. 26. 32. New York Times, 12 December 1964, p. 1.  33. Ibid., 3 March 1980, p. 1.  34. Terrorist attacks within the United States: 
a) Jeff Stein, "Inside Omega 7", The Village Voice (New York), 10
March 1980 
b) San Francisco Chronicle, 26 March 1979, p. 3; 11 & 12 December, 1979. 
c) New York Times, 13 September 1980, p. 24; 3 March, 1980, p. 1. 
d) John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (London, 
1981), pp. 251-52, note (also includes attacks on Cuban targets in 
other countries) 
e) Covert Action Information Bulletin (Washington), No. 6, October
1979, pp. 8-9.  35. The plane bombing: 
a) Washington Post, 1 November 1986, pp. A1, A18. 
b) Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (New York, 1987), p. 379. 
c) William Schaap, "New Spate of Terrorism: Key Leaders Unleashed", 
Covert Action Information Bulletin (Washington), No. 11, December 1980, 
pp.4-8. 
d) Dinges and Landau, pp. 245-6. 
e) Speech by Fidel Castro, 15 October 1976, reprinted in Toward 
Improved U.S.-Cuba Relations, House Committee on International 
Relations, Appendix A, 23 May 1977. 
 The CIA documents: Amongst those declassified by the Agency,
sent to the National Archives in 1993, and made available to the
public. Reported in The Nation (New York), 29 November 1993, p.657.  36. Dangerous Dialogue: Attacks on Freedom of Expression in
Miami's Cuban Exile Community, p. 26, published by America's
Watch and The Fund for Free Expression, New York and Washington,
August 1992.  37. Ibid., passim. Also see: "Terrorism in Miami:Suppressing Free 
Speech", CounterSpy magazine (Washington), Vol. 8, No. 3, March-May 
1984, pp. 26-30; The Village Voice, op. cit.; Covert Action Information 
Bulletin (Washington), No. 6, October 1979, pp. 8-9.  38. New York Times, 4 January 1975, p. 8.  39. San Francisco Chronicle, 12 January 1982, p. 14; Parade magazine
(Washington Post), 15 March 1981, p. 5.  40. The Village Voice, op. cit. 41. Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onis, The Alliance That
Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (A
Twentieth Century Fund Study, Chicago, 1970) p. 56.  42. Ibid.,p. 309; the list of Alliance goals can be found on pp. 352-5. 
43. Ibid., pp. 226-7.  44. New York Times, 26 December 1977, p.37. See also: Philip Agee, 
Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York, 1975) p. 380 (Editors Press 
Service). 45. Tad Szulc, Fidel, A Critical Portrait (New York, 1986), pp. 480-1.  46. Richard Nixon, Six Crises (New York, 1962, paperback edition) pp.
416-17.  47. Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the
Cult of Intelligence (New York, 1975), p. 289.  48. Marc Edelman, "The Other Super Power: The Soviet Union and 
Latin America 1917-1987", NACLA'S Report on the Americas (North American
Congress on Latin America, New York), January-February 1987, p.16; Szulc, see index. 49. Szulc, pp. 427-8. 50. Miami Herald, 29 April 1996, p. 1, from Kennedy administration 
documents declassified in 1996.