Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

The history of the Central Intelligence Agency is inseparable from that of cold war relations between the United States and Latin America. Established by the 1947 National Security Act only to collect, coordinate, and evaluate intelligence, the new agency got off to an inauspicious start. Rioting at the 1948 Inter-American Conference held in Bogotá, Colombia, elicited charges that the CIA had failed to forewarn the State Department. Although the first director (DCI), Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, successfully fended off Capitol Hill critics, he failed to convince bureaucratic rivals, especially J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), that they should cede their responsibilities in Latin America to the fledgling CIA.

The CIA's reputation improved, and it overcame its competitors' opposition when, empowered by a series of secret National Security Council (NSC) directives, it became progressively more involved in covert activities. It scored some immediate successes, and the selection of the respected General Walter Bedell Smith as DCI in 1950 solidified the Agency's standing. Three years later the CIA's golden era began. Bringing to the White House an enthusiasm for clandestine operations and psychological warfare developed during his World War II military command, President Dwight D. Eisenhower increased the CIA's authority and resources. To succeed Smith as DCI, he appointed Allen W. Dulles, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) veteran, principal author of the 1949 report that granted the CIA exclusive aegis over covert projects, and Smith's deputy director for plans. Eisenhower named Smith chief deputy to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Allen's brother.

Within Eisenhower's first year in office, the CIA rewarded the president by orchestrating the ouster of Iran's prime minister, Muhammad Mussadegh, and the shah's return to the Peacock Throne. It was in Guatemala the next year, however, that the Agency achieved legendary status. Since Guatemala's 1944 revolution, the United States had become increasingly concerned with the perceived leftward drift of presidents Juan José Arévalo Bermejo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. These concerns escalated when the Arbenz government enacted agrarian reform legislation in 1952 that appropriated some 400,000 acres held by Guatemala's largest landowner, the United Fruit Company. CIA analysts ascribed this behavior to the influence on Arbenz of Guatemalan Communists. Unless checked, these presumed agents of the Kremlin would, it was argued, promote Soviet penetration of the Western Hemisphere, thereby confronting the United States with a strategic nightmare.

Later scholars have rejected the CIA's estimate of the threat. Eisenhower never questioned it; he instructed the Agency to develop plans to rid the hemisphere of the menace. After the CIA failed to prevent the arrival in Guatemala of Czech-manufactured arms, Eisenhower approved Operation Success. On 18 June 1954, under the leadership of Carlos Castillo Armas, the U.S.-sponsored Army of Liberation invaded Guatemala from Honduras. Its progress, however, was less a determinant of the outcome than was the CIA's intensive program of psychological warfare that all but paralyzed Arbenz and his military. On 27 June, Arbenz resigned and left the country. Guatemala's next president was Castillo Armas. Subsequently many North and South American commentators have judged the United States culpable for Guatemala's internal strife and dismal record of human rights abuses. Although not diminishing the role of the United States, other scholars have focused on how the actions of the Guatemalan government were an attempt to control and reduce the country's large Mayan population.

The Eisenhower administration basked in the glory of the Guatemalan success. Predictably, therefore, notwithstanding CIA failures during the ensuing years, when Fidel Castro embraced the Soviet Union after overthrowing Cuba's longtime caudillo Fulgencio Batista, Eisenhower again asked the Agency to eradicate what was seen as a hemispheric cancer. Dulles delegated primary responsibility for planning to Richard M. Bissell, Jr., who had joined the CIA just in time to play an important role in Operation Success, and by masterminding the U-2 overflights program had become Dulles's heir apparent. Bissell modeled the plan to depose Castro after the Guatemalan venture and assigned many of the same personnel to it. By the time Operation Zapata took its final form, it had grown in size and degree of risk. Moreover, John F. Kennedy had become U.S. president.

Kennedy was never comfortable with Bissell's scheme, and many of his advisers were hostile to it. But Bissell gave assurances that when confronted with a brigade of Cuban exiles spread across three beachheads along the Bay of Pigs, Castro would suffer the same loss of nerve as Arbenz and his military had. In the worst-case scenario a stalemate would result that the Organization of American States (OAS) would resolve in favor of the United States. On 17 April 1961, Kennedy sanctioned the operation's implementation, but he curtailed the concomitant air strikes to reduce U.S. exposure. Castro's fighter planes retained air superiority, and his forces either killed or captured the defenseless invaders stranded on the beach. The Bay of Pigs fiasco strengthened Castro in Cuba and ended Dulles's and Bissell's careers in the CIA.

Its early warning of Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba in 1962 and the 1967 assassination of Castro's lieutenant Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia helped restore some of the CIA's lost luster. But after Operation Mongoose failed to eliminate Castro, and as it became increasingly preoccupied in Southeast Asia, the Agency in the 1960s and 1970s confined most of its Latin American enterprises to assisting the counterinsurgency efforts of U.S. clients. The major exception came in Chile, where the CIA expended great energy and resources to prevent the socialist Salvador Allende from securing the presidency. In 1970 he did so nonetheless. Debate continues over the extent of the CIA's direct involvement in the military coup three years later that ended in Allende's death. What is unambiguous is that between 1970 and 1973 the CIA distributed millions of dollars among Allende's opponents, and that it knew about and encouraged the successful plot against him.

Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 and his appointment of OSS veteran William Casey as DCI brought a revival of CIA activism, in Central America above all. The fundamental objectives were to bring about the collapse of Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista regime and to bolster the government of El Salvador in its battle against the guerrilla forces associated with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Assuming that the FMLN depended on the Sandinistas, the administration concentrated on the Nicaraguan front. Reagan proclaimed the indigenous opposition to the Sandinistas to be "freedom fighters," and Casey, aided by White House staffers and private citizens who had participated in the CIA's secret war in Laos, funneled human, financial, and material support to Contra units operating inside Nicaragua and across neighboring borders. Often this assistance required circumventing congressional prohibitions, the most notorious case of which led to the Iran-Contra scandal. The combination of Casey's sudden death, grants of immunity to key witnesses, the Sandinistas' electoral defeat, and the negotiated end to the Salvadoran insurrection has left many details of the CIA's operations in Central America unclear. The greater openness that accompanied the end of the cold war seemed to promise that additional information would be forthcoming. Although many documents still remain classified, the government has released important new information, such as CIA training manuals used in Latin America during the 1980s that discuss how to coerce captured enemies. Furthermore, the Kerry Committee in the U.S. Senate in 1998 found that the CIA often knew about the close ties between the Nicaraguan contras and drug traffickers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

General histories of the CIA include John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (1986); Loch Johnson, America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (1989); Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (1989). Equally insightful are biographies of the two most influential DCIs: Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979); Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (1994). The most comprehensive survey of the CIA's covert operations is John Prados, Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II (1986). For the project in Guatemala, see Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (1982); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982); and Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (1991).

The best studies of the Bay of Pigs are Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (1979); and Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (1987).

Gregory Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (1987), is excellent on the CIA and Allende. Starting points for examining CIA activity in Central America in the 1980s are Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987 (1987); Robert A. Pastor, Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua (1987); and Walter La Feber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (1993).

Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004.

Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954, 2nd edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Gambone, Michael D. Capturing the Revolution: The United States, Central America, and Nicaragua, 1961–1972. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. New York: New Press, 2003.

LeoGrande, William M. Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Rouquié, Alain. Guerras y paz en América Central. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994.

Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998.

Richard H. Immerman

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture