Contents
Diego Rivera’s Gloriosa Victoria depicts the aftermath of the U.S.-directed overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954. In the center of the painting, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles shakes hands with rebel leader Castillo Armas. Behind them, CIA director Allen Dulles whispers into his brother’s ear while US Ambassador John Peurifoy hands out money to Guatemalan military officers. The bomb, symbolizing those dropped on Guatemalan cities by U.S. planes, is etched with the face of President Dwight Eisenhower. At right, Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano officiates a mass over the massacred bodies of workers and children. [public domain]
II. Ideological and geopolitical underpinnings of the Cold War
- Socialist ideas and the Western democratic tradition
- The Bolshevik Revolution and Red Scare
- The third wave of socialism
- Policy alternatives
- US-Soviet relations
- The gathering storm
- The second Red Scare
- The Cold War solidifies
- War and peace in the Nuclear Age
- Accountability
- Greek tragedy: British-American intervention, 1944-49
- Offensive operations in the Soviet bloc, 1949-56
- Iran, 1951-53
- The Congo, 1960
- Indonesia, 1955-65
- Afghanistan, 1979
- Guatemala, 1952-54
- Cuba, 1959-62
- The Dominican Republic, 1960-65
- British Guiana, 1961-64
Henry R. Luce
Luce invoked the ghost of Woodrow Wilson in arguing that a new “international moral order” was both necessary and possible under U.S. leadership. “In 1919,” he wrote, “we had a golden opportunity, an opportunity unprecedented in all history, to assume the leadership of the world – a golden opportunity handed to us on the proverbial silver platter. We did not understand that opportunity. Wilson mishandled it. We rejected it.” Luce advised Americans not to pass up another opportunity, indeed to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation of the world and in consequence to assert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such means as we see fit.”
The Big Three at the Tehran Conference, 1943. Left to right: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
The Soviet Union, in contrast, was devastated by the war, losing an estimated 24 million soldiers and citizens, as compared to 418,500 total U.S. fatalities.[5] The German invasion and occupation destroyed, completely or partially, fifteen large Soviet cities, 1,710 towns, and 70,000 villages, and left 25 million people homeless. The invaders demolished tens of thousands of industrial enterprises, railway stations, electrical generators, oil wells, coal mines, farm machines, and other essentials of a modern industrial society, and slaughtered or carried away millions of farm animals.[6] The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war and also did the most to defeat the Nazi war machine.
Over the next three decades, however, the whole European imperial system fell apart. Indeed, the very word “imperial” lost its grandeur and became a term of opprobrium. The world that the U.S. sought to lead in 1945 was a cauldron of unrest, filled with destitute peoples, incipient revolts, challenges to economic elitism and racism, and conflicts between ethnic, religious, political, and national groups. U.S. leaders and many citizens were nonetheless confident that the time was ripe for America to take charge, indeed that it was America’s new “manifest destiny” to lead the world. As the historian Melvyn Leffler writes:
In 1945 the United States held a uniquely preeminent position. For many officials, businessmen, and publicists, victory confirmed the superiority of American values: individual liberty, representative government, free enterprise, private property, and a marketplace economy. Given their country’s overwhelming power, they now expected to refashion the world in America’s image and create the American Century.[8]
The idea of U.S. global leadership did not exclude cooperation with other nations nor with the newly formed United Nations, but it did imply that others would follow the U.S. lead and accept its designs. Financially strapped Great Britain, as it turned out, accepted a secondary great power role while cleverly enlisting the U.S. in support of its foreign missions, notably in Greece and Iran. Soviet leaders, on the other hand, were reluctant to accept U.S. global predominance, especially in Eastern Europe, a region deemed vital to Soviet security interests. The latter became a major point of contention among the Big Three as the Second World War drew to a close.
Still, the Cold War was not fated. During the war years, President Roosevelt had worked pragmatically with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Churchill in planning and executing the war against Nazi Germany. Roosevelt was well aware of the Soviet government’s internal repression, but he focused on their nations’ common interests in the international arena, and he used his personal charm to create a friendly negotiating climate.
Harry S. Truman
This cooperative approach shifted dramatically when Harry Truman inherited the presidency following Roosevelt’s sudden death in April 1945. Truman adopted a hard-edged, confrontational attitude, treating the Soviet Union as a pariah state and granting it few legitimate security interests. As a senator from Missouri in June 1941, Truman had responded to news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union by saying, “If we see Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.”[9]
As president, notes the historian Arnold A. Offner, Truman “likened Russian leaders to Hitler and [gangster] Al Capone, and inveighed against the ‘twin blights’ of Atheism and Communism.” Truman “was less an incipient statesman than an intense nationalist, overly fearful that appeasement, lack of preparedness, and enemies at home and abroad would thwart America’s mission (‘God’s will’) to win the post-World War Two peace on its own terms.”[10] Truman’s lack of training and experience in international diplomacy and geopolitics was exacerbated by his unshakeable belief in American righteousness and his undue confidence that U.S. military superiority could be leveraged into political gains in negotiations. According to the historian George Herring:
Policymaking changed dramatically under Truman’s very different leadership style. Understandably insecure in an office of huge responsibility in a time of stunning change, the new president was especially ill at ease in the unfamiliar world of foreign relations. Where FDR [Roosevelt] had been comfortable with the ambiguities of diplomacy, Truman saw a complex world in black-and-white terms…. He assumed that American ways of doing things were the correct way and that the peace should be based on American principles…. Confused, indeed befuddled, over the emerging conflict with the Soviet Union and embattled on the home front, he found comfort in the certainty of a black-and-white assessment of Soviet intentions and a hard-line foreign policy consisting of tough talk and no concessions.”[11]
President Truman is flanked by Stalin and Churchill at the Potsdam Conference in Germany on July 17, 1945 [National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)]
The Cold War, as such, went well beyond the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. U.S. leaders came to label as “communist threats” virtually any development that challenged perceived U.S. economic, geopolitical, or military interests. These included democratic socialist and communist parties in Europe, land redistribution programs in Latin America, national liberation movements in Asia and Africa, governments that exerted control over their natural resources (e.g., oil), coalition governments that included socialists and communists, and governments that received aid from the Soviet Union.[14] With such a plethora of apparent threats, U.S. leaders operated as if the United States were under siege rather than being the dominant world power that it was. According to Leffler:
The fears that plagued the policymaking community in Washington did not emanate from an unrelieved sequence of hostile Soviet measures. Soviet actions were mixed. But Truman’s advisers, like the president himself, riveted their attention on the more portentous elements of Soviet behavior and dismissed the more favorable signs…. At the end of 1945 these officials interpreted their environment in light of their own needs, fears, and interests. Their apprehensions were largely the result of worldwide conditions – social economic instability, political upheaval, vacuums of power, decolonization – occurring against a backdrop of depression, aggression, and war …[15]
For four decades, a succession of U.S. administrations explained and justified nearly all U.S. foreign policies in the name of “containing communism,” regardless of whether the Soviet Union was involved. In the very first “containment” action in Greece in 1947, the Soviet Union was not involved. The U.S. joined the British in backing a repressive, right-wing Greek government against a communist-led leftist movement that had turned to rebellion after being shut out of the political process. According to Joseph Jones, special assistant to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs at the time, “That the Greek government was corrupt, reactionary, inefficient, and indulged in extremist practices was well known and incontestable.”[16] The American public, however, was not well-versed on the situation in Greece and President Truman took advantage of this to establish a founding deception of the Cold War, framing the Greek conflict as a mythic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism in order to aid the so-called “democratic Greek government.”[17]
There were profound contradictions in the anti-communist mission of the United States. While rhetorically committed to freedom and democracy, the U.S. supported a host of repressive and dictatorial governments, including at various times, regimes in Greece, South Korea, French-controlled Vietnam (1950-54), South Vietnam (1954-75), Indonesia, Iran, Zaire, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, Chile, Pakistan, and the Philippines. The U.S. also covertly aided the overthrow of democratic governments, notably in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973), each of which was replaced by a murderous rightist regime fully supported by the United States. The historian Edward Pessen, in his reflective study, Losing Our Souls (1993), recounts the many casualties of the Cold War to which the U.S. contributed:
… at least three million Asian deaths in Southeast Asia, the wounding of millions more, the destruction of much of the Korean countryside [and three million Koreans], and the utter devastation of Vietnam, on which more bombs were dropped than on all the belligerents combined in World War II…. Bloodbaths in Indonesia, the Congo (now Zaire), Angola, Iran, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina; the killing of thousands of peasants, students, trade unionists, priests, and nuns; the wiping out of entire villages by right-wing governments, police forces, militias, secretive death squads, many of them trained by and in the United States – these were the consequences of our cold war policy.[18]
Protest during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Oct. 1962
The Cold War entailed other costs as well. It fostered a terrifying nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union, and a near-miss of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It engendered a military-industrial-political complex that consumed huge amounts of resources and depended on never-ending “threats” from abroad; and it inaugurated the “imperial presidency” in which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), at the behest of the president, secretly carried out sabotage, propaganda, and coup d’états in foreign lands, often without Congressional approval or public knowledge.
* * * * * * *
U.S. Information Service poster depicting the communist threat to the Philippines, August 1951
Cold War ideology defined a new role for the United States in the world, a new “manifest destiny” for the nation. Washington policymakers assumed a self-imposed mandate to protect other peoples and nations from “communism” and to lead the world to peace, prosperity and democracy. The Cold War ideological framework drew upon a deeper stratum of “exceptionalist” beliefs in America’s inherent goodness and benefic intentions, to the effect that the U.S. could be entrusted with world power because it would always use that power in benevolent and protective ways.[22] America’s assumed moral superiority was also transferable to its allies and client-states, exalted as the “free world” by mere association with the United States.
Though presented in “fairy tale” terms of good and evil nations, Cold War anti-communist ideology played an important strategic role in the U.S. quest for global predominance.[23] U.S. leaders conflated a variety of challenges to U.S. global interests and influence into a larger-than-life, monolithic “communist threat” that appeared to be everywhere on the rise. This overwrought threat perception, in turn, allowed U.S. leaders to justify U.S. intervention in every corner of the world. U.S. policymakers adopted the maxim that any diminution of U.S. influence anywhere constituted a potential gain for the Soviet Union and “communism.” They deemed the “loss” of even one small country unacceptable, surmising that “communists” elsewhere would be emboldened to knock over more dominoes. It was a perfect formula for unrelieved empire anxiety.
Soviet threat perception
Hyping the “Soviet threat.” First, U.S. Cold War ideology greatly magnified the “Soviet threat,” turning a classic geopolitical rivalry into a mythical struggle between good and evil nations.[24] As described in the U.S. National Security Directive 68 of 1950, “the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” As U.S. leaders saw no possibility of compromise or détente with the Soviet Union (at least for the first 25 years of the Cold War), their mandate was to frustrate “the Kremlin design” and “foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system,” according to the directive. To achieve these goals, a level of militarization just short of war was required, including “the capability of conducting powerful offensive air operations against vital elements of the Soviet war-making capacity.” Ignoring Soviet security fears and interests, the U.S. surrounded the Soviet Union with U.S. military bases and allies, and conducted covert operations within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (see section IV).[25]
The “Third World.” The U.S. and its Western European allies were designated the “First World,” the Soviet Union and its allies, the “Second World,” and the many underdeveloped nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the “Third World.”
To be sure, it was easier for U.S. leaders to convince American citizens of the benevolence of U.S. global designs and intentions than to convince the rest of the world. U.S. leaders promoted capitalism as the road to prosperity, yet for many poor peoples and nations on the periphery of industrial production centers – a majority of the world’s population – capitalism was more likely to be associated with economic dependency, exploitation, inequality, and foreign control.[27] The debilitating results of Western European imperialism in Asia and Africa, and of “Yankee imperialism” in Latin America, which conquered foreign markets to serve home industries, were ultimately more convincing to many in the Third World than the plethora of economic development platitudes and propaganda emanating from Washington.
Salvador Allende, president of Chile (1970-73)
Nor was the capitalist veneration of self-interest seen as superior in concept to the socialist ideals of economic security and greater equality. Jawaharlal Nehru, who led India after independence, testified to socialism’s appeal in a speech before the Lahore Session of the Congress in 1929, saying, “we must realize that the philosophy of Socialism has permeated the entire structure of society the world over, and almost the only points in dispute are the pace and the methods of advance to its full realization. India will have to go that way too, if she seeks to end her poverty and inequality, though she may evolve her own methods and may adapt the ideal to the genius of her race.”[29]
Americans, of course, were inclined to believe that their government and leaders were committed to the promotion of freedom and democracy abroad. Statements to that effect were voiced by the nation’s highest officials, echoed in the mainstream media, and inculcated in the body politic through the educational system, leading to their internalization as American identity. It was thus difficult for many citizens to understand the profound contradiction between the nation’s oft-stated ideals and its actual foreign policy practices; and not a few followed U.S. leaders in ignoring or denying the contradiction, reveling in America’s mythic identity as “leader of the free world.”
Socialist ideas and the Western democratic tradition
Still in their late ‘20s, the two political philosophers argued for “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” that exploited workers and called on workers (the proletariat) everywhere to unite in socialist solidarity. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” This rousing call to organize was complemented by a 10-point policy agenda that called for the abolition of property in land, a heavy graduated income tax, abolition of all rights of inheritance, the centralization of credit and means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state, the abolition of children’s factory labor, and free education for all children in public schools.[33]
Karl Marx with his daughter, Jenny, in London, circa 1866
Marx spent most of his life in London, where he and his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, raised seven children. His main intellectual quest was to decipher the “laws” of economics underlying capitalism, especially how internal contradictions would eventually lead to capitalism’s collapse and transformation. He postulated an “iron law of wages” that kept workers at bare subsistence level, but this turned out to be a bendable “law” in practice, as labor union pressure and minimum wage laws pushed up average wages over time. Marx spent much of his time educating workers, organizing trade unions, and fostering international socialist solidarity. He addressed the question of whether forceful change was necessary to achieve socialist transformation in a speech in Amsterdam in September 1872:
You know the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries – such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland – where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must someday appeal to erect the rule of labor.[36]
To summarize Marx’s view of social change, the achievement of a socialist society was not predicated on violent revolution, but he judged that force might be necessary in countries where political democracy and the right to organize were denied.
Democratic socialism
Edward Bellamy
The first and continuing manifestation of socialist ideas was democratic socialism in Western Europe and the United States. It emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to rising inequality and monopoly corporations. In the U.S., socialists joined populists, progressives, labor union advocates, and Social Gospel reformers in calling for governmental restrictions on big business, protection of workers, progressive income taxes, and various social welfare measures. Edward Bellamy, a journalist, authored the best-selling novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), which imagined an ideal socialist society in Boston in the year 2000. Bellamy believed that the state should guarantee “the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen, from the cradle to the grave.” His cousin, Francis Bellamy, a founding member of the Society of Christian Socialists, was the author of the American pledge of allegiance, first published in The Youth’s Companion on September 8, 1892, except that the phrase “under God” was added in 1954.[37]
With the publication of Imperialism: A Study (1902) by British Fabian socialist John A. Hobson, socialist ideas came to encompass a biting critique of imperialism. Hobson aimed to disabuse his fellow citizens of the notion that the British Empire benefited the people at large, as distinct from special economic interests.[41] More broadly, socialists argued that the basis of prosperity lay not in capitalism but in scientific and technological advances, and that these would be more productively and beneficially applied in a socialist system. They held that capitalism skewed the distribution of income and wealth to benefit the few over the many, and misdirected industrial production away from meeting human needs to enterprises such as war industries. Socialist theorists idealized international worker solidarity across national boundaries, and socialist legislators in Europe were in the forefront of efforts to preserve peace and reduce military expenditures.
Albert Einstein
Over the course of the 20th century, democratic socialist parties formed elsewhere in the world, joining a loose network called the Socialist International. Among the leaders of this organization were prime ministers Willy Brandt of Germany, Olof Palme of Sweden, and Michael Manley of Jamaica. One of more famous socialists was the scientist Albert Einstein. In an article titled “Why Socialism?” published in the Monthly Review in May 1949, he wrote that “the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.” Noting that the application of science and technology has created “a planetary community of production and consumption,” he argued that capitalism was a dysfunctional system:
We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor – not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules…. Production is carried on for profit, not for use…. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depression. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals … [which] I consider the worst evil of capitalism.
Einstein offered a cogent summary of the socialist alternative he envisioned:
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.[43]
The Bolshevik Revolution and Red Scare
V. I. Lenin in Moscow, November 7, 1918
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in November 1917 inaugurated a second manifestation of socialism, one more in line with the Russian Czarist tradition than with Western democratic socialism. Promising the impoverished and war-weary Russian people “Peace, Land, Bread,” Vladimir Lenin led a successful revolt against the moderate socialist Kerensky government, which had overthrown Czarist rule only nine months earlier. Almost immediately, the Bolsheviks faced a counterrevolution backed by Western powers, including the United States. Known as the “Midnight War,” U.S., British, French, Canadian and Japanese forces aided White Army counter-revolutionaries. This Western invasion poisoned U.S.-Soviet relations from the outset, especially as President Woodrow Wilson had publicly promised to respect Russian self-determination. Some historians mark the beginning of the Cold War from 1918 rather than the post-World War II period.[44]
U.S. soldiers marching into Vladivostok, August 1918, in the “Midnight War” against the Bolsheviks
In the U.S., a new Communist Party was formed out of the left wing of the Socialist Party on May 1, 1919. Relations between the two leftist parties remained chilly thereafter, though both faced the brunt of conservative intimidation. The first “Red Scare” was prompted by an unrelated series of bombings targeting influential business and political leaders in the spring of 1919. Though the origins of the bombings were unknown, Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer suspected leftists and set up an “anti-radical” division in the Department of Justice headed by J. Edgar Hoover. In late 1919 and early 1920, Hoover’s agents conducted raids in some 30 cities and towns, arresting thousands of suspected subversives. Many were detained for months without trial, and 556 resident aliens were deported. Hoover’s “vision of the Communist menace,” notes the historian Ellen Schrecker, “extended far beyond the Communist party to almost any group that challenged the established social, economic, or racial order, and he was to dedicate his entire professional career to combating that menace.”[46]
The infamous spider chart produced by the U.S. Army, 1923 (click to enlarge)
The “Red Scare” continued at a lower intensity throughout the interwar period. In May 1923, the Chemical Warfare Service of the War Department published a chart showing alleged conspiratorial connections between pacifist, socialist, and women’s groups. At the top, in big black letters, was the heading, “The Socialist-Pacifist Movement in America is an Absolutely Fundamental and Integral Part of International Socialism.” Among the groups identified were the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the National League of Women Voters, and other prominent women’s groups.[47]
The all-purpose anti-communist rationale
Marine cavalry unit in Ocotal, Nicaragua, 1928
In Nicaragua, where the U.S. had militarily intervened on numerous occasions, U.S. leaders justified yet another intervention in December 1926 in the name of fighting Bolshevism emanating from Mexico. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg submitted a report to the Senate on January 12, 1927, titled “Bolshevik Aims and Policies in Mexico and Latin America,” which charged that Bolshevik leaders were intent on destroying “what they term American Imperialism” as a necessary prerequisite to world revolution. Senator William Borah of Idaho found the assertion spurious. He pointed out that unrest in Nicaragua was a product of internal Nicaraguan politics, not foreign subversion. Borah was on target. In truth, the only foreign government intent on manipulating Nicaragua was the United States. As Under-Secretary of State Robert Olds candidly explained in an internal memorandum that same month, “we do control the destinies of Central America and we do so for the simple reason that the national interest absolutely dictates such a course.”[53]
Benito Mussolini, who achieved a fascist dictatorship in Italy in the mid-1920s, was a model for Adolf Hitler who did the same in Germany in the mid-1930s.
The anti-communist mission linked the U.S. to rightist governments across Europe and Latin America. Indeed, U.S. officials looked kindly upon the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy. In 1935, Henry P. Fletcher, the U.S. ambassador to Italy, praised Italian fascism as a bulwark against “Russian domination of Europe.” Should Mussolini be deposed, he warned, “a reign of terror” would be unleashed, presumably by leftists and communists.[54]
Soviet oppression
Soviet propaganda poster, 1933: Marx and Engels are included with Lenin and Stalin as icons of the Soviet state, although the former would likely have condemned Stalin’s oppression. Note at bottom the transition from turmoil to happiness under Stalin. [Gustavs Klucis, public domain]
The third wave of socialism
Teenage Italian resistance fighter during the Second World War
During the Second World War, communist parties in Europe and Asia were in the forefront of guerrilla resistance to German, Italian, and Japanese occupations. “In many countries,” writes Melvyn Leffler, “Communist leaders appeared as heroes of the resistance, proponents of socioeconomic reform, and champions of their nations’ self-interest.”
Communist membership soared [in Europe]. The Belgian party grew from 9,000 in 1939 to 100,000 in November 1945; in Holland from 10,000 in 1938 to 53,000 in 1946; in Greece from 17,000 in 1935 to 70,000 in 1945; in Italy from 5,000 in 1943 to 1,700,000 at the end of 1945; in Czechoslovakia from 28,000 in May 1945 to 750,000 in September 1945; in Hungary from a few hundred in 1942 to 100,000 in December 1945. In France, Italy, and Finland the Communist vote was already 20 percent of the electorate in 1945; in Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Sweden, it was close to 10 percent. These percentages were all the more impressive because of the fractious nature of multiparty politics in most European countries.[59]
In the aftermath of the war, the question of how to reconstruct the devastated economies of Europe was on everyone’s agenda. What rules and principles should guide that effort? In light of the widespread economic hardship that continued after the war, many Europeans were inclined toward socialist ideas that prioritized meeting basic needs. “Many of these peoples,” writes Melvyn Leffler, “had become disillusioned with bourgeois middle-of-the-road parties that had failed to meet their needs in the past.”[60] In October 1945, the French Communist Party won 26 percent of the popular vote and the Socialist Party won another 24 percent, giving the left dominant influence in the governing coalition led by Charles de Gaulle.[61]
Alcide de Gasperi, at microphone, addresses a huge crowd in Rome after his party’s electoral victory in April 1948 [AP]
In the incipient global Cold War against the left, Washington officials had few qualms about supporting rightist authoritarian governments. Along with the Greek government, the Truman administration supported the authoritarian rule of Antonio Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, who came to power in 1928. A CIA report in 1949 described Salazar’s government as a “comparatively benevolent dictatorship.” Portugal’s benevolence toward the U.S. consisted of allowing a U.S. military base in the Azores (located in the north Atlantic Ocean). Secretary of State Dean Acheson “was impressed by Salazar,” notes the historian David Schmitz:
In his memoirs, Acheson described Salazar as one of the few people he was immediately drawn to upon first meeting. He had come to power “to run a country that for twenty years had been sinking into economic chaos and political anarchy.” Acheson saw Salazar not as “a dictator in his own right as Stalin was, but a dictatorial manager employed and maintained by the power of the Army … to run the country in the interest of the middle class.”[66]
Dictators Antonio De Oliveira Salazar of Portugal (left) and Francisco Franco of Spain (right) gained U.S. support
Such were the Orwellian rationales of U.S. leaders to justify support for dictatorial regimes. Washington officials counted on rightist allies to align with the U.S. against the Soviet Union, sustain the open market capitalist system, and suppress leftist challenges to the American-led world order.
Ho Chi Minh beseeched the U.S. in vain to support Vietnamese independence [Communist Party of Vietnam]
The post-colonial world order
Between 1945 and 1975, fifty-two new states in Asia and Africa achieved independence from their European rulers. According to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian:
In 1946, there were 35 member states in the United Nations; as the newly independent nations of the “third world” joined the organization, by 1970 membership had swelled to 127. These new member states had a few characteristics in common; they were non-white, with developing economies, facing internal problems that were the result of their colonial past, which sometimes put them at odds with European countries and made them suspicious of European-style governmental structures, political ideas, and economic institutions.[71]
Many of the newly independent nations chose the path of democratic socialism or just socialism. Algeria, Burma, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Seychelles, Sudan, and Syria all wrote socialism into their constitutions; for example, “The Arab Republic of Egypt is a democratic, socialist state based on the alliance of the working forces of the people.”[72] The leading proponent of socialism in Africa, Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania in the 1960s, espoused a vision of communitarian socialism that was rooted in African traditions, cooperative village life, and communal ownership of land, known as Ujamaa (familyhood) in Swahili. For many, the definition of socialism winnowed down to the basic precept of economic sharing, with each country experimenting how this should be done. Given that national borders had been imposed by colonial powers, political power struggles were rife, national unity was fragile, and democratic institutions proved difficult to achieve in the emerging nations.
George Kennan
George Kennan, as head of the U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff, wrote a candid internal memorandum on February 24, 1948, in which he acknowledged the gross disparities of the international economic system. However, instead of suggesting ways to ameliorate this condition, he advised his colleagues that harsher measures would be needed in the future to maintain America’s privileged position:
We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have the answers to the problems which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples. Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction…. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.[75]
In practice, “to deal in straight power concepts” meant supporting governments that would maintain systemic economic inequalities and suppress leftist challenges to that order. U.S. officials did not dispense with altruistic and idealistic slogans, however, as these were necessary to convince the American public that U.S. foreign policies were benevolent. On June 24, 1949, President Truman called on Congress to fund a “bold new program” of technical assistance for poor countries, the Point Four program, warning that hungry people might “turn to false doctrines” unless they received help. Congress appropriated $35 million for the program in May 1950 with the stipulation that “recipient nations provide a healthy investment environment for foreign capital,” according to the historian Thomas G. Paterson.[76] Aid programs no less than national security policies were fashioned to secure U.S. interests.
The Non-Aligned Movement and New International Economic Order proposal
Bandung Conference leaders Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, 1955
In April 1955, a conference of Third World nations was held in Bandung, Indonesia. Organized by leaders of Indonesia, Burma, India, and Pakistan, the conference was attended by representatives from 29 African and Asian nations representing 1.5 billion people, or 54 percent of the world’s population. The representatives stated their commitment to steer clear of Cold War militarism, which they deemed a waste of resources needed for economic development. In 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement was officially established at a conference in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. As a condition for membership, states could not be part of any multilateral military alliance or sign a bilateral military agreement with one of the “big powers.” More than 100 nation-states eventually joined the Non-Aligned Movement.[77] The movement did not presume to tell any nation what kind of economic system it should have, ignoring the economic ideological presumptions of the Cold War.
NIEO stamps issued by the UN Postal Administration, 1980
Third World nations joined together to advocate changes in the global economic system. In 1964, they issued the “Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven” (nations) which called for “new attitudes and new approaches in the international economic field.” Ten years later, on May 1, 1974, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and an accompanying program of action. The NIEO proposal called for more favorable trade arrangements for underdeveloped nations, better access to international capital, the right to regulate foreign corporations and nationalize foreign properties, and a greater voice in the management of the international economy. The U.S., with the backing of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, successfully resisted this initiative. Prices for Third World agricultural exports continued to lag behind prices for First World manufactured imports. Apart from oil exporters and a handful of rising Asian economies on the Pacific rim, most Third World nations remained underdeveloped and sank deeper into debt in the 1980s.[81]
The shift in Washington from cooperation with the Soviet Union to opposition to all things “communist” proceeded in steps over a period of five years. It began in April 1945, when Harry Truman assumed the presidency and adopted a hardline attitude in negotiations with the Soviet Union, reviving pre-World War II antagonism. Key developments thereafter include:
- Diplomat George Kennan’s telegram from Russia in February 1946;
- Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech in March 1946;
- An internal report by Clark Clifford and George Elsey in September 1946 vilifying the Soviet Union;
- President Truman’s call to arms on March 12, 1947 (Truman Doctrine);
- The Second Red Scare (domestic politics);
- Three interrelated international developments in 1948-49 – the Marshall Plan, Berlin airlift, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – that solidified the Cold War in Europe;
- Heightened fears of the Soviet Union (atomic bomb testing) and China (Communist victory in the civil war), and the adoption of National Security Council Directive 68, leaving no room for compromise;
- The onset of the Korean War in June 1950.
Henry A. Wallace, Time, Aug. 9, 1948.
Not all administration officials were ready to forego cooperation with the Soviet Union. The most vocal critic of the Truman administration’s moves toward confrontation was Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, the nation’s vice-president during Roosevelt’s third term. A passionate humanitarian, Wallace offered an alternative to Henry Luce’s vision of American preeminence, proposing in 1942 “the Century of the Common Man” in which “No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations”; and “there must be neither military nor economic imperialism. The methods of the 19th century will not work in the people’s century which is now about to begin.”[84]
Eleanor Roosevelt at the UN, July 1947 [FDR Presidential Library]
The presence of Henry A. Wallace, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other critics suggests that the Truman administration had choices as to how to interpret global developments and how to construct U.S. foreign policies. According to the diplomatic historian Fredrik Logevall:
It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the “cold peace” that had prevailed from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 through the Second World War could have been maintained into the postwar years as well, even if the international system was now a very different entity…. The confrontation resulted from decisions by individual human beings who might have chosen otherwise, who might have done more, in particular to maintain the diplomatic dialogue, to seek negotiated solutions to complex international problems. Had FDR, with his belief that he could work with Stalin and his tacit support for spheres-of-influence agreements, survived into the postwar period, things might well have turned out differently…. American planners from the start defined their policy choices vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in remarkably narrow terms, and there is little evidence they ever gave close consideration of doing otherwise.[87]
Policy alternatives
- Global New Deal. The Truman administration was not obliged to align U.S. foreign policy with corporate capitalist interests, nor define socialist and communist ideas and leftist movements as national security threats. It could have chosen to promote a Global New Deal, as suggested by Wallace, encouraging economic development in other nations and tolerating socialist-oriented experiments. While corporate profits may have suffered in some countries, U.S. trade would likely have adapted. Adopting the principle of political tolerance, akin to religious tolerance, would have done much to dissipate Cold War fears and restrain aggressive policies and arms buildups.
- Cooperative internationalism. The Truman administration could have chosen to support the United Nations in full measure, as advocated by Eleanor Roosevelt. The U.S. was a founding member, to be sure, but U.S. leaders subsequently brushed aside the international body when U.S. and UN interests did not align. Full support would mean abiding by international prohibitions against aggression, supporting mediation and arbitration, and developing the collective security system set up in the UN Charter – in lieu of acting as a self-appointed world policeman. Developing an international security system would also allow individual nations to reduce military expenditures, thereby making funds available for constructive purposes.
- Peaceful coexistence and détente. The Truman administration could have chosen to meet the Soviet geopolitical challenge by investing in cooperation, offering loans, trade agreements, and mutual restraint in military matters. Peaceful co-existence would require U.S. acceptance of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe – which the U.S. ended up doing anyway – just as Moscow accepted the U.S. sphere of influence in Latin America, and British influence elsewhere. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the idea of détente, or easing of tension, was promoted by European leaders such as Willy Brandt of Germany. Henry Wallace’s vision of postwar cooperation was partly realized in 1972, as the U.S. embraced détente, signing trade and arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and trade agreements with China. Although détente was partially reversed in the early 1980s, it continued with China and resumed with the Soviet Union in 1986 (due mainly to the efforts of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev). The possibility of peaceful co-existence was always at hand. Indeed, a loan immediately following the Second World War, when the Soviet Union needed it most, would have done much to sustain good relations.
- Containment/encirclement. “Containment,” the policy officially adopted by the Truman administration, looked more like encirclement to Soviet leaders, as the U.S. surrounded the Soviet Union with military bases and allies. In a conversation with Secretary of State Byrnes on May 5, 1946, for example, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov wondered why the United States “leaves no corner in the world without attention” and “builds its air bases everywhere” from which American warplanes with atomic bombs could strike any city in the Soviet Union.[88] U.S. leaders furthermore applied the policy of “containment” to the Third World, supporting rightist authoritarian regimes that suppressed leftist movements and parties.
- Rollback/subversion. The Truman administration also discretely embraced the rollback of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, and of leftist movements and governments everywhere in the world. In August 1948, the administration secretly approved NSC 10/2 which authorized covert propaganda, economic warfare, and guerrilla sabotage in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.[89] Elsewhere, the U.S. engaged in subversion, aggression, and election manipulation to undermine leftist movements and parties and overthrow left-of-center governments. In 1952, the Republican Party sought to make rollback official U.S. policy, denouncing containment as a “negative, futile, and immoral policy … which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism.”[90] Although containment remained the official U.S. policy, Washington continued to pursue clandestine “regime change” operations around the world.
- Nuclear attack. The most aggressive option open to the Truman administration was a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. In September 1948, President Truman signed NSC-30, directing the U.S. military to be prepared to use nuclear weapons in war, with the final decision resting with the president. The plan, “United States Policy on Atomic Warfare,” concluded that “in event of hostilities, the National Military Establishment must be ready to utilize promptly and effectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons, in the interest of national security and must plan accordingly.”[91] Truman nevertheless stated his aversion to using the atomic bomb. At a meeting with U.S. officials on July 21, 1948, he said, “I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to…. You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon…. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people…. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.”[92]
British cartoon by David Lowe, 1946: Truman, In possession of the bomb, makes demands in lieu of negotiating with British and Soviet leaders.
During the Korean War, the idea of using nuclear weapons was moved to the front burner. In a press conference on November 30, 1950, following China’s entry into the war, President Truman said that the United States “will take whatever steps were necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.” A reporter asked, “Will that include the atomic bomb?” The president replied, “That includes every weapon that we have.” Asked again, “Does that mean that there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?” Truman said, “There has always been active consideration of its use. I don’t want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression.” Later that same day, the White House issued a press release stating that consideration of the use of the atomic bomb “is always implicit in the very possession of that weapon” and that “only the President can authorize the use of the atom bomb, and no such authorization has been given.” If this were meant to relieve public concern about the bomb, it did not, as it made clear there were no institutional checks on the president’s ability to wage a war of annihilation.[93]
US-Soviet relations
British poster, 1941: “Greetings to the heroic warriors of the Soviet Union from the British allies fighting with them” [UK National Archives]
On April 25, 1945, with the end of the war in Europe approaching, U.S. and Soviet armies met near the Elbe River, about 80 miles from Berlin. It was a celebratory occasion. Soldiers and officers embraced each other as comrades-in-arms and exchanged souvenirs. They gathered for a ceremony in which Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev presented U.S. General Omar Bradley with a magnificent stallion while Bradley gave Marshal Konev an American jeep. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the top Soviet general, awarded Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower the highest honor of the Soviet Union, the Order of Victory. Eisenhower, in turn, awarded Zhukov the Legion of Honor.
US and Soviet troops meet at a bridge over the Elbe River near Torgau, Germany April 25, 1945 [NARA]
There was a mad scene of jubilation on the east and west banks of the Elbe at Torgau as infantrymen of Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges, First U.S. Army, swapped K rations for a vodka with soldiers of Marshal Kornian’s Ukrainian Army, congratulating each other, despite the language barrier, on the linkup. Men of the 69th Division sat on the banks of the Elbe in warm sunshine today with no enemy in front of them or behind them and drank wine, cognac, and vodka, while they watched their new Russian friends and listened to them as they played accordions and sang Russian songs. . . . You get the feeling of exuberance, a great new world opening up.[95]
It would be unrealistic to expect this mutual rejoicing in victory to last, but neither was it fated that the U.S. and Soviet Union must square off in a long Cold War. In September 1945, a Gallup poll indicated that a majority of Americans believed that the Soviet Union could be trusted to cooperate with the United States.[96] In October, a group of U.S. Congressmen returned from Russia and reported that the Russian people felt friendly toward Americans, were strongly desirous of peace, and were eager to raise their standard of living. The overriding concern of Soviet leaders, one American correspondent noted, was “security.”[97] Indeed, Stalin had long ago adopted the strategy of “socialism in one country,” which meant prioritizing Soviet security interests above earlier Bolshevik notions of promoting global revolution.
Churchill-Stalin percentages agreement, October 1944
Above all, security to Soviet leaders meant cooperating with the U.S. and Britain in order to prevent Germany from ever threatening the Soviet Union again. “Stalin,” writes Leffler, “had a great deal to gain from a policy of cooperation. Postwar aid would expedite Soviet economic rehabilitation. Even if he was not able to secure loans, he might still extract large reparations from Germany. Most of all, mutual collaboration would mean that he could share in the control of German and Japanese power.” Stalin desperately hoped for a loan from the United States, but this was denied. In contrast, the U.S. provided Britain with a $3.75 billion loan at 2 percent interest, albeit after British leaders agreed to abandon their imperial preference trading system in favor of the U.S.-promoted open-door system.[99]
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Stalin took concrete steps to ameliorate the concerns of his wartime allies. As Leffler notes, Stalin withdrew Soviet troops from Denmark, Norway, and Czechoslovakia, “allowed relative free elections in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Berlin during late 1945 and 1946, and he cooperated in the establishment of representative governments in Finland and Austria.” Stalin also refused to support communist groups in Europe. “To the great dismay of the Communists in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, Stalin discouraged revolutionary action in 1944 and 1945 … To the extent that he communicated with Communists abroad, he insisted that they behave prudently, cooperate with democratic groups, and form coalition or ‘new type’ governments.”[100] The Soviet Union did not even support Mao Tse Tung’s communist revolution in China until after Mao’s victory in October 1949.
Stalin was nonetheless intent on establishing a pro-Soviet government in Poland. As Leffler writes:
German armies had marched through Poland into Russia twice in his lifetime. Before the war, Poland, Romania, and Finland had refused to accede to the Kremlin’s security requirements. During the war, Hungary and Romania fought alongside Nazi Germany, and Bulgaria cooperated with Hitler’s military commanders. Soviet security requirements mandated a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. It would serve as a buffer zone against future invasions, a means to facilitate and control the evolution of German power, and a source of raw materials and reparations for reconstruction.[101]
That Stalin could be ruthless in his pursuit of a Polish client state was clear from the Second World War when Soviet forces executed 14,700 Polish officers and officials in 1940 in what is known as the Katyn massacre. Four years later, the Soviet army waited outside Warsaw while the Germany army annihilated a Polish uprising. Stalin wanted no independent Polish government and military force.
Poland and GreeceLike the Soviets in Poland, the British intended to maintain their control over Greece. As British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin wrote in a memorandum to the cabinet in mid-1945, “The fundamental assumption of our policy has always been that… Greece must be retained within the British sphere.”[105] President Roosevelt expressed no objection to British domination in Greece. His strategy was to accept both the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and a much wider British sphere of influence that extended from Greece across the Mediterranean Sea to the oil-rich lands of the Middle East and beyond.
Following Roosevelt’s untimely death, President Truman rejected this Western-favored balance-of-power arrangement and sought to deny Soviet and communist influence everywhere. According to Leffler, “a pattern of actions developed that amounted to containment even before the policy was conceived as such.”
The pattern can be discerned by looking at a few examples of U.S. actions in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. With regard to Germany, the United States and Great Britain rebuffed Soviet desires to participate in the international control of the Ruhr [a rich mining area in western Germany]. Secretary of State Byrnes, Secretary of War [Henry] Stimson, and their expert advisors believed that the resources of this region had to be harnessed to serve the needs of Western Europe and western Germany. Byrnes negotiated an agreement at the Potsdam Conference that limited the reparations the Soviet Union could receive from outside its own zone…. The State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff also decided in July 1945 that Soviet overtures for base rights in the Turkish straits must be rejected.[106]
This was containment, to be sure, but also British-American hegemony. The British dominated the Mediterranean, and Britain and the U.S. jointly pursued control over Middle Eastern oil. If the U.S. were to grant Soviet bases in the Turkish straits, wrote Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in a position paper in July 1945, “Russia might be sorely tempted to combine her strength with her ideology to expand her influence over the earth.”[107] In reality, it was the U.S. and Britain that were expanding their control and influence. On June 1, 1945, the chief of the U.S. State Department’s Petroleum Division informed his British counterpart that “our petroleum policy toward the United Kingdom is predicated on a mutual recognition of a very extensive joint interest and upon a control … of the great bulk of the free petroleum resources of the world.”[108] Rather than work out a deal with the Soviet Union, the U.S. established a new Mediterranean command of twelve warships, a demonstration of force. As Paterson argues, “Russia was not militarily threatening Turkey; rather it was demanding joint control over the strategic Dardanelles – a traditional Russian desire more than a Communist one…. The United States refused to discuss joint Soviet-Turkish control after World War II and encouraged the Turks to be uncompromising.”[109]
The gathering storm
On February 22, 1946, George Kennan, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow, sent a 17-page telegram to the State Department, probing the character of Soviet leaders and peering into the future. He warned of an inherent expansionist tendency in the Soviet Union, based in part on Russian heritage, that must be countered with strong U.S. resistance, albeit “without recourse to any general military conflict.” Was peaceful co-existence possible? On the one hand, Kennan expressed the view that “peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible.” On the other hand, he wrote:
In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent modus vivendi [and] that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.[111]
In the view of Nikolai Novikov, the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Washington, any inability to maintain the wartime alliance was due, not to Soviet ideology, but to U.S. actions and intentions. In a cable to Moscow on September 27, 1946, Novikov wrote, “The foreign policy of the United States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the postwar period by a striving for world supremacy. This is the real meaning of the many statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles; that the United States has the right to lead the world. All the forces of American diplomacy — the army, the air force, the navy, industry, and science — are enlisted in the service of this foreign policy.”[112]
President Truman and Winston Churchill arrive in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946
On March 5, 1946, less than one month after Kennan’s internal memorandum, former British prime minister Winston Churchill traveled to Fulton, Missouri, Truman’s home town, to speak on the current situation in Europe. He came not as a representative of his government, then led by the Labor Party, but as a critic of the Labor Party’s emphasis on multilateral security and peacekeeping through the United Nations. He wanted to move the debate to the right, restoring national security prerogatives over collective security, and he wanted the U.S. to partner with Britain. His objective was to lay the groundwork for a British-American military alliance. The means to this end was to raise the specter of communism to new heights.[115]
In his speech, Churchill cited no direct Soviet military threat to the West but charged that Moscow was fomenting subversion through communist groups in countries around the world. “However, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world,” he said, “Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” Churchill highlighted Soviet control over Eastern Europe, intimating aggressive designs rather than historical security interests. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he said in his most famous line, “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent…. I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” The antidote to this presumed Soviet expansionism was an Anglo-American alliance:
If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths be added to that of the United States with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to [Soviet-communist] ambition or adventure.[116]
Some U.S. politicians and newspaper editors hailed Churchill’s speech for rousing the American public to dangers abroad, while others expressed concerns that diplomacy and the United Nations were being undercut, that a U.S.-British military alliance against the Soviet Union could lead to war, and that the U.S. would become entangled in upholding the British Empire. In Britain, the idea of an alliance with the U.S. was generally well received, but 105 Labor Party members of Parliament introduced a resolution to censure Churchill for undercutting the British government in making foreign policy. Prime Minister Clement Attlee refused to repudiate Churchill on the grounds that he had spoken only as a private citizen. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, Churchill’s speech induced “hysteria,” according to a New York Times Moscow correspondent. An article in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, titled “Churchill Rattles the Sabre,” charged that Churchill was inciting nations to war in an attempt to gain Anglo-American domination.[117]
The Clifford-Elsey report
Clark Clifford, special counsel to the president, Dec. 1947
The Truman administration’s first comprehensive assessment of Soviet motivations, intentions, capabilities, and behavior was produced in September 1946 by White House aides Clark Clifford and George Elsey after consulting with the secretaries of State, War, and Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and other officials. The report all but rejected the possibility of peaceful coexistence, ironically because the authors believed that Soviet leaders had rejected this possibility. According to Clifford and Elsey:
The fundamental tenet of the communist philosophy embraced by Soviet leaders is that the peaceful coexistence of communist and capitalist nations is impossible. The defenders of the communist faith, as the present Soviet rulers regard themselves, assume that conflict between the Soviet Union and the leading capitalist powers of the western world is inevitable and the party leaders believe that it is their duty to prepare the Soviet Union for the inevitable conflict which their doctrine predicts.[118]
The 80-page report described a range of Soviet activities designed “to strengthen the Soviet Union and to insure its victory in the predicted coming struggle between Communism and Capitalism.” The Soviets, the authors warned, would stir up trouble in every part of the world: “Every opportunity to foment antagonisms among foreign powers is exploited, and the unity and strength of other nations is [sic] undermined by discrediting their leadership, stirring up domestic discord, and inciting colonial unrest.” Most immediately, they wrote, the Soviet government was trying to “gain control of France by political means,” to “win a dominant role in Italian affairs” through communist party gains in elections, to establish a pro-Soviet government in Greece, and to “make Turkey a puppet state which could serve as a springboard for the domination of the eastern Mediterranean.” They also claimed that the Communist Party in the U.S. was actively aiding the Soviet Union by trying “to indoctrinate soldiers … capture the labor movement … [and] cripple the industrial potential of the United States by calling strikes at those times and places which would be advantageous to the Soviet Union.”[119]
“To what extent,” asks Melvyn Leffler, “did the Clifford-Elsey report accurately assess Soviet behavior, explain Russian motivations, and portray Soviet intentions?” His answers, based on expert knowledge of the issues, bear quoting at length:
Clifford and Elsey ignored actions that might have injected hues of gray into their black-and-white characterization of Soviet foreign policy. They neglected to mention that the Kremlin made no objection to the entry of U.S. troops into South Korea, pretty much accepted American domination of postwar Japan, and only feebly protested the American military presence in northern China. They were uninterested in the fact that Soviet armies had withdrawn from Manchuria and that there was scant evidence of any assistance to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. They overlooked the free elections that were held in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the relatively representative governments that were established in Austria and Finland. They disregarded the intelligence reports detailing the partial withdrawal of Soviet armies from occupied areas, the large-scale demobilization of Russian troops within the Soviet Union, and the departure of Russian forces from norther Norway and from Bornholm. They failed to acknowledge that Stalin discouraged insurrectionary activity in Europe, offered no leadership to Communist revolutionaries in Southeast Asia, failed to exploit opportunities in Arab lands, and straddled sides between the Nationalists and Communists in China.
Double standards and self-deception repeatedly crept into the Clifford-Elsey report. Truman’s advisers did not ask how America’s questionable record of compliance affected Soviet behavior. They did not acknowledge that [General Lucius] Clay and other War Department officials consistently identified France, not Russia, as the principal source of U.S. problems in Germany. They suspected that any Soviet interest in German unification masked the Kremlin’s quest to gain leverage over all of Germany, but they conveniently dismissed the American desire to dilute Soviet influence in the east and to orient all of Germany to the West. Likewise, Clifford and Elsey pointed to the retention of Russian troops in Iran as irrefutable proof of the Soviet desire to dominate Iran and gain control of Middle Eastern oil. They did not say (and may not have known) that, at the very time they were writing their report, State Department officials and military planners were contending that U.S. troops must remain beyond the stipulated deadlines for their withdrawal in Iceland, the Azores, Panama, the Galapagos, and other locations in order to augment American bargaining leverage for postwar base and military transit rights. Clifford and Elsey also presented a totally misleading rendition of Soviet capabilities. . . .
To emphasize these points is not to whitewash Soviet behavior. Aid from the Kremlin was making it increasingly possible for Communists in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland to consolidate their control. Russian power hovered over Hungary and Czechoslovakia despite the free elections. The Soviets were maneuvering for influence throughout Germany. They probed in Manchuria and Iran. They condemned British imperialism. They hoped national uprisings would erode Western control of important Third World areas in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. They sought to modernize their military arsenal and were working feverishly to develop their own atomic weapons.
But did these actions amount to a quest for world domination? Clifford and Elsey thought so, although they did not define what they meant by the term. They equated any growth of Soviet influence as signaling a Soviet desire for domination.[123]
The Truman Doctrine
President Truman addresses a joint session of Congress, March 12, 1947 [Truman library]
The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists … The Greek army is small and poorly equipped. It needs supplies and equipment if it is to restore the authority of the government throughout Greek territory. Greece must have assistance if it is to become a self-supporting and self-respecting democracy. The United States must supply that assistance…. There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn…. The British Government, which has been helping Greece, can give no further financial or economic aid after March 31…. We have considered how the United Nations might assist in this crisis. But the situation is an urgent one requiring immediate action and the United Nations and its related organizations are not in a position to extend help of the kind that is required.
Truman’s description of the situation in Greece omitted a crucial fact: the Soviet Union was not aiding the Greek communists. Stalin stuck to the agreement that he and Churchill made in October 1944, staying out of Greece. “Containment” of the Soviet Union, in other words, had already been achieved with respect to Greece through a quiet big power agreement. Truman’s ideological paradigm furthermore distorted the facts on the ground. He labeled the Greek government “democratic,” despite the fact that it ruled with an iron fist, and he described the communist-led rebels as being engaged in “terrorist activities,” though repression had pushed them into a state of rebellion. The foreign nation intruding on Greece was not the Soviet Union, but Great Britain, which had sent tanks in December 1944 to crush the Greek left, followed by support for the formation of a despotic rightist government. The United Nations could offer no assistance to the U.S. because the U.S. was acting against the spirit, if not the letter, of the UN in abetting war rather than seeking a mediated solution.
Truman’s speech culminated in an imaginative division of the world into two camps, one ruled by force, the other guided by freedom, a dichotomy presumably mirroring the Soviet Union and United States, respectively:
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
Neither the civil war in Greece nor Soviet control in Eastern Europe constituted a national security threat to the United States, but if these developments were seen as part of a grand plot by an expansionist totalitarian power to take over the world, then the picture changed dramatically. Truman made only one reference to “communist” in his speech but he used the word “totalitarian” four times, presumably to connect the alleged “communist threat” to the well-grounded Nazi threat of World War II. According to George Herring, “In portraying the war in Greece as a struggle between Communism and freedom, U.S. officials misinterpreted or misrepresented the conflict, ignoring the essentially domestic roots of the insurgency, blurring the authoritarian nature of the Greek government, and greatly exaggerating the Soviet role.”[126]
The Second Red Scare
Political competition between Republicans and Democrats ratcheted up anti-communist rhetoric and contributed to the Second Red Scare, later known as McCarthyism. The overall effects on policymaking were to encourage militant posturing and discourage negotiation. Talk of negotiations with the Soviet Union was dismissed as “appeasement” or deemed a ruse by Soviet leaders to gain advantage. It would take some 25 years before U.S. leaders would break out of this self-inflicted ideological strait-jacket and negotiate détente with the great communist powers.
FBI director J. Edger Hoover, testifying before HUAC in 1947, declares that the Communist Party USA is seeking to overthrow the U.S. government [AP photo]
McCarthyism as seen by cartoonist Herb Block
Whatever the motive, the “anti-Communist hysteria” went far afield of any real threat to U.S. national security. Anti-communist rhetoric turned extreme, not merely among far-right groups but also at the highest levels of government. In 1949, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath declared that “there are today many Communists in America. They are everywhere – in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.”[138]
In Great Britain, there was no such anti-communist mania. As Caute points out, the British “kept their heads” during the Clement Attlee era (July 1945 to October 1951):
… teachers and professors were not purged; dismissals in the civil service were few and confined mainly to genuinely sensitive jobs; Parliament did not go witch hunting; there was no Un-British Activities Committee to whip up enmity toward radicals or fellow travelers; no rash of loyalty oaths brought disgrace to the professions; welfare benefits were not denied to Communist veterans or their widows; union officials were not required by law to sign non-Communist affidavits; panels of military officers did not hound industrial workers from their jobs or question them as to how they had voted; seamen were not swept off ships by waves of prejudice; CP [Communist Party] leaders were not sent to prison for being Communists; there was no government list of proscribed organizations…. Need one go on?[139]
Perhaps the scariest part of the Red Scare was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s plan to imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty, ostensibly to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage,” as stated in the plan. Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, just after the Korean War began. The 12,000 names he had collected became part of an index “of which 97 percent are citizens of the United States.” The arrests were to be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names,” and the suspects would be held in “detention in Military facilities.” The prisoners eventually would have the right to a hearing, but the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” according to the plan. In September 1950, Congress passed and President Truman signed this draconian measure into law, authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. When Truman did declare a national emergency in December 1950, however, he invoked only wage and price controls. Congress rescinded the law in 1976.
The Cold War solidifies
Following the induction of West Germany into NATO in early May 1954, the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, including East Germany, established the Warsaw Pact, thus dividing Europe into opposing military blocs.
With the Cold War ideological paradigm established, a series of decisions and events led to the solidification of the Cold War into antagonistic blocs. In occupied Germany, the U.S., Britain, and France combined their spheres into one zone (West Germany), leaving the east to the Soviet Union. The U.S. approved the Economic Recovery Act, or Marshall Plan, binding Western Europe to the U.S. economically. This was followed by the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance of the U.S., Canada, and Western European nations. The lingering feeling of wartime camaraderie dried up, replaced by mistrust and animosity. This was not Stalin’s preferred choice, according to Leffler:
Throughout 1946 and early 1947, Stalin still beckoned for cooperation both through his rhetoric and through many (albeit not all) of his actions…. But Stalin always assumed that cooperation would mean the emasculation of German and Japanese power, the preservation of a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and the protection of the Soviet periphery from foreign interlopers. By the middle of 1947, these assumptions were no longer operative, and, to understand why, it is essential to look more closely at British and American policies.”[141]
In addition to drawing Western Europe into the U.S. orbit, the Truman administration sought to undermine Soviet control in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself through clandestine operations. On April 30, 1947, George Kennan, head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, proposed a program called “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” in which he outlined a multifaceted strategy to encourage and support, in the words of George Herring, “a radical program of political warfare using sabotage, guerrilla operations, and propaganda activities to stir up rebellion in Soviet bloc countries and perhaps even the USSR itself.”[142]
George C. Marshall at Harvard, June 5, 1947 [Marshall Foundation]
The Berlin Airlift: A C-54 cargo plane arrives with goods for West Berliners
The proposal to form NATO was first discussed at a meeting of U.S. and Western European representatives in December 1947. The alliance was designed to united the West against the Soviet Union and also to reassure the French that a revived German nation would not threaten France. One nation’s security, however, is another nation’s insecurity where trust is lacking. Alarmed by the prospect of NATO, Moscow not only tightened its grip on Eastern European nations but also made a play for control of West Berlin, which was located within East Germany but administered by Western powers. On June 24, 1948, the Soviets and their East German allies blocked all land access to West Berlin. “The Kremlin made it clear,” writes Leffler, “that its intent was to compel the Americans, the British, and the French to reverse their decisions to merge the western zones of Germany, to create a federal republic, and to reform the German currency. Stalin feared the recrudescence of German power and its incorporation into a Western alliance system.”[149]
NSC 68 and the Korean War
Korean War map (June 1950 – July 1953)
The North Korean attack on South Korea on June 25, 1950, turned the Cold War into a hot war for the U.S. Fighting between North and South Korea had gone on for years beforehand, with both sides engaging in border raids and sabotage. Believing that the attack was directed by Moscow, Truman gained quick approval from the UN Security Council for a defensive military force led by the U.S. to be sent to South Korea. Had the Soviet Union not walked out of the UN over the issue of seating China, the Security Council would never have permitted this action – an indication that the Soviets had not planned the invasion. Yet Stalin did give his approval to North Korean leader Kim II-sung two months before the invasion was launched.[152]
War and peace in the Nuclear Age
One year after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, John Hersey tells the personal stories of six survivors
Though few Americans grieved for Japanese civilians when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, John Hersey’s 30,000-word article, “Hiroshima,” published in The New Yorker in August 1946, induced sober reflections on the tragedy. The article was so popular that Henry Stimson, former Secretary for War, felt compelled to counter it with an essay published in The Atlantic (February 1947), playing up the alleged military necessity of using the bomb and playing down its harmful and long-lasting effects.
Although Truman resisted advice to use nuclear weapons in the Korean War, he did not forego building an arsenal of nuclear bombs and missiles, and testing them at Pacific islands and the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas. Open-air nuclear explosions, it was later found, affected not only people, animals, and the environment downwind from the blasts, but the whole world as air currents carried radioactive contaminants virtually everywhere. According to one report:
A total of 422 nuclear weapons were detonated in the atmosphere by the United States (206 tests) and the Soviet Union (216 tests) before large-scale testing ended with the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty. Yield from the six largest Soviet tests alone totaled 136.9 megatons, or the equivalent of nearly 4,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (36 kilotons)…. The period of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing was marked by significant increases in cancer in young children, who are at greatest risk for carcinogenic effects of exposure to radioisotopes.[156]
“Castle Bravo,” the 15 megaton nuclear explosion in the Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, was 1,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb
There was no “new thinking” about nuclear weapons in the Eisenhower administration any more than in the Truman administration. On March 1, 1954, the U.S. conducted its first hydrogen bomb test at the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands. Radioactive particles swept over the islands and also contaminated a small Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, 85 miles from the testing site. Many of the islanders subsequently developed radiation-linked illnesses, including thyroid cancer and leukemia. One of the Lucky Dragon crew members soon died. In an attempt to calm worldwide fears of nuclear fallout (radiation), U.S. officials read a statement at a press conference on March 31 in which they described the Marshall islanders as “well and happy” and indicated that the Japanese fisherman had experienced only minor problems.[157]
Only weeks later, on June 3, 1957, a NSC report confirmed the administration’s intention to keep its options open: “It is the policy of the United States to place main, but not sole, reliance on nuclear weapons; to integrate nuclear weapons with other weapons in the arsenal of the United States; to consider them as conventional weapons from a military point of view; and to use them when required to achieve national objectives.” The administration’s reticence to recognize the danger of nuclear fallout was evident when it sent 3,000 armed forces personnel to witness a nuclear explosion at the Nevada Test Site on August 31, 1957. These and other “downwinders” paid dearly for the illusion of national security.[160]
Vermont contingent in the massive demonstration for a nuclear weapons freeze, New York City, June 12, 1982 [outrider.org]
* * * * * * *
Salvador Allende during his inaugural parade, Santiago, Chile, Nov. 3, 1970 (photo by Naul Ojeda)
U.S. leaders applied different strategies and combinations thereof to achieve their foreign policy goals. Diplomatic bargaining and economic incentives were the usual fare of international relations. Governments that accommodated U.S. demands were typically rewarded with economic and military aid; hence, U.S. taxpayers funded a number of authoritarian governments around the world. If the ability to compel favorable policies was in doubt, U.S. leaders might covertly manipulate elections to assure that the proper leaders were elected, as was the case of Italy in 1948. According to New York Times correspondent Tim Weiner, “The C.I.A.’s practice of buying political clout was repeated in every Italian election for the next 24 years, and the agency’s political influence in Rome lasted a generation, declassified records show.”[169]
Political scientist Dov Levin identified 62 U.S. interventions in foreign elections between 1946 and 1989
If election manipulation was not feasible or did not produce the desired outcome, U.S. leaders might employ more diabolical covert methods, including assassinations, military coups, and insurgencies. The U.S. organized successful military coups in Iran, Congo, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Indonesia, and Chile, and fomented guerrilla insurgencies in Albania, Guatemala, Laos, Cuba, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. U.S. leaders much preferred clandestine operations to overt U.S. military intervention, but they were prepared to use U.S. troops and maintained the capability to do so. In 1963, the U.S. maintained 275 major bases in 31 nations with 1.25 million military-related personnel stationed abroad.[172] Apart from wars in Korea and Southeast Asia, U.S. troops were deployed to back a rightist government in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and to overthrow a leftist government in Grenada in 1983.[173]
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet shaking hands with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1976
President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) opened the door to friendly relations with the Soviet Union and China by instituting détente in 1972, yet he and his Machiavellian national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973.[177] President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) extended the idea of détente to Cuba and declared in 1978 that human rights “is the soul of our foreign policy,” but nonetheless kept U.S. aid flowing to the oppressive Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran right up to his overthrow in 1979.[178] Carter also secretly initiated covert operations against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan before Soviet troops intervened in December 1979, a policy that had long-lasting blowback effects (see Section V).
Accountability
A mockingly accurate description?
A byproduct of America’s covert operations was the dilution of democracy at home. The creation of the CIA under the National Security Act of 1947 provided the president with an army of secret agents and a stash of hidden funds with which to engage in every kind of mischief in other nations. U.S. administrations offered the American public a smorgasbord of lies and “fake news” to cover up their clandestine activities. Often, they kept Congress in the dark as well. It took significant effort just to find out what the U.S. government was doing around the world.
One Church committee report on the overthrow of the Chilean government on September 11, 1973, explained how the CIA moved, step-by-step, from supporting opposition candidates in 1964 to fomenting opposition to the election of Salvador Allende as president in 1970, to plotting the kidnapping of General Schneider (who was murdered), and “finally to advocating and encouraging the overthrow of a democratically elected government.” CIA agents admitted their involvement in the overthrow, but Kissinger insisted that the U.S. had nothing to do with it.[181]
According to former CIA agents Philip Agee, John Stockwell, and Ralph McGehee, the Church committee’s revelations were only the tip of an iceberg of CIA subterfuge. Their exposés of “the company,” with parts redacted by CIA censors, were written in the interest of truth and accountability.[184] McGehee, a 25-year veteran of the agency who was awarded the CIA career intelligence medal upon his retirement in 1976, wrote in the conclusion of his book, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (1983):
The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President’s foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting “intelligence” justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its cover action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies.[185]Ralph McGehee, former CIA agent and author [See 13-minute YouTube interview]
Accountability was also the goal of a number of truth commissions created in Latin America following eras of repression and civil war, established in Bolivia (1982), Argentina (1983), Chile (1990), El Salvador (1992), Guatemala (1994), Uruguay (1995), Panama (2001), Peru (2001), Ecuador (2007), and Brazil (2012). These commissions reinforced the Frasier committee message that the U.S. was supporting repressive regimes in Latin America. The truth commission in El Salvador determined that U.S.-backed state security forces and associated rightist paramilitary groups were responsible for 85% of assassinations and murders, whereas leftist rebels were responsible for 5%. The Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission found that government and allied forces were responsible for 93% of the violence, as compared to 3% for the rebels. The commission described the operations of the Guatemalan military as “acts of genocide.”[186]
President Bill Clinton, on a visit to Guatemala in 1999, took the unusual step of acknowledging a measure of responsibility. Speaking at the National Palace of Culture just after the release of the truth commission report, Memory of Silence, he said, “For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engage in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”[187]
I. F. Stone [Dagobah website]
Both during and after the Cold War many scholars have contributed to public accountability through their reflective critiques, constituting a kind of “fifth estate.”[190] Some scholars have focused on specific U.S. interventions.[191] Some have critically assessed particular regions or aspects of U.S. foreign policy.[192] Some have probed the contours of American empire and its accompanying intellectual architecture.[193] Among the latter is Noam Chomsky, who writes of American exceptionalism:
The fundamental assumption that lies behind the imperial grand strategy … is the guiding principle of Wilsonian idealism: We – at least the circles who provide the leadership and advise them – are good, even noble. Hence our interventions are necessarily righteous in intent, if occasionally clumsy in execution…. By virtue of its unique comprehension and manifestation of history’s purpose, America is entitled, indeed obligated to act as its leaders determine to be the best, for the good of all, whether others understand or not. And like its noble predecessor and current junior partner, Great Britain, American should not be deterred in realizing history’s transcendent purpose …”[194]
Philip Agee’s scathing exposé, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975), was an instant best-seller and eventually published in over 30 languages
In contrast to the noble sense of mission invoked by U.S. leaders, William Blum, in The Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000), argues that “the engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, nor even simple decency, but rather by the necessity to serve other masters.” The other masters include “preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model,” enhancing the domestic military-industrial-political complex, and “extending political, economic, and military hegemony over as much of the globe as possible.”[195]
President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech in January 1961, warned against the undue influence of the “military industrial complex” even though he had presided over a considerable expansion of the military budget and “defense” industries during his eight years in office. He averred that the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties and democratic processes.”[196] This was a clarion call to not let special interests determine military priorities through their campaign contributions to politicians. General Douglas MacArthur, speaking in July 1957, more pointedly warned of the inclination of political and military leaders to imagine monsters abroad in order to justify ever-increasing military budgets at home:
Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.[197]
Space limitations do not permit a comprehensive account of all U.S. interventions during the Cold War. The remaining part of this section and the next two sections offer synopses of eleven interventions in different regions of the world:
- Greece, Albania, and the Ukraine (Europe and the Soviet Union);
- Iran, the Congo, Indonesia, and Afghanistan (Mideast, Africa, and Asia); and
- Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and British Guiana (Americas).
Essays on the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Central America wars of the 1980s can be found elsewhere on the U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide website.
Greek tragedy: British-American intervention, 1944-49
Unarmed protesters at an EAM demonstration lying dead in front of the Greek Parliament building in Athens, while others run for their lives, Dec. 3, 1944 [Kathimerini (Greek newspaper)]
The following month, the financially strapped British asked the U.S. for active assistance in managing Greece, which is to say, suppressing the left. President Truman, in appealing to Congress for aid to Greece on March 12, falsely portrayed the country as a domino ready to fall to the Soviet Union.
Suspected leftists await trial in a military court during the Greek Civil War [Macedonia State Archives]
Stamping out “communism”
Refugee children fleeing across the border, 1948 [Macedonia State Archives]
Greek insurgents [Truman library]
Postwar authoritarianism in Greece
Georgios Papadopoulos, military junta leader, 1967-1973
The worst of the rightist governments emerged on April 21, 1967, when Greek military officers seized power. Their leader, Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos, had been on the CIA’s payroll since 1952. He announced that the military coup was necessary in order to “save the nation from the precipice of communism.” The right-wing junta subsequently imposed martial law, closed down parliament, suspended the constitution, banned political parties, silenced the press, and placed unions under government control. Within a few months, the junta had imprisoned more than 40,000 people, some of whom were tortured. Through it all, the U.S. backed the Papadopoulos regime. The military junta was ousted in November 1973 and democracy was restored. Papadopoulos and his cohorts were put on trial for high treason and torture. Found guilty, Papadopoulos spent the rest of his life in prison.[213]
Offensive operations in the Soviet bloc, 1949-56
General Reinhard Gehlen [German Federal Archives]
Operation BGFIEND in Albania
The first U.S. covert operation in Eastern Europe focused on Albania, a small country wedged between Greece and Yugoslavia that shared no border with the Soviet Union. The British were already operating there and the U.S. followed their lead.
Communist leader and dictator Enver Hoxha ruled Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985
The two main opposition groups to the Hoxha government were the Legaliteti, led by King Zog (Ahmet Muhtar Zogolli), and the Balli Kombëtar. The Legaliteti’s sole goal was to restore the monarchy. The CIA deemed Balli Kombëtar “poorly organized” and “confused by its own concurrent double-dealings with Axis and Ally.” Both groups had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. U.S. agents bribed and persuaded the two groups to join forces under a newly formed umbrella group called the National Committee for Free Albania (NFCA). The NCFA made its public debut at a press conference in Paris on August 26, 1949, presenting to the world the U.S. manufactured line that its goals were to establish “fundamental human rights” and “the restoration of full independence.”[223] In fact, the leaders of the NCFA were well-known Nazi collaborators, so well-known, in fact, that the U.S. State Department turned down a number of requests for U.S. entry visas. According to O’Rourke:
Declassified documents from the Nazi War Crimes Act show that the United States conspired with numerous known war criminals as a part of this endeavor. For instance, they encouraged Hasan Dosti to become head of the NCFA … despite knowing that he “served as a Cabinet Minister under the fascists.” Likewise, the CIA collaborated with Shaver Deva despite his behavior during WWII as “a German agent and ‘prize quisling’” who had started “a pro-German movement.”[224]
Following the establishment of NCFA, the next step in the U.S. plan was to initiate a propaganda offensive in Albania, the aim being to increase popular disenchantment with the Hoxha regime. “Toward this end,” writes O’Rourke, “the CIA’s Psychological and Paramilitary Staff funded NCFA publications, launched high-altitude balloon drops of anti-Hoxha leaflets, and created Radio Free Albania.”[225]
Covert operations in the Ukraine
Ukraine became an independent nation after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 (click to enlarge)
The underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in 1929. Eleven years later, a split occurred and OUN-B was formed under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. In the months leading up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Nazi leaders provided Bandera with 2.5 million marks to conduct covert operations against the Soviet Union and to form two Ukrainian battalions to assist the German Army. “The Ukrainian auxiliaries,” writes O’Rourke, proved to be willing and ready collaborators for the Nazi mass killing program in Eastern Europe.” At a meeting in July 1941, OUN-B leaders declared that Jews “have to be treated harshly…. we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.” In the months following the German invasion, OUN-B forces killed an estimated 12,000 Jewish civilians.[230]
Mykola Lebed
The SSU recruited other former Nazi collaborators, especially Mykola Lebed, who led a group called the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council (UHVR). In 1943, during the Nazi occupation, Lebed encouraged the ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians. According to a 1947 U.S. intelligence report, Lebed was a “well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans.” The U.S. nonetheless conspired with Lebed and later moved Lebed and his family to Munich to avoid extradition by the Soviet Union.[232]
By 1954, most of the clandestine cells in the Ukraine had been discovered and shut down by Soviet authorities. One CIA official was quoted in 1957 as saying that “the path of experience” in infiltrating agents in the Ukraine “has been strewn with disaster.” The official CIA history notes: “At least 75 percent of the 85 CIA agents dispatched under REDSOX disappeared from sight and failed in their missions.”[234] According to O’Rourke:
As in Albania, US planners found that the Soviet security forces in Ukraine always seemed to be one step ahead of them. Indeed, they were. Archival evidence shows that Soviet intelligence officials knew of the Anglo-American connections to Ukrainian nationalists as early as 1946…. In addition to their agents in Ukraine, the Soviet Union also maintained an extensive spy network in the American displaced persons camps and among the Ukrainian émigré community at large.[235]
In 1956, the U.S. ended its subversive covert operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, largely because they were practical failures. By then, Stalin had died and the European situation had stabilized into opposing NATO and Warsaw Pact blocs. Though both sides militarized the border, there were no attacks and none were expected. On May 15, 1955, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, United States, and France signed a treaty granting Austria independence and arranging for the withdrawal of all occupation forces. This was a victory for diplomacy.
Decolonization, 1944-1975 (click to enlarge)
In the wake of declining European empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, U.S. leaders were keen on maintaining Western influence. The first CIA report on September 3, 1948, “The Break-Up of the Colonial Empires and its Implications for US Security,” warned that the “shift of the dependent areas from the orbit of the colonial powers not only weakens the probable European allies of the US but deprives the US itself of assured access to vital bases and raw materials in these areas in event of war. Should the recently liberated and currently emergent states become oriented toward the USSR, US military and economic security would be seriously threatened.”[238]
U.S. involvement in Vietnam was the most infamous effort of the U.S. to control developments on the other side of the world. Leslie Gelb, who headed the team that compiled the Pentagon Papers between 1967 and 1969, was struck not so much by the lies of successive presidents revealed in the Papers, but “that our leaders, from Truman onwards, didn’t know hardly anything about Vietnam and Indochina. They were ignorant.”[240] Indeed, they seemed to be intentionally ignorant, having adopted a faulty and simplistic ideological blueprint that divided the world into saints and sinners. As Arnold Offner writes, “In Washington, ideological predispositions blinded policymakers to the actual political dynamics of East Asia.”[241]Iran, 1951-53
Iran, at the crossroads of the Old World [U of Texas Libraries]
Great Britain was the dominant power in the Middle East and fully intended to remain so after the Second World War. “No other area in the world,” writes Melvyn Leffler, “except for the United Kingdom itself, was considered more important than the Middle East.”
The British had extensive petroleum interests in the Persian Gulf, owned the largest refinery in the world at Abadan [Iran], controlled the oil fields in southern Iran, maintained airfields in Transjordan, Iraq, and Cyprus, stationed troops in Aden, Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia, and possessed a huge military base complex at Suez…. In 1945 there were more than 200,000 troops at the Cairo-Suez base, and close to 100,000 soldiers would remain during the next few years.[244]
Following the war, Soviet troops lingered in northern Iran, apparently to encourage independence movements by Kurdish and Azerbaijani groups – potential friendly allies. The U.S. protested the delay and the UN Security Council passed a resolution on January 30, 1946, demanding Soviet withdrawal. Stalin accommodated and Soviet forces were withdrawn in February. There was no Soviet threat in Iran thereafter.
Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh
Iran had a democratic form of government with a popularly elected parliament, a prime minister chosen by the parliament, and a shah (king) who played a nominal role. On April 28, 1951, the parliament chose as prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a European-educated lawyer and wealthy landowner in his early seventies. His main agenda was the nationalization of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a policy widely supported in his country. Six weeks earlier, both houses of the Iranian parliament had voted overwhelmingly to support nationalization.
US Ambassador to Iran Loy Henderson met with Mossadegh on Jan. 28, 1953, to discuss the oil issue [The Mossadegh Project]
Between March and August 1953, the CIA and MI-6 worked together to carry out a two-part strategy that involved fostering popular opposition to the Mossadegh government and recruiting military leaders along with the Shah to take over the government. The plan was codenamed Operation TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain’s MI-6. As described by the journalist-turned-historian Stephen Kinzer:
Two secret agents, Donald Wilber of the CIA and Norman Darbyshire of the British Secret Intelligence Service, spent several weeks that spring in Cyprus devising a plan for the coup…. With the cold calculation of the surgeon, these agents plotted to cut Mossadegh away from his people. Under their plan, the Americans would spend $150,000 to bribe journalists, editors, Islamic preachers, and other opinion leaders to “create, extend and enhance public hostility and distrust and fear of Mossadegh and his government.” They would hire thugs to carry out “staged attacks” on religious figures and other respected Iranians, making it seem that Mossadegh had ordered them. Meanwhile, General [Fazlollah] Zahedi would be given a sum of money, later fixed at $135,000, to “win additional friends” and “influence key people.” The plan budged another $11,000 per week, a great sum at that time, to bribe members of the Iranian parliament. On “coup day,” thousands of paid demonstrators would converge on parliament to demand that it dismiss Mossadegh. Parliament would respond with a “quasi-legal” vote to do so. If Mossadegh resisted, military units loyal to General Zahedi would arrest him.[249]
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife, Sorraya, adopted modern Western dress and styles, but remained Old World monarchs
The coup d’état took place on August 19, 1953, following four days of chaos in the streets. The Shah, at the behest of the CIA and MI-6, appointed General Zahedi prime minister and had Mossadegh arrested. There were a number of glitches and the plan nearly failed. In the end, it succeeded not only in ousting Mossadegh but also in replacing the democratic parliamentary system with an authoritarian system under the Shah. In the ensuing weeks, the Shah reversed the nationalization policy and granted U.S.-based oil companies the right to 40 percent of Iranian oil – America’s reward for sabotaging democracy. Initially uncertain about participating in the coup, the Shah quickly became comfortable with tyranny. In the weeks following the coup, hundreds of political activists and party leaders on the left were arrested though they had committed no crime. Mosaddegh was imprisoned for three years, after which he was put under house arrest until his death.
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is welcomed to the U.S. by President John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, April 1962 [Kennedy Presidential Library]
When the Shah was ousted by an Islamic revolution in early 1979 many Americans could not understand why Iranians appeared to hate Americans – television newscasts showed demonstrators in the streets shouting “death to America.” Few Americans were able to connect the dots between the coup of 1953 and the revolution of 1979. The U.S. media in the intervening years had painted a positive portrait of the impeccably dressed Shah Pahlavi as one who welcomed Western culture and a modicum of women’s rights. The 1953 coup and the Shah’s secret police were swept under the rug. Forty-seven years after the coup, however, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged a measure of U.S. responsibility for the deteriorating relationship between Iran and the United States, speaking before the American-Iranian Council on March 17, 2000:
In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs. Moreover, during the next quarter century, the United States and the West gave sustained backing to the Shah’s regime. Although it did much to develop the country economically, the Shah’s government also brutally repressed political dissent. As President Clinton has said, the United States must bear its fair share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations.[253]
The Congo, 1960
The decline and exodus of European colonial powers in Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s left the door open for many new experiments in nation building. For the Belgian Congo, a huge colony containing more than two hundred ethnic groups, independence came on June 30, 1960. In the lead-up, there were riots and violent clashes with Belgian authorities, but no war of liberation. Parliamentary elections were held on May 22, 1960, with twenty-eight parties vying for 127 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 84 seats in the Senate. The Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) won a plurality with 23.4 percent of the vote. Party leader Patrice Lumumba was selected prime minister despite Belgian attempts to block him.[254]Lumumba was born in 1925 in a small village in southwestern Congo and educated at a Protestant missionary school. In 1958, he attended the first all-African People’s Conference in Accra, the capital of Ghana. He came away convinced that the time had come for Africans to run their own affairs. On Congolese Independence Day, he spoke of the possibilities of the future:
Patrice Lumumba, 1960
We are going to institute social justice together and ensure everyone just remuneration for his labor. We are going to show the world what the black man can do when he works in freedom, and we are going to make the Congo the focal point for the development of all of Africa. We are going to see to it that the soil of our country really benefits its children. We are going to review all the old laws and make new ones that will be just and noble. We are going to put an end to the suppression of free thought and see to it that all citizens enjoy to the fullest all the fundamental freedoms laid down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.[255]
Lawrence Devlin, CIA station chief in the Congo, early 1960s [NY Times]
Col. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, 1960
The CIA developed a two-part plan to assassinate Lumumba and overthrow the government, securing a replacement amenable to the West. The CIA sent an agent to the Congolese capital with poison to kill Lumumba, but it was not clear if the assassination attempt was made before the overthrow took place on September 14, 1960. With U.S. and Belgian support, Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Chief of Staff of the Congolese National Army, deposed Lumumba in a bloodless coup and installed a new government. Lumumba took refuge at the United Nations headquarters in Léopoldville. He survived that day only to be arrested along with two of his associates on December 1. Mobutu, not wanting to be held responsible for Lumumba’s death, turned Lumumba over to his political enemies in the Katanga province. He was tortured and executed there on January 17, 1961.[259] A U.S. correspondent witnessed Lumumba’s arrival at Lubumbashi:
Lumumba, blindfolded with a grimy bandage, his hands tied behind him, and roped to two of his political lieutenants, was directed down the steps of the plane. Within sight of a large airport billboard proclaiming “Welcome to Free Katanga,” the trembling, stumbling Lumumba and his fellow prisoners fell to the ground in a hail of savage baton, rifle-butt and first blows and kicks from a gauntlet of snarling Katangese.[260]
President Mobutu Sese Seku of Zaire (formerly the Congo) meets with President Nixon at the White House on Oct. 10, 1973 [NARA]
Indonesia, 1955-65
Indonesia is an archipelagic nation located between Australia and Southeast Asia. It was colonized for over three hundred years by the Netherlands and known as the Dutch East Indies. In 1942, Japanese forces occupied the island nation and imprisoned Dutch administrators. Japanese authorities proclaimed Indonesia liberated and mobilized the population in support of the Japanese war effort. In the process, they nurtured Indonesian nationalist leaders such as future president Sukarno.[263] Japanese rule grew harsh as the war turned against them. A United Nations report in 1947 estimated that three million people on the island of Java and one million on other islands died as a result of famine, forced labor, and lack of medical care.[264]
Sukarno speaking at opening session of Bandung conference, April 1955
In April 1955, Indonesia hosted the Bandung Conference, the first step in the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement. In his opening remarks, Sukarno identified the origins of the great “battle against colonialism” in the American War for Independence, “the first successful anti-colonial war in history.” He warned against the continuing danger of neo-colonialism:
I beg of you do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.[265]
President Dwight Eisenhower and Sec. of State John Foster Dulles in 1956 [NARA]
The CIA enlisted all three branches of the U.S. military in the venture: the army training rebel troops, the navy providing offshore backup, and the air force creating and operating a rebel air force. The CIA hired 350 Americans, Chinese, and Filipinos to service and fly transport aircraft and B-26 bombers for rebel operations…. The CIA airdropped supplies to the rebels. CIA director Allen Dulles ran the Indonesia operation, and his brother [Secretary of State] John Foster Dulles was the moving force behind it.[268]
General Suharto presides at officers’ funeral, Oct 5, 1965
In 1965, a rebellion within the military establishment became an excuse for General Suharto, a pro-American officer, to launch a coup d’état against the Sukarno government. According to the political scientist Peter Dale Scott, the September 30th attack on the military officers was “the first phase of a three-phase right-wing coup,” noting that the generals who were killed in the rebellion were those most loyal to Sukarno and would likely have prevented the coup. Suharto blamed the attack on the left, thus providing the requisite justification for his army to conduct an all-out massacre of suspected leftists, which took more than 500,000 lives. Suharto placed Sukarno under his “protection” and prevented the president from resuming control. In March 1966, Sukarno was forced to sign a Presidential Order assigning Suharto the right to take all measures necessary to preserve national security and stability. One year later, Sukarno was stripped of his presidency and placed under house arrest.[272]
An unknown Indonesian man is captured by soldiers, 1965 [Russell Knight, Getty]
In Indonesia in October 1965, Suharto, a powerful Indonesian military leader, accused the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of organizing a brutal coup attempt, following the kidnapping and murder of six high-ranking army officers. Over the months that followed, he oversaw the systematic extermination of up to a million Indonesians for affiliation with the party, or simply for being accused of harboring leftist sympathies. He then took power and ruled as dictator, with U.S. support, until 1998….
While the newly declassified documents further illustrated the horror of Indonesia’s 1965 mass murder, they also confirmed that U.S. authorities backed Suharto’s purge. Perhaps even more striking: As the documents show, U.S. officials knew most of his victims were entirely innocent. U.S. embassy officials even received updates on the executions and offered help to suppress media coverage….
It should not be entirely surprising that Washington would tolerate the deaths of so many civilians to further its Cold War goals. In Vietnam, the U.S. military may have killed up to 2 million civilians. But Indonesia was different: the PKI was a legal, unarmed party, operating openly in Indonesia’s political system. It had gained influence through elections and community outreach, but was nevertheless treated like an insurgency.[274]
Washington officials not only tolerated the massacre, but were also pleased with the political outcome. State Department staffer Rob Barrett wrote to Charles Mann of the U.S. Agency for International Development in April 1966, “the trend of Indonesian political development has been drastically altered in the direction favorable to the United States interests in the Far East. The PKI has been eliminated as an effective political force…. The new leaders are trying to integrate the country into the international [capitalist] community. Investment should be encouraged.”[275]
Suharto ruled Indonesia with full U.S. support until 1998. He was never held accountable for the 1965 mass murders, nor for another round of atrocities committed in East Timor in 1975. As East Timor, which shares the island of Timor with Indonesia, emerged from its status as a Portuguese colony, the possibility of a leftist government prompted Suharto to launch a massive invasion of the country. According to the East Timor government, “During the invasion mass killings and rapes took place: 60,000 Timorese were dead by mid-February. A puppet Provisional Government of East Timor was installed in mid-December.”Afghanistan, 1979
Landlocked Afghanistan lies west of Iran and south of the Soviet Union (1980s)
In April 1978, the government of Mohammad Daoud was overthrown by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a communist party closely linked to the Soviet Union. Daoud, a Western-educated member of the royal family, was shot and killed along with most of his family. PDPA leader Nur Muhammad Taraki took the reins of government until he, too, was assassinated in October 1979, leaving the presidency to Hafizullah Amin.[277] Soviet leaders were critical of Amin, ironically, because he was overzealous in carrying out the communist program. That program included securing women’s rights, which grated on Islamic fundamentalist beliefs, as well as advancing public education and redistributing lands to peasants, among other modernization reforms; but Amin implemented these reforms in an authoritarian manner, riding roughshod over ethnic, religious, and tribal traditions and local power structures. The KGB (Soviet intelligence agency) station in Kabul pressed Moscow to remove him from office, warning that Amin’s heavy-handedness was causing the party to lose popular support and could lead to the “consolidation of the opposition” against the government.[278]
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and President Jimmy Carter at a daily briefing, 1979
The covert U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, codenamed Operation Cyclone, gained momentum in the spring of 1979. The Pakistan and Saudi governments agreed to be intermediaries and the CIA found willing allies among Islamic militants known as Mujahideen, or “Soldiers of God.” Mujahideen leaders such as Hekmatyar had been fighting “godless communism” for years. On July 3, Carter signed a presidential “finding” that authorized the CIA to spend just over $500,000 on propaganda and psychological operations, and to provide “unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support to Afghan insurgents, either in the form of cash or non-military supplies.”[281] The administration had to be cautious about providing weapons to the rebels because of Congress. In January 1976, Congress shut down a CIA operation in Angola after learning that the CIA was sponsoring an unauthorized war. The Carter administration deemed it prudent to provide cash to the Afghan rebels so that they could buy their own weapons.
Soviet tank secures a roadway
Babrak Karmal assumes the presidency
The Soviet intervention took place on December 24, 1979. Some 30,000 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, took control of the major urban centers and transportation arteries, and established a new government under Babrak Karmal, a Marxist general. Amin was killed in the presidential palace, though Soviet leaders denied any responsibility for his death.[285]
U.S. support for Islamic guerrillas
A group of Afghan rebels at the Khanday Khula camp in Pakistan near the Afghan border, July 3, 1980 (AP photo)
On December 26, 1979, two days after the Soviet intervention, Brzezinski wrote a memo to President Carter sketching out a more militant U.S. policy in Afghanistan. “It is essential that Afghanistan’s resistance continues,” he wrote. “This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels, and some technical advice. To make the above possible we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels.” A week later, Brzezinski wrote to State Department officials, “Our ultimate goal is the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Even if that is not attainable, we should make Soviet involvement as costly as possible.”[288]
In early 1980, Brzezinski personally travelled to the Afghan-Pakistan border near Khyber Pass to meet with Mujahideen leaders. “We know of their deep belief in God,” he told the men through a translator, “and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there [Afghanistan] is yours. You will go back to it one day because your fight will prevail, and you will have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side.”[289] Of course, it was the U.S. government that was on their side, in conformity with the realpolitik formula: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
A hand-crafted Afghan rug tells the story of the U.S.-backed guerrilla war against the Soviets, 1979-89
Carter did not mention that Afghanistan already had a communist government which the Soviets replaced with another. He did not reveal that the U.S. had delivered aid and arms to Afghan Islamic insurgents before the Soviet invasion. Nor did he offer any hint that the U.S.-backed insurgents were intent on turning Afghanistan into an Islamic state similar to Iran (although Sunni rather than Shia). Instead, Carter raised fears of Soviet expansion into the Middle East and vowed to protect the oil-rich region “by any means necessary,” a presidential edict that became known as the Carter Doctrine. The doctrine was aimed at Iran as much as the Soviet Union. It essentially replaced former U.S. reliance on Iran (under the Shah) to police the Gulf with direct U.S. military power and hegemony. As U.S. hegemony always had to be masked as defensive for public relations purposes, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan served this purpose. Carter also declared that the U.S. would “impose stiff economic penalties on the Soviet Union” and boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.[291]
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev responded by declaring that “the national interests or security of the United States of America and other states are in no way affected by the events in Afghanistan. All attempts to portray matters otherwise are sheer nonsense.”[292] Clearly there was a difference between the Soviet understanding of security, which was limited to its sphere of influence, and the American conception of security, which encompassed the entire globe.
For a brief period between 1944 and 1946, U.S. policymakers considered extending the Good Neighbor Policy to include support for democratic governance in the region. In November 1944, the State Department issued Instruction 4616, which informed American diplomats that military dictatorships and unconstitutional governments “are to be deplored”:
While the Department will continue to maintain cordial relations with all established and recognized governments, it is not incompatible with those policies to state unequivocally the self-evident truth that the Government of the United States cannot help but feel a greater affinity and a warmer friendship for those governments which rest upon the … freely expressed consent of the governed.[294]
In February 1946, the State Department took a step further in this direction, advising: “Economic assistance should be given only where it is clear that it will benefit the people of a country generally and will help in the development of democracy and honest government,” and that “no military equipment or assistance should be given except where such a policy is agreed upon by international action, or where it is clearly necessary for reasons of security to the United States.”[295]
This tentative shift in policy orientation in Washington was in keeping with a budding democratic movement that swept Latin America at the end of the Second World War. According to the historian Michael Schmidli:
Propelled by the combined effects of the global struggle against fascism, the relative benevolence of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, and, to varying degrees in each Latin American nation, the rise of an “emerging middle class and urban working class that joined with students, intellectuals, and in some cases a militant peasantry,” the region witnessed unprecedented demands for democratic reforms. Moreover, the United States actively assisted in the outpouring of Latin American democracy; flush with victory over authoritarian regimes in Europe and Asia, in the heady aftermath of V-J Day [Victory over Japan] a phalanx of hardheaded U.S. diplomats fanned out across the hemisphere, pressure Latin American authoritarians such as Paraguay’s Higinio Moringo and Guatemala’s Jorge Ubico to hand over the reins of power via electoral transitions. As a result, in 1946, Latin American could boast fifteen democracies out of a total of twenty nations – a startling figure considering there had been only four democracies two years earlier.[296]
The onset of the Cold War prompted a reversal of Washington’s tenuous pro-democracy policy. According to David Schmitz, the Cold War paradigm in Washington “ushered back in the positive evaluations of authoritarian governments in the worldwide struggle with the Soviet Union…. They would be wedged into the free world, no matter what their record of abuses.”[297] Such was the case in Nicaragua. The Truman administration initially withheld diplomatic recognition of the Nicaraguan government under Anastasio Somoza García after he ousted an elected president in May 1947. The shunning lasted less than a year, however, as Somoza was deemed a valuable ally in the global war against “communism.”
U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility
In March 1953, President Eisenhower approved NSC 144/1 as the basis for U.S. policy toward Latin America. The directive called on the U.S. to mobilize the hemisphere to “eliminate the menace of internal Communism.”[299] In practice, this meant aligning the U.S. with the landed aristocracy and rightist political and military forces that had been crushing leftist and labor reform movements for decades. Military dictators and repressive governments caught on quickly and appealed to the U.S. for aid on the basis of opposing communism. In Cuba, at the suggestion of U.S. ambassador Arthur Gardner, Fulgencio Batista established a special office dedicated to repressing “communists” (Buró de Represión a las Actividades Comunistas), which Batista used to suppress his political opponents. When Vice President Richard Nixon visited Havana in February 1955, he praised Cuba as a “land that shares with us the same ideals of peace, freedom and dignity of men.” In a toast to Batista, he likened the dictator to Abraham Lincoln.[300]
U.S. leaders pursued their anti-communist mission in large part by cultivating ties with Latin American military and security forces, deemed the most anticommunist of institutions. The U.S. offered four kinds of support: funds for military and police forces, U.S. military advisers, the training of Latin American security personnel at U.S. military schools, and the transfer of sophisticated equipment, especially for surveillance purposes. During the 1950s, the U.S. provided $400 million in military assistance to the region and assigned 800 military personnel to work with Latin American officials in order to improve so-called “internal security.” Between 1945 and 1959, the U.S. paid for nearly 8,000 Latin American military personnel to attend U.S. military facilities in either the Panama Canal Zone or the U.S. Equipment included “light weaponry geared toward internal security operations” and “sophisticated intelligence-gathering technology,” notes Schmidli, which repressive governments used in conjunction with “extralegal kidnappings, torture, and disappearances of political opponents.”[301]
Assault on VP Richard Nixon’s limousine in Caracas, Venezuela, May 13, 1958
U.S. support for repressive regimes did not sit well with many Latin Americans. When Vice President Richard Nixon visited Caracas, Venezuela, in May 1958, his car was assaulted by demonstrators, in part because of past U.S. support for the authoritarian rule of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Venezuelans had ousted Pérez Jiménez in a bloodless military coup five months earlier. In Cuba, U.S. support for the authoritarian government of Batista backfired when the great majority of Cubans celebrated the overthrow of the Batista government by Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army on January 1, 1959.
Off to a good start: Jacqueline and John Kennedy address an audience at La Morita Resettlement Project in Venezuela to commemorate the Agrarian Reform Program. Venezuela President Rómulo Betancourt sits to the right of President Kennedy.
The Kennedy administration touted the Alliance program as a Marshall Plan for Latin America, but it was rather a paltry imitation of it. Whereas the Marshall Plan provided outright grants, a large part of Alliance funds consisted of loans that had to be repaid; and the total amount of money was considerably less on a per capita basis. During the 1960s, the region received about $15 billion of the promised $20 billion from the U.S., or about $4 per person. The money stimulated some economic development but not enough to offset population growth and systemic trade inequalities. As Rabe explains, “In order to generate the $80 billion on domestic savings mandated by the Alliance, Latin America needed to sell on the global markets their primary produces – coffee, sugar, bananas, copper, tin, lead, zinc, and oil. But the prices of these tropical foods and raw materials declined in the 1960s even as the prices of imported industrial machinery and finished goods, the very things needed for economic development, rose.” Latin American leaders called for fairer terms of trade, but to no avail.[303]
The optimistic goals for the Alliance were also undermined by increased U.S. military and police aid to the region, which had the effect of strengthening reactionary forces violently opposed to economic reform, especially land redistribution programs. Economic progress as well as democratic governance fell victim to this “internal security” aid. According to George Herring:
U.S. military aid in some ways subverted the Alliance for Progress…. The Kennedy administration expanded military aid by more than 50 percent to $77 million per year. In 1962 alone, more than nine thousand Latin American military personnel trained in such educational institutions as the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia…. Between 1961 and 1963, military coups eliminated six elected governments. The U.S. aid program assisted the growth of military influence, and for the next two decades the military dominated hemispheric politics.[304]
The six military coups took place in Argentina (March 1962), Peru (July 1962), Guatemala (March 1963), Ecuador (July 1963), the Dominican Republic (September 1963), and Honduras (October 1963).[305] In Peru, to take one example, on July 18, 1962, a U.S.-supplied Sherman tank smashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Lima, and a U.S.-trained Peruvian officer informed the elected president that he was being ousted by a military junta. The Kennedy administration withheld diplomatic recognition of the Peruvian government for only one month before restoring diplomatic relations and U.S. aid. According to Schmidli, “during the 1960s, Latin America experienced no fewer than sixteen military takeovers, led by officers who had almost inevitably trained at U.S. facilities.”[306]
Brazilian president Joao Goulart was overthrown by a U.S.-backed military coup in 1964
In Brazil, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations actively assisted the overthrow of the democratic government of João Goulart, supplying the CIA with about $5 million to destabilize the country. President Goulart had run afoul of U.S. hegemonic designs by promoting economic reforms such as land redistribution and state controls over foreign capital, and by forging an independent foreign policy that recognized and traded with communist countries, including Castro’s Cuba. The coup took place on March 31, 1964, after which President Johnson sent his “warmest wishes” to the new military junta and offered “our intensified cooperation.” There followed a large influx of American advisers and aid that enabled the military junta to more effectively repress dissidents. In the first month alone, notes Odd Arne Westad, “more than 50,000 people were arrested, in the start of a ‘dirty war’ that would last up to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1985…. In strategic terms, however, the new Brazilian military dictatorship became a close ally of the United States in intervening elsewhere in Latin America.”[307]
Brazilian Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara (1974)
Dom Hélder Câmara, the archbishop of Recife, was declared a nonperson by Brazil’s military leaders – the media could not mention his name. The popular archbishop famously remarked: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why so many people are poor, they call me a Communist.”[308]
In 1975, the rightist governments of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil formed Operation Condor, a hemisphere-wide association of regimes dedicated to destroying the left. The central organizer of Operation Condor, Manuel Contreras of Chile, was a paid CIA asset between 1974 and 1977. According to the historian J. Patrice McSherry:
Condor specialized in targeted abductions, disappearances, interrogations/torture, and transfers of persons across borders. According to a declassified 1976 FBI report, Condor had several levels. The first was mutual cooperation among military intelligence services, including coordination of political surveillance and exchange of intelligence information. The second was organized cross-border operations to detain/disappear dissidents. The third and most secret, “Phase III,” was the formation of special teams of assassins from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to carry out assassinations of “subversive enemies.”[310]
Human rights groups in Latin America estimated that Condor commandos “disappeared” hundreds of persons in cross-border operations: 132 Uruguayans, 72 Bolivians, 119 Chileans, 51 Paraguayans, 16 Brazilians, 12 Argentines, and at least one American, Ronni Moffitt, who was assassinated along with Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the U.S., in Washington, D.C. on September 21, 1976. “Clearly,” writes McSherry, “Operation Condor was an organized system of state terror with a transnational reach. It was an anticommunist international that went far beyond targeting ‘communists,’ and it signified an unprecedented level of coordinated repression by right-wing military regimes in Latin America.”[311]
Quilt depicting Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship in Chile, on display at the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, spring 2020 (photo by curator Gabriela Martínez)
With this in mind, on August 23, 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger signed a telegram to U.S. ambassadors indicating that they should express concern to South American officials regarding any activities that “would further exacerbate public world criticism of the governments involved.” This can be read as a suggestion to not engage in assassinations or a warning to not get caught. In any case, Kissinger made no requests to the CIA to investigate Condor missions within the United States, though it was known that two Chilean secret police agents were traveling to Washington on false Paraguayan passports. These were the same men who killed Moffitt and Letelier by planting a car bomb. Following the assassinations, the CIA and State Department delayed and withheld information from the FBI concerning the murders. In an later interview, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hewson Ryan admitted: “We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning … some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don’t know. But we didn’t.”[313]
Guatemala, 1952-54
In 1944, Juan José Arévalo won the Guatemalan presidency in a free and fair election, ending 13 years of dictatorial rule under Jorge Ubico. Arévalo initiated a series of progressive reforms designed to institutionalize democratic structures and advance economic and social progress such as minimum wage laws, labor protections, increased educational funding, and expanded suffrage. Though his reforms were relatively moderate, a number of coups were attempted during his presidency, mostly led by conservative military officers with the backing of large landowners and employers.[314]In the November 1950 elections, former defense minister Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán won the presidency with 65.44 percent of the vote. Árbenz extended the reforms begun under Arévalo to include the redistribution of land to poor peasants. Enacted in June 1952, the Agrarian Reform Law empowered the government to expropriate uncultivated portions of large plantations (greater than 223 acres), to be paid for through 25-year bonds bearing three percent interest. Arbenz himself, a landowner through his wife, gave up 1,700 acres of land. [315] Árbenz explained the need for this reform in a speech in April 1951:
Our task is to work together in order to produce more wealth… but we must distribute these riches so that those who have less – and they are the immense majority – benefit more, while those who have more – and they are so few – also benefit, but to a lesser extent. How could it be otherwise, given the poverty, the poor health, and the lack of education of our people?[316]
Approximately two percent of the Guatemalan population controlled 72 percent of the arable land, while 88 percent of the population held 14 percent of the land. Of the privately held land, less than 12 percent was under cultivation. As the historian Douglas W. Trefzger writes, “In a country where more than two-thirds of the population participated in agriculture, this meant sweeping poverty, malnutrition, and its accompanying health problems. If ever a country needed an agrarian reform to solve its social ills, Guatemala was that country.”[317] During the eighteen months of its operation the Agrarian Reform program distributed 1.5 million acres to some 100,000 families.
Árbenz the politician
Among the lands expropriated by the government were 400,000 acres belonging to the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (UFCO). On the basis of tax declarations, the government offered UFCO $627,572 in bonds in compensation. The U.S. State Department, acting on behalf of UFCO, demanded 24 times that amount. The involvement of the U.S. government in this issue was due in part to personal ties to UFCO. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had both worked for a New York law firm with close links to UFCO. The Dulles brothers joined UFCO publicists in accusing the Árbenz government of being a “stooge” of the Russians. Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, who at one time sought a management position at UFCO, wrote to President Eisenhower denouncing Árbenz and his “Communist-administered Agrarian Reform Law.”[318]
Carlos Castillo Armas, rebel leader
The subversion part of the plan centered on Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a dissident military officer who had attended the U.S. Army’s elite school at Fort Leavenworth and had led previous coup attempts. With financial enticements and virulent propaganda against “godless communism,” Castillo Armas and CIA operatives were able to recruit some 400 to 500 men who were housed, fed, trained, and armed at bases in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, countries led by rightist dictatorial regimes. The CIA provided Castillo Armas’s insurgent army with rifles, submachine guns, mortars, bazookas, grenade launchers, ammunition, and rations. Most importantly, under cover of “arms assistance” to Nicaragua and Honduras, the CIA obtained some thirty planes for the planned invasion, including bombers and transport aircraft. American pilots would fly the planes.[321]
CIA director Allen Dulles
Unable to obtain OAS authorization for an overt intervention, the Eisenhower administration proceeded with its covert plans. Although the CIA has yet to declassify all documents regarding PBSUCCESS, including the names of 58 government officials targeted for assassination, the agency prepared a Memorandum in May 1975 providing an overview of the “CIA’s Role in the Overthrow of Arbenz,” which follows:
In August 1953, the Operations Coordinating Board directed [the] CIA to assume responsibility for operations against the Arbenz regime. Appropriate authorization was issued to permit close and prompt cooperation with the Departments of Defense, State and other Government agencies in order to support the Agency in this task. The plan of operations called for cutting off military aid to Guatemala, increasing aid to its neighbors, exerting diplomatic and economic pressure against Arbenz and attempts to subvert and or defect Army and political leaders, broad scale psychological warfare and paramilitary actions. During the period August through December 1953 a CIA staff was assembled and operational plans were prepared.
Following are the specific operational mechanisms utilized by the Agency in the overall missions against the Arbenz government:
- Paramilitary Operations. Approximately 85 members of the Castillo Armas group received training in Nicaragua. Thirty were trained in sabotage, six as shock troop leaders and 20 others as support-type personnel. Eighty-nine tons of equipment were prepared. The support of this operation was staged inside the borders of Honduras and Nicaragua. [1-1/2 lines of source text not declassified] There were an estimated 250 men in Honduras and El Salvador for use as shock troops and specialists, outside of the training personnel that had been sent to Nicaragua.
- Air Operations. The planning for providing air operational support was broken down into three phases; i.e. the initial stockpiling of equipment; the delivering of equipment to advance bases by black flight; and the aerial resupply of troops in the field. Thirty days prior to D-day, a fourth phase, fighter support, was initiated. There were approximately 80 missions flown during the 14–29 June 1954 period, by various type aircraft such as C–47’s, F–47’s and Cessnas which were used to discharge cargo, distribute propaganda and for strafing and bombing missions.
- Clandestine Communications. A clandestine radio broadcasting station was established in Nicaragua. The purpose of these broadcasts was to intimidate members of the Communist Party and public officials who were sympathetic to the Communist cause….
One of the propaganda ploys was to fabricate reports of Soviet arms deliveries to Guatemala by submarine, and then arranging to have a CIA planted cache of Soviet arms discovered and publicized. The mythical arms deliveries were superseded by the real thing when a ship carrying 2,000 tons of Czech weapons and ammunition arrived. This shipment created an international furor and provided clinching proof of what had been the main CIA propaganda theme, that Guatemala under Arbenz had become a Soviet satellite….
On 17–18 June five shock teams trained by the Agency crossed into Guatemala. The turning point came on 25 June when Castillo’s forces repulsed a counterattack and later bombed a fortress in Guatemala City. On 27 June Arbenz resigned …[326]
Although Castillo Armas was given credit for the overthrow of the Árbenz government, his role constituted only one of four parts, the others being U.S. air power, radio propaganda, and the defection of key Guatemalan military leaders, including Air Force Colonel Mendoza Azurdia on June 4, 1954. American pilots flying unmarked planes bombed and strafed the cities of Zacapa, Chiquimula, and Guatemala City. They also flew low over the capital city firing machine guns into the air to terrify the population. These raids (acts of war) ultimately proved more potent in demoralizing government forces than the insurgent army’s invasion on the ground, which ventured no further than Chiquimula, about 25 miles from the Guatemalan-Honduran border. Castillo Armas’s rebel army took control of Chiquimula on June 24 in a clash that took seventeen lives, the costliest battle of the brief war.[327]
U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala John Peurifoy
During the invasion, the “Voice of Liberation” broadcast false battle reports, creating the impression that thousands of insurgents were on the march. The international press corps was not allowed into rebel areas and thus could not confirm or deny the reports. The main source of “inside” news for the U.S. press was Ambassador Peurifoy who, as Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer write, “dropped tidbits of information, confided private thoughts to the correspondents and drank with reporters at the American Club downtown in the midst of the aerial bombardment. All were struck by his courage; none realized that he knew precisely when the raids were coming and where the bombs or bullets were expected to hit.”[331]
On June 20, three days after the rebel invasion began, the CIA sent a memo to the president explaining how black propaganda and disinformation were playing a key role in the coup:
… the entire effort is thus more dependent upon psychological impact rather than actual military strength, although it is upon the ability of Castillo Armas’ effort to create and maintain for a short time the impression of very substantial military strength that the success of this particular effort primarily depends. The use of a small number of airplanes and the massive use of radio broadcasting are designed to build up and give main support to the impression of Castillo Armas’ strength as well as to spread the impression of the regime’s weakness.[332]
The Eisenhower administration also carried out a disinformation campaign in the U.S. CIA and UFCO worked hand in hand to manipulate public opinion “through fabrication of evidence of the ‘communist menace’ in Guatemala,” writes the historian Gordon L. Bowen. “Indeed, Fruit Company-sponsored information constituted a near monopoly of sources used in American press reports about Guatemala in this era.”[333]
Guatemalan Foreign Minister Jorge Toriello
On June 21 and 22, a few days after the invasion began, Guatemalan foreign minister Jorge Toriello appealed to the United Nations to investigate and mediate the crisis, providing documented evidence of foreign air attacks. The U.S. blocked a proposed investigation in a Security Council vote. U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge went beyond denial to warn the Russian delegate Semyon K. Tsarapkin, “Stay out of the Western Hemisphere … Don’t try to start your plans and conspiracies here.”[335]
The recently enthroned military junta, including Castillo Armas (next to driver), being driven into Guatemala City by a CIA agent [Hub of History]
On September 1, the military junta in Guatemala dissolved and Castillo Armas assumed dictatorial power. To legitimize his authority, a plebiscite was staged on October 10 in which Guatemalans were asked a single question: “Are you in favor of Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas continuing in the presidency of the republic for a term to be fixed by the constituent assembly?” The approval rate was an implausible 99.8 percent. This was proof enough for the Eisenhower administration. Castillo Armas was invited to the White House in November 1955 and given a hero’s welcome. At a state dinner, Vice-President Richard Nixon described the Guatemalan leader as a “courageous soldier” who had led the Guatemalan people in revolt “against Communist rule.”[343]
In 2011, more than half a century after the overthrow, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom apologized for the coup, calling it a “great crime.” In a ceremony at the National Palace in Guatemala City, Colom turned to Mr. Árbenz’s son, Juan Jacobo, and asked for forgiveness on behalf of the state. “That day changed Guatemala,” President Colom said, “and we have not recuperated from it yet. It was a crime to Guatemalan society and it was an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring.”[345]
Diego Rivera’s Gloriosa Victoria (complete), painted in 1954, soon after the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz
Cuba, 1959-62
Castro as a young man, photo accompanying his 1953 “History Will Absolve Me” speech turned into a booklet distributed in Cuba
Castro himself was an enigma to Washington officials. Born in 1926, he had grown up in a moderately prosperous family on a sugar plantation in the Oriente Province. He enrolled at the University of Havana law school in 1945 and became active in politics. In early 1952, he campaigned for a seat in the Cuban Congress, but elections were never held, as Batista pulled a military coup. Enraged, Castro organized a group of followers and attacked the Moncada military barracks in the Oriente Province on July 26, 1953. He was captured, tried, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but released in 1955 in a government amnesty program. Castro left for Mexico with a few cohorts and began organizing a revolution to topple Batista, named the “26th of July Movement.” He was joined by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentinian medical student who had been in Guatemala when the Árbenz government was overthrown. On December 2, 1956, Castro, Guevara, and eighty other men landed on Cuba’s eastern shores. Batista’s forces were waiting for them and all but twelve insurgents were killed or captured. The survivors fled to the Sierra Maestra mountains where they found great support among the people.
Fidel Castro shakes the hands of well-wishers after his arrival at National Airport in Washington, April 15, 1959 [Photo by Henry Burroughs, AP]
Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally. He seems to be sincere. He is either incredibly naïve about Communism or under Communist discipline – my guess is the former, and as I have already implied, his ideas as to how to run a government or an economy are less developed than those of almost any world figure I have met in fifty countries.[352]
Vice President Richard Nixon meets with Fidel Castro in Washington, April 19, 1959 [UPI]
The American correspondent Herbert Matthews, who continued to visit Cuba in 1959, wrote in July that Castro wanted a social revolution, not a Communist revolution.[355] Washington officials, however, appeared not to distinguish between the two. According to a NSC report in January 1960 reviewing U.S.-Cuban relations in the year 1959:
The period from January to March might be characterized as the honeymoon period of the Castro government. In April a downward trend in U.S. Cuban relations had been evident…. In June we had reached the decision that it was not possible to achieve our objectives with Castro in power…. In July and August, we had been busy drawing up a program to replace Castro. However some U.S. companies reported to us during this time that they were making some progress in negotiations, a factor that caused us to slow the implementation of our program. The hope expressed by these companies did not materialize. October was a period of clarification…. On October 31, in agreement with CIA, the Department [of State] had recommended to the President approval of a program … The approved program authorized us to support elements in Cuba opposed to the Castro government while making Castro’s downfall seem to be the result of his own mistakes.”[356]
Cuba sugar cane cutters, circa 1960 [coldwarstudies.com]
CIA paratrooper training for Brigade 2506 [CIA]
CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell
The main proponent of the expatriate invasion of Cuba in White House discussions was CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell. Although he had no experience in running covert operations, he was confident that the invasion would succeed. Should problems arise, he surmised, he could call for backup U.S. airpower to overwhelm Cuban defenses.[361] The use of U.S. warplanes, however, would expose the hand of the U.S. in the illegal invasion, and President Kennedy was adamantly opposed to this. Kennedy put his personal credibility on the line at a press conference on April 12, 1961, just days before the invasion, stating:
… there will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces, and this government will do everything it possibly can, and I think it can meet its responsibilities, to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba…. The basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba; it is between the Cubans themselves. And I intend to see that we adhere to that principle. And as I understand it, this Administration’s attitude is so understood and shared by the anti-Castro exiles from Cuba in this country.[362]
Brigade 2506 insignia
The Cuban exiles in Guatemala preparing for the invasion were also confident that their mission would not fail, knowing that the powerful United States was backing them. Alfredo Durán, an early enlistee in Brigade 2506, recalled that “the brigade had a very high morale, which was surprising, because of the terrible conditions in the camps” which included bad food, constant rain, and “mud all over the place.”[363] The CIA also placed great expectations on anti-Castro cells within Cuba, counting on them to rouse the Cuban people against Castro when the invasion came.[364] CIA expectations far exceeded the capabilities of the small dissident groups, as Castro had mobilized impressive defenses and the population was mostly still on his side in early 1961. The CIA also changed its landing site from Trinidad to Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) only one month before the operation was set to take place.
Cuban expatriates taken prisoner following the invasion, April 17, 1961 [latinamericanstudies.org]
Fidel at Playa Girón with Captain Osmany Cienfuegos and militia [Granma]
We must talk of a new constitution, yes, a new constitution, but not a bourgeois constitution, not a constitution corresponding to the domination of certain classes by exploiting classes, but a constitution corresponding to a new social system without the exploitation of many by man. That new social system is called socialism, and this constitution will therefore be a socialist constitution.[369]
Soviet poster in the 1960s: “Long live the eternal, indestructible friendship and cooperation between the Soviet and Cuban peoples” [public domain]
Operation Mongoose was apparently not enough. An invasion might be needed as well. On March 5, 1962, the Kennedy brothers sent a memorandum titled “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba” to the Joint Chiefs of Staff requesting that an operational plan be drawn up to “provide adequate justification for US military intervention”:
Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective…. Time is an important factor in resolution of the Cuban problem. Therefore, the plan should be so time-phased that projects would be operable within the next few months. Inasmuch as the ultimate objective is overt military intervention, it is recommended that primary responsibility for developing military and para-military aspects of the plan for both overt and covert military operations be assigned the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Aerial photograph of Medium Range Ballistic Missile Launch Site 1 near San Cristóbal, Cuba, taken on October 25, 1962 [Kennedy library]
The resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis was a victory for diplomacy, but that was not how the Kennedy administration chose to spin the story for the U.S. media and public. U.S. officials failed to mention the non-invasion pledge and hid the agreement to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey; thus it appeared to the American public that Kennedy had stared down the Russian bear and forced the Soviets to retreat. This intentional deception was unfortunate for purposes of history and lessons thereof, as military confrontation rather than diplomatic negotiation was deemed the rescuer.[377] Soviet leaders proved to be reasonable, as did the Kennedy administration in the end. Of course, had President Kennedy made a pledge to not invade Cuba in the first place, there would have been no missile crisis. As the historian Thomas Paterson explains:
Had there been no exile expedition at the Bay of Pigs, no destructive covert activities, no assassination plots, no military maneuvers and plans, and no economic and diplomatic steps to harass, isolate, and destroy the Castro government in Havana, there would not have been a Cuban missile crisis. The origins of the October 1962 crisis derived largely from the concerted U.S. campaign to quash the Cuban Revolution. To stress only the global dimension (Soviet-American competition), as is commonly done, is to slight the local or regional sources of the conflict. To slight these sources is to miss the central point that Premier Nikita Khrushchev would never have had the opportunity to install dangerous missiles in the Caribbean if the United States had not been attempting to overthrow the Cuban government.[378]
The Cuban Missile Crisis did not end the Kennedy administration’s covert actions against Cuba, although a direct invasion was ruled out. “By the end of 1962,” writes the journalist Don Bohning, “the CIA station at an abandoned Navy air facility south of Miami had become the largest in the world outside its Langley, Virginia, headquarters. Thousands of Cuban exiles were on the payroll.”[379] U.S. covert operations against Castro continued until 1965, after which Cuban exile groups independently conducted their work of terrorism, the most infamous example being a bomb attack that killed 73 people aboard a Cuban civilian aircraft on October 6, 1976.
The Dominican Republic, 1960-1965
In May 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon undertook a goodwill tour through Latin America. In Venezuela, his motorcade was pelted with eggs and rocks. In Peru, he was shouted down by university students who also lobbed rotten tomatoes at him. In Paraguay, a government crackdown on protesters was required to smooth the way for the visiting U.S. dignitary. In marked contrast to Nixon’s “diplomatic Pearl Harbor,” as Walter Lippmann called the tour, Fidel Castro received a hero’s welcome when he visited Venezuela in January 1959. Many Latin Americans viewed Castro as a “freedom fighter,” an inspirational leader who had challenged the “colossus of the north” and successfully overthrown a U.S.-backed dictator.[380]
VP Richard Nixon and Rafael Trujillo embrace during better days [Life magazine 1955]
President-elect Juan Bosch meets with President Kennedy in the White House on Jan. 10, 1963. Within a year, the CIA would maneuver Bosch’s overthrow [Kennedy library]
US troops patrol the streets near a food line in Santo Domingo, May 5, 1965 [National Security Archive]
British Guiana, 1961-64
British Guiana, renamed Guyana in 1966 [IMGBIN.com]
Cheddi Jagan, Premier of British Guiana, meets with President Kennedy at the White House on Oct. 25, 1961, before the CIA secures Jagan’s ouster [Kennedy Library]
Previously unheard-of radio stations went on the air in the capital, Georgetown. The papers printed false stories about approaching Cuban warships. Civil servants walked out. The labor unions revolted. Riots took the lives of more than 100 people…. The agitation grew throughout 1962 and 1963. “A fire was set in the center of town,” Dr. Jagan said. “The wind fanned the flames, and the center of the city burned. There are still scars. Then they changed their tactics. This is where the C.I.A. support came in full. They imposed a full blockade on shipping and airlines. We were helpless. We had no power.”[391]
Prime Minister Forbes Burnham and President Johnson meet at the White_House, July 21, 1966
The U.S. got want it wanted on December 7, 1964. The PPP won only 24 out of 53 seats in the House of Assembly. The U.S.-backed anti-Jagan parties formed a governing coalition and elected Burnham as premier. In the ensuing months, according to Stephen Rabe:
Burnham developed a personality cult, pillaged the national economy, and trampled on civil liberties and human rights. Burnham and his henchmen also discriminated against Indians, denying Guyana’s majority population political and economic opportunities…. Forbes Burnham would not have had the opportunity to perpetrate his crimes against the Guyanese people had it not been for the political machinations of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations.[393]
Looking back on U.S. relations with Latin America at the end of the Cold War, Senator J. William Fulbright commented in The Price of Empire (1989):
Consider what we have done in Latin America. The Bay of Pigs in 1961, and the intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to cite only two conspicuous examples, were blatant violations of the charter of the Organization of American States. We ignored our treaty obligations and did as we pleased. We paid no attention then, and we pay no attention now when treaties and promises get in our way…. It has always puzzled me, however, that the same senators who thought me naive for objecting to our treaty violations would be seized with moral indignation at real and alleged Soviet violations.[396]
Challenging scholars who have played down the detrimental effects of U.S. policies in the region, Stephen Rabe writes in The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (2012), “The United States was not omnipotent, and Latin American leaders were not mere puppets of the United States. But historians can go too far in denying the realities of the global distribution of power or the active U.S. role in fomenting chaos in the region during the Cold War…. Historical inquiry mandates that both the causes and consequences of decisions be analyzed.”[397]
A celebration on the wall separating the city of Berlin, Nov 10, 1989, one day after its opening [AP photo]
- misperceived, manipulated, and manufactured alleged “threats” to the nation, especially “communist threats” in the Third World;
- disregarded international prohibitions against national aggression;
- engaged in unnecessary interventions, overt and covert, that produced tragic results for other peoples and nations;
- bolstered repressive regimes and dictators, contrary to human rights principles;
- undermined democratic governments and manipulated foreign elections, contrary to democratic principles;
- propagated lies, deceptions, ideological shibboleths to gain American public support;
- evaded democratic accountability in foreign policymaking; and
- intimidated and debased critics of the Cold War.
Bacevich offers this cogent summary of the Cold War:
Scholars can speculate endlessly about whether the Cold War was inevitable or might have been avoided. What we can say with certainty is this: As it unfolded across several decades, it produced ruinous consequences. It fostered folly and waste on a colossal scale, notably in an arms race of staggering magnitude. It bred hatred, hysteria, and intolerance, creating conditions rife with opportunities for demagogues. It warped political priorities, subordinating the well-being of people to the imperatives of state security. Whether directly or indirectly, it provided a pretext for murder and mayhem, even if the victims tended not to be citizens of the United States or the USSR.[403]
[1] Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941; reprinted in Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 159-171. For background on Luce, see Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Knopf, 2010).
[2] See Walter LaFeber, “Illusions of the American Century,” in Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century: A Postmortem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[3] Greg Grandin, in Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2006), argues that U.S. hegemony in Latin America provided the model for U.S. global hegemony extending from the Cold War to the post-Cold War era. See also, Roger Peace, “’Yankee Imperialism,’ 1901-1934,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2018, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/yankee-imperialism.
[4] Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 2; and George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 597.
[5] “Worldwide Deaths in World War II,” National WWII Museum, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war.
[6] D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, Vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1961), 252.
[7] Prime Minister Winston Churchill Speech at the Mansion House, London, Nov 10, 1942, reported in the New York Times, November 11, 1942, http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1942/421110b.html.
[8] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 3. References to “U.S. leaders” in this essay summarize a general view in Washington rather than specifying particular perspectives of individual officials. With the exception of Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, these perspectives did not range so far as to challenge the Washington consensus (see Section III of this essay). Among the major players in the Truman administration were State Department officials James Byrnes, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Robert Lovett, military officials Robert Patterson, James Forrestal, Paul Nitze, and Admiral William Leahy, and diplomats George Kennan, Averell Harriman, and John McCloy. Forrestal, a wealthy Wall Street investor, was perhaps the most hawkish of the bunch. Acheson changed with the times from moderately friendly toward the Soviet Union to a determined foe.
[9] New York Times, June 24, 1941, quoted in Arnold A. Offner, “’Another Such Victory’: President Truman, American Foreign Policy, and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 23 (Spring 1999), 132.
[10] Arnold A. Offner, “President Truman and the Origins of the Cold War,” February 17, 2011, BBC History, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/truman_01.shtml. See also, Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 268-70. Michael H. Hunt, in The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained & Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), adds another dimension to Truman’s personality – racial and religious prejudice. He writes of Truman (p. 199): “In his early years he referred to Mexico as ‘Greaserdom’ and Slavic peoples as ‘bohunks.’ His military service during World War I introduced him to ‘kike town’ (New York), evoked the stereotype of the avaricious Jew, widened his range of reference to include ‘frogeater’ for the French and ‘Dago’ for the Italians and stimulated a hatred for Germans. ‘They have no hearts or souls,’ he wrote home in 1918. The next world war introduced ‘Jap’ into his vocabulary. Once in the White House, Truman continued to think along well-worn racial lines. The Japanese were, he wrote in Potsdam in 1945, ‘savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatics.’ Accustomed to the southern pattern of race relations that had prevailed in his hometown of Independence, Missouri, Truman continued to refer to blacks as ‘nigs’ and ‘niggers’ at least as late as 1946…. When the president directed his gaze abroad to newly independent countries, he still thought in crude stereotypes…. [Only Anglo-Saxon Great Britain was deemed worthy of praise.] He lavished on the British, whom he saw as the source of American law and as close allies, the most fulsome praise he could manage for any foreigners, noting that ‘fundamentally … our basic ideas are not far apart.’”
[11] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 599, 603. D. F. Fleming, in The Cold War and Its Origins (p. 292) comments that Truman’s “handling of the Potsdam Conference [July 1945] was a far cry from Roosevelt’s mediating but firm and conciliatory role in the earlier conferences.” Truman wrote in his diary of his growing impatience at the meeting, telling Churchill and Stalin that if they did not get to the main issues he was “going to pack up and go home.” Truman added that he “felt like blowing the roof off the place.” [Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: 1945, Year of Decisions (New York: Signet, 1955), Vol. 1, 354, 359, 360, 364.]
[12] Quoted in Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 14-15. Placing this comment in context, Byrnes had gone to Moscow and made an old-fashioned horse-trading deal with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in which the U.S. would recognize Soviet-imposed governments of Romania and Bulgaria in exchange for Soviet acquiescence to U.S. domination in Japan and preemptive influence in China. Truman chastised Byrnes for continuing Roosevelt’s balance-of-power approach to global stability.
[13] Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), viii.
[14] See Richard J. Barnett, Intervention and Revolution: America’s Confrontation with Insurgent Movements Around the World (New York: New American Library, 1972), 20. The idea that any country receiving aid from the Soviet Union made it an ally of “communism” ignored a lesson from America’s own history: the U.S. received aid from the French in its War for Independence (1775-83) but had no intention of imitating France’s monarchical form of government.
[15] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 51-52.
[16] Quoted in Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 77.
[17] “Truman Doctrine: President Harry S. Truman’s Address before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.
[18] Edward Pessen, Losing Our Souls: The American Experience in the Cold War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 203.
[19] Raymond J. Haberski Jr., God and War: American Civil Religion since 1945 (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2012), 20, 23. See also, Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style of American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), which examines the “re-emergence of fundamentalism in politics” in the early Cold War era (72). On McCarthyism, see Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946-48 (New York: Schocken Books, 1974); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979; and Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston/New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
[20] A distinction should be made between popular and scholarly U.S. history. The former remains beholden to U.S. exceptionalist myths regarding American grandeur and purity. Scholars are divided on the character of U.S. foreign policy and have intensely debated the question of primary responsibility for the Cold War. During the early Cold War period, most U.S. historians assumed a nationalist perspective, reinforcing U.S. political leaders in blaming the Soviet Union and “communist” groups for global unrest and aggression. With the publication of William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and Gabriel Kolko’s The Roots of American Foreign Policy (1969), coupled with rising protests against the Vietnam War, critical “revisionist” views of the Cold War gained a wider reading and became dominant in certain areas – histories of the Vietnam War and U.S.-Latin American relations. When the Cold War ended in 1991, nationalist-minded historians such as John Lewis Gaddis declared victory for the U.S. and wrote off the Cold War’s carnage by referring to the era as “the long peace,” publishing a book by that name in 1989. Others, including Edward Pessen, Marilyn Young, Greg Grandin, and Stephen Rabe, to name a few scholars, highlighted the debilitating effects of U.S. Cold War policies. Melvyn Leffler, in his comprehensive account, A Preponderance of Power (1992), readily acknowledges that U.S. leaders aimed not merely for containment but for a “preponderance of power,” which is to say, hegemony, but he argues, “Preponderance did not mean domination” (19). This website essay argues, contrarily, that the evidence so expertly laid out by Leffler does indeed indicate U.S. domination, and often brutal domination, in line with Pessen’s comments. As such, this essay aligns with the “revisionist” school of historians although it recognizes a complex set of motivations rather than singling out economic interests.
[21] While official U.S. propaganda was indeed extensive, there was also an element of self-flattering self-deception among U.S. citizens who bought into the idea that it was America’s new “manifest destiny” to save the world from evil totalitarians and bring freedom and democracy to all. See Walter L. Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
[22] William Blum, a free-lance journalist and the author of numerous critical studies of U.S. foreign policy, explained American exceptionalism in a speech in June 2018, as follows: “The most basic of these basic [American] beliefs, I think, is a deeply-held conviction that no matter what the US does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the government of the United States means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on many occasions cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always honorable, even noble. Of that the great majority of Americans are certain.” “Talk delivered by William Blum at the Left Forum in New York, June 2, 2018,” The Anti-Empire Report #158 by William Blum, Published June 26th, 2018, https://williamblum.org/aer/read/158. Blum died on December 9, 2018. See also, David Ray Griffin, The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2018); and Steven M. Walt, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” Foreign Policy, October 2011.
[23] As background on ideological framing, see Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Boston: South End Press, 1992), Chapter One, online: http://goodtimesweb.org/analysis/2015/Noam-Chomsky-1992-Deterring-Democracy.pdf.
[24] President Ronald Reagan used the term “evil empire” to describe the Soviet Union in a speech in 1983.
[25] “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950): A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950, TOP SECRET,” pages 3, 5, https://www.citizensource.com/History/20thCen/NSC68.PDF. According to James R. Blaker in United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1990), Table 1, the U.S. maintained over 1,000 foreign military bases in 1947; that number declined to 582 in 1949, then rose to 815 in 1953, 883 in 1957, and 1,014 in 1967; cited in “U.S. Military Bases and Empire, Monthly Review, March 1, 2002, http://monthlyreview.org/2002/03/01/u-s-military-bases-and-empire. U.S. aircraft capable of delivering atomic bombs were stationed at British airbases beginning in April 1949; see Ken Young, “US ‘Atomic Capability’ and the British Forward Bases in the Early Cold War,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (2007), 131. For a review of internal debates over foreign bases within the military departments of the Truman administration, see Elliott V. Converse III, Circling the Earth: United States Plans for a Postwar Overseas Military Base System 1942-1948 (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, August 2005), https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a439386.pdf.
[26] A more formal system for inculcating empire identity was developed in Great Britain through the annual celebration of “Empire Day.” The ritual was introduced in 1904. According to Jim English, in “Empire Day in Britain, 1904-1958,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March 2006), “the annual festival of empire was able to traverse class lines and establish an imperial consciousness in the minds of working-class children” (248). Indeed, schoolchildren were the main targets. “Lessons and lectures were centred on the teaching of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and its civilizing mission, the empire story (replete with myths and heroes) and the vast geographical extent of the British empire. Thus, Empire Day could be presented as the righteous celebration of what was generally held to be a set of social facts – the primacy and destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, the virtuous progression of the British empire, and the common bond of an ‘imagined community’ inhabiting a vast and far flung empire” (249). Replace the words “Anglo-Saxon race” with “United States,” and “British empire” with “American influence,” and the description would aptly describe nationalist education in the United States, particularly in the early Cold War era.
[27] A classic work disparaging socialism is Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago, 1944). A condensed version appeared in the April 1945 edition of Reader’s Digest).
[28] Another aspect of the government-business collusion in the foreign policy arena is the formation of a military-industrial complex, a massive subsidy to the private sector.
[29] “Jawaharlal Nehru, excerpts from his speeches and writings,” Mainstream Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 24, May 30, 2009, https://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article1401.html. See also, C. P. Bhambhri and C. P. Bhamberi, “Nehru and the Socialist Movement in India (1920-47),” The Indian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1969): 130–48.
[30] Thucydides, “’Melian Dialogue,’ adapted by Suresht Bald from Complete Writings: The Peloponnesian War,” in Karen A. Mingst and Jack L. Snyder, Essential Readings in World Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, second edition), 18-20. Note that Sparta was no better than Athens in its treatment of other city-states; former Spartan allies Thebes and Corinth joined Athens in a war against Sparta in 395.
[31] See Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). An interesting twist is that many Eastern Europeans who were oppressed by Soviet-backed governments turned to the U.S. for support and inspiration, while people in the Third World oppressed by U.S. allies (Britain and France) and client states sometimes turned to the Soviet Union. The U.S. aided liberation movements in Eastern Europe, while the Soviets often aided anti-imperialist movements in Asia and Africa.
[32] Socialist theory can be traced back to French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), who distinguished between the working class and a smaller “idling class” that parasitically lived off the work of others through their financial investments and wealth. Early “utopian socialists” included French philosopher Francois Marie Charles Fourier and Welsh manufacturer Robert Owen. The latter founded a model community, based on common ownership of property, in the state of Indiana in the mid-1820s, called New Harmony; the experiment was short-lived.
[33] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” February 1848, reprinted with background information, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf. According to Sam Ben-Meir, professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City, the Manifesto was originally “published anonymously and in German by the Workers’ Educational Association in 1848, an English translation of the Manifesto would not appear until 1850. For the first decades of its life the Manifesto was mostly forgotten, and it would not be published in the United States until 1872.” Sam Bier, “The Communist Manifesto Turns 172,” History News Network, February 13, 2020, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174316.
[34] Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals under the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished, after labor has become not merely a means to live but has become itself the primary necessity of life, after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Cited in Harry Magdoff, “The Meaning of Work: A Marxist Perspective,” Monthly Review, October 1, 2006, https://monthlyreview.org/2006/10/01/the-meaning-of-work-a-marxist-perspective.
[35] Marx seems not to have ignored the ideas of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, the French philosopher who published The Spirit of Laws (1748) a century before the Communist Manifesto. Montesquieu critiqued the nature of despotic governments and set forth the general idea of checks and balances in government.
[36] La Liberté Speech delivered by Karl Marx on 8 September 1872, in Amsterdam, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/09/08.htm. Karl Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery north of London. Born in Trier, Germany on May 5, 1818, he lived in Berlin, Paris and London. He resided in London from 1849 until his death in 1883.
[37] Sydney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 298. The Pledge of Allegiance coined by Francis Bellamy in 1892 read: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” With the aid of the National Education Association, Bellamy and the editors of Youth’s Companion got the Pledge adopted as part of the National Public School Celebration on Columbus Day 1892.
[38] Fine, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State, 332.
[39] Irving Howe, Socialism and America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, 1985), 16. According to Howe, socialist groups in the U.S. “ranged dramatically in style, tone, and ethnicity, from German social democrats in Wisconsin, to Yiddish-speaking Jewish socialists in New York, to southwestern socialists who mixed their socialism with Christian revivalism, to the radical Wobblies in the West who stirred up revolt by low-paid agricultural workers and miners” (30-31). See also, Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
[40] “Socialist Party Platform of 1912, Indianapolis, Indiana, May 12, 1912,” http://sageamericanhistory.net/progressive/docs/SocialistPlat1912.htm.
[41] John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York, James Pott & Co., 1902).
[42] E. V. Debs, “The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech,” June 16, 1918, https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/canton.htm. Debs was released from prison after serving almost three years, his sentence commuted by President Warren Harding. The Espionage Act, passed by Congress in June 1917, empowered the federal government to imprison anyone who “interfered” with conscription or the enlistment of soldiers. The penalties set forth were harsh, up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. In May 1918, the Sedition Act was added to the Espionage Act, making it a federal offense to use “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the Constitution, the government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these acts.
[43] Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism,” Monthly Review (vol. 1, no.1), May 1949, republished in Monthly Review, May 1992, pp. 2, 6, 7, 8.
[44] See Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, The Russians Are Coming, again {the first cold war as tragedy, the second as farce} (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). See also, Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Wilson Administration’s War on Russian Bolshevism,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2018, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/ww1-russia.
[45] V. I. Lenin, “Third Congress of the Communist International, June 22-July 12, 1921,” endnote 1, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jun/12.htm.
[46] Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism, 1994), 11.
[47] Lucia Maxwell (Chemical Warfare Bureau), “Spider Web Chart: The Socialist-Pacifist Movement in America Is an Absolutely Fundamental and Integral Part of International Socialism,” published in The Dearborn Independent, XXIV (22 March 1924): 11, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, website: http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/wilpf/doc3.htm#spiderweb.
[48] John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), 173, 16; and Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism, 18.
[49] James A. Haggerty, “Anti-Communism Revolt, Dewey Efficiency, Truman Angle Cited,” New York Times, November 7, 1946, p. A13; and “New York Attorney General elections,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Attorney_General_elections#1942%E2%80%931990.
[50] Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 25.
[51] Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism, 14, 12.
[52] Douglas Little, “Antibolshevism and American Foreign Policy, 1919-1939: The Diplomacy of Self-Delusion,” American Quarterly 35, no. 4 (1983), 380-81.
[53] David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side: The United States & Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 50-52.
[54] Little, “Antibolshevism and American Foreign Policy,” 385.
[55] Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 115. Michael H. Hunt, in Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), similarly notes (p. 139) that the U.S. favored “a strong man” in other countries to check leftist movements and parties: “Kellogg, worried by leftist activities in Italy and China, welcomed the rise of Mussolini and Chiang Kai-shek to power. To put a stop to supposed communist infiltration in Nicaragua, he dispatched [Henry] Stimson on a mission that paved the way for the dominance of the Somoza family … In Cuba State Department representatives aborted one left-leaning revolution in 1933 and guided [Fulgensio] Batista toward the position of power he would hold until the late 1950s. Fears of Comintern subversion in Spain and Greece made U.S. policymakers sympathetic to military strongmen there, [Francisco] Franco in Madrid and Metaxas in Athens.”
[56] “Transformation and Terror,” in Glenn E. Curtis, ed., Russia: A Country Study (Washington: Government Printing Office for the Library of Congress, 1996). On Soviet terror, see Alexey Timofeychev, “Struggling with the facts: How terrible was Stalin’s Terror?” Russia Beyond (website), July 28, 2017, https://www.rbth.com/arts/history/2017/07/28/struggling-with-the-facts-how-terrible-was-stalins-terror_812958. According to Timofeychev, “In 1990, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov said that from 1930 to 1953 nearly 3.8 million people were jailed, and 786,000 were sentenced to death. The accuracy of these numbers is not challenged by professional historians.”
[57] Quoted in Robert Heilbronner, “A Vision of Socialism,” Dissent (Vol. 36, No. 3), Fall 1989, p. 563. Notwithstanding Harrington’s comments, other leftists were reluctant to openly criticize the Soviet Union, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, partly to avoid adding to the anti-Soviet hype and partly because the Soviet Union was deemed a necessary to support anti-imperialism and contain Western powers. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union practiced a more limited imperialism in Eastern Europe. Soviet tanks rolled into East Germany in 1953, into Hungary in 1956, and into Czechoslovakia in 1968.
[58] See William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 427; and Nicholas Daniloff, Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 107. On a personal note, as a boy growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I routinely saw this misquoted statement, “We will bury you!” on public buses, accompanied by menacing pictures of Khrushchev banging his shoe on a lectern (which he did at the UN General Assembly meeting on October 12, 1960).
[59] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 7.
[60] Ibid.
[61] “1945 French legislative election,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_French_legislative_election.
[62] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 7.
[63] The covert campaign in Italy was authorized under NSC 4a in December 1947. For a concise review of the campaign to undermine leftist political prospects in the 1948 Italian elections, see William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Intervention since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), 27-34. “Black propaganda” refers to spreading false stories and attributing those stories to individuals or groups in order to discredit them; for example, planting a story that secret documents have been discovered revealing a communist plot to take over the government and execute its leaders, and the like.
[64] Wyatt made this statement in a 1995 interview which was included in the 1998 CNN film documentary, “Cold War,” cited in Tim Weiner, “F. Mark Wyatt, 86, C.E.I. Officer, Is Dead,” New York Times, July 6, 2006.
[65] Calder Walton, “Intelligence, U.S. Foreign Relations, and Historical Amnesia,” Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, April 2019, 37. See also, Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, 1945-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
[66] Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 163-64.
[67] Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate (New York: Praeger, 1974), 84-85, 148.
[68] See Charter of the United Nations, Chapter XII, Articles 75 and 76. An earlier disillusionment occurred in 1919. President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic pronouncements in favor of “self-determination” were greeted with wild admiration and hope by millions of people in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia living under colonial rule. Wilson’s idealism, however, proved hollow as the Treaty of Versailles actually enabled the British and French to expand their empires. The U.S. thus forfeited a golden opportunity to establish itself as global leader of the anti-imperialist freedom movement, which the Soviet Union gained by default.
[69] Robert M. Blum, “Ho Chi Minh and the United States: 1944-1946,” in The United States and Vietnam, 1944-1947, a study based on the Pentagon Papers, prepared by the staff of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Study No. 2, p. 10; and “Letter from Ho Chi Minh to President Harry S. Truman, 2/28/1946,” DocsTeach, U.S. National Archives, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/ho-chi-minh-to-truman.
[70] See Su-Kyoung Hwang, Korea’s Grievous War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2016, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/korean-war.
[71] U.S. Department of State, “Decolonization of Asia and Africa, 1945–1960,” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/asia-and-africa.
[72] “List of former communist states and socialist states,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_communist_states_and_socialist_states.
[73] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 9.
[74] President Truman spoke to the issue in a speech at Baylor University on March 6, 1947. Linking political freedom to “freedom of enterprise,” he warned that unless the whole world adopted the open market system, the U.S. would be forced to alter its own free market system and adopt government controls (which the U.S., in fact, had already done in many areas of the economy). “Address on Foreign Economic Policy, Delivered at Baylor University, March 6, 1947,” The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-foreign-economic-policy-delivered-baylor-university.
[75] George Kennan, U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff Memorandum 23, February 24, 1948, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memo_PPS23_by_George_Kennan.
[76] Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 151; and Paterson, “Foreign Aid under Wraps: The Point Four Program,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 56, no. 2, 1972: 119-126.
[77] “Final Communiqué of the Asian-African conference of Bandung (24 April 1955),” CVCE.eu, https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/final_communique_of_the_asian_african_conference_of_bandung_24_april_1955-en-676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html; and “Bandung Conference,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Bandung-Conference.
[78] “Neutralism – The Eisenhower administration and neutralism,” American Foreign Relations, https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Neutralism-The-eisenhower-administration-and-neutralism.html; and “Foreign News: A New Look at Neutralism,” Time, October 24, 1960. See also, H. W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
[79] “National Security Council Report, NSC 5902/1: Statement of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America,” Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1958-1960, American Republics, Volume V, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v05/d11.
[80] See Roger Peace, John Marciano, and Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Vietnam War,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2017, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/vietnam-war.
[81] Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 206, 209; and H. W. Singer, “The New International Economic Order: An Overview,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 16, no. 4 (1978), 540.
[82] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136.
[83] Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 222.
[84] Henry A. Wallace, “The Century of the Common Man,” delivered 8 May 1942, Grand Ballroom, Commodore Hotel, New York, NY, accessed on American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/henrywallacefreeworldassoc.htm.
[85] Regarding Henry Wallace’s views and activities, see Oliver Stone and Pater Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 199-205. On the trials and tribulations of critics of the early Cold War, see Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, 95-113.
[86] Mary Welek Atwell, “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Cold War Consensus,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1979), 102-03. See also, “Eleanor & Harry: The Correspondence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, edited by Steve Neal, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/node/323446. Eleanor Roosevelt’s son, Elliott, was less congenial toward Truman. He wrote a scathing account in his best-selling book, As He Saw It (1946), accusing Truman of squandering his father’s legacy and blaming the United States and Great Britain for the collapse of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.
[87] Fredrik Logevall, “Bernath Lecture: A Critique of Containment,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 48, No. 4 (September 2004), 497-98. The lecture took place at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in June 2004. In another study, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Harvard University Press, 2009), Logevall and co-author Craig Campbell laud U.S. leaders for their conciliatory treatment of Western European allies but note a steep price paid in other lands: “Accurate numbers are hard to come by, but certainly U.S. policies in the Third World after 1945 led to the death or maiming of several million civilians who had never raised a hand against the United States. If the vast majority of Americans emerged from the Cold War unharmed, the same cannot be said for a great many others in a great many places” (361).
[88] Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 66.
[89] “National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, Washington, June 18, 1948,” FRUS, 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292. See also, Gregory Miklovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2000), 42-45; and Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 213-14.
[90] James Lee Ray, American Foreign Policy and Political Ambition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2014), 85.
[91] “’More Bang for the Buck:’ U.S. Nuclear Strategy and Missile Development 1945-1965,” Colloquium on Contemporary History, January 12, 1994 No. 9, Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/m/more-bang-buck.html; and NSC-30, September 16, 1948, “United States Policy on Atomic Warfare,” FRUS 1948, 1, pp. 624-28.
[92] Wittner, Cold War America, 259.
[93] “The President’s News Conference, November 30, 1950,” Public Papers Harry S. Truman, 1945-1953, no. 295, Truman Presidential Library & Museum.
[94] Donald O. Dewey, “Never Has Russia Stood So High: ‘The New York Times’ Assessment, 1941-1942,” 1986, Educational Resources Information Center, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED275588.pdf, page 6.
[95] Alexander Potemkin, “A handshake that made history,” April 25, 2015, Russia Beyond website, https://www.rbth.com/arts/2015/04/25/elbe_day_a_handshake_that_made_history_45455.html; and Studs Terkel, “The Good War,” An Oral History of World War II (New York: The New Press, 1984), 449.
[96] Wittner, Cold War America, 15.
[97] Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 255.
[98] Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 6-7.
[99] Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 36; and Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 63.
[100] Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 38-39.
[101] Ibid., 38.
[102] “The Yalta Conference, February 1945,” The Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/yalta.asp.
[103] William Larsh, “Yalta and the American Approach to Free Elections in Poland,” The Polish Review, vol. 40, no. 3, 1995: 267–280; and Richard F. Staar, Richard F. “Elections in Communist Poland,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, vol. 2, no. 2, 1958: 200-218.
[104] Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 33.
[105] Ibid., 31.
[106] Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 50-51.
[107] Ibid., 51.
[108] Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 20.
[109] Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, 111.
[110] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 77.
[111] “George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram,’ February 22, 1946, original scan, Wilson Center Digital Archive, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116178, pages 4, 14. This telegram had enough nuance in it to stimulate debate among scholars of foreign policy for the next 70 years. Added to this was Kennan’s mercurial personality which sometimes criticized militaristic containment and at other times advocated a ruthless policy of aggressive rollback. Kennan elaborated on his Long Telegram in an anonymous article in Foreign Affairs of July 1947, setting off a public debate on “containment.” On the debate over Kennan, see Melvyn P. Leffler, “Was the Cold War Necessary?” Diplomatic History 15, no. 2 (1991): 265-75; reviewed works: Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) and Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
[112] “Nikolai Novikov, Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Telegram, September 1946,” https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/novikov.htm; and Jenny Thompson and Sherry Thompson, The Kremlinologist: Llewellyn E. Thompson, American’s Man in Cold War Moscow (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2018), 58.
[113] Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 37; and John O Iatrides, “George F. Kennan and the Birth of Containment: The Greek Test Case.” World Policy Journal 22, no. 3 (2005), 129..
[114] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 56.
[115] See Ryan, Henry B. “A New Look at Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech.” The Historical Journal, vol. 22, no. 4, 1979, esp. p. 896.
[116] Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946, International Churchill Society, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace.
[117] “Churchill Speech Hailed,” New York Times, March 6, 1946, cited in Jacob R. Weaver, “The Rhetoric of Cold War: Churchill’s 1946 Fulton Speech,” July 6, 2018, The Churchill Project, https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/rhetoric-churchill-fulton-address/#_ftnref28. H. Bruce Franklin, in Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), writes: “With the magic wand of his oratory, Churchill transformed all Communist parties, including those heroic leaders of European Resistance against Nazism and Fascism, into ‘Communist parties or firth columns [that] constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization,’ while he transformed the ‘British Empire,’ then overlord of about a quarter of the earth’s surface, including enslaved colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, into the guiding light of global freedom and democracy” (p. 57).
[118] “American Relations With The Soviet Union” by Clark Clifford [“Clifford-Elsey Report”], September 24, 1946. Conway Files, Truman Papers, page 3, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/report-american-relations-soviet-union-clark-clifford-clifford-elsey-report?documentid=NA&pagenumber=1.
[119] Ibid., 4, 11-12, 68.
[120] Ibid., 8.
[121] Ibid., 77-78, 79.
[122] Ibid., 72.
[123] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 132-34.
[124] Hendrik Meijer, Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 356.
[125] Truman also vaguely addressed the situation in Turkey, saying that Turkey needed U.S. aid “for the purpose of effecting that modernization necessary for the maintenance of its national integrity,” intimating that the Soviet Union was pressuring Turkey in some way. What the Soviets had actually done was request base rights in the Dardanelles region, a crucial shipping lane bordering the Black Sea. According to Melvyn Leffler in A Preponderance of Power (78), “the Soviets had not submitted an ultimatum and had not engaged in any threats or intimidation.”
[126] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 616-17. The addition of the alleged Soviet threat to Turkey (previous endnote) adds more weight to the claim that the Soviet Union and communism are an imminent threat the West.
[127] “Truman Doctrine: President Harry S. Truman’s Address before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947,” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.
[128] Walter Lippmann, The Cold War, A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1947), 10.
[129] Theodore Roosevelt, “Fourth Annual Message to Congress,” December 6, 1904, https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/5487; and “Wilson’s War Message to Congress, April 2, 1917,” WWI Document Archive, https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wilson’s_War_Message_to_Congress.
[130] Lydia Saad, “Gallup Vault: Truman’s Doctrine Earned Him Public Kudos,” March 9, 2017, https://news.gallup.com/vault/205742/gallup-vault-truman-doctrine-earned-public-kudos.aspx. President Truman’s job approval rating rose from 48% in January 1947 to 63% in late March.
[131] “The Truman Doctrine and America’s Future,” The Christian Century 64 (April 16, 1947), 483, cited in Robert Shaffer, “The Christian Century: Protestants Protesting Harry Truman’s Cold War,” Peace and Change, Vo. 42, No. 1, January 2017, 106.
[132] Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 90-91.
[133] Ibid., 90.
[134] Caute, The Great Fear, 26-27; and Robert Justin Goldstein, “Prelude to McCarthyism: The Making of a Blacklist,”Prologue Magazine, Fall 2006, Vol. 38, No. 3, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/fall/agloso.html.
[135] Caute, The Great Fear, 27.
[136] Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and Origins of McCarthyism, 212; and Caute, The Great Fear, 27-28. Caute notes that Truman spoke up for free speech at times, but never acknowledged the Pandora’s Box he had opened with his loyalty oaths and hyperbolic anti-communist rhetoric, which others in his administration amplified. Caute describes Truman as having a “Jekyll-and-Hyde” persona (35).
[137] Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 221.
[138] Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1996), 103. “Anti-communism” became a catchall phrase for discrediting and disempowering the left, labor unions, and the emerging social welfare state. The focus on anti-communism completely obliterated the memory of right-wing, pro-Nazi Christian Nationalists – a group associated with Father Charles Coughlin – who were preparing to overthrow the U.S. government through violence before their arrest by the FBI in January 1940. See Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
[139] Caute, The Great Fear, 20-21. The same point was made by former president Herbert Hoover in a nationwide radio broadcast, as reported in the New York Times on January 28, 1952: “There is in Europe today no such public alarm as has been fanned up in the United States. None of those nations has declared emergencies or taken measures comparable with ours. They do not propagandize war fears or war psychosis such as we get out of Washington.” Cited in Carl Marzani, We Can Be Friends (Topical Books Publishers, 1952), pp. 20-21, https://archive.org/details/WeCanBeFriends/page/n11.
[140] Tim Weiner, “A 1950 Plan: Arrest 12,000 And Suspend Due Process, New York Times, December 23, 2007, p. 30; and U.S. First Army Headquarters, “How to Spot a Communist,” 1955, https://www.niu.edu/~rfeurer/labor/PDF%20Files/How%20to%20Spot%20a%20Communist.pdf.
[141] Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 42-43.
[142] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 622; and Scott Lucas and Kaeten Mistry, “Illusions of Coherence: George F. Kennan, U.S. Strategy and Political Warfare in the Early Cold War, 1946-1950,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 1 (2009): 39-66.
[143] “National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, NSC 10/2, June 18, 1948, State Department Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292; and “Report to the President by the National Security Council, November 23, 1948, NSC 20/4,” FRUS, 1948, General: the United Nations, Volume 1, Part 2, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/d60. See also, Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). The Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia shocked the West, but U.S. intelligence did not view it as a sign of Soviet expansion. On March 10, 1948, just after the coup, the CIA denied that “this event reflects any sudden increase in Soviet capabilities, more aggressive intentions, or any change in current Soviet policy or tactics.” Cited in Samuel J. Walker, “No More Cold War”: American Foreign Policy and the 1948 Soviet Peace Offensive,” Diplomatic History 5, no. 1 (1981), 77.
[144] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 618; and Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 158. William A. Williams, in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Norton, 2009; orig. pub. 1959), quotes Secretary of State George C. Marshall who declared that, unless the plan was adopted, “the cumulative loss of foreign markets and sources of supply would unquestionably have a depressing influence on our domestic economy and would drive us to increase measures of government control” (271). In Williams’s view, the Marshall Plan was part of a long-running “Open Door” foreign policy in which “the profitability of America’s corporate system depended upon overseas economic expansion” (270).
[145] Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 65, 66.
[146] Bradley F. Abrams, “The Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak Democracy: Elements of Interdependency,” in Martin A. Schain, ed., The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 108
[147] Walker, “No More Cold War”: American Foreign Policy and the 1948 Soviet Peace Offensive,” 77; and Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 139, 144-45, 149.
[148] “Foreign Assistance Act of 1948,” The George C. Marshall Foundation, https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/the-marshall-plan/foreign-assistance-act-1948; and Sarah Milov, The Cigarette: A Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 88.
[149] Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 82.
[150] “President Harry S. Truman, Brief remarks at the treaty signing ceremony, April 4, 1949,” quoted in “Rare Chance to View Original NATO Treaty,” National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), press release March 27, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2019/nr19-42. Six Western European nations remained neutral: Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, and Yugoslavia.
[151] “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950),” pages 3, 44, 15.
[152] When Stalin and Kim II-sung met in Moscow in April 1950, Kim assured Stalin that the U.S. would not intervene based on the fact that the U.S. did not directly intervene in the Chinese civil war. Kim also put forth the idea that 200,000 Communist Party members in South Korea would support the North Korean invasion. Stalin approved, but warned Kim that “if you get kicked in the teeth [by the United States], I will not lift a finger to help you.” Quoted in Mark Kramer, “Ideology and the Cold War,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), 543.
[153] Jaberski, God and War: American Civil Religion since 1945, 34. See also, Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011).
[154] See U.S. Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide, essays on the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
[155] Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 391, 397-99; and Lawrence S. Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 13.
[156] Joseph J. Mangano and Janette D. Sherman, “Elevated in Vivo Strontium-90 from Nuclear Weapons Test Fallout Among Cancer Decedents: A Case-Control Study of Deciduous Teeth,” International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2011), 137-38.
[157] Wittner, Confronting the Bomb, 53. The U.S. conducted a total of 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. See “Marshall Islands,” Atomic Heritage Foundation, https://www.atomicheritage.org/location/marshall-islands.
[158] Stevenson and a group of nuclear experts presented a grim assessment of the health consequences of America’s nuclear testing in a 25-minute film; available online: Sarah Robley, “’The Man Who Was Right Too Soon’: Nuclear Test Ban film,” Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, https://blogs.princeton.edu/reelmudd/2015/01/the-man-who-was-right-too-soon-nuclear-test-ban-film.
[159] Wittner, Confronting the Bomb, 53, 79; and “Memorandum of conversation, White House,” September 9, 1956, FRUS 20: 427.
[160] “National Security Council Report, June 3, 1957, NSC 5707/8, Basic National Security Policy, Note by the Executive Secretary to the National Security Council,” FRUS, 1955, National Security Policy, Volume XIX, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v19/d120. The “downwinders” and others affected by radioactive contamination eventually won a settlement in 1990 that paid up to $50,000 for each living person exposed, though the burden of proof was strict and almost half of the 6,008 people who applied were rejected. Marie I. Boutté, “Compensating for Health: The Acts and Outcomes of Atomic Testing.” Human Organization 61, no. 1 (2002): 44. See also, Dave Philipps, “Veterans Feel Cost of U.S. Nuclear Tests: Troops Who Cleaned Up Radioactive Islands Can’t Get Car,” New York Times, January 29, 2017, A1; and Sarah Alisabeth Fox, Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
[161] Wittner, Confronting the Bomb, 56-57, 64-65.
[162] Documents related to the proposed use of nuclear weapons against China in 1958 were secretly copied by Daniel Ellsberg around 1970 when he copied the Pentagon Papers. The latter were released in 1971, but he waited to release the China papers for another fifty years. Charlie Savage, “The U.S. Nuclear War That Almost Happened,” New York Times, May 23, 2021, p. A14; and Gareth Porter, “Eisenhower rejected military chiefs’ demand for nuclear war on China, classified account of ’58 Taiwan Strait crisis reveals,” Monthly Review online, May 31, 2021, https://mronline.org/2021/05/31/eisenhower-rejected-military-chiefs-demand-for-nuclear-war-on-china-classified-account-of-58-taiwan-strait-crisis-reveals/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=eisenhower-rejected-military-chiefs-demand-for-nuclear-war-on-china-classified-account-of-58-taiwan-strait-crisis-reveals..
[163] Ibid., Chapters Seven and Eight; and Roger C. Peace, A Just and Lasting Peace: The U.S. Peace Movement from the Cold War to Desert Storm (Chicago: Noble Press, 1991), Chapter Two. See also, “Treaties and Agreements,” Arms Control Association, https://www.armscontrol.org/treaties.
[164] Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007); and Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).
[165] Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 65. Regarding secrecy, following a 30-year waiting period, government documents related to U.S. foreign policy are supposed to be collected, published, and interpreted in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, albeit while still allowing for certain top-secret documents to remain classified. In the case of the U.S.-sponsored overthrow of the Iranian government in August 1953, the FRUS volume released in 1989, forty-six years later, omitted all mention of the U.S.- and British-backed overthrow and focused solely on oil negotiations. Criticized by some historians as a “fraud,” Congress passed legislation in 1991 mandating that FRUS provide “a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy.” Still, the CIA kept its secrets. In 2013, a trove of CIA records was released in response to Freedom of Information requests, which confirmed the CIA’s role in the coup; see Malcolm Byrne, ed., “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup,” August 19, 2013, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/#_ftnref4. The available documents finally made their way into a FRUS volume released in June 2017. This long period of secrecy served to protect U.S. officials from public scrutiny and legal repercussions. See Gregory Brew, “A Review of Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954: Iran, 1951-1954,” Passport (Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations), January 2018: 53-55.
[166] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 3, 7, 103, 109, 117. For other compendia of U.S. Cold War interventions, see Blum, Killing Hope; John Quigley, The Ruses for War: American Intervention since World War II (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992); Michael J. Sullivan III, American Adventurism Abroad: Invasions, Interventions, and Regime Changes since World War II (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006); and Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). O’Rourke compiled the following lists: Coup attempts: Iran 1952-53, Guatemala 1952-54, Indonesia 1954-58, Syria 1955-57 (aborted), Congo 1960, Dominican Republic 1960-61, British Guiana 1961-71, Chile 1962-73, South Vietnam 1963, Brazil 1964, Bolivia 1971, Libya 1982-89, Panama 1987-89 (failed, followed by U.S. invasion). Election interference: France 1947-52, Italy 1947-68 and 1972-73, Japan 1952-68, Indonesia 1954-58, Lebanon 1957-58, Laos 1959-73, British Guiana 1961-71, Dominican Republic 1961-62 and 1965-68, Chile 1962-73, Bolivia 1963-66, Somalia 1964-67, Thailand 1965-69, South Vietnam 1967-71, and Portugal 1974-75. Assassination plots: Syria 1955-57 (aborted), Congo 1960, Cuba 1960-68, South Vietnam 1963, and Dominican Republic 1965 (inadvertent). O’Rourke did not include a number of CIA actions in which she judged that CIA complicity had not been proven, as in the case of the overthrow of the government in Ghana in February 1966; see Seymour M. Hersh, “C.I.A. Said to Have Aided Plotters Who Overthrew Nkrumah in Ghana,” New York Times, May 9, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/09/archives/cia-said-to-have-aided-plotters-who-overthrew-nkrumah-in-ghana.html.
[167] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 7. Kissinger quoted in Newsweek, October 21, 1974, p. 5; and Anthony Lewis, “The Kissinger Doctrine,” New York Times, Feb. 27, 1975, p. 35.
[168] Ibid.
[169] Tim Weiner, “F. Mark Wyatt, 86, C.E.I. Officer, Is Dead,” New York Times, July 6, 2006. See also, Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Random House, 2008).
[170] Tim Weiner, “C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s,” New York Times, October 9, 1994. In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. adopted a neutral policy toward Japan, allowing left and right factions to compete in elections without interference, but as the Cold War heated up, the U.S. reversed course and sided with Japan’s corporate elite despite the fact that they had aided and abetted Japan’s militaristic expansionism. According to the diplomatic historian Fintan Hoey, “Following the surrender U.S. authorities had lifted the ban on left-wing political parties and labor unions, imposed a liberal constitution and carried out a major program of land redistribution. However, in 1947 a planned general strike was banned by General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Plans to break up Japan’s large industrial combines, the zaibatsu, were shelved. Figures associated with Japan’s wartime government and bureaucracy, once purged as dangerous militarists, were now welcomed back into public life. Conversely, a ‘Red Purge’ was carried out against Communists and other leftists. Not surprisingly, these changes engendered a sense of betrayal amongst Japanese progressives.” H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-19 (Dec. 9, 2019), Review of Jennifer M. Miller, Cold War Democracy: The United States and Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), https://hdiplo.org/to/RT21-19.
[171] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 112. Political scientist Dov Levin at Carnegie-Mellon University has identified 62 U.S. interventions in foreign elections between 1946 and 1989. See Peter Beinhart, “The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling,” The Atlantic, July 22, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-us-has-a-long-history-of-election-meddling/565538.
[172] Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5.
[173] For a brief review of the U.S. invasion of Grenada in October 1983, see Stephen Zunes, “The US Invasion of Grenada,” Foreign Policy in Focus, October 2003, https://archive.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2003/10grenada.htm.
[174] Christine Gray, International Law and the Use of Force (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018); and O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 3, 110.
[175] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 321. See also, Dov H. Levin, “When the Great Power Gets a Vote: The Effects of Great Power Electoral Interventions on Election Results,” International Studies Quarterly (2016) 60: 189–202. Levin does a statistical analysis of great power (US and USSR) intervention in 938 national-level elections in 148 different countries between 1946 and 2000, 82% of which occurred during the Cold War. Though he provides only a few examples of actual interventions, he does report that the U.S. engaged in 69% of electoral interventions, and the Soviet Union, in 31%. Using these figures, this would mean approximately 530 U.S. interventions and 250 Soviet interventions during the Cold War.
[176] Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 56. For a cogent overview of the many contradictions of the Kennedy administration, see Paterson, ed., Kennedy’s Quest for Victory, Introduction.
[177] Meticulous research and documents gathered through the Freedom of Information Act by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) enabled IPS to identify the exact date that the Nixon administration ordered the coup. “On September 15, 1970, during a twenty-minute meeting in the Oval Office between 3:25 pm and 3:45 pm, President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to foment a military coup in Chile. According to handwritten notes taken by CIA Director Richard Helms, Nixon issued explicit instructions to prevent the newly elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, from being inaugurated in November — or to create conditions to overthrow him if he did assume the presidency.” See Peter Kornbluh, ed., “‘Extreme Option: Overthrow Allende,'” National Security Archive Briefing Book #721, September 15, 2020, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-09-15/extreme-option-overthrow-allende.
[178] President Jimmy Carter, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights Remarks at a White House Meeting Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the Declaration’s Signing,” December 6, 1978, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/jimmy_carter.php.
[179] David Weissbrodt, “Human Rights Legislation and U.S. Foreign Policy: An Overview,” University of Minnesota Law School, 238-42, 256, http://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2141&context=gjicl.
[180] On April 13, 1953, three days after denouncing “Soviet brain perversion techniques,” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles secretly approved MK-Ultra, a top secret CIA program for “covert use of biological and chemical materials.” The program tested electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, and “a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals,” on vulnerable American subjects such as prisoners and men visiting prostitutes. Church Committee: Book II – Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Mary Ferrell Foundation, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1158, pp. 39-40, 57-58. On the Church committee, see Stanley Hochman and Eleanor Hochman, A Dictionary of Contemporary American History, 1945 to the Present (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 98-99. On CIA lethal mischief, see Brianna Nofil, “The CIA’s Appalling Human Experiments with Mind Control, 2019, https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments; Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt, 2019); and Jeremy Kuzmarov, “‘There’s Something Rotten in Denmark’: Frank Olson and the Macabre Fate of a CIA Whistleblower in the Early Cold War,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol. 8, Issue 1, Art. 3 (2020), https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol8/iss1/3.
[181] Church Committee, Volume 7, Hearings on Covert Action, p. 198, and Church Committee: Interim Report – Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Section 2, The President’s Initial Instruction and Background, Mary Ferrell Foundation, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1156, p. 227. The Church committee was allowed to see relatively few of the thousands of classified documents in the government’s files. In 1998, the Clinton administration approved a Declassification Project that produced 24,000 never-before-seen documents on Chile over the next two years, although still not all. One released document was a special cable from the CIA’s head of the Western Hemisphere, William Broe, to the CIA Chief of Station in Santiago, Henry Hecksher, on September 9, 1970, which initiated steps toward Allende’s overthrow: “The only prospect with any chance of success whatsoever is a military golpe either before or immediately after Allende’s assumption of power,” wrote Broe. Broe instructed Hecksher to undertake “the operational task of establishing those direct contacts with the Chilean military which are required to evaluate possibilities and, at least equally important, could be used to stimulate a golpe if and when a decision were made to do so.” See Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2004), xv-xx, 10; and Peter Kornbluh, ed., “Allende Wins”: Chile Marks 50th Anniversary of Salvador Allende’s Election,” National Security Archive Briefing Book #719, September 4, 1970, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-09-04/allende-wins. British scholar Jonathan Haslem, author of Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (Yale University Press, 2012), after culling through records at Chile’s Foreign Ministry Archive, reported: “I also interviewed James Schlesinger, formerly Secretary of Defense and director of CIA who, off the record, told me precisely how the White House orchestrated the coup…. Henry Kissinger at a meeting in New York gruffly berated me, saying I could not possibly know anything. But once he had seen my account, at our second encounter he wisely dropped the subject.” Cited in “Jonathan Haslam on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars,” H-Diplo Essay 250, Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars, 26 June 2020, https://hdiplo.org/to/E250.
[182] “U.S. policy on assassinations,” CNN.com/Law Center, November 4, 2001, http://edition.cnn.com/2002/LAW/11/04/us.assassination.policy. On the erosion of the “norm” prohibiting assassinations, see Andris Banka & Adam Quinn, “Killing Norms Softly: US Targeted Killing, Quasi-secrecy and the Assassination Ban,” Security Studies, Vol. 27, Issue 4 (2018): 665-703.
[183] The 134-page manual, titled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare,” was published in Spanish in 1984 and distributed to Nicaraguan rebels. See Virginia S. Williams, et. al., “Central America wars, 1980s,” esp. Section V, United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2018, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/central-america-wars. Another accountability measure enacted prior to the Church committee was the Hughes-Ryan Amendment of 1974 which prohibited the use of appropriated funds for CIA covert actions unless and until the President signed a “finding” for each such operation and submitted it to select Congressional committees. See also, “U.S. policy on assassinations,” CNN.com/Law Center, November 4, 2001, http://edition.cnn.com/2002/LAW/11/04/us.assassination.policy.
[184] Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (Toronto: George J. McLeod Limited, 1978); and Ralph McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Open Road Media, 1983; republished in 2015 with a new forward by CIA analyst David MacMichael). On David MacMichael, who resigned from the CIA in 1983 rather than pass on false reports about Sandinista Nicaragua, see Philip Taubman, “In From the Cold and Hot for Truth,” New York Times, July 11, 1984, B6. See also, Kaeten Mistry, “A Transnational Protest against the National Security State: Whistle-Blowing, Philip Agee, and Networks of Dissent, Journal of American History, Vol. 106, No. 2 (September 2019): 362-89.
[185] McGehee, Deadly Deceits, Conclusion. Ralph W. McGehee died in May 2020 at the age of 92. His obituary in the New York Times (May 15) noted that he had an “epiphany” in 1968 while serving in Vietnam, as “helicopter gunships circled overhead and B-52s dropped bombs in the distance. ‘My idealism, my patriotism, my ambition, my plans to be a good intelligence officer to help my country fight the Communist scourge – what the hell had happened?’ he wrote. ‘Why did we have to bomb the people we were trying to save? Why were we napalming young children? Why did the C.I.A., my employer for 16 years, report lies instead of the truth?’ He struggled to answer those questions for the rest of his life.” For a wide range of investigative articles on U.S. covert operations between 1978 and 2005, see CovertAction Magazine archives, https://covertactionmagazine.com/archives.
[186] From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador (1993), 36, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/file/ElSalvador-Report.pdf; Guatemala, Memory of Silence: Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (1999), 17, 42, https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/migrate/uploads/mos_en.pdf; and Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 168.
[187] Charles Babington, “Clinton: Support for Guatemala Was Wrong,” Washington Post, March 11, 1999, A1.
[188] Kevin Y. Kim, “Against the ‘American Century,’ Toward a Third World New Left: The Case of Helen Mears,” Diplomatic History, 43/1 (January 2019), 151.
[189] See Karl Weber, ed., The Best of I. F. Stone (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006). Regarding the less than stellar role of the media, New York Times associate editor Tom Wicker gave a speech in 1971 decrying “the failure of the American press … adequately to question the assumptions, the intelligence, the whole idea of America in the world – indeed the whole idea of the world – which led this country into the Vietnam War in the 1960s.” Tom Wicker, “The Tradition of Objectivity in the American Press: What’s Wrong with It,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 83 (1971), 85.
[190] The first three estates of democratic accountability refer to the balance of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. The “fourth estate” colloquially refers to the media and its essential role in informing the public about the workings and policies of government. The “fifth estate” is suggested here as a designation for the important role of historical scholarship in establishing accurate and truthful accounts of the past. On the role of historians in telling the truth about U.S. foreign policies, see Roger Peace, “Introduction: The Fifth Estate,” U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide, 2020.
[191] On specific U.S. interventions, see Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Lawrence Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991); Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations (New York: The New Press, 2013); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1983); Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick, Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba (USA: Gerard and Kuklick, 2015); Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention (1978); Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified: The CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: The New Press, 1998); Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965 (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005); Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability [Chile] (New York: The New Press, 2004); William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992 [Nicaragua and El Salvador] (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Brian D’Haeseleer, The Salvadoran Crucible: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency in El Salvador, 1979-1992 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017).
[192] For particular policies, eras, and regional contexts, see, for example, David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Hannah Gurman, Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (New York: New Press, 2012); and Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
[193] Notable critical studies of the “American empire” include William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Norton, 2009; orig. pub. 1959); Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1960 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000); Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Henry Holt, 2003); and Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).
[194] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 42-43.
[195] Blum, William Blum, Rogue State, 13-14.
[196] “Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961” (January 17, 1961), The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp.
[197] General Douglas MacArthur, “Address to the Annual Stockholders Sperry Rand Corporation” (30 July 1957), in Col. Edward T. Imparato, General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908-1964 (Turner Publishing, 2000), 206.
[198] Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, Vol. 6 of The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 293.
[199] Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 31-32.
[200] MacVeagh to Secretary of State, August 16, 1946, FRUS 1946, 7: 162, cited in Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 44.
[201] FRUS 1947, 5: 10-11, cited in Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 46-47.
[202] Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 87, 100, 228.
[203] Ibid., 104, 188.
[204] Horace Smith memorandum, November 17, 1947, U.S. National Archives Record Group 59, cited in Michael M. Amen, American Foreign Policy in Greece 1944/1949: Economic, Military and Institutional Aspects (Frankfurt, West Germany: Peter Lang Ltd., 1978, 114-15; and Blum, Killing Hope, 38.
[205] Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 155, 157. See also, Polymeris Voglis, “Political Prisoners in the Greek Civil War, 1945-50: Greece in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 523-40.
[206] Ibid., 149, 134.
[207] Ibid., 144. See also, Polymeris Voglis, “Political Prisoners in the Greek Civil War, 1945-50: Greece in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct. 2002): 523-40.
[208] Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 147.
[209] Ibid., 233-34, 251.
[210] Ibid., 253, 242.
[211] Ibid., 289.
[212] Ibid., 291.
[213] Ibid., 304-305.
[214] “Huge March In Athens Protests Visit By Clinton,” New York Times, November 18, 1999, A10.
[215] Gregory Mitrovich, in Undermining the Kremlin (178-81), notes that “the rollback of Soviet power itself was one of the most dangerous of U.S. attempts during the early cold war,” and that “recently declassified documents from America’s archives attest to the offensive ambitions of American national security policy and seem to substantiate many of the New Left’s charges.” Mitrovich nonetheless argues that “these materials do not demonstrate that American efforts to subvert the Soviet bloc were part of a broader effort to establish global hegemony. Rather, the United States was motivated by the desire to promote global stability and prevent the recurrence of economic collapse and world war.” In this author’s view, Mitrovich’s generalizations do not fit the evidence, particularly the idea that the U.S. was intent on promoting “global stability” in its nefarious interventions in Eastern Europe.
[216] Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 98.
[217] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 131-33.
[218] “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950),” page 40.
[219] Grose, Operation Rollback, 204.
[220] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 131-32.
[221] Kevin C. Ruffner, “Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists,” 1998, declassified and released by Central Intelligence Agency under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, Date 2004 / 2006, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/STUDIES%20IN%20INTELLIGENCE%20NAZI%20-%20RELATED%20ARTICLES_0015.pdf.
[222] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 138.
[223] Ibid., 140.
[224] Ibid., 141.
[225] Ibid., 141.
[226] Ibid., 143; and Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin, 44-45;
[227] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 143-44.
[228] Ibid., 144.
[229] Nikolaos A. Stavrou, “The Sino-Albanian Friendship,” World Affairs 134, no. 3 (1971): 234-42.
[230] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 146-47. O’Rourke describes the whole CIA operation in the Ukraine as being under Operation AERODYNAMIC, but this was only one of a number of programmatic initiatives, including ANDROGEN and REDSOX.
[231] Ruffner, “Cold War Allies,” 20-22, 30-32. In the words of one U.S. agent, to hand over Bandera to the Soviets “would imply to the Ukrainians that we as an organization are unable to protect them, i.e., we have no authority. In such a case there is not any reason or sense for them to cooperate with us” (31).
[232] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 148-49; and Wayne Madsen, “The CIA’s Destabilization Program: Undermining and ‘Nazifying’ Ukraine Since 1953,” Global Research center, January 20, 2016, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cias-destabilization-program-undermining-and-nazifying-ukraine-since-1953-covert-support-of-neo-nazi-entities/5502473.
[233] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 150-51; and Ruffner, “Cold War Allies,” 22.
[234] Ruffner, “Cold War Allies,” 39-40.
[235] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 151-52.
[236] Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings.” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 2 (1998), 164.
[237] Jane Perlez, “Archives Confirm False Hope Fed Hungary Revolt,” New York Times, September 28, 1996. Three years earlier, following a brief uprising in East Germany in June 1953, President Eisenhower approved NSC 158 on June 25, titled, “United States Objectives and Actions to Exploit the Unrest in the Satellite States,” which called for stimulating resistance movements. See also, Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin, 133.
[238] Central Intelligence Agency, “The Break-Up of the Colonial Empires and Its Implications for US Security,” September 3, 1948, Summary, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000258342.pdf.
[239] Michael J. Sullivan III, American Adventurism Abroad: Invasions, Interventions, and Regime Changes since World War II (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 18.
[240] Sam Roberts, “Leslie H. Gelb, 82, Former Diplomat and Journalist for The Times, Is Dead,” New York Times, September 2, 2019, A19.
[241] Arnold A. Offner, “Liberation or Dominance? The Ideology of U.S. National Security Policy,” in Andrew Bacevich, ed., The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 11. See also, Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
[242] Quigley, The Ruses of War, 97-104; Blum, Killing Hope, 140-45; and “Secret War in Laos,” Legacies of War, https://www.legaciesofwar.org. See also, Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Brutal Sideshows: Associated Wars in Laos and Cambodia,” United States Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide. The explanation for U.S. involvement in Laos was provided by Walter Robertson, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, who told a House of Representatives committee in 1959: “Every time you lose a country, they become correspondingly stronger and the free world becomes weaker…. We are engaged in a struggle for the survival of what we call a free civilization…. The Communists probe first in Europe, then in the Middle East, in Africa, Taiwan, in Laos…. this is an expansionist movement and they are dedicated to taking over the world.” Cited in Quigley, The Ruses for War, 98.
[243] Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat, 182-83; and “January 5, 1957: Eisenhower Doctrine,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-5-1957-eisenhower-doctrine.
[244] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 77.
[245] Westad, The Global Cold War, 120; and “After 65 Years: Mosaddegh’s Speech at The Hague (June 1951),” Iran Review, June 8, 2016. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company employed 57,237 Iranians in 1950; reported in “225 Million Barrels a Year,” New York Times Magazine, June 3, 1951, page 37.
[246] Brew, “A Review of Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954: Iran, 1951-1954,” 53-54. On British intelligence during the Cold War, including collusion with the CIA in the Iranian overthrow, see Rory Cormac, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[247] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 423.
[248] Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 189-90. In 1979, Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and the key CIA agent in Operation TRAJAX, published his account of the coup in Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979). He claimed that coup was staged in order to prevent a takeover of the Iranian government by the communist Tudeh Party. The Iranian-Armenian historian Ervand Abrahamian, on the other hand, argues that the coup was designed “to get rid of a nationalist figure who insisted that oil should be nationalized,” and that “there was never really a realistic threat of communism.” Quoted in Saeed Kamali Dehghan and Richard Norton-Taylor, “CIA admits role in 1953 coup,” The Guardian, August 19, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-role-1953-iranian-coup. See also, Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations (New York: The New Press, 2013); and Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004).
[249] Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2006), 123. For a blow by blow description of the coup, see “Secrets of History: The C.I.A. in Iran,” New York Times (archive) online book in sections, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-intro.html.
[250] Muhammad Sahimi, “16 Azar: Iran’s Student Day,” Frontline, December 6, 2009, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2009/12/16-azar-irans-student-day.html. Nixon’s visit was met with a demonstration at Tehran University, followed by a police attack left three students dead.
[251] Quoted in Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 192.
[252] Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982), 420, 436; cited in “Iran: Information on SAVAK,” https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6aaa724.html. General Huyser reported on his meeting with Iranian generals at a luncheon in New York with Joseph V. Reed, senior executive at Chase Manhattan Bank (which had much to lose if the Shah fell from power), Henry Kissinger, chairman of the Chase advisory board and former U.S. secretary of state, and John McCloy, former national security adviser and future chairman of the bank. All were part of Project Eagle, initiated by Chase bank chairman Nelson Rockefeller to persuade the Carter administration to continue its support for the Shah. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Bank’s Secret Campaign to Win Entry to U.S. for Shah of Iran, New York Times, December 29, 2019.
[253] Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “Remarks before the American-Iranian Council, March 17, 2000, Washington, D.C.,” U.S. Dept. of State Archive, https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/2000/000317.html.
[254] Wested, The Global Cold War, 137; and “1960 Belgian Congo general election,” Wikipedia.
[255] Wested, The Global Cold War, 137.
[256] Ibid., 138.
[257] Stephen R. Weissman, “CIA Covert Action in Zaire and Angola: Patterns and Consequences,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Summer, 1979), 265-66. See also, Weissman, American Foreign Policy in the Congo, 1960-1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974); and Weissman, “What Really Happened in Congo: The CIA, the Murder of Lumumba, and the Rise of Mobutu,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014.
[258] Weissman, “CIA Covert Action in Zaire and Angola, 265-66.
[259] Ibid., 268. According to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (November 20, 1975), Devlin was an “adviser” to a plot to “eliminate” Lumumba on the day after Mobutu’s coup.
[260] Quoted in Wested, The Global Cold War, 140.
[261] Ibid; and “The Congo, Decolonization, and the Cold War, 1960-65,” Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/congo-decolonization. See also, Lise Namikas, Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960-1965 (Stanford University Press, 2013).
[262] Wested, The Global Cold War, 142-43; Stevenson quoted in Quigley, The Ruses of War, 128.
[263] In Indonesia, one name is common.
[264] United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Report of the Working Group for Asia and the Far East, Supplement 10, 1947, 6-7, cited in John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 296.
[265] “Opening address given by Sukarno (Bandung, 18 April 1955),” https://www.cvce.eu/obj/opening_address_given_by_sukarno_bandung_18_april_1955-en-88d3f71c-c9f9-415a-b397-b27b8581a4f5.html.
[266] “No. 255, Memorandum by the Executive Secretary (Lay) to the National Security Council, top secret, United States Objectives And Courses Of Action With Respect To Indonesia, NSC 171/1, November 20, 1953,” Office of the Historian, U.S. State Department, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v12p2/d255.
[267] “1955 Indonesian legislative election,” Wikipedia.
[268] Quigley, The Ruses of War, 78. See also, Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Times Books, 2013).
[269] Quigley, The Ruses of War, 76.
[270] Ibid., 76-77.
[271] Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967.” Pacific Affairs 58, no. 2 (1985), 246.
[272] Ibid., 240, 242, 244.
[273] Katy Kadane, “U.S. Officials’ Lists Aided Indonesian Bloodbath in ‘60s,” Washington Post, May 21, 1990, p. A5, col. 1. See also, Ralph McGehee, “The Indonesia File,” The Nation, September 24, 1990, p. 296.
[274] Vincent Bevins, “What the United States Did in Indonesia,” The Atlantic, October 20, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/the-indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534. See also, John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
[275] Rob Barrett to Charles Mann, Indonesia, April 21, 1966, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 286, USAID, OPS East Asia Branch, Records relating to Indonesia (1961-1966), box 2, cited in Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, 105.
[276] Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1975, cited in Matthew Jardine, “East Timor: Media Turned Their Backs on Genocide, November 1, 1993,” FAIR (Fair & Accuracy in Reporting), https://fair.org/extra/east-timor-media-turned-their-backs-on-genocide; and Brad Simpson, ed., “Suharto: A Declassified Documentary Obit,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 242, posted January 28, 2008, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB242/index.htm. See also, Brad Simpson and Varsha Venkatasubramanian, “U.S. sought to preserve close ties to Indonesian military as it terrorized East Timor in runup to 1999 independence referendum,” National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 682, August 28, 2019, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/indonesia/2019-08-28/us-sought-preserve-close-ties-indonesian-military-it-terrorized-east-timor-runup-1999-independence.
[277] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 46. The constitution of Afghanistan, approved in 1964, created a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature and Supreme Court. The constitution identified Islam as “the sacred religion of Afghanistan,” but defined laws passed by the houses of parliament and signed by the king as superior to sharia law. Peter R. Blood, ed., Afghanistan: A Country Study (Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1997), 18.
[278] Washington Post, November 15, 1992, from declassified Politburo documents obtained by the newspaper, concerning the former KGB deputy station chief in Kabul, cited in Blum, Killing Hope, 342. According to the British political scientist and Mideast expert Fred Halliday, the communist governments of Taraki and Amin since April 1978 had canceled peasant debts to landlords, ended systems of usury that left peasants in perpetual debt, built hundreds of schools and medical clinics in the countryside, set up a land redistribution system to benefit some 200,000 families, outlawed child marriage and the giving of a woman in marriage in exchange for money or commodities, promoted literacy for girls and women. The latter items affecting the rights and roles of women were resented among traditionalist groups. See Blum, Killing Hope, 340-41; and Fred Halliday, “Soviet Foreign Policymaking and the Afghanistan War: From ‘Second Mongolia’ to ‘Bleeding Wound’,” Review of International Studies 25, no. 4 (1999): 675-91.
[279] Conor Tobin, “The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap’: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan, 1978-1979,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 44, No. 2, April 2020, 243-45, 255.
[280] Ibid., 255.
[281] Coll, Ghost Wars, 42-43, 46; and Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 146.
[282] San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 1979, page 9, cited in Blum, Killing Hope, 341.
[283] Quoted in Westad, The Global Cold War, 328.
[284] Tobin, “The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap,'” 251. Tobin’s quest in this article is to debunk a statement made by Brzezinski in an interview with a French newspaper, Le Nouvel Observateur, in January 1998, in which he claimed to have predicted and welcomed a Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan, similar to the earlier U.S. quagmire in Vietnam. According to one account, Brzezinski said: “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” Brzezinski added, “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” Marc Star, “A Coordinated Corruption: How the Hidden Hand Created a Modern Crisis in the Middle East (Part 1),” New Dawn, https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/a-coordinated-corruption-how-the-hidden-hand-created-a-modern-crisis-in-the-middle-east-part-1. Tobin argues that this was most likely bragging on Brzezinski’s part as his statement appears to be inconsistent with his actions and statements in 1979-80. While this is a plausible conclusion, Tobin nonetheless appears to take the Carter administration’s public statements at face value; for example, that the U.S. is interested only in protecting the region from Soviet aggression, though no evidence of such Soviet intentions is provided. Tobin furthermore misses Brzezinski’s grand strategy that sought not only to decouple Afghanistan from the Soviet sphere of influence, paralleling the U.S. loss of Iran as a client state, but also to engineer what later became known as the Carter Doctrine, whereby the U.S. forces would be deployed to the region, thus compensating for the loss of Iran as a military ally. See also, “Brzezinski: Six months before Soviet invasion, we financed the Mujahideen,” interview with Paul Jay, The Real News Network, January 15, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGjAsQJh7OM&feature=relmfu.
[285] Blood, ed., Afghanistan: A Country Study, 21-22.
[286] Mark N. Katz,), “Iran and Russia,” in Robin B. Wright, ed., The Iran Primer: Power, Politics, and U.S. Policy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2010), 186.
[287] American Embassy Kabul cable 7502 to Secretary of State, October 15, 1979, “President Amin’s Desire for Better Relations” (by Bruce Amstutz), National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 657, published Jan. 29, 2019, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/afghanistan-russia-programs/2019-01-29/soviet-invasion-afghanistan-1979-not-trumps-terrorists-nor-zbigs-warm-water-ports. As a young man, Amin had studied at Columbia University in New York City. See also, Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya, “Declassified Documents Show Moscow’s Fear of an Afghan Flip, U.S. Diplomat’s Meeting with Afghan Leader Helped Put Soviets Over the Edge,” National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 657, ibid.
[288] “Reflections on Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan,” memorandum for the president from Zbigniew Brzezinski, December 26, 1979, and “Memorandum for the Secretary of State,” January 2, 1980, both released by the Cold War International History Project, quoted in Coll, Ghost Wars, 31.
[289] CNN film transcript, “Soldiers of God” videotape, aired January 1, 2002, CNN.com, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0201/01/cp.03.html.
[290] Iran released the 52 American hostages on January 20, 1981, only minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. A number of government officials as well as former Iranian President Abulhassan Banisadr, charged that agents of the Reagan campaign secretly negotiated a delay in the release of hostages in order to diminish political prospects for President Carter’s re-election. Barbara Honegger, a 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign staffer and later a Reagan White House policy analyst, furthermore claimed that arms sales to Iran were part of the bargain (see Iran-Contra hostage crisis in the Central America wars, 1980s essay). Senate and House committee investigations, however, concluded in November 1992 and January 1993, respectively, that “credible evidence falls short of supporting the allegation of an agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of hostages.” Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (November 19, 1992), The “October Surprise” allegations and the circumstances surrounding the release of the American hostages held in Iran, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992), 115.
[291] President Jimmy Carter, “State of the Union Address,” January 23, 1980, https://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/assets/documents/speeches/su80jec.phtml. President Carter’s tough stance was driven in part by his desire to appear tough before the American public in this election year. The Iranian hostage crisis made him look “weak and feckless” in international affairs; all the more so when Operation Eagle Claw, an attempt to rescue 52 captive U.S. Embassy staff members, failed miserably on April 24, 1980. Elaine Kamarck, “The Iranian Hostage Crisis and Its Effect on American Politics,” November 24, 2019, Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/11/04/the-iranian-hostage-crisis-and-its-effect-on-american-politics.
[292] Blum, Killing Hope, 344.
[293] “Afghanistan: Soviet Invasion and Civil War,” World Peace Foundation, August 7, 2015, https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2015/08/07/afghanistan-soviet-invasion-civil-war; and “Fatalities in Afghanistan conflicts, 1979-present,” compiled by Wm. Robert Johnston, April 19, 2015, http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/afghanfatalities.html. See also, John Prados and Svetlana Savranskaya, “Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, No. 57, October 9, 2001, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57.
[294] Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 128.
[295] Ibid., 130, 132.
[296] William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy Toward Argentina (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2013), 10.
[297] Ibid., 140. One of the advocates of a pro-democracy policy after the war was U.S. ambassador to Cuba Spruille Braden, who wrote in October 1945 that the U.S. should refrain from extending to dictators any loans, economic assistance, invitation to Washington, honors, and, most importantly, military aid and cooperation, as the “military equipment supplied to a dictator may too frequently be utilized to maintain himself in power or to forge new chains wherewith to shackle his fellow citizens”(129). Braden was ousted from the diplomatic corps in 1947. He soon joined the anti-communist bandwagon, however, becoming a paid lobbyist for the United Fruit Company and pushing for U.S. covert intervention to overturn the democratic government in Guatemala in 1954.
[298] Quoted in Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 149, 194.
[299] Ibid., 194.
[300] Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 197; and Alfredo Prieto, “Nixon in Havana,” Cuba News, July 29, 2019, https://oncubanews.com/en/cuba-usa/nixon-in-havana; and Günter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower: A Centenary Assessment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1995), 231.
[301] Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, 12, 22, 26. The 1947 Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, or Rio Pact, provided the basis for military cooperation among American states; the U.S. sought to turn this hemispheric protection pact into an anti-leftist alliance. On U.S. security aid, see Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression.
[302] Rabe, The Killing Zone, xxxvi.
[303] Ibid., 94.
[304] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 719.
[305] Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 154.
[306] Wittner, Cold War America, 224; and Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, 25.
[307] Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 717; Blum, Killing Hope, 163-72; Wittner, Cold War America, 263-65; and Westad, The Global Cold War, 150-51. See also, James N. Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
[308] Gerard O’Connell, “Call Him a Saint?” America: The Jesuit Review, April 27, 2015, https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/call-him-saint.
[309] J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 91-92.
[310] J. Patrice McSherry, “Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. Role, Global Policy Forum, July 2001. See also, J. Patrice McSherry and John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New Yok: The New Press, 2004); and J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Ecuador and Peru joined Operation Condor in early 1978. On March 23, 2021, the eve of the 45th anniversary of the military coup in Argentina, the National Security Archive posted declassified documents revealing what the U.S. government knew, and when it knew it, in the weeks preceding the March 24, 1976, military overthrow of Isabel Peron’s elected government. Argentinian authorities thereafter undertook a “dirty war” against suspected leftists, murdering (“disappearing”) some 30,000 people over the next six years. See “Argentina’s Military Coup of 1976: What the U.S. Knew,” National Security Archive Briefing Book #751, edited by Carlos Osorio, published March 23, 2021, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2021-03-23/argentinas-military-coup-what-us-knew.
[311] J. Patrice McSherry, “Tracking the Origins of a State Terror Network: Operation Condor,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 2002), 39. Stephen Rabe, in a review of Alan McPherson’s article, “Strange Bedfellows at the End of the Cold War: The Letelier Assassination, Human Rights, and State Sovereignty,” in Cold War History (1 April 2019), writes: “The government of General Augusto Pinochet assassinated Letelier because he had been effectively lobbying in Europe and the United States against loans for Chile’s military dictatorship. In a meeting on 8 June 1976 in Santiago with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, General Pinochet twice objected to Letelier’s activities. Agents associated with the Chilean secret police, DINA, perpetrated the attack. A U.S. expatriate in Chile, Michael Vernon Townley, orchestrated the plot. Townley had been involved in previous assassination plots against Chilean dissidents living abroad. But Pinochet bore direct responsibility for the assassination of Letelier and Moffitt. Secretary of State George Shultz would subsequently inform President Ronald Reagan that U.S. intelligence agencies had directly linked Pinochet to the assassination. In Secretary Shultz’s words, it was ‘a blatant example of a chief of state’s direct involvement in an act of state terrorism.'” [Citation: Shultz to Reagan, “Pinochet and the Letelier and Moffitt Murders: Implications for US Policy,” 6 October 1987, in National Security Archive, “CIA: ‘Pinochet Personally Ordered’ Letelier Bombing,” Electronic Briefing Book No. 532, document 3, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//dc.html?doc=3212949-Document-03-DOS-Pinochet-and-the-Letelier.]
[312] Harry W. Shlaudeman, Department of State, “ARA Monthly Report (July): The ‘Third World War’ and South America,” August 2, 1976, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB416/docs/0000A02E.pdf.
[313] Kornbluh, The Pinochet File, 356-63. Hewson Ryan was interviewed on April 27, 1988, by Richard Nethercut for the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
[314] For background on Guatemala, see Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
[315] Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 193; and Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 135.
[316] Quoted in Douglas W. Trefzger, “Guatemala’s 1952 Agrarian Reform Law: A Critical Reassessment,” International Social Science Review 77, no. 1/2 (2002), 32.
[317] Douglas W. Trefzger, “Guatemala’s 1952 Agrarian Reform Law: A Critical Reassessment,” International Social Science Review 77, no. 1/2 (2002), 32.
[318] Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 193-5; and Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 135.
[319] On communist influence, see Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). In 1950, Assistant Secretary of State Edward Miller warned of “Communist political aggression against the hemisphere,” referring to democratic political activities. See Section II in Virginia S. Williams, et. al., “Central America wars, 1980s,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2018.
[320] Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), xv; see also, Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh, “CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 4, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4.
[321] Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1983), 115-16, 126, 171. Frederick W. Marks III, in “The CIA and Castillo Armas in Guatemala, 1954: New Clues to an Old Puzzle,” Diplomatic History Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter 1990), claims that Castillo Armas recruited thousands of fighters, a claim made by U.S. radio propagandists at the time (69-70).
[322] Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 195.
[323] Gordon L. Bowen, “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), 92-93; and Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 253.
[324] Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, 128-29.
[325] Max Paul Friedman, “Fracas in Caracas: Latin American Diplomatic Resistance to United States Intervention in Guatemala in 1954,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 21, Issue 4 (2010), Abstract.
[326] “287. Memorandum Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency, May 12, 1975, Subject: CIA’s Role in the Overthrow of Arbenz,” FRUS, 1952-1954, Guatemala, Office of the Historian, U.S. State Department, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54Guat/d287. See also, Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
[327] Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, 182.
[328] Ibid., 167-70.
[329] Ibid., 166.
[330] Quoted from a June 1954 CIA report, declassified in 2007, in David M. Barrrett, “Sterilizing a ‘Red Infection’: Congress, the CIA, and Guatemala, 1954,” Central Intelligence Agency Library, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol44no5/html/v44i5a03p.htm.
[331] Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, 186.
[332] Quoted in Bowen, “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change,” 96.
[333] Quoted in Bowen, “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change,” 95.
[334] Henry F. Holland, Assistant Secretary of State, “Subject: Guatemalan arms acquisition,” June 1954, CIA Historical Review Program Release as Sanitized, 2003, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp62-00865r000300200002-7; and Friedman, “Fracas in Caracas,” 672-73.
[335] Quoted in “Hemisphere Protection.” CQ Almanac 1954, 10th ed., Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1955. http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal54-1358403.
[336] Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 367.
[337] Barrrett, “Sterilizing a ‘Red Infection.’”
[338] According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, in Bitter Fruit, U.S. Ambassador Peurifoy was livid when informed that Árbenz and his aides would be allowed to leave the country; but the junta generals, particularly Carlos Enrique Díaz, held to a tradition that allowed military leaders – and Árbenz was a military man – to resign from office without personal harm (which they themselves would likely have to do at some point). Peurifoy also urged that the junta round up leading Communists and shoot them (209, 197).
[339] Ibid., 188-89; and Friedman, “Fracas in Caracas,” 683.
[340] “Reds’ Priority: Pin War on US,” Life magazine, July 5, 1954.
[341] Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side, 196.
[342] Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, 221.
[343] Ibid., 224; and Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 138.
[344] Doyle and Kornbluh, “CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents.”
[345] Elizabeth Malkin, “An Apology for a Guatemalan Coup, 57 Years Later,” New York Times, October 20, 2011.
[346] “National Security Council Report, NSC 5902/1: Statement of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America,” FRUS, 1958-1960, American Republics, Volume V, page 94.
[347] New York Times, February 24, 1957, cited in Richard E. Welch, “Herbert L. Matthews and the Cuban Revolution,” The Historian 47 (1984), 3.
[348] Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1960 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 140-41.
[349] Westad, The Global Cold War, 170; and Maximilian Forte, “History Will Absolve Me: Fidel Castro, Sixty Years Later,” Global Research, October 16, 2013, https://www.globalresearch.ca/history-will-absolve-me/5354525. Note that the right to a decent livelihood was also part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights in 1944.
[350] Castro speech database, January 4, 1959, speaking to citizens of Santiago, Cuba, https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1959/01/01-jan-1959.htm.
[351] Sheila Lambowitz, “Fidel Castro’s Visit to Mount Vernon,” Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington, https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/famous-visitors/article/fidel-castro.
[352] “287. Editorial Note,” FRUS, 1958-1960, Cuba, Volume VI, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06/d287.
[353] Kolko, Confronting the Third World, 141, 139; and James O’Connor, “Agrarian Reforms in Cuba, 1959-1963,” Science & Society 32, no. 2 (1968): 169-217.
[354] Charles McKelvey, “The Agrarian Reform Law of 1959,” August 5, 2014, Global Learning, http://www.globallearning-cuba.com/blog-umlthe-view-from-the-southuml/the-agrarian-reform-law-of-1959.
[355] Welch, “Herbert L. Matthews and the Cuban Revolution,” 11.
[356] Kolko, Confronting the Third World, 141. The NSC report was presented by the assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, Roy Rubottom, at the National Security Council meeting, January 14, 1960, cited in Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 14-15.
[357] Quoted in Kolko, Confronting the Third World, 142.
[358] Richard R. Fagan, “Cuba and the Soviet Union,” Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 1978), 70; James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1998), 161; and Robert S. Walters, “Soviet Economic Aid to Cuba: 1959-1964,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 42, no. 1 (1966), 74-75.
[359] Westad, The Global Cold War, 174; Kolko, Confronting the Third World, 141-42; and Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 160-61, xiv. See the CIA report released in 1997, with redactions, “Clandestine Services History, Record of Paramilitary Action Against the Castro Government of Cuba, 17 March 1960 – May 1961,” https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB353/19610505.pdf.
[360] Frederick Henry Gareau, The United Nations and Other International Institutions: A Critical Analysis (Chicago: Burnham Publishers, 2002), 149; and Fidel Castro, “Speech at the United Nations, General Assembly Session,” September 26, 1960 (New York: Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 1960), https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-documents.ri-prod/9781138824287/ch7/10._Fidel_Castro,_At_the_United_Nations,_1960.pdf; and Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 80-81.
[361] “The People of the CIA … Richard Bissell: An Agency Leader,” CIA News & Information, https://www.cia.gov/static/d4fe7175d9fac25e2b81755700845894/Reflections-of-a-Cold-Warrior.pdf; and Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 69.
[362] President John F. Kennedy, “News Conference 9, April 12, 1961, State Department Auditorium,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum archives, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-press-conferences/news-conference-9.
[363] Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 28.
[364] Ibid., see comments by Enrique A. Baloyra (pp. 28-29), who joined the anti-Batista underground while in high school, then joined the Students’ Revolutionary Directorate, an anti-Castro organization. He later became a professor of political science at the University of Miami’s Graduate School of International Studies.
[365] Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 96.
[366] “The Bay of Pigs Invasion,” Central Intelligence Agency News & Information, https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-bay-of-pigs-invasion.
[367] Blight and Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion, 169.
[368] Ibid., 28. Durán later became the leader of the Florida Democratic Party.
[369] Fidel Castro, “May Day Celebration (1961): Cuba is a Socialist Nation,” Castro Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1961/05/01.htm.
[370] Westad, The Global Cold War, 175.
[371] Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 16, 18.
[372] Quoted in Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 141.
[373] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2008), 6-7, 95-96. See John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, “Cuba: Operation Mongoose,” National Security Archive Briefing Book #687, published October 3, 2019, with 30 primary documents, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2019-10-03/kennedy-cuba-operation-mongoose.
[374] Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense; Subject: Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba,” March 13, 1962,“ National Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//coldwar/documents/episode-10/02.pdf.
[375] Office of the Historian, Department of State, “he Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962,” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/cuban-missile-crisis.
[376] Robert A. Pollard, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Legacies and Lessons,” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) 6, no. 4 (1982): 152-54. United Nations Secretary General U Thant worked behind the scenes to make negotiations possible, acting as mediator between Kennedy and Khrushchev. See A. Walter Dorn and Robert Pauk, “Unsung Mediator: U Thant and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Diplomatic History 33:2 (April 2009): 261-292. Primary documents regarding the “Plan for the Withdrawal and Disposition” of the Jupiter missile system from Italy and Turkey were published by the National Security Archive on April 20, 2023, Briefing Book #828, edited by William Burr and Leopoldo Nuti, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuban-missile-crisis-nuclear-vault/2023-04-20/jupiter-missiles-and-cuban-missile.
[377] See Benjamin Schwarz, “The Real Cuban Missile Crisis: Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong,” The Atlantic, January/February 2013 issue, https://benjaminschwarz.org/2013/01/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis-everything-you-think-you-know-about-those-13-days-is-wrong. As far as historical lessons are concerned, the Munich agreement of 1938, in which British and French leaders agreed to let Hitler take over the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in exchange for a promise to take no more territory, became the standard lesson of World War II for Cold Warriors in the U.S. Diplomatic negotiations, as such, were discredited as ruses; and military threats were regarded as the only means of preventing “totalitarian” aggression. The successful negotiations that defused the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that it was possible to dialogue with the “enemy,” thus undermining the narrow and dangerous lesson that only force can enhance security.
[378] Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 260. According to Richard J. Walton, in Cold War and Counterrevolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy (New York: Viking Press, 1972), Kennedy’s “decision to go to the brink of nuclear war was irresponsible and reckless to a supreme degree, that it risked the kind of terrible miscalculation that Kennedy was always warning Khrushchev about, that it was unnecessary, and that, if one assumes minimum competence, the Kennedy administration knew it was not necessary” (103).
[379] Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965 (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005), 9.
[380] Kirk Tyveia, The Dictator Dilemma: The United States and Paraguay in the Cold War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), Chapter 2.
[381] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 200-201.
[382] Stephen G. Rabe, “The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1958–1963,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter 1996): 58-59. According to Rabe, Trujillo’s henchmen “kidnapped in New York City and then murdered Jesus de Galíndez, a Spanish citizen and Columbia University scholar who had written a scathing indictment of Trujillo. Trujillo’s men then executed Charles Murphy, an aviator from Oregon who had piloted the plane that took Galíndez from New York to the Dominican Republic. The Galíndez-Murphy murders gained national attention through the persistent efforts of Oregon congressman Charles Porter. Trujillo’s agents responded to the uproar by arresting and murdering in prison Octavio de la Maza, a pilot and friend of Murphy.”
[383] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 201-203. See also, William Blum, Killing Hope, 175-83.
[384] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 204-10; and Rabe, The Killing Zone, xxxiv.
[385] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 213.
[386] Ibid., 214-15; and Piero Gleijeses, “Hope Denied: The US Defeat of the 1965 Revolt in the Dominican Republic,” November 2014, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper #72, pages 8 10, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/CWIHP_Working_Paper_72_Hope_Denied_US_Defeat_1965_Revolt_Dominican_Republic.pdf.
[387] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 217.
[388] Rabe, The Killing Zone, 13.
[389] Tim Weiner, “A Kennedy-C.I.A. Plot Returns to Haunt Clinton,” New York Times, October 30, 1994. Cheddi Jagan was born of Indian immigrants who arrived in British Guiana as indentured servants. He studied to become a dentist in Georgetown, Guiana’s capital, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, where he completed his training and also met and married Janet Rosenberg, an American. He returned to South America in 1943, at age 25. He remained a democratic socialist throughout his life, which Kennedy administration officials interpreted as a proxy for communism and ally of Fidel Castro. For background and declassified documents, see “CIA Covert Operations: The 1964 Overthrow of Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana, National Security Archive Briefing Book #670, April 6, 2020, compiled by Dr. John Prados, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2020-04-06/cia-covert-operations-overthrow-cheddi-jagan-british-guiana-1964?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9fedecba-8923-40a0-b5da-b6f30dc3bbb8.
[390] Calder Walton, “Intelligence, U.S. Foreign Relations, and Historical Amnesia,” Passport, The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, April 2019, 37-38; and John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 5. See also, Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and “British Guiana (1928-1966), University of Central Arkansas Political Science, https://uca.edu/politicalscience/dadm-project/western-hemisphere-region/british-guiana-1928-1966.
[391] Weiner, “A Kennedy-C.I.A. Plot Returns to Haunt Clinton.”
[392] “Guyana,” Editorial Note, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State Archive, Foreign Relations, 1964-1968, Volume XXXII, Dominican Republic; Cuba; Haiti; Guyana, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xxxii/44659.htm.
[393] Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana, 5-6.
[394] “Guyana,” Editorial Note, Office of the Historian.
[395] “Inaugural Address of President John F. Kennedy, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961,” Presidential Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations/Inaugural-Address.aspx.
[396] Senator J. William Fulbright, The Price of Empire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 36-37.
[397] Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxxiii and xxxv.
[398] Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, “Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy,” January 1993, pages 1-5, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//nukevault/ebb245/doc15.pdf. For the U.S., the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union marked the end of a set of rationales used to justify U.S. military forces and actions abroad. In December 1989, only one month after the Berlin Wall came down, the U.S. conducted a surprise invasion of Panama, offering a fourfold set of justifications: protecting American lives, capturing an international drug-dealer, promoting democracy, and protecting the “integrity of the Panama Canal.”
[399] “Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Interview on NBC-TV ‘The Today Show’ with Matt Lauer, Columbus, Ohio, February 9, 1998,” U.S. Department of State Archive, https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html.
[400] Bacevich, ed., The Long War, ix-x; and “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” September 2002, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/national/nss-020920.pdf.
[401] K.K. Rebecca Lai, Troy Griggs, Max Fisher, and Audrey Carlsen, “Is America’s Military Big Enough?” New York Times, March 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/22/us/is-americas-military-big-enough.html; Alice Slater, “The US Has Military Bases in 80 Countries. All of Them Must Close,” The Nation, January 24, 2018; and Nan Tian, Aude Fleurant, Alexandra Kuimova, Pieter D. Wezeman, and Siemon T. Wezeman, “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2017,” SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) Fact Sheet, May 2018, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2018-04/sipri_fs_1805_milex_2017.pdf.
[402] “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” December 2017, pages 3, 47, https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1655&context=jss.
[403] Andrew Bacevich, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), 37. See also, Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
[404] Sahil Kapur, “Trump Revives Old Battle Cry Against 2020 Democrats: Socialism,” March 7, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-07/trump-revives-old-battle-cry-against-2020-democrats-socialism. See also, Larry Wittner, “What Democratic Socialism Is and Is Not, March 24, 2019, History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171564.
[405] The Council of Economic Advisers, “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” October 2018, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-Opportunity-Costs-of-Socialism.pdf. See also, Kevin Breuninger, “White House issues 72-page report slamming ‘socialism’ as Trump blasts Democrats, CNBC, October 23, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/23/white-house-issues-report-slamming-socialism-as-trump-blasts-democrats.html. The Nordic countries refer to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Note that socialized medicine can lead to a drop in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while nonetheless improving the standard of living because the GDP includes spending on health disorders that could be prevented by timely availability of health care. American writers living in Finland, Anu Paranen and Trevor Corson, wrote a feature article in the New York Times (Dec. 8, 2019), “Finland Is Our Capitalist Paradise,” in which they described how capitalists and the business community have accommodated to the social welfare government in Finland, creating a system with more investment opportunity as well as a better quality of life, in the authors’ view. “If these moves by Finnish capitalists sound hard to imagine,” they write, “it’s because people in the United States have been peddled a myth that universal government programs like these [taxpayer-funded services] can’t coexist with profitable private-sector businesses and robust economic growth.” Moreover, they add, “The other Nordic countries have been practicing this form of capitalism even longer than Finland, with even more success.”
[406] President Donald Trump, “State of the Union Address, February 5, 2019,” transcript, Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/february-5-2019-state-union-address. On correcting the misperceptions and intentional deceptions regarding the nature of democratic socialism in the United States, see Richard White (a professor of American history), “We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders’s Socialism: He shares the conviction of Gilded Age socialists that values, not economic laws, determine the contours of American society,” New York Times, March 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/opinion/bernie-sanders-socialism.html; reprinted in History News Network, March 10, 2020, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174524.
[407] “Trump: ‘Democrat Lawmakers Are Now Embracing Socialism,” https://grabien.com/story.php?id=224569. Another rhetorical maneuver was to associate poverty exclusively with socialism, ignoring the poverty of underdeveloped capitalist nations as well as the rapid economic development under “market socialism” in China. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking in March 2019, disparaged Venezuela as an example of socialism’s failure. “[Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro promised a better life in a socialist paradise,” he declared. “And he delivered on the socialism part, which has proved time and time again is a recipe for economic ruin.” David E. Sanger and Edward Wong, “Options Fading, U.S. Remains Stymied on How to Oust Venezuelan Ruler,” New York Times, March 13, 2019.
[408] To take one example, the European wars between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries settled nothing about their rival interpretations of Christianity. Indeed, the violence was a stain on both groups.