While he warned about the military industrial
complex, he was less restrained when it came to
covert interventions, some which reverberate
today.
By Ted SniderAugust 15, 2021"Information
Clearing House" - "Responsible
Statecraft" -
On January 17, 1961, at the end of his
second term in office, President Dwight
Eisenhower tried to pull back the reins on U.S.
military intervention in other countries with
his
warning about the military industrial
complex. But he did not apply that same
restraint to covert CIA interventions in other
countries — covert interventions that he worked
very hard to protect and keep secret from
Congress and the public.
In 1956, when Senator Mike Mansfield proposed
that the CIA should keep Congress informed of
its activities, Eisenhower knew that the CIA
would be in big trouble if Congress learned its
deepest secrets. So, he
decreed that Mansfield’s “bill would be
passed over my dead body.”
According to journalist and CIA expert Stephen
Kinzer, Eisenhower then “pressed Senate
leaders to do whatever necessary to ensure that
it did not pass.” It didn’t.
During the initial stages of the Cold War,
the Western nations—those aligned with the
United States — confronted the Eastern bloc
—those aligned with the USSR. The mostly
non-aligned nations of what came to be known as
the Third World were left pretty much alone as
long as they kept the Communists sufficiently in
check: a tolerance that was known as the
“Jakarta Axiom” after its Indonesian paradigm.
In 1953, that policy changed. Washington
decided that merely keeping Communism in check
was no longer a credential for tolerance. Third
World countries had to specifically align with
the United States. In
The Jakarta Method, Vincent Blevins explains
that “the new rule…was that neutral governments
were potential enemies, and Washington could
decide if and when an independent Third World
nation was insufficiently anticommunist.” With
that, the age of the CIA coup began. It was
Eisenhower who made that decision.
The first country to be tried and condemned
under the Eisenhower doctrine was Iran: a
decision whose reverberations are still being
felt today. But Iran’s first democratically
elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq,
didn’t fall because he was Communist. While
British and American officials publicly played
up the Communist threat,
according to Ervand Abrahamian, a leading
expert on the 1953 coup d’etat, privately, they
knew better. The American State Department and
the British Foreign Office agreed that there was
“no element of Russian incitation” and that Iran
should “not be seen primarily as part of the
immediate short-term ‘cold war’ problem.” The
CIA assessed that Mosaddeq’s government “has the
capability to take effective repressive action
to check … Tudeh [the Communist Party]
agitations….The Tudeh will not be able to gain
control of the government.”
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The problem in Iran was not communism, but
neutralism and nationalism. In 1951, Mosaddeq
was carried into power on a wave of nationalism
that had made up its mind to rescue Iran’s oil
from Britain so that the people of Iran, and not
the stockholders of the British-owned
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, could benefit from
its profits. Mosaddeq immediately moved to
nationalize Iran’s oil, and, in April 1951, the
Iranian parliament approved the nationalization
bill. Mosaddeq was elected prime minister and
signed the bill into law the following month.
That was too much for the British. They
clamped a crushing embargo on Iran and sent
warships to enforce it. Not enough to pressure
the people of Iran to overthrow the popular
Mosaddeq — the State Department placed his
support at 95-98 percent — the British tried
instead. But they failed. And when Mosaddeq
responded by shuttering the British embassy in
Tehran and expelling its diplomats, Britain’s
spies were flushed out with them. England had no
one left in Iran to overthrow Mosaddeq.
So, they looked to America. Though President
Truman had considered ousting Mosaddeq,
according to Abrahamian, it didn’t
ultimately happen until the Eisenhower
administration.
On July 11, 1953, Eisenhower gave
presidential approval for Operation Ajax, the
very first CIA coup, and Mosaddeq was removed
from power. That coup would start a historical
tidal wave that led to the suffering of the
people of Iran under the dictatorship of the
Shah, the 1979 Iranian revolution, and the
American Embassy hostage-taking before crashing
on the shores of today and the current standoff
over the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement.
Not only across the sea, but in America’s
backyard, some of today’s troubles trace back to
Eisenhower. As Eisenhower delivered the first
CIA coup in Iran, so he delivered the first CIA
coups in Latin America. And as seen in Cuba,
Venezuela, Bolivia, Haiti and other Latin
American and Caribbean Basin countries, the
effects of that foreign policy orientation are
still being felt today.
Like Mosaddeq in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz of
Guatemala wanted his own people to benefit from
their own country’s wealth. He took on United
Fruit, which owned about 20 percent of the land
in his country and redistributed it. He also
regulated major U.S. companies in Guatemala.
In 1954, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow
Arbenz, and, in late June that year, it
succeeded.
The Latin American or Caribbean country most
in the news today is Cuba. Hostile U.S. policy
toward Cuba is usually traced back to the
Kennedy administration. But in all of the three
most important ways, those policies were born
during the Eisenhower years.
The U.S. embargo on Cuba went into full
lockdown by order of Kennedy in February 1962.
But the doors began to close already in
September 1960 when Eisenhower banned all
exports to Cuba except food and medicine. So,
the embargo, the lingering heart of the bad
relationship, traces back to Eisenhower.
So does the Bay of Pigs. Though, again,
usually attributed to Kennedy, it was in May
1960 that Eisenhower approved a covert action on
Castro. By October 1959, Eisenhower had
“approved measures,” according to CIA expert
John Prados, that led to “a secret war.” It was
Eisenhower, and not Kennedy, who authorized the
plan for the invasion of Cuba that would mature
into The Bay of Pigs. “There can be no doubt the
revised CIA plan amounted to an invasion,”
according to Prados. “Dwight D. Eisenhower,
not John F. Kennedy, holds the responsibility
there.” The CIA plan to invade Cuba is dated
December 6, 1960. Kennedy would be inaugurated
forty-five days later.
Like the embargo and the Bay of Pigs, the
original signature on the plan to assassinate
Castro is, not Kennedy’s,
but Eisenhower’s. In the summer of 1959,
William LeoGrande and Peter Kornblum explain in
their book,
Back Channel to Cuba, “key officials in the
Eisenhower administration reached….a clear
determination to bring about Castro’s demise.”
The decision was cast for regime change in Cuba
before Eisenhower left office. By October,
secret, but official, U.S. policy was to
overthrow Castro by the end of 1960. On November
5, according to LeoGrande and Kornblum, that
plan was approved by Eisenhower. On December 11,
1959, according to CIA expert Tim Weiner, Allen
Dulles, Eisenhower’s CIA director, gave the
go-ahead for Castro’s “elimination.” Dulles
changed “elimination” to “removal from Cuba.”
Stephen Kinzer
reports that on May 13, 1960, after being
briefed by Dulles, Eisenhower ordered Castro
“sawed off.”
These actions of Eisenhower sowed the seeds
for the embargo and regime change policies that
still bedevil U.S. relations with Cuba today.
While Eisenhower did pull in the regns on
American military intervention in other
countries, he also built up and gave free rein
to covert CIA operations — there would be 170 of
them during his two terms — that intervened in
other countries and that resonate 61 years after
he delivered his
famous farewell address and his warning
about the potential excesses of the military
industrial complex.