Gaddis, John Lewis - The Cold War: A New History by Gaddis John Lewis

Author:Gaddis, John Lewis [Gaddis, John Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Cold War, World Politics - 1945-1989, 20th Century, Modern, History & Theory, 1945-1989, General, United States, World Politics, Political Science, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, History
ISBN: 9780143038276
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

III.

IT MIGHT become necessary, the Doolittle Report suggested, for the American people to “be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.”26 But no administration from Eisenhower’s through Nixon’s tried publicly to justify learning “not to be good.” The reasons were obvious: covert operations could hardly remain covert if openly discussed, nor would departures from “hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct” be easy to explain in a society still resolutely committed to the rule of law. The resulting silence postponed, but did not resolve, the issue of how to reconcile Machiavellian practices with the constitutionally based principle of accountability, whether to Congress, the media, or the public at large. As a result, Americans did gradually become acquainted with the “repugnant philosophy” their leaders thought necessary to fight the Cold War, although rarely in ways those leaders had intended.

As the scope and frequency of covert operations increased, it became more difficult to maintain “plausible deniability.”27 Rumors of American involvement in the Iranian and Guatemalan coups began to circulate almost at once, and although these would not be confirmed officially for many years,28 they were persuasive enough at the time to give the C.I.A. publicity it did not want. By the end of the 1950s, it had an almost mythic reputation throughout Latin America and the Middle East as an instrument with which the United States could depose governments it disliked, whenever it wished to do so.

The consequences, in both regions, proved costly. In the Caribbean, the overthrow of Arbenz inadvertently encouraged communism: outraged by what had happened in Guatemala, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and their supporters resolved to liberate Cuba from Washington’s sphere of influence and turn it into a Marxist-Leninist state. When, after they seized power in 1959, the C.I.A. tried to overthrow them, it failed miserably. The unsuccessful Bay of Pigs landing in April, 1961, exposed the most ambitious covert operation the Agency had yet attempted, humiliated the newly installed Kennedy administration, strengthened relations between Moscow and Havana, and set in motion the series of events that would, within a year and a half, bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.29

Meanwhile, the Shah of Iran, restored to power by the Americans in 1953, was consolidating an increasingly repressive regime which Washington found impossible to disavow. Once again, a tail wagged a dog, linking the United States to an authoritarian leader whose only virtues were that he maintained order, kept oil flowing, purchased American arms, and was reliably anti-communist. Iranians were sufficiently fed up by 1979 that they overthrew the Shah, denounced the United States for supporting him, and installed in power under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini the first radically Islamist government anywhere in the world.30

Not all C.I.A. operations ended this badly. In April, 1956, one of the most successful of them was, quite literally, exposed when the Russians invited reporters to tour a tunnel the Agency had constructed, extending from West Berlin a third of a mile into East Berlin, by which it had intercepted Soviet and East German cable and telephone communications for more than a year.

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