The Subversion of
Undesirable Governments

excerpted from the book

Intervention and Revolution

The United States in the Third World

by Richard J. Barnet

World Publishing, 1968, paperback edition

p225
" We would be fools", Allen Dulles once answered an interviewer who asked whether his function as director of the Central Intelligence Agency was "to stir up revolutions," "if we did not cooperate with our friends abroad to help them do everything they can to explore and counter the Communist subversive movement." With a budget in excess of three billion dollars and a staff in excess of twenty thousand, the Central Intelligence Agency has conducted operations against legitimate governments on three continents. In a few cases, such as the Trujillo assassination of 1961, U.S. intelligence operations have worked against traditional right-wing dictatorships. Most of their activities, however, have been directed against regimes which have tried to take a radical or nationalist position on questions of development and foreign policy. Such regimes have attempted to nationalize foreign enterprises, have flirted with Marxist rhetoric, or have invited persons with real or suspected communist associations into the government. Any of these deviations from the standard which the United States has set for judging whether a foreign government is a responsible member of the Free World has been sufficient to convince the State Department that the government in question is "subverted" and that it is fair game for "countersubversive" operations from our side. While on occasion CIA agents may act prematurely and display too much zeal, and even sometimes, as in Laos in 1960, may act counter to official State Department policy at the moment, in most cases the agency is carrying out official policy that has been approved by the President. Subversion is simply another facet of the campaign against revolution. It is a technique which is cheaper and politically less embarrassing than open support of one side in a protracted civil war or landing American troops.

The intervention in Iran in r953 to unseat Premier Mohammed Mossadeq was America's first successful attempt in the postwar period to subvert a nationalist government. Mossadeq came to power on May 1, 1951, and three days later seized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In a fiery speech the wispy premier announced that Iran was taking rightful possession of "a hidden treasure upon which lies a dragon." Oil companies in the West boycotted the nationalized oil company and Iran lost the major source of its foreign exchange. Much to the annoyance of the British, the United States did not totally cut off aid to the Mossadeq government. In 1951 and 195Z it gave sixteen and a half million dollars for a small agricultural assistance program and to make up foreign-exchange deficits. "It seemed to the United States," Eden writes in his memoirs, "a reckless policy to allow the situation to deteriorate, as they considered it would if Mossadeq were left without any help." Eden's own reading of the situation was different. He believed that if Mossadeq fell, "his place might well be taken by a more reasonable Government with which it would be possible to conclude a satisfactory agreement."

A year later the newly elected Eisenhower administration had come to the British view. Mossadeq must go. Although the State Department continued to hint that there was a link between Mossadeq and communism, the political reality in Iran was quite different. Mossadeq had come to power as the head of the National Front, a nationalist coalition that had been energized chiefly by the oil issue. The Tudeh party, as the local communist organization was called, attacked the Front and on July 15, 1951, Mossadeq suppressed a communist-sponsored demonstration of the National Association for Struggle Against the Imperialist Oil Companies in Iran, killing one hundred and injuring five hundred demonstrators. In mid-l952 the Tudeh reversed its position, began to shift its attacks from the premier to the shah, and asked for a united front. But Mossadeq resisted the communists' call for a coalition, restated his refusal to legalize the Tudeh, and imposed martial law in Tehran. Less than a month before the coup that finally overthrew him, he received another open appeal to join forces with the communists, but despite the now transparent efforts of the United States and its allies to get rid of him and the mounting opposition of the shah, the army, the landowners, and the middle classes, Mossadeq refused to accept their help. Two days before he fell, his troops turned on communist demonstrators in Tehran. Nine years after these events Soviet analysts ascribed the failure of the Tudeh, which sharply declined in strength after Iran became a U.S. ally, to the fact that the party "was in fact fighting on two fronts-against imperialism and against Mossadeq."

The Eisenhower administration began its campaign against Mossadeq with economic pressure. "There is a strong feeling in the United States," the President wrote the Iranian, ". . . that it would not be fair to the American taxpayer for the United States Government to extend any considerable amount of economic aid to Iran so long as Iran could have access to funds derived from the sale of its oil products if a reasonable agreement were reached."

Exactly five weeks later, Mossadeq having rejected this offer, Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, formerly a history professor and OSS agent and at the time ClA's principal covert operative in the Middle East, arrived in Iran to direct a coup against Mossadeq. His mission was to replace him with General Fazollah Zahedi, who, despite his suspected Nazi sympathies during the war, was considered far more willing to cooperate with the oil companies and the State Department. Assisting in the operation was Brigadier General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, famous twenty years earlier as the New Jersey State Police officer who investigated the Lindbergh-baby kidnapping and later as the weekly narrator of the radio program "Gangbusters." With the help of five U.S. agents and seven Iranian intelligence operatives, Roosevelt plotted the coup from a Tehran basement. An admiring CIA colleague called it "a real James Bond operation."

Shortly after the U.S. agent's arrival, the shah dismissed Mossadeq, but Mossadeq's supporters rioted and forced the shah to flee the country. On August 19' 1953, while his chief, Allen Dulles, was conferring with the shah in Rome, Roosevelt was recruiting street mobs to oppose the Mossadeq supporters and the Tudeh, which was also demonstrating against the impending coup. With the help of substantial sums, which Roosevelt used for hired demonstrators to whip up the growing anti-Mossadeq mobs, and the support of the Iranian army, heavily dependent on U.S. equipment, the insurgents were able to turn the tide against the intractable premier and to drive him from office. The U.S. Military Assistance Mission in Iran took an active part in the operation. Major General George C. Stewart, director of military assistance, later told the House Foreign Affairs Committee:

When this crisis came on and the thing was about to collapse, we violated our normal criteria and among other things we did, we provided the army immediately on an emergency basis, blankets, boots, uniforms, electric generators, and medical supplies that permitted and created an atmosphere in which they could support the Shah.... The guns that they had in their hands, the trucks that they rode in, the armored cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defense assistance program . . . had it not been for this program, a government unfriendly to the United States probably would now be m power.

Once installed as premier, Zahedi concluded an agreement for an oil consortium which was highly favorable to United States companies. The details of the consortium agreement are still classified by the National Security Council. ("Making them public," Secretary Dulles explained to Congress, "would adversely affect the foreign relations of the United States.'' But the basic nature of the agreement is known. The British lost their former monopoly on Iranian oil. U.S. companies, including Gulf and Standard Oil of New Jersey, received a forty-percent interest in the consortium, which was negotiated for the United States by such oil-company executives on loan as Herbert Hoover, Jr., of Union Oil, and Howard W. Page, vice-president of Jersey Standard.

U.S. aid began to pour in. In 1954 85 million dollars was sent, of which 1.7 million dollars was earmarked as "bonuses" for the Iranian army and police. In the twelve years which followed, the United States spent 1.3 billion dollars on aid, about 500,000 dollars of which went to support the twenty-thousand-man army. "Do you know what the head of the Iranian army told one of our people?" Senator Hubert Humphrey demanded in the course of an investigation of the aid program. "He said the army was in good shape, thanks to U.S. aid-it was now capable of coping with the civilian population.'' In 1955 the Shah joined the Baghdad Pact. While in recent years he has attempted some land reform, the country continues to fit the familiar pattern of mass misery-in 1957 a congressional committee estimated illiteracy as high as ninety-three percent, existing with fabulous privilege. The events of the last several years have not overtaken the tempered judgment which Professor T. Cuyler Young, director of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, pronounced in the January, 1962, issue of Foreign Affairs: "They [Iranian patriots and nationalists] believe that the United States is interested primarily in the status quo and fearful of permitting any change that could mean social revolution. That may seem unfair to Americans, but we need to realize that this is our dominant image in Iran today." There is little in the recent history of U.S.-Iranian relations to suggest that the image is false.

***
Almost exactly nine years after the event, President Eisenhower reminisced before the American Booksellers' Association about the successful subversion of the government of Guatemala in 954

There was a time when we had a very desperate situation, or we thought it was at least, in Central America, and we had to get rid of a Communist government that had taken over....

The "desperate situation" had its origins in the revolution of 194~, which overthrew General Jorge Ubico, a brutal police figure who alternately compared his brand of justice to God's and Hitler's. Proudly noting his similarity to the German dictator, he liked to warn those he called his domesticated enemies, "I execute first and give trial afterward." Because the people of Guatemala "are not prepared for democracy and need a strong hand," Ubico not only banned labor unions but also declared the word "worker" subversive. After a military junta overthrew the dictator in 1944, Juan Arevalo was elected president by a wide margin. The new president abolished forced labor on the banana plantations, raised the minimum wage (to twenty-six cents a day), permitted unions, and began to pry the economy from its near-total dependence upon the United Fruit Company and other foreign corporations. (In 1948 the export of bananas accounted for forty-one percent of the country's foreign exchange. ) Such efforts to shake up the economic and political stagnation of the country provoked violent reactions.. His program, which Ronald Schneider in his book Communism in Guatemala found to be "essentially moderate,'' was attacked as "communistic," and more than two dozen attempts were made to overthrow him in his first four years in office. By 1950 the attempts to oust President Arevalo, who showed a willingness to use local communists in the bureaucracy, were growing more serious. He asked Ambassador Richard C. Patterson to leave the country because he sympathized openly with the conspirators and publicly attacked Arevalo for his "persecution of American business." The ambassador "represented Boston" (home of United Fruit), Arevalo charged in an interview with The New York Times.

U.S. firms cut down their operations in Guatemala in retaliation against such Arevalo reforms as the social-security provision, which cost United Fruit about two hundred thousand dollars annually. W. R. Grace and Pan American Airlines stopped promoting tourism. Banana exports plummeted eighty percent between 1948 and 195~. According to a United Nations report, "several companies which were engaged in prospecting discontinued their activities subsequent to the passage in 1949 of a petroleum law which they considered unfavorable.'' The World Bank withheld loans and the United States cut off military assistance.

In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a member of the military junta that had overthrown Ubico, was elected president, receiving 267,000 votes, almost twice as much as all the other candidates combined. Javier Arana, probably the most popular member of the junta, had been assassinated two years earlier under circumstances that appeared to implicate Arbenz. The new president's principal interest was land reform. About two percent of the population owned seventy percent of the land. By far the greatest landowner was United Fruit, and much of the land was uncultivated. In March, 1953, Arbenz expropriated 234,000 uncultivated acres, offering as compensation six hundred thousand dollars' worth of twenty-five-year bonds. (This was the value the company had declared for tax purposes.) United Fruit protested and demanded compensation in the amount of 15,854,849 dollars. The State Department, now headed by John Foster Dulles, intervened to suggest that this was exactly the amount of compensation required under international law.

A mammoth public-relations campaign was launched by United Fruit. Articles appeared in The New York Times Magazine and in other leading periodicals celebrating the company's beneficial impact on the Guatemalan economy, with special emphasis on the schools and hospitals it had built there. But the major thrust of the campaign was that communism was taking over in the Western Hemisphere. Spruille Braden, a former assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs turned unofficial adviser for United Fruit, told the Great Issues Seminar at Dartmouth College in a discussion of recent events in Guatemala:

Communism is so blatantly an international and not an internal affair, its suppression, even by force, in an American country by one or more of the other republics would not constitute an intervention in the internal affairs of the former.

In March, 1954, Dulles persuaded the Organization of American States to pass a resolution declaring that "the domination or control of the political institutions of any American State by the international communist movement, extending to the Hemisphere the political system of an extra-continental power, would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American States".

What was the role of the communists in Guatemala? What sort of a threat did they pose? There were perhaps as many as three thousand Communist-party members or active sympathizers in a country of three million. The Communists had no position in the cabinet but they held four key seats in Congress. Although Jose Manuel Fortuny, the party secretary-general, had lost his seat to an anticommunist in 1953, persons who called themselves "communists" held important positions in the labor movement and the official bureaucracies. Most of them, however, were scarcely under the discipline of Moscow. Indeed, the communist leadership itself was split between Moscow-oriented and nationalist factions. The U.S. White Paper charged Arbenz with implicitly accepting the communists as "an authentic domestic political party and not as part of the worldwide Soviet Communist conspiracy," and the charge is essentially correct. Arbenz, according to Ronald Schneider's study, Communism in Guatemala, had a confused relationship with communists, but there is no doubt that he numbered some of the communist leaders among his close friends and that he turned to them to help outline and administer some of his programs in education, agrarian reform, and social security. Arbenz' principal support, however, came from other leftist parties. The communists, who had previously disparaged land reform as a reformist trick, switched their position and lined up behind Arbenz. Communists took over key positions in the ministry of education, and some Marxist-leaning texts were distributed. They were also a leading influence in the labor unions. To put the communist issue in its darkest light, as Schneider does ("The author knows of no government, short of an openly Communist one, in which the Communists were so influential as they were in the Guatemalan government during the last two years of the Arbenz regime"), local communists were the leading source of ideas and political energy in the country. It also appears true that a few top Guatemalan communists took continuing direction from Moscow, but while they sought to deal with genuine local concerns, they had neither a revolutionary program nor a broad local constituency

What did all this mean? Guatemala was far from adopting a communist economy or social system. She was receiving no aid from the Soviet Union or indeed had any relationship with the communist bloc. Arbenz was actually using the communists to help administer a continuation of the moderate reformist program of Arevalo, who was a rather strong anticommunist. Arbenz's program of nationalization was neither more rapid nor more onerous than those of other noncommunist countries of Latin America and Asia. The cry of communism had been the traditional pretext for opposing reformers in Guatemala. Now that both the pace of reform and the participation of communists had been stepped up, anticommunism reached hysterical proportions.

In late 1953 the Eisenhower administration decided to arrange a coup to rid the hemisphere of the Arbenz regime. Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, the conservative who later became president of Guatemala, has given us an account of what the Eisenhower administration proposed to him in order to accomplish this:

A former executive of the United Fruit Company, now retired, Mr. Walter Turnbull, came to see me with two gentlemen whom he introduced as agents of the CIA. They said that I was a popular figure in Guatemala and that they wanted to lend their assistance to overthrow Arbenz. When I asked their conditions for the assistance I found them unacceptable. Among other things, I was to promise to favor the United Fruit Company and the International Railways of Central America; to destroy the railroad workers labor union; . . . to establish a strong-arm government, on the style of Ubico. Further, I was to pay back every cent that was invested in the undertaking.

The CIA succeeded, however, in locating Colonel Castillo Armas, who had been involved in earlier coups against Arevalo and was quite prepared to become the American candidate for president. John Peurifoy, a veteran diplomat who had been active in dealing with the Greek insurgency, was suggested to the President by Allen Dulles as an experienced man to lead the operation. Details of "Operation el Diablo," most of which turned out to be accurate, were discovered by Arbenz and published along with intercepted correspondence of Armas. In early 1954 the CIA set up a headquarters for Armas's forces in Honduras and later a training center on Momotobito, a volcanic island off Nicaragua supplied by Nicaragua's President Somoza, who was delighted to help overthrow the leftist Guatemalan government. Arbenz appealed to the Soviet Union for aid, offering to buy ten million dollars' worth of weapons. In mid-May the Swedish ship Alihem, with an estimated two thousand tons of small arms, set sail for Guatemala. The daily progress of the Alihem was plotted in newspapers throughout Central America, and despite the blockade which the United States had imposed on arms shipments, the vessel was allowed to land. The rifles and machine guns, which Dulles suggested might be used against the Panama Canal one thousand miles away, provided a new pretext for tightening the pressure on Arbenz. U.S. arms were now sent openly to Nicaragua and secretly dropped inside Guatemala at the United Fruit Company headquarters at Tiquisate.

On June 18, Armas, who had been trained at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth shortly after World War II, led his band of one hundred and fifty exile mercenaries across the border. U.S. pilots flying four P-47 Thunderbolts were bombing Guatemala City. (On June 20 Guatemala's charge that U.S. fliers were involved was denied by U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, but William A. Beall, a Texas pilot, publicly admitted that he and two other U.S. fliers had crashed off Guatemala since the beginning of the invasion.) Allen Dulles urged the President to send reinforcements to save the operation. Henry F. Holland, the assistant secretary of state for Latin-American affairs, thought, however, that such action would amount to "intervention" under international law. Since the United States had already spent on the order of five million dollars on the invasion, the legal arguments did not sit well. President Eisenhower recalls the scene:

Now different people, including Mr. Dulles and a member of the State Department and so on, came into my office to give their differing views....

And the man who opposed going any further was very vehement in his representation and he wanted no part. He thought we should stop right there, wash our hands of the thing and let it stand right there. Well, Mr. Dulles was on the other side. And when all of the views were presented, I decided we would go ahead and the orders went out [to send more planes].

... I said to Mr. Dulles ... before I made this decision I said "What are the chances that this will succeed?" Well, he said he thought about twenty percent. I told him later, "If you'd have said ninety percent, I'd have said no, but you seemed to be honest."

He told me later, "Well, you know, I knew that my opponent had lost the argument because he came in your office with three law books under his arm."

On June 27 Arbenz capitulated. Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz took over briefly but broadcast indiscreet remarks about "the mercenary invaders" and promised to fight. Ambassador Peurifoy strapped a .45 to his belt and began to lead the operation against Diaz. The next day a U.S. pilot bombed the radio station and the army headquarters in Guatemala City. Diaz was arrested by fellow officers and Armas arrived in Peurifoy's embassy plane to take charge of the government. In this way, as John Foster Dulles reported in a TV address to the American people the next day, was the situation "being cured by the Guatemalans themselves."

Arbenz had known about the impending invasion for a long time On June, his minister of the interior had publicly announced the plot, and throughout the months Arbenz' police were arresting suspects from the opposition. According to Schneider's book, which is based on affidavits collected by the Guatemalan Secretaria de Propaganda y Divulgacion, Arbenz made widespread use of terror, torture, and murder to discourage the plotters. The crucial factor in his downfall was the refusal of the army to fight for him and to distribute arms to the peasants. They refused to supply units of the people's militia as Arbenz urged, because they feared that this would strengthen the communists and destroy their own power. The army turned on Arbenz because of their concern with the growing influence of the communists and their disillusionment with the government's program, which was causing dislocation but had yet to show impressive results. Perhaps the most important consideration was their altogether realistic fear that the United States would not permit Guatemala to chart so independent a course as Arbenz was attempting. The commitment of U.S. power, through the bombing of Guatemala City, was looked upon by the officer corps as an invitation to prudence. Arbenz's general popularity was probably down from his peak strength in the last election, but there is no evidence that popular feeling had turned decisively against him. His downfall was the direct result of the defection of the army under the stimulus of a foreign invasion financed and directed by the United States.

In the next two years ninety million dollars poured into Guatemala to shore up the Armas government. In the previous ten years Guatemala had received about six hundred thousand dollars, exclusive of road subsidies.) Armas promptly returned United Fruit's expropriated lands and abolished the tax on interest and dividends to foreign investors, a reform which saved United Fruit about eleven million dollars. His National Committee for Defense Against Communism launched a campaign which resulted in the jailing of between five thousand and eight thousand persons. Armas also reformed the election law to eliminate the secret ballot and to disenfranchise the "illiterate masses" (about seventy percent of the country), enabling him to win what President Eisenhower in his memoirs calls a "thundering majority" in a one-candidate election.

In the United States the Subcommittee on Latin America of the House Select Subcommittee on Communist Aggression conducted an investigation of the history of communist penetration in Guatemala. Congressman Thomas G. Dodd and subcommittee adviser Patrick McMahon, who played active roles in the investigation, were also at the time registered agents for the Armas government. Three years later, Armas himself was assassinated. In the next decade the tiny country would undergo other coups. But U.S. influence in Guatemala remained secure. In 1961 Guatemala was used as a training base for an operation against Cuba modeled on the success in

Guatemala. Again a group of exiles was organized and trained by U.S. agencies. U.S. planes were provided. The story of the ill-fated operation is too well etched in the American consciousness to require repeating here.

***

In 1957-58 the United States tried unsuccessfully to support the subversion of the Sukarno government in Indonesia. For a year the Indonesian leader had been moving leftward. After a visit to Moscow he began to expropriate remaining Dutch property and launched a drive against west Irian (New Guinea). He suspended the old parliamentary system, substituting for it a "guided democracy," a coalition government run by himself, in which the one-million-member Communist party had an important role.

On February 15, 1958, a Revolutionary Council was set up in Sumatra under Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, Sukarno's former minister of finance, who had been head of the Bank of Indonesia. The Council accused the government of corruption and inefficiency and of permitting the communists too great an influence. But the major sentiment behind the revolt was Sumatran separatism. In his autobiography Sukarno recounts how his cabinet analyzed the revolt:

A few discontented regional leaders claim three-fourths of all revenue comes from Sumatra, but only a fraction returns there because most of the money stays in Java. They complain the country suffers from Djakartism [Djakarta is the capital city]. They demand a greater division economically.

In 1957 Allen L. Pope, a former air-force pilot in the Korean War who for three years had been flying for the Civil Air Transport, a CIA airline that had helped drop supplies to the French at Dien Bien Phu, was asked by the agency to fly missions in support of the rebels. A small number of B-26 bombers were to be flown to a rebel airstrip from the U.S. Air Force Base at Clark Field, Manila. Sukarno charges in his autobiography that "tens of thousands of light, American-made weapons were dropped by air. Non-Indonesian pilots were smuggled in."

As the rebellion gathered momentum, the United States professed neutrality. "The United States views this trouble in Sumatra as an internal matter," John Foster Dulles declared. "We intend to conform scrupulously to the principles of international law that apply to such a situation." At a news conference President Eisenhower denied that the United States was helping the rebels but observed that he could not control the activities of private "soldiers of fortune." A few days later, on May 18, Allen Pope's B-26 was shot down. The ambassador continued to insist that Pope was a "private American citizen involved as a paid soldier of fortune," but the Indonesians held a press conference in which they displayed the evidence of Pope's official status-his past association with the air force and the CIA; the possession of substantial foreign currency, including scrip good only in U.S. military installations; and, above all, his use of the air-force landing strip at Clark Field. At his trial two years later Pope admitted that he received two hundred dollars a bombing mission.

As a result of the exposure of its modest effort to overthrow a government with which it had diplomatic relations, the United States found it expedient to shift course and to support Sukarno. Within five days of Pope's capture, the State Department had sold rice and one million dollars in small arms to the Djakarta government. Shortly thereafter the United States made available to Sukarno twelve Globemaster aircraft, with which the Indonesian leader stamped out the last traces of the rebellion. When Kennedy came in, he recognized that Sukarno's distrust of America was compounded, as Schlesinger puts it, by "his knowledge that in 1958 the CIA had participated in an effort to overthrow him." Relations with Indonesia did not substantially improve, however, until Sukarno was finally overthrown in 1966 in an army coup with which the State Department openly sympathized but in which, so far as can be determined, U.S. agents did not play a significant role.

***

British Guiana, a British colony bordering Venezuela, composed of about three hundred thousand East Indians and a slightly smaller number of Negroes, had been the scene of anticolonial agitation for many years. The key political figure was Dr. Cheddi Jagan, an Indian dentist, trained at Howard University, a man who sometimes spoke like a Marxist and whose American wife had once been a member of the Young Communist League. For many years he had tangled with the British authorities. In 1953 the British had suspended the constitution and sent in troops after Jagan's Progressive People's party had won the election and had begun some legislative reforms, including repeal of the Undesirable Publications Law and the passage of a Iabor-relations bill to strengthen unions. "It has been evident," the Colonial Office stated, "that the intrigues of Communists and their associates, some in Ministerial posts, threaten the welfare and good administration of the colony.... The faction in power have shown by their acts and their speeches that they are prepared to go to any lengths, including violence, to turn British Guiana into a Communist state." Jagan spent some time in jail after being turned out of office, but in 1957 was returned again to the colonial government and in 1961 was reelected premier by a substantial vote. (Jagan's party won twenty out of thirty-five seats in Parliament. The premier now began to press for immediate independence for the colony.

In October, 1961, he came to the United States to meet President Kennedy and to seek economic assistance. "We are not engaged in a crusade to force private enterprise on parts of the world where it is not relevant," Kennedy told Jagan. "If we are engaged in a crusade for anything, it is national independence. That is the primary purpose of our aid." The President and his aides then began to examine Jagan on his political beliefs. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., describes the scene:

Jagan, after avowing his commitment to parliamentary government, went on to say that he also admired the Monthly Review and the rather pro-communist writings of Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman and Paul Baran. George Ball and I pressed him on this point, declaring there was a large difference between Bevan and the Sweezy group. [Jagan had said that he was a "Bevanite" and the President had "responded agreeably" to this.] Jagan finally said, "Well, Bevanism, Sweezyism, Hubermanism, Baranism-I really don't get those ideological subtleties." Kennedy observed later that this was the one time when his exposition rang false.

Jagan failed to pass ideological muster. The conversation gave the President the "feeling that in a couple of years he will find ways to suspend his constitutional provisions and will cut his opposition off at the knees.... With all the political jockeying and all the racial tensions, it's going to be almost impossible for Jagan to concentrate the energies of his country on development through a parliamentary system."' It was decided to give him no commitments for aid but to consider support for such individual projects as Guiana might submit. The State Department thought that there was at least a fifty-percent chance that Jagan would "go communist" and that therefore the risk of congressional criticism made it unwise to give him any aid. The British, anxious to cut loose their colonial responsibilities in the Western Hemisphere, insisted that there was no alternative to independence under a Jagan government. The Colonial Office, as Schlesinger reports, responded somewhat sarcastically to U.S. suggestions for a delay in the timetable of independence, since the State Department had been prodding them for years to give up their colonies in the rest of the world.

The British government had told the Kennedy administration that Jagan was "possible to work with." Although a Marxist in outlook, he had made no move to become part of the Soviet orbit. Indeed, he had in seven years succeeded in doing virtually no socialist planning and had continually applied to the United States for aid. Despite the visits of trade missions from the U.S.S.R., Cuba, and Hungary, a contract with Cuba for rice at an advantageous price and Castro's offer of thirty-five million dollars in loans (which the British refused to let Jagan accept), the Kennedy administration itself had no hard evidence that Jagan was about to make a "Cuba" of his country. When the premier had asked the President in 1961 whether the United States would object to a trading agreement with the Soviet Union, Kennedy replied that he would not, provided it did not involve a "condition of economic dependence." But as the early months of the new administration passed, the Latin-American specialists in the State Department and the White House became convinced that Jagan, "though perhaps not a disciplined communist, had the kind of deep pro-communist emotion which only sustained experience with communism could cure." Hence, he had to go. The British, bowing to U.S. pressure on a matter in its own hemisphere, acquiesced in the developing campaign to oust Jagan.

The United States had for some time been conducting political activities in British Guiana. During the 1961 election the U.S. Information Service, departing from its usual practice, had taken its films depicting the evils of Castroism from its own building and had shown them on street corners. Fred Schwartz' Christian Anti-Communist Crusade admitted spending seventy-six thousand dollars in the election, a questionable activity for a private organization, which the State Department did nothing to discourage. Jagan wrote Kennedy that the opposition candidates claimed they had commitments from the United States for "half a billion dollars as loans to the Government for 'infra-structure' development and half a billion for industrial development by private U.S. investors." The prime minister noted that, "these statements met with no denial from your Consulate-General, or any other U.S. official ''

Now U.S. activities in British Guiana were intensified. The major U.S.-sponsored anti-Jagan campaign in Guiana was conducted through labor unions. A CIA agent, Gerald O'Keefe, posing as an official of the Retail Clerks International Association; William McCabe, inter-American representative of the AFL-CIO; and a host of other U.S labor officials flocked to the British colony in 196Z and 1963. (There were more visits by trade-union representatives from the United States in eighteen months than in the previous eighteen years, Jagan observes.) They established close contact with the Trade Union Council (TUC), an anti-Jagan union, headed by Richard Ishmael, who had been trained in the United States at the American Institute of Free Labor Development. The institute, an organization set up by the CIO, with a board made up of business and labor leaders, is designed, according to its charter, to assist "in the development of free democratic trade union structures in Latin America." Although officially described as a partnership between labor, business, and government, it receives about ninety-five percent of its annual six-million-dollar budget from the U.S. Treasury. When Jagan was reelected in 1961, the institute began a major campaign against him. 'It appeared to me," Serafino Romualdi, the ATFLD director, later declared, "that young democratic trade union leaders would need intensive training to combat Dr. Jagan's efforts.'' Several Guianan labor leaders were brought to Washington for training and upon returning to their unions continued to receive a monthly stipend of two hundred and fifty dollars from the institute. According to the London Times, which in 1967 conducted an investigation of happenings in British Guiana four years earlier, the account that Jagan gives in his book The West on Trial is essentially correct. The British government agreed to a campaign of subversion to unseat Jagan.

In 196Z Jagan presented his budget, but Ishmael's union called a six-day general strike and the premier was forced to withdraw it. The AFL-ClO; ORIT, a Latin-American AFL-ClO affiliate; and the Retail Clerks International sent large amounts of food to the strikers. The following March, Jagan introduced his labor-relations bill, which provided for a commissioner of labor, a civil-service official, to be in charge of determining proper bargaining units and arranging representational elections. The Trade Union Council demanded that the board administering the law have a majority of TUC members and - business leaders. Although Jagan accepted a few amendments to his bill, which was modeled on the Wagner Act, he refused to compromise on the major objective of the bill, the elimination of company unions and the strengthening of trade unionism.

The Tuc declared a general strike, which this time lasted eighty days. The strikers were supported from the U.S. Treasury in the amount of approximately one million dollars. Jagan puts the figure at 1.Z million dollars. Polidor, a TUC official, estimates that U.S. sources paid each of twenty thousand strikers three dollars a week for about twelve weeks. One official of the Public Service International personally paid out about one hundred thousand dollars in strike benefits. Much of the money was paid through the International Affairs Department of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which, according to The New York Times, was "actually run by two [CIA] aides who operated out of the union's former headquarters in Washington with the knowledge of the union leadership.'' Funds were transferred to the union from the CIA through a paper organization known as the Gotham Foundation. The activities of the CIA and the U.S. unions in their service in British Guiana have been well publicized. None of it has been denied by the government or the unions involved, and some- such as the role of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees-has been specifically admitted. In the October 3, 1963, issue of Machinist, George Meaney noted with pride that "in British Guiana other Institute graduates are participating in the fight against the Cuba-oriented government of Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan."

In June, 1963, rioting broke out in Georgetown, and in the space of a week dynamite attempts were made on the principal public buildings, including the ministries of home affairs, labor, health, and housing. Rocks were thrown at Jagan and other government leaders while they were attending a funeral. Mobs roamed the streets of Georgetown, attacking people of Indian ancestry. At least fifty were injured. According to a secret report of the British police superintendent in British Guiana to the British commissioner, written on September 1l, 1963, which came to light in a debate in the House of Commons in 1966, the violence was instigated by a terrorist group which included British agents. The document states that O'Keefe, the CIA agent, financed these operations through "monetary transactions" with Ishmael. The report also included a letter of Jagan to the British governor charging that the Americans "by lockouts and blockade . . . hope to strangle my government financially and economically." U.S. agents cooperated with Jagan's opponents to exploit the delicate racial situation in Guiana by inciting feelings against the Indians, who comprised an important element of Jagan's support. The anti-Jagan union, TUC, began to distribute handbills urging violence ("Let us not be afraid to SHOOT"; "We must be as RUTHLESS AND MORE DESTRUCTIVE than CHEDDI'S Armed Forces ) .

The effect of all this subversive activity was to weaken seriously Jagan's political position and to provide a justification for securing British agreement to the further delay of Guianan independence. When U.S. oil companies cooperated with the strikers in refusing to unload petroleum, Jagan appealed to Cuba, which sent oil. Just as Arbenz nine years earlier had under pressure turned increasingly to the Soviet bloc, so Jagan now tried to get assistance from the only governments willing to defy the United States.

While Jagan's rule was being undermined through these illegal means, the United States was working to change the election law so as to make possible the defeat of Jagan by the constitutional process. Having concluded that Forbes Burnham, a former Jagan associate and now his arch political rival, "would cause us many fewer problems than an independent British Guiana under Jagan," Schlesinger reported to the President that the "way was open to bring it about" by persuading the British to adopt an election law based on proportional representation. (In 1961 Jagan's party had won a plurality of 4z.6 percent of the popular vote and under the existing law a substantial majority of parliamentary seats.) In October, 1963, as a result of Kennedy's conversations with Prime Minister Macmillan a few weeks earlier, the British changed the law. In the elections the following year, Jagan, despite the increase in his popular vote, giving him almost six percent more than any other party, lost to Burnham, now backed by a coalition of the other two parties. The terrorism that had continued throughout 1964 came to an end. The Burnham government quickly made it clear that despite election slogans advocating nationalization, it did not intend to disturb the investments of the Aluminum Company of America in bauxite, the Texas Oil Company's oil field, or the manganese industry, also under U.S. control.

A few months after leaving the White House, where by his own account he played an important role in the Jagan episode, Arthur Schlesinger summed up these events in an olympian postscript so apolitical in tone that he might have been describing a phenomenon of nature rather than a clash of men: "With much unhappiness and turbulence, British Guiana seemed to have passed safely out of the communist orbit."

***

U.S. intervention in the Congo does not fit easily into the familiar patterns that emerge from the cases of subversion discussed in this chapter. In the typical situations a constitutionally elected regime had demonstrated sympathy for communist ideology or dependence on communist governments or had taken or threatened some action inimical to U.S. business interests in the country (including the foreclosing of future opportunities). Small-scale clandestine operations conducted in collaboration with local politicians and military men who opposed their own legally constituted regimes were sufficient (except in Indonesia in 1958, Cuba in 1961, and other failures that may not yet have come to light) to bring down regimes which the United States did not like. The situation in the Congo was considerably more complex than this simple model.

The Congo became a world problem on June 30, 1960, when the Belgians granted the colony independence. As recently as 1955 the Belgians had been thinking in terms of a thirty-year program leading to independence, but riots in 1959 and mounting world pressure convinced them that they could preserve their economic interests, which were considerable, only by giving up political control. At the independence ceremonies Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister, revealed how deep ran the anticolonialist sentiment in the Congo by lashing out at the assembled dignitaries, including the Belgian king, for the fifty years of "humiliating bondage" and "colonial oppression" they had brought to the Congo. Although it is common to call these bitterly anticolonial feelings "nationalist," it is important to keep in mind that tribal and regional allegiances were much stronger than any sense of national identity.

Step by step the major powers were sucked into the Congo vortex. In early July Congolese army units mutinied against their white Belgian officers. Belgian civilians were attacked. Some women were raped. A few days later Katanga province, the home of Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga, a huge Belgian enterprise and the source of over sixty percent of the wealth of the whole country, declared its independence from the central Congolese government in Leopoldville. Moise Tshombe, the Katangan prime minister, had tried unsuccessfully to arrange for a separate province before the grant of independence, for neither he nor the Belgians wished to have their mines taxed to support the rest of the Congo. On the night of July 9 the Belgians decided upon military intervention to rescue their technicians and their families and to subdue the mutineers. Tshombe invited the Belgians in and later police forces from Britain and Rhodesia as well, wishing, as he later explained it, "to profit from the occasion to proclaim independence for Katanga" under Belgian protection.

The Eisenhower administration, which wanted to avoid "bringing the Cold War into Africa," supported Lumumba's urgent request for UN military intervention to keep out the Belgians and to end the secession of Katanga. Lumumba had also cabled Khrushchev "to watch hourly over the situation," but the Soviets at first were reluctant to act independently in a traditional Western preserve and supported the creation of a UN force. The Eisenhower administration was split between those who felt that the United States must support the nationalist element in Africa, represented by Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu, the Congolese president, and those who could not bring themselves to oppose a NATO ally. But the State Department decided to give wholehearted support to the UN operation, and the UN force that was supposed to restore peace in the Congo was transported in U.S. planes.

The Soviets, meanwhile, contrary to this agreement in the United Nations, had decided to send trucks and planes outside of the UN framework to strengthen Lumumba. The Congolese prime minister, as Roger Hilsman has characterized him, was a man who "played with Marxist verbiage" but above all was an African nationalist. In response to growing Soviet influence, President Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba, who was later kidnapped to Katanga and murdered, and closed the Soviet and Czech embassies. The United States and the Soviet Union were now in open diplomatic warfare over the Congo as the Kennedy administration took office.

Lumumba had turned on the UN because the force was not aggressive enough in his opinion in ending the Katangan secession. But the new moderate premier, Cyrille Adoula, elected in the summer of 1961, also insisted on vigorous UN action to end the Katangan revolt which Tshombe was maintaining, with the help of about five hundred white mercenary officers recruited from South Africa, Belgium, Rhodesia, and France. Arrayed against the pressure of the Congolese government and African nationalists and their sympathizers in Asia and Latin America was a powerful U.S. Iobby, "The American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters," organized by Michel Struelens, a Belgian public-relations man. It included Senator Thomas Dodd, who thundered that the suppression of the Katangan secession was "the Hungary of 1961" and continually pressed the State Department to restrain the UN force. The Kennedy administration became increasingly split under the mounting pressure between the Bureau of African Affairs and the American ambassador, Edmund Gullion, who thought that the United States would lose all influence in Africa if it did not identify with the nationalists by backing strong UN action, and those in the White House, who, in Arthur Schlesinger's words, "had become openly critical of deeper American involvement in the Congo." The latter group, who "regarded the conflict as essentially an internal matter," had become convinced that the communist danger had receded.

Around Christmas, 196z, political negotiations which Kennedy had been promoting for a Congolese settlement broke down. The British refused to support sanctions against Katanga, which did not appear to be effective in any event, and Tshombe talked confidently of a "scorched-earth" campaign against the central government and the UN..

In Washington the Kennedy administration surveyed the alternatives; there turned out to be only two because of the failure of political negotiations and economic sanctions. One was disengagement which was rejected because of the fear, as Hilsman puts it, "that the Communists would parlay our disengagement into a position of considerable influence, through a military aid program...."58 The remaining choice was to use U.S. military power, either directly or through the UN. Thus the State Department, in conjunction with the UN secretariat, began to develop a plan to crush the Katanga revolt. The day after Tshombe made a speech threatening to "destroy everything," the United States sent a military mission to the Congo under Lieutenant General Louis Truman, a move which the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Valerian Zorin, denounced as "direct subversion," despite the Soviets' own unilateral activities in the Congo. A few days later the UN began an offensive which pushed into Katanga, and by the first of the year the force had occupied approximately three-quarters of the productive facilities of Union Miniere. When Tshombe threatened to make a stand at Kolwezi and destroy all remaining facilities in his hands, the State Department announced that the United States was about to send trucks, armored personnel carriers, mine-clearing equipment, transport craft, and aircraft within the week. President Kennedy had also decided to send fighter aircraft upon request of the UN command. Under the threat of the mounting advance and a stronger U.S. military commitment, and the promise of an important political role for himself in the reunified Congo, Tshombe ended the secession on January 16, 1963. Willing to face the opposition of every other major power involved in order to block possible Soviet initiatives in the area, the United States had lent the crucial power to make the shaky international peacekeeping operation a success.

It was, however, only a momentary success. The major U.S. intervention in the Congo was still ahead. Tshombe was the principal rival to the authority of the central government, but he was not the only one. By the end of 1960 Lumumba and his associate Antoine Gizenga had set up a government in Stanleyville, in the northern province of Kivu, and had claimed to be the legitimate government of the entire Congo. The Stanleyville regime was nationalist, anti-Western, and sympathetic to Marxist rhetoric, and it looked to the African neutralists such as Nkrumah and Sekou Toure as well as to the communist countries as its natural friends. When Lumumba was murdered in February, 1961, while in Tshombe's custody, the more radical nationalist African states, including Guinea, Ghana, Mali, and the United Arab Republic, as well as the communist countries, including East Germany and Yugoslavia, promptly recognized Gizenga's regime in Stanleyville as a legitimate government. The Soviets also announced that Stanleyville was the "lawful government" and that they were considering giving it aid. The Kennedy administration favored a negotiated settlement of the Congolese situation, and in the summer of 1961 an agreement was reached with representatives from Stanleyville, which resulted in Gizenga being named vice-premier in the central Congolese government in Leopoldville. Gizenga's joining the government did not end the rebel movement. Gizenga's party (Parti Solidaire Africaine) sent representatives to Egypt, Ghana, and Nigeria to enlist support. The Chinese sent small quantities of weapons. (In late 1960, while he was deputy premier to Lumumba, Gizenga had written Peking "to learn to what extent your government would be in a position to support us in personnel . . . arms . . . and finances.")

On January 14, 1962, the United Nations force, with strong U.S. encouragement, defeated the three-hundred-man Stanleyville gendarmerie and arrested Gizenga, who was deposed as vice-premier. Meanwhile, Pierre Mulele and Christopher Gbenye, two radical members of the Gizenga group, enlisted the help of Nasser and other governments in setting up a Council of National Liberation, the purpose of which was intended to restore the Stanleyville government and eventually to provide the basis for extending a radical nationalist regime over the entire Congo. During 1963 they attempted to carry out a coup d'etat against the Leopoldville government. At the end of the Katangan secession, political opposition to the central government mounted furiously in Kivu province. Gbenye returned to lead the rebellion, which controlled a large area in the northeast of the country. The Soviet Union agreed to replace any weapons which African governments such as Guinea, the United Arab Republic, or Ghana might care to give the Congolese rebels. The Chinese supplied some arms directly through their embassy in Burundi. Most important, units of the central Congolese army were defecting to the Stanleyville government.

On June 30, 1964, the last units of the United Nations force were withdrawn, having turned over many of their installations and some of their equipment to the Leopoldville government. Beginning in October, 196Z, the United States began a program of direct military aid to the Congolese government without going through the UN. By mid-l964 this amounted to over six million dollars. Almost one hundred military personnel had been sent to train Congolese troops, and a dozen Congolese officers were receiving training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in what the Defense Department called techniques for protecting "legally constituted governments against subversion and domestic disorder.'' According to a report of the Brookings Institution, "two or three Americans recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reportedly flew combat missions in Kivu Province until they were grounded by the State Department. Under contract with the Congo Government, they had flown American-built T-28 fighters and attacked rebel positions near Bukavu." When the Soviets objected to the use of American citizens for what they called "punitive operations against Congolese patriots," Cuban exiles were used instead.

In the spring of 1964 there broke out in the Congo three separate revolts. These were apparently coordinated by Gbenye but sparked mostly by three local organizers, each with a base of rural support: Pierre Mulele, Gaston Soumialot, and Nicolas Olenga. A Popular Liberation army was formed, and on August 4 rebel forces again captured Stanleyville.

With that victory behind them the rebels were able to recruit thousands of partisans, who were called simbas (lions). The rebel force was soon strong enough to confiscate UN trucks, together with considerable stocks of weapons and ammunition left by the retreating Congolese army. The rebel army spread out in many directions and succeeded in ending the central government's administration of Orientale province. The rebels were divided along factional and tribal lines. The earliest group -to seize power in Stanleyville were extremists, and a wave of assassinations followed.

President Kasavubu decided that only Tshombe and the five hundred South African, Belgian, and other foreign mercenaries he controlled could save his government. The regular Congolese army was both inefficient and politically unreliable. So, although he was the symbol of treason for most black Africans, Tshombe was invited out of exile to become premier. He lost no time in launching an offensive into Kivu province

As the mercenaries advanced on Stanleyville, the United States sought to use this new pressure on Gbenye to force him to negotiate an acceptable settlement with the: Tshombe government. The rebels let it be known that they had over thirteen hundred foreigners in Stanleyville whom they intended to use as hostages. In Kenya Ambassador William Attwood tried to persuade President Kenyatta to intercede or mediate between the rebels and Tshombe. He also sought intervention on behalf of the Congolese government by the Organization of African Unity. Finally, he negotiated directly with Thomas Kanza, a representative of the Congolese rebels. "If you persist in helping Tshombe," the Congolese told Attwood, "the Algerians, the Egyptians and others will soon be in the Congo and you will regret it." Gbenye agreed, however, to release the hostages if Tshombe agreed to stop bombing Stanleyville, but neither was willing to make the first move.

Early in November Gbenye arrested two hundred and eighty Belgians and sixteen U.S. citizens as "prisoners of war" and declared war on the United States. Having earlier announced that Congo-Stanleyville was a "people's republic," he appealed for more help from the communist countries.

In his study of the rebellion, Professor M. Crawford Young, chairman of African studies at the University of Wisconsin, concludes that the "communist role in the Stanleyville rebellion was very small." Mulele had spent time in China and had studied guerrilla tactics and Maoist ideology, but there is no evidence, Young concludes, that he became a communist. Other rebel leaders had contact with Chinese representatives in their embassy in Burundi, but the Chinese, though they gave some aid, neither instigated nor controlled the events. Indeed the rebels, despite their radical rhetoric, had no revolutionary program whatever.

The United States had quite accurate information about the extent of Chinese and communist influence in the rebellion. What really alarmed them was the mounting wave of executions which the rebels conducted throughout their territory. In all, Professor Young estimates, as many as twenty thousand may have been killed in a few weeks, many of them after being publicly tortured. The State Department's humanitarian concerns were aroused only when it appeared that Americans and Europeans might be the next victims. But the earlier assassinations worried them for other reasons. It looked like the entire country was out of control and that the resulting chaos might be exploited by a communist power.

When Gbenye refused to release the American and Belgian hostages, the United States prepared to execute Operation Dragon Rouge, a drop from U.S. transport planes of five hundred and forty-five Belgian paratroopers to rescue the white civilians. The paratroopers were moved to Ascension Island and put on alert status.

A few days later Stanleyville radio announced that a U.S. medical missionary, Paul Carlson, was in reality a spy and had been sentenced to death. On November z4, 1964, the paratroopers landed. They not only rescued the hostages (not including Carlson, who had been killed), but they seized the strategic points of the city and coordinated their operation with the advancing columns of Tshombe's mercenary army that was moving swiftly toward the city. The combination of the two Western forces armed with advanced weapons brought the downfall of the rebel government. It is likely that had Gbenye not taken U.S. hostages, the operation would not have been mounted. Once the humanitarian basis was laid, however, the paratroopers' mission was to destroy the Stanleyville regime. Ambassador Attwood has given a good account of the African reaction to the stunning act of unilateral intervention:

We saw the Stanleyville rescue operation as a dramatic effort to save hundreds of helpless, innocent people. It was humanitarian, and it was necessary, since all other attempts to release them had failed. And the operation had to take place before the ANC column entered the city, for the panicky Simbas would probably have mowed down the hostages before fleeing from the mercenaries.

But if you could put yourself in the shoes of an average educated African, you got a quite different picture. When he looked at the Congo, he saw a black government in Stanleyville being attacked by a gang of hired South African thugs, and black people being killed by rockets fired from American planes. He did not know about the thousands of blacks who were tortured and murdered by the Simbas, but he did know that the mercenaries and their Katangan -auxiliaries left a trail of African corpses in their wake. (The orgy of looting and killing that followed the capture of Stanleyville by the ANC was so bad that the Belgian paratroop commander was glad to pull his men out of the city for fear they'd start fighting the mercenaries.)

Even more galling to the educated African was the shattering, of so many of his illusions-that Africans were now masters of their own continent, that the OAU was a force to be reckoned with, that a black man with a gun was the equal of a white man with a gun. For in a matter of weeks, two hundred swaggering white mercenaries had driven through an area the size of France, scattered the Belgians in American planes, had defied the OAU, jumped into the heart of Africa and taken out nearly two thousand people-with the loss of one trooper.

The weakness and impotence of newly independent Africa had been harshly and dramatically revealed to the whole world and the educated African felt deeply humiliated: the white man with a gun, the old plunderer who had enslaved his ancestors, was back again, doing what he pleased, when he pleased, where he pleased. And there wasn't a damn thing Africa could do about it, except yell rape.

There is little doubt from Attwood's own account that had the United States ordered Tshombe to stop bombing Stanleyville, the U.S. and Belgian hostages would have been released. It is equally clear that the prime objective of U.S. policy in the Congo in 1964 was to bring down the Gbenye regime because of its reckless character and radical orientation. Unlike the other cases discussed in this chapter, Congo-Stanleyville, although it had earlier been recognized by a number of African and communist states, had an ambiguous status. It was not clearly a legitimate government that had come to power according to constitutional processes, as had Mossadeq, Arbenz, and Jagan. However, Kivu province had never been brought under the administration of the central government in Leopoldville. In fact, Gizenga and Gbenye had carried on administrative and governmental operations in Stanleyville and the surrounding area since 1960, an accomplishment which the Kasavubu government had never been able to equal. Although U.S. officials sought to justify the operation not only on the grounds of humanitarian necessity but also on the UN mandate, the overwhelming majority of black Africans who had approved of the suppression of Katanga were outraged at Operation Dragon Rouge.

The Congo was a unique experience because of the role of the United Nations force in the Katanga war and the use of a variety of non-American troops in the Stanleyville operation. But once again the criterion for intervention was traditional American fear of communism, for the Congo was another case, along with the Dominican Republic and British Guiana, of preemptive intervention to forestall the possibility of a local communist government.

As Attwood's account makes clear, United States officials were vigorous in lobbying the African states for support, but the State Department showed very little willingness to be guided by their wishes.

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