Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner

Photo of Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of the C.I.A. from 1953–1961.




I strongly believe that every American should read a book entitled “Legacy of Ashes” by Pulitzer Prize winner, Tim Weiner. Want to know why? The following is a brief outline of the covert operations of the CIA during the decade 1953-1963 as distilled from that book. I present this little outline here just as an appetizer.

1. 1953. US, with British help, unseated the duly elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq and installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as the “Shah” of Iran. The Shah was a virtual dictator and “our guy” in the middle east for 30 years. He ruled Iran through the SAVAK, a brutal secret police trained by the CIA.

2. 1954. “Operation Success”. US virtually created a military coup to oust President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala and installed Carlos Castillo Armas. The coup was originally very weak, requiring actual direct bombing by the US to succeed. It led to forty years of military rulers, death squads and armed repression.

3. 1954. Japan. Despite the fact that Nobusuke Kishi was a war criminal who has signed the declaration of war against the US, the CIA “rescued” him from prison and installed him as Prime Minister (1957) and chief of the ruling party that held power in Japan for nearly half a century, through continuous CIA payoffs that the Japanese called “kozo oshoku”, or “structural corruption”.

4. 1953. USA puts Gamal Abdel Nasser in power in Egypt in a military coup bankrolled by the USA. But Nasser proved unwilling to take orders from the US. In 1956, Nasser went so far as to nationalize the Suez Canal.

5. During the Eisenhower years, the CIA delivered guns, money and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon and President Nuri Said of Iraq, successfully placing them in power.“Our guy” in Iraq, Nuri Said was overthrown by his military led by General Abdel Karim Quasim who went public with proof of CIA control of his country. We responded by backing a successful coup in Iraq and installed the ruling Baath Party under Ali Saleh Saadi. Eventually, we supported the take over of the Baath party by a young assassin named Saddam Hussein.

6. We supported the independence of Indonesia from the Dutch and helped President Sukarno take office; that is, until it was discovered that Indonesia had some 20 billion barrels of untapped oil. Sukarno by this time wanted to be “unaligned”, tied neither to the USA or the Soviets. In fact, Sukarno called a conference in of 29 Asian, African and Arab leaders to Indonesia and proposed a global movement of unaligned nations. This set off a 10 year “war” to unseat him, which, of course, forced him closer to Moscow. And the war proved difficult, as most of the senior officers in the Indonesian armed forces were trained in the US. And were loyal to Sukarno. Despite bombings and naval operations, Sukarno defeated all rebel and American forces sent against him. Years later, the CIA supported General Suharto who led an insurrection which killed some 500,000 people, according to Marshal Green, the American ambassador. Whole villages were “depopulated”. Green was to later lie before a Congressional committee and stated that the CIA had nothing to do with the uprising. In the coming years, the military junta jailed more than one million people.

7. On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, defeating the hopelessly corrupt dictator, Betista with substantial help from the CIA. In fact, in April – May that same year, Castro came to America for meetings with the CIA in Washington. But Castro proved difficult to control, so American policy quickly changed to “eliminating” him; this included an embargo which has almost starved the people of Cuba to death, the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs and various efforts to assassinate him, including a Mafia contract put out by the CIA’s Dick Bissell. He has just now relinquished power to his brother due to poor health, remaining alive and in power for almost 50 years, despite all efforts of the USA to kill him or otherwise remove him from power.

8. 1960. Patrice Lumumba was freely elected after the Congo expelled the Belgians, who had brutally ruled the Congo as a colony. When the Belgian paratroopers returned to reassert Belgium rule, Lumumba appealed to the US for help. This was denied, so Lumumba turned to Moscow for help. Thus, the CIA set out to kill him and replace him with “our man”, Joseph Mobutu. After a 5 year struggle, Mobutu came to power with the unwavering support of the CIA. He ruled for three decades as a brutal and corrupt dictator, stealing billions of dollars from his nation’s deposits of diamonds, minerals and slaughtering thousands to preserve his power. For that entire time, he was our “go to guy” in Africa, enjoying continuous American support.

9. The US brought Generalissimo Rafeal Trujillo to power in the Dominican Republic where he ruled for 30 years. He ruled by “force, fraud and fear, taking pleasure in hanging his enemies from meat hooks”. But he kept law and order, got the trains to run on time, etc. He was our kind of guy. Finally, under Kennedy, Trujillo became too much of an embarrassment, so the CIA had him killed. Chaos ensued as rioting in the streets of the capital broke out. The CIA claimed that the rioters were actually Cuban agents, and on that pretext, President Johnson sent in thousands of marines.

10. 1962; The American government spent millions of dollars to push Joao Goulart from power in Brazil and replace him with a military junta.

11. With American military and financial aid, Francois “Papa Doc” Dubalier came to power in Haiti. Papa Doc was a fanatically corrupt and violent dictator, a real mad man who ruled Haiti for years.

12. In 1953, Cheddi Jagan became the prime minister of British Guiana under the British colonial constitution. He was twice re-elected, visiting the oval office to meet with Kennedy in 1961. Almost immediately after that meeting, the CIA opened a covert operation to drive Jagan from power. It was know that he had a Marxist wife from Chicago (Jagan himself was an American educated dentist), and that was enough despite Jagan’s pledge that he was not going to hand Guyana to the Russians. At the time that this covert operation was started, Kennedy approved covert operations to overthrow the governments of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Pakistan, Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala and Venezuela. So much for Camelot!

13. In 1962, under Kennedy’s orders, the CIA’s Lucien Conein led an assassination effort that killed President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Diem was a Christian in a largely Buddhist country. We had put Diem in power and kept him there with millions of dollars. This, like our taking out Saddam Husain, let loose chaos in South Vietnam, which ultimately led to full out war, costing American thousands of lives and handing the USA it’ first ever military defeat.

14. In response to the North Vietnamese cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, the CIA brought suitcases of cash to bear, which forced out the freely elected coalition government and installed Prince Souvanna Phouma, whose CIA case officer was a young Yale graduate named Campbell James who saw himself as the viceroy in Laos. The CIA poured millions more into arming commando forces called The Hmong commanded by a mountain tribesman named Vang Pao and overtly attempted to start a hot war in Loas.

15. In Thailand, the US overturned the local government and established a military/police state. The head of the national police, supported by the CIA, was “an opium king”, and the military commander controlled Bangkok’s whorehouses. Thailand remained under military dictatorship for more than a decade, ruled under martial law. Even after elections were called, the CIA dumped many millions of dollars more to fix the elections and keep the same junta in power.

This is just a ten year period in the history of the CIA. Weiner’s book goes on to describe just this sort of activity up to the present. Like I said. I think every American should read this book.