Surprise,Kill, Vanish
By Annie Jacobson
4
By Annie Jacobson
4
Special Forces
In 1953, Billy Waugh was transferred to a U.S. military base in Augsburg,
Germany. Before he left, he saved up his army money and bought himself a car,
a sharp-looking 1949 Chevrolet four-door sedan. It was his first car and he
adored it. When he received orders to travel to Germany, he arranged to have it
shipped across the Atlantic so he could drive it around on the autobahn. A few
weeks after he arrived in country, his Chevy arrived. The army notified him to
say that his automobile was in the port city of Bremerhaven, 475 miles away. On
the train ride there, he noticed two U.S. Army sergeants wearing unusual
patches, with a parachute and aircraft on their shoulders.
“Why are you wearing that patch?” Waugh asked.
The men said that they were part of a new outfit, in Bad Tölz.
“Where the hell is Bad Tölz?” he asked.
They said that it was about eighty miles southeast of the U.S. military base in
Augsburg.
“What do you do there?” Waugh asked.
They couldn’t tell him, they said.
Now they really had Waugh’s attention.
“Do you have any vacancies?” Waugh asked.
“We need MOS Triple Ones,” one of the men said. “Platoon sergeants.”
Waugh pointed to his own shoulder, to a Combat Infantry Badge indicating
that he was MOS 111–eligible. The mysterious men gave him contact
information.
“I got my car, hightailed it back to Augsburg, and asked for a 1049, request
for transfer. Within a week, I was transferred, badge and baggage, to Bad Tölz. I
signed in at headquarters, went straight to the snack bar, and introduced myself
to the six guys who were there,” remembers Waugh.
“Welcome to the 10th Special Forces,” one of them said. The group was a
classified U.S. Army program that trained soldiers for unconventional warfare.
The first of its kind. Just four months old, it had been named the 10th Special
Forces so as to deceive the Soviets into thinking there were nine other Special
Forces units ready to engage in sabotage, subversion, and other forms of
guerrilla warfare. Waugh remembers feeling awestruck. “I’d found my true
home.”
If the U.S. Army went into the Korean War with no formal special operations
capabilities, it came out with a plan for an unconventional-warfare unit for use in
future wars. Outraged over its stalemate with the CIA regarding who controlled
covert operations in Korea, General McClure went directly to the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, determined to create for the army a Special Forces capability like no other
in the world. But to achieve success, said McClure, the organization should start
“modest and austere.” McClure knew that unconventional warfare was frowned
upon by most generals in the Defense Department. He didn’t want to jeopardize
the potential for success.
In its simplest terms, the army’s vision for unconventional warfare was to
support resistance movements in foreign lands—local guerrilla forces that shared
America’s pro-Western, anticommunist goals. Any resistance movement that the
U.S. Army would engage with would likely already be militarized and
semi organized. But to say that unconventional warfare could ever be defined in
simple terms was wishful thinking. Resistance movements were notoriously
turbulent, almost always led by charismatic leaders with big personalities, some
noble, others corrupt. For the U.S. Army to find success in training and
equipping these foreign fighters, its Special Forces operators would have to be
flexible, patient, and extremely disciplined. They’d have to be self-reliant, quick thinking warriors capable of operating in openly hostile territory without the
support of conventional military forces close by. In the winter of 1952, General
McClure secured the necessary blessing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The 10th
Special Forces Group would be a small and secret unit. Its soldiers would
become known as Quiet Professionals.
Finding the right volunteers was a priority. McClure had his adjutant general
prepare a roster of ex-O.S.S. officers with commando, ranger, and guerrilla
warfare backgrounds. He sent one of his officers to visit with retired general
William Donovan at Donovan’s law office in New York City. Donovan shared
with McClure his personal files, containing the names and addresses of more
than 3,900 former soldiers who’d served in the O.S.S. during the war. The army
sent out queries to hundreds of these individuals, some active-duty service
members, others retired, to see if they were interested in volunteering for the
clandestine unit. Volunteers had to be at least twenty-one years old, airborne qualified (or willing to become so), and able to pass a series of physical and
psychological tests. Enlisted men accepted into Special Forces had to commit to
training in one or more of five specialty areas: operations and intelligence,
engineering, weaponry, communications, and medical aid.
On June 19, 1952, the army activated its first unconventional-warfare unit at
Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, consisting of one officer, one warrant officer, and
seven enlisted men. The group’s first commander was O.S.S. Jed-burgh, Colonel
Aaron Bank. By the end of the month, 122 soldiers of all ranks were present for
duty. In November of the following year, the 10th Special Forces Group
(Airborne) received overseas orders and sailed for Europe. They arrived at
Bremerhaven and then traveled by train to Bad Tölz. Their facility was a former
Nazi training facility for the Waffen-SS.
The group’s original mission was to conduct unconventional warfare behind
enemy lines in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe, modeled after what the
O.S.S. Jed-burghs had accomplished in France. These small twelve-man units were
called A-Detachments or A-Teams. Each was made up of two officers and ten
non-commissioned officers, or N.C.O's. Every individual on the team had to pass
months of training and a series of grueling tests to become Special Forces–
qualified and wear the green beret. Each A-Team would be capable of infiltrating
a target by air, land, or sea and ex-filtrating stealthily. Each team, led by a
captain, had members trained in weapons, demolition and engineering, medical,
communications, and operations and intelligence. They would build their own
bases, conduct their own perimeter defense, and be able to operate in hostile
territory for an indefinite period of time. Everyone on the team was schooled in
at least one foreign language.
The members of this new group called Special Forces prided themselves on
being a certain breed of soldier with distinct temperaments and special abilities.
“Hard-bitten troopers who were willing to take calculated risks and face
challenges that conventional units need never be concerned with,” said Bank.
Men born of an “almost inhuman ability” to absorb any stressful situation and
carry on into battle without letting mental concerns or emotions get in the way.
Operators needed to be extremely competitive, self-reliant, stress-resistant, and
stoic to the point of arrogant.
Major General Edward Partain, an early member of Special Forces, summed it up this way: “In the early fifties, Special Forces groups were not a recognized part of the Army. They were seen as outsiders, great warriors but they could not live comfortably within the peacetime regimental system. You had people of the sort that you wished you could deep freeze on the last battlefield and thaw out on the next battlefield of the next war. It was a rough group.” Billy Waugh recalls Special Forces operators being called “snake-eaters, miscreants, and rogues” by conventional officers in starched shirts. Many of those recruited for Special Forces in the early 1950s were soldiers who fought in World War II for foreign armies, in foreign countries. Men like Larry Thorne.
Larry Thorne (christened Lauri Törni in Finland) stands out as a Special Forces legend: fearless, driven, and recklessly daring. “He would have been at home with the Greeks who infiltrated Troy inside a wooden horse,” said James Goodby, former U.S. ambassador to Finland, “the doomed protagonist in the mold of ancient Greek heroes.” Thorne began his career as a captain in the Finnish Army Reserves, where he trained army ski troops. When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, Törni served as unit commander. Under arduous conditions and in subzero temperatures, Törni and his unit were infiltrated behind enemy lines, where they engaged in hit-and-run operations, on skis, against Russian troops.
The Red Army had more than three times as many soldiers as the Finns, and what should have been clear Russian victories instead went to Törni’s unit. “In reaction to Thorne’s brave, devastating raids behind Soviet lines, the Red Army placed a price on his head, dead or alive, reputedly the only Finnish soldier so singled out for bounty,” says his biographer, J. Michael Cleverley. For his leadership and bravery, Törni was awarded the Knight of the Mannerheim Cross, the country’s highest commendation for valor and the equivalent of the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor. Finland’s relations with the Soviet Union changed several times during the war and when the country’s leaders turned to Nazi Germany for military aid, Törni traveled to Austria for seven weeks of training with the Waffen-SS. He returned to Finland as a Finnish officer and was also recognized as a German Untersturmführer. In 1943 he commanded a guerrilla warfare unit called Detachment Törni. This seventy-man anti-Soviet strike force was a Finnish Waffen-SS battalion. As its commander, Lauri Törni wore a Nazi uniform and was awarded the Iron Cross.
After the war ended, he was arrested and charged with treason. Found guilty and sentenced to six years, he was incarcerated in Finland’s notorious Turku prison. But the indomitable Lauri Törni escaped from prison three times, until he was transferred to Riihimäki prison, on a small island north of Helsinki. In December 1948 he was pardoned by Finnish president Juho Paasikivi and released. But when the threat of additional war crime charges resurfaced, Törni assumed the identity of a Finnish merchant sailer and fled to Venezuela under the alias Eino Morsky. From Venezuela he secured passage on a freighter headed to the United States. Just a few miles out from the shores of Mobile, Alabama, Törni leapt overboard and swam to shore, in a classic example of clandestine infiltration into a foreign target.
A fugitive in the United States, he made his way to New York City, changed his name to Larry Thorne, and worked as a carpenter in Brooklyn and Connecticut. It did not take long for the consummate warfighter to become restless and bored. In 1951, he sought out William Donovan, the former director of the OSS, and asked for his help joining an American unconventional-warfare unit. Donovan schooled Thorne on the newly instated Lodge-Philbin Act, which Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had been instrumental in getting passed. It allowed foreigners to join the U.S. military and earn citizenship if they served honorably for the United States for at least five years. Larry Thorne breezed through U.S. Army basic training and was singled out as a prime candidate for the 10th Special Forces Group. Sent to Bad Tölz, he became an invaluable part of the unit. “Thorne is one of the most devoted and conscientious officers I have known,” wrote his commander, “an aggressive officer who is at his best in a situation which demands physical exertion, direct action, and forceful leadership.” In addition to his physical prowess and irregular-warfare skill set, he spoke English, German, Estonian, Swedish, Norwegian, and of course Finnish. Working alongside Larry Thorne, Billy Waugh was amazed by the soldier’s breadth of talent, his discipline, stamina, and confidence.
At Bad Tölz, Thorne was participating in a third military command. He’d fought for the Finns, the Nazis, and now the United States. “He was what we called a total oner,” explains Waugh. “Having engaged in clandestine ops for several nations in just about every environment known to man, he could adapt to stressful situations anywhere in the world. Mostly he preferred going at it alone.” In Bad Tölz, Larry Thorne was made captain and became the quintessential Green Beret. He was exactly what the Special Forces were looking for in a warfighter.
One example of Thorne’s skill and prowess involved the successful completion of a perilous mission in Iran. In 1957, a U.S. Army C-130 transport plane filled with classified military equipment crashed somewhere in the mountains of northern Iran, in uncharted territory. The rescue operation called for locating the crash site, getting a team in there, recovering the bodies and the classified equipment, and getting out undetected. Three previously orchestrated attempts had all failed when Captain Larry Thorne volunteered for the job. Thorne parachuted into Iran with a twelve-man team of Green Berets. The unit made their way up a 14,000-foot peak, recovered all the bodies and the equipment, then exfiltrated undetected by the Iranians.
Bad Tölz was not for everyone; but for the disciplined nonconformists who embraced unconventional warfare, it was home. Countless foreign languages could be heard spoken in the coffee shop and around the team rooms. Besides European languages—French, Polish, Czech—one heard Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Pashto. The concept of training guerrilla fighters in other countries was at the core of the new U.S. Army Special Forces’ capability. Partnership with special units of foreign armies was a primary goal. In service of this mission, Special Forces operators trained with teams in Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. A team led by Major Joseph Callahan traveled to Jordan to establish the first airborne school for the Jordanian Army at the behest of King Hussein. A team led by Steve Snowden traveled to Turkey to train what would become known as the Turkish Special Forces. Another group went to Saudi Arabia and trained 350 officers and noncommissioned officers in a guerrilla force supported by King Faisal. Four teams traveled to Iran to train the Iranian Special Forces in mountain warfare. Another team trained Kurdish tribesmen in the mountains of Iran. One team went to Pakistan, where they trained with their special warfare warriors in desert warfare.
The 10th Special Forces Group remained a closely guarded secret until 1955, when the New York Times published a cryptic article about the men, describing them as a “liberation” force designed to fight behind enemy lines. A photograph showed members of the group wearing their green berets, their faces blacked out to keep their identities concealed.
The U.S. Army Special Forces began to grow. Hundreds, then thousands, of unconventional American warriors volunteered to join this elite group. They worked tirelessly, training and equipping guerrilla fighters around the globe so as to keep the threat of Soviet expansion in check. U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers would eventually fight secret wars alongside many of the foreign fighters they trained. Other times, they would find themselves fighting against them.
Like an inciting incident in a Shakespearean tragedy, the attack on Guatemala City catalyzed Che Guevara into action. Many men dream of leading a revolution, but Che Guevara would actually do it. His actions put him directly in the crosshairs of three U.S. presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. He would eventually be assassinated by CIA-trained fighters in the mountains of Bolivia in 1967.
Che Guevara had come to Guatemala to study medicine amid social revolution. When he first arrived, the country was in the throes of civil unrest. Guatemala, located just south of Mexico in Central America, had been plagued by violence and social upheaval since 1944, when university professor José Arévalo became the country’s first democratically elected president. For the first time in its history, Guatemala got a constitution, an elected representative body, and a supreme court, but the violence was constant. President Arévalo survived twenty-five coup and assassination attempts in his six years in office. From the perspective of the White House, political instability of this magnitude made Guatemala a prime target for Soviet meddling, and in 1950 the U.S. State Department sent its top diplomat, George Kennan, to investigate.
After touring Latin America, Kennan took the hard-line view that Moscow was indeed making ominous inroads in the Western Hemisphere. “Here, as elsewhere,” Kennan wrote in a secret report for the secretary of state, “the inner core of the [Soviet] communist leadership is fanatical, disciplined, industrious, and armed with a series of organizational techniques which are absolutely first rate.” In all likelihood, Kennan warned, Moscow’s first conquest in Latin America would be Guatemala, which it could then use as a beachhead to launch a takeover of the Americas. Kennan advised the secretary of state that communist influence in the Western Hemisphere had to be curtailed at any cost. Diplomacy was unlikely to work, and military intervention was not plausible, he wrote, which left covert action as the third and best option. “Now this gets us into dangerous and difficult waters, where we must proceed with utmost caution,” advised the man who’d first proposed that the CIA develop a guerrilla warfare corps.
What choice was there? From Albania to Poland, seven governments in Eastern Europe were now being ruled by Stalinists, leaders who’d been emplaced by rigged elections and who maintained power through a devious partnership with Moscow’s ironfisted state security services. Moscow’s movement toward Latin America forecast only disaster. Kennan’s report was reviewed by the president’s National Security Council, whose members unanimously agreed. Covert action was the best way forward.
The following year, in March 1951, a liberal democrat named Jacobo Arbenz, son of a Swiss German father and a Guatemalan mother, was elected president. In his inaugural address, Arbenz promised to move Guatemala from “a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.” The way he intended to do this, he said, was by limiting influence by foreign corporations. Guatemala was a poor nation with an agrarian-based economy. Two percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. The largest landowner, also one of the country’s largest employers, was the American owned United Fruit Company, a banana farming concern. When President Arbenz instituted sweeping reforms in farm labor and called for the expropriation and redistribution of land, including 234,000 acres owned by United Fruit, President Truman’s National Security Council took the position that these anti-American moves were being engineered by Moscow. The time had come for the hidden hand of the United States to intervene. “It [is] essential to our security that we fight fire with fire,” Kennan observed.
President Truman created a powerful new advisory committee to determine the “desirability and feasibility” of covert-action operations. Called the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), it included the director of Central Intelligence, the undersecretary of state, and the deputy secretary of defense, with a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acting as principal military advisor. The informal structure of the PSB allowed for “problem solving” to occur outside the scope of normal bureaucratic channels, insulating the president from potential backlash through plausible deniability. “The working group should shy away from any thought of a ‘Charter’ which would require formal departmental concurrence,” suggested Frank Wisner, then CIA deputy director of plans, in an early staff meeting. An agreement was reached to “develop a paper which would be informally accepted by the Board as indicating the general lines which [we] would probably follow.” In the case of Wisner, who was simultaneously in charge of JACK operations in Korea, the construct of plausible deniability insulated him personally from consequence, as the historical record makes clear. Whether Wisner was aware of his outsized incompetence during this fateful time, willfully ignorant of it, or mentally ill remains the subject of debate.
What is clear is that the goal of the PSB was not only to devise and plan covert operations but to manipulate the public’s perception of these hidden-hand events. “Our job is to influence the minds and wills of other people,” board members agreed, not as in “word warfare” but through paramilitary actions that had real-world consequences. “We help shape events to include all elements of pressure and persuasion,” PSB director Gordon Gray told the president.
The PSB’s plan for Guatemala was to stage a coup d’état against President Arbenz and overthrow him, using a CIA-trained guerrilla fighting force. The Office of Policy Coordination was in charge, as in Korea. The man chosen by the CIA to lead the mutiny and be installed as Guatemala’s new, pro-American president was a former Guatemalan military officer living in exile in Honduras, Carlos Castillo Armas. He was corrupt, right-wing, and militaristic, but the Office of Policy Coordination was willing to work with him because he had a decent-sized guerrilla force loyal to him, fighters who could be trained and equipped by CIA paramilitary officers with relative ease.
In January 1952, CIA headquarters began drafting its first-known assassination list, a compilation of individuals “to eliminate immediately” under the Agency’s Title 50 covert-action authority. This list was followed by at least two additional kill lists, one titled “Guatemalan Communist Personnel to be disposed of during Military Operations of Calligeris” (the code name for Carlos Castillo Armas) and the other under the heading “Selection of individuals for disposal by Junta Group.” The targets, or “disposees” [sic], would be “neutralized” under a construct called “Executive Action.” This euphemism, adopted by numerous future U.S. presidents, remains in effect as of 2019.
Whether President Truman was made aware of the assassination campaign remains a mystery. But the very next month, the subject of Soviet assassination capabilities was discussed by Gordon Gray in a Top Secret “Report to the President.” “Throughout the world,” Gray wrote, “[the Kremlin] has built up networks of agents who would move at the word of command to carry out an assassination or foment a civil war,” a subtle suggestion that the PSB plans for assassination were but a necessary means of fighting fire with fire.
Assembling a list of individuals for assassination was a flawed and haphazard process. CIA officers first worked from a 1949 Guatemalan Army list of communists, augmented by information from the Directorate of Intelligence as it came in. Memos made public in 1997 show that the list included “top flight Communists whom the new government would desire to eliminate immediately in the event of a successful anticommunist coup” but quickly grew to include other Guatemalans. Clandestine service officers were queried to help decide who else should be included on a “final list of disposees,” with one employee assigned the job of quality control, “to verify the list and recommend any additions or deletions.”
The assassination list was sent to Carlos Castillo Armas for input. The illegitimate son of a farmer, Armas had spent much of his life engaged in guerrilla warfare. From 1948 to 1949, he’d served as the director of Guatemala’s military academy. By 1952, he’d been involved in two previous coups d’état in Guatemala. He was a wanted man in his own country and his list of enemies was long. In September 1952, Armas added as many as fifty-eight names to the CIA’s assassination list.
Things quickly got more complicated. That same month, in the Dominican Republic, the strongman Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, called “the cruelest dictator in the Americas,” got word of the CIA’s assassination list and wanted in. Trujillo made a deal with Carlos Castillo Armas. In exchange for “the killing of four Santo Dominicans at present residing in Guatemala,” he offered Armas his material support.
“Castillo Armas readily agreed,” says CIA staff historian Gerald Haines. In addition to requesting that certain of his enemies be targeted and killed by the CIA, Trujillo offered to send his own assassins to participate in the action, “special [assassination] squads [that] were already trained.” In a declassified Agency memorandum, these death squads were referred to as “Trujillo’s trained pistoleros” and as “K” (presumably for “kill”) groups. But after considerable debate, says Haines, the idea was vetoed by the State Department. Still, Armas continued to make side deals of his own, and the CIA learned that Armas intended to make “maximum use of the K groups,” and would dispatch “Nicaraguan, Honduran and Salvadorian soldiers in civilian clothes to infiltrate Guatemala and assassinate unnamed Communist leaders” loyal to Armas. In Guatemala City, a local asset provided his CIA handler with a “hit list with the location of the homes and offices of all targets [that] had already been drawn up.” Haines says records of what happened next were destroyed or lost.
The CIA did not create the Latin American propensity for assassination. Long before the Central Intelligence Agency existed, targeting killing was a well established political tool throughout the region. These were the rules of the game for authoritarian regimes that ruled by force and corruption, not laws. In 1949, President Arbenz himself had benefited from the assassination of his political rival, Francisco Javier Arana. Arbenz had been one of only six men present when Arana, chief of the country’s armed forces, was shot in broad daylight during an altercation on the Puente de la Gloria, outside Guatemala City. As president, Arbenz did little to solve the extrajudicial killing he’d personally witnessed. There was no investigation of the murder, and his rival’s assassins were never apprehended. As of 2019, the killing remains a mystery.
As the CIA worked on its paramilitary operations and assassination plans, the president’s Psychological Strategy Board oversaw a robust psychological warfare campaign intended to influence the minds and wills of the people—to wage a Nerve War Against Individuals, according to a declassified memo. The idea was to instill fear and paranoia in a core group of military officials close to Arbenz so they might become turncoats and participate in “a mass defection of the Guatemalan army.” As the plans moved forward, the U.S. presidency changed hands. In January 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the thirty fourth president of the United States, and the PSB briefed the new commander in chief on its covert-action operations. “Cold War concerns convinced President Eisenhower to order the removal of the democratically elected leader by force,” according to Haines.
Starting on April 13, 1953, top Guatemalan communists received “death notice” cards, some for as many as thirty consecutive days, the contents of which remain classified. Others received physical objects courtesy of the CIA, including small wooden coffins, hangman’s nooses, and toy bombs. Communist leaders came home from work, or woke up in the morning, to find graffiti painted on the exterior walls of their homes. “Here Lives a Spy,” one message read. Another threatened, “You have Only 5 Days.”
The operation was gaining momentum. Declassified documents illustrate how quickly CIA officials at the highest level got on board with more advanced assassination, or “liquidation,” plans. J. C. King, CIA chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, learned of the hit list and on August 28, 1953, suggested “possibly assassinating key Guatemalan military officers if they refused to be converted to the rebel cause.” The following month, King sent a memo to CIA director Allen Dulles stating his support for “neutralizing” President Arbenz.
To the CIA, assassination was an objective, an action to be carried out with the precision and detachment of a military operation. It was during this period that the CIA assembled its first known how-to instruction booklet on assassination as an instrument of foreign policy—as a political tool. “An extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations.” Titled “A Study of Assassination,” the manual was organized into sections including “Planning,” “Techniques,” and “Classifications.” The ideal assassin worked alone, always mindful of the fact that “no assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded.” He or she would almost always report to just one person, with this same individual overseeing their infiltration to, and exfiltration from, the target area.
In addition to having all the qualities of a clandestine service agent, an assassin would have to be “determined, courageous, intelligent, resourceful and physically active.” Knowledge of a variety of weapons, including knives, firearms, grenades, and small bombs, was imperative for success. “It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skilled enough to do it well,” the CIA posited. “A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of the act they intend to commit.” In a section entitled “Justification,” the CIA warned its would-be assassins of the dark psychological territory into which they were heading. “Murder is not morally justifiable,” and “assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.”
The unvarnished truth about assassination was that while some operations involved the objective detachment of a sniper rifle, a pistol, or a lethal dose of poison, an assassin must always be ready to kill his target mano a mano. For that, he had to be willing to make use of any real-world object that might be lying around. “Anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice,” counseled the CIA, “a hammer or axe, fire poker or lampstand.” Pushing a target off a bridge, down an elevator shaft, or out an open window was a wise course of action; the assassin could “play horrified witness” if questioned by police. Staged car accidents were not recommended because a lengthy investigation almost always ensued. But if an assassin could drug his target and push the man and his vehicle off a high point or into deep water, that tactic could be considered. If the target was an alcoholic, getting the man drunk and injecting him with a lethal dose of morphine before he passed out was always a viable option. Avoid explosives and demolition charges, assassins were told. They were unreliable and prone to accidents. Often, when used as a booby-trap with a time delay, these kinds of devices wound up killing the wrong man.
Most of all, the assassin had to accept that he was not judge, jury, or hangman. “Assassination of persons responsible for atrocities or reprisals may be regarded as just punishment,” the authors forewarned, but to think of it as retribution for an offense was not what covert action was about. To kill a specific individual under Title 50 authority of the U.S. Code was about prevention, not revenge. “Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary,” the authors of the CIA’s assassination manual made clear.
On September 11, 1953, the CIA submitted its “General Plan of Action” for Guatemala, code-named Operation Success (PBSUCCESS). President Eisenhower signed off on the operation, approving a $2.7 million budget for “psychological warfare and political action” as well as “subversion,” to be conducted by the CIA. On December 23, 1953, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination opened a classified forward operating base in Miami, Florida, where covert operations in Guatemala would be run.
All elements of covert actions had code names: people, places, operations, and locations. The PBSUCCESS headquarters building, code-named Lincoln, was located about ten miles from Miami, on the second floor of a shabby twostory structure in the corner of Opa Locka Airport, only ever to be referred to as Building 67. “Effective this date all addressee stations will constitute component elements of PBSUCCESS regional command with project headquarters at LINCOLN under Jerome Dunbar,” Allen Dulles wrote. Jerome Dunbar was the code name for retired Colonel Albert Haney, former CIA station chief in Seoul. It was Haney, Frank Wisner, and Hans Tofte who had run the ill-fated JACK missions in Korea.
The CIA reached an agreement with rebel groups in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador to train and equip its guerrilla fighting forces inside these neighboring countries’ borders. In these secret paramilitary training camps, deep in the jungle, the CIA trained and armed local commandos to act as the fighting brigade for Castillo Armas. Come “D-Day,” this paramilitary army of foreign fighters would make an amphibious beach landing and carry out the CIA’s coup d’état, in the style of the Normandy invasion. Declassified documents reveal that at least 1,725 foreign fighters were trained by the CIA, with another “2500 persons of lesser caliber and faith committed to joining the fighting force if called upon.”
On January 5, 1954, Albert Haney requested a final list on the “liquidation of personnel.” The following week, Lincoln requisitioned twenty suppressors for twenty .22-caliber rifles, which were sent from CIA headquarters. A small group of “key leaders” were then chosen for the assassination program. On January 13, cables were sent discussing training protocols for these “assassination specialists.”
On April 17, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (the CIA director’s brother) gave PBSUCCESS the “full green light.” The following month, perhaps sensing his end was near, President Arbenz offered to meet with President Eisenhower, to reduce tensions between the two countries. But it was too late. The CIA coup d’état was in motion.
On June 15, 1954, CIA-trained sabotage teams and invasion forces launched from Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador and moved quickly into staging areas just outside the Guatemalan border. At 5:00 p.m. on June 18, President Arbenz held a massive rally at the railroad station. The gathering was buzzed by CIA planes. At dusk, Castillo Armas crossed the border with his personal strike force. Overhead, CIA planes strafed army troop trains. In Washington, DC, the PSB ordered the Matamoros fortress in downtown Guatemala City bombed. A hundred miles east of the capital, the city of Chiquimula fell to CIA guerrilla forces as an American F-47 flown by a mercenary pilot dropped bombs. Finally, on June 27, 1954, as Castillo Armas attacked the city of Zacapa, President Arbenz capitulated and resigned.
By June 30, the CIA decided that the coup had been a success. Now it was time for the hidden hand of the CIA to vanish. Frank Wisner sent a cable entitled “Shift of Gears,” urging all CIA officers and operators to withdraw. On July 4, the CIA dispatched a recovery team to Guatemala City to collect 150,000 documents related to all communist activity, for future use. On July 12, the Lincoln office in Opa Locka was shuttered. Frank Wisner ordered Albert Haney to destroy all documents relating to Operation Success. A few survived.
The president asked the CIA to brief him on the operation. Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and J. C. King used maps and charts to narrate how the coup had unfolded. The president asked how many men had died. “Only one,” a briefer lied. Eisenhower shook his head. “Incredible,” he said.
“Indeed it had been incredible,” writes CIA historian Nick Cullather. According to the Agency’s own records, at least forty-eight rebel fighters were killed in the action. The CIA’s perpetuation of the falsehood that it had been a success gave way to a decades-long CIA myth that the Guatemala operation had been an “unblemished triumph.” It was often cited as a model, a means of encouraging future presidents to authorize similar covert-action operations around the world.
On September 1, 1954, Castillo Armas declared himself the new president of Guatemala. Shortly after he took power, a group of junior army cadets, unhappy with the army’s capitulation, staged a coup. It was quickly put down, leaving twenty-nine dead and another ninety-one wounded. Come October, so-called elections were held, but Castillo Armas was the only candidate. As his government was being installed, a second insurgency emerged. This new military junta came down hard on the resistance movement, quashing rebellions with murder and oppression. It left tens of thousands—some historians say as many as 200,000—killed, tortured, maimed, or missing.
Three years later, on July 26, 1957, Armas, the CIA’s puppet dictator, was shot in the presidential palace by a member of his own guard. He died instantly. The assassin, Romeo Vásquez Sánchez, fled to another room in the palace and committed suicide.
The facts of the CIA’s hidden-hand operations in Guatemala would remain secret until May of 1997, when the Agency’s history staff “rediscovered” the allegedly lost records. Congress had been looking for them since at least 1975, when the Senate began its investigation into U.S. government–sanctioned assassination. Four years later, in 1979, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit ordered the Guatemala documents be declassified, but the CIA was able to keep its records sealed on national-security grounds. As for the assassination programs and kill lists, CIA staff historians continue to insist that no one was actually assassinated. This is a doubtful claim. When the documents were finally declassified, the names of the people targeted for assassination were redacted, making it impossible to discern if any were killed before, during, or after the coup.
Extreme secrecy and illicit hiding are but two elements of plausible deniability, designed to keep the office of the president from being embroiled in controversy and disgrace. But there is so much more that results, including grave and unintended consequence the CIA can neither foresee nor control. In its hidden-hand operations in Guatemala in 1954, the CIA created a revenge seeking monster intent on destroying its creator. It took the form of Che Guevara, the young doctor who watched the CIA-led coup through an open window in an apartment in Guatemala City.
Shortly after he wrote the letter to his mother expressing the magical sensation he felt watching violence and revolution unfold, Che Guevara set out onto the city streets to organize a resistance movement against the plotters of the coup. He teamed up with an armed militia organization called the Communist Youth, and expressed a desire to fight. Instead, the group’s leaders assigned him hospital duty and instructed him to await further orders. Within a few days, martial law was declared across Guatemala and the Communist Party was disbanded. With its fighters being rounded up, Che Guevara sought refuge in the Argentine embassy.
There he learned that the heart of the Latin American communist movement was moving to Mexico City. He applied for a visa and made his way. It was there that he met a young Cuban-born revolutionary living in exile there, Fidel Castro. “He is a young man, intelligent, very sure of himself and of extraordinary audacity,” Che Guevara wrote in his diary. “I think there is a mutual sympathy between us.” Fidel Castro asked Che Guevara to join his guerrilla movement and serve as the rebel group’s official doctor, and he accepted on the spot. In just five short years, the two revolutionaries would transform from complete unknowns to two of the highest-ranking enemies of the United States.
Back in Guatemala, as the CIA’s cleanup group was sorting through files of the fallen Arbenz regime, CIA officer David Atlee Phillips came across a single sheet of paper about the young doctor named Che Guevara and his communist ties.
“Should we start a file on this one?” Phillips’s assistant asked his boss.
“Yes, I guess we better have a file on him,” Phillips replied.
Soon the CIA would place Che Guevara on their kill list.
The assassination of a prominent government official creates a vacuum of instability, both actual and perceived. By 1953, when briefing Eisenhower on the assassination threat level in Iran, CIA director Allen Dulles, a member of the Psychological Strategy Board, told the president in no uncertain terms that if something wasn’t done about the situation, Moscow would surely take advantage of it.
“A Communist takeover of Iran is becoming more and more of a possibility,” Dulles told the president, and “the elimination of Mossadegh, by assassination or otherwise, might precipitate decisive events.” The result would be a domino effect across all of the Middle East. “If Iran succumbed to the Communists there is little doubt that in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some 60% of the world’s oil reserves, would fall into Communist control.” The CIA decided that its best bet for a covert-action partner to counter Soviet influence in Iran was the country’s vain young king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Fedayeen-e Islam had tried to kill the shah just a few years before.
It was a cool, crisp morning in 1949, in the capital city, and the twenty-nineyear-old king climbed out of his limousine and began making his way up the steps of Tehran University, waving to the crowd. A man pretending to be a photojournalist called out the shah’s name. As Mohammad Reza Pahlavi looked his way, the assassin fired off five shots, hitting him. One bullet entered the shah’s face through his open mouth, passing through his upper lip and exiting his face without hitting any bone. As he fell, a second bullet struck him in the backside, wounding him. The assassin fired off three more bullets, all of which hit the shah’s hat, before police leapt on the man and killed him. As the assassin’s dead body was pummeled by a vengeful mob, the shah was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he spoke with members of the press. “A few shots won’t deter my duties to my beloved country,” he told visitors gathered at his bedside.
The assassin’s name was Fakhr-Arai, a member of the Fedayeen-e Islam. By the time he tried to kill the shah, the group had already succeeded in killing two prominent members of Iranian society: Ahmad Kasravi, a historian, in 1946, and Mohammad Masoud, a newspaper publisher, in 1948. Both men had been writing and publishing antireligious pieces when they were assassinated. Their writings had deeply offended a central figure inside the Self-Sacrificers of Islam, a forty-nine-year-old cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini. Though relatively unknown outside religious circles at the time, in the decades to come this revolutionary cleric would become one of the most infamous villains in the Western world, known as Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran.
Fedayeen-e Islam modeled their activities after history’s original assassins, the Hashashin, an eleventh-century strike force of Shiite fundamentalist warriors led by the enigmatic holy man Hassan-i Sabbah, from whom the word “assassin” derives. Like its medieval predecessor, the modern Fedayeen-e Islam in Iran sought to target and assassinate those it deemed enemies of Shiite Islam. The assassins and their abilities, indeed the very mention of their name, bred terror. They were deadly and cunning, rumored to possess invisibility. One of the first known Western references to the assassins appears in a report written by Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor, in the year 1173. “They had a habit of killing [enemies] in an astonishing way,” explains Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton University, who first located the original reference (in 1967), “but it was the fanatical devotion, rather than the murderous methods” of the assassins that struck the imagination of Europe. Dormant for hundreds of years, the assassins were now at it again. The shah’s political ideology, the Divine Right of Kings, was a Western concept the Self-Sacrificers of Islam vowed to destroy.
After the Shiite fundamentalists tried to kill the shah in 1949, and despite the group’s clear allegiance to Islamic fundamentalism, the shah’s secular government, led by a prime minister, instead placed blame on Iran’s pro–Soviet Union communist party, the Tudeh Party, or Party of the Masses. As the shah recovered in the hospital, Iranian state police arrested more than two hundred Tudeh Party members and confiscated the group’s assets in an effort to rid the country of communists. The remaining members of the Tudeh Party went underground.
In Western media outlets, the assassination attempt was reported as being linked to economics, not religion. “The assassination attempt came one day after 2,000 students marched around the Majlis (Parliament) building and demanded cancellation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s concession [that is, exclusive rights] to take oil out of Iran,” reported the United Press. Half a century earlier, in 1901, a British entrepreneur named William D’Arcy secured from the corrupt former shah of Iran, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, the exclusive rights to pump oil out of the desert, on decidedly one-sided terms. D’Arcy’s British oil company would keep 84 percent of the profits, while 16 percent would go to the monarchy for the king to disperse as he saw fit, which was mostly in his pocket. Now, forty-eight years later, the bogus terms of the oil deal had become a legitimate point of contention for many Iranians. But in 1949 it was not oil that was directly related to the assassination attempt on the corrupt and ineffectual Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; it was religion.
In the Western media, the Soviet Union was cast as the villain in the Iranian situation. “Iran has been the scene of unrest since the end of the war,” reported the Associated Press. “Its vast oil resources have been a bone of contention between the Soviet Union, which has demanded concessions, and the Western powers, which have resisted Russian entrance into the oil fields where they have long dominated.” This was precisely what Stalin warned Ambassador Bedell Smith about, during their meeting at the Kremlin. Nine months after the Self Sacrificers of Islam failed to kill the shah, they succeeded in assassinating his minister of the royal court, Abdolhossein Hazhir. In an attempt to keep order, the shah appointed a hard-line anticommunist military general named Ali Razmara to be the new prime minister of Iran. In response, the Fedayeen-e Islam dispatched an assassin to kill him.
On March 7, 1951, Prime Minister Razmara was paying his respects at a funeral in the Shah Mosque, in Tehran, when a religious zealot named Khalil Tahmasebi stepped forward from the crowd and fired a bullet directly into his face, killing him instantly. The assassination garnered the world’s attention. “Premier of Iran Is Shot to Death in a Mosque by a Religious Fanatic; Victim of Assassin,” headlined the Associated Press. Just twelve days later, General Razmara’s minister of education, Abdul Hamid Zanganeh, was shot and killed by the same group while standing on the steps of Tehran University, where Fedayeen-e Islam had almost killed the shah two years before. In response to the back-to-back assassinations, the shah declared martial law.
In Washington, DC, members of the CIA convened to discuss next steps. “The assassination of Prime Minister Razmara seriously worsens an already grave situation in Iran,” warned a representative from the Office of Policy Coordination. “Political and economic insecurity combined with chauvinist and fanatical religious emotions have produced an atmosphere extremely favorable to Soviet subversion.” Alarmist or not, the perspective of the CIA was that the entire Middle East was on the brink of falling to communism. The successful assassination of a head of state can prompt copycat killings, raising the specter of chaos and instability, which is exactly what happened four months later, as a series of brutal assassinations swept across the Middle East. The first was in Lebanon.
As with most of its Arab neighbors, Lebanon had only recently gained independence from French colonial rule after the end of World War II. As per the terms of the United Nations Charter, the last French troops withdrew from Lebanon in December 1946. On July 17, 1951, Riad Al Solh, Lebanon’s first prime minister, was gunned down at Marka Airport in Amman, Jordan. The killers, members of a group called the Syrian Socialist National Party, declared that theirs was a revenge killing for the execution of one of their own party’s cofounding members. Three days later, on July 20, King Abdullah of Jordan was killed by a Palestinian assassin at the entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. He was walking into Friday prayers. The king, age sixty-nine, died instantly from three shots to the head and the chest. “The King who made [Jordan] a nation is no more,” a British newsreel proclaimed. “He was our friend. And for this he died.”
Standing at the king’s side when he was assassinated was his fifteen-year-old grandson, Prince Hussein, hit by bullet fragments. The prince’s life was saved when the fragments bounced off a medal, pinned to his chest, that his grandfather had given him earlier that same day. The assassin was shot dead by bodyguards and a state of emergency was declared in Jordan. The king’s eldest son, Prince Talal, took the throne. But Talal had a hidden history of mental illness and had been secretly treated for schizophrenia in a Swiss clinic the year before. After ruling Jordan for a year, he was removed from power by the parliament. Prince Hussein became King Hussein of Jordan, now age sixteen. He would rule Jordan for the next forty-five years. Having witnessed the assassination of his grandfather by a Palestinian fanatic made the teenage King Hussein forever cautious of those around him, he later said, and caused him to treat his fellow Arab rulers with a degree of skepticism. He is said to have always carried a gun when he left the palace and slept with a pistol within arm’s reach.
After the death of King Abdullah of Jordan, the State Department sent a telegram to all its ambassadors in the Arab states and Israel, encouraging them “to counsel restraint and moderation” as it worked to shore up a secret partnership with the shah of Iran. The killing of other heads of state in the region “could promote a further weakening of Iran’s internal stability,” CIA analysts feared. And the result could be “a general sense of aimlessness, insecurity, and frustration… highlighting Iran’s lack of capable leadership.” Which is exactly what happened next.
In Tehran, riots broke out. To appease an angry public, the shah appointed Mohammad Mossadegh, an Iranian nationalist, to serve as prime minister, giving him authority over Iran’s military forces. One of Mossadegh’s first actions was to wrest control of the oil industry from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which infuriated the British. Mossadegh imprisoned the founder of the Self-Sacrificers of Islam, Navab Safavi, which enraged the Fedayeen-e Islam, who put Mossadegh on their kill list.
Unable to kill Mossadegh, the Fedayeen went after the prime minister’s loyal foreign minister, Hossein Fatemi. In what was sure to be a spectacular display of fanaticism and revenge, the Fedayeen engineered a plan to kill Fatemi while he was attending a commemorative event marking the assassination of newspaper publisher Mohammad Masoud. But at the exact moment the assassin was reaching into his front jacket pocket to pull out a gun, a local photographer just so happened to snap a photograph of the killer, an image that would be reprinted in newspapers around the world. Adding to the uncanny timing of the photograph was the fact that the killer wasn’t a grown man but a young boy of fifteen. In 1952, the marriage of violence and Islamic fundamentalism was unfamiliar to most Westerners, and the idea that a teenage boy could be seduced into becoming an assassin in the name of religion was considered downright shocking. The teenager managed to get off only a single shot, hitting Iran’s foreign minister in the stomach, wounding him. The boy was captured by the shah’s state police, who took him back to police headquarters, where he confessed to being a member of Fedayeen-e Islam. In Washington, DC, President Eisenhower approved the Psychological Strategy Board’s plans for a hidden-hand coup d’état in Iran.
A year passed. On March 4, 1953, the National Security Council convened to discuss Iran. Dulles repeated his thoughts on what the assassination of Prime Minister Mossadegh would mean for the United States. “If he were to be assassinated or otherwise to disappear from power, a political vacuum would occur in Iran and the Communists might easily take over.” And if the communists moved on the Middle East and all its oil, it would mean the outbreak of war.
President Eisenhower was briefed on numerous plans. When he expressed a preference for U.S. financial support to Mossadegh instead of getting rid of him, representatives from State, Defense, and the CIA argued that to do so was useless. The days of propping up people who didn’t like the United States were coming to an end, CIA director Allen Dulles advised. Charles Wilson, secretary of defense, agreed. “In the old days, when dictatorships changed it was usually a matter of one faction of the right against another, and we had only to wait until the situation subsided,” Wilson told Eisenhower. “Nowadays, however, when a dictatorship of the right is replaced by a dictatorship of the left, a state could presently slide into Communism and [become] irrevocably lost to us.” It was the same mantra that had allowed the CIA to garner covert-action authority in Korea and Guatemala. Diplomacy wasn’t working, and military intervention was unwise. That left the president with his third option, the hidden hand.
The president told his advisors that the situation was “a matter of great distress” to him. That he could not understand why “we seemed unable to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us.” After listening to the president, the National Security Council secured authorization to proceed. The following month, on April 4, 1953, one million dollars was wired to the CIA’s Tehran Station to bring about the downfall of Mohammad Mossadegh.
The CIA plot to overthrow Mossadegh, code-named Operation Ajax, took place the third week of August 1953. The details of the coup—even the basic questions like who hatched the plot and who carried it out—remain the subject of debate. Mossadegh was not assassinated but instead arrested and convicted of treason. He served three years in jail before being banished to house arrest. He died in 1967. A retired army general named Fazlollah Zahedi became the CIA’s front man, retaining power as prime minister for two years. But the real goal for the United States was to quietly help the shah assume absolute power in Iran. With military and economic backing, by 1955, the CIA got its wish.
The Defense Department sent General McClure, founder of the U.S. Army 10th Special Forces, to Tehran, to serve as chief of the U.S. Military Mission in Iran. His job was to help Iran build up its conventional military forces, as well as a guerrilla warfare corps. In a letter to his liaison on the National Security Council, McClure relayed what he’d learned. “His majesty’s first and most important problem was the morale of the armed forces. Something must be done immediately to provide min[imum] housing requirements for its officers and noncommissioned officers, many of whom [are] at present living in squalor,” McClure wrote. Like a kid in a candy store, the shah’s wish list was long. “He desires a highly proficient and technically trained small army with considerable mobility, which could be backed, in time of war, by large numbers of tribesmen armed as Infantry and trained to fight defensively until overrun and then resort to guerrilla tactics.”
The shah insisted he needed an arsenal of weapons systems and artillery from the United States in order to exercise dominance in the region: “Three Battalions of Patton Tanks, an antiaircraft battalion to protect troops, steel mating for airstrips, 155 Howitzers and land mines,” wrote McClure. The shah accepted the fact that it was “too early” to talk about being supplied with U.S. jet fighter aircraft. The shah’s military reorganization was well under way, McClure wrote, the country’s charter being rewritten to move military authority away from the prime minister so it was entirely under the shah’s direction and control.
President Eisenhower expressed his approval for what was originally seen as a successful coup in Iran. The Soviets were at bay, at least for now. “The CIA carried out a successful regime-change operation,” says CIA staff historian David Robarge. “It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences.” Not until the Iranian Revolution in 1979 would the most impactful of the unintended consequences be revealed. Scores of foot soldiers of the revolution seeking to overturn the shah were members of Fedayeen-e Islam. But in 1953, with the shah firmly installed as the American puppet, and order seemingly in place, CIA officers mistakenly believed they could control the Self-Sacrificers of Islam, maybe even work with them.
A new strategy for dealing with radical Islamic fundamentalists emerged. The communists were avowed atheists. The CIA and the National Security Council advised President Eisenhower that the United States should begin using the communists’ irreligiosity against them. In September 1957, at a White House meeting with the president, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the CIA’s Frank Wisner, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and President Eisenhower agreed. “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect” endemic to the Middle East, Eisenhower said. Dulles suggested that the CIA create a “secret task force” through which the United States could deliver weapons, intelligence, and money to American-friendly monarchs including King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, and King Faisal of Iraq. It was an idea that would have grave unintended consequences. From these task forces a thousand monsters would be born.
As was the case with many Arab rulers in the 1950s, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power using assassination as a political tool, at least according to his successor, Anwar Sadat. In an interview with Arab television, Sadat said that Nasser conducted “a large-scale assassination campaign” starting in January 1952, an act that helped him secure power and respect. After trying, unsuccessfully, to machine-gun down a political rival during a military parade, Nasser led a successful military coup against King Farouk, which launched the Egyptian revolution. No one liked Egypt’s King Farouk. He was corrupt and ineffectual, vilified for riding around the country in his private train consuming oysters while so many of his subjects suffered from poverty and hunger. Spared execution, King Farouk was forced to abdicate, and he lived out the rest of his life in Monaco and Italy. Nasser became president of Egypt in 1956.
The use of assassination as a political tool cuts both ways. In a region where assassination was as much about revenge as it was about politics and religion, once you tried to assassinate a rival, you could assume that your rivals were going to be coming after you. Two years after taking power, Nasser became the target of an assassination attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s Sunni fundamentalist group.
On October 26, 1954, Nasser was in Alexandria, delivering a speech to celebrate the British military withdrawal. The historic event was broadcast live on radios all across Egypt and the Arab world. As Nasser regaled the massive crowd of supporters who’d gathered in Mansheya Square, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood stood up and fired at President Nasser from just twenty feet away. Despite firing eight shots in all, the assassin missed Nasser entirely. Pandemonium erupted among the crowd while Nasser remained sublimely calm. He seized upon the moment for political advantage, addressing millions of Egyptians listening to his speech on the radio.
“My countrymen!” Nasser shouted out. “My blood spills for you and for Egypt!” Even though Nasser wasn’t bleeding, the crowd went wild. “Let them kill me!” he cried. “It does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor, and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser!” As the crowd erupted in cheers, Nasser continued shouting into the microphone. “Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you, and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation,” he repeated again and again. Nasser, already popular, was now also publicly adored across the Arab world. His vision for pan-Arabism, the desire to unify the Arab world from North Africa to West Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea, could now take hold.
In neighboring Libya, a young Bedouin boy named Muammar el-Qaddafi listened to Nasser’s Mansheya Square radio broadcast with supreme adoration. In school, Qaddafi would leap up onto his chair and recite Nasser verbatim. People thought he was odd. His classmates made fun of him. He didn’t care. One day, he said, he’d prove all of them wrong. And he’d exact revenge on anyone who ever dared doubt him. Muammar el-Qaddafi would grow up, join the military, and seize power from Libya’s corrupt King Idris. He would emulate Gamal Nasser, promote his ideology, and insist the two men become friends.
Two thousand miles away, in Iraq, a rebel group plotted to assassinate their king. On July 14, 1958, the last king of Iraq, his family, his advisors, and his prime minister were all killed in one of the most brutal assassination and coups d’état in modern history. The bloodbath was a terrifying mix of political killing and revenge murder, finalized and sensationalized in a sadistic display of mob rage. King Faisal II, born in 1935, became king of Iraq when he was just three years old, after his playboy father died in a car crash. During World War II, the boy lived with his mother, Queen Aliya, in England. As a teenager, he attended the British boarding school Harrow alongside his second cousin, Hussein, then serving as king of Jordan.
King Faisal was twenty-three and engaged to be married when on July 14 the military stormed the palace in Baghdad. One of the king’s military commanders, a brigadier general named Abd al-Karim Qasim, ordered that the members of the royal family be lined up in front of a wall and machine-gunned to death. Prime Minister Nuri al-Said escaped the immediate carnage and the following day donned an abaya and sneaked out a back door of the palace. He was captured and shot, and his corpse “cut up by shawerma knives” by a vengeful mob. The mutilated corpses of the crown prince and the prime minister were then strung up outside the Ministry of Defense and hit with sticks. After the bodies were taken down, they were laid out in the street, where they were run over by an army vehicle. The corpses “resembled sausage,” reported a Baghdad newspaper, which ran photographs of the bodies and the mayhem.
King Faisal II had been decidedly pro-Western, a friend of the State Department and a guest of the White House during a visit to DC. His 1958 assassination was a blow to the CIA’s desire for regional control. The king had been a cornerstone partner in the Baghdad Pact of 1955, a five-nation alliance signed by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, in support of Western democratic ideals. The alliance, known as CENTO, was modeled after NATO and promised mutual cooperation among its signatory nations. At its core, the Baghdad Pact was an agreement to contain the spread of communism and limit Moscow’s influence in the already volatile Middle East.
After the murders, Allen Dulles was asked to meet with President Eisenhower to brief him on worst-case scenarios in Iraq and how the king’s killing might affect the overall region. Dulles told Eisenhower that a chain reaction downfall could easily occur across the entire Middle East. The kings of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran were all extremely vulnerable to assassination, Dulles warned, and if they were murdered, their weak governments would surely fall.
Iraq’s new leader, General Abd al-Karim Qasim, withdrew from the Baghdad Pact and began forging a partnership with the Soviet Union. In 1959, in keeping with the cycle of revenge, a six-man hit squad aligned with an underground resistance force tried to assassinate Qasim. One of the assassins was a foot soldier from the village of Tikrit named Saddam Hussein. During the ambush, Saddam Hussein began shooting prematurely, drawing fire from Qasim’s bodyguards and causing the plan to go awry. Qasim’s chauffeur was killed, but General Qasim survived the attempt on his life. Believing they’d killed General Qasim, the members of the hit team fled.
Saddam Hussein vanished. When he resurfaced years later in Egypt, the world was a different place.
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The KGB's Office of Liquid Affairs
Major General Edward Partain, an early member of Special Forces, summed it up this way: “In the early fifties, Special Forces groups were not a recognized part of the Army. They were seen as outsiders, great warriors but they could not live comfortably within the peacetime regimental system. You had people of the sort that you wished you could deep freeze on the last battlefield and thaw out on the next battlefield of the next war. It was a rough group.” Billy Waugh recalls Special Forces operators being called “snake-eaters, miscreants, and rogues” by conventional officers in starched shirts. Many of those recruited for Special Forces in the early 1950s were soldiers who fought in World War II for foreign armies, in foreign countries. Men like Larry Thorne.
Larry Thorne (christened Lauri Törni in Finland) stands out as a Special Forces legend: fearless, driven, and recklessly daring. “He would have been at home with the Greeks who infiltrated Troy inside a wooden horse,” said James Goodby, former U.S. ambassador to Finland, “the doomed protagonist in the mold of ancient Greek heroes.” Thorne began his career as a captain in the Finnish Army Reserves, where he trained army ski troops. When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, Törni served as unit commander. Under arduous conditions and in subzero temperatures, Törni and his unit were infiltrated behind enemy lines, where they engaged in hit-and-run operations, on skis, against Russian troops.
The Red Army had more than three times as many soldiers as the Finns, and what should have been clear Russian victories instead went to Törni’s unit. “In reaction to Thorne’s brave, devastating raids behind Soviet lines, the Red Army placed a price on his head, dead or alive, reputedly the only Finnish soldier so singled out for bounty,” says his biographer, J. Michael Cleverley. For his leadership and bravery, Törni was awarded the Knight of the Mannerheim Cross, the country’s highest commendation for valor and the equivalent of the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor. Finland’s relations with the Soviet Union changed several times during the war and when the country’s leaders turned to Nazi Germany for military aid, Törni traveled to Austria for seven weeks of training with the Waffen-SS. He returned to Finland as a Finnish officer and was also recognized as a German Untersturmführer. In 1943 he commanded a guerrilla warfare unit called Detachment Törni. This seventy-man anti-Soviet strike force was a Finnish Waffen-SS battalion. As its commander, Lauri Törni wore a Nazi uniform and was awarded the Iron Cross.
After the war ended, he was arrested and charged with treason. Found guilty and sentenced to six years, he was incarcerated in Finland’s notorious Turku prison. But the indomitable Lauri Törni escaped from prison three times, until he was transferred to Riihimäki prison, on a small island north of Helsinki. In December 1948 he was pardoned by Finnish president Juho Paasikivi and released. But when the threat of additional war crime charges resurfaced, Törni assumed the identity of a Finnish merchant sailer and fled to Venezuela under the alias Eino Morsky. From Venezuela he secured passage on a freighter headed to the United States. Just a few miles out from the shores of Mobile, Alabama, Törni leapt overboard and swam to shore, in a classic example of clandestine infiltration into a foreign target.
A fugitive in the United States, he made his way to New York City, changed his name to Larry Thorne, and worked as a carpenter in Brooklyn and Connecticut. It did not take long for the consummate warfighter to become restless and bored. In 1951, he sought out William Donovan, the former director of the OSS, and asked for his help joining an American unconventional-warfare unit. Donovan schooled Thorne on the newly instated Lodge-Philbin Act, which Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had been instrumental in getting passed. It allowed foreigners to join the U.S. military and earn citizenship if they served honorably for the United States for at least five years. Larry Thorne breezed through U.S. Army basic training and was singled out as a prime candidate for the 10th Special Forces Group. Sent to Bad Tölz, he became an invaluable part of the unit. “Thorne is one of the most devoted and conscientious officers I have known,” wrote his commander, “an aggressive officer who is at his best in a situation which demands physical exertion, direct action, and forceful leadership.” In addition to his physical prowess and irregular-warfare skill set, he spoke English, German, Estonian, Swedish, Norwegian, and of course Finnish. Working alongside Larry Thorne, Billy Waugh was amazed by the soldier’s breadth of talent, his discipline, stamina, and confidence.
At Bad Tölz, Thorne was participating in a third military command. He’d fought for the Finns, the Nazis, and now the United States. “He was what we called a total oner,” explains Waugh. “Having engaged in clandestine ops for several nations in just about every environment known to man, he could adapt to stressful situations anywhere in the world. Mostly he preferred going at it alone.” In Bad Tölz, Larry Thorne was made captain and became the quintessential Green Beret. He was exactly what the Special Forces were looking for in a warfighter.
One example of Thorne’s skill and prowess involved the successful completion of a perilous mission in Iran. In 1957, a U.S. Army C-130 transport plane filled with classified military equipment crashed somewhere in the mountains of northern Iran, in uncharted territory. The rescue operation called for locating the crash site, getting a team in there, recovering the bodies and the classified equipment, and getting out undetected. Three previously orchestrated attempts had all failed when Captain Larry Thorne volunteered for the job. Thorne parachuted into Iran with a twelve-man team of Green Berets. The unit made their way up a 14,000-foot peak, recovered all the bodies and the equipment, then exfiltrated undetected by the Iranians.
Bad Tölz was not for everyone; but for the disciplined nonconformists who embraced unconventional warfare, it was home. Countless foreign languages could be heard spoken in the coffee shop and around the team rooms. Besides European languages—French, Polish, Czech—one heard Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Pashto. The concept of training guerrilla fighters in other countries was at the core of the new U.S. Army Special Forces’ capability. Partnership with special units of foreign armies was a primary goal. In service of this mission, Special Forces operators trained with teams in Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. A team led by Major Joseph Callahan traveled to Jordan to establish the first airborne school for the Jordanian Army at the behest of King Hussein. A team led by Steve Snowden traveled to Turkey to train what would become known as the Turkish Special Forces. Another group went to Saudi Arabia and trained 350 officers and noncommissioned officers in a guerrilla force supported by King Faisal. Four teams traveled to Iran to train the Iranian Special Forces in mountain warfare. Another team trained Kurdish tribesmen in the mountains of Iran. One team went to Pakistan, where they trained with their special warfare warriors in desert warfare.
The 10th Special Forces Group remained a closely guarded secret until 1955, when the New York Times published a cryptic article about the men, describing them as a “liberation” force designed to fight behind enemy lines. A photograph showed members of the group wearing their green berets, their faces blacked out to keep their identities concealed.
The U.S. Army Special Forces began to grow. Hundreds, then thousands, of unconventional American warriors volunteered to join this elite group. They worked tirelessly, training and equipping guerrilla fighters around the globe so as to keep the threat of Soviet expansion in check. U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers would eventually fight secret wars alongside many of the foreign fighters they trained. Other times, they would find themselves fighting against them.
5
Ruin and Rule in Guatemala
On the wild night of June 16, 1954, a charismatic twenty-six-year-old
Argentine doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara stood staring out the window of
an apartment in Guatemala City, listening to machine-gun fire and watching a
fighter-bomber aircraft fire on civilians below. He sat down to pen a letter to his
mother, a wealthy aristocrat whom he adored. He felt a rush, watching people die
for a cause, he confided to her. “Even the light [aircraft] bombings have their
grandeur… the sounds of its machine gun, and the light machine guns that fired
back at it, [leave me] with the magic sensation of vulnerability.” At the time, the
young doctor had no idea that the jetfighter he observed was being flown by an
American-trained mercenary pilot who was part of a covert-action operation for
the CIA. The moment transformed him, he later said. Like an inciting incident in a Shakespearean tragedy, the attack on Guatemala City catalyzed Che Guevara into action. Many men dream of leading a revolution, but Che Guevara would actually do it. His actions put him directly in the crosshairs of three U.S. presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. He would eventually be assassinated by CIA-trained fighters in the mountains of Bolivia in 1967.
Che Guevara had come to Guatemala to study medicine amid social revolution. When he first arrived, the country was in the throes of civil unrest. Guatemala, located just south of Mexico in Central America, had been plagued by violence and social upheaval since 1944, when university professor José Arévalo became the country’s first democratically elected president. For the first time in its history, Guatemala got a constitution, an elected representative body, and a supreme court, but the violence was constant. President Arévalo survived twenty-five coup and assassination attempts in his six years in office. From the perspective of the White House, political instability of this magnitude made Guatemala a prime target for Soviet meddling, and in 1950 the U.S. State Department sent its top diplomat, George Kennan, to investigate.
After touring Latin America, Kennan took the hard-line view that Moscow was indeed making ominous inroads in the Western Hemisphere. “Here, as elsewhere,” Kennan wrote in a secret report for the secretary of state, “the inner core of the [Soviet] communist leadership is fanatical, disciplined, industrious, and armed with a series of organizational techniques which are absolutely first rate.” In all likelihood, Kennan warned, Moscow’s first conquest in Latin America would be Guatemala, which it could then use as a beachhead to launch a takeover of the Americas. Kennan advised the secretary of state that communist influence in the Western Hemisphere had to be curtailed at any cost. Diplomacy was unlikely to work, and military intervention was not plausible, he wrote, which left covert action as the third and best option. “Now this gets us into dangerous and difficult waters, where we must proceed with utmost caution,” advised the man who’d first proposed that the CIA develop a guerrilla warfare corps.
What choice was there? From Albania to Poland, seven governments in Eastern Europe were now being ruled by Stalinists, leaders who’d been emplaced by rigged elections and who maintained power through a devious partnership with Moscow’s ironfisted state security services. Moscow’s movement toward Latin America forecast only disaster. Kennan’s report was reviewed by the president’s National Security Council, whose members unanimously agreed. Covert action was the best way forward.
The following year, in March 1951, a liberal democrat named Jacobo Arbenz, son of a Swiss German father and a Guatemalan mother, was elected president. In his inaugural address, Arbenz promised to move Guatemala from “a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.” The way he intended to do this, he said, was by limiting influence by foreign corporations. Guatemala was a poor nation with an agrarian-based economy. Two percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. The largest landowner, also one of the country’s largest employers, was the American owned United Fruit Company, a banana farming concern. When President Arbenz instituted sweeping reforms in farm labor and called for the expropriation and redistribution of land, including 234,000 acres owned by United Fruit, President Truman’s National Security Council took the position that these anti-American moves were being engineered by Moscow. The time had come for the hidden hand of the United States to intervene. “It [is] essential to our security that we fight fire with fire,” Kennan observed.
President Truman created a powerful new advisory committee to determine the “desirability and feasibility” of covert-action operations. Called the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), it included the director of Central Intelligence, the undersecretary of state, and the deputy secretary of defense, with a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acting as principal military advisor. The informal structure of the PSB allowed for “problem solving” to occur outside the scope of normal bureaucratic channels, insulating the president from potential backlash through plausible deniability. “The working group should shy away from any thought of a ‘Charter’ which would require formal departmental concurrence,” suggested Frank Wisner, then CIA deputy director of plans, in an early staff meeting. An agreement was reached to “develop a paper which would be informally accepted by the Board as indicating the general lines which [we] would probably follow.” In the case of Wisner, who was simultaneously in charge of JACK operations in Korea, the construct of plausible deniability insulated him personally from consequence, as the historical record makes clear. Whether Wisner was aware of his outsized incompetence during this fateful time, willfully ignorant of it, or mentally ill remains the subject of debate.
What is clear is that the goal of the PSB was not only to devise and plan covert operations but to manipulate the public’s perception of these hidden-hand events. “Our job is to influence the minds and wills of other people,” board members agreed, not as in “word warfare” but through paramilitary actions that had real-world consequences. “We help shape events to include all elements of pressure and persuasion,” PSB director Gordon Gray told the president.
The PSB’s plan for Guatemala was to stage a coup d’état against President Arbenz and overthrow him, using a CIA-trained guerrilla fighting force. The Office of Policy Coordination was in charge, as in Korea. The man chosen by the CIA to lead the mutiny and be installed as Guatemala’s new, pro-American president was a former Guatemalan military officer living in exile in Honduras, Carlos Castillo Armas. He was corrupt, right-wing, and militaristic, but the Office of Policy Coordination was willing to work with him because he had a decent-sized guerrilla force loyal to him, fighters who could be trained and equipped by CIA paramilitary officers with relative ease.
In January 1952, CIA headquarters began drafting its first-known assassination list, a compilation of individuals “to eliminate immediately” under the Agency’s Title 50 covert-action authority. This list was followed by at least two additional kill lists, one titled “Guatemalan Communist Personnel to be disposed of during Military Operations of Calligeris” (the code name for Carlos Castillo Armas) and the other under the heading “Selection of individuals for disposal by Junta Group.” The targets, or “disposees” [sic], would be “neutralized” under a construct called “Executive Action.” This euphemism, adopted by numerous future U.S. presidents, remains in effect as of 2019.
Whether President Truman was made aware of the assassination campaign remains a mystery. But the very next month, the subject of Soviet assassination capabilities was discussed by Gordon Gray in a Top Secret “Report to the President.” “Throughout the world,” Gray wrote, “[the Kremlin] has built up networks of agents who would move at the word of command to carry out an assassination or foment a civil war,” a subtle suggestion that the PSB plans for assassination were but a necessary means of fighting fire with fire.
Assembling a list of individuals for assassination was a flawed and haphazard process. CIA officers first worked from a 1949 Guatemalan Army list of communists, augmented by information from the Directorate of Intelligence as it came in. Memos made public in 1997 show that the list included “top flight Communists whom the new government would desire to eliminate immediately in the event of a successful anticommunist coup” but quickly grew to include other Guatemalans. Clandestine service officers were queried to help decide who else should be included on a “final list of disposees,” with one employee assigned the job of quality control, “to verify the list and recommend any additions or deletions.”
The assassination list was sent to Carlos Castillo Armas for input. The illegitimate son of a farmer, Armas had spent much of his life engaged in guerrilla warfare. From 1948 to 1949, he’d served as the director of Guatemala’s military academy. By 1952, he’d been involved in two previous coups d’état in Guatemala. He was a wanted man in his own country and his list of enemies was long. In September 1952, Armas added as many as fifty-eight names to the CIA’s assassination list.
Things quickly got more complicated. That same month, in the Dominican Republic, the strongman Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, called “the cruelest dictator in the Americas,” got word of the CIA’s assassination list and wanted in. Trujillo made a deal with Carlos Castillo Armas. In exchange for “the killing of four Santo Dominicans at present residing in Guatemala,” he offered Armas his material support.
“Castillo Armas readily agreed,” says CIA staff historian Gerald Haines. In addition to requesting that certain of his enemies be targeted and killed by the CIA, Trujillo offered to send his own assassins to participate in the action, “special [assassination] squads [that] were already trained.” In a declassified Agency memorandum, these death squads were referred to as “Trujillo’s trained pistoleros” and as “K” (presumably for “kill”) groups. But after considerable debate, says Haines, the idea was vetoed by the State Department. Still, Armas continued to make side deals of his own, and the CIA learned that Armas intended to make “maximum use of the K groups,” and would dispatch “Nicaraguan, Honduran and Salvadorian soldiers in civilian clothes to infiltrate Guatemala and assassinate unnamed Communist leaders” loyal to Armas. In Guatemala City, a local asset provided his CIA handler with a “hit list with the location of the homes and offices of all targets [that] had already been drawn up.” Haines says records of what happened next were destroyed or lost.
The CIA did not create the Latin American propensity for assassination. Long before the Central Intelligence Agency existed, targeting killing was a well established political tool throughout the region. These were the rules of the game for authoritarian regimes that ruled by force and corruption, not laws. In 1949, President Arbenz himself had benefited from the assassination of his political rival, Francisco Javier Arana. Arbenz had been one of only six men present when Arana, chief of the country’s armed forces, was shot in broad daylight during an altercation on the Puente de la Gloria, outside Guatemala City. As president, Arbenz did little to solve the extrajudicial killing he’d personally witnessed. There was no investigation of the murder, and his rival’s assassins were never apprehended. As of 2019, the killing remains a mystery.
As the CIA worked on its paramilitary operations and assassination plans, the president’s Psychological Strategy Board oversaw a robust psychological warfare campaign intended to influence the minds and wills of the people—to wage a Nerve War Against Individuals, according to a declassified memo. The idea was to instill fear and paranoia in a core group of military officials close to Arbenz so they might become turncoats and participate in “a mass defection of the Guatemalan army.” As the plans moved forward, the U.S. presidency changed hands. In January 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the thirty fourth president of the United States, and the PSB briefed the new commander in chief on its covert-action operations. “Cold War concerns convinced President Eisenhower to order the removal of the democratically elected leader by force,” according to Haines.
Starting on April 13, 1953, top Guatemalan communists received “death notice” cards, some for as many as thirty consecutive days, the contents of which remain classified. Others received physical objects courtesy of the CIA, including small wooden coffins, hangman’s nooses, and toy bombs. Communist leaders came home from work, or woke up in the morning, to find graffiti painted on the exterior walls of their homes. “Here Lives a Spy,” one message read. Another threatened, “You have Only 5 Days.”
The operation was gaining momentum. Declassified documents illustrate how quickly CIA officials at the highest level got on board with more advanced assassination, or “liquidation,” plans. J. C. King, CIA chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, learned of the hit list and on August 28, 1953, suggested “possibly assassinating key Guatemalan military officers if they refused to be converted to the rebel cause.” The following month, King sent a memo to CIA director Allen Dulles stating his support for “neutralizing” President Arbenz.
To the CIA, assassination was an objective, an action to be carried out with the precision and detachment of a military operation. It was during this period that the CIA assembled its first known how-to instruction booklet on assassination as an instrument of foreign policy—as a political tool. “An extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations.” Titled “A Study of Assassination,” the manual was organized into sections including “Planning,” “Techniques,” and “Classifications.” The ideal assassin worked alone, always mindful of the fact that “no assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded.” He or she would almost always report to just one person, with this same individual overseeing their infiltration to, and exfiltration from, the target area.
In addition to having all the qualities of a clandestine service agent, an assassin would have to be “determined, courageous, intelligent, resourceful and physically active.” Knowledge of a variety of weapons, including knives, firearms, grenades, and small bombs, was imperative for success. “It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skilled enough to do it well,” the CIA posited. “A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of the act they intend to commit.” In a section entitled “Justification,” the CIA warned its would-be assassins of the dark psychological territory into which they were heading. “Murder is not morally justifiable,” and “assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.”
The unvarnished truth about assassination was that while some operations involved the objective detachment of a sniper rifle, a pistol, or a lethal dose of poison, an assassin must always be ready to kill his target mano a mano. For that, he had to be willing to make use of any real-world object that might be lying around. “Anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice,” counseled the CIA, “a hammer or axe, fire poker or lampstand.” Pushing a target off a bridge, down an elevator shaft, or out an open window was a wise course of action; the assassin could “play horrified witness” if questioned by police. Staged car accidents were not recommended because a lengthy investigation almost always ensued. But if an assassin could drug his target and push the man and his vehicle off a high point or into deep water, that tactic could be considered. If the target was an alcoholic, getting the man drunk and injecting him with a lethal dose of morphine before he passed out was always a viable option. Avoid explosives and demolition charges, assassins were told. They were unreliable and prone to accidents. Often, when used as a booby-trap with a time delay, these kinds of devices wound up killing the wrong man.
Most of all, the assassin had to accept that he was not judge, jury, or hangman. “Assassination of persons responsible for atrocities or reprisals may be regarded as just punishment,” the authors forewarned, but to think of it as retribution for an offense was not what covert action was about. To kill a specific individual under Title 50 authority of the U.S. Code was about prevention, not revenge. “Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary,” the authors of the CIA’s assassination manual made clear.
On September 11, 1953, the CIA submitted its “General Plan of Action” for Guatemala, code-named Operation Success (PBSUCCESS). President Eisenhower signed off on the operation, approving a $2.7 million budget for “psychological warfare and political action” as well as “subversion,” to be conducted by the CIA. On December 23, 1953, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination opened a classified forward operating base in Miami, Florida, where covert operations in Guatemala would be run.
All elements of covert actions had code names: people, places, operations, and locations. The PBSUCCESS headquarters building, code-named Lincoln, was located about ten miles from Miami, on the second floor of a shabby twostory structure in the corner of Opa Locka Airport, only ever to be referred to as Building 67. “Effective this date all addressee stations will constitute component elements of PBSUCCESS regional command with project headquarters at LINCOLN under Jerome Dunbar,” Allen Dulles wrote. Jerome Dunbar was the code name for retired Colonel Albert Haney, former CIA station chief in Seoul. It was Haney, Frank Wisner, and Hans Tofte who had run the ill-fated JACK missions in Korea.
The CIA reached an agreement with rebel groups in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador to train and equip its guerrilla fighting forces inside these neighboring countries’ borders. In these secret paramilitary training camps, deep in the jungle, the CIA trained and armed local commandos to act as the fighting brigade for Castillo Armas. Come “D-Day,” this paramilitary army of foreign fighters would make an amphibious beach landing and carry out the CIA’s coup d’état, in the style of the Normandy invasion. Declassified documents reveal that at least 1,725 foreign fighters were trained by the CIA, with another “2500 persons of lesser caliber and faith committed to joining the fighting force if called upon.”
On January 5, 1954, Albert Haney requested a final list on the “liquidation of personnel.” The following week, Lincoln requisitioned twenty suppressors for twenty .22-caliber rifles, which were sent from CIA headquarters. A small group of “key leaders” were then chosen for the assassination program. On January 13, cables were sent discussing training protocols for these “assassination specialists.”
On April 17, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (the CIA director’s brother) gave PBSUCCESS the “full green light.” The following month, perhaps sensing his end was near, President Arbenz offered to meet with President Eisenhower, to reduce tensions between the two countries. But it was too late. The CIA coup d’état was in motion.
On June 15, 1954, CIA-trained sabotage teams and invasion forces launched from Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador and moved quickly into staging areas just outside the Guatemalan border. At 5:00 p.m. on June 18, President Arbenz held a massive rally at the railroad station. The gathering was buzzed by CIA planes. At dusk, Castillo Armas crossed the border with his personal strike force. Overhead, CIA planes strafed army troop trains. In Washington, DC, the PSB ordered the Matamoros fortress in downtown Guatemala City bombed. A hundred miles east of the capital, the city of Chiquimula fell to CIA guerrilla forces as an American F-47 flown by a mercenary pilot dropped bombs. Finally, on June 27, 1954, as Castillo Armas attacked the city of Zacapa, President Arbenz capitulated and resigned.
By June 30, the CIA decided that the coup had been a success. Now it was time for the hidden hand of the CIA to vanish. Frank Wisner sent a cable entitled “Shift of Gears,” urging all CIA officers and operators to withdraw. On July 4, the CIA dispatched a recovery team to Guatemala City to collect 150,000 documents related to all communist activity, for future use. On July 12, the Lincoln office in Opa Locka was shuttered. Frank Wisner ordered Albert Haney to destroy all documents relating to Operation Success. A few survived.
The president asked the CIA to brief him on the operation. Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and J. C. King used maps and charts to narrate how the coup had unfolded. The president asked how many men had died. “Only one,” a briefer lied. Eisenhower shook his head. “Incredible,” he said.
“Indeed it had been incredible,” writes CIA historian Nick Cullather. According to the Agency’s own records, at least forty-eight rebel fighters were killed in the action. The CIA’s perpetuation of the falsehood that it had been a success gave way to a decades-long CIA myth that the Guatemala operation had been an “unblemished triumph.” It was often cited as a model, a means of encouraging future presidents to authorize similar covert-action operations around the world.
On September 1, 1954, Castillo Armas declared himself the new president of Guatemala. Shortly after he took power, a group of junior army cadets, unhappy with the army’s capitulation, staged a coup. It was quickly put down, leaving twenty-nine dead and another ninety-one wounded. Come October, so-called elections were held, but Castillo Armas was the only candidate. As his government was being installed, a second insurgency emerged. This new military junta came down hard on the resistance movement, quashing rebellions with murder and oppression. It left tens of thousands—some historians say as many as 200,000—killed, tortured, maimed, or missing.
Three years later, on July 26, 1957, Armas, the CIA’s puppet dictator, was shot in the presidential palace by a member of his own guard. He died instantly. The assassin, Romeo Vásquez Sánchez, fled to another room in the palace and committed suicide.
The facts of the CIA’s hidden-hand operations in Guatemala would remain secret until May of 1997, when the Agency’s history staff “rediscovered” the allegedly lost records. Congress had been looking for them since at least 1975, when the Senate began its investigation into U.S. government–sanctioned assassination. Four years later, in 1979, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit ordered the Guatemala documents be declassified, but the CIA was able to keep its records sealed on national-security grounds. As for the assassination programs and kill lists, CIA staff historians continue to insist that no one was actually assassinated. This is a doubtful claim. When the documents were finally declassified, the names of the people targeted for assassination were redacted, making it impossible to discern if any were killed before, during, or after the coup.
Extreme secrecy and illicit hiding are but two elements of plausible deniability, designed to keep the office of the president from being embroiled in controversy and disgrace. But there is so much more that results, including grave and unintended consequence the CIA can neither foresee nor control. In its hidden-hand operations in Guatemala in 1954, the CIA created a revenge seeking monster intent on destroying its creator. It took the form of Che Guevara, the young doctor who watched the CIA-led coup through an open window in an apartment in Guatemala City.
Shortly after he wrote the letter to his mother expressing the magical sensation he felt watching violence and revolution unfold, Che Guevara set out onto the city streets to organize a resistance movement against the plotters of the coup. He teamed up with an armed militia organization called the Communist Youth, and expressed a desire to fight. Instead, the group’s leaders assigned him hospital duty and instructed him to await further orders. Within a few days, martial law was declared across Guatemala and the Communist Party was disbanded. With its fighters being rounded up, Che Guevara sought refuge in the Argentine embassy.
There he learned that the heart of the Latin American communist movement was moving to Mexico City. He applied for a visa and made his way. It was there that he met a young Cuban-born revolutionary living in exile there, Fidel Castro. “He is a young man, intelligent, very sure of himself and of extraordinary audacity,” Che Guevara wrote in his diary. “I think there is a mutual sympathy between us.” Fidel Castro asked Che Guevara to join his guerrilla movement and serve as the rebel group’s official doctor, and he accepted on the spot. In just five short years, the two revolutionaries would transform from complete unknowns to two of the highest-ranking enemies of the United States.
Back in Guatemala, as the CIA’s cleanup group was sorting through files of the fallen Arbenz regime, CIA officer David Atlee Phillips came across a single sheet of paper about the young doctor named Che Guevara and his communist ties.
“Should we start a file on this one?” Phillips’s assistant asked his boss.
“Yes, I guess we better have a file on him,” Phillips replied.
Soon the CIA would place Che Guevara on their kill list.
6
Kings, Shahs,Monarchs and Madmen
Halfway across the world in the Middle East, the president’s covert-action
advisors also had their eyes on Iran. In these early days of the Cold War, the
Middle East was awash in spectacle killings that the CIA saw as motivated not
only by politics but also by religion and revenge. Assassination operations
undertaken by religious fanatics were particularly dangerous, the Agency
believed, “since a fanatic is unstable psychologically [and] must be handled with
extreme care.” In Iran, a group of these fanatics had recently succeeded in
assassinating eight high-ranking members of the country’s secular government.
They called themselves Fedayeen-e Islam, Self-Sacrificers of Islam, Shiite
fundamentalist Muslims whose declared mission was to rid Iran of “corrupting
individuals” through assassination. In 1953, President Eisenhower’s PSB met to
discuss covert-action plans involving Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad
Mossadegh, who the CIA believed was at the top of Fedayeen-e Islam’s kill list. The assassination of a prominent government official creates a vacuum of instability, both actual and perceived. By 1953, when briefing Eisenhower on the assassination threat level in Iran, CIA director Allen Dulles, a member of the Psychological Strategy Board, told the president in no uncertain terms that if something wasn’t done about the situation, Moscow would surely take advantage of it.
“A Communist takeover of Iran is becoming more and more of a possibility,” Dulles told the president, and “the elimination of Mossadegh, by assassination or otherwise, might precipitate decisive events.” The result would be a domino effect across all of the Middle East. “If Iran succumbed to the Communists there is little doubt that in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some 60% of the world’s oil reserves, would fall into Communist control.” The CIA decided that its best bet for a covert-action partner to counter Soviet influence in Iran was the country’s vain young king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Fedayeen-e Islam had tried to kill the shah just a few years before.
It was a cool, crisp morning in 1949, in the capital city, and the twenty-nineyear-old king climbed out of his limousine and began making his way up the steps of Tehran University, waving to the crowd. A man pretending to be a photojournalist called out the shah’s name. As Mohammad Reza Pahlavi looked his way, the assassin fired off five shots, hitting him. One bullet entered the shah’s face through his open mouth, passing through his upper lip and exiting his face without hitting any bone. As he fell, a second bullet struck him in the backside, wounding him. The assassin fired off three more bullets, all of which hit the shah’s hat, before police leapt on the man and killed him. As the assassin’s dead body was pummeled by a vengeful mob, the shah was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he spoke with members of the press. “A few shots won’t deter my duties to my beloved country,” he told visitors gathered at his bedside.
The assassin’s name was Fakhr-Arai, a member of the Fedayeen-e Islam. By the time he tried to kill the shah, the group had already succeeded in killing two prominent members of Iranian society: Ahmad Kasravi, a historian, in 1946, and Mohammad Masoud, a newspaper publisher, in 1948. Both men had been writing and publishing antireligious pieces when they were assassinated. Their writings had deeply offended a central figure inside the Self-Sacrificers of Islam, a forty-nine-year-old cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini. Though relatively unknown outside religious circles at the time, in the decades to come this revolutionary cleric would become one of the most infamous villains in the Western world, known as Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran.
Fedayeen-e Islam modeled their activities after history’s original assassins, the Hashashin, an eleventh-century strike force of Shiite fundamentalist warriors led by the enigmatic holy man Hassan-i Sabbah, from whom the word “assassin” derives. Like its medieval predecessor, the modern Fedayeen-e Islam in Iran sought to target and assassinate those it deemed enemies of Shiite Islam. The assassins and their abilities, indeed the very mention of their name, bred terror. They were deadly and cunning, rumored to possess invisibility. One of the first known Western references to the assassins appears in a report written by Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor, in the year 1173. “They had a habit of killing [enemies] in an astonishing way,” explains Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton University, who first located the original reference (in 1967), “but it was the fanatical devotion, rather than the murderous methods” of the assassins that struck the imagination of Europe. Dormant for hundreds of years, the assassins were now at it again. The shah’s political ideology, the Divine Right of Kings, was a Western concept the Self-Sacrificers of Islam vowed to destroy.
After the Shiite fundamentalists tried to kill the shah in 1949, and despite the group’s clear allegiance to Islamic fundamentalism, the shah’s secular government, led by a prime minister, instead placed blame on Iran’s pro–Soviet Union communist party, the Tudeh Party, or Party of the Masses. As the shah recovered in the hospital, Iranian state police arrested more than two hundred Tudeh Party members and confiscated the group’s assets in an effort to rid the country of communists. The remaining members of the Tudeh Party went underground.
In Western media outlets, the assassination attempt was reported as being linked to economics, not religion. “The assassination attempt came one day after 2,000 students marched around the Majlis (Parliament) building and demanded cancellation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s concession [that is, exclusive rights] to take oil out of Iran,” reported the United Press. Half a century earlier, in 1901, a British entrepreneur named William D’Arcy secured from the corrupt former shah of Iran, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, the exclusive rights to pump oil out of the desert, on decidedly one-sided terms. D’Arcy’s British oil company would keep 84 percent of the profits, while 16 percent would go to the monarchy for the king to disperse as he saw fit, which was mostly in his pocket. Now, forty-eight years later, the bogus terms of the oil deal had become a legitimate point of contention for many Iranians. But in 1949 it was not oil that was directly related to the assassination attempt on the corrupt and ineffectual Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; it was religion.
In the Western media, the Soviet Union was cast as the villain in the Iranian situation. “Iran has been the scene of unrest since the end of the war,” reported the Associated Press. “Its vast oil resources have been a bone of contention between the Soviet Union, which has demanded concessions, and the Western powers, which have resisted Russian entrance into the oil fields where they have long dominated.” This was precisely what Stalin warned Ambassador Bedell Smith about, during their meeting at the Kremlin. Nine months after the Self Sacrificers of Islam failed to kill the shah, they succeeded in assassinating his minister of the royal court, Abdolhossein Hazhir. In an attempt to keep order, the shah appointed a hard-line anticommunist military general named Ali Razmara to be the new prime minister of Iran. In response, the Fedayeen-e Islam dispatched an assassin to kill him.
On March 7, 1951, Prime Minister Razmara was paying his respects at a funeral in the Shah Mosque, in Tehran, when a religious zealot named Khalil Tahmasebi stepped forward from the crowd and fired a bullet directly into his face, killing him instantly. The assassination garnered the world’s attention. “Premier of Iran Is Shot to Death in a Mosque by a Religious Fanatic; Victim of Assassin,” headlined the Associated Press. Just twelve days later, General Razmara’s minister of education, Abdul Hamid Zanganeh, was shot and killed by the same group while standing on the steps of Tehran University, where Fedayeen-e Islam had almost killed the shah two years before. In response to the back-to-back assassinations, the shah declared martial law.
In Washington, DC, members of the CIA convened to discuss next steps. “The assassination of Prime Minister Razmara seriously worsens an already grave situation in Iran,” warned a representative from the Office of Policy Coordination. “Political and economic insecurity combined with chauvinist and fanatical religious emotions have produced an atmosphere extremely favorable to Soviet subversion.” Alarmist or not, the perspective of the CIA was that the entire Middle East was on the brink of falling to communism. The successful assassination of a head of state can prompt copycat killings, raising the specter of chaos and instability, which is exactly what happened four months later, as a series of brutal assassinations swept across the Middle East. The first was in Lebanon.
As with most of its Arab neighbors, Lebanon had only recently gained independence from French colonial rule after the end of World War II. As per the terms of the United Nations Charter, the last French troops withdrew from Lebanon in December 1946. On July 17, 1951, Riad Al Solh, Lebanon’s first prime minister, was gunned down at Marka Airport in Amman, Jordan. The killers, members of a group called the Syrian Socialist National Party, declared that theirs was a revenge killing for the execution of one of their own party’s cofounding members. Three days later, on July 20, King Abdullah of Jordan was killed by a Palestinian assassin at the entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. He was walking into Friday prayers. The king, age sixty-nine, died instantly from three shots to the head and the chest. “The King who made [Jordan] a nation is no more,” a British newsreel proclaimed. “He was our friend. And for this he died.”
Standing at the king’s side when he was assassinated was his fifteen-year-old grandson, Prince Hussein, hit by bullet fragments. The prince’s life was saved when the fragments bounced off a medal, pinned to his chest, that his grandfather had given him earlier that same day. The assassin was shot dead by bodyguards and a state of emergency was declared in Jordan. The king’s eldest son, Prince Talal, took the throne. But Talal had a hidden history of mental illness and had been secretly treated for schizophrenia in a Swiss clinic the year before. After ruling Jordan for a year, he was removed from power by the parliament. Prince Hussein became King Hussein of Jordan, now age sixteen. He would rule Jordan for the next forty-five years. Having witnessed the assassination of his grandfather by a Palestinian fanatic made the teenage King Hussein forever cautious of those around him, he later said, and caused him to treat his fellow Arab rulers with a degree of skepticism. He is said to have always carried a gun when he left the palace and slept with a pistol within arm’s reach.
After the death of King Abdullah of Jordan, the State Department sent a telegram to all its ambassadors in the Arab states and Israel, encouraging them “to counsel restraint and moderation” as it worked to shore up a secret partnership with the shah of Iran. The killing of other heads of state in the region “could promote a further weakening of Iran’s internal stability,” CIA analysts feared. And the result could be “a general sense of aimlessness, insecurity, and frustration… highlighting Iran’s lack of capable leadership.” Which is exactly what happened next.
In Tehran, riots broke out. To appease an angry public, the shah appointed Mohammad Mossadegh, an Iranian nationalist, to serve as prime minister, giving him authority over Iran’s military forces. One of Mossadegh’s first actions was to wrest control of the oil industry from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which infuriated the British. Mossadegh imprisoned the founder of the Self-Sacrificers of Islam, Navab Safavi, which enraged the Fedayeen-e Islam, who put Mossadegh on their kill list.
Unable to kill Mossadegh, the Fedayeen went after the prime minister’s loyal foreign minister, Hossein Fatemi. In what was sure to be a spectacular display of fanaticism and revenge, the Fedayeen engineered a plan to kill Fatemi while he was attending a commemorative event marking the assassination of newspaper publisher Mohammad Masoud. But at the exact moment the assassin was reaching into his front jacket pocket to pull out a gun, a local photographer just so happened to snap a photograph of the killer, an image that would be reprinted in newspapers around the world. Adding to the uncanny timing of the photograph was the fact that the killer wasn’t a grown man but a young boy of fifteen. In 1952, the marriage of violence and Islamic fundamentalism was unfamiliar to most Westerners, and the idea that a teenage boy could be seduced into becoming an assassin in the name of religion was considered downright shocking. The teenager managed to get off only a single shot, hitting Iran’s foreign minister in the stomach, wounding him. The boy was captured by the shah’s state police, who took him back to police headquarters, where he confessed to being a member of Fedayeen-e Islam. In Washington, DC, President Eisenhower approved the Psychological Strategy Board’s plans for a hidden-hand coup d’état in Iran.
A year passed. On March 4, 1953, the National Security Council convened to discuss Iran. Dulles repeated his thoughts on what the assassination of Prime Minister Mossadegh would mean for the United States. “If he were to be assassinated or otherwise to disappear from power, a political vacuum would occur in Iran and the Communists might easily take over.” And if the communists moved on the Middle East and all its oil, it would mean the outbreak of war.
President Eisenhower was briefed on numerous plans. When he expressed a preference for U.S. financial support to Mossadegh instead of getting rid of him, representatives from State, Defense, and the CIA argued that to do so was useless. The days of propping up people who didn’t like the United States were coming to an end, CIA director Allen Dulles advised. Charles Wilson, secretary of defense, agreed. “In the old days, when dictatorships changed it was usually a matter of one faction of the right against another, and we had only to wait until the situation subsided,” Wilson told Eisenhower. “Nowadays, however, when a dictatorship of the right is replaced by a dictatorship of the left, a state could presently slide into Communism and [become] irrevocably lost to us.” It was the same mantra that had allowed the CIA to garner covert-action authority in Korea and Guatemala. Diplomacy wasn’t working, and military intervention was unwise. That left the president with his third option, the hidden hand.
The president told his advisors that the situation was “a matter of great distress” to him. That he could not understand why “we seemed unable to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us.” After listening to the president, the National Security Council secured authorization to proceed. The following month, on April 4, 1953, one million dollars was wired to the CIA’s Tehran Station to bring about the downfall of Mohammad Mossadegh.
The CIA plot to overthrow Mossadegh, code-named Operation Ajax, took place the third week of August 1953. The details of the coup—even the basic questions like who hatched the plot and who carried it out—remain the subject of debate. Mossadegh was not assassinated but instead arrested and convicted of treason. He served three years in jail before being banished to house arrest. He died in 1967. A retired army general named Fazlollah Zahedi became the CIA’s front man, retaining power as prime minister for two years. But the real goal for the United States was to quietly help the shah assume absolute power in Iran. With military and economic backing, by 1955, the CIA got its wish.
The Defense Department sent General McClure, founder of the U.S. Army 10th Special Forces, to Tehran, to serve as chief of the U.S. Military Mission in Iran. His job was to help Iran build up its conventional military forces, as well as a guerrilla warfare corps. In a letter to his liaison on the National Security Council, McClure relayed what he’d learned. “His majesty’s first and most important problem was the morale of the armed forces. Something must be done immediately to provide min[imum] housing requirements for its officers and noncommissioned officers, many of whom [are] at present living in squalor,” McClure wrote. Like a kid in a candy store, the shah’s wish list was long. “He desires a highly proficient and technically trained small army with considerable mobility, which could be backed, in time of war, by large numbers of tribesmen armed as Infantry and trained to fight defensively until overrun and then resort to guerrilla tactics.”
The shah insisted he needed an arsenal of weapons systems and artillery from the United States in order to exercise dominance in the region: “Three Battalions of Patton Tanks, an antiaircraft battalion to protect troops, steel mating for airstrips, 155 Howitzers and land mines,” wrote McClure. The shah accepted the fact that it was “too early” to talk about being supplied with U.S. jet fighter aircraft. The shah’s military reorganization was well under way, McClure wrote, the country’s charter being rewritten to move military authority away from the prime minister so it was entirely under the shah’s direction and control.
President Eisenhower expressed his approval for what was originally seen as a successful coup in Iran. The Soviets were at bay, at least for now. “The CIA carried out a successful regime-change operation,” says CIA staff historian David Robarge. “It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences.” Not until the Iranian Revolution in 1979 would the most impactful of the unintended consequences be revealed. Scores of foot soldiers of the revolution seeking to overturn the shah were members of Fedayeen-e Islam. But in 1953, with the shah firmly installed as the American puppet, and order seemingly in place, CIA officers mistakenly believed they could control the Self-Sacrificers of Islam, maybe even work with them.
A new strategy for dealing with radical Islamic fundamentalists emerged. The communists were avowed atheists. The CIA and the National Security Council advised President Eisenhower that the United States should begin using the communists’ irreligiosity against them. In September 1957, at a White House meeting with the president, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the CIA’s Frank Wisner, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and President Eisenhower agreed. “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect” endemic to the Middle East, Eisenhower said. Dulles suggested that the CIA create a “secret task force” through which the United States could deliver weapons, intelligence, and money to American-friendly monarchs including King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, and King Faisal of Iraq. It was an idea that would have grave unintended consequences. From these task forces a thousand monsters would be born.
As was the case with many Arab rulers in the 1950s, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power using assassination as a political tool, at least according to his successor, Anwar Sadat. In an interview with Arab television, Sadat said that Nasser conducted “a large-scale assassination campaign” starting in January 1952, an act that helped him secure power and respect. After trying, unsuccessfully, to machine-gun down a political rival during a military parade, Nasser led a successful military coup against King Farouk, which launched the Egyptian revolution. No one liked Egypt’s King Farouk. He was corrupt and ineffectual, vilified for riding around the country in his private train consuming oysters while so many of his subjects suffered from poverty and hunger. Spared execution, King Farouk was forced to abdicate, and he lived out the rest of his life in Monaco and Italy. Nasser became president of Egypt in 1956.
The use of assassination as a political tool cuts both ways. In a region where assassination was as much about revenge as it was about politics and religion, once you tried to assassinate a rival, you could assume that your rivals were going to be coming after you. Two years after taking power, Nasser became the target of an assassination attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s Sunni fundamentalist group.
On October 26, 1954, Nasser was in Alexandria, delivering a speech to celebrate the British military withdrawal. The historic event was broadcast live on radios all across Egypt and the Arab world. As Nasser regaled the massive crowd of supporters who’d gathered in Mansheya Square, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood stood up and fired at President Nasser from just twenty feet away. Despite firing eight shots in all, the assassin missed Nasser entirely. Pandemonium erupted among the crowd while Nasser remained sublimely calm. He seized upon the moment for political advantage, addressing millions of Egyptians listening to his speech on the radio.
“My countrymen!” Nasser shouted out. “My blood spills for you and for Egypt!” Even though Nasser wasn’t bleeding, the crowd went wild. “Let them kill me!” he cried. “It does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor, and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser!” As the crowd erupted in cheers, Nasser continued shouting into the microphone. “Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you, and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation,” he repeated again and again. Nasser, already popular, was now also publicly adored across the Arab world. His vision for pan-Arabism, the desire to unify the Arab world from North Africa to West Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea, could now take hold.
In neighboring Libya, a young Bedouin boy named Muammar el-Qaddafi listened to Nasser’s Mansheya Square radio broadcast with supreme adoration. In school, Qaddafi would leap up onto his chair and recite Nasser verbatim. People thought he was odd. His classmates made fun of him. He didn’t care. One day, he said, he’d prove all of them wrong. And he’d exact revenge on anyone who ever dared doubt him. Muammar el-Qaddafi would grow up, join the military, and seize power from Libya’s corrupt King Idris. He would emulate Gamal Nasser, promote his ideology, and insist the two men become friends.
Two thousand miles away, in Iraq, a rebel group plotted to assassinate their king. On July 14, 1958, the last king of Iraq, his family, his advisors, and his prime minister were all killed in one of the most brutal assassination and coups d’état in modern history. The bloodbath was a terrifying mix of political killing and revenge murder, finalized and sensationalized in a sadistic display of mob rage. King Faisal II, born in 1935, became king of Iraq when he was just three years old, after his playboy father died in a car crash. During World War II, the boy lived with his mother, Queen Aliya, in England. As a teenager, he attended the British boarding school Harrow alongside his second cousin, Hussein, then serving as king of Jordan.
King Faisal was twenty-three and engaged to be married when on July 14 the military stormed the palace in Baghdad. One of the king’s military commanders, a brigadier general named Abd al-Karim Qasim, ordered that the members of the royal family be lined up in front of a wall and machine-gunned to death. Prime Minister Nuri al-Said escaped the immediate carnage and the following day donned an abaya and sneaked out a back door of the palace. He was captured and shot, and his corpse “cut up by shawerma knives” by a vengeful mob. The mutilated corpses of the crown prince and the prime minister were then strung up outside the Ministry of Defense and hit with sticks. After the bodies were taken down, they were laid out in the street, where they were run over by an army vehicle. The corpses “resembled sausage,” reported a Baghdad newspaper, which ran photographs of the bodies and the mayhem.
King Faisal II had been decidedly pro-Western, a friend of the State Department and a guest of the White House during a visit to DC. His 1958 assassination was a blow to the CIA’s desire for regional control. The king had been a cornerstone partner in the Baghdad Pact of 1955, a five-nation alliance signed by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, in support of Western democratic ideals. The alliance, known as CENTO, was modeled after NATO and promised mutual cooperation among its signatory nations. At its core, the Baghdad Pact was an agreement to contain the spread of communism and limit Moscow’s influence in the already volatile Middle East.
After the murders, Allen Dulles was asked to meet with President Eisenhower to brief him on worst-case scenarios in Iraq and how the king’s killing might affect the overall region. Dulles told Eisenhower that a chain reaction downfall could easily occur across the entire Middle East. The kings of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran were all extremely vulnerable to assassination, Dulles warned, and if they were murdered, their weak governments would surely fall.
Iraq’s new leader, General Abd al-Karim Qasim, withdrew from the Baghdad Pact and began forging a partnership with the Soviet Union. In 1959, in keeping with the cycle of revenge, a six-man hit squad aligned with an underground resistance force tried to assassinate Qasim. One of the assassins was a foot soldier from the village of Tikrit named Saddam Hussein. During the ambush, Saddam Hussein began shooting prematurely, drawing fire from Qasim’s bodyguards and causing the plan to go awry. Qasim’s chauffeur was killed, but General Qasim survived the attempt on his life. Believing they’d killed General Qasim, the members of the hit team fled.
Saddam Hussein vanished. When he resurfaced years later in Egypt, the world was a different place.
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