The CIA were also interested in gaining access to the Soviet’s landlines, particularly after they realized that Moscow’s encoding machines had a flaw which sent a faint echo of the uncoded message along with the encrypted version. When the CIA’s Carl Nelson visited Vienna, he came across the MI6 operation, and the two sides joined forces — although it seems that Nelson didn’t share the information about the clear versions with his allies.
The Vienna project was the inspiration for a similar operation in Berlin, which would in the end produce over forty thousand hours of telephone conversations and six million hours of teletype traffic. Ironically Operation Gold is best known because of the nature of its discovery by the Soviets.
The Berlin Tunnel would be deemed ‘one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken’ by then-DCI Allen Dulles who gave the go-ahead for the digging in conjunction with the British in December 1953. The tunnel was a major engineering feat, travelling nearly 1,500 feet beneath the ground to reach a cable that was only 27 inches from the surface. The cable’s location had been provided by an agent inside the East Berlin post office, and the construction of an Air Force radar site and warehouse was used as a cover for the work which began in February 1954. The tunnel itself was completed in February 1955, and taps were in operation until April the following year when it was discovered, with the Soviets trying to make a great propaganda coup from it. (This backfired: Time magazine commented that ‘It’s the best publicity the US has had in Berlin for a long time.’)
As far as the CIA were concerned at the time, ‘Analysis of all available evidence… indicates that the Soviet discovery of the Tunnel was particularly fortuitous and was not the result of a penetration of the agencies involved, a security violation, or testing of the lines by Soviets or East Germans.’ It seemed as if the Soviets had got lucky — but in fact, they were aware of the tunnel all the time, thanks to yet another KGB spy within MI6’s ranks, this time George Blake (see chapter 5), who had been present at the initial briefing in October 1953, two months before Dulles had approved the project. It seemed, though, that the KGB was more concerned with protecting Blake than keeping the secrets that would be revealed via the wiretaps, so didn’t act sooner.
The CIA’s successful involvement in the Italian election of 1948 was just the start of their intervention in the affairs of other countries. Sometimes this was by invitation of some of the parties involved — such as in China, where the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the CIA assistance — but by no means was this always the case.
Operation Ajax was a case in point. The CIA’s actions in Iran helped keep the Shah in power until the coup of 1979, but as its instigator, Kermit Roosevelt, would later note: ‘If we, the CIA, are ever going to try something like this again, we must be absolutely sure that the people and the army want what we want. If not, you had better call in the marines.’ The problem was: the CIA was acting against what a democratically elected government had decided.
The problem arose when the concession that granted oil rights in Iran to the British-run Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) came up for review in 1950. The Iranian parliament, the Majlis, called for the terms to be renegotiated so they weren’t so favourable to the AIOC. One member of the Majlis, Mohammed Mossadegh, a Europe-educated lawyer in his early seventies, became the focal point for the opposition, and in March 1951, the AIOC’s holdings were nationalized. Mossadegh was then elected prime minister on 29 April. The British didn’t take kindly to this: describing it as ‘a series of insensate actions’, they claimed that ‘Unless this is promptly checked, the whole of the free world will be much poorer and weaker, including the deluded Iranian people themselves.’ The Iranian people themselves, however, considered Mossadegh to be a hero for standing up to the British.
Although the Americans wouldn’t initially assist the British with removing Mossadegh, the Iranian’s unwillingness to deal with the increasing influence of the Communist party meant that he came into focus for the CIA as a potential enemy, and so Project Ajax was born. In March 1953, an Iranian army general approached the Americans about backing an Army-led coup, and there was concern that the Communists would step in during the chaos. DCI Allen Dulles approved the operation to ‘bring about the fall of Mossadegh’ on 4 April. General Zahedi was seen as the ideal figurehead for the new regime, and CIA and MI6 agents discussed how best to run the operation (with the CIA not trusting the British with details of their own assets inside the country).
The operation came close to collapse because of the weakness of the Shah of Iran, whose role was to dismiss Mossadegh and appoint Zahedi. After much vacillating, he eventually did so on 13 August, but the coup was very nearly a disaster. On more than one occasion, Roosevelt was advised to leave Tehran, the operation a failure, but, more by luck than judgement, it was eventually successful.
The CIA’s own official history of the project — leaked to the New York Times — describes the final day of the coup as ‘a day that should never have ended for it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it’. It would lead to a similarly aimed operation in Guatemala the following year; it can also be seen as a forerunner of the disastrous CIA operation which came apart at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961.
According to the CIA’s own in-house historians, their operation in Guatemala, confidently code-named Success, was ‘an intensive paramilitary and psychological campaign to replace a popular elected government with political nonentity. In method, scale, and conception it had no antecedent and its triumph confirmed the belief of many in the Eisenhower administration that covert operations offered a safe, inexpensive substitute for armed force in resisting Communist inroads in the Third World.’ Assassination plots, paramilitary and economic warfare, provocation techniques, psychological operations, rumour campaigns and sabotage all played their part in toppling Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the second legally elected president in Guatemalan history and replacing him with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas.
Árbenz was tolerant of locally known Communists, making him what the Americans regarded as a ‘fellow traveller’ and possibly a Communist himself, and when he brought in an Agrarian Reform Law that redistributed land belonging to the United Fruit Company this made some in the US administration believe that the Communists had now established a beachhead in Latin America via Árbenz.
The CIA felt that the military were ‘the only organized element in Guatemala capable of rapidly and decisively altering the political situation’, but the agency was aware that they would need considerable encouragement to make the right decision. Graffiti, political pamphlets, character assassinations and the daily delivery of fake death-notices to Árbenz and members of his cabinet all helped to prepare the way for the eventual invasion.
In the end, the army did turn on Árbenz, and he was forced to resign — but their actions perhaps were dictated more by the concern that the Americans would invade if Guzman remained in power, than because they feared the frankly feeble Colonel Armas and his very small Ejército de liberación. Dulles presented the results of Operation Success to President Eisenhower as a virtually bloodless coup, although he was aware that more than four dozen people had actually been killed.
After losing so many key agents in the West thanks to the various defections and revelations from the Venona transcripts, the KGB needed to rebuild its networks. In addition to infiltrating George Blake into MI6, they also targeted French intelligence and the new West German organization. Many of these were never discovered, unlike one of their best agents (in his own opinion) Georges Pâques, who was Chef de Cabinet and adviser to several French ministers in the post-war period before becoming a key agent during de Gaulle’s administration in 1958.