Coups

2 May 1951

Abadan, 1951. The CIA’s own history dates the British concession to 1901 and says the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had built it into a lucrative industry. In March 1951 Mohammad Mossadegh, then a member of parliament, brought in a bill to nationalize the company, and parliament quickly passed it. The CIA historian Scott Koch writes that the British government owned half of the company’s stock and did not intend to let it be nationalized “without adequate compensation as required under international law.”

15 Oct 1951

His case. Mossadegh answered Britain’s complaint to the UN Security Council in person. By the company’s own accounts, he said, its net revenue in 1948 was £61 million; Iran received £9 million, and £28 million went to the British Treasury in income tax. Iran’s statement to the Council added that 25 percent of the National Oil Company’s earnings was set aside as security for compensation. Britain took the company’s case to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in July 1952 that it had no jurisdiction, and from September 1951 embargoed steel, sugar and oil equipment bound for Iran. The CIA’s history says British leaders believed, “with good reason,” that cheap oil for Britain and high profits for the company were vital to their national interests.

4 Mar 1953

Washington’s worry. Under President Truman, Washington had urged London to settle and had opposed a British occupation of Abadan, fearing Iran might be split in two. On 1 March 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles told President Eisenhower that a Communist takeover in Iran was “becoming more and more of a possibility,” but added that even this crisis was “likely to be unsatisfactorily compromised without a Communist Tudeh victory.” On 4 March the minutes have him telling the National Security Council that, “as long as” Mossadegh lived, there was “but little danger”; the Council agreed to explore, among other things, “limited economic aid to strengthen Mossadegh’s position.”

19 Aug 1953

Tehran, 18 and 19 August 1953. On 18 August CIA headquarters cabled its Tehran station that the State Department held the operation “tried and failed” and that the British could not go on, so “operations against Mossadegh should be discontinued.” The next day, the National Security Archive’s account has bands paid by the plotters to demonstrate, then pro-Shah police, army units and tanks, join in, and the station cabled that the overthrow “appears on verge of success.” It asked for five million dollars for the new government’s payroll.

19 Aug 1953

Who made it happen? The National Security Archive says even who hatched the plot, who carried it out and how it succeeded are in dispute. The CIA’s historian Scott Koch quotes Amos Perlmutter, who held Mossadegh’s fall inevitable and the CIA’s role “not very significant,” and answers: “CIA’s role was significant.” Koch also writes that the crowds of 19 August “were genuine” though the CIA “had a hand in starting” them, and that Mossadegh by then “did not command mass support.” That day the CIA’s acting director reported to Eisenhower an “unexpected strong upsurge of popular and military reaction.”

Aug 1954

The consortium. After the coup, the CIA’s history says, the oil dispute “was settled along the lines that had been proposed to Mosadeq”: the industry stayed nationalized, but a group of foreign companies ran it, and Herbert Hoover Jr., the State Department’s oil adviser, helped persuade Iran. In the CIA’s list BP, the renamed Anglo-Iranian, held 40 percent, Shell 14, a French company 6 and U.S. companies 40: 7 each to Jersey Standard (later Exxon), Standard of California (Chevron), Socony Mobil, Texaco and Gulf, and 5 to Iricon, nine small firms, three of the big five being pieces of the Standard Oil told in The Trust.

Aug 1954

Oil and the NSC. In March 1953 the National Security Council had itself talked oil: a deal with Mossadegh, Eisenhower feared, might have “very grave effects on United States oil concessions in other parts of the world.” The CIA history gives the Cold War risk as its reason for the coup, and whether oil weighed more is argued, with no source here settling it.

17 Mar 2000

Admitted. In 2000 Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the U.S. “played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow” of Mossadegh, that the Eisenhower administration thought its actions justified “for strategic reasons,” and that the coup was “clearly a setback for Iran’s political development.” In 2009 President Obama spoke of it in Cairo, in a passage on the grievances between the two countries; his next sentence turned to Iran’s hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops. By 2013 the CIA had released a version of an internal history, written in the mid-1970s, that states the agency planned and helped carry out the coup; the State Department’s 1989 volume had left out the CIA, and in 2017 it published one on the covert operations. Mossadegh was sentenced to three years in prison and lived under virtual house arrest until his death in 1967.

17 Jun 1952

Guatemala, 1952. Jacobo Árbenz was elected in November 1950 and took office in early 1951, on a platform of agrarian reform. On 17 June 1952 he promulgated Decree 900: idle land above 223 acres could be redistributed, with owners paid in 25-year bonds at declared tax value. The State Department’s historians say he secretly met Communists to draw up the law, and the CIA history names three who drafted it, though only four Communists held seats in the 61-member congress and, it adds, a historian who examined the party’s seized records found fears of Soviet links “grossly exaggerated.”

20 Apr 1954

The company’s land. Counts of the land taken differ: 234,000 acres in February 1953 and 173,000 in February 1954 on the CIA history’s timeline, 209,842 acres at Tiquisate in March 1953 in Bitter Fruit. Schlesinger and Kinzer say Guatemala offered $627,572 in bonds, the company’s declared tax value, while a State Department note of 20 April 1954 demanded $15,854,849; the CIA history says land “appraised at just over $1 million” was valued by the company near $20 million. The company said it needed idle land as insurance against plant disease; critics said its reserves far exceeded its needs. A CIA officer wrote on 2 June 1954 that the State Department’s backing of the claim “lent some credence” to Guatemala’s charge that U.S. policy served “big capitalists.”

May 1951

What the company did. The CIA history says United Fruit hired the Washington lobbyist Thomas Corcoran, who in May 1950 met the State Department’s Thomas Mann “to discuss ways to secure the election of a centrist candidate” in the history’s text, though its timeline says to “suggest action to oust” President Arévalo; the CIA, it adds, “evinced little interest.” It says a public-relations barrage sent journalists to report on Communism in Guatemala, and that company officials “encouraged Castillo Armas with money and arms.” In May 1951 Justice Department lawyers were preparing an antitrust case when State objected; the action was suspended, and the historian writes: “It is often asserted that the United States acted at the company’s behest in Guatemala, but this incident suggests the opposite may have been true.”

1954

Two accounts. The CIA’s historian, Nicholas Cullather, chooses: American commercial interests “played only a contributing role in shaping policy,” and “the threat to American business was a minor part of a larger danger” to U.S. security, though the CIA says his views are his own. Schlesinger and Kinzer argue that “the takeover of United Fruit land was probably the decisive factor.” The State Department’s historians, describing Washington’s view, write: “Agrarian reform was not the issue—communism was.” The first plan to oust Árbenz, PBFORTUNE, was approved in August 1952 and ended once its cover was blown, before the Eisenhower administration took office.

1954

The brothers. Schlesinger and Kinzer write that John Foster Dulles, a senior partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, was general counsel to the Schroder bank and “handled the negotiations” in 1936 in which United Fruit took control of Guatemala’s railway company, a deal they call “cozy” and at his client’s expense, and that Allen Dulles also did legal work for the firm. They add that Under Secretary Walter Bedell Smith was seeking a United Fruit job while helping plan the coup; the CIA history says Corcoran arranged for Smith, a former CIA director, to join the company’s board in 1955. Cullather opens his first chapter with this line from Manuel Fortuny, as quoted by the historian Piero Gleijeses: “They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas.” These are the authors’ readings of the record, and a connection is not evidence of wrongdoing.

27 Jun 1954

June 1954. The National Security Council authorized covert action on 12 August 1953 and Allen Dulles approved the plan and $3 million that December, per the CIA’s timeline; the National Security Archive puts the budget at $2.7 million. Castillo Armas crossed the border on 18 June, but the CIA history says his planes’ bombs mostly failed to explode, and that what ended it was the Army: officers told Árbenz “If you don’t resign, the Army will march on the capital to depose you,” and on 27 June he handed power to Colonel Díaz. The Agency, Cullather writes, “never found out why” the government collapsed. A 1995 CIA history found “the option of assassination was still being considered” until Árbenz resigned; the Archive says none is recorded as carried out, but the targets’ names are deleted, so no one can check.

17 Jun 1954

The suit. On 17 June 1954, the day before Castillo Armas crossed the border, the National Security Council discussed reviving the antitrust suit shelved in 1951: the Justice Department had proposed a settlement, and the company would not settle unless the government first revealed its evidence. Dulles said suing might show Central Americans that U.S. policy was not meant to protect the fruit company, though it might interfere “with certain activities of the Central Intelligence Agency”; his brother Allen said “given a little more time, the Central American states would do Justice’s job for it,” and asked for a month’s delay.

17 Jun 1954

After the coup. The CIA history says that once the company’s “usefulness to PBSUCCESS was at an end” the administration proceeded with its suspended action, and in 1958 the company signed a consent decree giving up its railroad and marketing holdings. “The United Fruit Company did not profit from victory,” it adds. “Castillo Armas restored many of the company’s privileges, but they were worth less than before.”

1954

After. Castillo Armas’s police, the CIA history says, “concentrated on arresting thousands of peasants who tried to remain on the land granted them by Decree 900.” He disfranchised illiterates, two-thirds of the electorate, canceled land reform, and outlawed all political parties, labor confederations and peasant organizations. Árbenz was allowed to leave for Mexico on 12 September 1954 and lived in exile until he drowned in his bathtub in 1971. In the late 1960s, Cullather writes, a more proficient police force killed the labor leader Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez and 11 others. The CIA’s Chief Historian wrote that “we are perhaps less certain today than most Americans were at the time” that the operation was a Cold War victory.

10 Mar 1999

1999. Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification, whose coordinator, the German jurist Christian Tomuschat, was appointed by the UN Secretary-General, estimated over 200,000 people killed or disappeared in the armed conflict, and concluded that agents of the State committed acts of genocide in 1981–83. It named structural injustice, racism and the closing of political spaces as underlying causes, said that after the 1954 overthrow “there was a rapid reduction of the opportunity for political expression,” and that the cold war “also played an important role.” Asked about the U.S., Tomuschat said it bore no direct responsibility for any act of genocide but had known and kept supporting the army: “In that sense, the United States was implicated.” On 10 March 1999 President Clinton spoke about the report in Guatemala City, and his published remarks do not mention 1954.

4 Sep 1970

Santiago, 1970. On 4 September 1970 Salvador Allende won a plurality with 36.3 percent of the vote, and Chile’s Congress was to choose between the top two on 24 October. In November Kissinger told Nixon the election posed “one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere,” listing “some one billion dollars” of U.S. investments that “may be lost, at least in part” and warning that a Titoist government’s “model” effect “can be insidious,” while granting that Allende “has legitimacy.” Yet the Church Committee’s staff reports that an interdepartmental group had concluded the U.S. “had no vital interests within Chile,” and that the Executive Branch decided to intervene anyway.

1972

Copper and credit. The Church staff list three concerns behind covert action: “the desire to frustrate Allende’s experiment in the Western Hemisphere and thus limit its attractiveness as a model,” the fear that Chile might harbor subversives, and “the determination to sustain the principle of compensation for U.S. firms nationalized by the Allende government.” Under what became known as the Allende Doctrine, Chile proposed to deduct “excess profits” from copper compensation, so that U.S. copper companies “were in fact told they owed money.” The Export-Import Bank downgraded Chile’s credit rating and, in the Paris Club, the U.S. alone refused to reschedule Chile’s debt until there was movement on compensation. The staff concluded that policy was “driven more by political opposition” than by technical judgments, and called the motives a debate “not yet definitively settled.”

9 Sep 1970

ITT. The CIA’s 2000 report says that in early 1970 an ITT businessman urged a Santiago station officer to back Jorge Alessandri against Allende, and the station named a way to funnel ITT money; the Church staff dates a Santiago meeting with ITT to July, and shortly after McCone, an ITT director and then a CIA consultant, phoned Helms. ITT offered the CIA $1 million, which the CIA rejected, and at least $350,000 of ITT money reached Alessandri’s campaign and the National Party. On 9 September, after the vote, Geneen told McCone he would put up as much as $1 million “to stop Allende”; McCone took it to Kissinger and Helms and “does not receive a response.” On 29 September a CIA officer proposed a plan to accelerate economic disorder; the staff chronology says ITT rejected it, its text that ITT “did not actively respond.”

15 Sep 1970

Fifteen September. On 12 September, the National Security Archive reports, Kissinger told Helms: “We will not let Chile go down the drain.” On 14 September the aide Viron Vaky wrote that coup plotting was “patently a violation of our own principles” and asked: “Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.? It is hard to argue this.” On 15 September Nixon met Kissinger, Helms and Attorney General John Mitchell; Helms’s notes include “$10,000,000 available, more if necessary” and “make the economy scream,” and the CIA was told to organize a military coup without State, Defense or the ambassador knowing. After 15 October Kissinger and General Haig testified the White House knew of no further coup activity and CIA officials testified that it did; the Committee could not resolve it, and a CIA official said “the seeds that were laid in that effort in 1970 had their impact in 1973.”

22 Oct 1970

The general. General René Schneider, the army’s commander, was “considered an obstacle,” the Church Committee wrote, to stopping Allende taking office. Its interim report found that U.S. officials “continued to encourage and support Chilean plans for a coup after it became known that the first step would be to kidnap General Schneider,” and that the CIA passed three submachine guns, knowing earlier attempts had failed; its attaché was authorized to pay $50,000, though he insisted the kidnapping be completed first. Schneider was shot on 22 October 1970 and died on 25 October. The Committee found no evidence of a plan to kill him and that the CIA’s guns were probably not those used, the staff report says they “were returned,” and the CIA’s 2000 report says the Viaux group acted independently, though in November 1970 $35,000 was passed to a member of it to keep the contact secret.

11 Sep 1973

11 September 1973. The military overthrew Allende’s government; the CIA’s 2000 report says that with La Moneda “under bombardment from tanks and airplanes and in flames” he took his own life, as the 1991 Rettig Commission concluded. Pinochet was designated first president of the junta, the four chiefs agreeing to rotate the office; on 18 December 1974 he was declared Supreme Leader. Asked whether the U.S. was directly involved covertly, the Church Committee’s staff report, which calls its judgments “tentative,” found no evidence that it was, but the CIA’s 2000 report says it “did not instigate” the coup, was aware of the plotting, and “probably appeared to condone it.” Five days after the coup Kissinger told Nixon what is below, and the next word after “them” is blank in the transcript.

1990

The count. Chile’s Rettig Commission recorded 2,279 victims in all: 2,115 of human rights violations, including 957 who disappeared after arrest and 90 killed by politically motivated private citizens, and 164 of political violence, so the figure is not all state killing. An updated version in 1996 gave 3,197. In 2011 a government commission counted 3,065 killed or forcibly disappeared and 40,018 victims in all, counting those detained or tortured, between 11 September 1973 and 10 March 1990, the BBC reported; the sources here do not explain why the 2011 count of the dead is below the 1996 update. The Valech reports on imprisonment and torture are not among the sources here. After the coup, asked what to tell Congress about reports of hundreds killed, Kissinger said, in the Archive’s quotation: “this government is better for us than Allende was.”

1975

Three cases. Cullather opens his history of Guatemala by noting that it followed “successful operations that installed the Shah as ruler of Iran”; the Church staff wrote of Chile that “the pattern of United States covert action in Chile is striking but not unique”; and in 1973 Kissinger told Nixon that “in the Eisenhower period we would be heros.” In 1973 the Assistant Secretary of State, Charles Meyer, had told a Senate subcommittee that policy was no intervention in Chile’s political affairs: “we financed no candidates, no political parties”; the staff report records over seven million dollars in covert support to opposition groups after Allende took office.