Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (review)

Few aspects of U.S. foreign policy have been more controversial than the series of covert actions approved by the White House and orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on every continent except Antarctica in the decades after 1945. Thanks to the persistence of researchers like the National Security Archive’s John Prados, we have gained access to many important CIA records over the past twenty years that provide a relatively complete picture of the scale and scope of the agency’s “dirty work.” In this updated and expanded version of his 1987 classic Presidents’ Secret Wars, Prados offers compelling evidence that from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, covert action has been consistently antithetical to one of America’s oft-stated diplomatic goals—to make the world “safe for democracy.”

Readers of Prados’s earlier work will find some of Safe for Democracy quite familiar. Shortly after V-J Day, Truman dismantled the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which Franklin D. Roosevelt had set up before Pearl Harbor to wage secret war against Germany and Japan. Truman saw the OSS as dangerous and unnecessary in peacetime. When the Cold War heated up during the summer of 1947, the president reversed himself and urged Congress to pass the National Security Act, which established both the CIA and the National Security Council (NSC). Because the new legislation did not specifically authorize covert action, however, the CIA received its marching orders from the executive branch in early 1948 when Truman signed NSC 10/2, which authorized the new agency secretly to undertake propaganda, sabotage, and subversion to support “indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world” (p. 41). A central feature of Prados’s panoramic story is the growing tension between those on Capitol Hill who sought to monitor the CIA and the Cold Warriors in the White House who insisted that covert action must be conducted in complete secrecy.

During the Truman years, the CIA’s clandestine operations were focused mainly on Europe. The agency sought to prevent Soviet inroads in the Free World by funneling dollars to the Christian Democrats in Italy and bankrolling an anti-Communist intelligence network filled with ex-Nazis. Much less successful were operations behind the Iron Curtain. Secret U.S. support for anti-Soviet forces in Ukraine and the Baltic states amounted to little more than spoiling operations, and a joint Anglo-American effort to spark an uprising against Enver Hoxha’s communist dictatorship in Albania was drowned in blood after the Soviet authorities obtained details from Kim Philby, a spy inside MI6, Britain’s CIA.

By the 1950s, U.S. intelligence turned its attention from Europe to the Third World, where covert action became a favorite weapon in the Cold War arsenal of Dwight Eisenhower and the two Dulles brothers—Secretary of State John Foster and CIA Director Allen Welsh. Recapping episodes that Mark Gasiorowski and Richard Immerman have described elsewhere in exquisite detail, Prados reminds us that in Iran and Guatemala the Eisenhower administration helped make the Third World safe from democracy, not safe for democracy. In some splendid chapters on the late 1950s, Prados also covers less familiar territory, including abortive U.S. efforts to topple Sukarno’s neutralist regime in Indonesia and the CIA’s recruitment of Tibetan guerrillas to wage an unsuccessful secret war against the People’s Republic of China in the foothills of the Himalayas. In a 70-page section on the agency’s famously inept scheme to secure regime change in Cuba, Prados captures beautifully the “James Bond Meets the Three Stooges” aspect of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, for which both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy shared responsibility.

Eisenhower’s policies paved the way for other infamous and brutal covert actions in the 1960s. Discounting rumors that ugly episodes like the relentless campaign to kill Fidel Castro or the use of assassination teams to root out the Viet Cong infrastructure were CIA “rogue operations,” Prados...