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The Pragmatic Face of the Covert Idealist: The Role of Allen Dulles in US Policy Discussions on Latin America, 1953–61
Abstract
Assessments of the CIA's role in Latin America during the 1950s have tended to focus predominantly on the twin case studies of Guatemala and Cuba. Consequently, the Agency's role - and, more broadly, that of its head Allen Dulles - has come to be seen as one obsessed with covert action and relatively unimportant in terms of policy discussions. Dulles, in fact, has been portrayed as an unwilling and disinterested participant in policy discussions. The present article will challenge those assertions by suggesting that, by examining Dulles's role in the Eisenhower administration's discussions on Latin America, a different picture emerges - one that paints Dulles as an active and rational participant, and which raises important questions for our understanding of the CIA's role during the Eisenhower era.
... Eleanor Lansing Dulles demands a rethinking of "Christian nationalism as a mindset, with its religio-political underpinnings, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Christianity as a practice of good neighborliness, kindness, tolerance, modesty, and charity". 3 Her brothers embraced a nationalism that allowed for exercises in racism, betrayal, covert imperialist violence, and threats of "limited nuclear" attacks to fight the communist "evil" (Gaddis and Gordon 1999;Wells 1981;Sewell 2011;Talbot 2015;Woods 2020;Frumkin 2018). Perhaps they found Christian underpinnings in a twist on righteousness that allowed them to adopt moral indignation and a stance of justice. ...
The political impact of Dr. Eleanor Lansing Dulles has not been assessed in her capacity as a power broker who brought her theological understandings to Cold War United States policy. The deep influence of both her brothers—Allen, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John Foster, Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower—on global affairs and diplomacy has been the topic of myriad studies. Works draw extensively on family biography, noting that both “nature and nurture” brought religion to US foreign policy. Including Dr. Dulles in the analysis provides nuance and complexity to definitions of Christian nationalism and underscores the legacy of both missionaries and religious thought in US foreign relations during the early Cold War. Contextualizing religiosity through a study of gender and the Dulles family legacy of female missionaries into the Cold War narrative builds upon the existing literature of the Dulles family, religion, and Cold War diplomacy to challenge concepts such as Christian internationalism, Christian nationalism, and Left–Right binaries. Diplomacy is revealed as her form of Christian missionary work in the secular sphere. Eleanor Lansing Dulles became a missionary not for a religion, but for a nation.
Covert action has long been a controversial tool of international relations. However, there is remarkably little public understanding about whether it works and, more fundamentally, about what constitutes success in this shadowy arena of state activity. This article distills competing criteria of success and examines how covert actions become perceived as successes. We develop a conceptual model of covert action success as a social construct and illustrate it through the case of ‘the golden age of CIA operations’. The socially constructed nature of success has important implications not just for evaluating covert actions but also for using, and defending against, them.
In the conduct of foreign relations, it represents the option laden with most risk and danger. For many policymakers, it is the least appealing choice. Its raison d'être is to be inconspicuous to the extent that its very occurrence is in doubt. Some even question whether it is a core intelligence activity. Covert action nonetheless remains the most intriguing, controversial, intensely debated and headline-grabbing aspect of intelligence. Among the numerous agencies that make up the American intelligence community, none has been as closely associated with clandestine activities - historically and, moreover, in the popular imagination - than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). From its creation in 1947 to the present day, the CIA has, rightly or wrongly, been synonymous in the public consciousness with covert operations. The struggle to frame the popular debate has involved a range of narrators - from government officials, spies, journalists, scholars, political activists and ordinary citizens - promoting divergent, and oft en contrasting, histories of covert action. Rather than offer another story of secret activities conducted by, or linked to, the Agency, this essay considers the evolution of these competing narratives through a history of the history of covert action. It analyses how historiographical and popular narratives changed over the course of the Cold War, with particular attention to the CIA's relationship with the media and scholars, before outlining potential lines of future historical inquiry. © editorial matter and organisation Christopher R. Moran and Christopher J. Murphy, 2013 and the chapters their several authors, 2013.
This book is an international history of the relations between the United States, Britain, and the West Indies during the long decolonization of the latter. It draws on archives in seven countries to recover the story of that process, which resulted in the first new nations in the hemisphere-Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago-since the turn of the century. The process had begun amid depression, riot, and World War II, and it concluded at the moment of highest tension in the Cold War Caribbean. Moreover, the islands were a historical fount of black radicalism, which coursed intermittently through the hemisphere as the civil rights movement made the issue of American race relations particularly acute. In addition, the structure built to bring the islands to independence-the West Indies Federation-unexpectedly collapsed at perhaps the worst possible moment. Yet despite these ominous circumstances, the West Indian transition to independence was ultimately among the smoothest seen anywhere in the "Third World." It avoided the bloodshed that accompanied the end of empire in many areas, and avoided the U.S. military intervention so historically promiscuous around the Caribbean littoral. This book argues that a unique "protean partnership" between the U.S. and the West Indies, one which complemented the Anglo-American relationship, explains the smooth transition. That partnership encompassed the U.S. pursuit of national-security assets such as military bases and strategic materials, the give-and-take of formal Anglo-American diplomacy, and the informal "diaspora diplomacy" of transnational race-activism that nurtured West Indian nationalism and the African American freedom struggle alike. This study contributes to the literatures on inter-American relations, race and foreign affairs, the Cold War, and decolonization.
Lars Schoultz offers a comprehensive chronicle of U.S. policy toward the Cuban Revolution. Using a rich array of documents and firsthand interviews with U.S. and Cuban officials, he tells the story of the attempts and failures of ten U.S. administrations to end the Cuban Revolution. He concludes that despite the overwhelming advantage in size and power that the United States enjoys over its neighbor, the Cubans' historical insistence on their right to self-determination has been a constant thorn in the side of American administrations, influenced both U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy on a much larger stage, and resulted in a freeze in diplomatic relations of unprecedented longevity. © 2009 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
This study examines the way in which the United States decides upon and oversees the use of covert action-the pursuit of American foreign policy objectives through secret intervention into the affairs of other nations. First, the definitional nuances of covert action are explored, illustrating the ambiguities inherent in the term. Second, the magnitude of funding for covert action is estimated for the years 1947-86, revealing fluctuations in the attractiveness to policymakers of this "quiet option" as an instrument of foreign affairs. Third, the global targeting priorities for covert action are presented, again disclosing fluctuations but within a broad pattern of primary attention to small, developing nations. With this background, the study then turns to its main focus: the procedures by which the government approves of and reviews covert action. During the Ford and Carter Administrations, this decision process evolved into a complex matrix of checkpoints and overseers, including unprecedented legislative involvement. The Reagan years produced dramatic evidence, however, that these efforts at closer supervision of America's secret foreign policy-the "democratization" of covert action-had fallen short of the goals espoused by reformers. The Iran-contra scandal of 1986-87 cast doubt on the effectiveness of the new oversight procedures and stirred further debate on whether the United States could maintain both a robust secret service and reliable safeguards against the abuse of hidden power.
Preface Introduction The Role of Sugar in the Dominican Political Economy to 1957 U.S. Policy Toward the Dominican Republic, 1900-1957 U.S. Sugar Legislation and Dominican Exports, 1900-1957 Eisenhower and Trujillo, 1958-1960 Kennedy and Democratization Efforts, 1961-1962 Conclusion Bibliography Index
This article asks what lessons about diplomacy can be drawn from Fidel Castro's April 1959 trip to the United States and Canada, a trip long neglected by historians as an aberration in US–Cuban relations because of its apparent public relations success. The trip's meaning, rather, lies in the populist style Castro practiced to circumvent normal protocol, and more importantly in the failure of that populism to sway not only US foreign policy makers but also the US public. Based on comprehensive media and archival research and of interviews in Cuba and the United States, this is the first ever article-length treatment of this diplomatic visit. It helps to understand not only the US–Cuba divide that soon followed Castro's trip but also the limited potential of a populist diplomacy.
In 1947, the United States created a modern intelligence community to guard against another surprise attack like the one at Pearl Harbor. This community consists of 13 major agencies, among them the CIA and the FBI. Concealed from public view, they pose a significant challenge to the concept of government accountability in a democratic society. This article examines the failure of congressional lawmakers to hold the secret agencies accountable during the Cold War. Contrary to recent theoretical research on legislative oversight, which suggests reasons that accountability has been strong in the United States, this study finds that a weak system of legislative review has permitted a dangerous erosion of civil liberties. The study also explores the efforts of the Church Committee in 1975 to fashion new safeguards that would reduce the probability of further abuse of power by the intelligence community.
After decades of bloody revolutions and political terror, many scholars and politicians lament the rise and brief influence of the left in Latin America; since the triumph of Castro they have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing Communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. The Last Colonial Massacre challenges these views. Using Guatemala as a case study, Greg Grandin argues that the Cold War in Latin America was a struggle not between American liberalism and Soviet Communism but between two visions of democracy. The main effect of United States intervention in Latin America, Grandin shows, was not the containment of Communism but the elimination of home-grown concepts of social democracy. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Grandin uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries intent on holding on to their own power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists, blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of freedom and equality; and of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the continent. Drawing from declassified U.S. documents, Grandin exposes Washington's involvement in the 1966 secret execution of more than thirty Guatemalan leftists, which, he argues, prefigured the later wave of disappearances in Chile and Argentina. Impassioned but judicious, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest orderâa work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the triumphal role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.
The Point of No Return
- Robert Mcmahon
Robert McMahon, '''The Point of No Return'': The Eisenhower Administration and Indonesia, 1953–1960', in K. Statler and A. Johns (eds.) The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2006) pp.75–101.
America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society
- Cia
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on Congressional oversight and the CIA, Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press 1991);
16 Marc Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith: The United States
- Bowie
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- Peace
Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace. 16 Marc Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950 (
Mandate for Change: The White House Years
- Dwight D Eisenhower
51 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change: The White House Years (New York: Doubleday 1963) pp.425–26;
Secret History, p.98; Memorandum by the Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles to President Eisenhower
- Cullather
Cullather, Secret History, p.98; Memorandum by the Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles to President Eisenhower, 20 June 1954. FRUS 1952–1954 Volume IV: The American Republics, pp.1174–76.
Reflections of a Cold Warriors: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven: Yale University Press 1996) p.85. 53 James Reston, 'With the Dulles Brothers in Darkest Guatemala
- Richard Bissell
- Jonathan Lewis
- Frances Pudlo
52 Richard Bissell, Jonathan Lewis and Frances Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warriors: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven: Yale University Press 1996) p.85. 53 James Reston, 'With the Dulles Brothers in Darkest Guatemala', New York Times, 20 June 1954, p.E8. 1959, taken from 5http://www.foia.cia.gov4 (accessed 28 September 2009).
The Caribbean Triangle
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Rabe, 'The Caribbean Triangle'.