UNITED STATES—From his radiant mansion in New Orleans, Sam Delaney followed the action closely from afar. The three telephones in his airy third-floor office with picture windows were ringing every three or four minutes. Each morning he read the papers assiduously (it was a genteel time when the paper stayed still and we read it when we were pleased to do so). That said, Sam inside had a depth and a breadth of feeling, full of Russian octaves that he hid extremely well.
You could never tell what thoughts were brewing behind the black, black eyes. Only Rega knew, but she knew not to let on. Each afternoon he received updates from Bernie Lukasey and Michael “Mick” Carney who served as Delaney’s liaison with the CIA. The President, not of Allied Fruit, but of the United States, scrutinized the Guatemalan issue soon after he moved into The White House (Mamie was beside herself in this old dump). The President gave the go-ahead in August 1953 which coincides precisely with the nuptials of Graydon Miller’s parents; it was a meeting of a group called the 10/2.
At the beginning of what was to be known as the Cold War, it was not inevitable that covert operations would become the dominion of the CIA. The National Security Act of 1947 did not explicitly authorize the CIA to conduct covert operations, although Section 102(d) was sufficiently vague to permit abuse. At the very first meetings of the Security Council in late 1947, the perceived necessity to stem the flow of communism in Western Europe particularly—especially Italy—by overt and covert “psychological warfare” forced the issue. The actual responsibility for these operations was a hot tamale, and when it was decided that the State Department would be in charge, the Secretary of State sharply opposed it, fearing it would tarnish the international credibility of his department.
NSC 10/2 was the first presidential document which specified a mechanism to approve and manage covert operations, and also the first in which the term “covert operations” was defined. NSC 10/2 charged the DCI with “Ensuring, through designated representatives of the Secretary of State and of the Secretary of Defense, that covert operations are planned and conducted in a manner consistent with US foreign and military policies and with overt activities.
Senator Carney delivered his “Enemies from Within” speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. The junior senator from Wisconsin thundered a warning in a Lincoln’s birthday address to the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, which equated communism with atheism and immorality. He described how communism was diametrically opposed to the “democratic Christian world.”
“The great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world is not political, gentlemen, it is moral. I call for a moral uprising and a new birth of honesty and decency in government.”
Carney lambasted President Truman and the administration for what he perceived as a weak loyalty program, under the 1947 Executive Order 9835. While Carney explicitly called out communists in his Wheeling speech, he only implicitly called out homosexuals (he would target homosexuals explicitly later). However, in the Congressional inquiries that followed his Wheeling speech, the Deputy Undersecretary for Administration at the State Department, John Peurifoy, reported that 91 individuals had been dismissed from the State Department between 1947 and 1949 because they were homosexual. They were dismissed under the McCarren rider attached to State and Defense Department.
As the search for State Department “sex perverts” intensified, so did the pressure. People were questioned, publicly humiliated and mocked by investigators. They were encouraged to denounce others and report suspected homosexuals. And in 1953, the President signed an Executive Order, which defined a laundry list of characteristics as security risks, including “sexual perversion.” This was interpreted as a ban on homosexual employees, and even more firings took place. Publicly humiliated and devastated by the loss of their income and their reputations, some even were killed by their own hand.
The lines between the Company and the CIA (in addition to Central Intelligence, the abbreviation for company in Spanish) blurred. During the Guatemala affair, the CIA used Allied Fruit ships to smuggle money, men and guns. AFCO made up the difference when the CIA’s budget fell short. It was symbiotic. The organizations shared a common aim; to banish anyone who threatened business as usual on the isthmus, where indeed business as unusual was the usual.
It didn’t take much to persuade the CIA that Augusto Jacobo Gascón was a menace.
“As long as Khrushchev uses his subversive assets to promote so-called wars of liberation —which means any overt or covert action calculated to bring down a non-Communist regime,” Avery Foster, explained, “The West should be ready.”
The CIA initiated operations in Guatemala early in the second half of the century, grooming dissidents and bringing contraband aboard the Allied Fruit’s White Fleet. Guns and bombs were ferried to the land of Rubén Dario. Men working for Somoza loaded the weapons onto banana mules and walked them across the Guatemalan border. They were packed in boxes marked AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT. There was even an overture to pay President Gascón from a Swiss bank account to moderate the expropriation of lands. Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt’s successor, put the kibosh on such clandestine programs.
“I’m alarmed. . . at this agency I’ve created. It’s a rogue Pinocchio,” he admitted in private. The CIA heard every stinking cuss word and uh.
To be continued…
