The CIA on Latin America

ABSTRACT

A mythology has grown among scholars that during the early years of the Cold War the CIA was so preoccupied with a perceived Soviet threat that except for highly exceptional events such as the 1954 coup in Guatemala the agency largely ignored Latin America. In this narrative, it took the 1959 Cuban revolution to bring the region front and center in its imagination (but even then, still only as a pawn of the Soviet Union). A review of CIA documentation, however, indicates that from its beginnings the agency dedicated a significant amount of attention to the region. Not only does the material that the CIA’s case officers and their agents generated challenge our assumptions about the agency’s presumed priorities, it also highlights the value of a largely unexploited source to understand domestic developments in Latin America in the early post-World War Two period.

KEYWORDS:

• CIA
• FBI
• Latin America
• Ecuador
• surveillance

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest.

Notes

¹ For an example of the inclination in the literature to dedicate attention to Washington policy decisions toward Europe, see John Prados’s phenomenal Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006). A recent example of the tendency to ignore Latin American agency is Lars Schoultz’s excellent treatment In Their Own Best Interest: A History of The U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018).

² Stephen Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 12.

³ Schoultz, In Their Own Best Interest, 153.

⁴ Marc Becker, The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

⁵ “National Intelligence Authority, minutes of the NIA’s 9th Meeting, 12 February 1947,” in Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, ed. Dennis Merrill, vol. 23, The Central Intelligence Agency: Its Founding and the Dispute over its Mission, 1945–1954 (University Publications of America, 1998), 159–60.

⁶ Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 95, 111, 113.

⁷ Richard M. Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 83.

⁸ Russell Jack Smith, The Unknown CIA: My Three Decades with the Agency (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989), 4.

⁹ Ray S. Cline, The CIA under Reagan, Bush & Casey: The Evolution of the Agency from Roosevelt to Reagan (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1981), 13.

¹⁰ Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1974), 44.

¹¹ Agee, Inside the Company, 110, 179.

¹² Patrick J. McGarvey, CIA: The Myth and the Madness (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 57.

¹³ Even this number of reports may be understated because of scanning errors that resulted in documents being missed in database searches (for example, when the optical character recognition [OCR] process misrendered ‘Ecuador’ as ‘Eouador’). The substance of these reports is analyzed in much more depth in the author’s book The CIA in Ecuador (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).

¹⁴ It is also possible, of course, that the case officer continued to file reports that remain classified (or have been lost or destroyed).

¹⁵ The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, “George F. Jones,’ August 6, 1996, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Jones,%20George%20F.pdf.

¹⁶ One example of possible mention of an informant is a report on president Galo Plaza’s political party that lists the names of leaders but concludes with a redaction that might hide the identity of the person who provided the rest of the information. See CIA, “Reorganization of the MCDN,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, September 8, 1949, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp82-00457r003200200002-9.

¹⁷ Agee, Inside the Company, 138.

¹⁸ CIG, “Communist Party Activities,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, May 21, 1947, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp82-00457r000600140010-3.

¹⁹ Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 31.

²⁰ Steve Striffler, In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

²¹ Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, 90.

²² Ronn F. Pineo, Ecuador and the United States: Useful strangers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 134.

²³ CIA, “Fifth Congress of the Communist Party of Ecuador (PCE) Held at Ambato,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, October 7, 1952, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp82-00457r014100290007-1.

²⁴ The CIG originally established the ORE in January 1946 as the Central Reports Staff. In July 1946, its name was changed to the Office of Research and Evaluations, and again in October to the Office of Reports and Estimates. In November 1950, the newly appointed DCI Walter Bedell Smith divided the ORE into three units: the Office of National Estimates (ONE), the Office of Research and Reports (ORR), and the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), thereby separating out the functions of estimates, analytical reports, and current intelligence into three offices. For simplicity sake, scholars commonly refer to the analytical office as the ORE throughout the entire period, and this convention is followed in the listing of reports posted to the CIA website. See https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/intelligence-analysis/history.html. For more on the establishment of the daily and weekly summaries, see Thomas Troy’s official internal history of the foundation of the CIA, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, MD: Aletheia Books, 1981), 353.

²⁵ CIG, “Daily Summary,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, February 15, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a005800010038-3, also included in Michael Warner, ed., The CIA under Harry Truman (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1994), 39–40.

²⁶ Kyle Longley, In the Eagle’s Shadow: The United States and Latin America (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2002), 194.

²⁷ CIG, “Daily Summary,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, February 16, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a005800010037-4.

²⁸ CIG, “Daily Summary,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, March 1, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a005800010026-6.

²⁹ CIG, “Daily Summary,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, March 2, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a005800010025-7. See telegram from Robert Scotten to Secretary of State, Quito, February 28, 1946, no. 118, Record Group 59, 822.00/2-2846, National Archives Records Administration (NARA).

³⁰ CIG, “Daily Summary,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, March 7, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a005800010021-1; CIG, “Daily Summary,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, March 9, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a005800010019-4; CIG, “Daily Summary,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, April 2, 1946,https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a005800020076-0; CIG, “Daily Summary,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, April 8, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a005800020071-5.

³¹ J. Klahr Huddle, “Status of ORE Activities through 31 December 1946,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, December 31, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp67-00059a000300150001-1.

³² Weekly Summary – 14 June 1946 (#1), CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a001800010001-0.

³³ Weekly Summary – 28 June 1946 (#3), CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a001800010001-0.

³⁴ Weekly Summary – 5 July 1946 (#4), CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a001800010001-0.

³⁵ Weekly Summary – 26 July 1946 (#7), CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a001800010001-0.

³⁶ Weekly Summary – 2 August 1946 (#8), CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a001800010001-0.

³⁷ Weekly Summary – 9 August 1946 (#9), CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a001800010001-0.

³⁸ Weekly Summary – 2 August 1946 (#8), CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-01617a001800010001-0.

³⁹ Sherman Kent, Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates: Collected Essays (Washington, DC: History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1994); J. Peter Scoblic, “Beacon and Warning: Sherman Kent, Scientific Hubris, and the CIA’s Office of National Estimates,” Texas National Security Review 1, no. 4 (August 2018): 98–117.

⁴⁰ Woodrow Kuhns, “The Office of Reports and Estimates: CIA’s First Center for Analysis,” Studies in Intelligence 51, no. 2 (2007): 32–33.

⁴¹ CIG, “Soviet Foreign and Military Policy (ORE 1),” CIA Electronic Reading Room, July 23, 1946, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/0000256601.

⁴² https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/listing-of-declassified-national-intelligence-estimates-on-the-soviet-union-and-international-communism-1946-1984/1946.htm.

⁴³ https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/listing-of-declassified-national-intelligence-estimates-on-the-soviet-union-and-international-communism-1946-1984/1947.htm.

⁴⁴ CIG, “Soviet Objectives in Latin America (ORE 16),” CIA Electronic Reading Room, April 10, 1947, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/0000256978. Half a year later, the agency released a revised version of this document: CIA, “Soviet Objectives in Latin America (ORE 16/1),” CIA Electronic Reading Room, November 1, 1947, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/0000256612.

⁴⁵ “National Intelligence Authority Directive No. 1,” in Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, ed. United States Department of State (Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1996), 329–31. Allen Dulles, William Jackson, and Mathias Correa, a trio of prominent intelligence veterans from World War Two, criticized this practice of drafting analyses and then soliciting notes of dissent or concurrence from other agencies as not resulting in a true national estimate that drew on the strengths of all of the various agencies. The CIA had ‘become just one more intelligence agency producing intelligence in competition with older established agencies of the government departments.’ See Allen Dulles, William Jackson, and Mathias Correa, ‘The Central Intelligence Agency and National Organization for Intelligence: A report to the National Security Council,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, January 1, 1949, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp86b00269r001100090002-8. The summary of the report is reprinted in Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, 903–11. Also see the discussion in Kuhns, “The Office of Reports and Estimates,” 31.

⁴⁶ “Memorandum for the President, 7 February 1947,” in The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 6, ‘The Whole World Hangs in the Balance,’ 8 January 1947–30 September 1949, ed. Larry Bland, Mark Stoler, Sharon Ritenour Stevens and Daniel Holt (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 20–23, also in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1947, Vol. I, 714, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1947v01/pg_714.

⁴⁷ Kuhns, “The Office of Reports and Estimates,” 36.

⁴⁸ CIA, “Review of the World Situation as it Relates to the Security of the United States,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, September 26, 1947, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp67-00059a000500060004-6.

⁴⁹ Woodrow Kuhns, ed., Assessing the Soviet Threat: The Early Cold War Years (McLean, VA: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997), 138; CIA, “Review of the World Situation as it Relates to the Security of the United States,” CIA Electronic Reading Room, September 26, 1947, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp67-00059a000500060004-6.

⁵⁰ Daily Summary Excerpt, April 12, 1948, “Colombia: Continuation of Bogota Conference Favored,” in Kuhns, Assessing the Soviet Threat, 192. For a broader discussion of the events of Bogotá, see Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 53–55.

⁵¹ CIA, “Review of the World Situation as it Relates to the Security of the United States,” CIA 5–48, CIA Electronic Reading Room, May 12, 1948, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp67-00059a000500070009-0.

⁵² Weekly Summary, December 19, 1947, “Prospects for Additional Cominforms,” in Kuhns, Assessing the Soviet Threat, 161.

⁵³ Weekly Summary Excerpt, April 23, 1948, “Prospective Communist Strategy Following the Italian Elections,” in Kuhns, Assessing the Soviet Threat, 193, 196.

⁵⁴ Weekly Summary Excerpt, January 14, 1949 “Eastern Europe: Communist Penetration,” in Kuhns, Assessing the Soviet Threat, 274.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marc Becker

Marc Becker is professor of Latin American history at Truman State University. His publications include The CIA in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files (Duke University Press, 2017), Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017), Pachakutik: Indigenous movements and electoral politics in Ecuador (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements (Duke, 2008), Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory (Ohio University, 1993); co-editor (with Richard Stahler-Sholk and Harry E. Vanden) of Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action from Below (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015) and (with Kim Clark) of Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); and editor and translator (with Harry Vanden) of José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011). Becker has received Fulbright, SSRC-MacArthur, and other fellowships to support his research. He has served on the executive committees and has been web editor of the Ecuadorian Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Peoples (ERIP) sections of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA); the Andean and Teaching Materials committees of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH); the Peace History Society (PHS); and Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-Pad).