January 2, 1959: Fidel Castro and his rebel forces, having overthrown Batista’s corrupt but US friendly regime, take control of Cuba.

July 1959: Vice President Richard Nixon flies into Moscow and spends the night at Premier Khruschev’s dacha. The next day they engage in their impromptu “kitchen debate” at the US National Exhibition in Moscow.

September 1959: A major Cold War thaw is indicated by the debut of the animated television series Rocky and His Friends, an ABC afternoon broadcast which brings the first broad lampoons of Soviet spies — Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale — to the youth of America.

September 14, 1959: The Russians successfully hit the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon with an 858 pound missile.

September 15, 1959: Khrushchev visits Eisenhower in Washington, and, in a puckish mood, tells CIA Director Allen Dulles, “I believe we get the same reports — probably from the same people.” Dulles is not amused. The premier then proceeds to Los Angeles where he visits Hollywood. His visit to Disneyland, though, is cancelled because of security concerns. San Francisco, Des Moines (where Khrushchev eats his first hotdog), and the presidential retreat at Camp David complete the premier’s tour. It all seems to signal a thaw in the Cold War.

 

For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1957

1958

 

[This post draws directly from Tim Wiener’s compelling book Legacy of Ashes, published by Doubleday in 2007. It is highly recommended. Many thanks to Tim for allowing the use of his material.]

If you’ll remember, on September 25, 1957, President Eisenhower orders the CIA to overthrow Indonesia. He sets out 3 missions:

1. to provide “arms and other military aid” to “anti-Sukarno military commanders” throughout Indonesia.
2. to “strengthen the determination, will, and cohesion” of the rebel army officers on the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi.
3. to support and “stimulate into action, singly or in unison, non- and anti-Communist elements” among political parties on the main island of Java.

U-2 planes fly over the archipelago and plot the delivery of arms and ammunition to the rebels by sea and air. It takes 3 months to plan the operation. US operatives make contact with a handful of Indonesian rebels on Sumatra and another contingent of commandos seeking power on the island of Sulawesi, northeast of Java. The Pentagon puts together a package of machine guns, carbines, rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, hand grenades, and ammunition sufficient for 8,000 soldiers. Plans are made to supply the rebels on both Sumatra and Sulawesi by both sea and air.

January 8, 1958: The first arms shipment leaves Subic Bay in the Philippines on the USS Thomaston, bound for Sumatra. The arms arrive the following week in the northern Sumatran port of Padang. There is no pretense of secrecy.

January 31, 1958: The US successfully launches its first satellite, the Explorer.

February 10, 1958: The Indonesian rebels broadcast a challenge to Sukarno from a newly established CIA radio station in Padang. They demand a new government and the outlawing of communism within 5 days. Hearing nothing from Sukarno, they announce a revolutionary government. Their foreign minister is Colonel Maludin Simbolin, an English speaking Christian handpicked and paid by the CIA. Meanwhile, the CIA prepares new weapons shipments from the Philippines and waits for the first signs of a nationwide popular uprising against Sukarno.

February 21, 1958:  The Indonesian air force demolishes the revolutionaries’ radio stations in Central Sumatra. The Indonesian navy blockades rebel positions along the coast. The CIA’s Indonesian agents and their American advisers retreat into the jungle.

The CIA seems not to know (or care) that some of the most powerful commanders in the Indonesian army have trained in the US and refer to themselves as “the sons of Eisenhower.” The army, led by anticommunists, is at war with the CIA.

March 1, 1958: Khrushchev is named Soviet premier.

March 9, 1958: John Foster Dulles makes a public statement openly calling for a revolt against “Communist depotism” under Sukarno. General Nasution, Sukarno’s army chief, responds by assembling forces off the northern coast of Sumatra.

The new US ambassador to Indonesia, Howard Jones, cables Foster Dulles that General Nasution is a reliable anticommunist and the rebels have no chance of victory. The message is ignored.

General Nasution’s chief of operations , Colonel Ahmed Yani, is one of the “sons of Eisenhower” and a friend of Major George Benson, the American military attache in Jakarta. The colonel is preparing a major military offensive against the rebels and asks Major Benson for maps. The major, unaware of the CIA’s covert operation, gladly supplies them.

CIA flights carry 5 tons of weapons and ammunition and bundles of cash for the rebels on Sumatra.  The flights are detected by General Nasution’s patrols moments after they enter Indonesian air space. Nasution’s paratroopers pick up every one of the crates that the CIA’s pilots drop.

On Sulawesi, the CIA’s war also is a disaster.

April 19, 1958: The CIA’s pilots begin bombing and strafing Indonesia’s outer islands in contravention of Eisenhower’s orders. The president wants to keep the operation deniable. He orders that no Americans can be involved “in any operations partaking of a military character in Indonesia.” Dulles disobeys him. The pilots are described in a written CIA briefing for the White House and the president as “dissident planes” — Indonesian planes flown by Indonesians, not American aircraft flown by agency personnel.

April 27, 1958:  For the next 3 weeks, CIA pilots hit civilian and military targets in the villages and harbors of northwestern Indonesia. Hundreds of civilians die. Dulles says the bombings “stirred great anger ” among the Indonesian people. It is charged that American pilots had been at the controls. The charges are true, but the Eisenhower and his secretary of state deny them.

End of April, 1958: Sukarno’s soldiers destroy the rebels on Sumatra. The CIA flees Sumatra.

The American Embassy  and Admiral Felix Stump, commander of American forces in the Pacific, alert Washington that the CIA’s operation is a failure. Moreover, the failure of secrecy involved violates the agency’s charter and the president’s direct orders.

May 19, 1958: Allen Dulles sends a flash cable to his officers in Indonesia, the Phillipines, Taiwan, and Singapore telling them to stand down, cut off money, shut down the arms pipeline, burn the evidence, and retreat.

May 21, 1958: The agency tells the White House that the Indonesian army is suppressing communism and that Sukarno is speaking and acting in ways that are favorable to the United States. They announce that it is the CIA’s former friends who are threatening American interests.

Sukarno knows that the CIA tried to overthrow his government, his army knew it, and the political establishment of Indonesia knew it. The ultimate effect was to strengthen communism.

June 1958: Frank Wisner returns from Indonesia and his last operation as chief of the clandestine service. He is diagnosed with “psychotic mania.”

The president is wondering if the CIA  knows what it is doing. He asks Allen Dulles: “Allen, are you trying to scare me into starting a war?”

June 23, 1958: At a deputies’ meeting, Dulles says he is “at a loss as to what component of the Agency he can turn to when he desires specific information on the USSR.”

December 16, 1958: Eisenhower receives a report from his intelligence board of consultants advising him to overhaul the CIA. Its members fear that the agency is “incapable of making objective appraisals of its own intelligence information as well as of its own operations.” Led by former defense secretary Robert Lovett, they plead with the president to take covert operations out of Allen Dulles’s hands.

Dulles fends off efforts to change the CIA. He promises the president that Wisner’s replacement will fix the missions and organization of the clandestine service.

End of 1958: Abbot Smith, one of the CIA’s best analysts, wrote:

We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.

For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1957

1959

Photograph: US Embassy

January 1957: A follow-up report by the president’s intelligence board says that the CIA’s operations were conducted “on an autonomous and freewheeling basis in highly critical areas involving the conduct of foreign relations . . . . In some quarters that leads to situations which are almost unbelievable.”

April 1957: The CIA revives their plan for “a military coup d’etat” in Syria.

April 9, 1957: Fidel Castro chooses the 10th anniversary of the Bogota riots to launch his revolt against President Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. He sets up base in the Sierra Maestra mountains with an army of 82 men.

May 1957: Alger Hiss‘s book,  In the Court of Public Opinion, is published to generally scathing reviews.

May 2, 1957: Joseph McCarthy dies at the age of 47 from  liver failure. He is buried 5 days later in his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin.

June 2, 1957: First Secretary Nikita Khruschev makes his first appearance on US television, taking questions from American correspondents with the help of an interpreter. At one point he remarks:

Your grandchildren in America will live under socialism. And please do not be afraid of that.

June 20, 1957: A 5-member UN special committee unanimously votes to indict the Soviet Union for its brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising eight months earlier. The UN General Assembly votes on September 14 to condemn the USSR on the same grounds.

June 29, 1957: Khruschev ousts party leaders and former Stalin deputies Malenkov, Molokov, and Kaganovich from the Kremlin, citing their illegal activites in support of Stalin during the purges of the 1930s. In effect, this gives Khruschev sole control of the Communist Party, inspiring him to comment:

We had some bad sheep in a good flock [but] we took them by the tail and threw them out.

One was sent to Outer Mongolia, one to a hydroelectric plant thousands of miles from Moscow, and one to a cement plant somewhere beyond the Urals.

July 8, 1957: George Ziatovsky, once of the OSS, is indicted with his wife Jane on charges of spying for the Soviet Union.

July 18, 1957: Playwright Arthur Miller is fined $500 for contempt of Congress. He refused to answer questions before a House Committee in 1956 involving Communist writers he had worked with a decade earlier.

August 1, 1957: At a meeting of the National Security Council, Allen Dulles says Indonesia’s Sukarno has “gone past the point of no return” and “would henceforth play the communist game.” John Foster Dulles throws his full weight behind a coup.

August 7, 1957: Soviet Counter-Intelligence Colonel Rudolph Abel is arrested in Brooklyn, where he has resided since 1948 under an alias. He’s indicted as a Soviet spy for conspiring to obtain and transmit national defense information to Moscow. The highest-ranking Soviet spy ever caught in the US, Abel  is convicted on October 25 and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

August 26, 1957: Russia announces it has successfully tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile or ICBM, temporarily gaining the edge in “the missile race.”  The first two ICBM tests by the US in 1957 are failures.

September 1957: At a White House meeting, President Eisenhower says he wants to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. ” We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” he says. In response, John Foster Dulles proposes a “secret task force,” under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.

September 13, 1957: A committee led by officers of the CIA and the Pentagon urges the US to supply covert military and economic aid to army officers seeking power in Indonesia. But it also raises questions about the consequences of such action.

September 21, 1957: Air Force Captain George French is sentenced to life imprisonment for offering to sell secrets about atomic weapons in jet bombers to the USSR. His method is to drop a letter with his price ($27,500) onto the grounds of the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC. Unfortunately for French, an FBI agent intercepts the letter before it can be read by the Russians.

September 25, 1957: President Eisenhower orders the CIA to overthrow Indonesia. He sets out 3 missions:

1. to provide “arms and other military aid” to “anti-Sukarno military commanders” throughout Indonesia.
2. to “strengthen the determination, will, and cohesion” of the rebel army officers on the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi.
3. to support and “stimulate into action, singly or in unison, non- and anti-Communist elements” among political parties on the main island of Java.

U-2 planes fly over the archipelago and plot the delivery of arms and ammunition to the rebels by sea and air. It takes 3 months to plan the operation.

October 4, 1957: Sputnik — short for “fellow traveler of the earth” — is launched by the Soviet Union, becoming the first satellite to orbit the earth and sending America into a state of shock.

November 3, 1957: The 2nd Sputnik, much larger, is successfully launched. It carries a dog named Laika, who survives part of the adventure.

November 7, 1957: The annual Moscow Military Parade, held on the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, disappoints observers. No ICBM or tactical atomic weapon is included in the parade of new weapons.

December 6, 1957:  The first US attempt to put a satellite into space ends in disaster when the Vanguard rocket explodes on its launching pad at Cape Canaveral. The terms “Flopnik” and “Kaputnik”  appeared in papers around the world the next day.

December 17, 1957: The first successful ICBM is launched in the US.

For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1956

1958

Photograph by Edi Lucas

February 25, 1956: Khruschev gives a closed-door, four hour speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. The speech (later known as the Stalin speech) repudiates the actions taken by Stalin over the past 30 years. Khruschev describes Stalin as “a supreme egotist and sadist, capable of sacrificing everything and anybody for the sake of his own power and glory.” Shocking Communists the world over, Khruschev decries the “cult of personality” that Stalin fashioned, the murders he carried out, his “persecution mania,” and his abuse of those he considered to be “enemies of the people.” Thousands of Stalin’s political prisoners in gulags all over the USSR have their sentences committed. The era of de-Stalinization begins.

March 1956: The CIA picks up rumors about the February speech. Allen Dulles desperately wants a copy of the speech. (You can read the speech here.) The CIA relies heavily on foreign intelligence sources to come up with the text. Of course, the CIA is more than willing to pay.

April 1956: Israel’s spies deliver the text to James Angleton, the CIA’s one-man liaison with the Jewish state. This channel produces much of the agency’s intelligence on the Arab world, depending on Israel to explain most events in the Middle East. The Israeli perspective colors American perceptions for decades.

April 17, 1956: The Cominform is dissolved.

May 1956: George Kennan determines that the text in the CIA’s copy of the February speech is genuine, spurring debate within the agency. Some want to keep the speech a secret. Others want to use it to sow discord among the world’s communist parties. According to Ray Cline,  Angleton thought that by tweaking the speech with propaganda

he could have used it to such advantage that he would have discombobulated the Russians and their security services and perhaps used some of these emigre groups that we still at that time hoped to activate, and liberate the Ukraine or something.

Most of all, the CIA wants to lure Soviet spies in order to salvage a long-running, but ineffective operation called Red Cap. (For more on Red Cap, see SPYING YEAR BY YEAR: 1952.)

June 1956: An inspector general’s report declares that the Soviet division of the CIA’s clandestine service — run by Harvard grad Dana Durand — is dysfunctional. (The report is declassified in 2004).  The report states that the Soviet division could not produce “an authoritative statement of its mission and functions” much less grasp what was going on within the Soviet Union. The report contains a list of the CIA’s 20 “controlled agents” in Russia in 1956. None of them are in a position to have any idea what makes the Kremlin tick.

Early June 1956: Dulles decides to leak the text of Khruschev’s speech. For months afterwards, the speech is beamed behind the Iron Curtain by Radio Free Europe, the CIA’s $100 million media machine.

June 28, 1956: Although the CIA’s best analysts had concluded that no popular uprising was likely in Eastern Europe during the 1950s, after the speech was broadcast, Polish workers began to rise up against their communist rulers. The Polish struggle leads the National Security Council to search for cracks in Soviet control.

John Foster Dulles wins presidential approval for new efforts to promote “spontaneous manifestations of discontent” in dominated nations.

Allen Dulles promises to bolster a Radio Free Europe program that floats balloons over the Iron Curtain, carrying leaflets and “Freedom Medals.”

July 26 1956: Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser challenges the legacy of colonialism by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, the corporation created by the British and French to run the Middle East’s man-made maritime trade route.

 October 22, 1956: Frank Wisner travels to Europe to visit the CIA’s biggest stations.  His first order of business is to meet with Sir Patrick Dean, a senior British intelligence officer. They are to discuss plans to topple the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, but Dean is a no show. He’s in France putting the finishing touches on a coordinated military attack on Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel. The aim is to destroy Nasser’s government and take the Suez Canal back by force. The CIA knows nothing about this.

October 23, 1956: Students take to the streets of Budapest. By November 4, the rebellion is crushed. During the 2 weeks of the Hungarian uprising, the CIA knows no more than what it reads in the newspapers. (For more details see the BBC News Timeline.)

October 24, 1956: A crowd gathers at the Parliament in Budapest led by student demonstrators rising up against the communist government. The security police confront a second crowd at the government radio station. Some of the students are armed, and shots break out. The security police open fire and the protesters fight back. At the Budapest City Park, a third crowd tears a statue of Stalin from its pedestal. Red Army troops enter Budapest in retaliation. At Kossuth Square, crossfire erupts, and at least 100 people die.

October 26, 1956: Although Dulles has been informed by sources that something may be up regarding Egypt, he is disbelieving.  At a National Security Council meeting, he informs President Eisenhower that reports of a joint UK-French-Israeli military plan are absurd. That suits Ike just fine since he is obsessed with Hungary.

October 28, 1956: Frank Wisner flies to Paris and meets with Bill Griffith, the senior policy adviser at Radio Free Europe’s Munich headquarters. Beginning that evening, Radio Free Europe urges the citizens of Hungary to sabotage railroads, blow up tanks, and fight the Soviets.

November 1, 1956: At a National Security Council meeting, Dulles briefs Eisenhower on the situation in Budapest. He says:

What occurred there was a miracle . . . . Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80% of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms.

Dulles is wrong. The rebels have no guns to speak of and the Hungarian army has not switched sides. The Soviets are sending more than 200,000 troops and some 2,500 tanks and armored vehicles.

On the morning of the Soviet invasion, Radio Free Europe’s Bulgarian announcer told his listeners that “the pressure upon the government of the U.S. to send military help to the freedom fighters will become irresistable.”  But that was not the case.

November 4, 1956: The Soviet onslaught begins. In 4 days, the partisans of Budapest are crushed. Tens of thousands are killed and thousands more are taken to Siberian prison camps. Hungarian refugees begin besieging the American embassy in Vienna, begging America to do something.

November 7, 1956: Eisenhower is reelected. The president wakes up the next morning to a false report from Allen Dulles that the Soviets are ready to send 250,000 troops to Egypt to defend the Suez Canal from the British and French. Also, Ike’s unhappy about the CIA’s inability to report on the actual Soviet attack in Hungary.

November 11, 1956: The Soviets claim victory over the Hungarian freedom fighters.

December 20, 1956: President Eisenhower receives a formal report of a secret investigation into the clandestine service of the CIA. If it were to become public, it would destroy the agency. The top secret report has never been declassified. Its key findings appear in a 1961 record created by the intelligence board.

For his next 4 years in office, President Eisenhower tries to change the way the CIA is run, but he is unable to find a suitable replacement for Allen Dulles.  Dulles won’t accept oversight, instead leading the agency into new battles across Asia and the Middle East.

For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1955

1957