1955 was a slow year for espionage activity. But because so much of what happened that year centers on Japan, it was also an extremely important year. Before I list the timeline, here’s a little backstory on the year’s events and their impact.

As we’ve seen in the case of Italy, the CIA was good at using American money to buy the political outcomes it desired. It was also good at using cold cash to buy the services of foreign politicians. The first place it bought the future leader of a world power was Japan.

In 1957, with the CIA’s help, Nobusuke Mishi, a former American war criminal, became the prime minister of Japan. Kishi won his first postwar Diet (Japanese Parliament) seat in 1953. He gained American support and solidified his access to power in 1955.

Kishi became the leader of the rising conservative movement in Japan. Within a year of his election to the Diet, he controlled the largest faction among Japan’s elected representatives. Once in office, he built the ruling party that led Japan for nearly half a century.

Spying Year by Year: 1955

1955: President Eisenhower creates the Special Group — 3 designated representatives of the White House, State Department, and Department of Defense. He charges them with reviewing the secret operations of the CIA, but they have no ability to approve covert action in advance. The CIA director, Allen Dulles, believed the group had no need to know about covert action. They were in no position to judge him or the agency.

Dulles felt that “no policy approval was required” for his decisions. The director, his deputies, and the station chiefs abroad remained free to set their own policies, plot their own operations, and judge the results for themselves, in secret. Dulles advised the White House as he saw fit.

May 14, 1955: The Warsaw Pact is signed.

July 18, 1955: The leaders of the USSR, the United States, England, and France convene in Geneva to start the Big Four Conference. 

August 1955: John Foster Dulles meets with Nobusuke Kishi and tells him that he can expect the support of the American government so long as Japan’s conservatives unify to help the United States fight communism. One of the stronger relationships the CIA ever cultivates with a foreign leader is born.

November 1955: Kishi unifies Japan’s conservatives under the banner of the Liberal Democratic Party. As the party’s leader, he allows the CIA to recruit and run his political followers on a seat-by-seat basis in the Japanese parliament. He pledges to work with the CIA in reshaping a new security treaty between the United States and Japan. Kishi’s case officer, Clyde McAvoy, is able to report on (and influence) the emerging foreign policy of postwar Japan.

December 28, 1955: President Eisenhower changes the CIA’s marching orders. He recognizes that covert action isn’t going to undermine the Kremlin, so he revises the “rules” written at the beginning of the Cold War. The new order, NSC  5412/2, remains in effect for 15 years. The new goals are to “create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism,” to “counter any threat of a party or individuals directly or indirectly responsive to Communist control,” and to “strengthen the orientation to the United States of the people of the free world.”

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1954

1956

1954: A CIA officer dispatched to Moscow is caught in the act of espionage, arrested, and deported shortly after his arrival.

President Eisenhower creates a second (fact-finding) intelligence commission led by James R. Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eisenhower wants to prevent a surprise Soviet attack and presses for “communications and electronic surveillance” to provide “early warning of an impending attack.”

January – June 1954: The CIA embarks on Operation Success, the plot against Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz, with a $3 million budget.

• Castillo Armas and his few hundred rebels are scheduled to attack the 5,000 man Guatemalan military
• The CIA subsidizes an anticommunist student movement in Guatemala City (several hundred strong)
• A CIA officer (Henry Hecksher, the chief of the Berlin base) is sent to Guatemala City to persuade military officers to rebel against their government; he is authorized to spend up to $10,000 a month for bribes, augmenting the arms embargo and threat of American invasion already in place
• Hecksher becomes convinced that only an actual attack by the US will embolden the Guatemalan military to overthrow Arbenz
• CIA headquarters sends Hecksher a roster of 58 Guatemalans marked for assassination
• Castillo Armas and the CIA agree that the assassinations will take place during or immediately after Armas’ triumphal arrival in Guatemala City so as to underscore the seriousness of the rebels’ intent
• An arms shipment to the Arbenz government arrives in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala; the arms are basically rusted and useless, but they create a propaganda windfall for the US
• US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the State Department announce that Guatemala is now part of a Soviet plot to subvert the Western Hemisphere
• Speaker of the House John McCormack calls the antiquated arms shipment “an atomic bomb planted in America’s backyard”
• US Ambassador to Guatemala John Puerifoy says the US is at war

January 29, 1954: Planning for the Guatemalan coup is underway at Opa-Locka, FL.

January 30, 1954: The CIA’s plans for Guatemala are blown. Every major newspaper in the Western Hemisphere publishes President Arbenz’s accusations of a “counterrevolutionary plot” sponsored by a “Northern government,” led by Castillo Armas, and based in a rebel training camp in Nicaragua. The leak emanates from secret cables and documents that a CIA officer leaves in a Guatemala City hotel room.

March 1954: Mike Mansfield states: “Secrecy now beclouds everything about the CIA — its cost, its efficiency, its successes, its failures . . . ” Mansfield and 34 of his colleagues back a bill to create an oversight committee and order the agency to keep Congress fully and currently informed about its work. The bill will not pass for 20 years.

Senator Joseph McCarthy collects allegations that “the CIA had  unwittingly hired a large number of double agents — individuals who, although working for the CIA. were actually Communist agents whose mission was to plant inaccurate date.” Unlike many of McCarthy’s charges, this one was true.

Allen Dulles rebuffs Senator McCarthy’s attempt to supoena the CIA’s Bill Bundy who has contributed $400 to the defense fund of Alger Hiss, the suspected communist spy. Allen refuses to allow the senator to bring down the CIA.

Allen Dulles runs a dirty, covert operation on McCarthy. He organizes a team of CIA officers to penetrate the senator’s office with a spy or a bug (or both). His idea is to gather dirt, then spread it.

March 1, 1954: The US tests its first H-bomb.

March 9, 1954: Edward R. Murrow‘s popular CBS TV show See It Now features its “Report on Senator McCarthy,” including clips of the Senator in many uncomplimentary situations. The show i a smash, and a follow-up critique of McCarthy airs the following week.

April 6, 1954: McCarthy is given a chance to respond to Murrow on See It Now.

April 22, 195 4: The US Army vs. Senator Joseph McCarthy hearings begin, adding “point of order” to the American lexicon. ABC, NBC, and the Dumont networks all broadcast the hearings live. Americans watch as McCarthy flubs out before the skilled probing of Army counsel Joseph Welch. By the time the hearings conclude on June 17, McCarthy’s career is as good as over.

May 1, 1954: For four weeks the CIA wages psychological warfare in Guatemala through a pirate radio station called the Voice of Liberation run by a CIA contract officer. The station sends out shortwave reports of imaginary uprisings and defections and plans to poison wells and conscript children.

May 21, 1954: US Ambassador to Guatemala John Peurifoy says the US is at war and that “nothing short of direct military intervention will succeed.”

May 24, 1954: US Navy warships and submarines blockade Guatemala in violation of international law.

May 26, 1954: A CIA plane buzzes Guatemala’s presidential palace and drops leaflets over the headquarters of the presidential guard, the most elite of the army’s units in Guatemala City. They read: “Struggle against Communist atheism!” and “Struggle with Castillo Armas!” What he US wants is a terror campaign says the CIA’s E. Howard Hunt who worked on the political-warfare portfolio for Operation Success.

May 27, 1954: The Atomic Energy Commission’s personnel security board recommends that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance be revoked. The reason: ” a long history of having Communist ties, both prior to and during the time he served as director of the Manhattan Project.”

End of May, 1954: President Eisenhower receives a 6 page letter from an air force colonel (Jim Kellis), the first whistle blower from inside the CIA. The president reads the letter and keeps it. Eisenhower wants to counter the threats to the clandestine service and clean up its problems in secret.  The truth is that the “CIA wittingly or unwittingly delivered one million dollars to a Communist security service (the WIN operation in Poland) . . . CIA unwittingly organized an intelligence network for the Communists.”

June 5, 1954: The retired chief of the Guatemalan air force flies to Somoza’s farm in Nicaragua where he is interviewed and broadcast  for propaganda purposes.

June 6, 1954: Arbenz hears about the broadcast and reacts:

• He grounds his own air force for fear fliers will defect
• He raids the home of an anticommunist student leader working closely with the CIA and finds evidence of the American plot
• He suspends civil liberties and begins arresting hundreds of people, hitting the CIA’s student group the hardest — at least 75 are tortured, killed, and buried in mass graves.

June 8, 1954: The CIA station in Guatemala cables: “Panic spreading in government circles;” CIA leadership sends orders to further  fan the flames.

June 18, 1954: Castillo Armas launches his long-awaited assault, more than 4 years in the making: 198 rebels attack Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic Coast and are defeated by policemen and dockworkers; 122 rebels march toward the Guatemalan army garrison at Zacapa — all but 30 are killed or captured; 60 rebels set out from El Salvador only to be arrested by local police.

Castillo Armas himself leads 100 men from Honduras toward 3 lightly defended Guatemalan villages; he camps out a few miles from the Guatemalan border calling on the CIA for more supplies; within 72 hours more than half of his forces are killed, captured, or on the verge of defeat.

June 19, 1954: Ambassador Peurifoy commandeers the CIA’s secure communications line at the American Embassy and writes directly to Allen Dulles: “Bomb repeat Bomb.”

June 20, 1954: The CIA’s Guatemala City station reports that the Arbenz government is “recovering its nerve.”

June 22, 1954: Allen Dulles secretly authorizes one more air strike on Guatemala City; it is a dud. Eisenhower cuts a secret deal to bolster the CIA effort

June 25, 1954: The CIA bombs the parade grounds of the largest military encampment in Guatemala City, breaking the will of the officer corps. Arbenz summons his cabinet and announces that elements of the army are in revolt.

June 27, 1954: Ambassador Peurifoy meets with the coup plotters. Arbenz cedes power to Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, who forms a junta and vows to fight Castillo Armas. “We have been double-crossed, Peurifoy cables.

A US representative delivers a message to Diaz: “Colonel, you are not convenient for American foreign policy.”

The junta vanishes instantly, and is replaced in quick succession by four more, each more pro-American than the last.

Ambassador Peurifoy demands that the CIA stand down.

June 30, 1954: The CIA bows out.

July 1954: Shortly after the conclusion of Operation Success, Eisenhower commisions General Jimmy Doolittle and William Pawley to assess the CIA’s capabilities for covert action. Doolittle has 10 weeks to report back.

September 1, 1954: Castillo Armas officially becomes President of Guatemala. He receives a 21 gun salute at a White House dinner where the Vice President toasts:

We in the United States have watched the people of Guatemala record an episode in their history deeply significant to all peoples . . . . Led by the courageous soldier who is our guest this evening, the Guatemala people revolted against communist rule, which in collapsing bore graphic witness to its own shallowness, falsity, and corruption.”

For the next 40 years, Guatemala then endures military rulers, death squads, and armed repression.

October 19, 1954: General Doolittle reports to President Eisenhower at the White House.. The Doolittle Report states that the CIA has

ballooned out into a vast and sprawling organization manned by a  large number of people, some of whom were of doubtful competence.

He says that Dulles surround himself with people who are unskilled and  undisciplined. He also addresses the family relationship between Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, saying it would be better for all concerned if the personal connection were not a family connection. He conclude that an independent committee of trusted civilians should oversee the CIA for the president.

The report warn that Wisner’s clandestine service is “filled with people having little or no training for their jobs.” The report recommend a “complete reorganization” of Wisner’s empire.

Allen Dulles buries the Doolittle report and doesn’t allow high-ranking officers to see it — not even Wisner. The report remains classified until 2003.

November 1954: Work on the Berlin Tunnel is underway.

President Eisenhower approves efforts to build the U-2 spy plane.

November 27, 1954: Alger Hiss is released from the penitentiary in Lewisburg, PA, where he has served 44 months of his 5 year sentence. “Three years in jail is a good corrective to three years at Harvard,” he quips.

December 2, 1954: The Senate votes 67 to 22 to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy.

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1953

1955

COLD WAR SPYING: 1953

1953: The FBI conducts an “internal security” investigation of Groucho Marx, the much loved host of the popular quiz show You Bet Your Life.

Allen Dulles builds a public relations and propaganda machine that includes more than 50 news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron. As Director of the CIA, Dulles wants to be seen as master of a professional spy service.

January 1953: Walter Bedell Smith calls Kim Roosevelt into his office at CIA headquarters and asks (referring to Tehran): “ When is our goddam operation going to get underway?” (For more on Iran see Cold War Spying Year by Year: 1952.)

February 18, 1953: Sir John Sinclair, the newly installed chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service arrives in Washington to meet with CIA’s Allen Dulles. Sinclair (known to the public as “C” and to his friends as “Sinbad”) proposes Kim Roosevelt as field commander for an Iranian coup to depose Mohammad Mossadegh. Roosevelt has been working for two years on political propaganda and paramilitary operations to fight off a feared Soviet invasion in Iran. The British call their plan Operation Boot, but Roosevelt names it Operation Ajax.

Roosevelt aims to undermine support for Mossadegh inside Iran’s mainstream political and religious parties. He steps up a campaign of bribery and subversion.

March 5, 1953: Joseph Stalin dies at age 73 after a stroke, throwing the Communist Party into a free-for-all struggle for power that isn’t resolved for almost 3 years. The CIA announces:

We have no reliable inside intelligence or thinking inside the Kremlin . . . Our estimates of Soviet long-range plans and intentions are speculations drawn from inadequate evidence.

 Eisenhower is furious. He says:

Ever since 1946, all the so-called experts have been yapping about what would happen when Stalin dies and what we as a nation should do about it. Well, he’s dead. And you can turn the files of our government inside out — in vain — looking for any plans laid. We have no plan. We are not even sure what difference his death makes.

Eisenhower decides to base his strategy on secret weapons: nuclear bombs and covert action. With a global campaign of covert action, Ike hopes to stop the spread of communism. The National Security Council — more or less dormant during the Truman years — begins meeting weekly with Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and the cabinet members in attendance. Allen Dulles opens each meeting with a tour of the world’s hot spots.

March 7, 1953: Georgy Malenkov inherits the two key leadership posts vacated by Stalin’s death.

March 14, 1953: Nikita Khruschev assumes one of those top posts, deposing Malenkov as secretary of the Party Central Committee.

March 18, 1953: Frank Wisner informs Roosevelt that he has an initial go-ahead from Allen Dulles to support the coup in Iran.

April 1953: The Permanent Subcommittee on Government Operations opens for business, under Chairman Joseph McCarthy. The Subversive Activities Control Board, whose 5 members had been selected by the president, also begins operation.

April 4, 1953: CIA Headquarters sends $1 million to Tehran station. But Eisenhower still has his doubts about the coup as do other key players in the plan.

Summer 1953: Eisenhower convenes those he trusts most in the area of national security: Walter Bedell Smith, George Kennan, John Foster Dulles, and General James R. Doolittle.

The president begins trying to redirect the CIA. He wants to shape the agency into an effective instrument of presidential power. Under Eisenhower, the agency undertakes 170 new major covert actions in 48 nations. Ike makes his initial decisions on covert action in private conversations with the Dulles brothers.The CIA will fight the enemy in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and wherever colonial empires meet their demise. (For more on colonialism click here.)  The goal is to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with the US.

June 5, 1953: At a National Security Council meeting, Allen Dulles announces that he can’t give the president “any prior warning through intelligence channels of a Soviet sneak attack.”

June 16-18, 1953: Nearly 370,000 East Germans take to the streets in opposition to the Communist Party. The uprising is far larger than the CIA first realized, but the agency can do nothing to help the rebels. The uprising is crushed.

The next week, Eisenhower orders the CIA to “train and equip underground organizations capable of launching large-scale raids or sustained warfare” in East Germany and the other Soviet satellites. He also calls upon the CIA to “encourage elimination of key puppet officials” in those same states.

June 19, 1953: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing after President Eisenhower twice refuses to issue an order of executive clemency. The 1990s opening of the archives of the Russian Republic reveals that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty of passing secrets to their Soviet handler, Alexander Feksilov. However, they gave him classified information about sonar and radar, not the atomic secrets which cost them their lives.

July 1953: President Syngman Rhee of South Korea is sailing near the shoreline of Yong-do, the island where the CIA trains its Korean commandos. Officers and guards in charge of the training site open fire. No one is hurt but the South Korean President is displeased. He calls in the American ambassador and informs him that the CIA’s paramilitary group has 72 hours to leave the country. The CIA has to start all over again, recruiting, training, and parachuting agents into North Korea from 1953 until 1955. All of them end up captured and executed.

The CIA fails on all fronts in Korea. Thousands of Americans and their Asian allies die as a result. The fact that a great deal of Korean War intelligence is fabricated is kept secret. $152 million spent on weapons is wasted.

The Korean Conflict comes to an end.

July 7, 1953:  The CIA monitors a Tudeh Party radio broadcast. “The clandestine radio warned Iranians that the American government, along with various ‘spies and traitors,’ including (the Iranian) General Zahedi were working to ‘liquidate the Mossadeq government.’ Mossadeq had his own military and political intelligence sources, independent of the Tudeh, and he knew what he was up against.”

July 11, 1953: Eisenhower gives the go ahead for the coup in Iran. From this day on almost everything goes wrong.

August 16, 1953: At 5:45 AM, Radio Tehran goes on the air to announce that the coup has failed. In the evening, one of Roosevelt’s officers hands $50,000 to one of the CIA’s Iranian agents and tells them to produce a crowd posing as communist goons.

August 17, 1953: Hundreds of paid agitators flood the streets of Tehran, looting, burning, and smashing the symbols of government. Late that evening, Frank Wisner sends a message to Tehran saying that “in the absence of strong recommendations to the contrary from Roosevelt . . .  the coup against Mossadeq should cease.”

August 19, 1953: At dawn, the CIA’s hired mobs assemble in Tehran. Soon there was a substantial demonstration in favor of the Shah and against Mossadegh.

August 20, 1953: The USSR tests its first hydrogen bomb.

Prime Minister Mossadegh surrenders. He spends the next three years incarcerated and a decade more under house arrest before his death. Roosevelt hands General Zahedi (the new prime minister) $1 million in cash and he sets out to crush all opposition. He jails thousands of political prisoners.

Roosevelt is hailed as a hero at the White House and faith in covert action soars.

The shah returns to the throne and rigs the next parliamentary elections, using the CIA’s street gangs as enforcers. He imposes three years of martial law and tightens his control over the country. He calls upon the CIA and the American military mission in Iran to help him secure his power by creating a new intelligence service called SAVAK.

December 1953: Regency Press publishes McCarthy and His Enemies by Yale graduates William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell. Whittaker Chambers says McCarthy is “a raven of disaster.”

December 9, 1953:  Allen Dulles formally approves Operation Success, the CIA’s plot to overthrow the government of Guatemala. He authorizes a $3 million budget and appoints Al Haney as field commander.

December 23, 1953: Beria, the first deputy premier of the Soviet Union, is executed with six aides as the post-Stalin purges begin.

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1952

1954

Cold War Spying: 1952

1952: With the war in Korea still going strong, the Joint Chiefs command Frank Wisner and the CIA to conduct “a major covert offensive against the Soviet Union, aimed at “the heartland of the communist control system.” Wisner tries using the Marshall Plan’s pact building provisions to expedite the efforts. As America’s allies are provided with weapons, Wisner tries arming secret “stay-behind forces” to fight the Soviets in the event of war in Scandinavia, France, Germany, Italy, and Greece. He continues dropping agents to their deaths in the Ukraine and the Baltics.

The CIA sets up clandestine prisons in Germany, Japan, and the Panama Canal Zone. Prisoners are injected with drugs and interrogated.  Dulles, Wisner, and Helms provide leadership. The endeavor is named Project Artichoke.

A worldwide program called Red Cap is initiated, taking its name from the railroad porters who help travelers with their baggage. Red Cap aims to induce Soviets to defect from their country and work for the CIA. Ideally, they would serve as “defectors in place” — remaining in their government posts while spying for America. Failing that, they would flee to the West and reveal their knowledge of the Soviet system.

January 1952: The McCarran-Walter Act is passed by Congress. It empowers the Department of Justice to deport any alien or nationalized citizen who is found to have engaged in subversive activities.

May 1952: Allen Dulles (soon to be named Director of the CIA) holds a secret conference of his closest friends at the Princeton Inn. He believes that the “real war” for Western civilization is in Europe, and justifies the intelligence casualties in Asia. He asks his colleagues to consider how best to destroy Stalin’s ability to control his satellite states. He believes that communism can be undone by covert action and argues that the CIA is ready to roll Russia back to its old borders. “If we are to move in and take the offensive, Eastern Europe presents the best place to start,” he says.

 May 15, 1952: Dulles and Wisner receive a report on Project Artichoke, spelling out the agency’s effort to test heroin, amphetamines, sleeping pills, and LSD on human subjects.  A few months later, Dulles approves a new program testing long term use of LSD on humans. It is code-named Ultra.

May 21, 1952: Whittaker Chambers’ 799 page memoir, Witness, is published by Random House. It is chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, and has an unprecedented 10-part serialization in the Saturday Evening Post. On its cover, the Post brags that the book is “One of the Great Books of Our Time.”  The book was #1 on The New York Times best seller list for most of the summer, and went on to become the 9th best-selling nonfiction book of 1952.

Spring and Summer 1952: More than 1,500 Korean agents are dropped into North Korea. They send back a flood of detailed radio reports on North Korean and Chinese communist military movements. It is later determined that nearly every one of the Korean agents either invented his reports or worked in secret for the communists. One CIA agent noted:  “all important Korean agents were con men who had for some time been living happily on generous CIA payments supposedly being sent to ‘assets’ in North Korea. Almost every report we had received from their notional agents came from one of our enemies.”

 July 1952: The CIA drops a four-man guerilla team into Manchuria. Four months later, the team radios for help. It is a trap. The team has been captured and turned against the CIA. The agency authorizes a rescue mission, but the rescue plane goes down. Beijing later broadcasts a scorecard for Manchuria: the CIA had dropped 212 foreign agents into the region. 101 were killed and 111 captured.

July 9, 1952: Senator Joseph McCarthy addresses the Republican National Convention in Chicago. After several references to the ongoing Korean conflict his speech ends with these words:

I say one Communist in a defense plant is one too many. One Communist on the faculty of one university is one Communist too many. One Communist among the American advisers at Yalta was one Communist too many. And even if there were only one Communist in the State Department, that would still be one Communist too many.

October 27, 1952: Bedell Smith convenes a conference of the CIA’s 26 most senior officers and proclaims that “until CIA could build a reserve of well-trained people, it would have to hold its activities to the limited number of operations that it could do well, rather than attempt to cover a broad field with poor performance” from “improperly trained or inferior personnel.” He orders the convening of a Murder Board — a jury to kill off the worst of the CIA’s covert operations. Soon the Murder Board is disbanded.

November 1952: The CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence, Loftus Becker, goes on an inspection tour of all the CIA’s Asian stations. He returns home to resign in disgust, concluding that “the CIA’s ability to gather intelligence in the Far East is ‘almost negligible.’” The agency’s inability to penetrate North Korea remains the longest running intelligence failure in the CIA’s history, and the agency’s unwillingness to learn from its mistakes becomes a permanent part of its culture.

Kim Roosevelt, the CIA’s Near East operations chief, goes to Tehran to clean up a mess for British intelligence. He pays off a network of Iranian agents who had worked for the British. The British had been forced out of Iran when Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, caught wind of a British plot to topple him and expelled everyone in the British Embassy On the way home, Roosevelt stops in London and discovers that Prime Minister Winston Churchill wants the CIA to help in a renewed effort to overthrow Mossadegh. For those of you who might be wondering, it’s all about oil.

November 4, 1952: General Dwight D. Eisenhower wins the US presidency on a national-security platform that calls for the free world to liberate the Soviet satellites. He chooses a new CIA director: Allen Dulles. Dulles is devoted to covert action and he is not a fan of analysis. He also is adept at deceiving the president.

November 26, 1952: The British Spy Monty Woodhouse flies to Washington to meet with the CIA’s Walter Bedell Smith and Frank Wisner. The men discuss how to “unseat Mossadeq”  even though the stated policy of the United States is to support Iran’s prime minister. The agency sets out to depose Mossadeq without the knowledge or approval of the White House.

End of 1952: Some of Frank Wisner’s improvised operations are falling apart. Wisner and his men had dropped about $5 million worth of gold bars, submachine guns, rifles, ammunition, and 2-way radios into Poland. They had established contacts with emigres in Germany and London. These efforts weren’t successful.  In fact, the Poles had sent a chunk of the CIA money to the Communist Party of Italy.

Frank Lindsay (who had run operations in Eastern Europe) tells Dulles and Wisner that “scientific and technical means of spying on the Soviets will have to replace covert action . . . paramilitary missions to support imaginary resistance movements could not push the Russians out of Europe.”

The CIA is now a worldwide force with 15,000 people, half a billion dollars in secret funds to spend each year, and more than 50 overseas stations. It looks pretty much the way it will for the next 50 years. The Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations have been forged into s single clandestine service to serve abroad, there is a unified system for analysts at home, and there is a measure of respect for the CIA at the White House.

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1951

1953

COLD WAR SPYING:1951

January 4, 1951: Bedell Smith appoints Allen Dulles as the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans. The title is a cover for his real job: Chief of Covert Operations. The two men are not a good match.

Bedell Smith’s second in command, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Bill Jackson resigns in frustration. Bedell Smith has no choice but to promote Dulles to Deputy Director and Frank Wisner to Chief of Covert Operations. The two men propose a budget of $587 million, an 11 fold increas from 1948. More than $400 million is for Wisner’s covert operations — 3 times the cost of espionage and analysts combined.

Bedell Smith sees the budget proposal as “a distinct danger to CIA as an intelligence agency.” He goes on to say: “The operational tail will wag the intelligence dog.” He warned: “The top people will be forced to take up all their time in the direction of operations and will necessarily neglect intelligence.”

Korean War

1951: The CIA opens a second front in the Korean War. The officers on the agency’s China operations desk convince themselves that as many as one million Kuomintang Nationalist guerillas are waiting inside Red China for the CIA’s help.

Dulles and Wisner try to enlist Americans to parachute into communist China. Lacking American volunteers, the CIA drops hundreds of recruited Chinese agents into the mainland. Their orders are to find their way to a village. When they go missing, they’re written off as a cost of covert warfare.

The CIA also thinks it can undermine Mao with Muslim horsemen, the Hui clans of China’s far northwest, who have political connections with the Chinese nationalists.

The CIA drops tons of weapons and ammunition and radios and scores of Chinese agents into western China, then tries to find Americans to follow them.

A CIA front based in Taiwan, Western Enterprises, is created to subvert Mao’s China.

Early 1951: The Chinese Communists chase General MacArthur’s troops out. The Pentagon decides to open a second front using about 1,500 followers of Li Mi, a Nationalist general. The CIA begins flying Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Thailand, training them, equipping them, and dropping them along with pallets of guns and ammunition into northern Burma.

When Li Mi’s soldiers cross over into China, Mao’s forces shoot them.

The CIA discovers that Li Mi’s radioman in Bangkok is a Chinese communist agent.

Li Mi’s soldiers retreat and regroup, but they refuse to fight. They settle into the mountains known as the Golden Triangle and harvest opium poppies. Twenty years later the CIA starts another small war in Burma to wipe out the heroin labs.

February, March, April 1951: More than 1,200 North Korean exiles are gathered on Yong-do Island in Pusan Harbor under the command of operations chief, Hans Tofte.

Tofte forms 3 brigades — White Tiger, Yellow Dragon, and Blue Dragon — with 44 guerilla teams. Their mission is 3-fold:

• serve as intelligence gathering infiltrators
• serve as guerilla warfare squads
• serve as escape and evasion crews to rescue downed American pilots and crews.

End of April 1951: White Tiger goes ashore in North Korea with 104 men, reinforced by 36 more agents dropped by parachute. By November 1951 most of the White Tiger guerillas are killed captured or missing.

Blue Dragon and Yellow Dragon meet similar fates.

The few infiltration teams that survive are captured and forced to deceive their American officers with phony radio messages. None of the guerillas make it out alive.

April 1951 – end of 1952: Hedging its bets on the Nationalist Chinese, the CIA decides there has to be a “Third Force” in China. The agency spends roughly $100 million, buying enough arms and ammunition for 200,000 guerillas, but it doesn’t find the Third Force. About half the money and guns go to a group of Chinese refugees based on Okinawa. Their group is a scam.

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1950

1952

COLD WAR SPYING: 1950

Early 1950: Frank Wisner dreams up a new assault on the Iron Curtain under the leadership of Bill Coffin with the support of the Solidarists, a Russian ultra right wing group. The CIA and the Solidarists first smuggle leaflets into Soviet barracks in East Germany. Then they launch balloons bearing thousands of pamphlets. Then they send 4 man parachute missions in unmarked planes flying as far east as the outskirts of Moscow. One by one the Solidarist agents float down to Russia and are captured and killed. The CIA is delivering its agents to the Russian secret police.

During the 1950s, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents are sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. No accounts are kept and no penalty is assessed for failure. The missions are seen as a matter of national survival for the United States.

Years later, the CIA learns that the Soviets had known every aspect of the operations from the start. The training camps in Germany had been infiltrated.

Note: After leaving the CIA Coffin becomes known as William Sloane Coffin. He is the chaplain of Yale and one of the most passionate antiwar voices in American during the 1960s. Regarding his years in the CIA, he says: “We were quite naive about the use of American power.”

January 21, 1950: The 2nd trial of Alger Hiss ends when he is convicted of perjury. He is sentenced to 5 years in federal prison.

February 9, 1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), a former Marine tail-gunner, gives a speech before the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He charges that the State Department “is thoroughly infested with Communists.” He waves a piece of paper that he claims (in some reports) bears the names of 205 employees in the State Department who are either “card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.” The following day he delivers a similar speech in Salt Lake City, but now the number has been lowered to 57. He later says that this is the number he meant all along.

March 1, 1950: Klaus Fuchs, German-born atomic research physicist who worked at Los Alamos before relocating to England, pleads guilty to violating the Official Secrets Act by giving the Russians atomic secrets. This activity dates back to 1942. He is sentenced to 14 years in prison.

April 10, 1950: The US Supreme Court upholds the power of congressional committees to compel witnesses to state whether or not they are now, or ever have been, Communists.

June 1950: Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television is published by a team of ex-FBI agents who published the newsletter Counterattack. A pamphlet 213 pages long, it lists 151 names, 130 organizations, and 17 publications with suspicious ties to Communist Doctrine.

June 1950: The one true source of intelligence on the Far East from the final days of WWII until the end of 1949 is American signals intelligence. On the eve of the Korean War, William Wolf Weisband, a Soviet spy, penetrates the code breaking nerve center. A linguist who translates broken messages from Russian into English, Weisband was recruited as a spy by Moscow in the 1930s. He single-handedly shatters the ability of the US to read Soviet secret dispatches. The result is the creation of the National Security Agency (NSA), the signals-intelligence service that grows to dwarf the CIA in size and power.

June 25, 1950: The US faces a surprise attack that looks like the start of World War III when the People’s Democratic Republic of North Koreas invades the Republic of South Korea.

The Korean War is the first great test for the CIA.  It gives the agency its first real leader: General Walter Bedell Smith. Bedell Smith became the 4th Director of Central Intelligence in 4 years. His task is to learn the secrets of the Kremlin.

In his first days in office, Bedell Smith discovers that Frank Wisner reports to the State Department and the Pentagon, not to the Director of Central Intelligence. In a fit of fury, he informs Wisner (the Chief of Covert Operations) that his freewheeling days are over.

August 1950: Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada sees his Internal Security Act passed into law. It requires any “Communist action” or Communist front” organization to register with the attorney general. The officers of such ‘subversive’ organizations must also register. President Truman is alarmed by the broad powers of the law and calls the bill “unnecessary, ineffective, and dangerous.” His veto is overridden by both Houses of Congress. In effect, this makes the act of registration an admission of guilt in belonging to an illegal organization, while the failure to register is also a crime.

October 11, 1950: President Truman leaves for Wake Island to meet with General Douglas MacArthur. The general hates the CIA and does his best to ban its officers from the Far East. He insists that the communist Chinese would never enter the Korean War. The CIA more or less concurs, assuring Truman that it sees “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea . . . barring a Soviet decision for total war.”

Early November 1950: 100,000 Chinese troops attack and almost push the Americans into the sea.

The CIA has misread every global crisis over the past year: the Soviet atom bomb, the Korean War, the Chinese invasion.

December 1950: President Truman declares a national emergency and recalls General Dwight David Eisenhower to active duty.

December 1950: The Senate creates their own version of the McCarran Act, the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1948

1949

1951 and the Korean War

COLD WAR SPYING: 1949

Start of 1949: The CIA lacks the legal authority to carry our covert action against any nation. It has no constitutional charter from Congress and no legally authorized funds for covert missions. When engaging in covert action, the agency is operating outside the laws of the United States.

January 1949: Chinese Communist forces enter Beijing.

January 1949: Allen Dulles presents the results of a top secret investigation into the structural weaknesses of the CIA to President Truman. The report asserts:

• the CIA is churning out reams of paper containing few (if any) facts on the communist threat
• the agency has no spies among the Soviets and their satellites
• the CIA is not yet “an adequate intelligence service” and it will take “years of patient work to do the job” of transforming it.

The report remained classified for 50 years. The implicit argument that the agency needs a bold new leader is disregarded. The National Security Council orders Director Hillenkoetter to implement the report but he never does.

Dulles begins telling his friends in Washington that unless something drastic is done at the CIA, the president faces disaster abroad.

February 1949: Hillenkoetter, the Director of Central Intelligence, meets privately with Carl Vinson, a Georgia Democrat and the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. He warns that Congress must pass formal legislation blessing the CIA and granting it a budget as soon as possible. He argues that the agency needs legal cover. Hillenkoetter submits the Central Intelligence Act of 1949 to Congress for their consideration.

March 28, 1949: James Forrestal resigns as Secretary of Defense.

April 1949: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is formed.

May 12, 1949: The Berlin Blockade is lifted. Great Britain and the US have flown 272,000 missions, airlifting 2,325 million tons of supplies to West Berliners.

May 27, 1949: The CIA Act is rammed through Congress. Congress gives the agency the widest conceivable powers. The act gives the agency the ability to do almost anything it wants as long as Congress provides the money in the annual package. Approval of the secret budget by a small armed services subcommittee was understood to constitute a legal authorization for all secret operations.

A key clause of the 1949 Act allows the CIA to let 100 foreigners a year into the US in the name of national security, granting them “permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws.”

By 1949, the US was willing to work with almost anyone against Stalin.

June 13, 1949: The Hollywood Ten, cited for contempt of congress, learn their convictions have been upheld by the US Circuit Court of Appeals. Eight of them serve one year in prison. Herbert Biberman and Edward Dmytryk serve 6 months. Each of the Ten is assessed a fine of $1,000. All are blacklisted upon their release.

July 1949: Under pressure from the army, the CIA takes over the Gehlen Group, an intelligence agency established in June 1946 by US occupation authorities in the United States Zone of Germany

July 1, 1949: Judith Coplon is sentenced to prison on charges of espionage. Judith is an alleged KGB spy whose trials, convictions and successful appeals have a profound influence on espionage prosecutions during the McCarthy era.

July 18, 1949: Baseball star Jackie Robinson testifies before HUAC, addressing the question of whether people of color in the US will be willing to fight against Russia if war is declared. He thinks they will.

August 6, 1949: Secretary of State Dean Acheson announces that the US is withdrawing support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese government.

August 27, 1949: Famed singer, actor, and Soviet supporter, Paul Robeson, participates in a concert in Peekskill, NY. The music is disrupted when a riot breaks out. Robeson and Pete Seeger, among other stars, return a week later to give a second concert. That one also ends when an ugly riot ensues.

August 29, 1949: Russia detonates its first atomic bomb. Americans don’t learn of this until President Truman announces the fact at a September 23 press conference.

September 1949: An air force crew flying out of Alaska detects traces of radioactivity in the atmosphere.

September 5, 1949: A team of Ukrainian dissidents sponsored by the CIA lands near the city of LVOV in the Ukraine, penetrating the Soviet Union, but “the Soviets quickly eliminated the agents.” Still, the operation sets off a huge wave of enthusiasm at CIA headquarters.

The CIA dispatches dozens of Ukrainian agents by air and land. Almost every one is captured. Soviet intelligence officers use the prisoners to feed back disinformation. Then they kill them.

After 5 years of “abortive missions, CIA discontinued this approach.” In the long run, “the Agency’s effort to penetrate the Iron Curtain using Ukrainian agents was ill-fated and tragic.”

Still, Frank Wisner starts new paramilitary adventures all over Europe.

September 20, 1949: The CIA confidently declares that the Soviet Union won’t produce an atomic weapon for at least another 4 years.

September 21, 1949: The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) is founded.

September 23, 1949: Truman announces to the world that Stalin has the bomb.

September 29, 1949: The CIA’s chief of scientific intelligence reports that his office lacks the talent to track Moscow’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction. He reports that the agency’s work on Soviet atomic weapons has been an “almost total failure” at every level.

The Pentagon frantically commands the CIA to place its agents in Moscow in order to steal the Red Army’s military plans. Richard Helms reflects: “ the possibility of recruiting and running any such sources was as improbable as placing resident spies on the planet Mars.”

October 1949: Four weeks after the first flight into the Ukraine, Wisner teams up with the British to run rebels into communist Albania, the poorest and most isolated nation in Europe. He sees Albania as fertile ground for a resistance army formed from exiled royalists and impoverished loyalists in Rome and Athens. There are many failed missions. The agents who survive were taken prisoner, and their messages back to the Athens station are controlled by their captors.

The flights go on for 4 years. Roughly 200 of the CIA’s foreign agents die. Almost no one in the American government knows.

October 7, 1949: The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) is formed.

October 14, 1949: Eleven leaders of the American Communist Party are convicted of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government, a violation of the 1940 Smith Act. Their 9 month trial generates 21,157 pages of testimony and costs the government a million dollars to prosecute. The trial is held in NY City under Judge Harold R. Medina. After sentencing the Red Eleven to 5 year prison terms, Medina is celebrated on the cover of Time Magazine (October 24, 1949). Among those who testify: FBI counterspy Herbert A. Philbrick, a Boston-based agent who had spent the last 9 months infiltrating Communist organizations, and Matt Cvetic, whose undercover activities took place in Pittsburg. Their escapades would soon be dramatized in autobiographical books, radio shows, a television series, and a movie.

December 7, 1949: China officially becomes a Communist country after Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist army flee to Formosa (Taiwan), leaving Beijing to the forces of Mao Zedong.

December 18, 1949: Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin meet for the first time — in Moscow. They will meet only once more, on January 22, 1950.

December 18, 1949: Nikita Khruschev relocates from the Ukraine to Moscow, where he is appointed a secretary of the All-Union Central Committee.

 For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1948

1950

Cold War Spying: 1948

March 5, 1948: General Lucius D. Clay, chief of American occupation forces in Berlin, sends a cable to Washington saying he has a gut feeling that a Soviet attack on Berlin could come at any minute. The Pentagon leaks the cable.

March 6, 1948: President Truman goes before Congress warning that the Soviet Union and its agents are threatening disaster. He demands and wins immediate approval of the Marshall Plan. Read more about the Marshall Plan in our post titled St. Patrick’s Day 1948.

The plan offers billions of dollars to the free world to repair the damage done by war and to create an American economic and political barricade against the Soviets. The US will help rebuild 19 capitals — 16 in Europe and 3 in Asia — using an American blueprint. George Kennan and James Forrestal are among the plan’s principal authors. Allen Dulles serves as a consultant.

A secret codicil gives the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It lets the agency skim uncounted millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan. But how?

After Congress approves the Marshall Plan, it appropriates about $13.7 billion over 5 years. In addition, any nation receiving aid from the plan has to set aside an equivalent sum in its own currency. Five percent of those funds — $685 million — are made available to the CIA through the plan’s overseas offices. This guarantees that wherever the plan flourishes in Europe and in Asia there will be a fertile environment for American spy craft.

Secret funds are the heart of secret operations. The CIA now has an unfailing source of untraceable cash. The scheme remains secret until after the cold war ends.

March 31 – April 1, 1948: The Russians give the first orders forbidding the entrance of military trains into — and the exporting of freight out of  — Berlin without their approval.

May 4, 1948: George Kennan sends a top secret paper to about 20 people in the State Department, the White House, and the Pentagon. He proclaims “the inauguration of organized political warfare” and calls for the creation of a new clandestine service to conduct covert operations worldwide. He states clearly that the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the CIA’s covert operations are all interlocking parts of a grand strategy against Stalin.

The money that the CIA siphons from the Marshall Plan will finance a network of false fronts to recruit foreign agents. These foreigners, under CIA control, are to create underground political groups in the free nations of Europe. The underground is to spur “all-out liberation movements” behind the Iron Curtain.

May 19, 1948: Congressmen Richard M. Nixon’s and Karl Mundt’s bill to “protect the United States against un-American and subversive activities” — the Mundt-Nixon Bill — passes in the House by a vote of 319 to 58. The bill, also known as the Internal Security Act, makes it a crime to attempt to establish a totalitarian dictatorship by any means. In effect, this makes the existence of th Communist Party a violation of the law.

June 1948: Washington Witch Hunt by Bert Andrews, decrying the recent abuses of civil liberties by Red hunters, is published by Random House.

June 18, 1948: Kennan’s plans are approved in a secret order from the National Security Council. NSC Directive 10/2 calls for covert operations to attack the Soviets around the world. The strike force Kennan conceives to carry out the secret war is called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). It’s a cover placed within the CIA.  Its chief, though, is to report to the secretaries of defense and state because the director of central intelligence is so weak.

State and Defense differ in their objectives. State wants to carry out “rumor-spreading, bribery, the organization of non-communist fronts.” Forrestal and the Pentagon want “guerilla movements . . . underground armies . . . sabotage and assassination.”

June 23, 1948: At Frank Wisner’s urging, the Western powers institute a new German currency. In immediate response, the Soviets blockade Berlin. The United States mounts an airlift to beat the blockade.

June 28, 1948: Yugoslavia’s Communist Party, under Marshal Tito, is expelled from the Cominform, becoming the first Soviet satellite nation to break free of Moscow’s rule.

June 28, 1948: The total blockade of West Berlin begins. Over the next 11 months, the United States and Britain will airlift food, medicine, and fuel to help maintain the city and the well-being of its occupants.

July 20, 1948: After a 13 month investigation, a New York grand jury returns indictments against 12 members of the National Board of the Communist Party, who are charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

July 28, 1948: Elizabeth Bentley, known as the Red Spy Queen, testifies before a Senate subcommittee and, 3 days later, to HUAC. She concedes that she was a courier to a Washington-based Soviet spy ring during the war. She also implicates Whittaker Chambers, the man she replaced.

August 25, 1948: In what has become known as Confrontation Day, Whittaker Chambers testifies before HUAC regarding his earlier acquaintance with Alger Hiss. Hiss looks on.

September 1, 1948: Frank Wisner takes charge of American covert action. His mission is to roll the Soviets back to Russia’s old boundaries and free Europe from Communist control. Covert operations become the agency’s dominant force, remaining so for 20 years.

December 15, 1948: Former State Department official Alger Hiss is indicted on 2 counts of perjury for denying his role in passing classified documents to the Russians. His first trial ends on July 8, 1949 with a hung jury.

Late 1948-Early 1949: Planning begins for Radio Free Europe

Check out more Cold War Spying Year By Year:

1947 

1946

1945

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