Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [17]
As in any war, what mattered were results, the more immediate and tangible the better. For Dulles and his deputies, all other considerations were secondary. Their world presented itself as a series of problems to be solved and opportunities to be exploited. They had little time to spare for contemplating long-term effects. Their preferred measure of effectiveness was straightforward: Did the operation succeed or fail? According to this narrow standard, Iran and Guatemala showed the Agency at its scintillating best.
Dulles waged his clandestine war wrapped in an armor of moral certitude. The cause required actions that might ordinarily have appeared distasteful—disseminating false information, suborning foreign officials, planning acts of sabotage, overthrowing governments, and ordering assassinations. Yet the implications of failure—the Soviets overrunning the Free World—seemed so dire as to justify acts that might otherwise have been considered beyond the pale. Indeed, for Dulles and his lieutenants, to do what others might shrink from doing became a symbol of rectitude. As Evan Thomas has written in his study of the early CIA, “The ability to swallow one’s qualms, to do the harder thing for the greater good, was regarded as a sign of moral strength.”28 In this sense, the cause itself cleansed such acts of any taint of iniquity. However paradoxical, the pursuit of fixed and permanent universal values went hand in hand with the embrace of highly flexible moral standards.
Not surprisingly, devotion to the mission and to the Agency were inextricably linked. When, in 1953, a senior automobile executive nominated to the post of secretary of defense testified to his conviction that “what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa,” he was roundly derided. Yet Charles E. Wilson was merely expressing a sentiment shared by other movers and shakers of the day. Wall Street bankers, university presidents, big-city newspaper publishers, cardinal archbishops, and senior military officers all agreed: For the country to flourish, the institutions for which they bore responsibility had to flourish. To promote institutional interests was, therefore, to promote the common good. Generally left unsaid but understood was this: To promote institutional interests was also to elevate the personal standing of the individuals who sat atop such institutions. For those occupying the executive suite, institutional clout translated into personal influence and frequently into more material benefits as well.
Dulles was an authentic patriot, who viewed the Cold War as a righteous cause. No reason exists to question the sincerity of that conviction. Yet the atmosphere of permanent crisis he encouraged created large opportunities both to advance the well-being of the Agency and to satisfy his own personal ambitions. To ignore this neat correlation would be naïve. To put it another way, Dulles (and the CIA) had everything to gain by hyping the Red menace and much to lose should the suspicion take hold that the Russians might not actually pose such a dire threat after all. To refine the point that Charles Wilson made: In Dulles’s eyes, whatever threatened to harm the CIA endangered the country. And anything that threatened the CIA threatened him personally.
No more dangerous threat existed, however, than the possibility that outsiders—not Russians, but Americans—might gain access to the secret world over which the CIA exercised something like a near monopoly. Perpetuating the Agency’s (and the director’s) hold on power demanded the preservation of that monopoly. The prying eyes that caused Dulles most concern belonged not to the president,