True Men, Liars, and the Failures That Worked - Part 2

A Tale of Two Assassination Plots

“He fancied himself a technological promoter and entrepreneur. He wanted to know, could you assassinate someone without anyone ever finding out about it?”
-Sidney Gottlieb on Richard Bissell

Sidney Gottlieb had already explained to his lawyer Terry Lenzner how his work with the CIA as Chief of the Technical Services Division had involved developing poisonous methods to kill Fidel Castro, including “a monogrammed handkerchief dipped in poison, exploding cigars, poisoned wet suits.” He also learned about President Eisenhower approving a plot to insert deadly toxin developed by Gottlieb for insertion into Patrice Lumumba’s food or toothpaste. What bothered the pair about the U.S. Senate committee was that in documents released to the public before the 1975 hearing, Gottlieb’s name remained unexpunged for all to read, whereas other CIA personnel had a shield of secrecy with their names redacted. Fearing his client would be made a scapegoat, his lawyer sought and received immunity for Gottlieb in exchange for testifying before the U.S. Senate.

Gottlieb preferred to explain his case to the public, thinking they would understand his aims and service to the country. Lenzner believed that revealing his participation in assassination plots in the name of national security would not serve to win Gottlieb public sympathy. “Look, Sid, the goal here is to keep you out of the newspapers and, at a minimum, out of jail,” Lenzner explained to him. “You don’t understand how this works. You could very well become the fall guy in this whole investigation.” The Manhattan District Attorney was also pursuing an investigation into Frank Olson’s death. “They could try to pin Olson’s death on you.” The immunity request with the Church Committee delayed Gottlieb’s participation until such time that interest in the committee was waning, playing into their “slowdown strategy.”

The hearing had been going well in Lenzner’s eyes, until Senator Robert Schweiker handed them a document. “Dr. Gottlieb,” he said. “Can you tell me what this memo is about?” It bore the ominous title of “Health Alteration Committee.” Despite an agreement with the Committee to share materials in advance, this memo caught them by surprise. Having been in charge of the Committee, Gottlieb knew the answer to Schweiker’s question but he remained quiet. Gottlieb then whispered to Lenzner, “I need to talk to you about this.” Lenzner pretended Gottlieb’s heart condition was acting up to buy them time to discuss the matter in private.

A Contemptible Face

Gottlieb revealed to his lawyer that the Health Alteration Committee memorandum contained a plot regarding a Communist official in Iraq that the CIA had “wanted to get rid of.” The State Department had described the official as “extremely aggressive...anti-Western to the point of hatred...and has given important support for the success of Communism and Soviet policy in Iraq.” The target was Colonel Fadhil ’Abbas al-Mahdawi, who had “assumed a role of one of the most powerful of the military leaders” in Iraq as President of the Higher Military Court, also known as the “People’s Court.” Whereas Lumumba had sealed his fate through lacking in eye contact when speaking with U.S. representatives, Mahdawi did himself no favors by being an avowed Communist with an unfortunate physical appearance, according to U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John Jernegan. While expressing his displeasure to Iraqi leader Abd al-Karim Qasim with regard to the People’s Court, Jernegan felt that “one difficulty was that the head of the court was his cousin, Mahdawi, who was really the most detestable man I think I've ever seen. He looked detestable; he had a nasty face. And his actions as president of the court sometimes were almost incredible.” Qasim would reply, “Oh well, you know really he’s not so bad. Mahdawi’s not so bad as you think. The people demand that we have trials of people who have betrayed their trust.” Jernegan was frustrated with this obstinance: “I never got anywhere.” The U.S. took special note of Mahdawi’s provocative statements during a January 12, 1959 trial:

“My late father was a butcher. I pride myself on the fact that I am a self-made man from a poor family. I am proud that the people have made me the President of the Court to defend the rights of the poor and oppressed. My father was a butcher who slaughtered sheep. I am a butcher of traitors.”

By February 1960, the CIA’s Near East Division was ready to take action against Mahdawi, seeking approval from the Health Alteration Committee, an apt term which CIA Director Allen Dulles found to be a humorous euphemism for assassination. The written proposal to remove Mahdawi, approved in April, took a middle ground between incapacitation and murder, in keeping with the committee name: “We do not consciously seek subject’s permanent removal from the scene; we also do not object should this complication develop.” As to their rationale, there were the surface-level explanations: Mahdawi’s kangaroo court, his relationship with the Soviets, and then there was oil, as Anne E. Tazewell explained in A Good Spy Leaves No Trace: “My father [James M. Eichelberger] was part of a euphemistically named ‘Iraqi Health Alteration Committee’… [Iraq] demanded that the Anglo-American-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) share 20 percent of the ownership and 55 percent of the profits with the Iraqi government. When the IPC rejected this proposal, Qasim issued a law to take away 99.5 percent of the IPC’s ownership and establish an Iraqi national oil company to oversee the export of its oil...protecting Western oil interests was the real driver.”

To get through his 1975 testimony before the U.S. Senate, Gottlieb worked with his lawyer to craft an acceptable statement with just enough ambiguity to keep him out of trouble: “The approved operation was to mail a monogrammed handkerchief containing an incapacitating agent to the colonel from an Asian country. [Gottlieb] testified that, while he did not now recall the name of the recipient, he did remember mailing from the Asian country, during the period in question, a handkerchief ‘treated with some kind of material for the purpose of harassing that person who received it.’” This incapacitating agent, which was tuberculosis, he told his lawyer, was sent from a pretend “fan club” and Mahdawi “died after a couple of weeks.” It turns out that more than a decade after the fact, Gottlieb had misremembered the outcome and Mahdawi had survived receipt of the poisonous gift. He did, however, fall ill and was forced out of public life for several months. Mahdawi and certain of his family members developed serious cases of what they thought was “influenza” in 1962. “We weren’t trying to kill him,” Gottlieb later claimed. “Just put him on his back and make him sick.”

The CIA in the end kept their hands clean as another group did the ultimate task for them, the Agency noting Mahdawi “suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad (an event we had nothing to do with) not very long after our handkerchief proposal was considered.” Iraqi citizens were shown on television a five-minute film featuring Qasim’s dead body, entitled The End of the Criminals, which culminated in his corpse being spat upon. The regime change the CIA had sought came to pass in 1963 with the rise of the Ba’ath Party and a new figure who would become inextricably linked to U.S. foreign policy for decades to come: Saddam Hussein.

Sukarno’s Temptation

Senator Schwarz: On the subject of Sukarno, were you involved in the making of the movie in which an actor was made up to look like Sukarno, and he engaged in sexual activity, with the proposal, the plan, being that the movie would be released in Indonesia?

Richard Bissell: I have no recollection of that.

-Top Secret U.S. Senate Testimony, June 11, 1975

Gottlieb for his part had continued to work on methods to handle problematic foreign leaders including, according to a Dulles biographer, “a noiseless gun which the committee had produced for firing darts smeared with LSD, germs, or venom at enemy agents or foreign personalities whose existence the CIA was finding embarrassing.” There was perhaps no other plot, however, more bizarre than the one revealed to Lenzner that had involved attempting to give a foreign leader a sexually transmitted disease. The full story was more strange that Lenzner could have ever imagined.

Following Dwight Eisenhower’s ascension to the presidency in 1952, some in the CIA felt that it was open season for the Agency to take on Cold War foes. A paramilitary officer passed by the desk of Joseph Burkholder Smith, who had recently joined the CIA, and excitedly described to him the prospects: “Now we’ll finish off the goddamned Commie bastards,” the officer said. “We’ll get rid of the fucking pinkos in the State Department and around this place too. They’ll all be as dead as that little baldheaded son of a bitch who said he thought he was going to cry last night when he had to concede to Ike.”

Smith, who had joined the Agency not knowing what to expect, was assigned to Asia as a case officer and trained in the art of deception. When planning covert action against a foreign nation, he learned that assassination was another tool at their disposal. “Maximum accomplishment via minimum violence became a prime consideration,” he recalled. “Thus, assassination was always a contingency action to be included in the plans, though approval would have to come from the National Security Council (NSC) before any assassination was attempted.” Recruitment of assassins appeared to Smith to be the most challenging piece of the puzzle: “The reading of case studies of the successful assassinations by Soviet secret service counterparts, such as the killing of Trotsky, wasn’t much help because the Soviet service exercised a control over its agents we could not impose, certainly not on Asians.” That left, in his estimation, “only criminals and cranks” for consideration to carry out the task on behalf of the U.S. government.

In the fall of 1956, the CIA set its sights on the first President of Indonesia. Smith learned this direction had come from Frank Wisner, the Agency’s Deputy Director of Plans: “I think it’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire,” he was said to have ordered. Smith was certain this had been passed down from CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. There was to be nothing to be put in writing about what the statement meant precisely. “Thus began a year and a half of concentrated misadventures,” he reflected, “that ended with thousands of Indonesians dead, and an American pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, in a Djakarta jail, awaiting execution.” With a population of 90 million, Indonesia was the third most inhabited country in Asia, behind India and China. The Agency’s ire was focused on the country’s leader, who according to the CIA did little beyond make speeches, at which he was nonetheless adept. Sukarno had begun showing signs of supporting Soviet and Chinese economic models for development and his political party PNI (in English, the Indonesian National Party) had worked closely with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), one of the largest Communist groups in the world. Smith did not completely buy into John Foster Dulles’ worldview: “I was convinced that he did more harm than good to our cause by demanding that people around the world take a stand either for us (the side of Light) or for the Russians (the hordes of Darkness).” In this model of black-and-white thinking, there was little room for shades of gray.

Sukarno’s reputation was that of a womanizer and he privately engaged in numerous affairs. He expressed no shame at bringing his attitudes into the workplace and he explained his reasoning behind surrounding himself with attractive young women in his autobiography:

I enjoy young women around my office. When visitors remark about my youthful female adjutants, I joke, “A woman is like a rubber tree. She’s not good after thirty years.” Let’s say I react better to women. They’re more understanding—more sympathetic. I find them refreshing. Women just have it for me. Again, I do not mean just physically. I’m drawn to a soft look or something that appears pretty. As an artist, I gravitate naturally toward what pleases the senses.

Late in the day I’m tired. I’m often so exhausted I can barely move a muscle. If some big, unattractive ugly bald male secretary came up with a huge file of documents for me to sign, I would scream at him to go away and leave me alone. Pieces of his skin would actually fall off from the shock waves. I would thunder at him. I would bring down lightning on his head. But when a slim, well-groomed, sweet-smelling girl secretary smiles gently and purrs softly, “Pak, please…,” you know what happens? No matter how irritable I am, I get calm. And always I say, “Okay.”

Upon first arriving in Indonesia, Smith could not help but hear gossip about Sukarno’s affair with the wife of an oil company executive. One of the nation’s top military leaders was rumored to have arranged the affair and Sukarno was said to have used military aircraft for his private trysts. The CIA was limited in its ability to use this information against Sukarno for propaganda purposes, having ceased its subsidization of the local press to plant stories years before. What the Agency did have was contact with dissident colonels intent on undermining Sukarno’s power. The Agency wanted to take this relationship as far as it could without seeking the approval of the NSC, lest their plans be halted. They hid their source of the intelligence and hoped to submit enough alarming information to prompt the course of action they wanted to take. “This was a method of operation which became the basis of many of the political action adventures of the 1960s and 1970s,” Smith wrote. “In other words, the statement is false that CIA undertook to intervene in the affairs of countries like Chile only after being ordered to…In many instances, we made the action programs up ourselves after we had collected enough intelligence to make them appear required by the circumstances. Our activity in Indonesia in 1957-1958 was one such instance. We also made a few special contributions to the technique of making a situation appear to require that CIA step in to correct it.”

The new U.S. ambassador, John Allison, was skeptical of the value of having a CIA case officer in contact with dissident colonels. The Agency swiftly mitigated this by lying to him, pretending that contact was occurring through a series of sophisticated cut-outs. “The most efficient way,” Smith came to realize, “to handle ambassadors who demand their rights as heads of U.S. missions abroad to be informed of CIA operational activities was to tell them plausible lies.” Ambassador Allison “continued to raise annoying questions” until the CIA had seen enough, working through Director Dulles to cajole his brother at State to have Allison removed from his post within a year. After this, they stopped hearing any objections towards their preferred plan. Once the rebel colonels began requesting arms, however, the CIA faced a dilemma: while still wanting to avoid oversight from the NSC, they risked losing access to this intelligence source if they failed to produce the weaponry being sought. The solution, they believed, was to provide funds that could then be used to purchase arms, which they viewed as being plausibly deniable. A problem was that the colonels wanted U.S. arms, so Smith sought out the services of an intermediary, who they decided may have been “even more flamboyant than one the colonels might arrange for themselves.” With the military options running out, their focus turned to propaganda.

Sukarno’s amorous ways gave ample ammunition for the Agency’s propaganda efforts. The CIA was made aware of another affair: this time with a Soviet female agent. They received reports that “a good-looking blond stewardess” had been present on all of his flights during his time visiting the Soviet Union in 1956 and that the same woman had also been seen in his company in Indonesia during a reciprocal visit. This had to be evidence of Soviet influence, blackmail, or both, placing Sukarno under control of the U.S.S.R., they convinced themselves. It was a tough avenue for the Agency to pursue given the general population’s apathy on the subject. “His conquests didn’t disturb Indonesians too much,” Smith admitted. “In Indonesian society a woman’s place is in the bed. And it was the Prophet Mohammed who promised his faithful warriors that he would furnish heaven with beautiful black-eyed houris to provide them eternal happiness if not eternal rest. However, what we were saying was that a woman had gotten the better of Sukarno. Being tricked, deceived, or otherwise outsmarted by one of the creatures God has provided for man’s pleasure cannot be condoned.” The CIA hoped that the propaganda they created on this front would have more impact outside of Indonesia. If they were able to foster a negative perception of Sukarno worldwide, this would make the task of removing Sukarno by the dissident colonels easier: “We wanted the world to agree with us that Indonesia would be better off,” Smith recounted. Their efforts were successful at adjusting the narrative; the story appeared around the world and the British quarterly Round Table attributed an Indonesian revolt in part to Sukarno having been blackmailed by a Soviet spy.

Their success going to their heads, the CIA officers began to pursue a new, deranged course of action. Walking into the office of Al Ulmer, Chief of the Far East Division one day, Smith encountered his colleagues preparing to watch a film. When the lights were dimmed, they turned their attention to watching “a grainy and gamey exposition of genital activity between what looked like a Mexican man and a seedy-looking woman.” The gentlemen all agreed that this effort at making a pornographic film featuring a pretend Sukarno would not suffice; they needed more suitable actors. On the surface, this was an extension of their more traditional media propaganda efforts: they had claimed Soviet blackmail was involved and here they were intent on producing the “proof” of it, whether through a porno or at least, still photographs showing “Sukarno” and his Russian girlfriend in the midst of intercourse.

What were called at the time “blue films” were procured for the Agency through their Chief of Security and close contacts with the Los Angeles Police Chief. They had an ample supply of films to review and they believed these would in some way work, “because they included dark male subjects, like the Mexican, who might be made to look like Sukarno with a little touching up,” Smith remembered. “The problem was the female partner. They did not use talent in blue films in Los Angeles in those days that could compare with that of a decade later. We saw no likely candidates for the beautiful blond Soviet agent.”

Finding an actor to mimic Sukarno’s looks was also proving to be difficult. The CIA asked the LAPD to locate for them “a dark and bald male lead.” They learned through periodicals such as Time magazine that “Sukarno almost never takes off his black military-cut pitji in public: he doesn’t like to reveal the fact that he is getting balder as the years go by.” The Agency decided to use his vanity against him by showing his baldness on screen; however, amongst all of the candidates they assessed, Smith found there were “a number of bald Chicanos but no Sukarnos.” The Agency went as far as deciding to develop a Sukarno face mask for their pornographic actor to wear and ask the LAPD to pay this performer to use it in their scene-for-hire.

The night of November 30, 1957, Sukarno was in the process of leaving a fundraiser at the school of his two oldest children when five hand grenades were thrown at his entourage. Sukarno avoided harm by ducking behind a car, but the explosions killed ten people and injured 48 children. The Agency had no clue as to the perpetrators, but not wanting to spoil an opportunity for propaganda, put out a story that the assassination attempt had been staged by the PKI at the behest of the Soviets.

The CIA continued its monitoring of Sukarno through attempt to bug his hotels throughout his travels internally, but were only successful in placing recording devices in advance of his arrival in Cairo. They learned nothing of operational importance, but delighted in eavesdropping on Sukarno’s conversation with the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Once settled in his room, Sukarno called Nasser with a warm greeting and an offer: “I have three gorgeous Pan American stewardesses here with me and they’d like to have a party.” There was silence on the other end of the line; Nasser eventually replied that he could not accept the invitation and summarily slammed the receiver down. Before this conversation, the Agency had considered recruiting one of the Pan Am flight attendants as an agent when they learned of his chartering of the plane for the trip, but ultimately viewed it as unproductive: they already had enough details on his sex life and training an agent to obtain useful intelligence would take too long. “We were relieved to know now,” Smith recalled after learning of the phone conversation, “that we hadn’t missed an orgy involving Sukarno and Nasser with all the possibilities the mere thought of such a thing brought to mind.”

In late 1957, a CIA-supported coup attempt embarrassed the U.S. when an Agency pilot who had been shot down during a bombing mission in May 1958, Allen Pope, was captured and made to stand trial. Sukarno ultimately released him in 1962, telling him: “I want no propaganda about it. Now go. Lose yourself in the USA secretly. Don’t show yourself publicly. Don’t give out news stories. Don’t issue statements. Just go home, hide yourself, get lost, and we’ll forget the whole thing.” After his return to the United States, Pope later flew further CIA missions in Southeast Asia. “I enjoyed killing Communists,” he remarked. “I liked to kill Communists any way I could get them...They said Indonesia was a failure, but we knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn’t even know what Communism meant.”

As Smith’s time on the Indonesian operation came to a close, he watched as an Indonesian military officer, Joop Warouw, desperately requested assistance from the CIA to support his rebellion efforts. Smith committed to memory the note signed by Director Allen Dulles that turned him down for the final time: “Tell Colonel Warouw that we must disengage,” which was followed by general encouragements and calls to courage. Later in 1960, Warouw was captured, imprisoned for six months, and then killed.

A colleague passed by Smith’s desk and handed him a package: “Here’s the final result of our porno studio,” the officer said of the film, entitled Happy Days, and produced by CIA freelancer Robert Maheu. “You’re supposed to be able to get anything at all printed in the Philippine press, maybe you can use these photos.” Smith did nothing further with the photos in the end and the film was never seen by the public. His superior who had given the order against Sukarno, Frank Wisner, lost his mind after the Indonesian operation failed. An officer visiting the office one day in 1958 found his secretary outside sobbing and Wisner babbling inside: “None of it made sense," he recalled. “It was like he couldn’t stop. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.” His employer and family not knowing how to address bipolar disorder, then known as manic depression, Wisner was subjected to electroshock treatments, resigned from the Agency, and took his own life in 1965.

Left out of Smith’s account was the actual plan for assassination revealed in later Congressional investigations. The Rockefeller Commission in 1975 found evidence of a plot to assassinate Sukarno; the Health Alteration Committee had begun these discussions in 1955. This information was removed from the version of the Rockefeller Commission report released to the public under orders of the White House. Richard Bissell, who replaced Frank Wisner after his departure from the role as Deputy Director for Plans at the CIA, testified that the assassination plot against Sukarno had “progressed as far as the identification of an asset who it was felt might be recruited for the purpose. The plan was never reached, was never perfected to the point where it seemed feasible.” No further investigation into this planning was undertaken and the 86-page report itself remained secret until 2016 when it was discovered as part of the papers of Dick Cheney, then the deputy assistant to President Gerald Ford.

Bissell later admitted in the 1990s: “We felt that if Sukarno could be biologically immobilized, it would be a tremendous gain” and they “ran a few ops...One involved a female associate of the target.” Bob King, Bissell’s special assistant, confirmed Gottlieb’s account that the plot involved attempting to give Sukarno a sexually transmitted disease: “It was common knowledge that Sukarno was insatiable. He took a great many airline stewardesses, one after another. So the thought was, Hey, let’s give him a dose of the clap. We did find a stewardess whose job was to keep him happy, but even at our worst, we couldn’t do it.” The existing CIA files reveal that under the name Project HARPSTAR, Robert Maheu had found an “attractive and intelligent female [that] could get to [Sukarno] and, through feminine charm, persuade his thinking in a more favorable direction.” The woman in question was described as 35-years-old, as well as “highly intelligent and extremely attractive.” The newly recruited agent accepted her role and pursued Sukarno in a trip to Indonesia in January 1959. The CIA revealed “she did meet Sukarno, but due to unfortunate timing that had him leaving his country on official business, she had little time to cultivate him; consequently, the purpose of the mission was not fulfilled.” The Agency was pleased that at a minimum they had selected the right recruit: “It should be noted that Sukarno took sufficient notice of her that during an unofficial visit to the United States in June 1959, he expressed a strong desire to see her and did.”

While the initial CIA-inspired rebellions had failed, the Agency later got its wish for the regime change following the mass killings in 1965-66 of upwards of a million communists, which culminated in the overthrow of Sukarno in 1967, who remained under house arrest until his death in 1970. His replacement Suharto ruled as an authoritarian leader for another three decades, being named as one of the most corrupt in modern history, embezzling billions of dollars from the Indonesian people.

Postscript

Gottlieb successfully maneuvered the U.S. Senate and through his immunity deals never faced punishment for his actions at the CIA, including document destruction that served to erase his legacy at the Agency. Much like his Project MKULTRA files, any mention of the Health Alteration Committee was completely wiped from the Agency’s documentary record: requesters later asking for such files through the Freedom of Information Act were provided only the testimony that he stage managed with Lenzner back in 1975.

Throughout his involvement in the Indonesian covert operation, Joseph B. Smith had believed that the Agency’s targeting of Sukarno had not meant an intention of assassination, but rather a nudging to move his positions to match those of U.S. interests. How a fake Sukarno pornographic film shared with the public anonymously was intended to accomplish this, he never explained.

In his earlier years at the CIA, Smith had his naivete challenged while working in Malaysia. There he met a 91-year-old financial adviser who informed him he had never met an intelligence officer with deserving of the moniker, their mental acuity sorely lacking in his view. Despite this introduction, Smith mistakenly believed the man was interested in hearing of the Agency’s views on world affairs and he parroted John Foster Dulles while the man patiently listened. Taking his silence as interest, Smith pontificated on the burden of the United States in an ideological world conflict, humbly leading the fight for fundamental values because history had given this responsibility to the free world. There was a long pause from the old man. “Young man,” he replied, “I hope you really don’t believe any of what you’ve just told me. I don’t see how you possibly could, you seem to walk and move about like a rational person. No rational person could believe such utter nonsense. In any case, I implore you, don’t try to tell this to the Malays. They are very polite people, so they won’t harm you, but in their hearts they’ll want to lock you up in some institution for the disturbed.”