Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
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May 29, 1997, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 19; Column 1; National
Desk
LENGTH: 1120 words
HEADLINE: C.I.A. Destroyed Files on 1953 Iran
Coup
BYLINE: By TIM WEINER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 28
BODY:
The Central Intelligence Agency, which has repeatedly pledged
for more than five years to make public the files from its secret mission to
overthrow the government of Iran in 1953, said today that it had destroyed or
lost almost all the documents decades ago.
Two successive Directors of Central Intelligence, Robert M. Gates in 1992 and
R. James Woolsey Jr. in 1993, publicly pledged that the Iran records would be
released as part of the C.I.A.'s "openness" initiatives. But they did not know
there was virtually nothing left to open: almost all of the documents were destroyed
in the early 1960's.
"If anything of substantive importance that was an only copy was destroyed at
any time," Mr. Woolsey said tonight, "this is a terrible breach of faith with
the American people and their ability to understand their own history.
"I had every reason to believe in '93 that the full historical record, anything
important to the historical understanding, was there and available. I had no
notion that anything important had been destroyed."
A historian who was a member of the C.I.A. staff in 1992 and 1993 said in an
interview today that the records were obliterated by "a culture of destruction"
at the agency.
The historian, Nick Cullather, said he believed that records on other major
cold war covert operations had been burned, including those on secret missions
in Indonesia in the 1950's and a successful C.I.A.-sponsored coup in Guyana
in the early 1960's.
"Iran -- there's nothing," Mr. Cullather said. "Indonesia -- very little. Guyana
-- that was burned."
Brian Latell, the C.I.A. official who runs the Center for the Study of Intelligence
at the agency, acknowledged today that most of the Iran records were destroyed
or lost in the 1960's. He said he thought the agency still had "substantial"
records on its covert actions in Indonesia, which it has promised to release.
He said he could not discuss Guyana, which he called an operation whose existence
the C.I.A. had never acknowledged.
"Dr. Cullather is correct" about the Iran records, he said.
In the early 1960's, Mr. Latell said, C.I.A. officials told the keepers of the
Iran records "that their safes were too full and they needed to clean them out."
"This was the culture in the early 1960's," he said. "No such culture exists
any longer and hasn't existed for some time."
The Directors in that era were Allen W. Dulles, who served from February 1953
through November 1961, and John A. McCone, who succeeded Mr. Dulles and served
through April 1965. It is unclear whether either man was aware of the destruction.
Mr. Cullather, now an assistant professor of history at Indiana University and
associate editor of the Journal of American History, joined the agency's history
staff in 1992. He was assigned to write a warts-and-all account of the C.I.A.-sponsored
coup in Guatemala in 1954. Mr. Gates had just made his pledge of openness and
promised to release the files on Guatemala, Iran and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba.
But the C.I.A. "quickly found there were no documents on Iran," Mr. Cullather
said. "They had been routinely purged. When I left in 1993, they had rounded
up about 25 or 50 pieces of paper. There was almost nothing. The bulk of the
documents on that operation were destroyed."
Mr. Latell said only "a small body" of Iran records remained. Other officials
said the surviving files totaled about one cubic foot. No one at the agency
had told Mr. Woolsey about the records' destruction before he gave a speech
in September 1993 rededicating the C.I.A. to releasing the Iran files.
Ed Cohen, the director of information management at the C.I.A., said in an interview
that strict procedures now insured that no valuable historical records were
routinely burned. "The destruction process is not mindless," he said.
Historical records of secret operations are reviewed by the agency's covert
operators, the C.I.A.'s general counsel, the agency's inspector general and
the office of the historian, where Mr. Cullather worked.
Mr. Cullather agreed that "there's no grand conspiracy in the C.I.A. to destroy
documents."
"What there is," he said, "is neglect, or negligence" and a "culture of destruction,"
born of secrecy.
The broad outlines of the Iran operation are known: the agency led a coup in
1953 that installed the pro-American Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi on the throne,
where he remained until overthrown in 1979. But the C.I.A.'s records were widely
thought by historians to have the potential to add depth and clarity to a famous
but little-documented intelligence operation.
The C.I.A. has proved that it can release history-altering documents. On Friday,
it declassified 1,400 pages on the Guatemala coup in 1954 and two historical
papers, including Mr. Cullather's 116-page account of the operation. A separate
study on assassination planning for the coup was also released.
Mr. Cullather said the records on which he based his work were preserved only
by a quirk of history: a lawsuit seeking the documents, filed under the Freedom
of Information Act in 1982 by Steven Schlesinger, an author of "Bitter Fruit:
The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala," (Doubleday, 1982).
"The C.I.A. is presenting the Guatemala release as evidence of good faith and
openness," Mr. Cullather said, "but it's the exception."
He said the breadth and depth of the documents' preservation "generally doesn't
happen with C.I.A. operations."
Using the documents preserved by the lawsuit, Mr. Cullather produced an astonishingly
frank account, written in 1993 and printed in 1994, which may be a high-water
mark in the agency's openness.
His account says the C.I.A. directly lied to President Dwight D. Eisenhower
when it told him that only one of the agency-backed rebels had died in the Guatemala
coup. In fact, at least 43 rebels were killed. The account also says the Guatemala
operation, which "went into agency lore as an unblemished triumph," was marked
by poor security, bad planning and third-rate reporting.
It describes the leaders installed by the C.I.A. as repressive and corrupt.
The coup, it says, destroyed the political center in Guatemala, which "vanished
from politics into a terrorized silence," and led to a series of brutal military
governments and a "cycle of violence and reprisals" that "claimed the lives
of a U.S. Ambassador, two U.S. military attaches and as many as 10,000 peasants"
in the 1960's.
"The C.I.A. never learned from the experience," Mr. Cullather said, so the Guatemala
coup became a model for the Bay of Pigs debacle. "Legend replaced reality. It's
a classic case of the C.I.A. not learning from its own history," a history that
was secret.
GRAPHIC: Photo: The C.I.A. burned nearly all of its files on
its role in the 1953 coup in Iran. Documents detailing the 1954 Guatemala coup
were recently declassified, including a study of assassination plans, above.
(The New York Times)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: May 29, 1997