Rigged

When an interfering actor’s preferred electoral outcome is achieved, it is tempting to attribute the result to covert action. But the historical record paints a more uncertain picture. The CIA was in its infancy in 1948. It lacked not only a playbook but also experience. After the election, CIA officers, while triumphant, had no evidence that their tactics, which were just part of a broader operation, had made the difference. Maybe Marshall’s speech was the decisive factor, or maybe De Gasperi would have won unassisted. “We still argue about it,” Robarge said. “The best we can say, even at this late date, is that we probably gave the [Christian Democrats] enough of a margin [of victory]—a big margin—to be able to say the election was honest, the Communists lost fair and square, and there’s no reason for them to take to the streets.”69

Robarge’s assessment is entirely plausible but, in tracking the development of American foreign policy, largely irrelevant. In Washington’s collective imagination, the CIA had rescued Italy’s democracy. The CIA’s work “resulted in the Christian Democrats essentially dominating Italy for the next fifty years,” commented Joseph Wippl, a Cold War–era CIA officer, “and certainly it was in our interests to support them.” When I pressed Wippl, though, he recognized that he did not know if the agency had accomplished what he had just claimed it did. “If you were to ask me, ‘Joe, can you prove that that $10 million we spent in that election actually resulted in the election result?’ I can’t. It maybe would have happened anyway.”70

No proof was needed. America’s preferred party had won. And influential voices noticed. After 1948, Averell Harriman, a close adviser to Truman, and Allen Dulles, the CIA’s powerful deputy director, pressed for further interference in Italy’s elections.71 Dulles, in 1951, warned that the Italian Communist Party “constituted a continuing threat to democratic government and even to the security of the NATO forces in Western Europe.” Dulles further argued that the Christian Democrats—whom he described as “complacent and somewhat feeble”—would not act boldly on their own. “They may be prepared, however, with some backing from us and if persuaded by our seriousness, to take on, one by one, a series of measures to cripple the Communist Party.”72 Psychological warfare applies not only to the masses: Often, covert interference involves manipulating friendly officials, too.

Dulles advocated an aggressive posture. He called for a surge in covert support for “patriotic citizens” in the “press, radio, motion pictures and like media,” as well as efforts to “break the strength” of Communist-aligned labor unions. At the end of his cable, he concluded that “it should be a major point of American and of NATO policy to cripple these Communist Parties, to uncover their true intentions, to sow discord in their ranks and promote defection, to deprive them of privilege and respectability, and to drive them underground.”73

The CIA went to work. After 1948, it funneled almost $65.2 million into Italy (roughly $582 million in 2020 values) over the course of twenty years. Nearly 84 percent of those funds, or $54.6 million went to the Christian Democrats and related organizations, while the rest went to “other non-Communist parties and affiliates.”74 Dunn, for his part, suggested in 1951 that “a most effective way of combating Communism is … in such a way that the workers are approached on a personal basis.”75 But by then, targeted forms of interference had become difficult to execute. No future election elicited as much emotion as that of 1948, making another letter-writing campaign unfeasible. America needed a new playbook for a new moment.

The CIA picked William Colby, a young and ambitious intelligence officer, for the job. In 1953, he moved to Rome, where he spent the next five years manipulating Italy’s elections. In his memoirs, he described the effort as “by far the CIA’s largest covert political action program undertaken until then or, indeed, since—an unparalleled opportunity to demonstrate that secret aid could help our friends and frustrate our foes without the use of force or violence.” America’s preferred parties used the CIA’s money to execute newsletter, leaflet, and poster campaigns, as well as to organize public rallies, membership events, and voter registration drives—all to reach and influence the masses. “More was needed than the sporadic election year support,” Colby explained, “especially since Moscow was covertly pouring in massive support to the Italian Communists.”76

Colby was especially passionate about the media. While in Italy, he recruited a newspaper editor to whom he could feed anti-Communist stories, which other outlets then reproduced. Thomas Fina, an embassy official in Rome, later said that the United States had “the tilting power to shift decisions marginally one way or another” in Italy, including by “subsidizing the publication of books, the content of radio programs, subsidizing newspapers, [and] subsidizing journalists.”77 Colby rarely contacted the recipients of CIA funds directly. Most of the time, he worked through third parties, or cutouts, which protected both the agency and its beneficiaries.78

America was intent on keeping its hand hidden. Dulles wanted measures deployed against Italy’s Communists to “be covert not overt” and “presented to the people as independent” developments.79 Dunn, the ambassador, likewise concluded that “the most effective action in influencing the Italian people away from Communism would be that taken … without too much evidence of American participation.”80 His attitude had evolved since 1948, when much of America’s operation was visible and attributable. The second-term Truman administration, convinced that overt tactics would backfire, informed as few people as possible about the CIA’s work. This secrecy stretched across presidencies. In January 1953, the CIA director, Walter Smith, briefed Dwight D. Eisenhower, Truman’s successor, on world affairs. During the briefing, one of Eisenhower’s advisers said the “remarks of our aiding the Italian elections” should not be shared with members of Congress—a suggestion promptly “agreed upon” by the room.81

The CIA equated its effectiveness with which party led Italy. By this measure, every election was encouraging. The Christian Democrats governed through 1994, by which point the Cold War had ended. The perception inside Washington was that the CIA had changed Italy’s future. “Our accomplishments could not be measured in short-term ways,” Colby acknowledged in his memoirs. But he insisted that in the long term the CIA had strengthened the Christian Democratic Party, divided the Front, and therefore “did succeed.” He then launched into a passionate defense of covert electoral interference:

The charge has been leveled that the United States and, most certainly, the CIA have no business “interfering” in the domestic political affairs of another sovereign nation, that their assistance to one side or another in an election there is not only illegal but immoral… . [If] military “interference” is accepted, then surely lesser forms of interference can be justified under the same conditions. The test involves both ends and means. The end sought must be in defense of the security of the state acting, not for aggression or aggrandizement, and the means used must be only those needed to accomplish that end, not excessive ones. In this moral and philosophical framework, assistance to democratic groups in Italy to enable them to meet the Soviet-supported subversive campaign there can certainly be accepted as a moral act. It was clearly for the defense of the United States and its NATO allies against the danger of Soviet expansion, and the financial and political support given was plainly a low-key and nonviolent means of acting for that end. This framework cannot justify every act of political interference by CIA since 1947, but it certainly does in the case of Italy.82

Figures like Colby, who went on to direct the CIA, had come to believe in covert electoral interference, just as the Cold War expanded in scope and intensity. In 1950, Truman’s foreign policy team filed NSC 68, a top secret document advocating, in part, the need for “operations by covert means in the fields of … political and psychological warfare.”83 Covert action, initially limited in use, became central to American foreign policy. In 1953 alone, the CIA executed hundreds of covert action projects across forty-eight countries.84 Electoral operations were central to this web of activity. Miles Copeland, who joined the CIA in 1947, later summarized this evolving dynamic: “In an election in such-and-such a country, the Soviet KGB backs a candidate, the CIA backs a candidate, and the CIA candidate wins.”85

Decades later, in 1984, William Colby married Sally Shelton, his second wife and a former ambassador, eight years after retiring as CIA director. Colby suggested a destination wedding, with a specific location in mind: Venice, Italy.

“I think he wanted somehow to reconnect with Italy through marrying me, given our respective backgrounds, since we both loved Italy and both spoke Italian,” Shelton-Colby told me, reminiscing about her late husband. “He had a thing for Italy, a certain fascination for the country,” she recalled, as his time there “was one of the highlights of his career.”

Colby forever felt attached to the country he thought he had saved. Not long after their wedding, he and Shelton-Colby traveled there again. While strolling on a side street, Colby noticed a poster for the Democratic Party of the Left, the successor to the Communist Party, which had disbanded. He asked his wife to photograph him next to it. “We did it,” Colby told her, staring at the poster, tears in his eyes. “The U.S. did it.”86

Chapter 3

THE EXPLOSION

From Italy emerged an era of covert electoral interference. The Italy operation became “a template,” explained David Robarge, the CIA’s chief internal historian, for what the agency then did “in many, many countries around the world.”1 The appeal of this tactic was obvious: The costs were manageable, the loss of life was zero, and the payoff seemed substantial. Influencing an election to the detriment of a certain politician was also more palatable than, say, staging a coup d’état against that politician (as both Moscow and Washington did, in select cases, including CIA operations to topple the elected leaders of Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s).

Manipulating democratic elections in the name of democracy might seem contradictory. But during the Cold War, in what felt like an existential battle with the Soviet Union, the ends appeared to justify the means. “It was 100 percent ensuring that you got a government that was pro-U.S. as opposed to pro-Soviet,” said Bobby Inman, the CIA’s deputy director in 1981 and 1982. “Everything was seen in the light of bipolar: You are either with us or you are against us.”2 American policy makers feared that Communist politicians, once in power, would abandon the democratic model, as they had in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. These precedents provided officials in Washington with a moral rationale for covert electoral interference: better to undermine undemocratic candidates at the ballot box than let those candidates take power and unravel their democracies from within. Manipulating voters in the short term, the argument went, protected the rights of those same voters in the long term.

While the CIA escalated its covert operations, the KGB did the same, targeting democracies everywhere. “The Cold War affected everyone in the world,” writes historian Odd Arne Westad, and without it “Africa, Asia, and possibly also Latin America would have been very different regions today.”3 It should be said that comparing the CIA with the KGB is a fraught business. Domestically, there is no comparison: The KGB terrorized its citizens in a way that America’s equivalents never did. But on electoral matters, after 1948, both Soviet and American intelligence had entered “the game,” as various CIA officers put it. “This issue of intervening in elections was part of a comprehensive strategy, which both sides were doing,” said Arturo Muñoz, who joined the CIA in 1980. “We were a mirror image of each other.”4

Colby and Wyatt, while in Italy, had suspected that Moscow was bankrolling the Front, but lacked conclusive evidence. Now it seems all too clear. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union, despite its economic struggles, still used the KGB to distribute $200 million (roughly $480 million in 2020 values) to the Communist Parties of eighty countries.5 Although Italy’s Communist Party never took power, the KGB kept supporting its campaigns. Plan A was a Communist victory, but Plan B was what happened instead: Communist candidates receiving significant popular support. In foreign elections, America’s sole measure of success was whether its preferred parties triumphed. Moscow, by contrast, saw advantages to performing well in defeat. The robust standing of Italy’s Communist Party—in 1976, it received more than 12.5 million votes—lent Moscow influence abroad and propaganda at home. State-sponsored news outlets could advertise that in Italy, a country entrapped in America’s sphere of influence, millions of citizens still desired Communist rule.

For Moscow, covert electoral interference was a win-win. So the KGB provided Italy’s Communists with $6.2 million in 1972 and $6.5 million in 1976, hoping for victory but reaping benefits regardless.6 Beyond bankrolling campaigns, the KGB funded news outlets, bribed journalists, and spread disinformation. Ahead of the 1974 election in France, where the Communist Party boasted considerable support, the KGB carried out dozens of “significant operational measures” designed to advantage François Mitterrand, the head of the left-wing coalition, over Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, his right-wing rival; one such measure involved circulating a fake document connecting Giscard’s policies with the murder of one of his relatives. Mitterrand narrowly lost, but the interference persisted. In 1979 and 1980, the KGB’s Paris station planted 287 news articles, held 146 “influence conversations,” spread disinformation verbally seventy-eight times, and disseminated leaflets, books, and forgeries. The money also kept flowing. Ahead of another election, the French Communist Party received $2 million from Moscow, but its leader, Georges Marchais, was not yet satisfied. He wrote Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, requesting more “emergency financial aid.” The KGB dutifully delivered another $1 million.7

Compared with their American counterparts, Soviet intelligence possessed an advantage—a lack of boundaries and accountability—and a disadvantage: They had no background in professional campaigning. The Soviet Union never held a competitive election, so the initiatives that the CIA concocted in Italy, like voter registration drives, were unfamiliar to the KGB. But Moscow made up for its lack of experience with sheer will.

Targeted countries had at least one feature in common: They held competitive elections. Much of the world did not, and the countries that did were typically in America’s sphere of influence. For the CIA, unlike the KGB, manipulating an election often meant manipulating an ally.8 Such was the case with Japan, the target of a three-pronged electoral interference operation executed by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s. The first component involved delivering money and campaign advice to key members of the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The motivation was familiar—to preserve a friendly government—as was the method: The CIA used cutouts, or middlemen, to transfer the funds. “In effect the LDP was kind of in our pocket,” Robarge said. The second component, authorized in 1959, was to sow division within Japan’s leftist bloc. And third, the CIA ran a well-funded propaganda operation aimed at manipulating Japanese citizens.9

Each of these tactics had originated in Italy and had since become a part of the CIA’s playbook: subsidizing campaigns, dividing the opposition, and influencing voters’ minds. The effort appeared successful. The LDP governed without interruption from 1955 to 1993. “The principle was certainly acceptable to me,” U. Alexis Johnson, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan, said in 1994. “We were financing a party on our side.”10

In certain instances, Washington used covert electoral interference to establish rather than merely preserve its influence over another country. Before Guyana’s 1964 election, the CIA, hoping to unseat Cheddi Jagan, the country’s left-wing leader, provided the opposition with money and counsel. “Jagan must be defeated in the next election,” Dean Rusk, then the secretary of state, cabled President Lyndon B. Johnson. The operation, again, seemed to pay off. Forbes Burnham, America’s preferred candidate, was able to form a majority coalition. But as was so often the case, CIA-led interference in Guyana did not end with a single contest.11

As the next election approached, the CIA worked to “assure” Burnham’s continued success at the polls.12 In this instance, the United States, while influencing voters, also showed a tolerance for altering the actual vote count. In 1968, Burnham won the election by a wide margin—by cheating. Policy makers in Washington had known about his plans in advance. “When the U.S. Government learned that Burnham was going to use fraudulent absentee ballots to continue in power in the 1968 elections, it advised him against such a course of action, but did not try to stop him,” the State Department recently acknowledged. In all, from 1962 to 1968, the CIA spent more than $2 million on its covert action programs in Guyana, which Burnham ruled until his death in 1985.13

In Washington, covert electoral interference had earned a reputation for effectiveness. When the CIA got involved, America’s preferred candidate always seemed to win. Henry Kissinger, a famed practitioner of realpolitik, advocated such operations while serving as national security adviser, a position he assumed in 1969. A German refugee with a PhD from Harvard, Kissinger was known for identifying hidden opportunities to advance America’s interests. In 1970, he told President Richard Nixon about an “excellent” CIA memorandum detailing “covert programs to offset the threat of Communist election victories in the Free World,” from Chile to Guyana.14 Kissinger then sent Nixon the full document, part of which read,

There have been numerous instances when, facing the threat of a Communist Party or popular front election victory in the Free World, we have met the threat and turned it successfully. Guyana in 1963 and Chile in 1964 are good examples of what can be accomplished under difficult circumstances. Similar situations may soon face us in various parts of the world, and we are prepared for action with carefully planned covert election programs when U.S. policy calls for them.15

The case of Chile—top of mind for both the CIA and Kissinger—was unique in several respects. At a time when Moscow and Washington were targeting elections globally, CIA interference in Chile proved unusually extensive and unusually representative of the tools the agency used to interfere in elections. And because the U.S. government has declassified many of its Chile files, the CIA’s work there can be examined in exceptional detail.

While Italy marked the beginning of CIA-led electoral interference, Chile marked its peak.

Porter Goss much prefers to discuss his work as CIA director under President George W. Bush than his work as an intelligence officer a generation earlier. What Goss saw and did for the CIA is legend within the agency. After graduating from Yale in 1960, he joined the CIA’s clandestine service. “It was men from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, gentleman-type organizations, working with extremely loose rules in terms of gentlemen knowing what was right or wrong,” Goss told me on his porch in the Florida Keys. Even now, Goss speaks, thinks, and acts like a spy. “You see a nice thing that happened,” he proposed excitedly. “Maybe it’s an election; maybe the good guys win an election. If nothing that you can observe seems out of the ordinary, ‘oh, isn’t that a good thing, and it just happened,’ well, guess what: It happened because of covert action.”16

Goss recalled why the CIA became so involved in Chilean politics. “It was worries about what was going on in our hemisphere, defending the Monroe Doctrine, are Communists moving into our quarters, do we have stable governments,” and, above all, it was about Allende.

In interviews with Goss and his contemporaries, the same name always arose: that of Salvador Allende, a Chilean politician whom the CIA relentlessly worked to undermine. Allende was born to privilege in 1908 in the town of Valparaíso. As a young man, he was twice jailed for his political activism while pursuing his medical degree. A year after graduating, he founded the Chilean Socialist Party alongside fellow Marxists. He spent his adult life operating at the highest levels of Chilean politics. Well educated, deliberate, and ambitious, he was elected to the Senate in 1945. He first ran for president in 1952 but lost resoundingly. Six years later, in 1958, he ran again and came within thirty-three thousand votes of victory. Many Chilean analysts had anticipated that Allende would perform well, as a result of a decline in real wages, entrenched wealth inequality, and swelling resentment of the American companies that controlled copper mines in Chile. Washington, though, was caught off guard: A self-described Marxist had nearly won an election in the Western Hemisphere.17

Then, in 1959, Fidel Castro seized control over Cuba.18 Allende soon visited and met with Castro, to whom he became personally close. The CIA warned internally that “Communist influence has been rising in Latin America,” threatening “all aspects of US-LA relations—diplomatic, economic, and cultural.” The KGB, meanwhile, drew inspiration from Castro’s rise. Oleg Kalugin, then based in New York, said that “isolating America” from countries in its hemisphere was a “major strategic part of the anti-America battle.”19

In this environment, Chile’s 1964 election, in which Allende would again compete, captivated Washington. As in Italy, the logic of containment applied to Chile. The U.S. embassy in Santiago assessed that an Allende administration would pursue the “drastic reduction [of] US influence in Chile and the Hemisphere,” marking a “defeat for US policy” and prompting “alarms from the U.S. press and business interests.”20 The loss of Chile would also reflect poorly on the Alliance for Progress, America’s massive aid program for Latin America, for which Chile was meant to be the showcase.21

Worst of all, Allende sought to take power through a competitive election. “Another ‘Castro’ in the Hemisphere, particularly one who achieved power through the democratic process in a country where we have invested the highest rate of per capita assistance, would be awfully tough to handle,” reported a U.S. embassy official in mid-1964. A Time article similarly warned that Chile would be the first country in the Western Hemisphere to elect a Marxist president. The CIA feared other countries would then follow suit.22

As America plotted in secret, the Soviet Union did as well. Washington suspected what the KGB archives now confirm: Allende was cooperating with Soviet intelligence. Svyatoslav Kuznetsov, a KGB colonel, established contact with Allende in 1953 and assigned him the code name “Leader.” Through the 1950s, they met in various Latin American countries and established a “friendly and trusting” bond.23 Moscow began providing Chile’s Communist Party—which belonged to Allende’s coalition—with an annual subsidy, ranging from $50,000 to $400,000.24 The KGB recorded that, in 1961, a “trusting relationship” as well as “systematic connection” with Allende had been “solidified.” The archives read,

In that period, Allende declared his readiness to confidentially cooperate and provide necessary help since he considered himself a friend of the Soviet Union. He readily shared political information and, at the KGB’s request, took direct actions to protect Cuba and took steps to establish diplomatic relationship between Chile and the USSR.25