Dispatches from a Controlled American Source in Quito

A review of The CIA in Ecuador, Marc Becker, Duke University Press, 2021.

A large literature exists on United States intervention in Latin America. Much has been written about the CIA’s role in fomenting coups, influencing election results, and plotting to assassinate popular figures. Well-documented cases of abuse include the overthrow of the popularly elected president of Guatemala in 1954 and the attempts to assassinate Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Books about the CIA make for compelling stories and sensationalist titles: The Ghosts of Langley, The Devil’s Chessboard, Killing Hope, Legacy of Ashes, Deadly Deceits. They are usually written from the perspective of the agency’s headquarters—which moved to Langley, Virginia, only after 1961—, and they concentrate on the CIA leadership or on the wider foreign policy community in Washington—The Power Elite, The Wise Men, The Georgetown Set. Rarely do they reflect the perspective of agents in the field: the station chiefs, the case officers, the special agents charged with gathering intelligence and monitoring operations on the ground. Such narratives require a more fine-grained approach that is less spectacular than the journalistic accounts of grand spying schemes but more true to the everyday work of intelligence officers based in US diplomatic representations abroad. Fortunately, sources are available. There is a trove of declassified intelligence documents made available to the public through the online CREST database under the 25-year program of automatic declassification. In The CIA in Ecuador, Marc Becker exploits this archive to document the history of the Communist Party of Ecuador as seen from the surveillance and reporting activities of the CIA station in Quito during the first decade of the Cold War.

This is not a spy story

This book will be a disappointment for readers with a fascination for the dark arts of the spy trade and who expect crispy revelations about covert operations, clandestine schemes, and dirty espionage tricks. There were apparently no attempt to manipulate election results, no secret plots to eliminate or discredit opposition leaders, and no extraordinary renditions to undisclosed locations. Of the two missions of the CIA, the gathering of foreign intelligence and the conduct of covert action, archival evidence indicates that the Quito station strictly stuck to the first one during the period covered by the book, from 1947 to 1959. Nor are the names of confidential informants, domestic assets, or deep cover moles uncovered and exposed: intelligence reports or diplomatic dispatches usually don’t identify their sources by name and only mention their reliability (a “B2” classification thereby signifies that the source is “usually reliable” and that the content is “probably true.”) The farthest the author goes into revealing state secrets is by exposing the names of the successive station chiefs in Quito—for many decades, US authorities maintained that there was “no such things as a CIA station,” and diplomatic dispatches only referred to their intelligence as coming from a “controlled American source.” Using public records, Marc Becker was able to reconstruct their career path subsequent to their posting in Ecuador. They were not grandmaster spies destined for prestigious careers: throughout the 1950s, Quito was a small station for the CIA, and Ecuador was peripheral to Cold War interests. Their intelligence reports do not make for entertaining reading. They speak of bureaucratic work, administrative drudgery, and solitary boredom in a remote posting that rarely lasted more than three years.

To be true, despite the book’s title, the author is not interested in “the CIA in Ecuador.” He uses CIA documentation and State Department archives to write a detailed history of the left in Ecuador in the postwar period, focusing in particular on the Communist Party that was the object of intense surveillance from the CIA. The 1950s were a unusually quiet period in the turbulent political life of Ecuador. After a long period marked by political instability and infighting—twenty-one chief executives held office between 1931 and 1948, and no one managed to complete a term—, Ecuador entered a twelve-year “democratic parentheses” during which a series of three presidents were elected in what critics generally recognized as free and fair elections and were able to finish their terms in office and hand power to an elected successor from an opposing party. Despite persistent rumors of coups and insurrections, the army stayed in the barracks and public order was broadly maintained, with the occasional workers’ strike, student demonstration, or Indian mobilization, the latter facing the most violent repression. The Communist Party of Ecuador sought to coalesce these social forces into a political movement that would lay the basis for a more just and equal society. Rather than pressing for class struggle and a violent revolution, communist leaders advocated the pursuit of democratic means to achieve socialism in coalition with other progressive forces. But their attempts to form a broad anticonservative alliance with the liberals and the socialists repeatedly failed, and they drew minimal support during elections. Their emphasis on a peaceful and gradual path to power eventually led a radical wing to break from the party in the 1960s. After 1959, Ecuador returned to its status quo ante of political volatility and instability, and leftist politics became more fragmentary and confrontational.

Cold Warriors in Ecuador

Unlike Marc Becker, I am more interested in the CIA’s activities and style of reporting he indirectly describes than in the travails of the communist movement in Ecuador. Unsurprisingly, the authors of diplomatic dispatches and intelligence reports were Cold Warriors, and they shared the biases and proclivities of their colleagues and leaders in Washington. They considered world communism as the enemy, and drew the consequences of this antagonism for the conduct of foreign policy in Ecuador. They were convinced, and tried to convince their interlocutors, that the communists were dangerous subversives bent on death and destruction and that they plotted to disturb the smooth functioning of society. They were determined to implicate communists in coup attempts and they repeatedly pointed to external support for subversive movements. They saw the hand of Moscow, and Moscow’s gold, behind every move and decision of the PCE, and they closely monitored contacts with foreign communist parties and their fellow travelers, including by intercepting incoming mail and opening correspondence. Despite their weak number—estimate of party membership oscillates between 5000 and 1500 during the period—, communists were suspected of manipulating labor unions, student movements, and intellectual organizations, and of infiltrating the socialist party and progressive local governments. According to American officials, Ecuadorians did not take the communist threat seriously enough. United States representatives pressed the Ecuadorian government to implement strong anticommunist measures and applauded when it did so. The accusations of communists organizing riots and fomenting revolution fed an existing anticommunist paranoia rather than reflecting political realities. Evidence shows that the communists had no intentions of resorting to violence to achieve their political goals. But their claim for social justice and labor empowerment was perceived as posing a threat to the economic and political interests of the United States, and was fought accordingly.

In this respect, and contrary to its reputation as a rogue agency or a “state within the state,” there is no evidence that the CIA was running its own foreign policy in Ecuador. Its objectives were fully aligned with those of the State Department, and there was close cooperation between the CIA station chief and the rest of the embassy’s staff. Different branches of the government represented in Quito, including the military attaché, the cultural affairs officer, and the labor attaché, collaborated extensively around a shared anticommunist agenda. Indeed, Cold War objectives were also shared by other countries allied to the United States, and Becker quotes extensively from the correspondence of the British ambassador, who stood broadly on the same anticommunist positions but expressed them with more synthetic clarity and literary talent. To be sure, there were some petty infighting and administrative rivalry between services within the embassy. The CIA typically exaggerated communist threats, whereas State Department officials dedicated more attention to the much larger socialist party and to violent political organizations inspired by Italian fascism and the Spanish Falange. There were redundancies between official correspondence and covert reporting, and diplomats competed with CIA agents for the same sources and breaking news. Officials in Washington had “an insatiable demand for information” and were constantly fed by a flow of cables containing little valuable information and analysis. Occasionally, case officer would annex to their correspondence a tract or a manifesto that, considering the absence or destruction of party archives, provides the historian with an invaluable source of information.

Cognitive biases

In failing to give a realistic assessment of the political forces in Ecuador, CIA officials exhibited several cognitive biases and were prone to misjudgments and errors. They interpreted events through a Cold War lens that colored their understanding of the realities they observed. Their belief in the presence of an international conspiracy that sought to throw chaos across the region bordered on paranoia and made them neglect or distort important pieces of information. They failed to report that the communist party was opposed to involvement in military coups, and they overestimated the communists’ influence in the armed forces. They were blind to the threat posed by proto-fascist movements such as the falangist group ARNE and the populist CFP, suspecting the later of leftist leanings because its leader was a former communist even though he became violently opposed to his former comrades. They overreacted to some news such as the disruption of an anticommunist movie projection with stink bombs thrown by unidentified students or the spontaneous riots that followed the radio broadcasting of Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds, “a prank turned terribly awry.” They had mood swings that alternated between overconfidence and inflated fears, minimizing the strength of the party while overemphasizing its influence over the course of events. They exhibited an almost pathological urge to uncover external sources of funding for subversive activities, even though they knew that Ecuadorian communists had only minimal contacts with Moscow and that their party’s finances were always in dire straits. They were oversensitive to divisions within the party, providing the historian with valuable information about internal currents and debates, but failed to notice political organizing efforts among Indian communities that provided strong support to the party (in general, indigenous people were a blind spot in embassy’s reporting: “The Indians are apart and their values are unknown,” pondered the ambassador.) Like any bureaucracy, the CIA and the State Department fell victim of mission creep: as one officer observed, “There was a lot of information for information’s sake.”

Considering Marc Becker’s many criticisms of US interference and interpretive biases, one wonders what an alternative course of action might have been. The United States might have adhered to a strict policy of neutrality in the hemisphere and refrained from their vehement denunciation of communism by acknowledging that the Communist Party of Ecuador and its supporters were a legitimate political force in the local context. In other terms, they might have tried to disconnect Latin America from the broader geopolitical forces that were shaping their Cold War strategy, stating in effect that Ecuador was irrelevant to the pursuit of their global policy objectives. Considering not only their words but the limited means they allotted to CIA surveillance in Ecuador in the 1950s, this is more or less what American policymakers did: only with the turbulent sixties would the United States invest more means, including covert actions, to prevent the expansion of communism following the Cuban revolution and the rise in insurgency movements. Alternatively, at the individual level, officers might have tried to rid themselves of the cognitive biases and to paint a more realistic picture of the political situation, emphasizing not only the threat but also the opportunities raised by the development of the progressive left. This might have been the course pursued by more enlightened diplomats, but considering the political climate prevailing in Washington, where McCarthyism was in full swing and the State Department was decimated by red purges, this would have meant political suicide and instant demotion for the officers involved. Better, in their perspective, to bide their time and adhere to a more conformist line of analysis, serving to their political leaders the discourse that they wanted to hear.

A revisionist history

The historian is not without his own bias. Marc Becker is a revisionist historian bent on setting the record straight: during the 1950s, the Ecuadorian Communist party was a progressive force preaching reformism and European-style social welfare programs within the parliamentary system. To demonstrate his case, he sticks to the archival record and provides much more detail for the period from 1949 to 1954, for which sources are abundant and detailed, than for the years after 1955, for which the CREST database contains much fewer documents. Like his sources, he tends to overemphasize the geopolitical importance of Ecuador and Latin America in postwar global history. His concluding chapter on the year 1959 states that “the triumph of revolutionary forces in Cuba is arguably one of the most significant political events of the twentieth century.” He sees all activities of US diplomats in Ecuador with suspicion, and tracks in every detail the heavy hand of American interventionism where in fact diplomatic missions were only doing their job of representation, advocacy, and reporting. He detects a running contradiction between the official policy of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other countries and the reality of Americans trying to shape opinions and influence outcomes. In doing so, he doesn’t clearly distinguish between adherence to the principle of non-interference, the pursuit of influence through public diplomacy, and the defense of the national interest. The fact that diplomatic dispatches conclude that a presidential candidate or a policy measure may be more favorable to American interests abroad is not synonymous with meddling into internal affairs: it is the bread-and-butter of diplomatic activity, even though what constitutes the national interest may be open to democratic debate. In the case of Ecuador during the 1950s, it was in America’s interest to monitor the activities of a communist party that was vehemently opposed to “Yankee imperialist capitalism,” however small and inconsistent its threat to the neoliberal international order. The fact that diplomatic representatives and intelligence officers pursued this mission with dedication and rigor may be put to their credit, and our understanding of the past is made richer for the documentary record they left behind.