Covert operations as an instrument of foreign policy: United States intervention in Iran and Guatemala

This dissertation is an analysis of the role of the intelligence community in presidential decisions to use the CIA to intervene covertly. Specifically to what extent did CIA officials use their positions as heads of the intelligence community to push covert action. When this project first started, I imagined the problem as one of information management. Hence the role of the intelligence community in defining the threat seemed the key to understanding decisions to implement covert action.; This research will show that despite the bureaucratic and organizational rivalries, the CIA and the State Department defined the threat in similar fashion. Important differences exist between raw intelligence (daily State and CIA traffic as well as the opinion of high level CIA officials) and the finished intelligence product (NIEs and OIRs). Raw intelligence generally provides affirmative answers to questions decision makers ask about the level of Communist activity and influence, or the extent of popular disaffection with the regime. The finished intelligence products are more careful, more cautious in drawing conclusions, and will often challenge the prevailing perceptions.; While information the president receives about the situation in the country still remains part of the story, presidential perceptions of the utility of diplomacy and covert action played a far more important role. The CIA has made a compelling case for covert action largely because presidents began to view diplomacy as a weak and ineffective solution. The belief that the US could get rid of whomever it wanted quietly and without much cost played a major role in shaping how the decision making process has worked. This belief obliterated the need for the intelligence community to provide alternative conceptualizations of the problem, or for it to clearly define the nature of the threat. In the case of the Eisenhower administration, the president's perception of the domestic situation was all the more important. It called for portraying foreign policies, as radically different approaches. Under these circumstances, covert action assumed a more important purpose in that they provided the appearance of dramatic foreign policy victories, victories that were interpreted as a reversal in America's perceived passivity toward the Soviet threat.