October 1, 1999, Monthly Review, Subversion in British Guiana: Why and How the Kennedy Administration Got Rid of a Democratic Government, by Hector J. Parekh,

October 1, 1999, Monthly Review, Subversion in British Guiana: Why and How the Kennedy Administration Got Rid of a Democratic Government, by Hector J. Parekh, 

On June 30, 1963, President John F. Kennedy, his British counterpart Harold Macmillan, and a coterie of ambassadors, Foreign Ministers and assistants, met for talks at scenic Birch Grove, England. A joint press communique revealed that the delegations discussed issues of mutual and global importance, such as the multilateral force treaty. However, nowhere in the text of the communique is it mentioned that the question of British Guiana (now Guyana) figured prominently in the Birch Grove discussions. Macmillan's memoirs and those of Presidential Aide Theodore Sorenson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk all fail to acknowledge that British Guiana - a small, economically backward colony in South America with the population of a small American city - was actually the first subject on the agenda that summer day in 1963. Even Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Kennedy Administration only covers the Birch Grove meeting in one cryptic sentence: "... Macmillan said no on multilateral force and yes on British Guiana." It is only in recent years, with the partial declassification of documents surrounding U.S. relations with British Guiana, do we learn what Macmillan agreed to: a covert scheme to remove Cheddi Jagan, British Guiana's left-leaning but democratically elected leader, from power.

Origins: 1953-1961

The origins of this little-known tale of subversion (little-known because details remain secret even to this day) go back to 1953, when Jagan's Peoples' Progressive Party (PPP) first came to power in the colony of British Guiana. The PPP's leaders were young, independence-minded Guianese who, by and large, looked to socialism to end the cycle of economic dependency that colonialism had brought to their colony. Jagan openly expressed his admiration for communist governments - a politically naive move, in the context of the West's 1950s anticommunist fervor. It is little wonder, then, that the British Government used Jagan's first contentious piece of legislation, a 1953 labor relations bill that proposed an overhaul of the colony's labor union system, as proof that the PPP wanted to take British Guiana down the slippery slope towards communism. The British Government dissolved the PPP government only 133 days after the 1953 elections and quickly threw Jagan in prison.

In 1957, the Guianese people reelected Jagan and his PPP under a new and more restrictive constitution. This time, Jagan's first effort was to draft, in true "socialist" fashion, a Five-Year Plan for the economy. Because the British Guianese legislative assembly did not have taxation powers, Jagan sought foreign loans to implement his plan. He flirted with the Communist Bloc and Cuba and received some lucrative offers, all of which the British government in London disallowed. But Jagan remained determined to get the money he needed to implement his economic plan. So, in August 1961, after winning yet another election, he prepared to take his crusade for development aid directly to President Kennedy's Oval Office.

Jagan and the United States: "Whole-hearted Cooperation?"

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that all Americans knew or even cared about Cheddi Jagan; but those who did clearly did not like him. State Department files in the U.S. National Archives hold many hundreds of letters from U.S. citizens hostile to the idea of another Castro in the American hemisphere. The State Department responded to many of these letters by gently informing the writers that the British Guianese elected Jagan in a free and fair election and, despite what they read in the newspapers, Jagan never actually called himself a communist.

In the Senate, Thomas Dodd saw Jagan as a proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing, akin to Fidel Castro, who came to power in Cuba on a platform of reform and democracy - only to show later his communist stripes. For Dodd, the fact that Cheddi Jagan denied being a communist was irrelevant: "If an animal looks like a duck, walks like a duck and lives habitually with ducks, I believe that every rational person would be prepared to agree that the animal in question is a duck." The Senator cautioned President Kennedy against cooperating with Jagan, noting that "being nice" to communists, like Josef Tito in Yugoslavia, did not work out to be in the best interests of the United States.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk agreed with Dodd's assessment. Believing Cheddi Jagan to be "very far to the left indeed," Rusk argued that Jagan's continued presence in Guianese politics would be a "setback" for the hemisphere. "In the final analysis," Rusk noted, "we should plan for the possibility that we will have no responsible alternative but to work for Jagan's political downfall."

But in late 1961, President Kennedy and his Special Assistant, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., were not yet convinced of the threat Jagan posed to the United States, and despite public and congressional aversion to Jagan, they both believed that an amicable working relationship with Jagan's PPP would be the best and safest course of action. Unfortunately, when Jagan came to the United States in late October 1961, he failed to make a good impression on Kennedy. His refusal to say anything negative about the Soviet Union during an appearance on "Meet the Press" angered the President because it made cooperation politically difficult. Moreover, during the meeting,Jagan failed to convince Kennedy of his sincerity by side-stepping when questioned about his ideological beliefs. "Well, Bevanism, Sweezyism, Hubermanism, Baranism - I really don't get those ideological subtleties," Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., recorded him as saying. Still, though Kennedy privately confided that he doubted Jagan would remain committed to parliamentary democracy, he wanted to try to woo him into the democratic camp. Thus, at the end of 1961, the U.S. government's official policy was a "whole-hearted, across-the-board effort to work with the new Jagan Government and to foster effective association between British Guiana and the West." But before the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) could send the nearly 1.5 million dollars (U.S.) in technical aid that Kennedy allotted to British Guiana, a political riot broke out in the colony on February 16, 1962, forcing the United States to rethink its policy towards Cheddi Jagan.

Toward a New Policy (1962)

The February 1962 riot had a profound impact on U.S. policy toward British Guiana. If Kennedy's policy of cooperation was, before the strike, politically dangerous in light of congressional opposition to the Jagan government, it was even more so afterwards. How could the President justify cooperating with a government that very obviously did not have the full support of its people?

For this reason, Dean Rusk reversed U.S. policy towards British Guiana shortly after the riot. In a once Top Secret missive to his British counterpart, Lord Home, Rusk stated that "it would not be possible to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan." The inference in this sentence is unmistakable: Rusk wanted the British to do something about this colonial nuisance.

But what? Deposing a democratically elected leader was a thorny affair in which the British government did not want to become involved. Besides, at seven million dollars (U.S.) a year, British Guiana's colonial status was a drain on British coffers. Removing Jagan and reimplementing direct rule would raise that figure to twenty million dollars (U.S.). What is more, the British government could not see what all the fuss over Jagan was about. To them he was not the fearsome communist boogie man the United States made him out to be. In Colonial Secretary Reginald Maudling's words, he was little more than a "naive London School of Economics Marxist filled with charm, personal honesty and juvenile nationalism."

In short, the British government saw it as neither desirable nor necessary to get rid of Jagan simply because U.S. knee-jerk antimarxists disagreed with his ideological disposition. Colonial Secretary Maudling summed up the British feeling over Jagan most concisely when he asked Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., tongue in cheek: "if you Americans care about British Guiana so much, why don't you take it over? Nothing would please us more."

Though no one in the U.S. government ever thought of going that far - ethical arguments aside, the costs alone of occupying the country would have led to insurmountable congressional opposition - the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 sharply refocused U.S. public attention on the specter of communism in the Caribbean and put pressure on Kennedy to do something about Jagan. By late 1962, the pragmatic Kennedy was already looking ahead to the 1964 presidential campaign and believed that British Guiana, added to the Cuba problem, could well tip the scales in the Republican party's favor. The American people, he felt, would not stand for a situation which looked as though the Soviet Union had "leapfrogged over Cuba to land on the continent of South America."

Conveniently, Kennedy found an easy solution to the Jagan problem in the form of electoral manipulation. Guianese politics was not a very sophisticated affair. By and large, the multicultural colony's two most populous races, the Africans and the East Indians, split the popular vote equally. Because Guiana's East Indians worked mainly in the agricultural sector, the East Indian-led PPP captured all of the colony's numerous rural ridings (electoral districts), while the mainly African Peoples' National Congress (PNC) won the smaller number of municipal ridings. A third party, the United Force (UF), led by a millionaire of Portuguese descent, also captured a number of city ridings. Because Cheddi Jagan's PPP had not won a large majority of the popular vote, British officials came up with the idea of changing the electoral system to proportional representation (PR). Under this system, a political party will win a number of seats in the legislative assembly commensurate with the percentage of the popular vote it receives in an election. If this were to occur, Jagan would not be able to win a majority in the legislative assembly, and a UF-PNC coalition might be brokered to keep the PPP out of power.

The problem that remained was how to go about changing the electoral system. Even though Guiana was still fully a British colony, Cheddi Jagan had been elected in a free and fair election under a democratic electoral system to which Britain itself adhered. Simply imposing proportional representation for no good reason would leave Britain to face a barrage of protests in the United Nations General Assembly. What the British government needed was some kind of situation - an "emergency," one U.S. State Department official put it - to prove to the world that the British Guianese electoral system was not working and needed a little "fine tuning."

Covert Action and British Guiana

Since the end of the Second World War, U.S. policymakers have often relied on covert action to effect U.S. foreign policy objectives as the well-documented cases of covert U.S. involvement in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile attest. Like nearly all postwar Presidents, John E Kennedy was not gun-shy about using covert action. But the failed Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961, in which CIA-supported Cuban exiles tried to invade Cuba, left Kennedy red-faced and, as a result, he was more cautious when dealing with covert action in British Guiana. He knew that covert action was the most precarious option he had at his disposal, for if evidence of U.S. subversion came to light, Jagan would become "a martyr of Yankee imperialism" in the eyes of the world.

But the CIA, facing a post-Bay of Pigs imperative to prove its relevance to U.S. policymakers, continued to work on the British Guiana problem. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. noted that in the wake of the Bay of Pigs humiliation, the CIA's Directorate for Plans (DDP) needed a place to practice its skills, to hone its techniques of covert action, in short to "show its stuff." (Letter to the author, October 1996.) Given the U.S. public's aversion to the Jagan Government, British Guiana was an obvious target.

The first plan the DDP came up with, the details of which are classified to this day, involved manipulating an election in British Guiana under the traditional electoral system. But this plan met with opposition from White House staff members. The President's national Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, told Kennedy that he did not believe that the "CIA knows how to manipulate an election in British Guiana without a backfire." Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. concurred and asked whether the CIA could carry out a "really covert operation - i.e., an operation which, whatever suspicion Jagan might have, (would) leave no visible traces which he can cite before the world as evidence of U.S. intervention." These criticisms led to a reexamination of the Agency's original tactical plan, the result of which was a politically safer, but no less effective approach to covert action: the manipulation of the British Guiana Trades Union movement.

During the 1960s, official State Department policy aimed to give Caribbean trade union movements an "appreciation of U.S. foreign policy and trade objectives." President Kennedy chartered the American Institute for Free Labor development (AIFLD) in August 1961, partly to further this policy and to help fend off communist influences in Latin American and Caribbean labor unions. However, various authors have contended that AIFLD played another role, as a covert arm of the CIA. Where British Guiana was concerned, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. confided that AIFLD "very likely organized and financed opposition to Jagan." In addition to supporting the British Guianese labor unions financially, AIFLD trained foreign labor "operatives" at its school in Front Royal, Virginia. In the summer and fall of 1962, AIFLD reportedly graduated no less than six British Guianese operatives,who went on to play pivotal roles in organizing and fomenting strikes in their country in 1963.

While AIFLD explored the potential for cooperation with British Guianese labor unions, the State Department began making overtures to Jagan's main rival, Forbes Burnham, to see whether he would be willing to lead a U.S.-sponsored coalition government against Jagan. British officials considered Burnham to be a shrewd opportunist, who looked to politics as a means to achieve personal power. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. agreed with this assessment and told President Kennedy in writing that an independent Guiana would be worse off under Burnham than Jagan.

But Burnham, despite being a self-professed "Scandinavian style" socialist, did not have the same reputation that Jagan did in the United States and managed to make a favorable impression on the State Department, AID, and labor leaders whom he met in Washington. On October 14, 1962, less than two weeks before a British Guianese Independence, Burnham met in secret with State Department officials, who warned him that he would not receive U.S. economic aid if he collaborated with Jagan in any way.

Creating Crisis

Armed with the moral support of the State Department and a promise of future economic aid, Burnham returned to British Guiana and began to lobby in favor of changing the electoral system to one based on proportional representation. He adopted the slogan "no PR, no independence" and saw to it that an Independence Conference held in Georgetown degenerated into a squabble over changes to the electoral system. The future dictator of Guyana, remembering the State Department's warning, refused every one of Cheddi Jagan's numerous offers of compromise.

In early April 1963, Jagan proposed what might have been a harmless labor relations bill, designed to eliminate "company unions" by giving workers in a given industry the right to vote for the union they wanted to represent them in the British Guiana Trades Union Council (BGTUC). But the BGTUC did not see the bill as harmless and called a general strike on April 22. Jagan, refusing to be intimidated, passed the bill on the same day.

According to documents declassified in 1996, the real purpose of the April 1963 strike was to overthrow the Jagan government. Once the strike commenced, BGTUC head Richard Ishmael refused all negotiation with the government. For example, when Home Affairs Minister Claude Christian agreed to hold off enactment of the legislation pending discussions, Ishmael ignored him.

By May 9, the economic situation in the colony had deteriorated markedly. More seriously still, scores were dying from related racial violence between Guiana's Africans and East Indians, whose mutual antipathy dated back to the nineteenth century. The U.S. government knew that if the situation grew worse, the Macmillan government would have the excuse it needed to suspend the British Guianese constitution and impose a new electoral system in the colony.

U.S. covert operators and the funds they supplied played a pivotal role in blowing the strike of 1963 out of proportion. Without funds, the strike would have lasted no more than a few weeks at best before the threat of starvation forced Guianese laborers back to work. Instead, workers were able to stay on strike for eighty days - enough time to virtually cripple the economy. Their leader, Richard Ishmael, received a small amount of overt emergency aid from world trade unions such as the U.S. AFL-CIO, the British Trades Union Council, and the Caribbean Confederation of Labor.

But emergency aid was not enough. In order to keep worker morale high and ensure the strike's momentum, the BGTUC needed to keep actual funds flowing into the pockets of British Guiana's workers. For this, the State Department entered into the fray and coordinated relief efforts from Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Georgetown. At one point, the U.S. government arranged for the deposit of a minimum of thirty thousand dollars (U.S.) into the accounts of British Guianese trade unionists Joseph Pollydore and Walter Hood, in order to help the BGTUC "meet the shock of [the] first checkless payday."

Until quite recently, the source of the BGTUC's funding remained a secret. The AFL-CIO openly admitted to supporting the BGTUC financially, but claimed that the funds came from U.S. union coffers and nowhere else. The U.S. government maintained that it had nothing to do with the strike efforts and still refuses to declassify many documents relating to its operation in British Guiana. However, in once-classified government memoranda, one gleans evidence of U.S. covert involvement. For example, at the beginning of the strike, Consul General Melby wired the State Department advising that it should be wary of sending money directly to BGTUC head Richard Ishmael because he "is too erratic, talks too much [and] would be bound to give away the source of the funds." (Emphasis added). Because the source of the funds was supposedly the AFL-CIO and its affiliates, who openly admitted their support for the BGTUC, the source that Ishmael "was bound to give away" was evidently the U.S. government. How much the United States spent on the strike is still a matter for speculation since "national security" precludes declassification of certain documents.

By the time Kennedy and Macmillan met at Birch Grove in June 1963, the U.S.-backed strike had brought the British Guianese economy to a virtual standstill. The turmoil in British Guiana, gave the British government the justification it needed to intervene in the colony's electoral system. When the Colonial Secretary asked the President whether the United States would be prepared to support Britain in the United Nations should the former change the electoral system in British Guiana, Kennedy (who had twice expressed his concern over the impact of a "communist" British Guiana on his chances for reelection), piped up enthusiastically: "It would be a pleasure. We would go all out to the extent necessary."

A Dubious Legacy

Shortly after Birch Grove, the general strike in British Guiana ended when the BGTUC suddenly and inexplicably agreed to negotiate with the Jagan government. In October 1963, at an Independence Conference in London, Colonial Secretary Sandys declared that the "root" of the British Guianese troubles was the development of party politics along racial lines. He argued that changing the electoral system to one based on proportional representation would resolve the problem by encouraging "interparty coalitions and multi-racial groupings." In December 1964, despite receiving a majority of the popular vote, Cheddi Jagan's PPP lost its majority status in the legislative assembly to a U.S.-supported coalition government led byForbes Burnham.

In 1996, former Special Assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. admitted that "as it turned out, Jagan was neither as sinister nor Burnham as benign as we supposed." Ironically, the U.S.-supported government ofForbes Burnham quickly turned "socialist" and began nationalizing some of an independent Guyana's main industries. But after Guyana's independence in 1966, the American public, preoccupied with events in Southeast Asia, did not noticeBurnham's turn to the left or his increasingly corrupt leadership. He ruled Guyana until his death in 1985.

The "Illusion of American Omnipotence"

The real reason for Cheddi Jagan's removal from office is shocking. As the evidence in the historical record shows, John E Kennedy and his administration never perceived any strategic or economic threat from the Jagan government. What really concerned the President was how the U.S. public's perception of "another Castro" in the hemisphere would affect his chances for reelection. By getting rid of Jagan, President Kennedy was simply ensuring that his Republican competitors would have one less round of ammunition to fire at him in the presidential campaign of 1964.

In 1975, Senator Frank Church wrote that the "illusion of American omnipotence" contributed to the "fantasy that it lay within [the U.S.'s] power to control other countries through manipulation of their affairs." In the case of British Guiana, this notion was not fantasy. This case is a solid example of how covert action could destabilize a foreign government and leave very few telltale signs. In the final analysis, however, arranging for Jagan to lose power did not further any real U.S. national interest in the slightest. The Kennedy Administration wasted taxpayers' money getting rid of a leader whose only crime was to disagree vocally with the perceived capitalist exploitation of his country. As a question of the esthetics of imperialist intervention in the affairs of small nations, the covert operation in Guyana was artful and elegant. But for the people of Guyana, who then lived through twenty years of the corruptBurnham dictatorship, a certain lack of appreciation is entirely understandable.

Hector J. Parekh earned an MA from the University of Calgary. He currently lives in Ottawa.