In the aftermath of the failed independence conference of 1962, British Guiana became a subject of debate in international forums. Cheddi Jagan appealed to both the British Commonwealth and the United Nations for assistance. In early 1963, Commonwealth members of the United Nations proposed sending a commission to investigate British Guiana and to help resolve differences. The Macmillan government rejected the help, reasoning that the “Commission might quite likely come down on Jagan’s side on the issue of the electoral system (since ‘first past the post’ is a more familiar and usual method of voting in Commonwealth countries than proportional representation) and this might prove embarrassing and even impede an ultimate settlement.”² British authorities also worried that the Committee of Twenty-Four, the U.N.’s “Committee on Colonialism,” would schedule public hearings on the status of British Guiana. At U.S. urging, Forbes Burnham made an appearance before the Committee of Twenty-Four in March 1963. Burnham’s appearance was designed both to demonstrate that Jagan was not the only national leader and to win the support of black African nations. Despite Burnham’s pleadings, the Committee of Twenty-Four voted to hold hearings on British Guiana at the 1963-64 U.N. session.³

Debate about British Guiana also intensified within the United Kingdom. In January 1963, Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, unexpectedly died. Gaitskell had generally supported Prime Minister Macmillan’s foreign policies. The new Labour leader, Harold Wilson, launched sharp attacks upon the government, perhaps sensing that the public had grown weary of the Conservatives, who had governed since 1951. Wilson’s criticisms quickly gained credence when, by March 1963, the John Profumo-Christine Keeler scandal began to envelop the Macmillan government. Profumo, the war minister, misled the House of Commons, asserting that he had not had a sexual relationship with Keeler, a prostitute. The affair evolved from a personal indiscretion into a matter of national security when the public learned that Keeler also had an intimate relationship with a Soviet military intelligence officer attached to the Soviet Union’s embassy in London. In this new political atmosphere, Labour members of Parliament, like Anthony Greenwood, Arthur Bottomley, and Fenner Brockway, began to question the government’s plans for British Guiana. Greenwood would become colonial secretary in the first Wilson government (1964-66). Parliamentary concerns about British Guiana were not limited to opposition politicians. Iain MacLeod, the former colonial secretary who retained his seat in the House of Commons, still held that the United States had succumbed to irrational fears about communism in British Guiana.⁴

Governor Ralph Grey doggedly opposed London’s plan to undermine the Jagan government. As always, the view from Georgetown differed remarkably from those in Washington and London. In his years in the colony, Grey had not come to admire Jagan. He continued to report that Jagan was an inefficient manager who was leading the colony into administrative and economic chaos. Nonetheless, he judged Jagan to be a superior politician and a better human being than either Burnham or Peter D’Aguiar. He noted that Jagan remained popular in the countryside and that he was capable of defeating a referendum on proportional representation. Even if London dissolved the government, Jagan would remain on the political scene. Colonial authorities had the choice of either dealing with Jagan as “an ineffective leader or as an effective opposer.” Grey asked, “Should we therefore avoid putting ourselves in any position from which it would be impossible, if all else failed, to ‘make the best of Jagan,’ as I was seemingly supposed to do when I was sent here?”⁵ Career colonial officials in London quietly accepted Grey’s arguments.⁶

The governor took special delight in ridiculing claims about international Communist activity in British Guiana. In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. officials asked the British to check out every allegation of Cuban subversion raised by Cuban refugees in Miami. As Grey lamented, “I have always thought it unfortunate that the picture of this country that has the widest circulation overseas is of conditions very different from those that are apparent on the spot.” Responding to U.S. intelligence, Grey’s security agents boarded the Russian ship, Mitshurinsk, looking for arms. The ship allegedly had a cargo of “tomato paste,” serving as cover for the arms. The governor’s agents found neither arms nor tomato paste on the Mitshurinsk.⁷ A Soviet trade mission to British Guiana in early 1963 proved similarly innocuous. D’Aguiar and his minions in the United Front thought the mission presaged a Soviet beachhead on the South American continent. The trade delegation found the visit disappointing, however, because the colony had little to offer that interested the Soviets. Jagan’s government signed a few small contracts to sell rice and timber in exchange for Soviet tractors. Although the four Soviet trade emissaries left the colony without any major deals, they apparently provided Guyanese males with an evening to remember. The Soviets hosted a farewell party at their hotel, replete with vodka, crabmeat, caviar, and women. Governor Grey’s office reported that “it was a very merry affair.”⁸

Beyond sending his sardonic reports about life in British Guiana, Governor Grey made one last effort to break the political deadlock in the colony. He vouched for Jagan in his efforts to reach President Kennedy. On 16 April 1963, Prime Minister Jagan sent a lengthy, impassioned letter to the president. As the governor explained to the Colonial Office, “It is all too plain that the current American policy is getting us—and them—nowhere.” In his cover letter to the State Department that accompanied Jagan’s plea to the president, Grey emphasized that “this country seen at first-hand is very different from almost all things that it is reputed to be.” Grey wanted U.S. officials to meet again with Jagan in the United States and to send an administration official, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., to British Guiana. Grey even seconded Jagan’s suggestion that President Kennedy should come to Georgetown.⁹ Beyond extending invitations, Jagan in his letter to Kennedy pleaded for economic assistance, citing several cases in which the United States had made preliminary promises of help and then reneged on loans. The prime minister praised the Alliance for Progress and noted that he carried out the type of fiscal, tax, and agrarian reforms called for in the charter of the Alliance. He stated that he wanted a mixed economy for his country and that his party had no plans to nationalize the key bauxite and sugar industries. He denied that the economy of British Guiana had become closely tied to “any international conspiracy.” In fact, the colony continued to sell most of its primary products to the industrial democracies. Jagan further reaffirmed his commitment to parliamentary democracy and his respect for the rights of citizens as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.¹⁰ The Foreign Office deemed Jagan’s letter “impressive” and predicted that President Kennedy would probably read it.¹¹

Jagan’s letter never made it to the Oval Office. Jagan merely received an acknowledgment from the president of his letter. The president’s advisers and the State Department agreed that the United States would not respond in detail to the points Jagan raised in his twenty-five paragraphs. In their view, Jagan had made two erroneous assumptions in his letter. British Guiana was not eligible for Alliance for Progress funds, and it was not a democratic, progressive country. Jagan’s Marxist beliefs belied his pledges of respect for parliamentary democracy. The State Department even suggested that Jagan had engaged in racial favoritism, claiming that his compulsory saving scheme would have fallen more heavily on black civil service workers as opposed to rice growers. The Kennedy administration’s cold 3 June 1963 response advised Jagan to consult with Consul Everett Melby if he had issues to discuss with the United States.¹²

Prime Minister Jagan and Governor Grey’s letters had arrived in Washington even as the administration plotted to intensify the pressure on Jagan and his colonial masters. Through National Security Adviser Bundy and then personally, President Kennedy asked Ambassador Ormsby-Gore in March and April 1963 about the United Kingdom’s future plans for the colony. The British responded that the time was “still not ripe” for an intervention in British Guiana.¹³ The Macmillan government, including Colonial Secretary Sandys, understood that it would have to overrule Governor Grey if it acceded to U.S. demands for action against Jagan. As Sir Hilton Poynton, the ranking career officer in the Colonial Office, lamented, formulating an overt policy was far more difficult than hatching a covert move against Jagan. Poynton also grumbled about pressure from the United States and the United Nations, “neither of whose business it really is.”¹⁴ The president’s inquiries followed what the administration would have judged an alarming report from Consul Melby. On 14 March 1963, Melby warned his superiors that “time favors Jagan,” because the PPP was strong and was working to solidify its political position. Melby correctly opined that the Macmillan government feared the international embarrassment that would accompany a move against Jagan. But the British were deluding themselves if they believed that the Jagan government would “disappear due to its own incompetence.” Few governments fell “through stupidity,” and in any case, Cheddi Jagan could count on “Janet Jagan and some of the men surrounding her” to provide the needed intelligence. Melby also warned that a new Labour government would likely not be interested in proportional representation and would accelerate the independence process.¹⁵

Consul Melby’s dispatch helped spur the administration into action. It began immediate inquiries into Harold Wilson’s views on British Guiana and vowed to inform him of the U.S. position on the colony when he called on Washington.¹⁶ Administration officials also held, on 20 March 1963, a presumably critical meeting on British Guiana that remains classified.¹⁷ CIA Director John McCone subsequently journeyed to London to discuss British Guiana with Prime Minister Macmillan. Whether Macmillan gave his approval for a new CIA campaign cannot be determined from available evidence. Poynton thought that his prime minister had satisfied McCone by explaining the United Kingdom’s international and domestic difficulties.¹⁸ The Colonial Office, however, may have been engaged in wishful thinking. In a 30 April 1963 message to Kennedy, Macmillan indirectly referred to clandestine activities, suggestively pointing to “our agreed plans.” Investigative newspaper accounts later claimed that Macmillan and Sandys acquiesced in the CIA role in the British colony.¹⁹ In any case, within a month after Mc-Cone’s meeting with Prime Minister Macmillan, the Kennedy administration launched another full-scale covert assault on Cheddi Jagan and the PPP. Operating through the AFL-CIO, the administration organized and financed an eighty-day general strike in British Guiana.

The general strike, which was ostensibly led by Burnham, Richard Ishmael, and affiliates of British Guiana’s Trade Union Council, began on 18 April 1963 and lasted until 8 July. The strikers claimed that the government’s proposal to strengthen labor laws would undermine the free trade union movement. Jagan’s party had reintroduced the labor bill it had first proposed in 1953, giving workers the right, upon a 65 percent approval, to decertify an existing union and join a new one. In introducing the bill, the PPP had an obvious political purpose, providing a vehicle for the mainly Indian sugar workers to leave the company union, the Manpower Citizen’s Association headed by Ishmael, and join a new union associated with the PPP. Although the proposed legislation would benefit the PPP, it could be readily justified within the context of the international labor movement. In 1953, Burnham had supported the same legislation, which had been modeled on the Wagner Act (1935) of the United States. British trade union officials admitted to the Colonial Office that they did “not see any real dangers in the bill.” They objected, however, to the growing influence of U.S. unions. British trade unionists further observed that the strike was “wholly political.” One noted that “if Dr. Jagan had called me and told me that the unions could write their own demands and he would agree to them, the TUC [Trade Union Council] would still find reasons for not accepting.” Governor Grey also did not find fault with the legislation.²⁰

The strikers proved as lawless as the gangs and mobs that had destroyed Georgetown in the previous year. Widespread looting again broke out. Because the strike shut down fuel supplies, looters especially favored stealing bicycles, locally known as “tickers” for the sound made when a rider shifted gears. Bombs exploded at government buildings. Strikers hurled rocks and bottles at Prime Minister Jagan and other government officials. Jagan’s bodyguard and a PPP legislator suffered serious injuries. Handbills were posted inciting strikers to violence. The handbills proclaimed: “Let us not be afraid to shoot!” As they had in 1962, Forbes Burnham and Peter D’Aguiar played to the mob. Burnham fired up crowds with denunciations of the government, and he led sit-ins at the entrances to government buildings. At one point in the strike, Burnham allegedly advised strikers to bring the agitation to “places where they grow rice.” British Guiana’s Indians grew rice. In response to unruly crowds, police apprehended strikers, loaded them into vans, and dropped them off outside of urban centers. D’Aguiar dispatched his brewery and soft-drink trucks to ferry the strikers back to the demonstrations.²¹

The strike added to the colony’s economic woes and intensified racial hatred among its citizens. The strikers, which included civil servants, effectively shut the government down and immobilized transportation and communication facilities. Critical shortages of food and fuel developed. Potential foreign investors lost further faith in the colony. Per capita income declined by 20 percent from its 1961 high. Racial violence also became a daily feature of the general strike. Virtually all strikers were Afro-Guyanese who associated with Burnham’s PNC. Mobs regularly attacked Indian merchants who stayed open for business and nonstriking Indian workers. Nine Guyanese died during the strike and scores were injured. In the midst of the strike in a speech in New Amsterdam, Burnham told PNC members that the racial violence was in the “nature of things,” because the PPP practiced “political discrimination” against unemployed blacks in Georgetown. Burnham further alleged that the PPP aimed “to make Guiana a Soviet satellite.” With the economy and society collapsing, the Jagan government withdrew the labor legislation and granted amnesty to the civil servants.²² The colony’s Indians unfortunately drew hard lessons from the fire bombings of 1962 and the strike of 1963, initiating attacks of their own. Wholesale racial warfare broke out after the strike, with hundreds of Guyanese casualties over the next eighteen months. As one scholar would note in the late 1980s, the agitation of 1962-64 “left a legacy of racial hatred that has permanently scarred the national psyche of the Guyanese population.”²³

The Afro-Guyanese strikers were sustained by a massive strike fund, estimated to be over $1 million, provided by the CIA through the AFL-CIO. Union President George Meany surreptitiously deposited funds in the Royal Bank of Canada.²⁴ The funds paid for the feeding of up to 50,000 people, providing them with a weekly ration that included salt fish, rice, sugar, flour, tin milk, cooking oil, split peas, potatoes, and bars of soap. The strike’s organizers established food distribution centers in strategic locations throughout major areas such as Georgetown and New Amsterdam and in larger villages.²⁵ William Howard McCabe again organized the union’s campaign in British Guiana and was aided by Guyanese graduates of the American Institute for Free Labor Development. McCabe kept Andrew McLellan of the union’s International Division apprised of the course of the strike. Union officials, like Gerard P. O’Keefe and Tom Bornstein of the Retail Clerk’s Union, assisted McCabe in British Guiana. Gene Meakins of the American Newspaper Guild later joined the effort, directing anti-Jagan propaganda campaigns over the radio. Guyanese would suddenly find new radio stations popping up on the colony’s radio band. The American Newspaper Guild reportedly had access to substantial amounts of CIA money.²⁶ McCabe maintained a public profile during the strike. His purported international affiliate, the Public Service International, issued a special bulletin depicting McCabe heroically unloading food for striking workers.²⁷

The AFL-CIO never publicly wavered from its stance that it joined the fight “to help save the trade union movement of British Guiana from being crushed by a totalitarian regime.” It also claimed that both blacks and Indians supported the strike and that the union kept out of the colony’s politics. ²⁸ In fact, AFL-CIO representatives distributed, along with food, 25,000 pieces of PNC literature.²⁹ Although U.S. union leaders fervently believed that they were waging the good fight against communism, they expressed misgivings about the campaign in their internal documents. McCabe informed Ernest Lee, President Meany’s son-in-law, that Indians were not safe in Georgetown and that a strike would inevitably lead to riots. McCabe also told the State Department that he found Burnham “unreliable.”³⁰ Gene Meakins predicted to McLellan that, if the PNC gained power, it would try to gain control over Guyanese unions.³¹ Nonetheless, the AFL-CIO forged ahead with its anti-Jagan campaign. After the successful strike, it convened a conference in late July 1963 in Barbados attended by Richard Ishmael and other union officials from British Guiana to conduct a postmortem on the strike and to plan agitation for the next year.³²

Whereas U.S. union officials may have entertained doubts about British Guiana’s future under Forbes Burnham, no such uncertainty characterized the Kennedy administration’s war against Jagan and the PPP. During the strike, Kennedy became displeased with the British. On 4 June 1963, he wrote to Macmillan, recommending that his government take advantage of the turmoil in Georgetown, suspend the constitution, and restore direct British rule over the colony. He even advised Macmillan that, before intervening, “it might be desirable to let the local situation deteriorate still further.” The president assured the prime minister that the U.S. public would support the action and that he was not worried about the reaction in the United Nations. He further reminded Macmillan that, “as you know, British Guiana continues to be a matter of greatest concern to me.”³³ On 15 June Macmillan responded to Kennedy, pointing out that his government had no desire to bear the expense of direct rule and that it feared both the international and domestic uproar that would follow the removal of a democratically elected government in the British Empire. The British further antagonized Kennedy when they permitted Cuban ships to unload food and fuel in Georgetown during the strike. The petroleum products came to Cuba from the Soviet Union. The desperate Jagan had turned to the Cubans as a way of alleviating the effects of the general strike, after failing to obtain Venezuelan oil. The Macmillan government had no objection in principle to trade with Communist countries. Governor Grey reported that Jagan had bought oil from Cuba for practical rather than political reasons.³⁴

A feverish anticommunism continued to inspire President Kennedy’s war against British Guiana. In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy seemed ever more determined to destroy any sign of Castro’s influence in the Western Hemisphere. In November 1962, the president had publicly pledged not to invade Cuba in return for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s agreement to remove ballistic missiles from Cuba. But the administration considered all measures, short of a military invasion of the island, to be available in its campaign against Fidel Castro. The administration developed an integrated program of propaganda, economic denial, and sabotage against Cuba. On 19 June 1963 at a meeting in the White House, for example, the president approved a sabotage program that included attacks on Cuban electric power plants, oil refineries, and sugar mills.³⁵ The administration commingled its suspicions about the Jagans and the PPP with its loathing of Castro. In July 1963, Secretary of State Rusk circulated to U.S. embassies around the world a list of charges against the pair and their supporters. Rusk found the Jagans guilty because they visited Cuba, spoke favorably of the Cuban Revolution, sold rice to Cuba, and permitted about sixty Guyanese students to study in Cuba. In the secretary of state’s judgment, such beliefs and activities threatened U.S. national security.³⁶

Secretary Rusk and President Kennedy dreaded a Soviet/Cuban outpost in South America and the spread of communism throughout the region. U.S. officials never explained, however, how an independent Guyana, led by English-speaking Indians of Hindu and Muslim faiths, would spread Marxist-Leninist doctrines in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking lands populated by racially-mixed Roman Catholics whose ancestors were from the Americas, the Iberian Peninsula, and West Africa. Moreover, British Guiana’s relations with its neighbors were strained or nonexistent. British Guiana and Venezuela had not overcome the boundary disputes of the nineteenth century. Indeed, so isolated was British Guiana from its continental neighbors that foreign and colonial officers actually tried to promote a Latin American presence in the colony. In 1963, the Foreign Office instructed its embassy in Rio de Janeiro to facilitate contacts between Brazilian and Guyanese academics and journalists. British diplomats in the Brazilian capital responded that Brazilians were self-absorbed, with little interest in their insignificant neighbor.³⁷ Impenetrable tropical rain forests helped, of course, to keep British Guiana and Brazil apart.

Hard thinking also did not characterize the Kennedy administration’s analysis of racial relations within British Guiana. President Kennedy disdained racism and treated foreign leaders with dignity and respect. He especially enjoyed the company of Latin Americans and became a dear friend of President Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela. Although not a fervent supporter of the U.S. civil rights movement, the president grew disgusted over the violence perpetrated by white southerners against African Americans seeking to exert their constitutional rights in states such as Alabama and Mississippi. In a moving, eloquent national address on 11 June 1963, Kennedy embraced the civil rights movement and pledged to introduce legislation that would strike down discrimination and segregation in U.S. life. Historians of U.S. foreign relations have aptly pointed out that the president also acted because he understood that discrimination against African Americans hurt the United States in the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of the nonwhite people of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Diplomats from these areas frequently encountered segregationist practices when they traveled through the U.S. South. Secretary of State Rusk made those points when he testified on 10 July 1963 in favor Kennedy’s civil rights legislation. Rusk, a native of Georgia, repudiated the segregationist thinking of his fellow southerners.³⁸

At the very moment that Kennedy and Rusk joined the struggle for simple justice in the United States, they were fostering policies that fueled racial hatred between blacks and Indians in British Guiana. Neither man, nor any other foreign policymaker in the administration, explored that contradiction, because they gave priority to the fight against communism. Forbes Burnham had persuaded U.S. officials that he was a reliable alternative to the suspect Cheddi Jagan. In other areas of the world, the administration also sided with racist non-Communists. For example, the administration opposed harsh sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa because it feared the association of Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress with the international Communist movement.³⁹ Although Burnham presented himself as a political moderate, it helped his case that he, unlike Jagan, had influential friends in the United States who also identified with the struggle for justice for black Americans. Both conservative northern Democrats and progressive African American Democrats spoke on his behalf. The AFL-CIO, which joined the U.S. civil rights movement, also embraced Burnham. Perhaps in the minds of some U.S. citizens, Burnham’s drive for power coincided with the struggle for racial justice for African Americans. Such an association would become apparent in the mid-1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

The initial U.S. talks with the British, which lasted from 25 to 27 June 1963, proved inconclusive. British officials dismissed U.S. fears about communism, pointing to the strong internal opposition that confronted Jagan. Revoking the constitution and imposing direct rule would create too many problems. Members of the United Nations and the Commonwealth would be outraged. The action would make Jagan even more popular among Indians, who would soon be a numerical majority in the colony. In any case, direct rule would cost too much money. The British judged that they had no strategic interests in British Guiana and “the sooner we shed our obligations there the better.” Because “we have other areas of greater importance to our interests in which to sink our money,” the British sarcastically suggested that the United States should foot the bill if it wanted direct rule in British Guiana.⁴²

President Kennedy brought the Anglo-American talks on the British colony to a conclusion. The president arrived at Birch Grove, Macmillan’s country estate outside London, at the height of his international standing and power. Widely perceived as having forced the Soviet Union to back down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president had another Cold War victory in Berlin. On 26 June, he addressed a gigantic, delirious crowd of West Berliners from a platform mounted on the steps of the city hall. That morning Kennedy had seen the Berlin Wall for the first time. The president ensured that the wall, the hideous scar that divided Berlin, would forever symbolize the political and socioeconomic failures of communism. The president sent the crowd into a frenzy with his memorable proclamation that “today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner [I am a Berliner]!” His answer to anyone who questioned the moral superiority of the West: “Let them come to Berlin!” The “Free World” had problems, “but we never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us!” Kennedy’s triumphant performance in Berlin garnered the president adulation both at home and abroad.

President Kennedy’s discussion with Prime Minister Macmillan and his advisers on 30 June 1963 must surely rank as one of the most extraordinary exchanges of views among allies during the history of the Cold War. The confident Kennedy politely listened as Colonial Secretary Sandys listed the colonial, racial, and parliamentary issues that bedeviled the government’s relationship with British Guiana. Kennedy congratulated Sandys on his presentation and immediately shot back that “it was obvious that if the UK were to get out of British Guiana now it would become a Communist state.” Kennedy then raised the stakes by adding that independence for the colony could precipitate a war in the Caribbean and perhaps a global conflict. A second Communist state in the region would “create irresistible pressures in the United States to strike militarily against Cuba.” Embellishing the theme, Kennedy implied to the British that they had the power to prevent the election of a belligerent, rash person in the 1964 U.S. presidential race. Kennedy was presumably thinking of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative anticommunist from Arizona. The president repeated “that the great danger in 1964 was that, since Cuba would be the major American public issue, adding British Guiana to Cuba could well tip the scales, and someone would be elected who would take military action against Cuba.” Kennedy added that the “American public would not stand for a situation which looked as though the Soviet Union had leapfrogged over Cuba to land on the continent in the Western Hemisphere.” The president promised that the United States would take a sympathetic approach to British problems with such colonies as Southern Rhodesia, but the British needed “to drag the thing out” when it came to independence for British Guiana. Kennedy recommended that the British cite “instability and the danger of racial strife” as rationales for delay.⁴³

According to the memorandum of conversation, Prime Minister Macmillan did not respond directly to the president’s strident lecture. Perhaps he had been stunned by his friend’s aggressive approach. In his memoirs, Macmillan did not address the confrontation at Birch Grove other than to note that “on other difficult but really less important matters we were in agreement.”⁴⁴ Macmillan concluded that his government could no longer delay in implementing the scheme to drive Cheddi Jagan from power. On 2 July, Duncan Sandys informed the Colonial Office that the United States would not accept an independent country under Jagan and ordered it to start working on a constitution that included proportional representation. On 18 July Macmillan wrote to Kennedy promising that his government would unseat Jagan.⁴⁵ Knowing that he would pay a domestic and international price for acceding to the U.S. demands, Macmillan took solace in reflecting on U.S. hypocrisy. As he told his diary on the day before he wrote Kennedy, “it is . . . rather fun making the Americans repeat over & over again their passionate plea to stick to ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ at all costs.”⁴⁶

Wanting to screw Macmillan’s courage to the sticking point, Kennedy responded on 10 September 1963 to the prime minister’s letter. He told Macmillan that the United States could fully assist his government if it informed the United States of the details of how it planned to suspend British Guiana’s constitution and mandate a new election based on proportional representation. Kennedy pledged that the United States would steer Forbes Burnham and Peter D’Aguiar on the right path and would fund a “real economic development program” for the colony once Jagan was unseated. The president also promised that his administration would work on “creating and launching an alternative East Indian party” in British Guiana. The president concluded by acknowledging that “this problem is one in which you have shown a most helpful understanding of my special concern, and I am grateful to you and also to Duncan Sandys for your willingness to take hold of it when there is so little advantage in it for you.”⁴⁷ On 28 September, Macmillan informed Kennedy that Sandys would call for a conference on October 1963 and then impose a solution. Macmillan warned, however, that the British scheme would collapse if Burnham and Jagan agreed to share power. The prime minister told Kennedy that he trusted “that your people will be doing what they can to discourage any joint moves, either for a coalition or an outside inquiry, either which might upset all our plans.”⁴⁸

Colonial Secretary Sandy’s artful plan for British Guiana aimed at satisfying the United States and deflecting domestic and international criticism. Sandys presumed that the conference, which would be held in late October 1963, would deadlock on the first day, with Prime Minister Jagan insisting on setting a date for independence, with no new elections. Burnham and D’Aguiar would predictably demand a new electoral scheme. Sandys would then impose his solution of new elections based on proportional representation. The United States would support the United Kingdom’s decision at international forums like the United Nations. But “in order to avoid disclosing the prior understanding between the two Governments, the U.S. Government will continue to refrain from comment on British Guiana until the British Government’s decision has been announced.” At the conference, Sandys would not raise the issue of communism but instead emphasize the racial tensions in the colony. Such an approach would provide cover from the allegation that the United Kingdom was merely responding to U.S. Cold War fears. After the conference, the United States would make an initial grant of $5 million to the colony with a “crash” program of economic aid to follow.⁴⁹

The United States carried out its assigned role in the conspiracy. U.S. diplomats approached Chile, which served on the five-nation subcommittee on British Guiana of the U.N.’s Committee of Twenty-Four on colonialism, and advised Chilean officials that the United Kingdom should not be pressured, because British Guiana lacked the internal peace and order necessary for independence. Chileans were reminded that they represented the region’s interests and could help prevent a “Congo-like situation developing” in the Western Hemisphere.⁵⁰ President Kennedy played his part by publicly downplaying the U.S. role in British Guiana. At a news conference in late August, Kennedy declined to answer a three-part question on Jagan and British Guiana, noting “I don’t think it would be useful to respond.” The president then added that is was “very important that we point out that this is primarily a British matter and we should leave the judgment to them.”⁵¹ While Kennedy was denying a U.S. interest, the U.S. Information Service prepared to launch a massive propaganda campaign in the colony. The agency assigned a second officer, described as “young, vigorous, and single with field experience in Brazil,” to British Guiana. He and his colleague and the local staff of eight would flood the colony with anticommunist films, books, and pamphlets. They also planned to work with the U.S. information service in New Delhi and ship Hindi-language material to British Guiana.⁵² Gene Meakins and the AFL-CIO also prepared to coordinate their anti-Jagan efforts in the labor field with the U.S. Information Service.⁵³

Both British and U.S. officials rejected last efforts to save democracy in British Guiana. Jock Campbell, the head of Booker Brothers, told Sandys that British Guiana needed a “Trinidad-like constitution,” which preserved the British “first past the post” voting system but also guaranteed a distribution of power based on race in key governmental posts. Campbell offered a solution meriting debate, because Trinidad and Tobago, which gained its independence in 1962 under the leadership of Dr. Eric Williams, had a multiracial society with blacks somewhat outnumbering Indians. The new constitution of Trinidad and Tobago protected racial minorities by requiring a three-quarter majority to amend critical clauses. The nation’s constitution also provided for a nominated upper house, or Senate, to include “special interests” not elected to the lower house.⁵⁴ Governor Grey took the extraordinary step of going public with his opposition to the plot against Jagan. In September 1963, Grey gave an interview to a journalist based in Scotland, which subsequently appeared in newspapers throughout the United Kingdom. Grey especially criticized President Kennedy for refusing Jagan’s repeated pleas for economic assistance. U.S. economic aid would have kept the colony firmly tied to West. As always, Grey ridiculed the idea that impoverished, resource poor British Guiana would be of any interest to the Communists or anyone else. The international press exaggerated Jagan’s significance and once the colony gained independence “its importance in international affairs would be virtually non-existent.” Speaking for the president, National Security Adviser Bundy complained to Ambassador Ormsby-Gore about Grey. The president assumed that the article accurately reflected the views of Grey and some in the Colonial Office. Although not upset by such views, the president believed that Grey’s remarks added to “difficulties in handling the situation within the administration and within Congress.” Ormsby-Gore relayed the president’s complaint to Foreign Secretary Home and advised him to contact Duncan Sandys.⁵⁵ Shortly thereafter, Sandys transferred Governor Grey out of Georgetown.

Cheddi Jagan’s final efforts to reach a compromise also proved futile. In September, Jagan asked Consul Melby what could be done to improve relations with the United States. He had concluded that the United States had adopted a policy of “Jagan must go.” The prime minister asked for U.S. understanding and assistance in realizing his ideal of making his country the “first example of a socialist state created by non-violent means.” Melby thought that Washington should at least talk to Jagan. Secretary Rusk instantly dismissed Jagan’s overture and his consul’s advice, instructing Melby that “we wish to avoid creating any impression, or enabling PPP to do so, that there exists real possibility of improving relations between PPP and USG.”⁵⁶ The bitter Jagan thereafter protested to the Colonial Office that there was “some unholy agreement” between the United States and the United Kingdom to deny British Guiana its independence so long as he was in power. He lamented that “Americans saw things in black and white; anyone who was not wholeheartedly allied to the West was a Communist and had to be got rid of.” Jagan knew that the United States was behind Burnham, and he feared that his life would be in danger with Burnham in power acting under U.S. direction. Despite his anger and fear, Jagan remained interested in a solution, like the Trinidad constitution, that would preserve majority rule and protect minority rights.⁵⁷

The British Guiana Conference, which took place in London from 22 to 31 October 1963, exceeded Colonial Secretary Sandys’s grandest expectations. The first days of the conference proceeded as scripted with Burnham, D’Aguiar, and Jagan debating whether the colony needed new elections and a new electoral scheme prior to independence. On 25 October, Sandys pronounced the conference deadlocked and offered to arbitrate the dispute. Burnham and D’Aguiar immediately accepted the offer, probably having already been quietly told by U.S. diplomats or by CIA agents to put their faith in Sandys. The colonial secretary’s main concern had been “not to make a martyr or hero out of Dr. Jagan.”⁵⁸ But Jagan surprised Sandys when he too agreed to sign a paper asking Sandys to arbitrate. Sandys carried out the pretense of thinking deeply about the issue for several days and then announced his decision on 31 October. Independence would not be considered, until British Guiana conducted new elections based on a system of proportional representation, with the entire nation a single constituency. Sandys also rejected Jagan’s call for lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.⁵⁹ Burnham and D’Aguiar’s supporters rejoiced at the decision. Richard Ishmael expressed to Consul Melby his “profound surprise that Sandys had not even thrown a crumb to Jagan.”⁶⁰

PPP members, including apparently Janet Jagan, criticized Jagan for trusting Sandys. Scholarly analysts of Guyanese politics have judged Jagan to have been politically naïve.⁶¹ In his memoirs, Jagan wrote that he agreed to arbitration, thinking it was the only way to bring the British to fix a date for independence.⁶² Jagan’s mistake may have been more tactical than strategic. His domestic and international opponents would always make the propaganda point that Jagan had no right to complain about the results of subsequent elections based on Sandys’s electoral scheme. But Sandys was going to impose the same solution no matter what Jagan agreed to at the conference. Prime Minister Jagan could have hardly known that President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had personally conspired against him, his wife, his political party, and his little nation.

In November and December 1963, Secretary of State Rusk, “filled with admiration for the way Mr. Sandys had handled the British Guiana problem,” reviewed Jagan’s defeat with British leaders. The British cynically noted that they found it “slightly awkward that Dr. Jagan had given so little trouble” at the conference. Rusk observed that it had been “very difficult for the Americans to keep their mouths shut about British Guiana.” He added that “it was vital” that British Guiana not “become an internal issue in the United States.” Colonial Secretary Sandys assured Rusk that the colony’s election would take place after the November 1964 U.S. election. He happily predicted that the new electoral system would encourage splinter parties, because a party would need to win less thanof the total vote to win a seat in Parliament. Nonetheless, the British could not guarantee that the PPP would fail to win 50 percent of the vote. British Guiana needed those splinter parties to draw Indian votes away from Jagan. Sandys advised that “it would be a good thing if the American and British agencies concerned were to get together on this point.”⁶³ Indeed, Rusk had already ordered the consulate in Georgetown to conduct a demographic analysis of British Guiana and to predict “the eligible voters based on race.”⁶⁴ The United States would also begin to search for an Indian political figure who could serve as an alternative to Jagan.

In parliamentary debates, Labour members Arthur Bottomley and Fenner Brockway attacked Sandys for doing U.S. bidding, heightening racial tensions, and undermining electoral fair play in British Guiana. Sandys rejected the charges and answered that “my sole aim” was “to put an end to racial politics which is the curse of British Guiana.” The colonial secretary ventured that, under a system of proportional representation, political parties would become multiracial, as they competed for voters across ethnic and racial lines, trying to win 50 percent of the vote.⁶⁵ Nonpartisan students of British Guiana’s political milieu rejected Sandys’s sophistry. Governor Ralph Grey, Consul Everett Melby, and Jock Campbell of Booker Brothers agreed in their separate analyses of the London conference that proportional representation ensured the continuation of racial politics and that parties would organize on strictly racial lines. So worried was Melby about British Guiana’s future that he suggested in his last dispatch from Georgetown that the colony needed to be placed under the supervision of an international body like the Organization of American States. In one of his last dispatches, Governor Grey also noted that Indians would never waver in their support for Cheddi Jagan.⁶⁶

By 1 November 1963, three weeks before his death, President Kennedy had essentially achieved his goal of preventing Cheddi Jagan and the PPP from governing an independent Guyana. In the president’s analysis, he had exercised “international responsibility,” in preventing a second Cuba in the Western Hemisphere.⁶⁷ Kennedy had, however, paved the way to power for Forbes Burnham, a political leader who had exacerbated racial tensions in British Guiana. What the president would have thought of Burnham’s two decades of misrule cannot be determined. But the president’s fervent admirers, like Arthur Schlesinger, subsequently regretted the administration’s opposition to democracy in British Guiana.

New men in Washington, London, and Georgetown directed policy for British Guiana. Although not as personally involved in the British Guiana issue as Kennedy, President Johnson maintained U.S. policy and relied on Kennedy men, like Secretary of State Rusk and National Security Adviser Bundy, to carry it out. Within a month after Johnson became president, the State Department informed the British that it worked from the assumption that the understandings between Kennedy and Macmillan held and added that “President Johnson is just as concerned with this problem as his predecessor because he feels as strongly that we cannot have another Communist state in the Western Hemisphere.”⁶⁸ The message went to a new prime minister. Weakened both by his own poor health and by the Profumo sex and espionage scandal, Macmillan resigned in mid-October 1963, just before the opening of the London conference on British Guiana. Foreign Secretary Home resigned his peerage and took over the leadership of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons. He left Duncan Sandys in charge of colonial affairs. The new prime minister visited Johnson in February 1964 and briefly discussed British Guiana with the president. Johnson reminded Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home of the Kennedy-Macmillan agreements and, according to Bundy, “the Prime Minister at once replied that he understood this agreement and supported it.”⁶⁹

Colonial Secretary Sandys replaced Governor Grey with Richard Luyt, a native of South Africa and a career colonial officer. Luyt had primarily served in the African posts of Kenya and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and had developed a good relationship with Kenneth Kaunda, the nationalist leader of Zambia. Unlike Grey, Luyt accepted proportional representation and principally defined his role as supervising a new election. Luyt, who had a reputation as a tough anticommunist, quickly took, however, the position of his gubernatorial predecessors—Savage, Renison, Grey—that international Communism did not threaten British Guiana. In his first comprehensive report to London, Luyt noted that Indians feared “hooliganism” by blacks more than they feared communism. Luyt also dutifully checked out reports of automatic weapons on Cuban ships that docked in Georgetown. His agents found sugar and rum but no weapons. Grey assured the Colonial Office that he saw no evidence to sustain U.S. allegations of Cuban influence in the colony. Luyt soon became exasperated, informing the Colonial Office that he understood that his mission was “to bring British Guiana peacefully and constitutionally to independence.” If his primary mission was to frustrate communism, “he should be told.”⁷⁰

Beginning in March 1964, Consul General Delmar R. Carlson reported to Washington from Georgetown. The State Department had extended Everett Melby’s tour of duty so that he could report on the London conference and its aftermath. Carlson’s arrival in British Guiana was a routine transfer of personnel. Carlson, a career foreign service officer from Colorado, served in Germany and Canada and the State Department’s Office of British Commonwealth and Northern European Affairs. Carlson fully adopted the contempt of his boss, Secretary Rusk, for Cheddi Jagan. Upon arriving in Georgetown, he conspicuously called on Forbes Burnham and Peter D’Aguiar before meeting with Jagan, the popularly elected prime minister of British Guiana. Although he accepted that “the defeat of Jagan is consonant with U.S. interests,” Carlson initially displayed no fondness for Jagan’s opponents. He opined that British Guiana was “a country outstanding for the perversity of its politics and the paucity of its leadership.” He thought Burnham “a racist and probably anti-white,” who “remembers slights and repays them; at the same time he takes advantage of people who treat him softly.” Carlson judged D’Aguiar, the millionaire brewer and soft-drink maker, as being meticulous, pedantic, colorless, and a poor speaker, with a family life that was “not exemplary.” D’Aguiar allegedly kept mistresses in British Guiana and abroad. Carlson excused D’Aguiar, however, noting “that for a respectable member of the community to have mistresses is a common situation in British Guiana.” ⁷¹ Such charity had not previously characterized U.S. and British comments on Janet Jagan’s alleged extramarital relationships.

Governor Luyt and Consul Carlson witnessed horrific violence in British Guiana in 1964. After the London conference, tension mounted in the country, with Jagan and PPP members denouncing Sandys’s decision. Jagan implied that the decision was void, because Sandys had not set a date for independence. The British responded that the colonial secretary had made no promises when Jagan agreed to arbitration. Guyana’s seawalls were transformed into billboards with slogans such as “Kill to Prevent PR [Proportional Representation]” or “PR or Death.” Strikes in the sugar fields and demonstrations in cities and villages descended into violent riots. Unlike the horrors of 1962 and 1963, when principally Indians suffered attacks from blacks, both groups perpetrated violence against the other. Friends and neighbors battled one another in villages named “Bachelor’s Adversity,” “Vigilance,” “Friendship,” and “Valley of Tears.” PPP members conducted “Freedom Marches” from the country districts to Georgetown. Residences and businesses were burned near where the marchers encamped. Freedom House, the headquarters of the PPP, was bombed, killing or injuring several party members, including Janet Jagan, who was cut by flying glass. The Jagans’ young daughter, Nadira, was twice beaten up at school by Afro-Guyanese students. The parents sent Nadira to live with relatives in Chicago and dispatched her brother, Cheddi Jr., to Barbados. Two appalling incidents especially burned into the country’s historical memory. In late May 1964, Guyanese blacks responded to the mutilation and murder of a black couple by attacking the Indian village of Wismar, beating residents, raping women, and torching their homes. The retaliation ruined 200 homes and left 1,800 people homeless. In June, two bombs exploded at the home of a senior Afro-Guyanese civil servant. The civil servant and seven of his nine children were consumed in the inferno.⁷²

The end-of-the-year accounting of the political violence made for grim reading in a country of only 600,000 people. Two hundred Guyanese had died and 800 suffered injuries in the colony’s 368 political/racial clashes. The violence had left 13,000 Guyanese as refugees. Security officials calculated 1,600 cases of arson, 226 explosions, and 675 illegal discharges of firearms. Between 1957 and 1961, British Guiana had an average of 2,000 indictable offenses per year. The figure rose to 4,000 indictable offenses in 1964. Little wonder that 5,000 blacks and Indians, aghast at the interracial turmoil, submitted a petition to Governor Luyt calling for a partition of the colony. In fact, in the aftermath of the violence, formerly multiracial villages became effectively partitioned.⁷³

Although nominally in authority, Prime Minister Jagan had no power to control the violence. Forbes Burnham had underscored Jagan’s helplessness when, in April 1964, he threatened that “if it comes to a showdown, the East Indians must remember that we could do more killing than they could.”⁷⁴ The police force, which consisted of 1,320 blacks and only 164 Indians, ignored government orders. Police Commissioner Peter Owen, a colonial officer, defended the racial imbalance by observing that “the African group in the population tends to be more aggressive, are tougher physically, and have more stamina as police material than do the Indians.” Consul Carlson joined in the racism, telling Washington that “environmental reasons favor blacks in attaining physical and educational requirements.”⁷⁵ Owen and Carlson were perhaps unaware that independent India had built an impressive army that caught the attention of neighboring China and Pakistan. In any case, the Indians of British Guiana could not pass police examinations, because they had historically been denied educational opportunities in the colony’s Christian schools. With the colony in chaos, Governor Luyt assumed emergency powers in late May and began ordering the arrest of PPP and PNC loyalists. He conceded to the Colonial Office that Indians had no confidence in the racially biased police force. Luyt rejected, however, a Colonial Office idea that he throw Burnham, D’Aguiar, and Jagan in jail and form a “National Government.”⁷⁶ The governor’s assumption of emergency powers had the effect of further limiting Jagan’s authority.

Students of Guyanese politics have long known that outside actors like the CIA stimulated the riots and strikes of 1962 and 1963. They have assumed, however, that non-Guyanese played no leading roles in the violence of 1964.⁷⁷ Whereas the lack of access to CIA records makes a definitive judgment difficult, Department of State, White House, and AFL-CIO records point to substantial U.S. responsibility for the ugly events of 1964. Although overjoyed by the results of the London conference, President Johnson’s national security team was disappointed by what immediately followed. In his correspondence with President Kennedy, Prime Minister Macmillan had suggested that, after Sandys had imposed his proportional representation scheme, a distraught Jagan would resign as prime minister. The United Kingdom would “renew direct rule for a period of six months to a year while a new constitution is introduced and new elections held under it.”⁷⁸ But Jagan failed to fulfill expectations. He immediately began to plead his country’s case to Caribbean neighbors like Barbados and Jamaica, Commonwealth members like Canada, Ghana, and India, and to the United Nations. Jagan elicited international sympathy, albeit little practical help, for his wronged nation and party. Wanting to “minimize international and domestic criticism of the UK,” State Department officials proposed to McGeorge Bundy that the United States force a confrontation between Jagan and the British. In a series of mid-December 1963 papers, William Burdett of the European Division wrote that “harassment of Jagan should be started immediately with a view to driving him to the conclusion that he has no alternative but to resign.” Burdett suggested a covert psychological campaign, spreading rumors and having the U.S. Information Service personnel in British Guiana antagonize Jagan.⁷⁹

Other U.S. officials also wanted to attack Jagan. In February 1964, in a background memorandum on British Guiana for President Johnson, Bundy reported that “our professionals are somewhat more hardnosed than the British and would like to see the British resume direct government and throw Jagan out.” Bundy noted that neither he nor Rusk “feels as strongly on this” as did the “professionals” in the CIA. Nonetheless, Bundy worried that Colonial Secretary Sandys’s busy schedule kept him from focusing on British Guiana. He warned Johnson “that an independent Jagan government would be literally unacceptable to us and we would have to make sure that it was overthrown, by hook or by crook.”⁸⁰ In February, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responding to a White House order, actually developed contingency plans to parachute 1,400 troops and land eight tactical fighter aircraft and six tactical reconnaissance planes in British Guiana within a day’s notice. The U.S. military’s mission would be to support the British “in preventing Communist or anti-West uprisings or movements.” Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, reported to Secretary of Defense McNamara that the United States now had invasion plans for three countries in Latin America: Cuba, Panama, and British Guiana.⁸¹

The CIA closely monitored the political/racial confrontations of 1964. Richard Helms sent detailed reports to Bundy about the strikes in the sugar fields. The agency blamed the PPP for the country’s violence, terrorism, and racial antagonism. But the CIA probably went beyond just monitoring the violence. It sent intelligence about the PPP to U.S. union activists in British Guiana.⁸² The CIA’s man in the labor movement, William Howard McCabe, encouraged the Manpower Citizen’s Association, the company union of sugar workers, to engage in “counter violence with self protection.” McCabe organized twenty-man security teams or “Vigilance Committees” to resist the PPP’s alleged use of violence and terror. The AFL-CIO also paid the wages of twenty-seven organizers who worked for the Manpower Citizen’s Association. ⁸³ Gene Meakins, who earned $200 a week from the AFL-CIO, trained members of British Guiana’s Trade Union Council to work in radio and in the news. Meakins’s operation defended Burnham and the PNC and attacked Jagan and the PPP. In 1963-64, Meakins produced 624 ten-minute radio broadcasts, the “Voice of Labor,” and fifty-two issues of the Labor Advocate newspaper. Between April and July 1964, Meakins reported that he had spent $25,000 on program expenses. Andrew McLellan of the AFL-CIO’s International Division pointed to the union’s massive role in British Guiana when he noted that “I know that more assistance has gone into British Guiana in the last two or three years from the International Trade Unions which includes the AFL-CIO than any other country in Latin America, including Brazil which is almost as large as the United States and has a population of well over 70 million people.”⁸⁴

Although U.S. officials and labor leaders perceived British Guiana as a critical Cold War battleground, they continued in 1964 to lack hard evidence about Soviet and Cuban influence in the colony to confirm their prejudices. U.S. intelligence reports unwittingly sustained Governor Luyt’s judgment that international Communists could not be found in British Guiana. The State Department listed as a nefarious activity the charge that a music band from British Guiana had toured Cuba.⁸⁵ U.S. officials constantly sounded the alarm about Jagan selling rice to Cuba. But the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Empire angered President Johnson by continuing to trade with Castro’s Cuba. Such dubious evidence perhaps prompted National Security Adviser Bundy to admit in March 1964, in a telephone conversation with Under Secretary of State George Ball, that “we don’t rate him [Jagan] a Communist; we just think he’s hopelessly imprisoned. If we knew how to spring him we would.” Bundy added that “we know our man [Burnham] is no good.”⁸⁶ Doubts never, however, pierced Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s mind. Rusk responded to the argument that Canadian investors in British Guiana spoke highly of Jagan with the historical analogy that “there had been German businessmen who had thought they could control Hitler.”⁸⁷

Sustained by unpleasant perceptions of the past, the Johnson administration worked tirelessly to ensure that Guyanese rejected Cheddi Jagan in the national election, scheduled for December 1964. The administration aimed to prevent the PPP from garnering 50 percent of the national vote and thereby winning 27 of the 53 parliamentary seats. In a parliamentary system, the party that wins the most seats is customarily given the first opportunity to form a government. But presuming the PPP could be kept short of 27 seats, the Anglo-American plan was to have Governor Luyt tap Burnham, whose party was expected to finish second, to form a government with Peter D’Aguiar and his United Front Party. Although an archconservative who adamantly opposed the socialist policies of the PNC, D’Aguiar shared Burnham’s hatred of Jagan and the PPP. The Johnson administration focused on enhancing the organizational abilities of the PNC and UF and creating splinter parties to draw Indians away from Jagan and the PPP.

Richard Helms, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, directed the administration’s anti-Jagan campaign in British Guiana. He reported to Bundy that his agents believed that an alternative Indian party could be formed by appealing to the professional classes and civil servants. By March 1964, the agency had produced a fifty-six page political survey of the colony based on interviews with over 1,400 Indian voters. The survey suggested that nonleftist Indians should be told that they could win political power in a system of proportional representation. The survey further called for informing moderates that another Jagan victory would discourage foreign investment and job creation and bring “political oppression, and the economic chaos and misery characteristic of Communist countries.”⁸⁸ The CIA settled on Jai Narine Singh and Balram Singh Rai to lead the new Justice Party. Jai Narine Singh asked the United States for $75,000 a month in campaign expenses to be deposited in the Royal Bank of Canada. In conjunction with the British, the CIA also helped create a political party for Muslims, the Guiana United Muslim Party, or GUMP, led by Hoosein Ganie.⁸⁹ Throughout 1964, the CIA analyzed voter registration lists and polled the Guyanese electorate, sending the results to Bundy and the NSC. Most reports found the CIA “cautiously optimistic” that the PPP could be kept at under 50 percent of the vote and fewer than 27 seats. In its last report on 7 December 1964, the CIA estimated that the PPP would be held to 22 seats and that the Justice Party and GUMP would win a total of 3 seats. As Gordon Chase of the NSC noted to Bundy, “this, of course, would be a delightful outcome.”⁹⁰

The CIA also assisted the two main opposition parties—the PNC and UF—with money, advice, and campaign propaganda. Recognizing the superior capabilities of the PPP, the CIA focused on improving the organizational capabilities of the two parties. After perusing a U.S. study on “methods of influencing the election result,” a Foreign Office official noted to colleagues, perhaps wryly, that the PNC and UF “are receiving good advice on organization.” As did the Justice Party, the PNC asked for U.S. financial assistance.⁹¹ The AFL-CIO also campaigned for the PNC. Gene Meakins’s operation distributed campaign literature that promoted the PNC. At the suggestion of President George Meany, Andrew McLellan stopped in British Guiana in October 1964 to assess the election prospects of the PNC.⁹² The Johnson administration also pledged to Burnham that his nation would receive in 1965 over $10 million in U.S. economic aid dedicated “to repairing some of the damage caused by Jagan’s neglect and poor administration.” Burnham confidently made predictions to the electorate about what magic the United States would perform in British Guiana, after he took power. In turn, Burnham assured U.S. officials he would never recognize the Soviet Union and would sever all ties with Cuba.⁹³ As the election neared, the CIA worked on ensuring a big turnout of opposition parties, making certain that anti-Jagan voters had access to absentee and proxy ballots and that the PPP did not intimidate voters.⁹⁴ The CIA followed National Security Adviser Bundy’s vow that, whether “by hook or by crook,” Cheddi Jagan would never again exercise power.

In a December 1964 intelligence memorandum, the CIA noted that the PPP “reportedly” received $500,000 from Cuba and Algeria. The agency did not identify the source of the report and provided no evidence to confirm the report.⁹⁵ How much the CIA spent in British Guiana supporting the opposition parties falls into the realm of educated guess. CIA documents on British Guiana can be found in the National Security Files of the Johnson Presidential Library, but the agency has refused to declassify all documents. In the 1970s, however, a congressional investigative committee declassified documents on the CIA’s 1964 presidential campaign in Chile. President Johnson authorized the agency to spend $3 million dollars to ensure the election of Eduardo Frei Montalva of the Christian Democratic Party and the defeat of Salvador Allende Gossens, leader of the Marxist left. CIA money accounted for about half of Frei’s campaign chest. As it did in British Guiana, CIA agents in Chile spent money on polling, posters, advertisements and anticommunist projects designed to appeal to targeted constituencies.⁹⁶ The CIA probably spent less than $3 million in British Guiana, because Chile’s population of approximately 6 million people was considerably larger than British Guiana’s population.

The Johnson administration left unexamined the ironies inherent in the massive U.S. intervention in the 1964 campaign in British Guiana. President Johnson would become identified at home by his promotion of civil rights and his Great Society social welfare programs. But in British Guiana, the administration backed a racially divisive figure in Burnham and a relic of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism in D’Aguiar. The administration also promoted religious intolerance. Some of the indentured servants who arrived in British Guiana from colonial India had been Muslims. Hindus and Muslims did not divide on nationalistic or religious grounds, because sectarian conflict would hurt their common aspirations for a better life in British Guiana. Both communities voted for Jagan and the PPP in 1953, 1957, and 1961. In the 1960s, Hindus and Muslims did not take sides in the bitter India-Pakistan confrontation.⁹⁷ But the U.S.-backed Muslim party, GUMP, made explicit religious appeals to Muslims to reject Jagan and the PPP. In creating the Justice Party, the CIA resorted to a crude Marxist analysis, reasoning that propertied and educated Indians would vote their economic interests and reject the left-wing PPP. Veteran observers of the colony’s political culture, like Governor Grey and Consul General Melby, had ridiculed such notions. Cheddi Jagan inspired devotion among Indians, because he had risen from poverty on a sugar plantation, flourished in the colony’s Christian schools, and triumphed in prestigious universities in the United States. He had transformed his educational achievements into political power and had become an actor on the international stage. Blinded by their anticommunist zealotry, U.S. officials failed to see that voters in many countries would respond positively to such an inspiring story. Grey and Melby proved prescient about the Indian electorate. Despite the CIA’s best efforts, the Justice Party and GUMP garnered less than 1 percent of the total vote and no parliamentary seats in the 1964 election.

As the Johnson administration managed the political campaigns of the four parties opposed to Jagan, it rebuffed entreaties for peace and compromise. First through the High Commissioner of India and then twice directly with Consul General Carlson, Jagan again pleaded for U.S. understanding. He rehashed the arguments of the past. He had “laid my cards on the table” when he met President Kennedy in 1961; he thought he had “passed the test.” He reiterated his beliefs in socialism and parliamentary democracy, pledged again not to nationalize the bauxite and sugar industries, and vowed never to ally with the Soviet bloc. He envisioned his country pursuing a neutral course based on the Austrian model. Jagan also engaged in self-pity. He decried that “no matter what I try to do; I can get nowhere.” He further lamented that “I am opposed by everyone, including the CIA, which I suppose is the American Government.”⁹⁸ Jagan’s pleas left officials in Washington unmoved. At a meeting attended by Bundy, Helms, and State Department officers, the group conceded that talking to an emissary from Jagan “might conceivably cool down the British Guiana security problem.” But the officials rejected the idea, concluding that meaningful dialogue was impossible, “since we would have very little to say to Jagan.”⁹⁹

The Johnson administration also rebuffed international mediators. In early 1964, Jagan had aired his case at a meeting of Caribbean heads of state. The leaders of Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago criticized Jagan for his relationship with Cuba and for not respecting the Cold War concerns of the United States. Reflecting his habitual refusal to accept the reality of his country being within the U.S. sphere of influence, Jagan responded that India accepted economic aid from both East and West and maintained its neutrality. Despite their exasperation with Jagan, the Caribbean leaders, led by Eric Williams of Trinidad, unanimously opposed proportional representation. Caribbean diplomats also judged Burnham “superficial, opportunistic, and wanting in statesman-like qualities” and thought that D’Aguiar secretly yearned for perpetual colonialism.¹⁰⁰ The State Department rejected the help of Caribbean nations, warning Trinidad and Tobago to take care to “ensure its mediation efforts give no aid and comfort to Jagan’s maneuvers to perpetuate his hold on British Guiana government with attendant danger of spreading Castro infection in Eastern Caribbean.”¹⁰¹ The administration similarly scoffed at a Colonial Office peace proposal. Frantic with fear that the colony was descending into civil war, Colonial Secretary Sandys actually proposed in July 1964 creating a Burnham-Jagan coalition to rule until the December elections. U.S. officials instantly denied the British request, pointing out that a coalition now would establish an unacceptable precedent for the postelection future.¹⁰²

Winning the acquiescence of the Labour Party to proportional representation proved the most critical test for the Johnson administration in its drive for victory in British Guiana in 1964. British Guiana had long been an issue of contention within the Labour Party. Between 1953 and 1960, for example, Labour’s National Executive Committee had received more resolutions on British Guiana than any other colonial subject. Left-wing members of the party resented Labour leaders’ decision in 1953 not to denounce Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s overthrow of Jagan and his PPP government. With national elections certain in 1964, Labour parliamentarians made British Guiana a political attack point against the Conservatives. They called proportional representation the worst thing possible—“un-British.” They decried CIA influence in the colony and charged that the CIA controlled Forbes Burnham. In a speech in the House of Commons, Robert Edwards of the Labour Party implied that the CIA fomented violence in the colony. In June 1964, Labour leader Harold Wilson criticized Prime Minister Douglas-Home, noting he had no “confidence or trust for a simple British Guiana solution, least of all on the basis of what we regard as a fiddled Constitution; fiddled by the right honorable Gentleman.”¹⁰³ Wilson had previously sent a personal emissary, John Hatch, to Georgetown to investigate. Hatch had served as Labour’s Commonwealth Officer from 1954 to 1961. In thoughtful, analytic pieces published in the New Statesman, Hatch saw tragedy in British Guiana’s racial dilemmas. Blacks had long assumed they would have status and power once independence came. Racial tensions had arisen when Indians moved into middle-class occupations and showed success in commerce. The author thought that the process of social mobility would produce an integrated Guyanese society but in the short term it provoked racial antagonism. Hatch blamed U.S. officials, “goaded by their hysterical feelings toward Cuba,” for intensifying racial tensions. He judged Jagan a poor administrator but infinitely superior to Burnham, who would “collapse without CIA propping.” Hatch also feared that British Guiana faced “an ever more violent future” under the system of proportional representation.¹⁰⁴

Labour leaders lacked the courage of their convictions. In February 1964, Patrick Gordon Walker, Labour’s “shadow” foreign secretary, assured the State Department that Labour recognized the primacy of U.S. interest in British Guiana and did not want to confront the United States over the issue. Gordon Walker added, however, that the United States “exaggerated” the menace of Jagan, pointing out that Jagan did not control Georgetown. In April, Christopher Mayhew, a Labour spokesman on foreign affairs, informed Washington that two schools of thought existed within the party. Led by Arthur Bottomley, the shadow colonial secretary, members upheld the traditional Labour policy of bringing colonies to independence under chosen national leaders. These members denied that Jagan was a Communist and depicted him as the natural leader of the future racial majority. On the other hand, Mayhew reported that Gordon Walker stressed Anglo-American relations and would be prepared to accept proportional representation. Mayhew reasoned that Harold Wilson would have to decide the issue. In fact, although Wilson sharply criticized Sandys’s electoral scheme, he took care in parliamentary debate never to say he would delay or cancel the December 1964 election. Assuming a Labour victory soon that would make him prime minister, Wilson neither wanted to commit himself to a policy for British Guiana nor alienate the United States. One Labour leader privately confessed to a U.S. diplomat in London that Labour had no idea how to bridge the colony’s racial divide.¹⁰⁵

The Johnson administration prepared for a Labour victory. In its discussions with Labour representatives, it emphasized that the United States would not accept another Castro in the hemisphere. It also asked the AFL-CIO to speak with friends in the Labour Party and Trade Union Council about British Guiana. As the October 1964 election approached, administration officials discussed ways “to advise Harold Wilson of the importance that President Johnson attaches to events in British Guiana.” One official suggested that President Johnson should raise the subject of British Guiana in his congratulatory telephone call to Wilson. The CIA took a less alarmist tone, predicting that Labour would win the general election but that it would not fundamentally change the Conservatives’ plans for the colony.¹⁰⁶ The CIA proved prescient on both points. Labour squeaked out a narrow victory with a parliamentary majority of five seats, ending twelve years of Conservative rule. Harold Wilson became prime minister on 16 October 1964.

The Labour Party’s victory electrified Cheddi Jagan and the PPP. Having attentively followed political debate in the United Kingdom, Jagan surmised that Labour would either delay or perhaps cancel the December election. He headed for London at the end of October. Jagan could have saved his airfare. Within days after the Labour victory, the United States began to lobby the new government. Taking note of Jagan’s expected mission to London, Ambassador Bruce spoke to Foreign Secretary Gordon Walker, who promised to relay U.S. concerns to Prime Minister Wilson. The foreign secretary assured Bruce that Labour recognized the U.S. government’s “particular interest in safeguarding British Guiana against Communist subversion.” The Johnson administration also inquired about Wilson’s appointment of Anthony Greenwood to lead the Colonial Office. Wilson had put Arthur Bottomley in charge of Commonwealth affairs. Greenwood had been less outspoken than Bottomley on the issue of British Guiana, although he had expressed sympathy for Jagan’s plight. U.S. officials concluded that Wilson and his foreign secretary would control Greenwood.¹⁰⁷

The Johnson administration moved its lobbying campaign from London to Washington, hosting Foreign Secretary Gordon Walker in late October 1964. In a 23 October letter, Colonial Secretary Greenwood asked the foreign secretary to be firm with the United States, for the “Americans must not be allowed to think that we shall be willing for their sake to delay the grant of independence to British Guiana, or to ensure that it becomes independent only under a government which they regard as acceptable.” Gordon Walker avoided responding directly to Greenwood, but he did note that the December elections would not be postponed.¹⁰⁸ In Washington, Gordon Walker proved amenable to U.S. policy concerns. Secretary Rusk reiterated the points that it would be an “intolerable situation” for Jagan to win the election and transform the colony into a “base for Communist subversion.” If Burnham took power, however, Rusk promised a massive U.S. aid package. So pleased was Rusk with the new government’s cooperative attitude that he informed President Johnson that he would not have to raise the British Guiana issue with Gordon Walker when he met him in the Oval Office on 27 October. ¹⁰⁹ The Wilson government had no desire to confront the United States over the future of a troublesome but insignificant colony. With its minuscule majority in Commons, the new prime minister wanted to strengthen Labour’s position for new elections by focusing on economic issues. He needed international help in addressing the United Kingdom’s staggering balance of payments deficits. During his eight years as prime minister, Wilson avoided opposing U.S. Cold War policies. Although he resisted U.S. entreaties for troops, he disappointed Labour faithful by publicly supporting the U.S. war in Vietnam.

Among the numerous political batterings that Cheddi Jagan took in the years after his audience with President Kennedy, his meeting with Prime Minister Wilson on 29 October 1964 probably proved the most painful. The December elections would go forward as scheduled. The prime minister conceded that he had criticized the new electoral system in Commons but added that he never promised to change it once in power. His government “had to deal with the facts as they found them.” Wilson suggested that Jagan and Burnham could cooperate in a new government. Jagan dismissed Wilson’s naïve idea, noting that a coalition was “not acceptable to Burnham doubtless because it was not acceptable to the US Government.” Jagan predicted “that independence under Burnham could very easily lead to the sort of right-wing dictatorship which was familiar in Latin America.” Wilson thrice pledged that he would not approve of independence for British Guiana until blacks and Indians showed that they could work together. He further promised to end the racial imbalances in the police force and to send a Commonwealth team to ensure fair elections. From Jagan’s perspective, Wilson did not understand the underlying realities of what was about to unfold. The United States “would do anything” to keep him and his party from power. Jagan concluded his difficult time with Wilson by observing that “elections are the end of the road; while you think they are the beginning.”¹¹⁰

Prime Minister Wilson apparently believed that he could bring peace and justice to British Guiana. In subsequent meetings in November with Gordon Walker and Greenwood, the three leaders agreed that they disliked both Jagan and Burnham. But they continued to speculate that they could persuade the Johnson administration to support a Burnham-Jagan coalition. Wilson asserted that the timing of the colony’s independence “is entirely a matter for us” and that his government would ensure “that there is no interference with the election” and would see to the “ending of external pressures as soon as possible.” He also intended to make good on his promise to end racial imbalances in the police, security services, and civil services. ¹¹¹ At the end of November, Wilson informed Washington that British Guiana would not “receive independence for a good many years to come.” Wilson wrongly calculated that he would have a free hand in British Guiana after the December elections. Perhaps Foreign Secretary Gordon Walker better understood Jagan’s “end of the road” metaphor than his prime minister. Speaking with Rusk on 7 December 1964, election day in British Guiana, the foreign secretary remarked that if Jagan won, “we might be driven to try to promote some kind of coalition government; so it might be better for Burnham to win.”¹¹²

The 7 December electoral results generally met CIA expectations. Jagan and the PPP made an impressive showing, winning 45.8 percent of the vote, up from the 42.6 they won in 1961. But under proportional representation in the single national constituency, the PPP merited only twenty-four of the fifty-three parliamentary seats. About the same percent of the electorate as in 1961, 40.5 percent, voted for the PNC, whereas D’Aguiar’s UF fell from 16 percent to 12.4 percent. Governor Luyt asked Burnham, who controlled twenty-two parliamentary seats, to form a government in conjunction with D’Aguiar, whose party earned seven seats. The Burnham-D’Aguiar coalition took power in British Guiana on 15 December 1964. In his postelection analysis, Luyt conceded that the PPP, under the traditional “first across the post” electoral system and the old electoral map, would have won a solid victory, garnering twenty of the thirty-five seats. The governor also admitted that proportional representation had made racial voting more evident and that multiracial parties had not materialized, as Duncan Sandys had predicted. ¹¹³ The CIA wasted its money on the Justice party and GUMP. At most, the splinter parties cost the PPP one parliamentary seat. Nonetheless, Philip Agee, the former CIA agent, recalled that Jagan’s defeat represented “a new victory for the station at Georgetown” and the culmination of a five-year effort.¹¹⁴

Scholars have depicted the December 1964 elections as the last election that Guyana would have for the next three decades in which there were no widespread voting irregularities.¹¹⁵ The Commonwealth team of electoral observers did ensure that votes were counted accurately. But elections are not normally judged fair and free when external actors, like the CIA and the AFL-CIO, interfere. Violence also marred the electoral process. Consul General Carlson reported on an incident in late November when the correspondent of Time risked his life to save a female PPP supporter who was attacked by a mob. The journalist, Mo Garcia, a U.S. citizen, acted because the police stood by and did nothing. The conduct of proxy voting also raised questions. Over 6,000 Guyanese cast their votes by proxy, with the PPP winning less than 9 percent of those votes.¹¹⁶ Burnham and the PNC would steal future elections by manipulating the proxy voting system. What perhaps can be accurately said about the 1964 election is that it served as the vehicle by which the United States accomplished its goal of driving Cheddi Jagan and the PPP from power.