In the past four decades, the populations of Western Hemisphere nations have boomed, with big countries like Brazil and Mexico and small ones like Costa Rica more than doubling their populations. The United States has added over 80 million people to its population since 1960. Guyana’s population has barely grown from 560,000 in 1960 to about 700,000 in 2000. In the recent past, Guyana’s population has actually declined because of high mortality rates and emigration. In both 1998 and 1999, Guyana lost more than 1 percent of its population through emigration.¹ Many Guyanese now reside in the cosmopolitan city of Toronto.

Under the happiest of circumstances, Guyana would struggle to achieve high rates of economic growth. Less than 4 percent of its territory, a narrow belt of land on the coastal plain, is arable. For a depth of five to eight miles, the coastal plain is below sea level at high tides. Guyanese have been forced to construct seawalls, canals, and dikes in a constant struggle to keep the land dry. Sugar and rice have been the traditional cash crops of Guyana. Neither crop has commanded a strong price on global markets in the past few decades. Guyana does mine a valuable natural resource, bauxite, from which aluminum is extracted. Unlike neighboring Venezuela or Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana does not, however, produce petroleum. Guyana also offers no haven for tourists. Its beaches are a muddy mess, when the tides recede. With its dense rain forests, Guyana could perhaps appeal to ecotourists.

Although not naturally blessed, Guyana has not always been one of the most desperate places in the hemisphere. In 1960, it seemed to have a future. A colonial possession of the United Kingdom, British Guiana anticipated its independence within two to three years. Its population was growing steadily through natural increase. With a per capita income of $384, British Guiana was better off than the smaller Central American nations and ahead of South American nations like Bolivia and Paraguay. It had substantial foreign investments, principally from Great Britain and Canada. International economic teams that surveyed British Guiana in the 1950s issued optimistic reports about the country’s future. Colonial officials and domestic political leaders further believed that the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada would generously provide foreign aid to assist the newly independent, English-speaking nation.

Why Guyana failed to achieve its visions is not a complex mystery. Both the U.S. Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) provide persuasive explanations. Both agencies annually compile useful fact books and background notes on individual countries complete with thumb-nail sketches on a country’s history, politics, and economy. These studies are readily available on the agencies’ websites.² Both the State Department and the CIA note that, after achieving independence in 1966, Guyana suffered misrule until 1992, principally under the autocratic Forbes Burnham (1964- 1985). Burnham developed a personality cult, pillaged the national economy, and trampled on civil liberties and human rights. Burnham and his henchmen also discriminated against Indians, denying Guyana’s majority population political and economic opportunities. Since 1992, Guyana has conducted free and fair national elections. The redoubtable Jimmy Carter, the former U.S. president, assisted Guyana’s transition to democracy. But as the State Department points out, voting and life in Guyana are racially polarized. Indians, about 50 percent of the population in 2000, vote for the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), whereas Guyanese of African heritage, about 35 percent of the population, vote for the People’s National Congress (PNC), the party founded by Forbes Burnham. The palpable tension that exists between Indians and Afro-Guyanese hampers national progress. The State Department properly concludes that Guyana’s racial and ethnic tensions can be traced back to the “politically inspired racial disturbances” that erupted between Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese in the pre-independence years, especially between 1962 and 1964. Political agitators murdered or injured over a thousand Guyanese, and arsonists burned the central part of the capital city, Georgetown, to the ground.³

The irony inherent in the State Department’s and CIA’s concise accounts of Guyana’s history would probably not be lost on politically informed Guyanese who perused the agencies’ websites. Forbes Burnham would not have had the opportunity to perpetrate his crimes against the Guyanese people had it not been for the political machinations of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. Both administrations demanded that the British devise a shameless electoral scheme that would guarantee Burnham’s election and deprive the PPP and its leader, Cheddi Jagan, of power. The Johnson administration subsequently aided and abetted Burnham’s manipulation of the electoral machinery to ensure that he stayed in office. Knowledgeable Guyanese also understand that the CIA, using the good offices of U.S. labor unions, encouraged and funded the marches, demonstrations, and strikes that degenerated into arson, murder, and terrorism between 1962 and 1964. During the time of the civil rights movement in the United States, U.S. officials backed Afro-Guyanese in their campaign to deprive the majority Indo-Guyanese of their basic political rights.

The State Department and CIA’s omission of the critical U.S. role in Guyana’s brief history can perhaps be passed off as a need to be diplomatic and forward looking. In any case, institutional memories are short, and few people who made policy in the 1960s are alive in the early twenty-first century. Historical consciousness is also not a strong U.S. national trait. But this lack of historical awareness can have tragicomic consequences. President Bill Clinton conducted excellent relations with President Cheddi Jagan (1992-1997), who finally gained power when Guyana had its first free and fair election. In 1994, Clinton blundered, however, when he nominated a U.S. trade union official, who had worked against Jagan in the 1960s, to be the U.S. ambassador to Guyana. Jagan protested, wryly observing that “maybe President Clinton doesn’t know our history, but the people who advise him should at least know their own history.”⁴

If Clinton’s staff had consulted the published literature on U.S. relations with British Guiana/Guyana, they would have found little to guide them. Scholars, like Thomas J. Spinner and Chaitram Singh, who wrote fine analyses of Guyana’s domestic political milieu, learned from their Guyanese sources of the extensive U.S. role in the 1960s. But neither scholar had access to U.S. archival sources.⁵ Following sensational revelations in the late 1960s by muckraking journalists like Drew Pearson, a flurry of books appeared that highlighted the relationship between the CIA and the U.S. labor movement. These books usually touched on the U.S. intervention in British Guiana.⁶ Former CIA agents Philip Agee and Joseph Burkholder Smith indicated in their memoirs that the CIA conducted extensive covert operations in the British colony.⁷ Their assertions were, however, based on hearsay evidence. In 1967, both the New York Times and the Sunday Times of London published exposés of the CIA intervention in British Guiana.⁸ Little public discussion ensued, however, perhaps because the newspapers’ readers had more immediate issues to ponder, like the ongoing U.S. war in Vietnam. Indeed, Neil Sheehan, who wrote the article for the New York Times, would subsequently devote his career to analyzing the Vietnam debacle.

In 1994, historian Cary Fraser explored the U.S. role in British Guiana in his outstanding monograph on the U.S. response to decolonization in the British West Indies from 1940 to 1964. Fraser devoted two chapters of his study to British Guiana as a way of amplifying his theme of “ambivalent anticolonialism.” Fraser found that, although U.S. officials employed the rhetoric of anticolonialism and national self-determination, they subordinated ideals to Cold War imperatives. In preparing his chapters, Fraser gained access to Department of State records for the 1950s and a few documents from the Kennedy and Johnson presidential libraries.⁹ A research breakthrough occurred in the mid-1990s, when the Historical Office of the State Department published two volumes on Cuba and one on the other American Republics for 1961-63 in its magnificent Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. The volume on the American Republics contained a section on British Guiana. The Historical Office reported that the CIA and State Department initially resisted declassifying major portions of the compilation on British Guiana. Appeals from the Historical Office and the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, which were considered “at the highest levels” within the State Department, led to the declassification of most but not all vital documents.¹⁰ Nonetheless, the documents in the FRUS volume served as the basis for a chapter on British Guiana in The Most Dangerous Area in the World, my study of John Kennedy’s Latin America policy.¹¹ Two doctoral dissertations also drew on the new documentary evidence. Gordon Oliver Daniels used the FRUS documents in his doctoral dissertation on the U.S. intervention in British Guiana. A native Guyanese, Daniels recalled, as a young man, seeing U.S. labor union officials allotting food to strikers opposed to Cheddi Jagan. Jane L. Sillery combined her research in U.S. and British archives with interviews with Guyanese officials. Sillery discovered, however, that there are no publicly available records on the major political parties in Guyana. Both Daniels and Sillery limited their studies to the period from 1961 to 1964.¹²

Scholarship on the U.S. intervention in British Guiana is remarkably thin, especially as compared to the voluminous literature that exists on the U.S. interventions in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1962-64), Chile (1970-73), Central America (1980s) and Panama (1989) and the seemingly perpetual U.S. efforts, beginning in 1959, to undermine the Cuban Revolution. Historian Thomas Leonard noted, for example, that over 900 books had appeared from 1979 to 1992 purporting to explain the Central American crisis.¹³ These studies are substantiated by strong documentary evidence. In 2003, the Historical Office released a special volume devoted to the U.S. covert intervention in Guatemala in 1954. In part, the Historical Office wanted to rectify a mistake of the past, when in 1983 it published a volume, American Republics, 1952 - 1954, that gave scant attention to the intervention.¹⁴ Numerous documents are available for even a relatively recent intervention, such as the Reagan administration’s war against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Government officials who opposed U.S. policy “leaked” documents to journalists, and public-interest groups, such as the National Security Archive, persistently pursued documents.¹⁵

Scholarly neglect of British Guiana may indicate that the U.S. intervention does not rank as a significant Cold War event. But the actions of policymakers, past and present, seem to belie that judgment. In 2003, the CIA declined to declassify CIA Director Allen Dulles’s briefing to President Eisenhower and the NSC about the British decision to suspend the constitution of British Guiana and to send troops to the colony. (Dulles delivered his comments in October 1953, fifty years before my declassification request!¹⁶) Although it has acknowledged conducting eleven covert operations, including ones in Guatemala, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, the CIA declines to confirm or deny an operation in British Guiana. In 1997, Nick Cullather of Indiana University, who had worked as a historian at the CIA, reported that in the 1960s the CIA had burned records of its covert operation in British Guiana.¹⁷ Not all significant documents, however, ended up in the CIA’s furnaces. The Historical Office has had to delay its volume on South America for the 1964-68 period because of disputes over twenty-four documents pertaining to British Guiana.¹⁸ A well-informed archivist at the Kennedy library related to me that he never understood why the library held so many records on such a small, obscure colony. In fact, President Kennedy seemingly thought that his presidency depended on keeping Cheddi Jagan from leading an independent Guyana. In March 1962, for example, presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote to the president that the U.S. government was “spending more man-hours per capita on British Guiana than any other current problem!”¹⁹ President Johnson did not display the same intense interest in British Guiana, but he assigned his national security advisers, McGeorge Bundy and Walt W. Rostow, to monitor developments in the British possession. Secretary of State Dean Rusk relentlessly pursued an anti-Jagan policy in both administrations.

Although governmental agencies, such as the CIA, tenaciously hold on to records of an operation that may or may not exist, multiarchival work can help locate the pieces of a historical puzzle. Decisions to open or close records are often arbitrary and capricious. Copies of important memorandums also turn up in the private papers of former officials. For example, Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan exchanged several letters on British Guiana. One exchange is classified in the United States but is available in the prime minister’s correspondence at the Public Record Office in London.²⁰ The FRUS volume includes a “Special National Intelligence Estimate” on British Guiana, which was submitted by the director of the CIA in April 1962. Four and one-half lines of the paragraph on Forbes Burnham remain classified. The unabridged version of the intelligence paper, which can be found at the Johnson library, states that the U.S. intelligence community considered Burnham an opportunist, a thief, and a racist and predicted that Guyana would undergo conflict and instability if Burnham gained power.²¹ Perhaps because the United States supported Burnham in the 1960s, a government agency decided in the mid-1990s to censor a critical statement about an autocrat who had been dead since 1985. Fortunately, government censors normally do not comb through private archives. Labor union records, particularly the records of the AFL-CIO on deposit at the George Meany Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, proved a rich source for this study on U.S. policy toward British Guiana. The AFL-CIO worked intimately with U.S. intelligence agents in British Guiana and boldly advised the president, the State Department, and the CIA on how to conduct policies in the colony. Indeed, the correspondence of President George Meany demonstrates that labor union officers developed techniques to transfer substantial sums of U.S. money to Cheddi Jagan’s political enemies.²² In the parlance usually associated with nefarious activities, the AFL-CIO “laundered” CIA money.

Beyond being an important story with ample evidence, an analysis of the U.S. intervention in British Guiana opens several modes of inquiry that have become important to historians of U.S. foreign relations. Diplomatic historians customarily address the political, economic, and military manifestations of power. They enjoy writing about a dramatic “crisis-event.” They are also relentlessly empirical, basing their interpretations on archival evidence from official sources. And they employ traditional narrative techniques to present their findings.²³ This study of the U.S. intervention in British Guiana from 1953 to 1969 easily fits within those conventions. It analyzes why U.S. presidential administrations tried to control British Guiana’s political development and details the ways the United States exercised its awesome power against a small, weak colony. Reflecting concerns voiced by historians over the past three decades, this study tries, however, to steer clear of pot-holes in the traditional path. U.S. historians have been properly criticized for relying too much on U.S. sources for their ideas and interpretations and writing international history solely from the perspective of the White House and Department of State. Incorporating the perspectives of British and Guyanese actors helps avoid what is disparagingly dubbed the “view from Washington” syndrome.²⁴ This study further accepts the argument that nations and governments are never of one mind and that what serves as policy is often a complex interplay of competing bureaucratic interests.²⁵ The “bureaucratic politics” paradigm helps explain the inconsistent policies of London toward British Guiana. Harold Macmillan (1957-63) and Harold Wilson (1964-70) led different political parties. Nonetheless, both prime ministers found themselves caught in the middle of a rivalry between their Foreign and Colonial Offices.

In addition to urging historians to take an inclusive, nuanced approach to international history, scholars have also called on students of U.S. foreign relations to appreciate the roles played by corporations, universities, foundations, and missions in the export of U.S. values, ideas, and lifestyles.²⁶ U.S. and British labor unions were obvious “nonstate actors” that played a major role in determining British Guiana’s fate. Domestic interest groups also influenced policy. African American politicians hosted Afro-Guyanese in the United States and suggested that Forbes Burnham and his followers be viewed within the context of the U.S. civil rights movement. Democrats, like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, were eager to display their civil rights credentials and to court favor with African American leaders. Both Democrats also closely monitored domestic politics, wishing to deflect any charges of being “soft on communism” either from Republican opponents or conservative Democratic supporters.

A study of the U.S. covert intervention in British Guiana also opens up issues of race and gender, which are of increasing significance to historians of U.S. foreign relations. Scholars, many of whom engage in colonial discourse analysis and posit postcolonial theory, have argued that powerful nations and their elite leaders employ the language of race and gender to create and reinforce their hegemony over others.²⁷ In choosing to back Afro-Guyanese over Indo-Guyanese, U.S. officials displayed complex, contradictory views in their representations of the two groups. They accepted a “hierarchy of race,” suggesting in their language that Indians lacked the essential qualities requisite for self-governance. Among the alleged deficiencies of Indians was that their men lacked the masculine properties of people of African heritage. This concern for gender extended to Cheddi Jagan’s partnership with his wife, Janet Rosenberg Jagan, a native of Chicago and ostensible political radical. U.S. and British officials constantly spoke of Cheddi Jagan being “dominated” by a willful wife. Diplomats even took to speculating in official dispatches about Janet Jagan’s alleged sexual promiscuity with nonwhite males.

Although responding to contemporary scholarly concerns is important, the central purpose of this study is analyzing what happened to British Guiana/Guyana in the 1950s and 1960s. Guyanese deserve a complete and accurate historical record of their nation’s fate during the Cold War. An account of the U.S. destruction of British Guiana’s popular democracy might also help bring some balance to the history of the Cold War. Scholars and pundits appropriately celebrate the demise of the Soviet Union and its cruel tyrannies and the liberation of Eastern Europeans.²⁸ But this “triumphalist” attitude should not be permitted to conceal the stories of the victims of the West.