Brazil Purged One-Fifth of Legislature as US Spent $5 Billion in Turkey
By Harlan Pryce ·
Kept secret for 47 years, these notes to the President track the violent "sanitizing" of the Brazilian government and the fraying stability of the NATO flank.
A member of the Brazilian legislature was purged from his seat, and a US military attache in Laos lay dead. These were the disparate costs of a global order fraying at the edges in February 1969.
The record, a "Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2016/07/14" from the CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, presents these updates as "Late Notes for the President's Daily Brief of 10 February 1969." It is a snapshot of a world where the lines of deterrence were being redrawn not just by treaties, but by the sudden closing of state legislatures and the extension of concrete runways in the jungle.
No maneuvers until the end of the year
In the Warsaw Pact, the cracks were appearing in the East. The US Ambassador in Belgrade had received word from a "high-level Yugoslav Foreign Office official" that Romania was no longer being squeezed by Moscow to hold spring maneuvers. The reason was simple: the Soviets were still bogged down in Czechoslovakia.
The Soviet Ambassador in Bucharest had reportedly told his Yugoslav colleague that no maneuvers would take place in Romania until the end of the year. This was more than a scheduling conflict; it was a signal. The Romanians further suggested that the Moscow Conference of World Communist Parties, slated for that spring, would be postponed. While the Romanians intended to attend if it eventually happened, the Yugoslavs planned to stay away.
For an analyst, this is the sound of a bloc losing its cohesion. When the satellites and the ambassadors start reporting that the satellites of Moscow are drifting, the window for leverage opens.
Sanitizing Brazil
While the Eastern Bloc sputtered, the Western Hemisphere was undergoing a different kind of correction. In Brazil, the military was "pushing ahead with the 'sanitizing' of Brazil." The scale of the purge was clinical: nearly one-fifth of the national legislature had been removed, and five state legislatures were closed entirely.
To ensure the process remained efficient, the Brazilian National Security Council approved a military-police commission to investigate "subversive or counterevolutionary acts." The brief notes that this commission could make the harassment of the government's "real and fancied opponents less haphazard." President Costa e Silva may have opposed the drift, but the record is certain he "lacks the power to reverse the trend."
South of Brazil, in Peru, the "coterie around Velasco" was playing a different game of chicken. They were convinced the US would not apply sanctions over the expropriation of the International Petroleum Company. This arrogance left them vulnerable; the brief notes that trade negotiations with the Soviets were failing because Moscow was only interested in selling trucks and mining equipment—goods the Peruvians did not want—while the Soviets showed no interest in buying Peruvian sugar or minerals.
700 new barracks
In the East, the threat was moving into the soil. Satellite photography from late January showed the Chinese extending the runway at Ssu-mao airfield to accommodate jet fighters. Once finished, Ssu-mao would become the fourth jet fighter field in the border area, extending China's air defenses across the entire Vietnam and Laotian frontier.
But the real story was in the logistics. Engineer units were building a massive military base in the southern Yunnan salient. Aerial photography identified 800 barracks and storage facilities within five miles of the Laotian border; 700 of them were new. These structures sat near a Chinese road construction project in northern Laos, designed to make it easier for Beijing to support Communist forces in remote areas.
This was the hard reality of the conflict in Laos. While the US launched "unusually heavy airstrikes" against North Vietnamese positions surrounding Thateng, the prospects for lifting the three-month siege were poor. In Muong Soui, the cost of the struggle was written in blood: Communist terrorists had withdrawn after killing one US military attache and wounding another.
A $5 Billion Anchor
Nowhere was the tension between investment and stability more acute than in Turkey. The US had poured over $5 billion in economic and military aid into the country, training and equipping a military establishment of half a million men. Turkey was the "southeastern anchor of NATO," providing the vital installations needed to monitor Soviet missile and space developments.
Yet the anchor was dragging. The record describes a population that was 45 percent illiterate and 70 percent dependent on agriculture, creating a fertile ground for "frustration and xenophobia." The 1960 military revolution had shifted the tide, allowing the "long-dormant political left" to emerge. The Marxist Turkish Labor Party (TLP) had begun a coordinated program to drive the American military out of Turkey and pull the country out of NATO.
This leftist surge had triggered a mirror image on the right. Right-wing "commandos" had organized as shock troops to counter the TLP, leading to clashes in an atmosphere of "increasing violence and instability." Between the Cyprus dispute, the threat of the TLP, and the need to cut aid without destroying the investment, the US was walking a tightrope.
The brief concludes that Turkish-American relations had entered a "potentially delicate period of transition."