The Articles in the Category cover a vast range of history not only in our country but in the world as well. The category is entitled “How We Sold Our Soul”. In many cases our history has hinged on compromises being made by the powers at be. They say hind-sight is 20/20, which is why I am discussing these land mark decisions in this manner. The people that made these decisions in many cases thought they were doing the right thing. However in some instances they were made for expediency and little thought was given to the moral ramifications and the fallout that would result from them. I hope you enjoy these articles. The initial plan is to discuss 10 compromises, but as time progresses I am sure that number will increase.

Chiquita bananas, CIA funded coups, and Colombian hit squads.

Why do people in the United States eat so many bananas? Bananas are a staple of American breakfast, specifically Chiquita Bananas. Easy, quick, and nutrient dense, families for generations have been turning to the phallic fruit to start their day. However, the Chiquita banana company (formally known as United Fruit Company) has a dark history of oppression and violence that would make even the drug cartels proud. I think it’s time we reevaluate our love of the banana and consider a new fruit without such a violent path to our mouths.

With the average American eating more than 25 pounds of bananas yearly, there is no question of the popularity of the fruit. They are always available, and cheap at that. However, few Americans know the true devastation and political instability that Chiquita bananas have left behind. The multinational United Fruit Company, which later became known as Chiquita Brands International, was involved in a controversial operation to overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1954 with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In the early 20th century, the United Fruit Company had significant economic and political power in Central America, where it controlled large swaths of land and employed thousands of workers. The company’s influence extended to the Guatemalan government, which was friendly to U.S. interests and supportive of United Fruit’s operations.

However, in the 1940s and 1950s, a social reform movement emerged in Guatemala that sought to redistribute land and wealth, improve workers’ rights, and challenge the dominance of foreign corporations like United Fruit. The movement was led by President Jacobo Árbenz, who was elected in 1950 and implemented land reform policies that threatened the interests of United Fruit.

In response, United Fruit lobbied the U.S. government to take action against Árbenz, arguing that his government was Communist and posed a threat to U.S. interests in the region. The CIA was tasked with carrying out a covert operation to overthrow Árbenz and install a government more friendly to American interests.

The CIA operation, known as Operation PBSUCCESS, involved a propaganda campaign to discredit Árbenz and financial support for a rebel army led by a former Guatemalan military officer named Carlos Castillo Armas. United Fruit played a key role in the operation, providing logistical support, intelligence, and lobbying efforts in Washington.

In 1954, the CIA-backed rebels launched a successful coup against Árbenz, who was forced to flee the country. Castillo Armas was installed as the new president, and the U.S. government recognized his government as legitimate.

The coup had devastating consequences for Guatemala, as it led to decades of political instability, repression, and violence. The new government reversed many of Árbenz’s reforms and cracked down on political dissidents and labor activists. The legacy of the coup continues to shape Guatemalan politics and society to this day.

The United Fruit Company’s involvement in the coup, along with the U.S. government’s role in supporting it, has been widely criticized as a violation of international law and an example of U.S. imperialism in the region. It has also raised questions about the responsibility of corporations like United Fruit for contributing to political instability and human rights abuses in the countries where they operate.

This was not the only instance of United Fruit meddling and shaping political landscapes. Their horrors have deep roots in Colombia as well, where they have been exploiting their workers for over a century. In 1928, United Fruit was paying their entire Colombian workforce of more than 30,000 with company credit, only good at company stores. When workers held a strike to demand payment in cash, the company called in the Colombian military who proceeded to breakup the strike with armed conflict. Over the next few days it is estimated that between 1,000 and 3,000 workers and their families were killed by the military forces in what was dubbed the Banana Massacre.

United Fruit continued to destabilize the region for decades, fueling the ongoing conflicts between government and guerrilla groups. During the 1990s and early 2000s, in order to protect its operations, Chiquita Banana began making payments to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group.  This group was responsible for numerous human rights violations, including massacres and forced displacement of communities. The payments, which totaled over $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004, were made through a subsidiary company called Banadex and were falsely classified as “security expenses.” The AUC hit squads performed many murders on behalf of United Fruits interest, and eventually this collaboration became public knowledge.

In 2007, Chiquita Bananas (formerly UFC) pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to charges of supporting terrorism for its payments to the AUC and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. The company admitted that it knew the AUC was a violent group and that the payments were illegal, but claimed that it had no choice but to make them in order to protect its employees and operations.

Chiquita Banana shaped politics throughout Latin America and still today has a great influence in Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Belize, Honduras, and other tropical nations. Purchasing the fruit directly supports the actions of the company and it is high time for conscious Americans to remove the fruit from their breakfast table. Travel to a tropical country and eat bananas where they are fresh and delicious. All the Chiquita bananas in the States were picked green and shipped thousands of miles anyhow, and you’ve likely never even had a decent one unless you’ve traveled.

Background on the Guatemalan Coup of 1954

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Latin American governments were characterized by economic policies that allowed for liberal foreign investments from wealthy countries like the United States. Military dictators led a number of these Latin American governments. The United Fruit Company (UFCO), an extremely successful American owned and run company, profited greatly from investments it made in Guatemala. The business of United Fruit was bananas, and from bananas it had built a business empire in the Central American nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. The United States government was also interested in bananas, and had sponsored initiatives to promote the fruit in the American diet. Guatemala became known as a “banana republic,” a disdainful term for poor, developing countries that relied on a single cash crop, such as bananas, and were ruled by corrupt governments. Under the Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico, the United Fruit Company gained control of 42% of Guatemala’s land, and was exempted from paying taxes and import duties. Seventy-seven percent of all Guatemalan exports went to the United States; and 65% of imports to the country came from the United States. The United Fruit Company was, essentially, a state within the Guatemalan state. It not only owned all of Guatemala’s banana production and monopolized banana exports, it also owned the country’s telephone and telegraph system, and almost all of its railroad track.

The United Fruit Company was well connected to the Eisenhower administration. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his New York law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, represented the company. Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and brother of John Foster Dulles, had served on UFCO’s Board of Trustees and owned shares of the company. Ed Whitman, the company’s top public relations officer, was the husband of Ann Whitman, President Eisenhower’s private secretary. Ed Whitman produced a film, Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas, which depicted UFCO fighting on the front line of the Cold War. The company’s efforts paid off. It picked up the expenses of journalists who traveled to Guatemala to learn its side of the crisis, and some of the most respected North American publications, including the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, New York Herald Tribune, and New Leader, ran stories that pleased the company.

The Guatemalan Revolution of 1944 forced the resignation of the right-wing dictator, Ubico, who by then had ruled the nation for 13 years. The country held what many believed was the first true election in its history, popularly electing Dr. Juan Jose Arévalo to the presidency. A new constitution, based on that of the United States, was adopted. Arévalo, a liberal politician and educator, built over 6,000 schools and made great progress in education and health care. Arévalo was followed by Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, who became president in democratic elections in 1951. After Arbenz came to power, he extended political freedoms, allowing Communists in Guatemala to participate in politics. In a country of three million people, only 4,000 were registered as Communists; however, with the Cold War in full force, the United States was extremely concerned with the decision so close to home in the Western Hemisphere.

The United States became further alarmed after President Arbenz proposed “Decree 900,” to redistribute undeveloped lands held by large property owners to landless farmers, which constituted 90% of the population. The United States likened this land reform policy to that enacted by Communist regimes. By 1952, Arbenz had expropriated (taken from its owners) 225,000 acres and made them available to rural workers and farmers. At the time, just two percent of landowners owned 70% of useable agrarian lands, and farm laborers were kept in a form of debt slavery. The biggest obstacle to land reform in Guatemala was the United Fruit Company. While the government compensated property owners for the expropriated lands, United Fruit believed the compensation was not enough. The company demanded to be reimbursed for the full market value of the land, while the Guatemalan government was only willing to pay according to the worth of the land claimed in May 1952 tax assessments. This was problematic because United Fruit, like other big companies, had understated the value of the land to reduce its tax burden. The Guatemalan government was able to seize 40% of the land held by the giant corporation at little cost.

United Fruit felt that Arbenz was challenging it politically and financially. The company began a massive anti-communist propaganda effort against Guatemala in the U.S. press. The Eisenhower administration was also alarmed by the policy direction of the Arbenz government. Eisenhower did not want to intervene directly in Guatemala, however, to avoid the impression that the United States would attack a Western Hemisphere ally. Additionally, Eisenhower had vowed to reduce Cold War military spending. Instead, the United States utilized the newly created Central Intelligence Agency to launch a covert operation to remove Arbenz. The CIA was created, in part, to conduct espionage missions around the world. The Guatemalan operation was known as “Operation PBSUCCESS.” In 1952, two years after the election of Jacobo Arbenz, the CIA began recruiting an opposition force to overthrow him. Looking to the Guatemalan military, the CIA chose a disgruntled, anti-Arbenz officer, named Carlos Castillo Armas, to lead the operation.

On June 17, 1954, with the support of the U.S. government and the CIA, Armas launched an invasion. The invading forces numbered only 150 men, but the CIA had convinced the Guatemalan public and Arbenz that a major invasion was underway. The CIA set up a clandestine (secret) radio station to broadcast propaganda messages, jamming Guatemalan radio signals. Skilled American pilots were hired to bomb strategic points in Guatemala City. U.S. personnel flew the invasion aircrafts and filled the airways with bogus transmissions, adding to the impression. The CIA used spies within the Guatemalan military and government to actively undermine President Arbenz’s authority, demoralize his supporters, and block efforts to defeat Armas.

Unaware that the CIA was orchestrating the military coup against him, Arbenz turned to the U.S. government for help, placing his faith in a so-called ally that stated it was committed to advancing and spreading democracy. On Sunday, June 27, 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz resigned from office and fled Guatemala. The CIA replaced him with a military dictator, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, whom the CIA designated the “liberator” of the Guatemalan people.

Cleaning up America’s Backyard: The Overthrow of Guatemala’s Arbenz

President Truman spent a good portion of his presidency in a war against communism. The National Security Act of 1947 under Truman gave the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) authority to conduct covert action in addition to its stated intelligence and counterintelligence roles. This enabled the U.S. government to undertake a covert role against worldwide communism.

Starting almost immediately in 1948, Truman began to use CIA in this capacity to influence foreign policy, without overt diplomacy or military strength, but through covert action campaigns. He sent CIA operatives behind the Iron Curtain where their mission was unsuccessful and the operatives were captured and executed. But he also sent operatives to Italy to engage in political covert action, influencing the Italian elections, which was by and large successful. The short history of covert action to this point was rather scanty but the newly instituted practice had promising future implications that only needed to be tested with a President who would exercise the newly created tools added to the foreign policy arsenal.

With a worldwide increase in communist activities toward the end of his presidency, offensive operations against and to deter communism were in action. Communism was one of the highest threats to U.S. interests and the Truman Administration was determined to derail its actions abroad. The uncompromising Administration was fully dedicated to the fight against communism and they devoted significant energy to its execution. The planning had just begun and then Truman’s presidency was over. America had a new President with the same newly enabled abilities to combat the communist threat as his predecessor. To his advantage, he would enter the office with a strong and formidable military background that made his ability to confront worldwide communist threats even more overwhelming.

It was in January 1953 that President Eisenhower was elected, with the promise to supply help to any country in order to deter and resist communism, while also protecting American interests from its aggressions. This campaign promise became a fundamental part of the newly elected President’s stance on communism and one that would be tested from the very beginning of his tenure in office. Developments not too far south of the continental United States in Guatemala made communist actions too prevalent to ignore and an issue that President Eisenhower would tackle head on.

As a result of a popular revolution in Guatemala that started in 1944, Jacobo Árbenz was democratically elected as the president of the country in 1951 with a policy that Washington saw as in support of communism and in contrast to U.S. interests. Eisenhower knew firsthand of the aggressions of communism from his prior military career and tasked CIA with handling this development. Due to the concerning developments of the Árbenz government with regard to American interests, CIA was anticipating having to play a heavy and was lobbying on behalf of U.S. interests made that happen.

The new policies of the Guatemalan government under Árbenz proved extremely adverse for U.S. company United Fruit Company (UFC) which engaged in a highly effective lobbying campaign for the U.S. government to overthrow the Árbenz government. It was argued that the interests of UFC were no different from American interests overall and the U.S. government could not allow for such perceived communist developments to adversely impact American well-being abroad. Guatemala was forecasted by CIA and many ranking officials of the U.S. government to be on the verge of going “black” into the isolated abyss inflicted by communism. CIA officers in the Directorate of Plans believed that this marked a new threat where communists, for the first time, targeted a country in “America’s backyard” for subversion with anti-access/area denial strategic implications. Eisenhower saw no distinction between his own beliefs and the U.S. government assessment that was previously supported by President Truman during his term and thus authorized covert action to overthrow Árbenz in August 1953. The active measure approved by Eisenhower was codenamed Operation PBSUCCESS (replaced by the lesser effective Operation PBFORTUNE). It carried a $2.7 million budget for “psychological warfare and political action” along with “subversion,” among the other components of a small paramilitary war.” PBSUCCESS was both ambitious and thoroughly successful as it marked the Agency’s pinnacle point in the business of covert action.

On account of U.S. government desires and Eisenhower’s own anti-communist convictions, it was planned that Árbenz would be deposed and hopefully replaced with an “acceptable” leader approved by Washington. Eisenhower believed that democracy in Guatemala was premature and Árbenz must be replaced with a moderate, authoritarian regime that was not susceptible to communist penetration. Pushed by Congress, Eisenhower was called to act on Árbenz on account of the administration’s perceived complacency towards the leader and the need to obstruct communism infiltrating the Latin American countries. An American interest, United Fruit Company, served more or less as a representation of U.S. interests in Guatemala. For Eisenhower, any assaults on United Fruit Company, would be tantamount to an attack on the U.S. For Operation PBSUCCESS, Eisenhower viewed clandestine operations as an inexpensive alternative to military intervention. PBSUCCESS was designated as a clandestine operation of psychological warfare and political action. Eisenhower saw a communist penetration of Guatemala and Latin American countries as a serious threat to U.S. interests, such that action was necessary, and a communist government in Latin America would not be tolerated nor would his leadership allow one to exist.

Following approval from Eisenhower, the National Security Council authorized PBSUCCESS as a covert action operation against Árbenz, giving CIA primary responsibility with coordination from the Department of State. This covert operation’s objective was to “remove covertly, and without bloodshed if possible, the menace of the Communist-controlled government of Guatemala.” DCI Dulles established a temporary station (LINCOLN) to plan and execute PBSUCCESS.

While psychological warfare and political action were the originally described means of execution for PBSUCCESS, assassination dseveloped as an option on the table via a special request on 5 January 1954 for the liquidation of regime personnel. This assassination protocol was further described in a training manual that provided education in the art of political killing. Assassination as a form of targeting was killed but then subsequently revived by Agency leadership because assassination might make it possible for (1) the army to take over the government or (2) high-level government official elimination may cause the country to collapse. The Department of State, more times than one, promoted Agency-supported assassination. Policy directives from Washington were ambiguous although the removal of Árbenz from power was a foremost priority to the extent that consensus read that “Árbenz must go; how does not matter.” None of the proposals recommended or even planned for assassination were ever implemented.

While assassination through CIA-trained operatives was never achieved, a Castillo Armas force supported by CIA was dispatched on 16 June 1954 to Guatemala City and successfully assumed the presidency on 27 June 1954 after over a week of the force’s presence. But the success did not come easily. Initial setbacks due to the rebels’ failure to make any striking moves debilitated the insurgency effort. CIA provided aircraft to provide aerial assault on the country at numerous locations in order to disorient the public, achieving psychological victory for the rebel forces. Causing little material damage, the aerial attacks led many citizens to believe that the insurgency was more powerful than it actually was, an example of the high potential of deception campaigns in psychological operations. To further confront the Guatemalan army, additional planes were requested by Castillo Armas. These requests were promptly authorized by Eisenhower.

On the aforementioned date, Árbenz resigned his office and sought asylum in the Mexican embassy in Guatemala City upon which the newly emplaced Castillo Armas government allowed Árbenz to leave the country for Mexico where he was granted political asylum. While the Castillo Armas government successfully deposed Árbenz, Guatemalan military governments were favored until Castillo Armas was unanimously elected president. The new presidency was immediately recognized as the new government by the U.S. despite being internationally reviled. Both domestically and internationally, the U.S.-supported coup was described as a “modern form of economic colonialism.” Reports of humanitarian issues propagated from the Castillo Armas government ensued for the decades following the coup. Nevertheless, the covert action objectives were satisfied even beyond their original calculations.

President Eisenhower did not allow communism to exist in America’s backyard while fulfilling his campaign promise to aid any country to resist and deter the communist threat and to protect American interests from the threat of it. CIA was up to the challenge and distinguished itself as incomparably competent and professional in covert action planning as well as execution. Operation PBSUCCESS marked incredible success for the U.S. government’s capability for political action and deception. CIA planners designed a plan in accordance with higher objectives and intents that were expertly executed by operators on the ground through their available agent networks. Support for the operation was maintained by President Eisenhower through to the very end of the covert action protocol and in concert with the contingencies that were not planned for but accomplished by the mission anyway—probably indicative of Eisenhower’s military background.

Washington was steadfast that Árbenz had to be removed from power through any means necessary—even through assassination. Considered acceptable at the time, both from the perspective of Washington policymakers as well as those at CIA, assassination was classed as a political weapon to use in the struggle against communism and other political threats. Two decades later, DCI William Colby prohibited any CIA involvement in assassination and subsequent Executive Order 11905 banned any U.S. Government involvement in assassination attempts.

The U.S. Government’s act of foreign policy and CIA-mediated covert action represent one of the classic examples of the debate of Title 10 versus Title 50 of the United States Code. While Title 10 authorizes overt military involvement overseas, Title 50 specifically authorizes CIA to conduct covert intelligence activities and actions. PBSUCCESS was a cloudy area, although the majority of the planning was achieved via CIA, although military support was supplied. Even today, the distinction between Title 10 and 50 is grey at best. Through the National Security Council, Executive Branch, and smaller organizations in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, debate remains a forefront of concern in overseas policy and PBSUCCESS finds itself to be an example comparison time and again.

As a historical example that was supplanted as a marked success of American foreign policy and the high point of covert action, PBSCUCCESS had larger implications for the U.S. Government’s role in foreign action abroad. More specifically, it demonstrated to the world and American citizens what the U.S. Government would do and what it was capable of. Covert action programs persisted in the years following the Operation with rather great frequency and implications although PBSUCCESS was without a doubt the most successful of those undertaken. And while covert action remains a part of CIA’s charter today and such programs do in fact occur, they do not have the gravity or implications of the golden age of covert action of the past century. Nevertheless, the worldwide seriousness of CIA was heightened immensely after the covert action in Guatemala. No longer was CIA known only as America’s premier intelligence agency, it was one of the most powerful organizations on the planet. Even for countries that did not necessarily receive direct intervention on behalf of the American government, CIA’s strength was showcased in Guatemala and that invariably made an imprint in the minds of many around the world.

At the same time as covert action’s high success and almost invincibility was demonstrated, strategic thinking in terms of war was in the process of changing. While only a little while before this, CIA’s mission was shared by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in what was the Army’s Office of Special Services (OSS). The predecessor of both CIA and JSOC, OSS was responsible for intelligence gathering and covert action programs of which the latter was not formally stipulated until the National Security Act of 1947. Nevertheless, these responsibilities were shared by the military and, as such, the American way of war. There was no distinction between Title 10 and 50 as previously discussed. CIA involvement, as a civilian agency that reported only directly to the White House, was not an agency of war and neither were its activities. This would be fine if it was sure that CIA had no involvement in covert action, although the pretense of plausible deniability only goes so far, and its understanding is eventually known in some way or form. Even if not unclassified or affirmed by the U.S. Government, the possibility exists and this changed the way of war for the United States.

What happened next however was more of a backtrack, although predominantly a result of PBSUCCESS’s success and the failure of the covert action programs that followed. Covert action began to substitute for diplomacy, acting in some cases as the only form of foreign policy that was supplied by the U.S. Government. While successful in some regards, substituting covert action for diplomacy or overt military action is not a recipe for success and surely not a good formula for adequate foreign policy. It is probably contended, nevertheless, intelligence professionals believed as they still do that this backtrack was a good thing. The reason being, is that covert action has benefits but only when used in conjunction with diplomatic efforts and possibly overt military action. Intelligence and diplomacy are sometimes referred to as the stepchildren who aim to accomplish the same goal although through different means and sometimes at each other’s cost. As the U.S. Government soon realized this, we grew less to rely on covert action through its successes but using it in conjunction with diplomacy and military action. After this, the Departments of State and Defense became a little more comfortable with CIA. But that does not mean that they are always all on the same page or have the same ambitions.

Amidst this all, Operation PBSCUCCESS was a success for the U.S. Government both in terms of achieving success at foreign policy with plausible deniability and CIA-mediated action. The way of war in the American national security and foreign policy apparatus was forever changed. The role of covert action changed several times over the next few decades but the impending changes occurred as a cascading result of PBSUCCESS.

In sum, Operation PBSUCCESS was a success for CIA in that it demonstrated the Agency’s quick and decisive ability to perform covert action like never before. Planners at the Agency operated without much higher guidance or many rules of engagement but knew how to accomplish the mission. Furthermore, President Eisenhower’s strong will and temperament in the situation signified his strong convictions, leadership and promise to protect the U.S. at all costs. Covert action should never replace policy but the two should be coordinated well in order to create the best possible solution. In this case, policy was directly coordinated with covert action at the strategic level, albeit with rather minimal instruction at the operational level. The same is not true for many clandestine operations in administrations since. Operation PBSUCCESS demonstrated the U.S.’s place in the world as well as its capabilities—a strong mark of success for CIA.

The Guatemala 1954 Documents

These documents, including an instructional guide on assassination found among the training files of the CIA’s covert “Operation PBSUCCESS,” were among several hundred records released by the Agency on May 23, 1997 on its involvement in the infamous 1954 coup in Guatemala. After years of answering Freedom of Information Act requests with its standard “we can neither confirm nor deny that such records exist,” the CIA has finally declassified some 1400 pages of over 100,000 estimated to be in its secret archives on the Guatemalan destabilization program. (The Agency’s press release stated that more records would be released before the end of the year.) An excerpt from the assassination manual appears on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Saturday, May 31, 1997.

The small, albeit dramatic, release comes more than five years after then CIA director Robert Gates declared that the CIA would “open” its shadowy past to post-cold war public scrutiny, and only days after a member of the CIA’s own historical review panel was quoted in the New York Times as calling the CIA’s commitment to openness “a brilliant public relations snow job.” (See Tim Weiner, “C.I.A.’s Openness Derided as a ‘Snow Job’,” The New York Times, May 20, 1997, p. A16)

Arbenz was elected President of Guatemala in 1950 to continue a process of socio- economic reforms that the CIA disdainfully refers to in its memoranda as “an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the ‘Banana Republic.'” The first CIA effort to overthrow the Guatemalan president–a CIA collaboration with Nicaraguan dictator Anastacio Somoza to support a disgruntled general named Carlos Castillo Armas and codenamed Operation PBFORTUNE–was authorized by President Truman in 1952. As early as February of that year, CIA Headquarters began generating memos with subject titles such as “Guatemalan Communist Personel to be disposed of during Military Operations,” outlining categories of persons to be neutralized “through Executive Action”–murder–or through imprisonment and exile. The “A” list of those to be assassinated contained 58 names–all of which the CIA has excised from the declassified documents.

PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953, carried a $2.7 million budget for “pychological warfare and political action” and “subversion,” among the other components of a small paramilitary war. But, according to the CIA’s own internal study of the agency’s so-called “K program,” up until the day Arbenz resigned on June 27, 1954, “the option of assassination was still being considered.” While the power of the CIA’s psychological-war, codenamed “Operation Sherwood,” against Arbenz rendered that option unnecessary, the last stage of PBSUCCESS called for “roll-up of Communists and collaborators.” Although Arbenz and his top aides were able to flee the country, after the CIA installed Castillo Armas in power, hundreds of Guatemalans were rounded up and killed. Between 1954 and 1990, human rights groups estimate, the repressive operatives of sucessive military regimes murdered more than 100,000 civilians.

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DOCUMENTS

Document 1: “CIA and Guatemala Assassination Proposals, 1952-1954”, CIA History Staff Analysis by Gerald K. Haines, June 1995.

CIA records on assassination planning in Guatemala were first gathered pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in 1979. All of them were withheld on national security grounds at that time. In 1995, the CIA’s historical staff “rediscovered” these records during a search of Guatemala materials to be declassified as part of the agency’s “Openness” program. A staff historian, Gerald Haines, was assigned to write this brief history of these operations. He concluded that as early as January 1952, CIA headquarters began compiling lists of individuals in Arbenz’s government “to eliminate immediately in event of [a] successful anti-Communist coup.” Planning for assassination included budgeting, training programs, creation of hit teams, drafting of target lists of persons, and transfer of armaments. Haines writes that “until the day that Arbenz resigned in June 1954 the option of assassination was still being considered.” The CIA, according to this history, did not implement its assassination strategy. But the declassifiers of this study, and other related documents, have deleted the names of the targeted individuals, making it impossible to verify that none of them were killed during or in the aftermath of the coup.

Document 2: “A Study of Assassination”, Unsigned, Undated.

Transcription

Among the documents found in the training files of Operation PBSUCCESS and declassified by the Agency is a “Study of Assassination.” A how-to guide book in the art of political killing, the 19-page manual offers detailed descriptions of the procedures, instruments, and implementation of assassination. “The simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination,” counsels the study. “A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.” For an assassin using “edge weapons,” the manual notes in cold clinical terms, “puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached….Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region.” T he manual also notes that to provide plausible denial, “no assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded.” Murder, the drafters state, “is not morally justifiable,” and “persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.”

Document 3: “Selection of individuals for disposal by Junta Group”, March 31, 1954.

One of the many assassination lists compiled by the CIA during planning for Operation Success. As the memorandum indicates, the chief of one of the CIA’s divisions involved in the coup (the division title has been deleted) requested a list of names of Arbenz government leaders, members of the Communist Party, and individuals “of tactical importance whose removal for psychological, organizational or others reasons is mandatory for the success of military action.” The memo asks that CIA personnel read through the list and initial the names of those who should be included on a “final list of disposees.” The list (and the initials or names of all CIA officers appearing in the document) has been withheld. A handwritten note attached on the bottom of the memo reads:

Elimination List
April [illeg.] – [Illeg.] is taking a copy of list of
names for checking with the [illeg.]
April 7 – Original Memo
with attached Biographic data
has been passed to [deleted]
Returned by [deleted] on 1 June 1954

Document 4: “Guatemalan Communist Personnel to be disposed of during Military Operations of Calligeris”, Origin deleted, Undated.

Another version of the assassination lists compiled by the CIA and Carlos Castillo Armas (code-named “Calligeris”) in the course of preparing for the 1954 coup. The names of the agency’s intended victims were divided into two categories: persons to be disposed of through “Executive action” (i.e., killed) and those to be imprisoned or exiled during the operation. Before releasing this document to the public, the CIA deleted every name, leaving only the rows of numbers to indicate how many people were targeted.

Document 5: “Operation PBSUCCESS: The United States and Guatemala, 1952- 1954”, CIA History Staff document by Nicholas Cullather, 1994. Excerpt.

A narrative history of the CIA’s role in planning, organizing and executing the coup that toppled Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán on June 27, 1954. Cullather, now a diplomatic historian at the University of Indiana, worked on contract for one year with the CIA, where he was given access to thousands of agency records and secret operational files in order to produce this overview. The result is a surprisingly critical study of the agency’s first covert operation in Latin America. Beginning with a review of the political, economic and social forces that led to Arbenz’s presidency in 1951, the document is an intimate account of how cold war concerns convinced President Eisenhower to order the removal of the democratically-elected leader by force. It also provides countless new details of a covert mission plagued by disastrous military planning and failed security measures: according to Cullather, “Operation Success” barely succeeded. The CIA scrambled to convince the White House that it was an unqualified and all but bloodless victory, however. After Arbenz resigned, Eisenhower called the Director of Central Intelligence, Allan W. Dulles, and his senior covert planners into a formal briefing of the operation. Cullather’s account now reveals that the agency lied to the president, telling him that only one of the rebels it had backed was killed. “Incredible,” said the president. And it was. At least four dozen were dead, according to the CIA’s own records. Thus did the Guatemala coup enter agency lore as an “unblemished triumph,” Cullather explains, and become the model for future CIA activities in Latin America.

In Guatemala, of course, “Operation Success” had a deadly aftermath. After a small insurgency developed in the wake of the coup, Guatemala’s military leaders developed and refined, with U.S. assistance, a massive counterinsurgency campaign that left tens of thousands massacred, maimed or missing.

‘YOU CAN OWN THE WORLD’

On June 15, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to launch an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, an attempt to overthrow the communist-leaning, reform-minded government of the small Central American nation of Guatemala. “I want you all to be damn good and sure you succeed,” the president told his CIA director, Allen Dulles. “When you commit the flag, you commit it to win.”

The CIA’s “field” headquarters for the covert operation were on an abandoned Marine air base in Opa-Locka, Fla., in a suite of offices over a former nursery. In the dusty old barracks, determined men moved swiftly, impressive maps and a 40-foot chart lined the walls, phones rang, telexes chattered. To Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes, the Ivy League-bred senior CIA operatives sent to supervise the attempted coup, it all looked like a smoothly run, crisply efficient organization.

Artful, quick, inexpensive coups d’etat: Here was a role for the CIA that really worked, or so Bissell and Barnes believed. At the time, Eisenhower was trying to cut back his military budget, which had been bloated by the Korean War. The Republican platform had made some grand statements about liberating the “slave states” of Eastern Europe, but Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had no desire at all to go to war to deliver on this promise. “Eisenhower didn’t trust the military,” said historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “He knew too much about it.” The CIA beckoned as a promising alternative. It was small, relatively cheap, elite, nonbureaucratic and, best of all for a political leader, deniable.

Secretary of State Dulles had made the most noise about rolling back the Iron Curtain. But he did not really believe his own rhetoric. He was content to contain communism, which seemed a large enough task in the early 1950s. The place it was growing fastest was in the Third World, where colonialism was giving way to chaos. He saw the CIA as a convenient tool that could stop the Red stain from spreading on the map. It was his personal action arm: All he needed to do was call his brother, Allen, the CIA director.

So the new battleground would be back alleys and restless barracks from Cairo to Havana. The Third World beckoned as an easier place to operate than the East Bloc. The communists were the insurgents, not the government. The Kremlin had long tentacles, but they became attenuated with distance; local communist movements were easier to penetrate than ones close to Moscow Center. Third World strongmen were already dependent on American and British companies to run their economies, and the services of many public servants south of the border and east of the Levant were for sale. By judiciously dispensing cash and favors, an American CIA station chief could gain the kind of power enjoyed by a colonial proconsul.

The odds for intervention seemed so encouraging that the men who ran the CIA overlooked one shortcoming: They knew almost nothing about the so-called Developing World.

In Guatemala, the CIA had pulled together a rebel “army” of 200 men, which it trained on one of Gen. Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaraguan plantations. The chief CIA trainer was an American soldier of fortune named William “Rip” Robertson. The rebel commander — the “Liberator” — was a disaffected Guatemalan army officer named Carlos Castillo Armas. Robertson regarded his recruits as “10th rate” and sarcastically said that Castillo Armas “might make sergeant in the American Army.” Tracy Barnes had his doubts about Castillo Armas, whom he called a “bold but incompetent man.” But he tried to put a brave face on Castillo Armas’s ragtag soldiers, calling them “the hornets.”

On June 18, three days after Eisenhower’s order, Castillo Armas, dressed in a checked shirt and driving his command vehicle, a beat-up old station wagon, pushed across the Guatemalan border with about 200 “hornets,” whom he had met for the first time a week before.

Once the invasion began, the “Voice of Liberation,” a phony radio station set up by the CIA, broadcast false bulletins, breathlessly reporting pitched battles and heavy casualties. The CIA front used classic disinformation techniques to start rumors and spread fear. “It is not true that the waters of Lake Atitlan have been poisoned,” began one broadcast. “At our command post here in the jungle we are unable to confirm or deny the report that Castillo Armas has an army of 5,000 men.”

Barnes and Bissell were back at CIA headquarters in Washington when the invasion began, fomenting insurrection via coded telexes to their operatives under cover in the field. The two men, who had been schoolmates at both Groton and Yale, were completely sure of their place and purpose in the world. Neither man had any experience with failure during a large-scale covert operation — or, for that matter, much experience with failure of any kind. The secret war against Moscow was still in its infancy in the early 1950s. For young Ivy League activists at the CIA like Bissell and Barnes, there was still a sense of Big Game anticipation about the emerging rivalry with the Soviet Union. Having just won the Second World War against fascism, they were prepared to wage a larger, if more shadowy, struggle against Marxism. The battlefield, as well as the prize, was the entire world. For both the KGB and the CIA, Guatemala was, as Barnes had put it while recruiting an operative for PBSUCCESS , “an easily expandable beachhead, if you want to use the current term.”

GEN. WILLIAM “WILD BILL” DONOVAN, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, America’s World War II spy agency, liked to hire Wall Street lawyers and Ivy Leaguers to commit espionage. “You can hire a second-story man and make him a better second-story man,” Donovan explained, referring to the cat burglars sometimes employed by investigative agencies. “But if you hire a lawyer or an investment banker or a professor, you’ll have something else besides.” Donovan wanted a higher class of men; although the OSSers were teased for being socialites, they tended to be confident and intelligent. On the other hand, they didn’t have much of a knack for, or experience with, the planning and execution of second-story jobs.

Donovan’s hiring philosophy was embraced by the OSS’s Cold War successor, the CIA. Its top ranks were filled with Wall Streeters, many of whom were OSS veterans, and academics from leading eastern colleges. They were especially visible — at once admired and resented — at the upper levels of the Directorate of Plans, the CIA’s operations arm, also called the clandestine service, or, by reporters of a later era, “the Department of Dirty Tricks.” Operating in secret, they were not public figures, though in their heyday, the 1950s and early 1960s, they were very powerful. Within the CIA, the men who ran the clandestine service were known for their courage and elan, as well as for their occasional recklessness.

More than three decades later, the style of covert action these men pioneered remains seductive to policymakers, even after the various CIA scandals over the years — the assassination plots, the illegal break-ins, the betrayals by Kremlin mole Aldrich Ames. With encouragement from Capitol Hill and the White House, the CIA’s new director, John M. Deutch, has called this autumn for stepped-up clandestine operations against post-Cold War threats like terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Secret operations can produce quick and useful results. But the long-term legacy can be sour. The CIA’s intervention in Guatemala did not achieve democracy, but rather a string of repressive regimes. Few Americans were surprised last spring when a Guatemalan colonel on the CIA’s payroll was linked to human rights abuses, including the death of an American. And last month, Deutch fired two senior agency officers and disciplined eight others for their handling of the reporting of the incident.

The ubiquitous meddling of the agency in its early years has created a permanent climate of suspicion in some parts of the world. Many foreigners — and not a few Americans — see CIA plots everywhere. Most of these conspiracy theories are pure fiction. But the culture that Bissell and Barnes helped create is still alive today in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where the old boys still toast their secret coups, Guatemala prominent among them.

SOME HISTORIANS USE a corporate conspiracy theory to explain why the CIA sought to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954. The story, as it is usually told, begins in 1936 on Wall Street with a deal set up by John Foster Dulles, then a lawyer with Sullivan & Cromwell, to create a banana monopoly in Guatemala for his client, United Fruit Co. In 1952, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Guatemala’s president, expropriated United Fruit’s holdings. To get his company’s land back, Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray, the head of United Fruit, hired Washington lobbyist Tommy “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran. His case was sympathetically heard, in part because just about everyone in a position to do something about Guatemala was, in one way or another, on United Fruit’s payroll. Both Dulles brothers had sat on the board of United Fruit’s partner in the banana monopoly, the Schroder Banking Corp. The assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, John Moors Cabot, owned stock in United Fruit. (His brother Thomas had served as president of the company until 1948.) U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was a stockholder, and had been a strong defender of United Fruit while a U.S. senator. Ann Whitman, Eisenhower’s personal secretary, was the wife of Edmund Whitman, United Fruit’s PR director. Walter Bedell Smith, the undersecretary of state, was actively seeking a job with United Fruit and later sat on the company’s board.

Against this capitalist juggernaut, the story usually goes, stood Arbenz, an idealistic reformer who wanted only to help the downtrodden peasants of his country. Arbenz posed no national security risk to the United States. His badly equipped, poorly led army of 6,500 men was incapable of threatening its neighbors, much less the colossus to the north. Arbenz was a leftist, but not really a communist, and he wasn’t working for Moscow or trying to subvert other countries. His only crime was to threaten the profits of United Fruit.

There is some truth behind this explanation of the CIA’s involvement in Guatemala during the 1950s, but it is not the whole story. For one thing, Arbenz “considered himself a communist, and with his few confidants, he spoke like one,” wrote historian Piero Gleijeses. Guatemala was the one country in Central America willing to harbor communists, and agrarian land reform did pose an ideological threat to its neighbors. Arbenz was not a Stalinist or even a budding Castro. But he was not just a nationalist, either. He had the potential to be a useful client for Moscow.

Certainly, the top policymakers in Washington believed that Arbenz was a communist, or close to it, and that he posed a threat to the hemisphere. With or without United Fruit, Guatemala would have been a likely target for American intervention in the early 1950s. The prevailing view in Washington was succinctly stated by Tracy Barnes when he signed up David Phillips, a CIA operative, to join the Guatemala operation. In his agency memoir, Night Watch, Phillips quoted Barnes’s recruiting pitch:

“It’s not just a question of Arbenz,” Barnes explained. “Nor of Guatemala. We have solid intelligence that the Soviets intend to throw substantial support to Arbenz . . . Given Soviet backing, that spells trouble for all of Central America.”

Barnes believed what he was saying; he was not being cynical. After churning out pages of urgent warnings about global communism for the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board in 1952, he had convinced himself; his views were generally shared by his friends and colleagues. “Tracy and I were not concerned with an ideological debate over whether to do it,” Bissell said later. “Just how to do it.” Barnes and Bissell were activists, and overthrowing a foreign government was action on a dramatic scale. “Tracy was so relieved he could actually do something,” said his wife, Janet.

Barnes and Bissell were not Allen Dulles’s first choice to run the Guatemala operation. Dulles had asked Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt who had recently engineered a successful coup in Iran, to reprise his feat in Central America. But Roosevelt demurred. For a coup to be successful, he told Dulles, the army and the people have to “want what we want.” He doubted that the Guatemalan peasants wanted what United Fruit wanted.

In later years, the CIA’s work in Guatemala would be regarded as a model of tactical success, of agency cunning and mastery of covert action. To the participants at the time, however, it was a near disaster saved by good fortune, the willingness to take risks and the cravenness of the opposition.

The CIA had tried and failed to lure Arbenz out of power by offering him a Swiss bank account. The agency also considered assassinating Arbenz, but didn’t want to make him a martyr. If the CIA couldn’t bribe Arbenz or kill him, perhaps it could scare him out of office. The CIA’s records do not disclose who first suggested the idea, but the concept, first contemplated in the fall of 1953, closely mirrors the World War II experiences of the operation’s co-supervisor, Tracy Barnes.

Barnes had worked on Wall Street for Carter, Ledyard, the blue-stocking law firm. He was hired into the OSS during the war by John Bross, the senior prefect in Barnes’s class at Groton. “Tracy came to me . . . looking for something active,” Bross later wrote in a private memoir. “If we couldn’t give him some kind of combat service, he was going to get a job as a waist gunner in the air force.” Bomber crews over Germany at the time had about the same life expectancy as sailors on the Murmansk run. “I rather got the impression that he wanted specifically to look death in the eye,” wrote Bross. Barnes’s classmate got him assigned to the Jedburgh program, training commandos to drop behind German lines and link up with the French Resistance. In Peterborough, England, Barnes was instructed by British commandos in the black arts: how to blow up a bridge, code a message, operate a radio, forge documents, and silently strangle someone from behind.

On August 5, 1944, Barnes parachuted into France, breaking his nose on the airplane hatch as he jumped. Attacking along with only one other commando, he convinced a garrison of Germans holding a little town in Brittany that they were under siege from a superior force. Barnes accomplished this trick by racing about on the outskirts of the village firing weapons, setting off explosions and generally making a ruckus. The frightened Germans fled.

In Guatemala, the CIA set about to play essentially the same trick on a grander scale. The CIA would recruit a small force of exiles to invade Guatemala from Nicaragua. They would pretend to be the vanguard of a much larger army seeking to “liberate” their homeland from the Marxists. By radio broadcasts and other propaganda, the insurgents would signal a broad popular uprising. Fearing a revolution, Arbenz would throw up his hands — like the frightened Germans — and flee.

The key to shocking Arbenz, Barnes and his psychological warfare staff believed, was air power. The Guatemalan air force consisted of a few light training planes and 300 men. If the insurgents could get control of the skies and bomb Guatemala City, they could create panic. Barnes set about creating a small pirate air force to bomb Arbenz into submission. An odd-lot fleet — six aging P-47 Thunderbolts, three P-51 Mustangs, a Cessna 180, a PBY naval patrol bomber and a P-38 Lightning — was smuggled into neighboring Nicaragua under the cover of military aid to the Somoza regime. To fly these planes, the CIA recruited soldiers of fortune like Jerry DeLarm, a former skywriter who owned an automobile dealership in Guatemala City and who liked to put a .45-caliber pistol before him on the table when he spoke to a stranger.

This entire operation was supposed to be highly secret — deniable by the U.S. government. But Gilbert Greenway, who had been assigned to help locate air crews for the operation, recalled that “Tracy was very lax on security. We were going to hire crews with very little cover. He was in such a hurry that he wanted to hire people without any security checks, a flagrant security violation. He just wanted to get going.” Greenway balked, but Barnes insisted. “Oh, go ahead,” he urged. In the end, the cover for the pilots was pretty flimsy: Many of them were hired from a Florida flight school owned by Greenway’s brother-in-law.

One of Barnes’s recruits for the Guatemala operation was E. Howard Hunt. Hunt would work for Barnes for most of his CIA career, sometimes to Barnes’s detriment. A graduate of Brown University, Hunt regarded himself as Barnes’s social peer, but others did not share this estimation. Hunt was at once devious and melodramatic. He successfully moonlighted as a part-time author of spy thrillers; he wrote dozens of them under various pseudonyms. Barnes signed him up to be chief of propaganda for the Guatemala operation.

David Phillips, a charming if unsuccessful actor who had drifted into the CIA when he could not make it on Broadway, was put in charge of the phony Voice of Liberation to make clandestine radio broadcasts into Guatemala. Its slogan was “Trabajo, Pan y Patria” — Work, Bread and Country. Phillips hired a couple of Guatemalans — “Pepe” and “Mario” — to write stirring calls to arms. The idea was to prepare the proper psychological climate for the revolution.

Phillips was a smart man — more grounded than Hunt — and he was perceptive about the conflicts roiling below Barnes’s unflappable exterior. As he was being recruited by Barnes, Phillips asked him, “What right do we have to help someone to topple his government and throw him out of office?” Barnes “ducked” the question. “For a moment,” Phillips wrote later, “I detected in his face a flicker of concern, a doubt, the reaction of a sensitive man.”

The CIA’s Berlin station chief, Henry Heckscher, was brought back and sent to Guatemala City disguised as a coffee buyer in a straw hat and dark glasses. Heckscher tried, without much success, to penetrate Arbenz’s army and turn the officers against the president. He did manage to recruit one member of Arbenz’s planning staff, who turned out to be a useful spy.

Before the “hornets” being trained in Nicaragua could be set loose, the United States needed some justification to make clear to the world and the Guatemalans that Arbenz was a dangerous communist. The CIA tried to contrive evidence by planting caches of weapons — fraudulently stamped with the Soviet hammer and sickle — along the Guatemalan coast. The discovery does not seem to have caused much of a stir. But then Arbenz played into Washington’s hands.

In January 1954, according to the CIA’s still-secret history of the operation, a Panamanian double agent had revealed that the CIA was plotting against Arbenz. This betrayal might have blown the whole operation. But Arbenz overreacted. Precisely because he feared an attempt by “los norteamericanos” to overthrow him, the Guatemalan president went shopping for communist reinforcements. Through his spy on Arbenz’s staff, Heckscher learned that Arbenz had ordered an entire shipload of weapons from Czechoslovakia, to be shipped from Poland aboard the freighter Alfhem.

The CIA tracked the Alfhem all the way to the Guatemalan port of Puerto Barrios, where it docked in mid-May 1954. At first the CIA’s chief of clandestine operations, Frank Wisner, was angry that the U.S. Navy had failed to intercept the freighter — until he realized that the shipment of 200 tons of communist weaponry was just the excuse the United States needed to intervene.

Surreptitiously, Rip Robertson and a band of his hornets tried to stop the shipment before it reached Guatemala City. Their plan was to destroy a railroad trestle just as the Guatemalan freight train carrying the weapons rumbled across. But the dynamite did not explode; a downpour had drenched the fuses.

It did not really matter; the weapons were of limited used to Arbenz. The World War II vintage machine guns did not work and the antitank weapons had no utility in a region that had no tanks. But they gave the State Department cause to fulminate. The American ambassador to Guatemala, John E. “Jack” Peurifoy, had been handpicked by Wisner to work with the CIA. A flamboyant figure who paraded around the embassy in a jumpsuit with a shoulder holster, sporting a green Borsalino hat with a feather on his head, Peurifoy demanded an audience with Arbenz and cabled home that if the Guatemala leader was not actually a communist, “he’ll do until one comes along.” The White House denounced Guatemala as a Soviet bastion and the Pentagon shipped 50 tons of small arms to the exile “army” of Castillo Armas.

The American press played along with this charade. It simply ignored Arbenz’s cry that the CIA was plotting against him. Most reporters accepted uncritically whatever American officials told them, and if they didn’t, their editors did. Dispatches from Time magazine reporters in Guatemala, generally sympathetic to Arbenz, were rewritten at the magazine’s editorial offices in New York to take a hard line against the Guatemalan government. The editor-in-chief of Time Inc., Henry Luce, was a friend of Allen Dulles, and the reporters strongly suspected government intervention. The most naked — and successful — attempt to control the press came at the New York Times. The dispatches of Sydney Gruson, the Times’s man in Mexico City, seemed overly influenced by the Guatemalan foreign minister. Since the Times reporter was taking the wrong line, Wisner suggested to Dulles that the CIA try to silence Gruson. As a “left-leaning” emigre who traveled on a British passport issued in Warsaw, Gruson was a “security risk,” Wisner argued. The necessary phone calls were made, and — as a patriotic gesture — New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger ordered Gruson to stay out of Guatemala, just as Gruson was about to launch an investigation of Castillo Armas’s army.

Wisner was able to control the press, but he was nonetheless full of doubts. He had initially opposed the creation of a CIA-backed rebel air force — even threatening to resign — for fear that it would blow the agency’s cover. After the Panamanian double agent informed Arbenz of the CIA plot, Wisner considered aborting the operation, but Dulles decided that the agency was already committed. Then the agency discovered electronic bugs “similar to the jobs the Russians used” — including a microphone in the chandelier — in the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Wisner wrote a memo to file, stating that the operation “appears to be rather naked . . . Several categories of people — hostile, friendly and neutral’ — either know or suspect or believe that the U.S. is directly behind this one and, assuming it proceeds to a conclusion, will be able to tell a convincing story.” To try to “quiet” the operation, Wisner briefly suspended “black” flights of arms and other supplies to the hornets.

Barnes tried to calm nerves at the operation’s Opa-Locka headquarters. He traveled to the barracks accompanied by his old schoolmate, now his CIA colleague, Richard Bissell. In his role as a special assistant to Allen Dulles, Bissell had been dispatched as a kind of “eyes and ears” for the director, to report back to Washington on how this bold and highly sensitive operation was progressing.

Owlish and clumsy, Bissell made an unlikely James Bond. But he was intellectually domineering and bold, physically as well as mentally. As a Yale undergraduate, his unsanctioned sport was climbing over the steep-pitched roofs of the gothic halls at night — “criminally dangerous,” he later conceded. Though unknown to the public, he was regarded as one of the brightest young men in government. He was the hidden genius behind the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, and in later years at the CIA, he developed the U-2 spy plane, eventually becoming chief of all covert action. It was Bissell who masterminded the agency’s assassination plots and hired the Mafia in a fruitless attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s.

At operation headquarters in Florida that June 1954, Bissell was thoroughly impressed with what his Groton classmate had helped create. He later recalled that both he and Barnes admired the military plans and operations. Neither of them had ever been before in a military headquarters on the eve of battle, and their experience with paramilitary operations was entirely theoretical. That was about to change.

WHEN THE GO-AHEAD came down from President Eisenhower, Barnes’s air force went into action. Jerry DeLarm, the former skywriter who was now code-named Rosebinda, dropped leaflets heralding the coming liberation of Guatemala City. A Cessna pilot dropped hand grenades and Coke bottles filled with gasoline out the window over Puerto Barrios, making loud bangs but causing no real damage. Two other planes were shot up by small arms fire, and another pilot, sent to strafe the city of Coban, ran out of gas while airborne. He crash-landed just over the Guatemalan border in Mexico. A pilot sent to knock out the government’s radio station blew up the transmitter of some American evangelical missionaries by mistake. In Guatemala City, the CIA’s station chief sent a cable describing the bombing as “pathetic.” The Guatemalan people did not rise up.

In early June, just before the invasion began, Arbenz had cracked down on student dissenters, arresting 480 in the first two weeks. Barnes noted that the CIA’s network of spies had “suffered losses” and suggested to Wisner that it be “reorganized.” “But,” noted the CIA’s internal history of the operation, “there was nothing left to organize.” Instead, Arbenz executed ringleaders, burying 75 dissidents in a mass grave. At agency headquarters in Washington and at Opa-Locka, optimism was fading quickly. Only Barnes, with his characteristic buoyancy, remained upbeat. Everyone else feared a disaster in the making. “We were all of us at our wits’ end,” recalled Bissell. Al Haney, the CIA’s field commander, begged Washington to send more airplanes. Wisner was nervous, unsure what to do. It was almost too late to keep the CIA’s involvement a secret. James Reston was beginning to hint in the New York Times that Washington was behind the “invasion,” and a sudden show of force, if thinly disguised, risked exposing the whole operation. Wisner decided to push ahead anyway. “He was almost fatalistic, amenable to putting the actions in motion and letting the cards fall where they may,” Bissell recorded in his memoirs.

Allen Dulles, accompanied by Bissell, brought the request for more planes to President Eisenhower. He was opposed by an assistant secretary of state, Henry Holland, who brought an armload of law books to argue that the United States was violating a number of laws and treaties by its increasingly blatant intervention. Eisenhower listened to Holland and asked Dulles what the odds were of success. Dulles responded that with the planes they were “about 20 percent”; without the planes, zero. The president gave Dulles the planes.

Dulles had deputized Bissell to handle logistics for the operation. Bissell had proved himself an able logistics officer during World War II. He quickly found two war-surplus P-51s; as cover, the CIA gave $150,000 to Nicaragua’s Somoza to buy the planes; he in turn leased them back for a dollar. Bissell worked feverishly as the operation headed for an uncertain climax. Fearful that Arbenz would move to crush Castillo Armas’s tiny force, still sitting just inside the border, Bissell worked out a plan to rescue them with a sealift and then land them at a different location. Bissell contacted his old wartime friends in the shipping industry to charter what Bissell later called “a few small disreputable ships.”

Before Bissell could stage this covert Dunkirk, however, events on the ground dramatically improved. The CIA’s psywar experts would later take credit. The Voice of Liberation had been broadcasting from “somewhere in Guatemala” — actually, Nicaragua and the roof of the American Embassy in Guatemala City — calling on the people to rise up against their communist bosses. The broadcasts were not having much effect on the people, but they helped plant doubt in the conservative Guatemalan officer corps by warning that Arbenz planned to betray the army and arm the peasants.

An air force colonel defected and the psywar operatives tried to persuade him to broadcast back an appeal to fellow officers to join him. The colonel refused. But he proceeded to get drunk with the American agents, who coaxed him into giving the speech he would have given. Secret tape recorders captured the fiery diatribe, which was broadcast the next day while the officer slept off his hangover. Worried about losing his tiny air force, Arbenz grounded it.

The psywar campaign was given credibility when Castillo Armas and his hornets finally bestirred themselves to fight a small battle. On June 24, the rebel column dared to advance to a small border town called Chiquimula. There they engaged a garrison from the Guatemalan army in a brief firefight. Richard Bissell later traced the turning point of the operation to the scene of a hospital train arriving in Guatemala City, bearing dozens of wounded soldiers from the front. The two new P-51s sent down by Washington went into action on a 72-hour bombing spree. They didn’t do much actual damage, but a large smoke bomb dropped on the parade grounds of Fort Matamoros made it look as though the government were under siege. The locals began referring to the bombs as “sulfatos” — laxatives — for the effect they were having on Guatemala’s leaders. To shut the radio transmitters at the U.S. Embassy, Arbenz ordered the power turned off, but the ensuing blackout just caused more panic. From Opa-Locka, Phillips ordered the Voice of Liberation to launch a “final big lie” — that two massive columns of rebel troops were advancing on Guatemala City.

In Washington, Wisner remained anxious. He was enraged when Rip Robertson, acting on his own authority, sank a British freighter on June 27 by dropping a 500-pound bomb down its smokestack. (Robertson mistakenly thought the freighter was delivering fuel to Arbenz for his trucks and planes; this “subincident,” as Bissell described it, cost American taxpayers $1.5 million to repay.) Bissell was not optimistic about the prospects for PBSUCCESS, putting the odds at less than even.

But then Arbenz panicked. The Guatemalan president was exhausted and drinking heavily. He was convinced that if he suppressed the rebel invasion, a greater invasion beckoned — by U.S. Marines. On June 25, he had ordered the distribution of weapons to “the people’s organizations and political parties.” This was anathema to the conservative officer corps, whose loyalty was already shaky. In addition, as Piero Gleijeses has pointed out, the Guatemalan officers were afraid of Uncle Sam moving in with a full-scale invasion.

Pressured by his officers, Arbenz agreed on the evening of June 27 to step aside for a military junta.

The news caught the CIA by “surprise,” said Bissell. “We thought we’d lost,” recalled Phillips. In the “war room” inside the CIA’s “L Building” on the Reflecting Pool a few hundred yards from the Lincoln Memorial, glasses were raised and cheering broke out as Arbenz tearfully announced his resignation over the government radio that Sunday night.

There was still some cleanup work to be done in Guatemala City, however. The CIA had planned to install Col. Elfego Monzon as the caretaker president of Guatemala until “the Liberator” Castillo Armas could make his triumphant procession into the capital. Ambassador Peurifoy called Monzon his “tame pup”; he had been recruited by the CIA’s Guatemala station chief, John Doherty, in the least subtle way: Doherty had knocked on his door one morning and announced, “I’m the CIA’s chief of station. I want to talk to you.” After Arbenz resigned, Monzon lost his nerve and agreed to serve in a junta under army Chief of Staff Col. Carlos Enrique Diaz. The CIA was furious. “We’ve been double-crossed. BOMB !” CIA operative Enno Hobbing cabled Washington.

Jerry DeLarm took off in a P-47 and dropped two loud bombs on the Fort Matamoros parade grounds. Hobbing and Doherty then paid a visit to the new junta.

Diaz started arguing about the merits of Arbenz’s social reforms.

Hobbing was blunt: “Wait a minute, colonel,” he interrupted. “Let me explain something to you. You made a big mistake when you took over the government.” He paused for a moment. “Colonel, you are just not convenient for the requirements of American foreign policy.”

Diaz, who had been nicknamed “the Sad Chicken” by his troops, stammered, “I talked to your ambassador. He gave me your approval.”

“Well, Colonel,” Hobbing said, “there is diplomacy and then there is reality. Our ambassador represents diplomacy. I represent reality. And the reality is that we don’t want you.”

OVER THE NEXT 11 DAYS, five provisional governments formed (Monzon set a record by appearing in four of them) before Castillo Armas took over, with Washington’s blessing. The “Liberator” was greeted by 150,000 people in Guatemala City, shooting off firecrackers that had been distributed through the crowd by the CIA.

In Washington on the July 4 weekend, John Foster Dulles went on national radio to proclaim “a new and glorious chapter” in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The press played right along. The New York Times judiciously noted that the United States had supplied “moral support” to Castillo Armas just as Moscow had provided “moral support” to Arbenz. With classic newsmagazine equivocation, Newsweek wrote: “The United States, aside from whatever gumshoe work the Central Intelligence Agency may or may not have been busy with, had kept strictly hands off.” The New Republic coyly noted, “It was just our luck that Castillo Armas did come by some secondhand lethal weapons from Heaven knows where.”

At the CIA, Dulles and Barnes were giddy, “exuberant,” recalled Tom Braden, then a senior CIA official. “Allen was very Rooseveltian. He’d say, Bully! Bully! We did it!’ He gave Tracy a lot of the credit.”

Gratified and proud, President Eisenhower summoned the CIA men for a formal briefing at the White House, with slides and charts.

“How many men did Castillo Armas lose?” Eisenhower asked about the operation, which had cost less than $20 million. The answer was “only one.” Dave Phillips watched as Eisenhower shook his head, remembering, perhaps, the thousands killed at D-Day. “Incredible,” the president said.

Tracy Barnes’s wife was sitting at home after the briefing when her husband and Frank Wisner burst in. Barnes generally did not discuss his work at home, but he could not resist telling her about the Guatemala operation. “Wiz and Tracy were very pleased,” she recalled. “They did a little scuffling dance and said, We’ve been to see the prexy, and it was great!’ “

The war stories began to circulate; the memory of the mistakes began to fade. Phillips regaled agency hands with his brilliant disinformation campaign on the Voice of Liberation. Barnes recounted how the agency’s pet colonel, Monzon, had been dead drunk when the time came for him to assume power; a CIA man had to hold him up in the shower. This theme, of the hapless Third World stooge being supported — literally — at the critical moment by a cool and all-knowing CIA man was becoming a staple of agency folklore. These tales were good for esprit, and true enough. But they contained dangerous illusions. The lesson of Guatemala to Richard Bissell was that a Central American strongman can be frightened out of power by the mere thought of U.S. intervention. Bissell later contrasted the way things looked to the CIA against the way they must have looked to Arbenz during the invasion. At the agency, officials fretted over the obstacles to success — just a few planes and some sullen exiles to work with, botched assignments and missed communications, freelancing troublemakers like Rip Robertson. Yet Arbenz, as he drank alone at the presidential palace in Guatemala City and listened to the sound of exploding sulfatos outside, apparently was seized by doom, fearful that he was about to be crushed by “the government of the north.” Lower ranking officials had the same explanation for the agency’s miraculous success. “It should have been a fiasco,” said Hobbing, “except for the idiotic Latin attitude that the gringos are all-powerful.”

The American press may have been lulled into playing down U.S. involvement in Guatemala, but the Latins had no doubt. In the week Arbenz fell, there were Yankee-Go-Home riots in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Latin American revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara was in Guatemala at the time of the coup; he had come to study Arbenz’s social reforms. “It was Guatemala,” his first wife said, “which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism.” Guevara learned a practical lesson as well: that it was necessary to purge an army of all conservatives. Arbenz’s revolution failed because it had been too moderate.

For Guatemala, the coup ushered in several decades of repression. The “Liberator” canceled Arbenz’s land reform, gave United Fruit back its holdings, banned subversive books like Les Miserables, and restored the secret police. Jose Linares, the police chief, gave electric baths to suspects and employed a skullcap designed to “pry loose secrets and crush improper thoughts.” Exiled, Arbenz died of drugs and alcohol in Mexico in 1971. A CIA official noted that “he was his own person, he was not a Soviet agent. He didn’t go to the Soviet Union and become a colonel in the KGB.”

In later years, Barnes and Bissell would regret the outcome of the Guatemala coup. Bissell would blame “poor follow-up” by the White House and the State Department. But in 1954, PBSUCCESS ensured that their CIA careers would take off. For his role, Barnes was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency’s second-highest honor (the Distinguished Intelligence Cross is usually awarded posthumously), in a secret ceremony. “After Guatemala,” recalled his wife, it was ” You can have any job you want! You can own the world!’ “

Indeed, to Bissell and Barnes, the Guatemala operation was impressive, even thrilling.

The two men liked it so much they replicated it six years later in setting up Operation Zapata, better known as the Bay of Pigs.

Evan Thomas is the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek. This article was adapted from his book The Very Best Men, published this month by Simon & Schuster.

COPYRIGHT 1995 FROM THE “THE VERY BEST MEN,” PUBLISHED BY SIMON & SCHUSTER INC. PRINTED BY PERMISSION. CAPTION: In promoting the Guatemalan coup, Tracy Barnes, far left, relied on psywar devices, including this photo op, where CIA-recruited rebels hold an effigy of the president at gunpoint. CAPTION: In a climactic moment of the coup, as a crowd of 150,000 gathered in front of the cathedral in the heart of Guatemala City, the CIA even distributed firecrackers to help them celebrate. CAPTION: The rest of the cast: clockwise from top left, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Carlos Castillo Armas, Richard Bissell, Allen Dulles. 

Resources

http://www.militarystrategymagazine.come, “Operation PBSUCCESS: U.S. Covert Action in Guatemala.” By J. Robert Kane; nsarchive2.gwu.edu, “CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents.” By Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh; www2.umbc.edu, “Background on the Guatemala Coup of 1954.”; washingtonpost.com, “‘YOU CAN OWN THE WORLD’.” By Evan Thomas; biggerlifeadventures.com, “Chiquita bananas, CIA funded coups, and Colombian hit squads.”;

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