operation pbhistory: the aftermath of success

MAX HOLLAND

Operation PBHISTORY: The Aftermath ofSUCCESS

Save for the efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, no singlecovert action undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) duringthe Cold War has been more widely written about than OperationPBSUCCESS. The CIA-supported overthrow of Guatemalan PresidentJacobo Arbenz Guzman in June 1954 is a staple in all histories of theAgency, in biographies and memoirs of former officers, and in theacademic literature on post-war United States relations with Guatemalaspecifically, and Latin America in general.1

While deserved, this fascination with PBSUCCESS has left the covertoperation that followed on its heels all but neglected. There is, to be sure,an oft-told anecdote derived from PBHISTORY, the cryptonym for theproject dedicated to gathering and exploiting Guatemalan Communistdocuments. As a direct consequence of PBHISTORY, the CIA opened afile on a young Argentinian physician named Ernesto Guevara. Apartfrom this episode though, the covert operation that followed PBSUCCESShas been relegated to a paragraph here and there or described in few pagesat most, when not reduced to a footnote.2 PBHISTORY merits closerattention, and now that documents about the operation have beendeclassified, it is finally possible to give the operation its due.3

The organic sequel to PBSUCCESS yields many insights. Above all,PBHISTORY represents Washington’s covert effort to justify a covertaction ex post facto because of the adverse international reaction toArbenz’s overthrow. The operation also reveals some of the inner workings

MaxHolland was a Research Fellow at theMiller Center of Public Affairs at theUniversity of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. His articles on internationalevents have appeared in a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and scholarlyj o u r na l s . Mr . Ho l l a nd ’ s b ook , A Need to Know: Inside the WarrenCommission, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 17: 300–332, 2004

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.

ISSN: 0885-0607 print/1521-0561 online

DOI: 10.1080/08850600490274935

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of the (then) Plans Directorate, techniques of ‘‘white,’’ ‘‘gray,’’ and ‘‘black’’psychological warfare as practiced by U.S. government agencies in the mid-to-late 1950s, and the interagency nature of what was predominantly, thoughnot exclusively, a CIA operation. PBHISTORY also illuminates the Agency’scollaborative relationship with then-sympathetic congressional committees,and the dangers (such as ‘‘blowback,’’ and exposure of intelligence sourcesand methods) inherent in congressional inquiries striving for publicity.Finally, and despite limitations recognized at the time, PBHISTORYconstitutes one of the Agency’s most notable counterintelligence effortsand windfalls in the first decade of the Cold War against Communism.

GENESIS

On the evening of 27 June 1954, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman announced over theradio his abrupt resignation from the Guatemalan presidency that had beenhis since 1950. Although it would take eleven more days to install ColonelCarlos Castillo Armas, the successor favored by Washington, withArbenz’s removal Operation PBSUCCESS had culminated in the desiredresult. Accordingly, on 30 June, Frank Wisner, the Deputy Director forPlans (DD=P), sent what became known as the ‘‘shift of gears cable.’’ The‘‘time had come for the surgeons [CIA officers] to step back and [let] thenurses [U.S. diplomats] . . . . take over the patient,’’ instructed Wisner.4

Within a matter of hours CIA officers in the field started to melt away andthe PBSUCCESS infrastructure began to disappear. La Voz de laLiberacion (the Voice of Liberation), the clandestine radio station of theinsurrectionists, stopped broadcasting just as mysteriously as it had started.

Yet Wisner was the first to recognize that the Agency’s job was not entirelyover. The covert triumph opened up several opportunities that the CIAwould be utterly foolish to ignore. The time was ripe to recruit agents inboth camps: from among Communists (not just Guatemalans but otherLatin nationals) now willing to defect, and from ‘‘untainted’’ Guatemalanswho might soon play a role in the new government. Recruiting assets fromamong those who might work in any new or revamped internal securityapparatus would be particularly important.

In addition, the success of PBSUCCESS promised a paper bonanza, achance to perhaps expose, as never before, Soviet machinations throughoutthe Western Hemisphere. It was thought that the coup’s rapidity—it hadtaken but ten days to crack open the regime—meant that Arbenz and hisfollowers had not had time to destroy incriminating materials that woulddocument the extent of Moscow’s penetration and the workings ofinternational Communism, especially its tactics of infiltration. These couldbe exploited for all manner of propaganda operations throughout thehemisphere; utilized to ensure the root-and-branch eradication of

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Communism in Guatemala; shared selectively with friendly and neighboringanticommunist governments for their use; and finally, provided to theAgency’s own experts, keeping them busy for months if not years.

The last of these considerations was not a small one. Although theCommunist movement in Latin America had been in existence since atleast 1919, because of its clandestine nature it was not easy for CIA tocome by such rudimentary information as the ‘‘order of battle’’ of a localCommunist Party like the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT). But itappeared extremely likely that PGT records left behind in haste wouldenable the Agency’s International Communism Division to reconstruct thePGT’s ‘‘collective leadership’’ and organizational structure, and perhaps dothe same for Moscow-oriented movements throughout the hemisphere.5

Identifying individuals who were secret Communists would also enable theAgency to monitor or possibly recruit, and if not recruit then neutralizeand perhaps manipulate, persons sympathetic to Moscow. And PGTrecords were only one of several promising possibilities. Besides partyheadquarters, Wisner envisioned searching the private offices and homes ofCommunist leaders (and of their friends and relatives) from Arbenz ondown; government offices dominated or strongly influenced byCommunists; offices of labor and peasant unions, Communist fronts andaffiliated organizations; the Foreign Ministry; and the regime’s internalsecurity agencies.6

Negative World Response

These reasons alone were more than sufficient to launch what was dubbedPBHISTORY. Yet by 1 July, the operation acquired another acutejustification when it became apparent that Western and non-alignednations’ reaction to Arbenz’s overthrow was continuing to be adverse.7

Arbenz’s secret purchase of weapons from Czechoslovakia, and theirarrival in Guatemala in mid-May, had given Washington a propagandawindfall in the weeks leading up to PBSUCCESS. Once Colonel CastilloArmas’s forces crossed into Guatemala on 18 June, however, the tenor ofinternational media coverage changed swiftly and dramatically—influencedto a considerable degree by the Communist media’s saturation coverage.8

Suddenly, Jacobo Arbenz’s only sin seemed to be that he was a courageous‘‘agrarian reformer’’ willing to challenge the United Fruit Company’s gripover the local economy; simultaneously, Castillo Armas was portrayed as amercenary leading an aggression against a democratically electedgovernment not to Washington’s liking.

Reading these allegations in Communist and Communist-controlled mediawas one thing. When criticisms of this kind were leveled by such normallypro-American voices as Britain’s Labour Party and Sweden’s Social

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Democratic Party, the CIA took notice. Nowhere, of course, was thisproblem more acute than in deeply nationalistic Latin America. ‘‘No onecould recall so intense and universal a wave of anti-U.S. sentiment in theentire history of Latin America,’’ wrote one keen observer in the wake ofthe coup.9 Mexican students laid a black-draped wreath at the door of theU.S. embassy ‘‘in memory of the Good Neighbor policy,’’ while inHavana, hundreds of young men lined up at the Guatemalan embassy toenlist in the Guatemalan army. As the Agency’s Current IntelligenceWeekly for 9 July noted,

The Castillo Armas revolution in Guatemala has been almostunanimously attributed by the rest of Latin America to theintervention of Washington acting through the governments ofHonduras and Nicaragua . . . . ‘[A]nti-intervention’ demonstrations andeditorials have been widespread and in some cases violent. Manygovernment officials have hinted that Washington either suffers fromexcessive anti-Communist zeal or is unduly influenced by the interestsof the United Fruit Company.10

World reaction was so unfavorable, and even sharply hostile to the UnitedStates, that Moscow’s propaganda barrage had to be answered by the CIA’sown ‘‘mighty Wurlitzer,’’ the term Frank Wisner used for the Agency’sformidable array of informational assets, of which the media were a mostimportant part.11 A problem, in other words, that had been created by theCIA’s triumph needed amelioration by further CIA action beforePBSUCCESS could produce undesirable and long-lasting effects upon non-Communist governments and public opinion alike. ‘‘Counteractingunfavorable world reaction is a matter of highest priority,’’ observed aPsychologicalnParamilitary Operations Staff memo from early July, ‘‘and itis therefore necessary to undertake with all means at our disposal a world-wide campaign presenting the true facts as quickly and effectively aspossible.’’12 Consequently, just as the Agency was doing everything toscrub all traces of PBSUCCESS out of existence, it simultaneouslylaunched a new initiative.

Becoming Assertive

The ‘‘snatch job on documents while the melon was freshly burst open’’ beganon 4 July, with the arrival in Guatemala City of two CIA officers and two fromthe State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research (OIR).13 One officer,Lothar Metzl, was from the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff. An Austrianlawyer who had emigrated to the United States after the Anschluss, Metzlseemed at first glance an unlikely person to be the Agency’s leading experton international Communism. He had written fourteen musicals for the



Viennese musical theater, and also worked as a playwright and songwriter onBroadway after immigrating. Metzl was equally fascinated by Communistmachinations though, dating back to the tumultuous 1930s in CentralEurope. Eventually, his study of the Comintern and various nationalCommunist Party organizations turned into his life’s work. Indeed, Metzl’sability to detect every nuance in Communist Party policy or doctrine wasunmatched in and outside the government.14

The initial survey was made in a situation of great confusion, even chaos,and flux over who was in genuine authority, Colonel Castillo Armas havingarrived in Guatemala City only the day before. The initial targets were PGTheadquarters, Jacobo Arbenz’s personal effects and papers (and those of hisbrief successor, armed forces chief Colonel Carlos Enrique Dıaz), trade unionoffices, known front organizations, and police agencies. The four-man teamwas quickly disappointed by what it found. Because no guards had beenposted at PGT headquarters, the ‘‘obvious hub of the [Communist]conspiracy,’’ offices had already been plundered systematically by theGuatemalan army and unsystematically by looters.15 Other sensitive partyand government offices were in little better shape; what official documentsremained were strewn about in heaps, and secret police documents couldbe purchased from street urchins. One particular disappointment was theteam’s inability, despite days of searching, to find any documentspertaining to the Czech arms shipment that had arrived in mid-May. Norcould any documents evincing Soviet control of the Communist movementin Guatemala be found. Stung by accusations that it had acted merely toprotect the dividends of the United Fruit Company, Washington wantedproof of an operational link between Guatemala City and Moscow, andnot merely evidence of a casual ideological or intellectual affinity. But theCommunists seemingly had sufficient time to destroy or remove anyespecially sensitive documents.16

Notwithstanding the early disappointment, a large number of records—upto an estimated 150,000, and that figure did not include government files—were judged ripe for exploitation, making it, in quantitative terms, the‘‘greatest catch of documents ever left behind by a Communist Party andits auxiliaries.’’17 Explicit instructions from Moscow might be missing, butthe remaining records would document a strong Communist influence overand infiltration of the Arbenz regime, and depict in considerable detail thestructure and personalities of the country’s Communist apparatus,including ‘‘transmission belts’’ like labor unions, peasant organizations,student unions, and youth groups. The cache also promised to yield moreinformation than was already known about overt internationalconnections. In sum, there was every reason to believe that the documentswould provide sufficient information about Guatemala’s Communistcomplex to accomplish its complete ‘‘exposure and destruction.’’18

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After two weeks in Guatemala, the CIA’s two-man team presented itspreliminary inventory and recommendations in Washington on 20 July.The decision to accelerate exploitation of captured Guatemalan documentswas made that same day. DD=P Frank Wisner also asked Tracy Barnes,chief of the Agency’s Political=Psychological Staff, to prepare a publicationthat Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen W. Dulles could passaround at an upcoming National Security Council briefing on Guatemalafor President Dwight D. Eisenhower. With the assistance of CIA’s printingshop, Barnes quickly pulled together a booklet from the preliminaryinventory.19 The twenty-three documents reproduced included photographsof Arbenz’s library of Marxist literature; Communist Chinese materials onagrarian reform; pages from Mrs. Arbenz’s copy of Stalin’s biography;documents revealing that Arbenz had tried to purchase arms from Italy;and miscellaneous letters and cables revealing the former president’s strongpro-Communist bias. The booklet also contained documents about the lastthroes of the Arbenz government, including some communications thatshowed Arbenz rejecting offers in early June to rid his government ofCommunists in return for the Guatemalan armed forces’ putting up astaunch fight against Castillo Armas. The publication, insofar as PresidentEisenhower was concerned, buttressed Ambassador John Peurifoy’sfamous judgment, initially uttered in a State Department cable after hisfirst long meeting with Arbenz, and soon to be repeated in publictestimony before Congress. After a six-hour dinner with Arbenz inDecember 1953, Peurifoy had reported ‘‘that if [the] President is not aCommunist he will certainly do until one comes along.’’20

THE TWO-MONTH PUSH

On 4 August, after a series of conferences, it was agreed that the newPBHISTORY team would consist of twelve officers, including three fromthe State Department, one from the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), andeight from the CIA. The leader of the CIA delegation, and therefore chiefof the PBSUCCESS team, was an Agency officer with the pseudonym‘‘Francis T. Mylkes,’’ who operated under State Department cover.21 Thedeputy to ‘‘Mylkes’’ would be an enterprising 32-year-old American whonormally worked as a newspaper editor in Chile. At one time an aspiringactor, David Atlee Phillips was fluent in Spanish and fresh from workingunder contract to the CIA during PBSUCCESS. Under the pseudonym‘‘Paul D. Langevin,’’ Phillips had been the Agency’s chief liaison andadvisor to La Voz de la Liberacion, one of the most effective tools in thepsychological war waged against Arbenz.22

The PBHISTORY task force adopted as its cover name the ‘‘SocialResearch Group’’ (Grupo de Estudios Sociales). As had been the case with



PBSUCCESS, CIA wanted to retain some semblance of deniability in itsdealings with Castillo Armas. The PBHISTORY team consisted of privatebusinessmen and experts from universities, or so Castillo Armas wastold.23 At the same time, the Agency was anxious to obtain the newleader’s unstinting support, lest PBHISTORY ‘‘be faced with long‘manana’ type of delays.’’24 Ransacking the Foreign Ministry and othersensitive government offices for documents was bound to raise nationalisthackles at some point, so there never was any question but that theGuatemalans would retain ownership of all records. It was hoped,however, that ‘‘through demonstration of the services which the task forcecan perform for the Guatemalans . . . fullest [sic] cooperation will beobtained.’’25 One of these services—if not the key one—was to instructGuatemalans on how to establish a records and filing system that wouldenable a new, thoroughly professional intelligence service to identify andkeep tabs on known Communist subversives. As part of its bequest to thenew Guatemala, the CIA was intent on leaving such an organizationbehind.26

Under prodding (and with funding) from the CIA, on 20 July CastilloArmas had signed a decree creating such an executive agency, responsibleonly to the governing junta, that would investigate and dismantle thecountry’s Communist complex.27 The National Committee for Defenseagainst Communism (Comite de Defensa Nacional Contra el Comunismo)was not a police force but a nascent intelligence service with certain policeprerogatives and functions. In theory, it had power over all military andpolice authorities and could order the arrest of anyone suspected of beinga Communist. The PBHISTORY team would initially assist this nucleus ofa new internal security service by helping it create a central repository ofinformation on PGT members, fronts, and sympathizers.28 PBHISTORYofficers would instruct Comite personnel in the screening, classifying,indexing, and carding of the confiscated documents. Subsequently, and sothat it could incorporate new information as it became available, theComite would be taught the rudiments of mail control, logging,abstracting, and cryptic reference.29 Only after all these lessons had beenabsorbed could CIA depend upon the Comite (or a successor service) toconduct the ‘‘back-track’’ investigations necessary to obtain the completepicture of Communism in Guatemala, and ensure that the country waspurged of ‘‘all commie influence.’’30 In the meantime, PBHISTORYchairman ‘‘Mylkes,’’ along with the CIA chief of station and Comitemembers, would develop the full framework for a new countersubversiveservice.31 Although this effort initially depended on CIA funding, CastilloArmas, as well as the Agency, recognized that such financing could prove‘‘very embarrassing’’ if it became known. The new Guatemalangovernment would have to supply the operating funds as soon as possible.32

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The work of sorting through hundreds of thousands of documents wasarduous, of course, though made much easier with the assistance oftwenty-five Comite officials and clerical personnel.33 The North Americanshad a private entrance=exit to the offices where the documents were hauledand sorted, so as to preserve the appearance of an all-Guatemalan affair,as the ‘‘Social Research Group’’ operated overtly but without publicity.All documents had to be indexed, a monumental but necessary task if theywere going to be useful for name-checks. (By late September, the centralindex would consist of 15,800 cards).34 Documents from the PGT,Guatemala’s official Communist Party, received the highest priority.Everything handwritten and in typescript was preserved; generally, three orfour copies of printed materials were retained. This procedure meant thatabout fifty percent of the volume of paper gathered was incinerated.35 Oneaspect which slowed processing, of course, was the need to reproducedocuments, since all originals were to remain in Guatemala. The categoriesof documents that interested U.S. agencies were numerous, and becameeven longer once the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) heard aboutthe project.36 Accordingly, the Agency arranged for state-of-the-artmicrofilm and three photostat machines to be delivered to the premises, allof which were driven to their limits.

The CIA’s initial disappointment over the quality of the documents wasnot cured by further hard work. By early September, after much sortingand screening, the percentage of genuinely ‘‘top secret’’ documents wasconfirmed as extremely low. Retrieved government files made it fairly clearthat Arbenz government officials and top Communist leaders had eitherdestroyed or taken with them the most sensitive material. And amid thejockeying for power that persisted for weeks after Arbenz’s departure, onemember of the ruling junta had refused to allow the Comite to makearrests and search the homes of private citizens, where such materials mayhave been secreted.37 When he finally emerged as the junta’s undisputedpresident, Carlos Castillo Armas told the PBHISTORY chief that he‘‘personally knew that [Guatemalan] Army G-2 [intelligence] files had beenburned in their entirety.’’38

By the time the document processing terminated on 28 September 1954,conservative estimates indicated that the ‘‘Social Research Group’’ hadplowed through more than 500,000 documents (not including duplicates), aconsiderably higher number than initially expected. Of this amount, 2,095documents were considered of sufficient importance to warrantphotostating; 50,000 documents of secondary importance weremicrofilmed; 750 positive photographs were made for immediateexploitation by local and international media; and a small number oforiginal documents were set aside for technical study.39 Duplicates of these



documents, in turn, were parceled out to the agencies participating directly inPBHISTORY, as well as to the FBI.40

EXPLOITATION

Even before the processing began, the captured documents were expected tobecome subject to competing urges. The primary tension would be betweenexploiting the documents for operational intelligence, and using theinformation for informational and propaganda purposes. To some degreethis tension was replicated in the agencies participating in PBSUCCESS.The CIA, for its part, was most interested in data that would allow it toact against Communism, not only in Guatemala but throughout thehemisphere; it would also have a singular interest in controlling and=orexploiting persons, based on information contained in the documents. TheState Department’s greatest interest lay in using the records to reconstructthe pattern and growth of Communist influence and subversion in theyears since the 1944 revolution, which had overthrown the 14-yeardictatorship of Jorge Ubico y Casteneda. The equity of the U.S. InformationAgency (USIA) in the documents, meanwhile, was nearly identical to that ofthe State Department, except for the USIA’s emphasis on information thatcould be released to inform international opinion.

Timing, of course, was everything. The U.S. government was engaged in aglobal, seemingly endless, struggle in which such a wealth of information washard to come by. The desire to immediately extract maximum advantage waspowerful; yet with respect to counterintelligence, patience often paiddividends. The expectation was that ‘‘Francis Mylkes’’ would favor neitheroperational needs nor propaganda, but strike an appropriate balancebetween the two. In any case, in return for inviting State and USIA toparticipate, the CIA retained two important veto powers. It insisted onexclusive control over relations with the Guatemalan government withrespect to the captured documents, and if there were any records thatcould be used most effectively for clandestine operations, then the CIAreserved the right to deny their public use by either State or USIA.41

Linked Ventures

Two preexisting covert operations would be nourished directly by thecaptured documents: KUFIRE and KUGOWN. Both had beeninstrumental parts of PBSUCCESS, and they also happened to coincidewith the primary tension inherent in the PBHISTORY operation.KUFIRE was the code-name for the program to identify, irrespective ofnationality, all Communist party members, front members, andsympathizers who had flocked to Arbenz’s Guatemala. These activists were

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expected to return to their country of origin, or to countries known for theirliberal asylum policies, like Mexico. Once safe, presumably these activistswould resume fomenting ‘‘trouble and agitation.’’ Via KUFIRE, the CIAwas intent on charting their movements and monitoring or frustrating theirmachinations.42

David Atlee Phillips’s assigned task was to review the captured documentsfor KUGOWN purposes. But given the smallness of the PBHISTORY staffand informality of the setting, everyone pitched in as needed. Thus, it fellaccidentally to Phillips to order the opening of what would in time becomea most important file. In the midst of the sorting operation, another CIAanalyst approached Phillips carrying a single piece of paper. ‘‘Should weopen a file on this one?’’ she asked, as she handed him the document. Itcontained biographical information on a 25-year-old physician namedErnesto Guevara who had sought asylum in the Argentine embassy. ‘‘Iguess we’d better have a file on him,’’ said Phillips casually, though therewas nothing especially alarming or sinister about the physician. In ashorter time than anyone could imagine, however, the ‘‘Che’’ Guevara filewould become one of the Agency’s thickest dossiers on a single person.43

Elsewhere in his memoir The Night Watch, Philips recounts generally thatthe ‘‘The CI-nicks—counterintelligence officers—who worked with me [onPBHISTORY] were ecstatic. These [documents] were pearls which could befondled for years.’’44 Yet the language in contemporary reports from thePBHISTORY team was far more restrained. Exploitation of the captureddocuments for KUFIRE purposes resulted in few operational leads for theCIA, and none were fully developed.45 The captured documents, from anoperational perspective, were of primary value to the Comite and=or itssuccessor. With some Communists still in the government and used tooperating clandestinely, the pressing need was to exploit the records for thepurpose of exposing them. Reports also indicated that known Communistswho initially sought asylum in foreign embassies were already resumingtheir activities under assumed names.46

KUGOWN’s Value

The relationship between PBHISTORY and the Agency’s operationKUGOWN proved far more profitable. KUGOWN was the cryptonym forthe propaganda component in the broad program of psychological warfarethat had been initiated in the run-up to the coup. During PBSUCCESS,KUGOWN’s targets had been the Arbenz regime, followed by Guatemalaas a whole, its Central American neighbors, the rest of the hemisphere,nonaligned countries, and the Western alliance in roughly that order. Thatlist of priorities would remain the same under PBHISTORY (save for theregime) because the pressure to disseminate derogatory information aboutArbenz was as intense after the coup as before.



Exploitation under the KUGOWN rubric began as early as mid-August,when enough material had been processed for the Comite to hold its firstpress conference. The PBHISTORY team wanted the Comite to issue pressstatements and reports as soon as possible, so as to create a public profile,lest the Comite be perceived by the press as a secret, powerful, andtherefore dangerous organization.47 Speed was also vitally important,because of the perceived ‘‘perishability of the documents.’’48 The standardprocedure became one whereby PBHISTORY officers periodically selecteddocuments for release, and wrote the covering explanation. In order toassure that the local authorities got their share of the credit, the author ofthe cover letter would usually be identified as ESSENCE, the CIA’s code-name for one of Castillo Armas’s chief anti-Communist lieutenants.49 Viathis process a steady stream of incriminating documents was released, andthey received ‘‘good’’ and sometimes ‘‘excellent’’ play in the local, Central,and South American press.50 The Comite also produced (with CIAassistance) a six-minute documentary film, Despues Descubrimos La Verdad(‘‘Later We Discover the Truth’’) that was shown in every movie theater inGuatemala City. Guatemala’s literate and=or moviegoing population, atleast, became saturated with evidence that Arbenz’s government, contraryto the denials, was dominated and controlled by Communists.

Combatting Widespread Skepticism

Internationally, the captured documents’ impact was believed to be muchless, and rightly so, judging from the unrelieved criticism of the U.S. rolefrom almost every quarter, save West Germany and the United Statesitself. Because so few top-secret documents were found, ‘‘few stories wereworthy of honest world news coverage.’’51 The Reuters News Servicecarried the initial Comite press release, but there were no other takers. TheAgency’s failure to put a dent into adverse international commentarycertainly did not occur for lack of trying. Dissemination was undertaken asrapidly as possible because it was rightly thought that the only way tosecure publication was to release material while the eyes of the world werestill on Guatemala, given the competition in world news. In furtherance ofKUGOWN, a press release in English and Spanish was written describingthe activities of the Comite. Together with photographs of PBHISTORYmaterials, this press kit was mailed from Guatemala to ninety principalnewspapers in Latin America, North America, and Western Europe.52

Where possible, the kit was modified to make it ‘‘hotter for publication.’’The release sent to Chile, for example, was augmented by a description ofall discovered links between Chilean and Guatemalan Communists.53 ThePBHISTORY team also prepared innumerable releases of documents forvisiting correspondents and local representatives of foreign newspapers.Separately, two Guatemalans, a former ambassador and popular

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newspaper columnist, toured Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay, where, armed witha goodly number of PBHISTORY documents and the six-minutedocumentary, they held news conferences and handed out press kits.

The lack of international media play, despite these efforts, so vexed thePBHISTORY team that at one point they conceived of a dramatic ploy toattract attention. Plans were drawn up for a phony ‘‘raid’’ on Comiteheadquarters that would be blamed on Guatemala’s remainingCommunists. Comite officials would claim that Communists were trying todestroy the captured papers because they were so incriminating. While theCIA officers on PBHISTORY thought such a ploy would surely garner theinternational attention they craved, the idea was ultimately abandonedwhen they realized that ‘‘too many indigenous persons would have to be inthe act,’’ making it too risky.54 But the proposal was indicative of theurgency everyone felt about the need to counter adverse world reaction,and defeat the widely held notion that officials in the Arbenz regime‘‘weren’t real Reds.’’55

Of course, one of the easiest things to do was to make a very visible showof all the Communist propaganda that had flooded into Guatemala. In thisvein, Keith Monroe, one of the first U.S. journalists on the scene after thecoup, wrote an article for Harper’s subtitled ‘‘What the Reds LeftBehind.’’ It prominently referred to the masses of textbooks, and six-foothigh stacks of pamphlets, posters, and magazines printed behind the IronCurtain that he saw, courtesy of PBHISTORY.56 The same, or a similar,display also made an impression on Donald Grant, one of the mostexperienced and respected U.S. journalists covering Latin America at thetime. After inspecting the publications, Grant declared that they helpedhim conclude that one ‘‘cannot doubt the connection between the ArbenzGovernment and Soviet Russia.’’57 Such visible props, however, seemed toimpress U.S. journalists primarily.

Other KUGOWN exploitations included providing twenty-one documentsfrom PBHISTORY to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. so that he couldincorporate the information in a speech before the United Nations.58

Similarly, in late August more than forty documents were sent to WhitingWillauer, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. Tegucigalpa had cooperatedfully with PBSUCCESS, to the extent of allowing its territory to be usedas the staging area for Castillo Armas’s insurrection. Now the governmentneeded to justify its cooperation by including PBHISTORY revelations ina ‘‘White Paper’’ it was preparing on ‘‘Guatemalan Communistinterference in Honduran affairs.’’59

In subsequent years, the CIA would utilize PBHISTORY documentsperiodically to emphasize ‘‘appropriate aspects of the Guatemalanrevolution.’’60 In this regard, the captured documents proved useful inpersistent efforts to disparage ex-President Arbenz as he lived out the rest



of his life in exile. Though Arbenz would become a somewhat controversialfigure on the Left—some blamed him for capitulating unnecessarily to a rag-tag insurgency—he remained in many Latin Americans’ eyes a symbol ofprincipled opposition to the overbearing United States. To a degree, thisidealization was a function of continuous Soviet propaganda, whichdepicted Arbenz as a tragic figure, martyred by the United FruitCompany. Indeed, Arbenz was in many ways Moscow’s riposte toWashington’s championing of Eastern European leaders, like Hungary’sFerenc Nagy, who had been deposed as their nations turned into ‘‘people’sdemocracies.’’ Just as Nagy was hounded at every turn by Sovietpropagandists for alleged ‘‘fascist’’ inclinations, U.S. agencies made Arbenza continuous target.

In mid-1957, for example, when Arbenz first returned to the WesternHemisphere after nearly two years in Prague and Moscow, the CIAengaged in an energetic effort to discredit him as he settled in Montevideo.Washington feared that Uruguay was but a temporary stop on the way toMexico, the hemispheric center of opposition to the Castillo Armas regime.Because the State Department did not want to make it seem as thoughWashington and Castillo Armas were overly concerned with Arbenz, theeffort to disparage the former president was conducted through the CIA’scovert assets. PBHISTORY documents, along with other intelligencematerials, were used to compile a ‘‘damaging’’ biography of Arbenz thatbranded him as a Soviet agent. This biography was provided selectively tofriendly press outlets so as to remind everyone that Arbenz was not simplya reformer. Rather, he had been a conscious tool of internationalCommunism, and as such was ‘‘mentally, morally, and spiritually’’ ill andunfit for public trust.61

PBHISTORY AND THE CONGRESS

A special instance of PBHISTORY exploitation occurred when thecaptured documents were utilized by a congressional subcommittee in1954. Aside from being an interesting domestic example of thedocuments’ utilization, it offers a rare glimpse into the intersection ofCIA covert operations with domestic politics, and an illustration of thecooperative spirit that prevailed in the CIA’s relations with Congress inthe 1950s. If anything, the Agency found members of Congress a littletoo eager to insert themselves into a sensitive situation. As a consequence,the subcommittee became drawn into the CIA’s cover stories forPBSUCCESS (unwittingly) and PBHISTORY (wittingly), and may wellhave compromised sources and methods, albeit with the Agency’scooperation. ‘‘Someone was asleep at the switch,’’ observes SamuelHalpern, a 30-year DD=P veteran.

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The initial two years of the Eisenhower administration coincided with the83rd Congress, only the second Republican-controlled Congress in twentyyears. The GOP majority translated into a much more intensive emphasison anti-Communism in the Senate and House of Representatives, for bothreasons of ideology and political gain. White, working-class, and mostlyCatholic voters in cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee werenormally solidly Democratic. But the volatile issue of Communism hadhanded Republicans a golden opportunity to erode this Democratic urbanbase, and they were determined to exploit it to the hilt.

The Kersten Committee

The Senate’s effort was largely defined by the work of the JudiciaryCommittee’s Internal Security Subcommittee, under Senator Albert Jenner(R., Indiana), and by the Government Operations Committee’s PermanentSubcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy(R., Wisconsin). In the House, in addition to the continuation of theCommittee on Un-American Activities, the Republican leadership created,in July 1953, the ‘‘Baltic Committee,’’ known formally as the SelectCommittee to Investigate the Incorporation of Lithuania, Latvia, andEstonia in the U.S.S.R. In 1954, the committee’s name was changed to theSelect Committee on Communist Aggression to reflect a broaderinvestigative authority, and it became popularly known as the KerstenCommittee, after its chairman, Charles Kersten (R., Wisconsin), a 52-year-old lawyer from Milwaukee in his third term. The committee’s mandatenow included ‘‘the subversion and destruction of free institutions andhuman liberties in all other areas controlled, directly or indirectly, byworld Communism.’’62

In the two years of its existence—it ceased to exist after the Democratsrecaptured the House in November 1954—the Kersten Committeemanaged to compile a thick public record and garner considerablepublicity.63 It held fifty hearings in major cities all over the United States(invariably, these urban areas had large enclaves of voters who wereEastern European in origin), and in London, Munich, and West Berlin. Ittook testimony from more than 335 witnesses, entered into the recordapproximately 1,500 exhibits, and published 27 reports pertaining to theoccupation of almost every nation in the Eastern bloc, including some, likeUkraine, that were considered inseparable from the Soviet Union itself. Insum, Kersten’s panel effectively functioned as one of Washington’s moreprominent, if unusual, Cold War propaganda instruments during itsrelatively short life, and as such came under constant, virulent attack fromall manner of Communist media, as did Kersten himself.64 The Sovietpress, for example, called the ‘‘notorious’’ Wisconsin congressman an



‘‘arrant reactionary’’ and ‘‘tireless anti-Sovieteer’’ who elicited testimonyfrom ‘‘all sorts of human dregs, emigrant scum, and criminals.’’65

The Kersten Committee naturally received assistance from a host ofnongovernmental ethnic and religious groups united in their opposition toCommunism. It was also aided, and openly so, by the Department ofState, the USIA, the CIA-funded Committee for a Free Europe (RadioFree Europe), and behind-the-scenes by the CIA directly. The Agencyhelped the Kersten Committee find eyewitnesses whose dramatictestimonies about life behind the ‘‘Iron Curtain’’ were likely to generateheadlines. As Edward O’Connor, the committee’s staff director, told DCIAllen Dulles on 9 July 1954, just after the conclusion of the panel’sEuropean hearings, without the Agency’s help the committee’s overseaseffort would have been like a ‘‘hay-wagon with only three wheels on it.’’66

The Kersten Committee’s interest in Guatemala, and what was perceivedto be the first successful rollback of Communism since World War II, wasinevitable. During the same conversation in which he effusively thankedhim, O’Connor advised Dulles that some committee members ‘‘want to goon the [Guatemala] thing as a cleanup.’’67 O’Connor said he was stronglyadvising against it, probably because he recognized that the Guatemalansituation in mid-July was still extraordinarily sensitive, and thatcongressional hearings of any kind would roil the waters. Then and there,Dulles declassified PBHISTORY for the cooperative staff director. ‘‘Well,[Guatemala’s] what we’re working on now,’’ said the DCI. ‘‘We’ve sent ateam down. This is confidential, of course, [but] we’re getting a setuporganized there to really get the documents. We’re getting thousands andthousands of documents [though] we haven’t analyzed them. . . . I’ll have areport in a day or two.’’68 If Dulles thought he had the committee undercontrol by keeping the staff director well informed, he was mistaken.

A Newcomer to the Fray

Representative Kersten, and a 31-year-old second-term congressman on thecommittee, Patrick Hillings (R., California), kept pressing to hold hearings,and it was not easy to keep them at bay. Hillings was chairman of thecommittee’s newly formed Subcommittee to Investigate CommunistAggression in Latin America, a forum expressly designated to holdhearings on Guatemala. And though Hillings was very junior, and one ofthe youngest members of the House, this ambitious, energetic congressmanwas not without powerful friends in the administration. He had takenRichard M. Nixon’s House seat in the 1950 election when Nixon ran forthe Senate, and was widely considered the new Vice President’s protege.69

Following the footsteps of his mentor, Hillings hoped congressionalhearings on Guatemala would enhance his political profile, just as theAlger Hiss case had catapulted Nixon to national prominence.70 Hoping to

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lay the groundwork for a very public investigation, Hillings paid his first visitto Guatemala City in early June, just weeks before the launch ofPBSUCCESS, and to the great consternation of everyone in the U.S.diplomatic mission.71 Only upon receipt of an urgent cable from VicePresident Nixon himself had the irrepressible Hillings agreed to postponepublication of an ill-timed report on the ‘‘Communist beachhead’’ in theWestern Hemisphere.72 Allen Dulles’s special concern, naturally, was thatin their eagerness to expose international Communism in Central America,the Kersten and Hillings effort would ‘‘run afoul of or cross wires with’’CIA operations.73 In particular, the congressmen were officially unwittingof PBSUCCESS and Allen Dulles wanted to keep it that way.74

By mid-August, and with the knowledge of Ambassador Peurifoy, Dulleswas funneling PBHISTORY records to Kersten so as to enable thecongressman to make documented speeches about Moscow’s penetrationof the Arbenz government and its fomenting of unrest in Central America.Of course, only the 64 photostated documents were supplied by the CIA;the conclusions in the speech were all Kersten’s. By establishing ‘‘sufficientgood will’’ with the energetic Wisconsin congressman on Guatemala, andkeeping him and Representative Hillings informed (up to a point), Dulles’sfirm hope was that he might be able to keep them from inadvertentlytripping over, and possibly even exposing, the CIA’s role in the coup.75

The congressmen could not be held off indefinitely, however, especially inan election year with Republican control of Congress at stake.76 On 30August, Representative Hillings arrived at CIA headquarters for a briefingon the situation in Guatemala. A few days later—roughly the half-waypoint in the PBHISTORY team’s massive sorting operation—Hillings,along with a consultant, Patrick McMahon, arrived in Guatemala City totake their own measure of the situation and gather material for hearings,even though the CIA station had recommended that their visit bepostponed because of the unsett led si tuat ion.77 For five days,PBHISTORY chief ‘‘Francis Mylkes’’ escorted Hillings to all hisappointments, even acting as a translator during the meeting withPresident Castillo Armas. The PBHISTORY team also armed Hillingswith propaganda kits and a specially prepared six-page Comite reportdescribing its activities and what an analysis of the captured documentsproved.78

The hearings so desired by Kersten and Hillings finally occurred in lateSeptember and October 1954 over a period of six days. The decidedlydomestic and political nature of the exercise was illustrated by itsproximity to the 2 November election, its location, and some of thewitnesses called by Hillings. Although no important purpose was served byconvening outside Washington, two of the subcommittee’s hearings tookplace in Los Angeles, the major city closest to Hillings’s district. (That city



was also the home of another Republican congressman, Donald Jackson,who was called to testify on the grounds that his chairmanship of theLatin America subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committeemade him an expert witness). The two days of Los Angeles testimony wereheld in mid-October, just before the mid-term elections, and featured onewitness, Leo Carrillo, whose appearance was guaranteed to generate localpublicity, and attract attention from Los Angeles’s growing, and largelyCatholic, community of Spanish-speaking Americans. Carrillo was anactor who had achieved fame as the ‘‘Mexican character’’ in countlessHollywood films, and as ‘‘Pancho’’ in the television series ‘‘The CiscoKid.’’ But his insights into the Communist movement in Latin Americawere pedestrian at best.

The Committee’s Report

Notwithstanding the self-aggrandizing and political purpose of the hearings,they did put some useful information on record, and the CIA was pleased bythe extensive publicity.79 President Castillo Armas, the featured witness, wasperhaps the first sitting head of state to testify (albeit via a prerecorded tape)before a congressional panel, and Ambassador John Peurifoy gave anextended statement on his eventful year in Guatemala. More to the point,the hearings became one of the principals means of domesticallypublicizing the documents obtained under PBHISTORY auspices—Hillingshad left Guatemala with more 1,000 photostated documents.80 In additionto Castillo Armas and Peurifoy, the subcommittee heard (via aninterpreter) from Raul Midence Rivera, a Comite staff member, whoappeared at the recommendation of PBHISTORY chairman ‘‘FrancisMylkes.’’81 Midence, without divulging PBHISTORY or the CIA’s fundingand control of the Comite, essentially described the entire covert operationand laid out the results in considerable detail. 82 A 36-page appendix to thehearings consisted entirely of photographs and reproductions of documentsostensibly provided by the Comite. Much was made of the number of‘‘Red’’ books that had been found in the personal library of formerPresident Arbenz and his politically active wife, Marıa.

In its final report, the Hillings subcommittee went well beyond thedocumentary evidence presented, and declared flatly that ‘‘Communists incontrol of Guatemala were acting under direct orders and instructionsfrom the Kremlin.’’83 Such an unsupported conclusion was, of course,hardly the Agency’s problem. At the same time, CIA had good reason tobe genuinely concerned about other aspects of the subcommittee’s work.The congressmen had been witting of the CIA’s role as the driving force incapturing the documents, and dutifully kept that secret. But in theireagerness to exploit, out of political self-interest, the first rollback ofCommunism since World War II, the members became enmeshed in

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Agency cover stories, and probably pressed the Agency to exposePBSUCCESS assets to unnecessary risk.

The Hillings report, for example, gave renewed credence to the discreditedallegation that a large cache of Soviet weapons had been deliveredclandestinely by submarine to Nicaragua. Unwittingly, Hillings wasawkwardly drawing attention to Operation WASHTUB, CIA’s effort toplant incriminating weapons and simultaneously account for the arms usedby Castillo Armas’s forces. A skeptical press had rightly paid littleattention to Nicaragua’s feigned ‘‘shock’’ at the discovery of the armscache in early May, and the CIA’s ‘‘gilding the lily’’ effort had beendeservedly forgotten after the genuine Czech arms arrived—that is, untilHillings drew unnecessary attention to it. The same final report, written byconsultant Patrick McMahon, went on to observe that ‘‘we in the UnitedStates still have much to learn about propaganda techniques,’’ and urgedthe U.S. government to study the experience of La Voz de la Liberacion.84

But the radio station, of course, had been the CIA’s creation. Theseexamples of ‘‘blowback,’’ or the propagation in the United States ofuntruths manufactured by the DD=P in the first place, were always ofconcern to the CIA and justifiably so. Having them printed in acongressional report was especially problematic.85

Much more seriously, the Hillings subcommittee’s eagerness to bask in theafterglow of PBSUCCESS may have played a role in retaliation againstGuatemalans who directly helped the CIA overthrow Arbenz. During thehearings, the subcommittee took testimony from two (of the three) mostimportant Guatemalans who had worked with David Atlee Phillips on LaVoz de la Liberacion broadcasts from Nicaragua. These young menappeared before Hillings’s panel, as did Raul Midence, at the expressrecommendation of ‘‘Francis Mylkes;’’ subsequently, all three of Phillips’scolleagues were identified by name in the subcommittee’s final report.Within a period of three years after the coup, two of these young menwere murdered for political reasons. ‘‘Pepe, leaving his home one morningfor work, was gunned down in front of his family by assassins,’’ wrotePhillips in his 1977 memoir. ‘‘Mario, too, was assassinated, dying outside adowntown supermarket in a hail of machine gun slugs.’’ At this remove, itis impossible to know whether the testimony and=or final report hadanything to do with the assassinations. Quite possibly these men, all ofwhom were quite proud of their role in overthrowing Arbenz, spokeopenly about their activities in Guatemala, and that alone marked them.Nonetheless, in its eagerness to promote the notion that Castillo Armas’sinsurrection was entirely indigenous, the Agency seems to have beenreckless, if not derelict, in allowing these men to testify and=or be identifiedin any manner in connection with the radio Liberacion. At the very least,their appearance should have been conditioned upon an ironclad guarantee



from Hillings. And although Hillings’s subcommittee was apparentlyunwitting, it cannot evade all responsibility, especially for a congressionalpanel that claimed to understand fully the ruthlessness of Arbenz’s‘‘communized police state.’’86

PBHISTORY AND HISTORY

February 1955 marked the last opportunity to exploit the captured recordsfor essentially propaganda purposes. Early that month, Vice PresidentNixon paid a three-day visit to Guatemala as part of an extended tour ofCentral America. Included on his itinerary was a visit to the ‘‘Anti-Communist Exhibit’’ at the National Palace, where he was personallyescorted by President Castillo Armas. Nixon dutifully feigned theappropriate level of interest, though none of the items displayed came as asurprise. He had seen pictures of everything in the exhibit in the ‘‘greybook’’ CIA had prepared for the NSC the previous July.

Once exploitation under the KUGOWN rubric had run its course, if notbefore, the PBHISTORY team realized that the most useful purpose to beserved by the captured records was to document the Communistmovement in Guatemala from 1944 to 1954. Communism had grown froma few adherents rotting in dictator Jorge Ubico’s prisons in 1944, to aclandestine nucleus of perhaps forty members by 1949, to about 4,000card-carrying party members and serveral times that number ofsymapthizers by 1953. Apart from sheer numbers, Communism arguablycarried as much appeal and influence in Guatemala as in any countryoutside the Soviet bloc. By 1954, Communists held commanding positionsin the Guatemalan labor movement, the Arbenz political coalition, and,within the government itself, key positions in certain strategic agencies.87

The captured documents, more than anything, revealed how a handful ofmostly inexperienced Communists had managed to capture the leadershipof what started out as an indigenous revolution. In David Phillips’s words,the records were ‘‘an intelligence gold mine, filled with nuggets ofinformation which explained the motivation and plans of the Arbenzregime.’’88

From PBHISTORY’s inception, the understanding was that theDepartment of State would conduct scholarly-type research into thedocuments, and so it fell to State’s then–Office of Intelligence Research(OIR) to undertake the fullest study of the 50,000 microfilmed records.89 A50-page OIR study took approximately five months to write, and wasconsidered by State the definitive answer as to ‘‘how Communism cameabout in Guatemala.’’90 In a sense, it was a classified supplement to anAugust 1954 publication by the State Department, Intervention of

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International Communism in Guatemala, which laid out the U.S. argumentabout Communist penetration of the Arbenz government without referenceto the PBHISTORY materials.91

By 1957, however, it was becoming clear that Washington, despite itsrollback victory, was neither writing the history of the episode nor definingit in terms congenial to U.S. interests. This was a formidable problembecause of the significance the coup had acquired in the hemisphere.Normally, military overthrows (and especially those in Central America)rarely produced much literature, save for propaganda issued by thesuccessful faction. But in this instance both victors and vanquished werevigorously seeking to define history, and as one reviewer noted, ‘‘thedefeated party has been more articulate than the victors’’ in theGuatemalan case.’’92 Better-received books were being written by ardent (ifself-interested) defenders of the Arbenz regime, and naturally these weresimultaneously highly critical of the United States. Intensely nationalisticLatin Americans of every class were falling sway to the argument thatCastillo Armas’s government, rather than being true to the 1944 revolutionand representing an indigenous reaction to a alien ideology, was in fact a‘‘creation of the U.S. State Department.’’93

Perhaps as a consequence, in October 1956 the U.S. government decided tomake the PBHISTORY collection available to Ronald Schneider, a youngPrinceton University scholar. Still two years away from receiving hishistory Ph.D., Schneider received permission to write a book based onexclusive access to the captured documents. The work would be conductedunder the aegis of a Philadelphia-based think tank, the Foreign PolicyResearch Institute (FPRI).

CIA’s Publishing In£uence

There would be nothing exceptional about this coda to PBHISTORY, savefor the fact that several indicators suggest that Schneider’s acclaimed 1959book, Communism in Guatemala: 1944 to 1954, was an extension of theoperation’s original purpose, and may have even been subsidized in somemanner by the CIA, unbeknownst to Schneider. At the time, bookunderwriting occupied a special position in the realm of media andpropaganda covert actions undertaken by the CIA.94 ‘‘Books differ fromall other propaganda media,’’ a CIA official observed in 1961, ‘‘primarilybecause one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude andaction to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other singlemedium.’’95 More than 1,000 books were published under some kind ofsponsorship by the Agency until 1967, approximately 25 percent of themin English, and more often than not, the author was unaware of CIAinvolvement. Nor was that undesirable, since a main purpose was to get



the book published without it being ‘‘‘contaminated’ by any overt tie-in withthe U.S. government.’’96

In this instance, both FPRI, where Schneider was a research assistant whilehe wrote, and Frederick A. Praeger, the publisher of Communism inGuatemala, received funds from the Agency during the 1950s. In 1967,when CIA subsidies to unions, student groups, think tanks, and publisherswere publicly exposed, one of the organizations identified as having beenfunded through CIA-friendly foundations was FPRI.97 The same exposerevealed Praeger Publishing to be a recipient of CIA funds, with FrederickPraeger himself conceding that he had printed ‘‘20 to 25 volumes in whichthe C.I.A. had had an interest, either in the writing, the publication itself,or the post-publication distribution.’’98 The Agency has always managed toavoid releasing specific information on the publishing projects that itsubsidized during the 1950s and 1960s.99 Even if the English-languagepublication of Schneider’s book was not directly underwritten, theSpanish-language edition may have been Agency-subsidized.100 Thatconsideration alone would have met the CIA’s criteria of underwritingbooks ‘‘for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability.’’101

At a minimum, the Agency had to assent to a work based on documents ithad retrieved assiduously, and at considerable effort and expense, even ifSchneider had actually used the copies of PBHISTORY in possession ofeither the State Department or the USIA. The precise manner in which the‘‘never before available’’ documents were opened to Schneider exclusivelywas not explained in the book. In the foreword, Professor ArthurWhitaker stated that Schneider ‘‘made extensive use of a large collection ofcopies . . . of Guatemalan materials which the [FPRI] was able to place athis disposal.’’102 Whitaker, who taught at the University of Pennsylvaniaand was a FPRI associate, may have played a key role in facilitatingSchneider’s access. Considered one of the pioneers of Latin Americanstudies in the United States, Whitaker had good ties with the U.S.government, having served as a consultant to the State Department duringWorld War II. When questioned about the matter in 1966, Whitaker saidhe had gotten the documents through ‘‘State Department sources’’ butrefused to shed more light.103 Schneider, in his preface and bibliography,wrote that the FPRI had ‘‘initiated’’ the project and retained him to carryit out under Whitaker’s supervision.104 Schneider also forthrightlyidentified the Comite National de Defensa contra el Comunismo as thecollector of the captured documents, but naturally made no mention of theCIA’s pivotal role in the funding and operations of the Comite, nor did hetrace how 50,000 documents gathered by the Comite happened to arrive inthe United States.105

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A Balanced Presentation

Lest there be any doubt, Schneider’s Communism in Guatemala was noapologia for either the coup or U.S. support of Castillo Armas’s right-winggovernment. If anything, Schneider’s account tended to support the viewsof Rutgers University Professor Robert Alexander, another leading LatinAmericanist, who was quite critical of U.S. policy in Guatemala.Alexander’s argument was that the best protection against Communism’sspread in the region was a strong, vibrant democratic Left, trying ‘‘in ademocratic way to bring about the social revolution which is so necessaryto the future of Latin America.’’106 Notably, Schneider had not beencontent to rely on the PBHISTORY documents alone. After studying themfor six months, he traveled to Mexico and Guatemala in the spring of 1957to gather additional material and interview participants in the tumultuousevents from 1944 to 1954. His Panamanian-born wife, a Latin Americanistin her own right, helped Schneider break down the suspicions that an‘‘inquisitive gringo’’ encountered among those Guatemalans whosesympathies lay with Arbenz.107

Notwithstanding the manner in which Communism in Guatemala may havebeen permitted, or aided and abetted by the CIA, it stood on its own as apiece of historical scholarship.108 A 1960 review of Central Americanhistoriography described the book as ‘‘easily the most comprehensive andbest documented work on that subject, and one of the most revealingstudies on Central America of recent years.109 Of greater import,Schneider’s central conclusions about the nature and extent of Communistcontrol were largely affirmed in Professor Piero Gleijeses’s Shattered Hope,a 1991 book openly sympathetic to the Arbenz regime and considered thedefinitive treatment of the subject to date.110

NOVEL ADVENTURE=MIXED RESULTS

PBHISTORY was the first operation of its kind for the Agency. By the CIA’sown estimate, very few ‘‘hot, Communist damaging documents’’ were found,a deficit which ‘‘Francis Mylkes’’ attributed to the fact that ‘‘the Communistshad all the time in the world to take away or destroy [documents].’’111

Notwithstanding the lack of sensational disclosures, PBHISTORY suppliedthe U.S. intelligence community with a ground-level look at a Communisttakeover by slow motion. This valuable research material, plus theopportunity to establish and train a new Guatemalan counter-subversiveservice, justified the internal estimate that PBHISTORY was a success.112

Yet PBHISTORY did not succeed in its most vital purpose—to persuadeLatin America to look at Communist penetration of the hemisphere from thestandpoint of the United States. Many nations, and vast numbers of Latin



American citizens, had viewed Guatemala’s socioeconomic reforms after the1944 revolution as a positive good—primarily, if not entirely indigenous—and far outweighing any Communist means. As Donald Grant, a keenstudent of the region observed in 1955, ‘‘That Guatemala communism wasthe instrument of Russia was widely doubted in Latin America.’’113

PBHISTORY proved incapable of altering that perception. Even theultimate utilization of the captured documents achieved in RonaldSchneider’s sober account could go no farther than to prove the ‘‘virtualtake-over’’ of the country by no more than 4,000 card-carrying PGTmembers.114

Moscow’s Line Prevails

Instead, Moscow’s preferred version of the 1954 coup eventually gripped thehemisphere’s imagination. In other words, Arbenz’s Guatemala was eithernon-Communist or at least non-threatening to Washington, yet thenorthern colossus had crushed the revolution for the most selfish reason,i.e., to protect the privileged, monopoly control of Guatemala’s economyby the United Fruit Company. Notably, this was not an instantaneousjudgment. For a period of about two years after the coup, judgment wasreserved pending the outcome in Guatemala. But, following CastilloArmas’s assassination in August 1957, the most reactionary politicalelements achieved power and vitiated the vital reforms ushered in by the1944 revolution. The die was finally cast when the Eisenhoweradministration greeted this adverse development with nary a protest, muchless with energy. Washington had once again relegated Guatemala to thegeopolitical sidelines.

Nothing so illustrated the Soviet triumph than the reception accorded VicePresident Nixon when he made a good-will tour of eight South Americancountries in April 1958. Beginning with his very first stop in Montevideo,Uruguay, Nixon met with verbal and physical abuse everywhere he went.Ultimately, the tour had to be cut short in Venezuela because the threat tohis safety became so acute. The discontent could not have been so large ifthe only protestors had been Communists and their active sympathizers.Rather, these groups were exploiting latent but intense resentment againstthe United States— in particular, anger over the implausible U.S.disavowal of any important role in Arbenz’s overthrow. The lack of hardevidence had no bearing on Latin perceptions, and the Soviet documentsthat might have changed those perceptions were unavailable.

Plausible Deniability Fails

In effect, a State Department forecast issued in August 1953 had largely cometo pass. The Bureau of Inter-American Affairs had predicted that, ‘‘Our

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secret stimulation and material support of the overthrow of the ArbenzGovernment would subject us to serious hazards. . . . Were it to becomeevident that the United States has tried a Czechoslovakia in reverse inGuatemala, the effects on our relations in this hemisphere, and probably inthe world at large, could be as disastrous as those produced by openintervention.’’115 For the Agency, in particular, the episode gave it asudden, and probably undesirable, profile and reputation in thehemisphere. When Lyman Kirkpatrick, a senior CIA official, made anotherwise routine tour of Latin America in 1956, he found a new,smoldering resentment of the Agency everywhere he went.116

The Agency had not been so naıve as to believe that dislodging the Arbenzgovernment would not be credited to the United States, and perhaps even theCIA specifically. But the Plans Directorate and Allen Dulles had argued thatPBSUCCESS could be accomplished with ‘‘plausible deniability’’ intact. Onthe basis of the hemisphere’s reaction, PBSUCCESS was a covert action inname only, and PBHISTORY ultimately could not repair the damagecaused by implausible deniability.

REFERENCES1The standard scholarly works about the coup include Cole Blasier, TheHovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976); Blanche WiesenCook, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy (Garden City, NY:Doubleday, 1981); Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The ForeignPolicy of Intervention (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982); BryceWood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin, TX: Universityof Texas Press, 1985); Stephen Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: TheForeign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1988); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The GuatemalanRevolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1991); and Nicholas Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’sClassified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1999).

The most prominent works by journalists are David Horowitz, The FreeWorld Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War(New York: Hill & Wang, 1965); Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, eds.,Guatemala (Berkeley, CA: North American Congress on Latin America[NACLA], 1974); Thomas McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy ofUnited Fruit (New York: Crown Publishers, 1976); and Stephen Schlesingerand Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup inGuatemala (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982).

General CIA histories and biographies that treat PBSUCCESS in some detailinclude Andrew Tully, CIA: The Inside Story (New York: William Morrow,1962); David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government (New York:



Random House, 1964); Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets:Richard Helms & the CIA (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979); John Ranelagh,The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster,1986); John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon CovertOperations Since World War II (New York, William Morrow, 1986); BurtonHersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (NewYork: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992); Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Lifeof Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994); Christopher Andrew, Forthe President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidencyfrom Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); William Blum,Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II(Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995); and Evan Thomas, The VeryBest Men: Four Who Dared, The Early Years of the CIA (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1995).

For useful memoirs of participants see Dwight Eisenhower, The White HouseYears: Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963);E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (NewYork: Berkley Publishing, 1974); David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch: 25Years of Peculiar Service (New York: Atheneum, 1977); Richard M. Bissell,Jr., with Jonathan Lewis and Frances Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior:From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996);and Richard Helms, with William Hood, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Lifein the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003).

2David Atlee Phillips provided the most extensive description until NicholasCullather’s 1999 account of the coup. Even so, Cullather describes PBHISTORY

almost in passing, simply as part of the Plans Directorate’s ‘‘mopping up’’after Arbenz’s departure. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer describePBHISTORY (although it is not identified as such) in half a paragraph; BlancheWiesen Cook mentions PBHISTORY (again, not by name) in a footnote.Cullather, Secret History, pp. 106–107; Schlesinger and Kinzer, Bitter Fruit,p. 220; Phillips, Night Watch, pp. 51–52; Cook, Declassified Eisenhower, pp.375–376.

3On 15 May 2003, the Department of State released a retrospective Guatemalavolume to supplement the publication, twenty years earlier, of a standardForeign Relations of the United States volume on Latin America from 1952to 1954. See Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States,1952–1954, Vol. IV, American Republics (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, 1983), and U.S. Department of State, ForeignRelations of the United States, 1952–1954, Guatemala (Washington, DC:U.S. Government Printing Office, 2003). The supplemental volume (hereafterFRUS Guatemala) was wholly devoted to documenting the role of the U.S.government, and especially the CIA, in President Arbenz’s ouster. On thesame day, the CIA made available 5,120 redacted documents, totaling 14,000pages, pertaining to Operations PBFORTUNE, PBSUCCESS, and PBHISTORY.These documents (hereafter CIA Guatemala ERR) are posted on theAgency’s Electronic Reading Room Website.

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4Cullather, Secret History, p. 103.

5Letter, DCI Allen Dulles to President Eisenhower, 18 April 1955,with attachment, ‘‘Brief Studies on Various Aspects of InternationalCommunism,’’ April 1955, CIA Guatemala ERR. Dulles does not explicitlystate that PBHISTORY enabled the Agency’s International CommunismDivision to construct an organizational chart of the PGT by 1955, but thatappears likely.

6Telegram from CIA Headquarters to CIA Station in Guatemala, 30 June 1954,FRUS Guatemala, p. 408.

7Cable from DD=P Frank Wisner, 27 June 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR; FRUSGuatemala, pp. 377–378.

8The international Communist movement ‘‘unleashed a propaganda campaignof virtually unprecedented scope and intensity—especially considering thecomparative size and remote location of the country involved.’’ Memo forChiefs, All Area & IO Divisions, 9 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

9Daniel James, Red Design for the Americas: Guatemalan Prelude (New York:John Day, 1954), p. 13.

10‘‘Latin American Reactions to the Guatemalan Crisis,’’ Current IntelligenceWeekly, 9 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

11Stuart Loory, ‘‘The CIA’s Use of the Press: A ‘Mighty Wurlitzer,’’’ ColumbiaJournalism Review, September=October 1974, p. 12. A 26 July 1954 memoconcerning measures taken to counteract unfavorable world opinion is arevealing glimpse of Wisner’s Wurlitzer at work. ‘‘Report on Actions Takento Counteract Unfavorable World Reaction to Overthrow of Arbenz Regimein Guatemala,’’ 26 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

12Memo for Chiefs, All Area & IO Divisions, 9 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

13The State Department officers arrived independently and unbenownst to theCIA officers, but they soon joined forces. ‘‘Report on Activity . . . inGuatemala City, 4–16 July 1954,’’ 28 July 1954; ‘‘Investigating Teams inGuatemala,’’ 13 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

14Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder, p. 111.

15‘‘Report on Activity . . . in Guatemala City, 4–16 July 1954,’’ 28 July 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR.

16‘‘Summary Report on CIA Team to Guatemala City,’’ 24 July 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR.

17‘‘Report on Activity . . . in Guatemala City, 4–16 July 1954,’’ 28 July 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR. Besides the PGT, documents included records from theConfederacion Nacional de Campesinos de Guatemala (CNCG); ConfederacionGeneral de Trabajadores de Guatemala (CGTG); Partido Revolucionario deGuatemala (PRG); Sindicato de Trabajadores de Educacion de Guatemala(STEG), Confederacion de Trabajadores Guatemaltecos (CTG).

18‘‘Summary Report on CIA Team to Guatemala City,’’ 24 July 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR.



19‘‘Documents Obtained in a Brief, Preliminary Sampling of the DocumentaryEvidence of Communist Infiltration and Influence in Guatemala,’’ 28 July1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

20Select Committee to Investigate Communist Aggression, Communist Aggressionin Latin America, Ninth Interim Report of Hearings, House of Representatives,83rd Congress, 2nd Session, 8 October 1954 (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, 1954), p. 124.

21‘‘Mylkes’s’’ identity remains classified, but judging from his earlier involvementwith PBSUCCESS, he seems to have been a senior counterintelligence officer. Cableto Director from Lincoln, 31 January 1954; ‘‘Final Summary Report ofPBHISTORY Project,’’ 29 October 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

22Phillips, The Night Watch, pp. 30–54.

23As part of the effort to protect U.S. deniability, Castillo Armas himself was ledto believe that he was not dealing with the CIA directly, but rather, with afictional group of anti-Communist businessmen not tied to United Fruit butinterested in Latin America. Whether he believed this fiction is not known.FRUS Guatemala, p. 438; ‘‘PBHISTORY Progress Report 4–9 August,’’ 9August 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

24‘‘Project Summary PBHISTORY,’’ 5 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

25Ibid.

26‘‘Report on Activity . . . in Guatemala City, 4–16 July 1954,’’ 28 July 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR. This memo contains the most detailed description of Agencyefforts to create an efficient, professional anti-subversive unit in thereconstituted Guatemalan government.

27Cable to Director from Guatemala City, 22 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

28‘‘Project Summary PBHISTORY,’’ 5 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR. While thetotal amount of financial support of the Comite is not clear, in Septemberalone CIA subsidized its operations in the amount of $15,000. ‘‘$15,000Approved for September Operation,’’ 27 September 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

29‘‘PBHISTORY Records Report No. 4,’’ 24 September 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

30‘‘Summary Report on CIA Team to Guatemala City,’’ 24 July 1954; Cable toDirector from Guatemala City, 22 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

31‘‘Final Summary Report of the PBHISTORY Project,’’ 29 October 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR.

32Cable to Director from Guatemala City, 23 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

33‘‘Final Summary Report of PBHISTORY Project,’’ 29 October 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR.

34‘‘PBHISTORY Progress Report 18 August–1 September 1954,’’ 3 September 1954,CIA Guatemala ERR.

35‘‘PBHISTORY Records, Report No. 1,’’ 13 August 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

36‘‘Coordinated Intelligence Requirement for PBHISTORY,’’ 30 August 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR. The Bureau wondered whether Guatemala had given theSoviets a new base of operations because of its proximity to the United States.

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The PBHISTORY team was tasked with a whole new set of requirementspertaining to Soviet espionage, the U.S. Communist Party, liaison betweenCommunist parties in the Americas, any significant financial transactions, andnew Soviet operational methods or techniques. ‘‘ODENVY Requirements,’’ 9September 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

37‘‘Report on Information Available to the Social Research Group inGuatemala,’’ 19 August 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

38‘‘PBHISTORY Progress Report 18 August–1 September 1954,’’ 3 September 1954,CIA Guatemala ERR.

39‘‘Final Summary Report of PBHISTORY Project,’’ 29 October 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR.

40The State Department received 2,031 photostats, 50,000 microfilmed documents,and 531 other documents. USIA received 1,657 documents, 50,000 microfilmeddocuments, and 192 others. The FBI was sent 32 documents. ‘‘Distribution ofPBHISTORY Documents at Headquarters to Non-CIA Use,’’ 27 October 1954,CIA Guatemala ERR.

41‘‘Mechanics for Exploitation of Guatemalan Documents,’’ 28 July 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR.

42‘‘List of Guatemala Communists,’’ 4 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

43Phillips, The Night Watch, p. 54.

44Ibid., pp. 51–52.

45‘‘PBHISTORY Summary Progress Report,’’ 1 October 1954, CIA GuatemalaERR.

46‘‘Project Summary PBHISTORY,’’ 5 July 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

47‘‘PBHISTORY Progress Report 4–9 August,’’ 9 August 1954, CIA GuatemalaERR. Notwithstanding the Agency’s concerns, the Comite did acquire abaleful reputation. It functioned as a direct arm of the executive, withseemingly unlimited police powers that did not recognize habeas corpus orother normal judicial safeguards. John Gillin and K.H. Silvert, ‘‘Ambiguitiesin Guatemala,’’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 3, April 1956, pp. 480–481. Onejournalist likened the Comite, with its secret powers, to a ‘‘Ku Klux Klan-likeorganization.’’ Keith Monroe, ‘‘Guatemala: What the Reds Left Behind,’’Harper’s, July 1955, p. 65.

48‘‘For Director of Central Intelligence,’’ 11 January 1955, CIA Guatemala ERR.

49ESSENCE may have been the head of the Propaganda Ministry.

50‘‘PBHISTORY Summary Progress Report,’’ 1 October 1954; Memo ‘‘For Mr.Dulles,’’ 19 January 1955, CIA Guatemala ERR.


52‘‘PBHISTORY Progress Report 18 August 1–September 1954,’’ 3 September 1954,CIA Guatemala ERR.




54Ibid.

55Monroe, ‘‘What the Reds Left Behind,’’ p. 60.

56Ibid.

57Donald Grant, ‘‘Guatemala and United States Foreign Policy,’’ Journal ofInternational Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1955, p. 69.

58‘‘Documentation for Ambassador Cabot Lodge,’’ 24 August 1954, CIAGuatemala ERR.

59‘‘Documents for Ambassador Willauer,’’ 26 August 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.


61‘‘Jacobo Arbenz . . .Operations Against,’’ 15 and 16 May 1957; ‘‘CurrentActivities Concerning Arbenz,’’ 4 June 1957, CIA Guatemala ERR.

62National Archives and Records Administration, Guide to the Records of theUnited States House of Representatives at the National Archives, 1789–1989(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), p. 317.

63Kersten’s preoccupation with Communism apparently did not help him at thepolls in 1954, when he was defeated in his bid for a fourth term. He went onto become a White House consultant on psychological warfare until 1956,when he resumed his law practice.

64Select Committee on Communist Aggression, Summary Report, House ofRepresentatives, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, 1955), pp. 1–3.

65‘‘In the Pillory,’’ New Times, Moscow, 14 March 1957, and ‘‘Kersten Is GoingTo War,’’ Izvestiya, Moscow, 7 January 1955.

66Transcript of a conversation between DCI Allen Dulles and Edward O’Connor,Kersten Committee, 17 July 1954, Dulles Papers obtained under the Freedom ofInformation Act.

67While the coup was still more than a month away, there was apparently somediscussion of encouraging the Kersten Committee, as well as the SenateSubcommittee on Internal Security, chaired by William Jenner, to holdhearings so as to increase the psychological pressure on the Arbenzgovernment. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower, pp. 264–265, 382.

68Conversation between Dulles and O’Connor, 17 July 1954, Dulles Papersobtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

69Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, Guatemala, p. 84; Irwin F. Gellman, TheContender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946–1952 (New York: TheFree Press, 1999), pp. 282–283.

70Hillings began pressing for congressional hearings as early as May. ‘‘Reportfrom Congressman Pat Hillings,’’ 17 May 1954. Correspondence: Hillings,Box 342, Richard Nixon Vice Presidential Papers, National Archives—PacificRegion.

71Cable to Director from Station Guatemala, 30 August 1954. Cable to SeniorRepresentative, Guatemala City, from Director, Central Intelligence, 16

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August 1954, CIA Guatemala, ERR; and Select Committee on CommunistAggression, Communist Aggression in Latin America, p. 113.

72Nixon cabled Hillings that ‘‘publication of report might prove detrimental to USinterest . . .. You should be fully appraised of all current developments andpossible implications [but] this can be accomplished only by consultation [inWashington]. Cable, to Patrick Hillings from Richard Nixon, 24 June 1954;and Cable, from Lightner (Munich) to Secretary of State, 25 June 1954, bothin Correspondence: Hillings, Box 342, Richard Nixon Vice PresidentialPapers, National Archives—Pacific Region. The report was never issued, butan eleven-page draft is contained in the Hillings Correspondence file, probablywritten by Patrick McMahon.

73Cable to Senior Representative, Guatemala City from Director, CentralIntelligence, 16 August 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.

74The Kersten Committee was not one of the congressional bodies the DCI wassupposed to keep apprised of covert activities.

75Cable to Senior Representative, Guatemala City from Director, CentralIntelligence, 16 August 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR; ‘‘Journal, Office ofLegislative Counsel,’’ 25 August 1954, CIA Records Electronic Search Tool,National Archives.

76Carey McWilliams, ‘‘Committee on Horrors . . . the Kersten Show,’’ The Nation,4 September 1954, pp. 186–188. Kersten himself was facing a tough race againsta popular Democrat, Henry Reuss, and in fact was not reelected.

77Patrick McMahon’s consultancy represented an egregious conflict of interest.His regular job was as Washington editor of the vociferously anti-CommunistAmerican Mercury, a New York–based magazine once edited by H.L.Mencken. Another Mercury editor was John Clements, who also ran a publicrelations firm, John A. Clements Associates. While Arbenz was in power,United Fruit retained Clements’s firm to mount an extensive publicitycampaign against the regime; after the coup, Castillo Armas’s regime hiredClements Associates for $8,000 a month. This campaign was managed byClements and Patrick McMahon, according to the Justice Department foreignagents’ filing, and thus while a paid foreign agent, McMahon wrote theHillings subcommittee’s final report. McMahon also arranged severalfavorable articles to be published in American Mercury, including anextremely flattering profile of Castillo Armas. Later, from 1956 to 1958,McMahon received $26,000 for his services to the Guatemalan government.Douglass Cater and Walter Pincus, ‘‘The Foreign Legion of U.S. PublicRelations,’’ The Reporter, 22 December 1960; NACLA, Guatemala, pp. 84–85;Patrick McMahon, ‘‘The Man Who Kicked the Reds Out of Guatemala,’’American Mercury, July 1954, pp. 21–23; Stephen Schlesinger and StephenKinzer, Bitter Fruit, pp. 94–96.





80Memo to Chief, Western Hemisphere from Chief of Station, Guatemala, 10September 1954, CIA Guatemala ERR.


82Select Committee on Communist Aggression, Communist Aggression in LatinAmerica, pp. 9–68.

83Select Committee on Communist Aggression, Report of the Subcommittee toInvestigate Communist Aggression in Latin America, House of Representatives,83rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government PrintingOffice, 1954), p. 2.

84Ibid., pp. 15–16.

85Interview with Herbert Romerstein, 21 June 2003.

86In his 1977 memoir, Phillips did not connect the identifications in the 1954House report to the assassinations. He named two of the three Guatemalanswho worked with him most closely, and protected the other identity,presumably on the grounds that the individual was still alive insofar asPhillips knew. The Guatemalans identified by Phillips as having beenassassinated were named Mario Lopez Otero and Jose Toron Barrios (aka‘‘Pepe’’). The Hillings subcommittee final report identified the radio Liberacionemployees as Mario Lopez Villtoro, Lionel Sisniega Otero, and Jose Tohran.The first two men also testified openly during the hearings and were linked tothe radio then. Despite the discrepancies in names and=or spelling, thereseems little doubt that two of these individuals are identical to Phillips’s‘‘Mario’’ and ‘‘Pepe.’’ Phillips, The Night Watch, pp. 38, 53–54; SelectCommittee on Communist Aggression, Report of the Subcommittee toInvestigate Communist Aggression in Latin America, pp. 15–16. Although‘‘Mylkes’’ would seem to bear most of the responsibility for exposing theseassets, DCI Dulles and DD=P Wisner were also kept well informed aboutHillings’ plan for hearings. In all probability, the final report was finished inhaste and not properly vetted, because the Select Committee on CommunistAggression was a temporary body of the 83rd Congress only, and itsauthority expired on 31 December 1954.

87Ronald Schneider, Communism in Guatemala: 1944 to 1954 (New York: Praeger),1959, pp. 1–2, 183.

88Phillips, The Night Watch, pp. 51–52.


90‘‘Use of PBHISTORY Documents by Office of Intelligence,’’ 28 February 1955;‘‘Use of Documents Collected in Guatemala,’’ 2 March 1955, CIA GuatemalaERR.

91Department of State, Intervention of International Communism in Guatemala,Publication 5556, Inter-American Series 48, (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, 1954). The publication, sometimes referred to asthe ‘‘Blue Book,’’ was released in August and contained a basic study on theCommunist movement in Guatemala as of May 1954, probably prepared bythe Department’s OIR and not for public consumption initially.

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John Foster Dulles had a quixotic idea for another kind of book, just beforethe PBHISTORY team arrived in Guatemala. Dulles’s idea was to find a authorwho could write ‘‘a sort of historical novel’’ about Communism in Guatemala,with an ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Ida Tarbell touch.’’ The author would be givenaccess to all relevant documents save for CIA records, and the documentationwould be separately published. Dulles discussed his idea during a July 3rdtelephone call with C.D. Jackson, a TIME-LIFE journalist and psychologicalwarfare expert. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, p. 181.

92Julio Adolfo Rey, ‘‘Revolution and Liberation: A Review of Recent Literatureon the Guatemalan Situation,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 38,Issue 2, May 1958, pp. 239–255; William Griffith, ‘‘The Historiography ofCentral America Since 1830,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 40,No. 4, pp. 548–569. Rey observed that the 1954 coup had given rise to ‘‘anunprecedent[ed] body of literature’’ in a short time, and although the numberof books was roughly equivalent (nine on each side), if one subtracted‘‘official’’ publications, the pro-Arbenz books (many of which were memoirsby regime officials) clearly came out ahead, especially in the Spanish language.Perhaps the most influential pro-Arbenz tome was written by GuillermoToriello, the regime’s last foreign affairs minister. Toriello, who was never apublicly recognized Communist, couched his account in nationalist terms, andas a result the memoir was widely acclaimed and circulated throughout LatinAmerica. Another incisive defense of Arbenz was mounted by Manuel Galich,also a former foreign affairs minister. Guillermo Toriello, La battalla deGuatemala (Mexico, DF: Cuadernos Americanos, 1955); Manuel Galich, Porque lucha Guatemala, Arevalo y Arbenz: Dos hombres contra un imperio(Buenos Aires: Elmer Editor, 1956).

93Gillin and Silvert, ‘‘Ambiquities in Guatemala,’’ pp. 469–482.

94According to the Pike Committee, ‘‘It is believed that if the correct number of allmedia and propaganda projects could be determined, it would exceed electionsupport as the largest single category of covert action projects undertaken bythe CIA.’’ Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, CIA: The Pike Report(Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 1977), p. 190.

95Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect toIntelligence Activities, Final Report: Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book I,94th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government PrintingOffice, 1976), pp. 192–194; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War:The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999),pp. 244–246.

96Senate Select Committee to Study Intelligence Activities, Final Report, p. 193.

97‘‘Units Linked with C.I.A.,’’ The New York Times, 19 February 1967; MichaelWarner, ‘‘Sophisticated Spies: CIA’s Links to Liberal Anti-Communists,1949–1967,’’ International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol.9, No. 4, Winter 1996–1997, pp. 425–433.

98John Crewdson, ‘‘C.I.A. Attempted to Shape Public Opinion Toward U.S.Policy Over Three Decades,’’ The New York Times, 25 December 1977.



99Victor Navasky, ‘‘Why Sue the C.I.A.?’’ The New York Times, 26 October 1982.

100Ronald Schneider, Comunismo en latinoamerica: el caso Guatemala (BuenosAires: Agora, 1959). An Agency subsidy could be achieved by the simpleexpedient of guaranteeing to purchase a certain number of copies via acooperating foundation.

101Senate Select Committee to Study Intelligence Activities, Final Report, p. 193.

102Schneider, Communism in Guatemala, p. viii.

103Sol Stern, ‘‘War Catalog of the University of Pennsylvania,’’ Ramparts, August1966.

104Schneider, Communism in Guatemala, p. xii.

105Ibid., pp. 323–326. Upon completion of Schneider’s book, FPRI donated theentire collection of captured documents to the Library of Congress manuscriptdivision in 1958, where they remain to this day.

106Ibid., p. viii; Robert Alexander, Communism in Latin America (New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957).

107Schneider, Communism in Guatemala, p. xii.

108Schlesinger and Kinzer unfairly dismissed Schneider’s book as ‘‘the ‘official’history of the Guatemalan overthrow,’’ Bitter Fruit, p. 220.

109Griffith, ‘‘Historiography of Central America,’’ p. 567.

110Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, pp. 197–198. One significant point of disagreementbetween Gleijeses and Schneider was over the extent of Communist infiltrationof the Guatemalan armed forces.


112The captured documents were reportedly absorbed into an entity called theGeneral Sub-Direction of National Security (Sub-direccion General deSeguridad Nacional). Schneider, Communism in Guatemala, p. 323.

113Grant, ‘‘Guatemala and United States Foreign Policy,’’ p. 69.

114Schneider, Communism in Guatemala, p. vii.

115FRUS 1983, p. 1083.

116Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. 88.

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