Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  John Foster Dulles himself stated explicitly at the press conference called to announce the shipment of arms on the Alfhem: “If the United Fruit matter were settled, if they gave a gold piece for every banana, the problem would remain just as it is today as far as the presence of Communist infiltration in Guatemala is concerned. That is the problem, not United Fruit.”22

  Richard Bissell, Jr., who was intimately involved in PBSUCCESS, said in an interview in November 1977, “I have a strong conviction that United Fruit’s interests would not have been particularly persuasive on Allen Dulles. I think by this time in his career my guess is that Foster Dulles was infinitely less interested in the United Fruit Company than he was with communism.… As for Mr. Eisenhower and Bedell Smith, two military men, I would bet very heavily that the issue was not United Fruit, but communism.”23

  All of which may very well be true, but what is also absolutely true is that United Fruit had some powerful supporters in the Eisenhower administration. Aside from the Dulles brothers, and their connection with Sullivan and Cromwell, there was John Moors Cabot, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. He was a major stockholder in United Fruit. His brother, Thomas Dudley Cabot, the State Department’s Director of Security Affairs, had previously been a director of United Fruit and president of the First National Bank of Boston, the registrar bank for United Fruit. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce, Sinclair Weeks, had been another director of the First National Bank. Robert Cutler, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, had been board chairman of the Old Colony Trust Company, United Fruit’s transfer agent. Others in the Eisenhower administration had direct financial interests in Guatemala, including Robert Hill, ambassador to Costa Rica, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., U. S. Representative to the United Nations. Hill later became a director of United Fruit. So did Bedell Smith after he left the government.24

  If one were to apply the duck test to this list of worthies, one might be forgiven for concluding that despite Dulles’ disclaimers, despite Bissell’s vehement denials, the United Fruit Company did play a significant role in convincing Ike that, whatever his scruples about not intervening in the internal affairs of a sister republic, the Arbenz regime had to be toppled.

  But Eisenhower himself told one of his oldest friends, General Alfred Gruenther, that policies which defended individual companies without considering the adverse effects such policies had on nationalist movements were shortsighted and “Victorian.” He believed that the Western powers should make gradual concessions to satisfy the spirit of nationalism in developing countries, thereby assuring their continued support. As he wrote his friend Bill Robinson of the New York Herald Tribune, if the United States followed policies inimical to the economies of the developing nations, “we will most certainly arouse more antagonism.” Then the possibility of these countries “turning Communist would mount rapidly.” But it was entirely another matter once a country had already turned Communist, as Ike thought had happened in Guatemala.25

  Eisenhower made his decision and ordered the CIA to go ahead with PBSUCCESS. The CIA, flushed with its triumph in Iran, was about to overthrow another government.

  PBSUCCESS ALMOST GOT STARTED in the Truman administration. In 1952, Anastasio Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator, approached Bedell Smith, then director of the CIA, with a proposal. If the CIA would send him sufficient arms, he would take care of the Arbenz problem. Smith approved and got the shipment ready, but the State Department learned of the deal and vetoed it.

  A year later, in August of 1953, Thomas Corcoran, former aide to FDR and then a lobbyist for United Fruit, approached the by-then Under Secretary of State Smith. “The intervention of Tommy the Cork with Bedell Smith was decisive,” Howard Hunt said, “that is according to everything I’ve heard and I’ve never heard anything in contrast.”26

  Corcoran told Smith that both Nicaragua and Honduras were prepared to act against Arbenz, provided they were assured of American help. He also said that Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas and Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes (Arbenz’s major opponent in the 1950 election) had met in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to sign a “gentleman’s pact” promising to cooperate to overthrow Arbenz. Castillo Armas told Ydígoras Fuentes that they could count on American support. In September, Castillo Armas wrote Somoza saying, “I have been informed by our friends here that the government of the North, recognizing the impossibility of finding another solution to the grave problem of my country, has taken the decision to permit us to develop our plans.”27

  Allen Dulles was the driving force behind PBSUCCESS in the United States. Richard Bissell stated in an interview that Dulles “was closer to the Guatemala operation than he was to the Bay of Pigs.… The Guatemalan operation was authorized at a higher level at the very beginning, like the Bay of Pigs operation, and was regarded as a very major operation, with potentially political overtones and the rest.”28

  When Ike approved PBSUCCESS in its original form, he did so strictly on the basis of making a plan and creating a force to carry it out, which he regarded as an asset that might or might not be used, depending on circumstances. He was accustomed to operating in that manner—his paratroopers, for example, had made literally dozens of plans in France and Germany in 1944–45, and more than half a dozen times had gotten to the point of actually loading up, but only one operation, MARKET-GARDEN, had gone forward to become reality. Ike vehemently and frequently insisted to his closest associates that approval of plans did not mean approval of actual operations. “He was very, very precise about that,” General Andrew Goodpaster, Eisenhower’s liaison officer between the CIA and the White House, stated in a 1979 interview.29 Ike gave the order to go only after the arrival of the Alfhem in Guatemala.

  The CIA had set up its headquarters for PBSUCCESS at Opa-Locka, Florida, outside Miami. There were about one hundred agents involved. The first head of the project was J. C. King, an FBI holdover, who, according to Bissell, “epitomized the old FBI approach, and that was an approach that concentrated almost exclusively on espionage.” So King was replaced by Al Haney, who was not, according to Hunt, any improvement. “ ‘Zaney’ Haney … was a real nut. His Spanish was execrable, but that was the least of his deficiencies.… ”30

  At this point Dulles sent in four of his best men. Tracey Barnes, who had worked with Dulles in Switzerland during the war, became head of the operation, under the supervision of Frank Wisner, Deputy Director of Plans for the CIA, and Richard Bissell. And Howard Hunt became Chief of Political Action for PBSUCCESS.*

  Hunt’s first and most important task was to select Arbenz’ replacement. There was not much choice. “It’s like talking about an opposition in the Soviet Union today,” Hunt explained. “You can’t really pick your people from the inside, where they are under harassment or possibly in prison. You had to deal with those who had managed to escape.”

  Ydígoras Fuentes, who had run against Arbenz in 1950, and who was in Honduras, was the obvious choice, but “the people in State said he was too reactionary. Anybody who doesn’t like communism becomes an ultra-rightest in their vocabulary.” But Hunt himself recognized that Ydígoras Fuentes would not do, because “he looked like a Spanish noble. And these were the little things we had to take into consideration. You don’t rally a country made up of mestizos with a Spanish Don.”32

  Colonel Castillo Armas, by way of contrast, “had that good Indian look about him. He looked like an Indian, which was great for the people.” Further, he had machismo. A professional soldier (and a graduate of the U. S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas), Castillo Armas was something of a folk hero. Wounded in an abortive 1950 uprising against the Arévalo government, Castillo Armas was believed dead and was taken off to be buried. Only a fortuitous moan changed his destination to a hospital. After his release he was sentenced to prison, from which on June 11, 1951, he dramatically escaped by hand-digging a long tunnel. Subsequently he traveled throughout Central America contacting oth
er counterrevolutionaries, including Ydígoras Fuentes. His military background, honest reputation, heroic image, and Mayan appearance made him a good choice to lead the invasion.33

  The CIA created a base for Castillo Armas in Honduras. Via Opa-Locka, he received money and an “army,” mercenaries recruited throughout Central America. At the training camp, an American reporter saw soldiers “receiving wads of dollar bills passed out by men who were unmistakably American.” There was another “rebel” center in Nicaragua, located on a personal estate of Somoza. Americans came in from Opa-Locka via an old-abandoned French airstrip in the Panama Canal Zone, then on to Nicaragua.

  In May 1954 the United States signed military agreements with Nicaragua and Honduras, and the New York Times could report, “Militarily the United States is doing its utmost to draw a circle around this spot of Communist infection.… The charter aircraft business at Toncontin [Honduras] boomed so that it was virtually impossible to hire a private plane.”34

  Diplomatic support for PBSUCCESS was deep and far-reaching. Bedell Smith kept a close watch on the operation. Bissell said Smith “was the State Department official with whom we dealt almost hour by hour.… One of the occasions that I remember was a meeting in Smith’s office, and several of us were there. We were trying to get permission to send four more of those little obsolescent aircraft, and Henry Holland, the Assistant Secretary responsible, was opposing and Bedell Smith overruled him.”35

  Smith had a team of diplomats in Central America under his direct orders. There was Peurifoy, of course, serving as “team leader” from his post as Ambassador to Guatemala. He communicated with the CIA via the agency’s station there to Opa-Locka. Other members of the team included Whiting Willauer, the Ambassador to Honduras, who had been Claire Chennault’s deputy in the Chinese Flying Tigers (the outfit that had fought so long against the Chinese Communists), along with Robert Hill, Ambassador to Costa Rica, and Thomas Whelan, Ambassador to Nicaragua.

  The United States Information Agency (USIA) mobilized all its resources to support PBSUCCESS. Its main goal was to convince the Organization of American States that there was a genuine Communist threat in Guatemala, a difficult task since, as the USIA noted, most Latins “either regarded the Arbenz regime as a ‘homegrown’ revolutionary movement dedicated to improving the lot of the exploited Guatemalans, or preferred to dwell on the United Fruit issue and speculate as to United States motives of economic imperialism.” The USIA flooded Central America with pamphlets, tape recordings, planted stories in newspapers and on radio programs, all designed to establish the point that Arbenz was indeed a Communist.36

  The Secretary of State himself took the lead in providing legal justification for action. In March 1954 he flew to Caracas, Venezuela, to attend the Tenth Inter-American Conference. In his opening remarks, Dulles dealt at length with the threat of communism and Soviet aggression in the Americas. Then he introduced a draft proposal, “Declaration of Solidarity for the Preservation of the Political Integrity of the American States Against Communist Intervention,” later known as the Declaration of Caracas. Denouncing communism as “alien intrigue and treachery,” the declaration concluded by proposing that Communist domination or control of any country would justify “appropriate action.”

  That phrase, “appropriate action,” aroused traditional Latin fears of Yankee intervention, and various amendments were added. During the debate the Guatemalan Foreign Minister denounced the resolution as “merely a pretext for America for intervening in our internal affairs,” and he accused the United States of returning to Teddy Roosevelt diplomacy, internationalizing McCarthyism, and seeking to use the false issue of communism to suppress Latin American desires for economic independence. Nevertheless, the declaration passed by an overwhelming majority, although Uruguay’s chief delegate seemed to speak for many when he told Time magazine, “We voted for the resolution but without enthusiasm, without optimism, without joy, and without the feeling that we are contributing to the adoption of a constructive measure.”37

  With the declaration safely adopted, Dulles flew off to Geneva for the conference on Indochina, where he continued to fight the never-ending battle against communism. Smith went with him. Arbenz, faced with invasion, rebuffed time after time in his attempt to buy arms from the United States, mistrustful of his own military, now turned to the Soviet Union for help. He intended to arm the peasants. The Russians, delighted at an opportunity to extend their influence to Central America, arranged for the shipment of arms from the Skoda factory to Puerto Barrios.

  When Allen Dulles reported the shipment of arms to Ike, the President ordered the CIA to put PBSUCCESS into full operation.

  THE MILITARY PREPARATIONS for the showdown, on both sides, were little more than a show. The Czechoslovakian arms were either worn out or ineffective for jungle warfare and completely inappropriate—because they were too complex or too cumbersome—for a militia force. Most of the arms were never used but stored in an arsenal, where they were eventually blown up.

  On the American side, too, the Castillo Armas “army” was ridiculous, nothing more than a “rag-taggle” (Bissell’s description), never intended for serious fighting. Instead the emphasis of PBSUCCESS was psychological warfare. The key project was to broadcast anti-Arbenz, pro-Armas radio pronouncements into Guatemala from the surrounding countries. It got started on May 1, 1954; the Labor Day holiday ensured a wide audience. Calling itself the Voice of Liberation, the station adopted the slogan “Trabajo, Pan y Patria”—Work, Bread and Country.

  The broadcasters claimed that they were operating from within Guatemala itself, even though they never set foot on its soil. They would simulate a “raid” by government officials, only to broadcast again the next day, allegedly from a new location, thus providing “proof” of Arbenz’ ineptness. The Voice of Liberation sounded so authentic that soon foreign correspondents, including those from the New York Times and Life magazine, accepted it as the source of information.

  The CIA arranged for propaganda leaflets, criticizing the Arbenz government for selling the country out to the Communists, to be dropped on Guatemala. The agency also arranged for Cardinal Spellman of New York to have his associates hold clandestine meetings with Guatemalan priests, which led to a massive volume of anti-Arbenz pastoral messages each Sunday. Guatemalan Army officers who could not be convinced that Arbenz was a Communist were bought off by direct bribery.38

  As the pressure mounted, Arbenz turned to the Soviets with a plea for more military aid. They responded by arranging to ship six tons of antiaircraft shells to Puerto Barrios. But Ike had already declared a blockade of Guatemala, and on June 14 the United States announced that German port policemen in Hamburg, acting under the direction of U. S. Army occupation officers, had prevented the loading of the shells aboard the Hamburg-American Line freighter Coburg. This action caused a tremendous uproar. The U. S. Army officer on the scene admitted that the documents accompanying the shipment were in perfect order and that the cargo was legitimate export; he said therefore that the Coburg had been “detained but not confiscated.”39

  The British were greatly alarmed. They rejected out of hand John Foster Dulles’ proposal that ships bound for Guatemala voluntarily submit to a search by U. S. Navy vessels. “There is no general power of search on the high seas in peacetime,” Anthony Eden declared. Drew Middleton reported from London that the British wished to be polite to Mr. Dulles, but did want him to understand that they “cannot allow either the Atlantic or the Caribbean to become his private preserve.”40

  At this juncture Robert Murphy, Deputy Under Secretary of State (who had been kept ignorant of PBSUCCESS), upbraided Dulles for his “bankrupt” policy of blockade. “Instead of political action inside Guatemala we are obliged to resort to heavy-handed military action on the periphery of the cause of trouble,” Murphy complained. “While I do not question the usefulness of a display of naval force in the Central American area under present circumstances, forcible detention of foreign
flag shipping on the high seas is another matter.… In our past we asserted our right to deliver arms to belligerents.” Murphy said that the American disregard for the high principle of freedom of the seas was a bad mistake, brought on by “inadequate staff action in the Department.”41 Henry Holland, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, was also critical of the decision to impose a blockade.

  All of which made Ike furious. He later told Goodpaster that “he and the National Security Council had gone quite deeply into the Guatemalan situation” and the decision to act had been made. At this “crucial period,” Goodpaster recalled Ike saying, “some of those, of his principal associates … began to get nervous about it, after we had committed ourselves. And his answer to them, which stayed very clear in his mind, was that the time to have those thoughts was before we started down this course, that if you at any time take the route of violence or support of violence … then you commit yourself to carry it through, and it’s too late to have second thoughts, not having faced up to the possible consequences, when you’re midway in an operation.”42

  Ike told Dulles to push on. The following day, June 19, the New York Times’ headline proclaimed, “REVOLT LAUNCHED IN GUATEMALA: LAND-AIR-SEA INVASION REPORTED: RISINGS UNDER WAY IN KEY CITIES.”

  That was putting it rather grandiloquently. In fact, Castillo Armas’ “army” of 150 men had crossed the Honduran border, advanced six miles into Guatemala, settled down in the Church of the Black Christ—and waited for the Arbenz regime to collapse.