by Rich Cohen
Remember what Pinocchio did as soon as Geppetto carved him a pair of hands?
He reached out and pinched the toymaker.
Allen Dulles, who served in the OSS in the Second World War, was the second man to head the CIA (Beetle Smith was the first). Before joining the government, Dulles worked various legal jobs, including as a counselor to United Fruit, in which capacity his brother John Foster Dulles also worked. Despite this, the banana lands remained something of terra incognita for the CIA. The OSS had not operated in South America, which had been under the jurisdiction of the FBI. When planning operations in the region, which became increasingly important during the cold war, the CIA had just one useful model: the banana companies, which had been behaving like spy and paramilitary agencies on the isthmus for generations. Some experts consider Zemurray’s overthrow of the Honduran government a model for almost all the CIA missions that followed. In 1911, Sam deployed many tactics that would become standard procedure for clandestine operations: the hired guerrilla band, the phony popular leader, the subterfuge that convinces the elected politician he is surrounded when there are really no more than a few hundred guys out there. Like the CIA, Zemurray did a lot with a little because that’s the best way to leave no fingerprints—and because a little is all he had.
It was, in fact, hard to distinguish United Fruit from the CIA in those years. The organizations shared personnel as well as equipment and intelligence. Throughout the Guatemala affair, the CIA used United Fruit ships to smuggle money, men, and guns. When the CIA’s funding fell short of its budget, U.F. made up the difference. After all, the organizations had a common goal: to drive anyone who threatened the status quo off the isthmus. It did not take much to convince the CIA that Jacobo Arbenz was a threat. The agency was founded with just such situations in mind. “As long as Khrushchev or his successors use their subversive assets to promote ‘wars of liberation’—which means … any overt or covert action calculated to bring down a non-Communist regime,” Allen Dulles explained later, “the West should be prepared to meet the threat.”
The CIA began operating in Guatemala in the early 1950s, cultivating dissidents and smuggling weapons aboard the Great White Fleet. Guns and bombs were shipped to Nicaragua in boxes marked AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT. Men working for the dictator Anastasio Somoza (FDR: “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”) loaded the weapons onto banana mules and walked them across the border to Guatemala. There were other efforts, too, including a failed attempt to bribe Arbenz, to pay him from a Swiss bank account to moderate his policies. Truman put a stop to all such covert programs. In his final years as president, he seemed to become alarmed by his creation, by this rogue Pinocchio, which, given feet as well as hands, ears, and eyes, increasingly operated on its own initiative.
The situation escalated in 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower became president. (U.F.’s chief obstacle had not been Arbenz, but Truman.) Eisenhower’s policy was more aggressive. Whereas Truman pledged to contain the Communists, Eisenhower promised to confront them. He called the policy “rollback.” He reexamined the Guatemala situation soon after he arrived in the White House. Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for Guatemala in August 1953, at a meeting of something called the 10/2 Committee. Operation Success would replace the Arbenz government, defeating communism on the isthmus. The go-ahead did not make the overthrow inevitable—exit ramps were built in along the way, in case Arbenz buckled or things changed—but the long black train had left the station.
Soon after Operation Success was green-lighted, Tommy Corcoran, who served as Zemurray’s go-between with the CIA, met with a member of the 10/2 Committee named Albert Haney. U.F. then began funneling money to agents working on Guatemala. “We always had to be careful,” Corcoran said later. “We had to know what was going on but we couldn’t [seem to] be in on it because if the plan failed, this could hurt us.… The Fruit Company didn’t refuse to tell the CIA what it thought, but it couldn’t afford to let itself be caught.”
By then, there was a perfect model for the overthrow of Arbenz: Operation Ajax, in which CIA agents deposed the prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, after Mossadegh nationalized oil fields belonging to British corporations, specifically British Petroleum. Approved by Eisenhower at the urging of John Foster Dulles, Operation Ajax returned the shah of Iran to power. The success of this operation, carried off as the overthrow of Arbenz was being planned, must have encouraged the 10/2 Committee. It suddenly seemed so easy. It was, in fact, a near-exact parallel. Just cross out the old names and write in the new ones: bananas instead of oil, U.F. instead of B.P. (Like Ajax, Operation Success would be a military coup disguised as a popular revolt.)
Command of Operation Success was offered to Kermit Roosevelt Jr. (Teddy’s grandson), who had led Ajax. Roosevelt gave it a pass, later saying he came to fear the hubristic mood of the Eisenhower administration. Describing John Foster Dulles in a debriefing, Roosevelt wrote, “His eyes were gleaming; he seemed to be purring like a giant cat. Clearly he was not only enjoying what he was hearing, but my instincts told me that he was planning [something].”
Backroom control of Operation Success was given to Tracy Barnes (Yale ’34), who tapped a number of other agents to participate, including E. Howard Hunt (Brown ’40), who chronicled the mission in Undercover. The first order of business was finding a replacement for Arbenz, a dissident with roots in the country who could be plugged into the engine after the defective piece was removed, à la Manuel Bonilla. Estranged Guatemalan military men and exiles were interviewed. Among the early favorites was Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, a general who opposed Arbenz in the presidential election. In his book My War with Communism, Ydígoras Fuentes recalled a visit to his house by three men—two agents from the CIA and an executive of the United Fruit Company. The agents promised to make Ydígoras Fuentes president of Guatemala if he agreed to purge the Communists and restore United Fruit’s property, among other things. The general turned down the offer, calling the terms “abusive and inequitable.” He said it would seem like a naked takeover by the banana company.
The CIA eventually selected Carlos Castillo Armas, a thirty-nine-year-old disaffected officer in the Guatemalan military living in exile in Honduras. Because he agreed to all the conditions and because, according to Hunt, he “had that good Indian look…, which was great for the people.” What’s more, Castillo Armas had an interesting biography, always a helpful distraction for the media. (If you don’t want them to find the truth, give them a better story.) Here was a poor Indian who found his calling in the military, a religious man who opposed communism because it was godless. In 1950, Castillo Armas led a group of soldiers against Arévalo. He was defeated and sixteen of his men were killed, himself among them. Or so it seemed. While being dragged across a field to the cemetery, he moaned. He was taken to a hospital, put back together with string and glue, tried for treason, sentenced to death. He escaped six months later, just two days before he was to be executed, slipping out of prison through an abandoned tunnel of the International Railways of Central America, which had been founded by Minor Keith, whose dream was to build a train from New York to Tierra del Fuego. Think about it! Here was Keith, the former vice president of U.F., collaborating through the ages, with Zemurray, providing the tunnel that saves the general who overthrows the president and restores the banana land. Castillo Armas went to Colombia, then Honduras, where he took many jobs, eventually finding steady work as a salesman in a furniture store, which is where the CIA tracked him down in 1953.
He was flown to Florida, then driven to a CIA base in a palmetto grove, where he sat with the clean-cut young men running Operation Success. The outlines of the plan were explained: Castillo Armas would be placed at the head of a liberation movement invented by the CIA, given $3 million in cash, guns, grenades, and, at the right time, technical and air support. If he needed more guns, these would come from the United Fruit Company. Castillo Armas would train his army on island bases in Lake Managua, Nicaragu
a. A handful of American pilots were meanwhile stationed in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the same strip later used during the Bay of Pigs invasion. CIA operatives were scattered among a dozen locations, in camps and safe houses, where they prepared the psychological tricks crucial to Operation Success. Exiled Guatemalan newspapermen wrote fake stories that warned of the swelling ranks of the rebel army; printers made up flyers to be dropped from airplanes in the first hours of the war; engineers recorded sound effects—Hunt called them “terror broadcasts”—to be played during the invasion. Panicked newsmen, terrified crowds, exploding bombs—the same sort of tricks Orson Welles used during his War of the Worlds radio drama.
Equally important was the part played by John Foster Dulles’s State Department. Meetings of the Organization of the American States, discussions at the UN, American calls for investigation and sanction. Weapon sales to Guatemala were banned. At Dulles’s insistence, Eisenhower replaced his ambassador to Guatemala (just as Bernays wanted) with John Peurifoy, who arrived in Guatemala City in late 1953 with a single mission: convince Jacobo Arbenz that he has just one more chance to moderate.
Peurifoy, who had become the American ambassador to Greece after that country’s civil war, dressed in gaudy neckties, loud sports jackets, and candy-colored slacks. He was a specialist, a symbol as much as a diplomat. His coming heralded the end of a regime. If he behaved like a man trying to prove something, it’s because he was. When Joseph McCarthy made his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming the State Department was filled with Communists, it was a smear of Peurifoy, who was State’s head of personnel. He cabled McCarthy asking for the names: if he did not trust the State Department with such information, wrote Peurifoy, McCarthy should at least give the names to the FBI. McCarthy never acknowledged the cable and accused the State Department of covering up instead. In the years that followed, Peurifoy was a man in search of vindication. Whether he was in Athens or Guatemala City, he seemed determined to prove he was the fiercest Communist fighter in the world.
A few weeks after Peurifoy arrived in Guatemala, Arbenz invited the ambassador and his wife, Betty Jane, to the official residence for dinner. It was the only time the men would ever meet. The meal, later known as the six-hour dinner, was a decisive encounter. I could go into great detail setting the scene—it was, for all the talk of the peasant ethos of the regime, a palace affair—but I believe it enough to set the names of the principals side by side. John and Betty Jane Peurifoy seated across from Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and María Cristina Villanova Castro.
The dinner started with cocktails just after eight p.m. By the time Ambassador Peurifoy and his wife stood to leave, it was two in the morning. Arbenz did most of the talking. It was as if he had just this one chance to state his grievance. Did he talk too much? Of course he did. He was like one of those James Bond villains who give away every detail because they know, just know, they’ve brought it off. It was not only the topic of conversation that bothered Peurifoy—it was the manner. No matter the subject, Arbenz always found his way back to the United Fruit Company, whose railroads are greased with blood and whose ships run on burning souls. The ambassador objected, refuted, argued, scoffed, and bickered with the president and the president’s wife as Betty Jane sat quietly.
According to Flora Lewis, who profiled Peurifoy in The New York Times Magazine, the ambassador tried “to make the Guatemalan Government see that whether it whipped or embraced the United Fruit Company, the United States cared supremely about only one thing—ousting Communists from positions of control.”
Peurifoy was supposed to figure out whether Arbenz was in league with the Communists, was a Communist, or was just a dupe. By the end of the evening, with the black sky glowering over the spires of the capital, he was more certain than ever. “Peurifoy came away convinced that, far from being an unwilling and unwitting tool of the Communists, Arbenz was firmly established as the determined leader, not the follower, of developments in Guatemala,” Lewis wrote.
Peurifoy got back to the embassy at two thirty. By three, he was at his desk, writing his report. Addressed to John Foster Dulles, it would be passed from the State Department to the CIA to the White House. A five-page memo sent by secure cable, the report chronicled the dinner with Arbenz. “The President stated that the problem in this country is one between the Fruit Company and the Government,” wrote Peurifoy. “He went into a long dissertation giving the history of the Fruit Company from 1904; and since then, he complains, they have paid no taxes to the Government. He said that today when the Government has a budget of $70 million to meet, the Fruit Company contributes approximately $150,000. This is derived solely from the one-cent tax applied to each stem of bananas which is exported.…
“If Arbenz is not a Communist,” Peurifoy added, “he will certainly do until one comes along.”
You can read this last sentence in two ways. Either the way Peurifoy probably intended, which is jaunty, full of attitude—hey, this guy is trouble—or you can deconstruct it, thus seeing what the ambassador was really saying, even if he did not realize it: Arbenz is NOT a Communist, but let’s treat him like one anyway.
Peurifoy ended the memo with a bit of wee-hour lyricism that was picked up and quoted in diplomatic circles: “The candle is burning slowly and surely, and it is only a matter of time before the large American interests will be forced out [of Guatemala] completely.”
If you want to fight a preemptive war, you should probably have a casus belli, a triggering episode or event—best if it can be photographed—that you can point out to your public and say, This is why! In Guatemala, it was a shipload of military equipment sent from Czechoslovakia but seized by the U.S. Navy before it could land in Puerto Barrios. The ship, a Swedish vessel called the Alfhem, had falsified its papers and switched flags at various ports, but the CIA tracked its every move. Its holds were inspected, its contents seized: bombs, rifles, ammunition, antitank mines, and artillery that seemed to prove Soviet support of the Guatemalan government. Arbenz said the Alfhem proved only that no other nation would sell him weapons, because of the American-led embargo. He said he needed weapons to fight the imminent invasion of Castillo Armas and his army. “Arbenz’s emissaries had been busy behind the Iron Curtain procuring large quantities of Czech arms and munitions,” wrote E. Howard Hunt. “This development was watched with apprehension, for if the armaments reached Arbenz before we were able to mount an invasion, the odds would be even more heavily weighted against Castillo and his men.”
Never mind that the above passage shows the invasion was fixed before the guns were seized. Never mind, too, that most of the weapons were junk that never would have worked. Spread on the deck of the seized ship, the guns proved the perfect photographic evidence, whipping the American public into a frenzy. As Bernays said, the masses are led by symbols, the most primary of which—you can get as Freudian with this as you want—is the steely shaft of a Commie’s pistol.
On April 26, 1954, President Eisenhower, addressing Congress, said, “The Reds are in control in Guatemala, and they are trying to spread their influence to San Salvador as a first step to breaking out of Guatemala to other South American countries.”
On June 15, the CIA was given the final go-ahead for Operation Success. “I want you all to be damn good and sure you succeed,” Eisenhower told Allen Dulles and a few others. “When you commit the flag, you commit it to win.”
* * *
Che Guevara had arrived in Guatemala City less than a year before. He walked for hours, talked all night. He described it as the place where a person could breathe the “most democratic air in Latin America.” It was here that he met the tough young Cubans, the leaders of Fidel Castro’s army, whose cause he would take as his own. Castro was in prison in Isle of Pines, Cuba, but his soldiers had been granted refuge by President Arbenz. In these men, Guevara found the perfect mix of theory and action, ideology and bravado. He moved into their apartments, can be seen in photos sharing sleeping bags and meals with t
he exiled army. In this way, the seizure of U.F.’s land did more than damage the ledger books of the fruit company. It lit a fuse that burned through the continent. It gave Guevara a cause. It was the Cubans who first called him “Che,” which means something like “Hey!” As in, Hey, Guevara, let’s go overthrow the Ubico flies!
* * *
Sam was in New Orleans, monitoring the action from afar. Each morning, he read the papers and met with underlings. Each afternoon, he got the news from Bernays and Corcoran and others, took it all in, then offered ideas and suggestions of his own, saying, Fine, fine, fine.
* * *
Operation Success was not a war—it was a shadow play, a farce. It was three weeks of smoke and mirrors, flash and noise. It was the United States making a point about communism and Eisenhower drawing a contrast with Truman. It was the United Fruit Company getting back what it had lost.
It began with a couple of Second World War fighter props piloted by retired air force men flying low and loud, dropping smoke bombs and paper flyers (GET OUT!) on Guatemala City. This was followed by strafing runs, bombs. If you saw three planes in the sky, you were seeing the entire rebel air force. Then came the psychological tricks meant to confuse the people and terrify Arbenz and his loyalists. Hidden speakers boomed out the sound of guns and shells. Fake newscasts filled the entire bandwidth, some calling for the overthrow of the dictator, some claiming the dictator had already been overthrown. Others heralded the arrival of Castillo Armas and his men in the capital, where they were being greeted by jubilant crowds.