by Tim Weiner
On December 9, 1953, Allen Dulles formally approved Operation Success and authorized a $3 million budget. He appointed Al Haney as field commander and named Tracy Barnes as its chief of political warfare.
Dulles believed in the romantic notion of the gentleman spy. Tracy Barnes was an exemplar. The well-bred Mr. Barnes had the classic CIA résumé of the 1950s—Groton, Yale, Harvard Law. He grew up on the Whitney estate on Long Island with his own private golf course. He was an OSS hero in World War II and won a Silver Star by capturing a German garrison. He had dash and panache and the pride that goes before a fall, and he came to represent the worst of the clandestine service. “Like those who no matter how great their effort seem doomed never to master a foreign language, Barnes proved unable to get the hang of secret operations,” Richard Helms reflected. “Even worse, thanks to Allen Dulles’ constant praise and pushing, Tracy apparently remained unaware of his problem.” He went on to serve as chief of station in Germany and England, and then on to the Bay of Pigs.
Barnes and Castillo Armas flew to Opa-Locka on January 29, 1954, where they started hammering out their plans with Colonel Haney. They awoke the next morning to discover that their scheme had been blown sky-high. Every major newspaper in the Western Hemisphere published President Arbenz’s accusations of a “counterrevolutionary plot” sponsored by a “Northern government,” led by Castillo Armas, and based in a rebel training camp on Somoza’s farm in Nicaragua. The leak had come from secret cables and documents that a CIA officer—Colonel Haney’s liaison with Castillo Armas—had left in a Guatemala City hotel room. The hapless officer was summoned to Washington and advised to take a job as a fire watcher somewhere deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
The crisis quickly revealed Al Haney as one of the loosest cannons in the CIA’s arsenal. He flailed for ways to distract Guatemalans from the accounts of the plot by planting fake news in the local press. “If possible, fabricate big human interest story, like flying saucers, birth sextuplets in remote area,” he cabled CIA headquarters. He dreamed up headlines: Arbenz was forcing all Catholic troops to join a new church that worshipped Stalin! A Soviet submarine was on its way to deliver arms for Guatemala! This last idea captured the imagination of Tracy Barnes. Three weeks later he had his CIA staff plant a cache of Soviet weapons on the Nicaraguan coast. They concocted stories about Soviets arming communist assassination squads in Guatemala. But few among the press and the public bought what Barnes was peddling.
The CIA’s charter demanded that covert action be conducted in ways so subtle that the American hand was unseen. That mattered little to Wisner. “There is not the slightest doubt that if the operation is carried through many Latin Americans will see in it the hand of the U.S.,” he told Dulles. But if Operation Success was curtailed “on the grounds that the hand of the U.S. is too clearly shown,” Wisner argued, “a serious question is raised as to whether any operation of this kind can appropriately be included as one of the U.S. cold war weapons, no matter how great the provocation or how favorable the auspices.” Wisner thought that an operation was clandestine so long as it was unacknowledged by the United States and kept secret from the American people.
Wisner summoned Colonel Haney to headquarters for a come-to-Jesus meeting. “There is no operation regarded as being so important as this one and no operation on which the reputation of the Agency is more at stake,” he told Haney. “The boss has to be satisfied that we have what it takes,” Wisner said, but “Headquarters had never received a clear and concise statement of what the plans are with respect to what takes place on D-day.” Colonel Haney’s blueprint was a set of interlocking timelines scrawled on a forty-foot roll of butcher paper pinned to the wall at the Opa-Locka barracks. He explained to Wisner that you could understand the operation only by studying the scribbles on the Opa-Locka scrolls.
Wisner began “to lose confidence in Haney’s judgment and restraint,” Richard Bissell remembered. The fiercely cerebral Bissell, another product of Groton and Yale, the man once known as Mr. Marshall Plan, had just come aboard at the CIA. He had signed on as “Dulles’s apprentice,” as he put it, with promises of great responsibilities to come. The director immediately asked him to sort out the increasingly complicated logistics of Operation Success.
Bissell and Barnes represented the head and the heart of Allen Dulles’s CIA. Though they had no experience in running covert action, and it was a mark of Dulles’s faith that they were ordered to find out what Al Haney was up to in Opa-Locka.
Bissell said he and Barnes rather enjoyed the hyperkinetic colonel: “Barnes was very much pro-Haney and gung-ho about the operation. I believed Haney was the right man for the job because the person in charge of an operation of this kind had to be an activist and strong leader. Barnes and I both liked Haney and approved of the way he was running things. No doubt Haney’s operation left a positive impression on me, because I set up a project office similar to his during the preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion.”
“WHAT WE WANTED TO DO WAS TO HAVE A
TERROR CAMPAIGN”
The “bold but incompetent” Castillo Armas (to quote Barnes), along with his “extremely small and ill-trained” rebel forces (to quote Bissell), waited for a signal from the Americans to attack, under the watchful eye of Haney’s man Rip Robertson, who had run some of the CIA’s ill-fated guerrilla operations in Korea.
No one knew what would happen when Castillo Armas and his few hundred rebels attacked the five-thousand-man Guatemalan military. The CIA subsidized an anticommunist student movement in Guatemala City, several hundred strong. But they served mainly, in Wisner’s words, as a “goon squad,” not as a resistance army. So Wisner hedged his bet and opened up a second front on the war against Arbenz. He sent one of the CIA’s best officers, Henry Hecksher, the chief of the Berlin base, to Guatemala City with orders to persuade senior military officers to rebel against the government. Hecksher was authorized to spend up to $10,000 a month for bribes, and he soon bought the loyalty of a minister without portfolio in Arbenz’s cabinet, Colonel Elfego Monzon. The hope was that more money would drive a wedge into an officer corps already beginning to crack under the twin pressures of an arms embargo imposed by the United States and the threat of an American invasion.
But Hecksher soon became convinced that only an actual attack by the United States would embolden the Guatemalan military to overthrow Arbenz. Hecksher wrote to Haney: “The ‘crucial spark’ has to be generated by heat—United States heat”—in the form of bombing the capital.
CIA headquarters then sent Haney a five-page roster of fifty-eight Guatemalans marked for assassination. The targeted killing was approved by Wisner and Barnes. The list encompassed “high government and organizational leaders” suspected of communist leanings and “those few individuals in key government and military positions of tactical importance whose removal for psychological, organizational or other reasons is mandatory for the success of military action.” Castillo Armas and the CIA agreed that the assassinations would take place during or immediately after his triumphant arrival in Guatemala City. They would send a message underscoring the seriousness of the rebels’ intent.
One of the many myths about Operation Success, planted by Allen Dulles in the American press, was that its eventual triumph lay not in violence but in a brilliant piece of espionage. As Dulles told the story, the trick was turned by an American spy in the Polish city Stettin, on the Baltic Sea—the northern terminus of the iron curtain—posing as a bird watcher. He saw through his binoculars that a freighter called the Alfhem was carrying Czech arms to the Arbenz government. He then posted a letter with a microdot message—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—addressed to a CIA officer under deep cover in a Paris auto parts store, who relayed the coded signal by shortwave to Washington. As Dulles told the story, another CIA officer secretly inspected the hold of the ship while it docked at the Kiel Canal connecting the Baltic to the North Sea. The CIA, therefore, knew from t
he moment that the Alfhem left Europe that she was bound for Guatemala carrying guns.
A wonderful yarn, repeated in many history books, but a bald-faced lie—a cover story that disguised a serious operational mistake. In reality, the CIA missed the boat.
Arbenz was desperate to break the American weapons embargo on Guatemala. He thought he could ensure the loyalty of his officer corps by arming them. Henry Hecksher had reported that the Bank of Guatemala had transferred $4.86 million via a Swiss account to a Czech weapons depot. But the CIA lost the trail. Four weeks of frantic searching ensued before the Alfhem docked successfully at Puerto Barrios, Guatemala. Only after the cargo was uncrated did word reach the U.S. Embassy that a shipment of rifles, machine guns, howitzers, and other weapons had come ashore.
The arrival of the arms—many of them rusted and useless, some bearing a swastika stamp, indicating their age and origin—created a propaganda windfall for the United States. Grossly overstating the size and military significance of the cargo, Foster Dulles and the State Department announced that Guatemala was now part of a Soviet plot to subvert the Western Hemisphere. The Speaker of the House, John McCormack, called the shipment an atomic bomb planted in America’s backyard.
Ambassador Peurifoy said the United States was at war. “Nothing short of direct military intervention will succeed,” he cabled Wisner on May 21. Three days later, U.S. Navy warships and submarines blockaded Guatemala, in violation of international law.
On May 26, a CIA plane buzzed the presidential palace and dropped leaflets over the headquarters of the presidential guard, the most elite of the army’s units in Guatemala City. “Struggle against Communist atheism!” they read. “Struggle with Castillo Armas!” It was a deft blow. “I suppose it really doesn’t matter what the leaflets say,” Tracy Barnes told Al Haney. He was right. What mattered was that the CIA had swooped down and dropped a weapon on a country that had never been bombed before.
“What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign,” said the CIA’s E. Howard Hunt, who worked on the political-warfare portfolio for the operation—“to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War Two.”
For four weeks, starting on May Day 1954, the CIA had been waging psychological warfare in Guatemala through a pirate radio station called the Voice of Liberation, run by a CIA contract officer, an amateur actor and skilled dramatist named David Atlee Phillips. In a tremendous stroke of luck, the Guatemalan state radio station went off the air in mid-May for a scheduled replacement of its antenna. Phillips snuggled up to its frequency, where listeners looking for the state broadcasts found Radio CIA. Unrest turned to hysteria among the populace as the rebel station sent out shortwave reports of imaginary uprisings and defections and plots to poison wells and conscript children.
On June 5, the retired chief of the Guatemalan air force flew to Somoza’s farm in Nicaragua, where the broadcasts originated. Phillips’s men fueled him with a bottle of whisky and induced him to talk about his reasons for fleeing Guatemala. After the tape was cut and spliced at the CIA’s field studio, it sounded like a passionate call for rebellion.
“CONSIDER UPRISING A FARCE”
When Arbenz heard about the broadcast the next morning, his mind snapped. He became the dictator the CIA had depicted. He grounded his own air force for fear his fliers would defect. Then he raided the home of an anticommunist student leader who worked closely with the CIA and found evidence of the American plot. He suspended civil liberties and began arresting hundreds of people, hitting the CIA’s student group the hardest. At least seventy-five of them were tortured, killed, and buried in mass graves.
“Panic spreading in government circles,” the CIA station in Guatemala cabled on June 8. That was exactly what Haney wanted to hear. He sent orders to fan the flames with more falsehoods: “A group of Soviet commissars, officers and political advisers, led by a member of the Moscow Politburo, have landed…. In addition to military conscription, the communists will introduce labor conscription. A decree is already being printed. All boys and girls 16 years old will be called for one year of labor duty in special camps, mainly for political indoctrination and to break the influence of family and church on the young people…. Arbenz has already left the country. His announcements from the National Palace are actually made by a double, provided by Soviet intelligence.”
Haney started flying bazookas and machine guns down south on his own initiative, issuing unauthorized orders to arm peasants and to urge them to kill Guatemalan police. “We question strongly…that Campesinos be enjoined kill Guardia Civil,” Wisner cabled Haney. “This amounts to incitement civil war…discrediting movement as terrorist and irresponsible outfit willing sacrifice innocent lives.”
Colonel Monzon, the CIA’s agent in Arbenz’s cabinet, demanded bombs and tear gas to kick off the coup. “Vitally important this be done,” the CIA station told Haney. Monzon was “told he better move fast. He agreed…. Said Arbenz, Commies, and enemies will be executed.” The CIA station in Guatemala pleaded again for an attack: “We urgently request that bomb be dropped, show strength be made, that all available planes be sent over, that army and capital be shown that time for decision is here.”
On June 18, Castillo Armas launched his long-awaited assault, more than four years in the making. A force of 198 rebels attacked Puerto Barrios, on the Atlantic coast. They were defeated by policemen and dockworkers. Another 122 marched toward the Guatemalan army garrison at Zacapa. All but 30 were killed or captured. A third force of 60 rebels set out from El Salvador, only to be arrested by local police. Castillo Armas himself, clad in a leather jacket and driving a battered station wagon, led 100 men from Honduras toward three lightly defended Guatemalan villages. He camped out a few miles from the border, calling on the CIA for more food, more men, more weapons—but within seventy-two hours, more than half of his forces were killed, captured, or on the verge of defeat.
On the afternoon of June 19, Ambassador Peurifoy commandeered the CIA’s secure communications line at the American embassy and wrote directly to Allen Dulles: “Bomb repeat Bomb,” he pleaded. Haney weighed in less than two hours later with a blistering message to Wisner: “Are we going to stand by and see last hope of free people in Guatemala submerged to depths of Communist oppression and atrocity until we send American armed force against enemy?…Is not our intervention now under these circumstances far more palatable than by Marines? This is the same enemy we fought in Korea and may fight tomorrow in Indo-China.”
Wisner froze. It was one thing to send legions of foreigners to their deaths. It was quite another to send American pilots to blow up a national capital.
The morning of June 20, the CIA’s Guatemala City station reported that the Arbenz government was “recovering its nerve.” The capital was “very still, stores shuttered. People waiting apathetically, consider uprising a farce.”
The tension at CIA headquarters was almost unbearable. Wisner became fatalistic. He cabled Haney and the CIA station: “We are ready authorize use of bombs moment we are convinced would substantially increase likelihood of success without disastrous damage interests of United States…. We fear bombing of military installations more likely to solidify army against the rebellion than to induce defection and we are convinced attacks against civilian targets, which would shed blood of innocent people, would fit perfectly into Communist propaganda line and tend to alienate all elements of population.”
Bissell told Dulles that “the outcome of the effort to overthrow the regime of President Arbenz of Guatemala remains very much in doubt.” At CIA headquarters, “we were all at our wit’s end as to how to proceed,” Bissell wrote years later. “Grappling with continual operational snafus, we were only too aware how perilously close to failure we were.” Dulles had limited Castillo Armas to three F-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, in the name of deniability. Two were out of commission. Now, Bissell rec
orded in his memoirs, “the Agency’s reputation and his own were at stake.”
Dulles secretly authorized one more air strike on the capital as he prepared to meet with the president. On the morning of June 22, the single plane still flying for the CIA set a small oil tank ablaze on the outskirts of town. The fire was out in twenty minutes. “Public impression is that attacks show incredible weakness, lack of decision, and fainthearted effort,” Haney raged. “Castillo Armas efforts widely described as farce. Anti-Commie anti-government morale near vanishing point.” He cabled Dulles directly, demanding more aircraft immediately.
Dulles picked up the phone and called William Pawley—one of the richest businessmen in the United States, the chairman of Democrats for Eisenhower, one of Ike’s biggest benefactors in the 1952 elections, and a CIA consultant. Pawley could provide a secret air force if anyone could. Then Dulles sent Bissell to see Walter Bedell Smith, whom the CIA had consulted daily on Operation Success, and the general approved the back-channel request for aircraft. But at the last minute the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Henry Holland, objected violently, demanding that they go to see the president.
At 2:15 p.m. on June 22, Dulles, Pawley, and Holland walked into the Oval Office. Eisenhower asked what the rebellion’s chances of success were at that moment. Zero, Dulles confessed. And if the CIA had more planes and bombs? Maybe 20 percent, Dulles guessed.
The president and Pawley recorded the conversation almost identically in their memoirs—with one exception. Eisenhower erased Pawley from history, and it is clear why: he cut a secret deal with his political benefactor. “Ike turned to me,” Pawley wrote, “and he said: ‘Bill, go ahead and get the planes.’”
Pawley telephoned the Riggs Bank, a block away from the White House. Then he called the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United States. He drew $150,000 in cash and drove the ambassador to the Pentagon. Pawley handed over the cash to a military officer, who promptly transferred ownership of three Thunderbolts to the government of Nicaragua. The planes arrived, fully armed, in Panama from Puerto Rico that evening.