Huddled Masses at the Guatemala City Airport

Huddled Masses at the Guatemala City Airport

By William R. Meara

During the spring of 2019 I was on a visit to Central America with a group of students from the National War College.  I was a Foreign Service officer assigned to the War College faculty.   Our students were in the region to gain first-hand understanding of the challenges facing U.S. policy makers.  On April 3, 2019 as part of that trip we were visiting the Deportee Reception Facility at the Guatemala City airport – this was the place that “received” those Guatemalans who had been deported from the United States.  The vast majority of the deportees were being sent back for trying to enter the United States illegally along the Mexican border.

At first everything seemed quite normal.  We were listening to briefings from the staff.  But then a few of us noticed that the staff got a bit apprehensive.  Someone was hurriedly straightening out the rows of plastic chairs. Someone else was putting pamphlets on each chair. Staff members were looking at their watches and looking out the windows. It seemed like something was about to happen.

I guess I should have known what was going to happen. As one of the faculty members I should have paid more attention to the itinerary. But we had left the planning to the students, all of whom were fairly senior in either the U.S. military or in a civilian agency. I knew we were scheduled to visit the reception facility, but I hadn’t realized that we would be there to witness the arrival of a plane full of deportees. One of the U.S. officials at the center confirmed it: A flight from Brownsville, Texas with a full load of deportees was about to land in Guatemala City. For the deportees the facility we were visiting would be the last stop on a very long and difficult journey. 

Guatemalan migrants who were deported from the U.S. arrive at La Aurora airport in Guatemala City, July 10, 2014.Pakal Koban /

It was a fairly large plane, like a 737. It rolled to a stop close to the reception center. We walked out to the plane as they wheeled a staircase into position. One of the U.S. officials explained that the women on the plane would come off first. They were kept apart from the much larger group of men on the aircraft. The door opened and we got our first look at the deportees.

Three teenage girls stepped out onto the stairway. And they were crying. This was, for them, a completely unwelcome homecoming. They had risked their lives, gone deeply into debt, and had likely faced horrendous abuse – including the likelihood of rape – in order to get to the United States. They had made it all the way through Mexico, only to have gotten caught at the finish line.  And now we had sent them back to Guatemala. They would probably have to go through the ordeal of the journey all over again.

It was easy to understand why they were crying. I felt sorry for them. They were just a bit older than my own daughter. In them, I saw her, and tried to imagine her distress. I also thought of my wife, who, like them, is from a small Latin American country.

The men got off next and the group filed in to fill the plastic chairs. They were mostly young.  Most were the age of my son.  They all seemed to be covered with dust. They looked to me like what Emma Lazarus must have had in mind when she wrote that poem that ended up on a plaque on the base of the Statue of Liberty (see below).   Lazarus wrote of the “wretched refuse” and “huddled masses” who we were happily taking in.   But we weren’t processing this group into the country at Ellis Island. No, unlike the Americans of Emma Lazarus’s time, we were treating these people like wretched refuse.  We were sending these huddled masses back where they came from.

For me, the most surprising thing about that arrival was the reaction of the other Americans – faculty and students – on our team. We had spent months studying the Central American migration situation, so the others on our team knew all about the “push factors” that caused young people to undertake the dangerous journey north: gang violence; crushing, child-stunting poverty; climate change-induced hunger.  All of this with no real prospect of improvement. I thought that this background knowledge, combined with an actual look at the distress caused by deportation, would make my colleagues sympathetic to the plight of the deportees. But in most of our group, I saw no signs of sympathy, no sign that they felt bad about what they were witnessing. Most seemed largely indifferent to the plight of these young people.  This was surprising and disturbing – my colleagues were all good people, people with families.  I talked to them about it afterwards and they confirmed the indifference. I think that is the most disturbing aspect of the problem we face with Central American immigrants: our empathy deficit.

Part of this can, I think, be explained by some basic misunderstandings about immigration.  People sometimes try to portray the migrants at people who are just trying to jump the line, to get into the United States without waiting their turn.  They claim that while their immigrant forebearers came here legally, the Central American migrants are jumping the line and coming in illegally.  But this ignores the fact that most of our immigrant relatives essentially walked through an open door (Emma Lazarus’s “golden door”).  I have the letters that my great-grandfather wrote from Ireland to his sister in New Jersey as he prepared to come to America – in these letters there is absolutely no discussion of visas or immigration quotas.  At age 20, he just came over.  That was it.  The Central American migrants cannot do this.  For them, Emma Lazrus’s golden door is closed – there is simply no way that they can legally migrate to the United States. A twenty year-old Guatemalan can’t just go to the U.S. Embassy, announce that he wants to migrate to the United States, and then wait for an immigrant visa. He would not be allowed to legally migrate to the United States. Our immigration system is based largely on family reunification. If you have no close family members who are legally in the U.S. and who can petition for your immigration, you are out of luck.  You can’t even visit. Foreign Service officers who have worked in Consulates know that largely because of their age and nationality, these poor people would routinely be denied tourist visas, because they would almost certainly overstay their visas and remain in the U.S.   

So the truth is they simply can’t come to the United States legally. They are not in any line. There is no line for them to jump. They can come here illegally, or they can stay home. And in Central America, staying home could be fatal.

This nostalgia about earlier migrations also ignores another important parallel with the present: We often fail to realize that that earlier wave of migrants was driven by many of the same “push factors” that propel today’s migrants. Most of my ancestors came here fleeing hunger and poverty in Ireland during the years following the great famine. When I looked at those dust-covered young people in the Guatemalan reception center, I was reminded of my immigrant great-grandparents. We have a tendency to disparage “economic migrants.” We act as if they are not as worthy as political refugees. We should remember that most of us are the descendants of economic migrants.

“There but for the grace of God go I.” The nuns in Catholic school taught us the morally correct way to look at someone who is suffering, someone in distress. When we consider the migrants, we should ask ourselves:  What would I do if I were in their shoes? Would I just resign myself to a lifetime of hopeless poverty and violence for me and my family? Or would I head North, taking the only real chance available to me? The Bible is filled with quotes that remind us of the need to try to put ourselves in their shoes: Exodus 23:9 “Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.” The comedian Chris Rock talked about the role of luck in determining which side of the border we are all born on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKwyIccIQvI I think most of us – certainly most of the military people in my group – would do whatever it took to feed and protect their kids. We too would head north, and we would try to cross that border. Illegally if necessary. If we were in their shoes, we’d be doing just what they were doing.

My grandmother was big on the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them to unto you.” How would I like to be treated by those I meet at the end of a difficult migration journey? How would I want my children to be treated?  We’d want to be treated with empathy by the people on the other side. We’d certainly want our children to be treated kindly.

I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how the United States should approach the migrant problem. Many problems in international relations have no real solutions.   There are dilemmas here. But whatever we do, we should approach this problem with empathy, and act in a manner that is consistent with our values. We should realize that if we were in their shoes, we too would be trying to get into the United States by any means possible. And we should remember that they are coming here for the same economic reasons that propelled most of our immigrant ancestors. 

There but for the grace of God go I.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 

National War College Lecture: Rule of Law Problems in Guatemala

In March 2019 as part of a National War College global survey course, I was asked to lecture on rule of law issues in Central America.  I focused on Guatemala.  Here my slides and notes from this lecture:  

The slides: 

http://soldersmoke.com/NWCGuatemala.pdf

The slides and my notes on the slides (click to download): 

http://soldersmokecom/NWCGuatemala.docx

Lost Chance for Wisdom — The 1837 Precedent for the Sandinista-Contra War

Lost Chance for Wisdom:

The 1837 Precedent for the Sandinista-Contra War 

By William R. Meara

Contras in Yamales 1989

Each spring the U.S. National War College sends groups of students and faculty members on week-long trips to countries around the world.  The students use these trips to gather material for their research projects, and to get some experience interacting with U.S. Embassy staff and senior host government officials. Before the students travel they are enrolled in seminars that focus on the country or region they will visit.  In 2019 I was tasked with taking students to Central America, and I was the lead faculty member for the Central America seminar. It is often said that the teacher of a course can learn more than the students.  I hope our students learned something, but I came away thinking that I may have benefited from the course more than they had.  I thought I knew a lot about Central America, but I learned  that even though I had worked on the region for ten years, I had done so without a full understanding of key aspects of Central America’s history and political culture. 

To get ready for our trip, we read a really wonderful history of the region,  “Central America — A Nation Divided” by Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.  I had been pleased to include this book in the reading list not only because it is excellent, but also because of the author’s background.   Dr. Woodward is Professor Emeritus of Latin American History at Tulane University.  He is the author of more than 60 scholarly articles and 17 books on the region.   His academic credentials are impeccable, and his book is very well written. Also important was the fact that he had been a United States Marine. You might think that his military service should have been irrelevant, but at the National War College it was an important consideration.  As I drew up the reading list for our seminar, I saw that most of the books had been written by journalists or academics who write from a leftist, often pro-revolutionary perspective. I did not want our students to suspect that I was trying to give them an unbalanced view of the region, so for each book or article that seemed to come from the left side of our political spectrum, I tried to find another whose author seemed to have links on the other side of the ideological divide.  Woodward’s USMC background seemed to provide some of this.  Two of our seven students were Marines — I hope that they and their classmates found Woodward’s Marine status at least somewhat balancing.   

With my students in Huehuetenango, Guatemala 1979

In his early chapters, Woodward had been helping us understand the important ethnic and social divisions in Central America, and especially in Guatemala.  In colonial times, at the top of the social hierarchy had been the Peninsulares (the Spaniards). Just below them, were the more numerous Creoles — these were  people of Spaniard family background, but who had been born in Central America.  Then there were the Ladinos — these were people of mixed European and Indian heritage.  They were culturally and linguistically Hispanic — they spoke Spanish and had a pattern of life that was closer to the Creoles than to the Indians.  Finally, at the bottom of the social structure were the Indians.  These were the survivors of the slaughter and disease that had followed the arrival of the Spaniards.  

The Ladino-Indian split evolved into the most significant ethnic feature of modern Guatemala.  The Indians continue to live largely apart from Hispanic Guatemala — they speak indigenous languages, wear traditional Indian dress,  and live in Indian villages, usually in the mountains. They continue to be exploited by those higher up on the social spectrum. I had some experience with Guatemalan Indians — I had spent my 20th and 21st summers in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, in the Cuchumatanes mountains in a town called Huehuetenango.  While there I had helped teach English to middle school students, half of whom were Indian kids who the Christian Brothers were bravely trying to help.  In Huehuetenango I’d seen some of the cruelty and abuse that characterizes Guatemala’s ethnic split.  Especially memorable was the plight of a very homesick little Indian girl forced to work under harsh conditions as a live-in servant for a Ladino family.  

The little Indian girl, with volunteer Kathy Spellman, 1979

As he went through the history, when Dr. Woodward got to around 1837, his book gave me what I guess we could call “a history epiphany.” Woodward was describing the big post-colonial 19th century political divide in Central America between the Conservatives and the Liberals. This was the period of the Central American Federation. Colonial rule from Spain had ended.  Central America was then just one country — not the five we know today.      The Conservatives were the defenders of the old order, of the system that had been set up by the colonial rulers from Spain. They were also the defenders of the power and privileges of the Catholic Church.   The Liberals were the reformers, the modernizers.  Woodward was writing about Guatemala in the 1830s and 1840s, but his book made me think of Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s.   

On the Honduras-Nicaragua border 1989

By 1988, about eight years after my college visit to Guatemala, I was a U.S. Embassy officer in Honduras.  I was working with the Nicaraguan Indians who formed the rank and file of  the anti-Sandinista counter-revolution: The Contras.  Years after we left the region, my former boss in Honduras, Dr. Tim Brown, explored the ethnic dimensions of the Contra war in his book "The Real Contra War — Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua."   He wrote of the Contras (Comandos): 

The peasant Comandos made it clear to me that they saw themselves and the peasantry from which they had emerged as different from others in their country.  They also saw themselves in "us versus them" terms and their war as not only a battle against a revolution, but also as a peasant fight against urban, Pacific lowland espanoles, or Spaniards. Of the forty-four Comandos formally interviewed, all but one identified himself as indio.  This strongly suggests that the Comandos had consciously placed themselves on the Indian side of Nicaragua's principle ethnic divide. 

The Nicaraguan Indians were far more culturally Hispanic than were the Guatemalan Indians, but their indigenous identity was very important and created an ethnic divide similar to that of Guatemala. 

Very few American officials actually worked with the Contras; those of us who did all spoke Spanish and had significant experience in Latin America.  We were fairly confident that we understood the people we were working with.  But in reading Woodward, I realized there had been big gaps in our knowledge of Central American history, gaps that had weakened our understanding of a very basic question about the Contras:  Why did they fight?  

Critics of the Contras often tried to portray them as U.S.-paid mercenaries.  But those of us who worked with them knew this could not be a true description — they just weren’t getting paid enough.  At best, most of them could count on a meager ration of rice and beans and a tortilla each day.  Those were not mercenary wages.  But this situation begged the question:  Why were these thousands of young Nicaraguans fighting against the Sandinistas? I think most of the U.S, officers involved with the Contras had a deep understanding of why we were opposing the Sandinistas:  They were allied with our geo-strategic enemy in the Soviet Union. Our motive in this conflict was very clear.  But what about the Contras?  Why were they in it?  We had heard them talk about their dislike for the Sandinistas, but in the back of my mind I sometimes wondered why this group of dark-skinned Indians who had been oppressed and abused for so long by the Nicaraguan elite was so violently opposed to a group — the Sandinistas — who claimed to be working on behalf of the downtrodden. 

With a Contra commander on the Nicaraguan-Honduran border 1989

Over time, after dozens of interviews with Contras, I came to accept their rationale for their war:  They just didn’t like big changes being pushed on them by people they saw as privileged, white, city-slicker, do-gooders.  They disliked the effort to collectivize agriculture.  They disliked Sandinista efforts to indoctrinate the children.  They deeply resented Sandinista moves against the Catholic Church. For many of them, the last straw was Sandinista military conscription — if they were going to have to be in an army, they preferred to be in the anti-Sandinista army.  I understood these grievances, but still, I was a bit perplexed by the incongruity of downtrodden peasants rising up against the leftist revolutionaries who claimed to be fighting for their liberation. 

I wasn’t the only one with these kinds of questions.  On a hilltop overlooking an improvised parade field in the Contras’ sanctuary area on the Honduran side of the Nicaraguan border, the senior military leader of the Contras had once turned to me with an odd question. “Do you know anything about poor, country people (campesinos)?”  This commander was hard to talk to.  He was sullen and brooding and he was not impressed by visiting gringos.  I knew I had to give him a good answer if there was any hope of continuing the conversation.  I told him that I had learned that campesinos are generally very conservative, averse to change.  He agreed with me, then commented on how — in spite of this — some 15,000 of them had taken the very bold step of joining a counter-revolutionary army.  This commander seemed to be wondering about the same incongruities that I saw. Why had the Contras risen up against their would-be benefactors?  It always seemed kind of odd. I thought of it as being unprecedented.  And that is where I was wrong. It never occurred to me that this had all happened before, but it had, in Guatemala, starting around 1837. 

Like the Sandinistas, the Liberals of 19th century Guatemala had an ambitious agenda for change, an agenda that was based on foreign ideas. Both groups sought to address the region’s underdevelopment.  The foreign ideology of the Sandinistas was Marxist-Leninism.  The 19th Century Liberals were influenced by the Enlightenment, and by progress in the UK and the U.S.  Both groups had a hard time getting the lower social classes to accept their plans.  Woodward wrote about 19th Century Central America:  

“At the heart of the heart of the difficulty lay the Liberals’ reform program — the logical extension of changes inspired by Enlightenment philosophers… The creoles added a new dimension, however, when they  made a conscious effort to emulate the rapidly advancing English-speaking world.  Direct contact with English and North American merchants and diplomats in Central America was responsible for part of this, but probably more important were the readings and travels of Central Americans.  Morazan and Galvez believed that enlightened legislation could transform Central America into a modern, progressive republic. Convinced that their nation’s underdevelopment was the result of Spanish colonialism, they sought to destroy Hispanic institutions and laws and to create new ones modeled upon the successful experience of Great Britain and the United States.”  

For the 19th Century Liberals, the bogey man was the colonial legacy and the Hispanic institutional framework the Spaniards had left behind. For the Sandinistas the bogey man was North American Capitalism.

As was the case with the Sandinistas,  the Liberals were often insensitive and tone deaf in pushing their agenda. Woodward wrote that “The Guatemalan Liberals displayed exceptional ineptitude in converting a population accustomed to paternalism to their well intentioned reforms.”   Faced with a need to increase government revenues, the Central American government imposed a direct “head tax” similar to a widely disliked tax that the Spaniards had levied. In an effort to build infrastructure, the government required all residents to work on the roads three days each month.  Those with resources were able to substitute a payment, but poorer Guatemalans found themselves required to participate in forced labor.  They didn’t like it. 

Contras, 1989

And as with the Sandinistas, the Liberals of 1837 were often vengeful and brutal in their exercise of power. In both cases the government was, in effect,  militarized. And in both cases opponents faced harsh treatment including exile, confiscation of property, or worse.  

Liberal land reform efforts backfired — the Liberals of 1837 pushed for a system of individualized land ownership that was alien to the Indians who had used the land as common property.  The new law allowed outsiders to become owners of that land — the Indians soon found themselves as “sharecroppers or debt peons.” This was, for me, very similar to the complaints I heard from many of the Contras about Sandinista efforts to collectivize agriculture. . 

Like the Sandinistas, the Liberals went after the Catholic Church, and in both cases this was a major contributor to popular resistance.  The Liberal government of the Federation moved against clergymen aligned with the conservatives, including the Archbishop.  Monastic orders were suppressed. Church funds were seized. Religious holidays were abolished, Civil marriage was authorized, and divorce was legalized.  The government moved to set up secular schools, taking education out of the hands of the church. The Catholic Church reacted forcefully to these changes, using its enormous grass-roots influence to oppose the government.

Contra with crucifix

The Nicaraguan Contras  were very religious, very Catholic.  Devotion to the Virgin Mary was quite evident. Many of the Contras wore rosary beads around their necks. Some of the Contra military encampments along the Honduras/Nicaragua border featured improvised chapels. Contras disabled by war-wounds had created something of a cottage industry turning U.S. M-16 rounds into crucifixes; in a bit of politico-religious humor, one of the Contra leaders joked that they had tried to make these “Contra Crosses” out of Soviet AK-47 rounds, but “for some reason” it never worked. It was easy to see why people like the Contras would reject the efforts of those who described religion as “the opiate of the masses.” Whenever the Contras would complain about life under the Sandinistas, they would talk about Sandinista hostility to the church. 

A Contra Cross made from an M-16 round

The Liberal Guatemalan government of Galvez launched a program to “westernize” the Indians.  Woodward describes one program in which “uneducated children” were taken from their parents and assigned to “protectors” who would, supposedly, provide for their education.  Many of the children ended up as inexpensive maids for the wealthy.  This reminded me of Contra complaints about the Sandinistas sending Nicaraguan children to Cuba’s Isle of Pines for revolutionary education.  As with the Guatemalans of 1837, the Nicaraguans of 1981 were bitterly opposed to having their children taken away from them.   

Woodward wrote that “The grassroots reaction against the Liberals was especially violent against foreign elements and against efforts to change traditional lifestyles and patterns of rural life.” That phrase about “traditional lifestyles and patterns of rural life” resonated with me.   Working with the Contras, or with other Central American campesinos, you realize that when they contemplated change, the stakes were quite high.  The main reason they do things the same way their grandfathers did was because the new techniques might not work, and a crop failure could be devastating.  Woodward notes that in pushing their agenda, the Liberals made “substantial headway” in gaining the acceptance of the elite, but “they found the changes unwelcome among the lower classes.”  He was writing about 1837, but those statements would also have been true in 1981.

So as I read Woodward, I began to realize that the Contras were  not the first group of Central Americans to reject the efforts of educated city folks who claimed to be working for their benefit.  

As with the Contras in the 1980s, in Central America in 1837, bitter lower-class dissatisfaction led to war.  In 1837, a natural leader — a Guatemalan ladino named Rafael Carrera — emerged. Campesinos rose up across Central America.  Woodward notes that soon “The war was becoming a race war, with rural Indians, ladinos, mulattoes and zambos joining together against the white creoles and the foreigners.” As noted by Dr. Brown, ethnicity was also an important factor in the Contra war; I was reminded of this when I noticed that the Contras were sometimes referring to me as a “chele” (white guy).   

So as I walked through the Yamales valley in Honduras in 1988 and  ‘89, trying to understand the motives that had pushed the Contras to war,  I was unaware of the fact that 150 years earlier, other Central Americans had, in a similar way, taken up arms in opposition to proposals for societal change, proposals in many ways similar to those of the Sandinistas.  I may be wrong about this, but I don’t think any of the other Americans working with the Contras were aware of the 1837 precedent. I do not remember it ever coming up in conversation, and I have not seen reference to it in my colleagues’ writings. 

Through other readings for the Central American seminar, I learned that I was not the only one to have realized later that I had missed out on some of the wisdom that history can provide.  Anthony Lake was the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning (George Kennan’s old job) during the Carter Administration. Lake was aware of the big gaps in his knowledge of what had led us to the crisis of the 1980s.  Thrown into the political wilderness by Ronald Reagan’s electoral victor, Lake decided to fill those gaps by writing a book about the region.  “Somoza Falling — The Nicaraguan Dilemma: A Portrait of Washington at Work” is mostly about how the Washington bureaucracy dealt with the region, but it begins with a superb look back at how previous U.S. administrations had struggled with the area.  In the preface to his book, Lake wrote “I remember feeling at the time that I did not know nearly as much about the subject as I would have wished, that there was not enough time to study its history and nuances. This book then, offered a chance at furthering my education.” 

Not having trudged through base-camps in the Yamales valley trying to understand the Contras, my students at the National War College were not as surprised and excited as I was about Woodward’s description of a 19th century Central American peasant rebellion.  I tried to use the similarities between the two cases as an example of the benefits of studying history.   

I don't  think that knowledge of what had happened in Guatemala in 1837 would have changed what we did with the Contras, or our approach to them. But awareness of this precedent would have helped us understand the Contras a bit better, and it may have helped us  better explain their struggle to skeptical outsiders. I wish I had read Woodward’s book before I started working with the Contras — I missed out on the kind of wisdom that history can provide. 

-----------------------------

Post Script:

Dr. Ralph Woodward Jr. 

In June 2020, while preparing this article,  I was pleased to make e-mail contact with  Dr. Ralph Woodward.  I thanked him for all the wisdom conveyed by his books and articles. 

Copyright 2020 by William R.Meara.  All rights reserved. 

Guatemala Ghosts at Hogwarts-on-Potomac – Reconsidering the 1954 Coup

Guatemala Ghosts at Hogwarts-on-Potomac –  

Reconsidering the Strategic Wisdom of the 1954 Coup 

By William R. Meara

"La Gloriosa Victoria" by Diego Rivera

On  March 22, 2019 I was lecturing at the National War College in Washington, D.C. Two hundred students – all mid-career military or civilian officers – were seated in the amphitheater in front of me.  I was a Foreign Service officer on loan to the War College;  as part of a global survey course I had been asked to speak about Central America. 

They had asked me to do this because I had experience in the region.  In 1979, at age 20, I’d gone to Guatemala’s Western Highlands to help out with English instruction at a Catholic mission school.  Later, as a U.S.  Army officer I had been in exercises in Honduras, had worked on Central America at the U.S. military’s headquarters for Latin America (“The Southern Command,” then in Panama), and had served as a trainer/adviser during the war in El Salvador.  As a Foreign Service officer I was a U.S. Embassy liaison officer to the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance, aka The Contras. It had been an amazing adventure, but in the summer of 1989, at age 30, I had left the region and moved on both  professionally and personally.  The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 seemed to put a definitive punctuation mark on the decade – the Cold War was over and our concern about Central America waned considerably.  I said goodbye to the region.  I got married, we had kids, and I started taking assignments in family-friendly Western Europe.  I didn’t think very much about Central America until – 28 years after leaving the region – the State Department assigned me to the faculty of the National War College.  Preparation for my lecture brought me back to the area.  

Guatemala seemed like a good focal point for my lecture.  With hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans (by some estimates fully 2% of the Guatemalan population) arriving on our southern border, our past actions in that country seemed to cry out for critique.  So I zeroed in on Guatemala with a special emphasis on the coup that the United States carried out in 1954, on our overthrow of an elected Guatemalan government.    I included in my PowerPoint slides a typical War College “strategic wisdom” question:   Was the 1954 U.S. coup in Guatemala a wise strategic move for the United States?   I told the students that being a teacher at the War College had caused me to think more deeply about this, and to re-evaluate the issue using the strategy framework we present at the school.  I wanted them to carry out the same kind of evaluation, even if they found it distasteful or painful. 

Hogwarts-on-Potomac

Roosevelt Hall 

Theodore Roosevelt Hall, the building that is home to the National War College, encourages this kind of strategic retrospection.  Located on Fort McNair at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers,  the school seems to rise up from the shorelines like an ancient Roman cathedral (perhaps to Mars?).  Think "Hogwarts-on- Potomac." The “school for wizards” analogy is quite apt – “wisdom” and “wizard” share the Middle English root word (“wys”), and imparting strategic wisdom is the War College’s goal.   Perhaps recognizing this, as part of a lecture hall skit, one of the course directors recently gave all his faculty colleagues conical wizard hats.   

Built early in the 20^th century, Roosevelt Hall is an old building,  full of historic memorabilia, much of it depicting grisly death on the battlefield. Late at night or in the pre-dawn hours it can seem like the kind of place that might be haunted.  Indeed, one of the buildings directly in front of Roosevelt Hall was the site of the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators – they were found guilty and hanged in the area that today is a tennis court. Over-imaginative enlisted soldiers who patrol the base at night have claimed to see ghosts in the trial building.

Theodore Roosevelt

There is a big focus on the building’s namesake, with many depictions of TR’s military exploits in Cuba.  There is a cannon on display that was captured from Spanish forces in Cuba during that war.   If you look carefully you can find bits of history related specifically to Central America: In the Marine Corps corridor there is a painting of a USMC biplane attacking the army of Augusto Cesar Sandino in Ocotal, Nicaragua in 1926 (sixty years later, I would be with other Nicaraguans,  not far from Ocotal).  In the basement, in the Intelligence Community corridor there is one small 1987 photo from the war in El Salvador. There are a few old maps of the Panama Canal in the State Department corridor.   And if you look even more carefully you can find a few mementos that are directly connected to the fateful events that took place in Guatemala in the summer of 1954.  These are what made me think that if the place were haunted,  there might be a few ghosts from Guatemala 1954.  I decided to include some these ghost stories in my lecture. 

Strategic Framework

The War College’s strategic logic framework forces students to evaluate the wisdom or folly of past moves on the global chessboard.  First, the strategist must clearly define the U.S. interests.  Then he or she must identify the threats to those interests, or opportunities to advance them.  From this comes the Political Aim – the desired “end state” of the strategy: what success looks like.  To get us there, students identify supporting objectives, and plan out the use of all of the instruments of national power (diplomacy, information, military, economic). Throughout, the strategist should be evaluating risks – risks to the strategy and risks that might arise from it, while keeping an eye on both the U.S. domestic context and the global context.   

The curriculum takes students all the way back to Thucydides and the Peloponnesian wars, causing them to evaluate whether or not strategists of the past acted wisely and logically. Did they exaggerate their national interest or the threat to those interests?  Was their Political Aim truly supportive of that interest?  Given the strength of the instruments at their disposal, could they realistically hope to achieve their objectives? And if they attained all the subordinate objectives, would the Political Aim be reached? Again, Guatemala seemed like a good subject for this kind of retrospection. It was relatively close to us in time – as I would tell the students, I had met two people who had been involved in the coup.

Guatemala – Background

Guatemala’s current problems have roots that go back 500 years, back to the arrival of Spanish colonizers.  Here is a very quick summary:  The Spaniards encountered both land and Indians.  They took both.  They set up a semi-feudal social system with the Indians serving as New World serfs. When colonial rule ended, the Spaniards were replaced at the top of the totem pole by an ethnically European Guatemalan elite. With a few exceptions, this system dominated Guatemalan life for centuries. Then, during the final phase of World War II, came an effort to change things.  

In 1944 Guatemalans,  inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,  and hopeful about progress in the post-war world, deposed a military dictator and tried to put their country on a path toward reform.  The revolution of 1944 – also known as the October Revolution or the Guatemalan Spring – sought to correct the old injustices.  A civilian with a PhD in education,  Juan Jose Arevalo, became Guatemala's first democratically elected president.  The reforms that he pushed were opposed by those who were benefiting from the feudal system, especially by the agro-export elites whose business models depended heavily on the continued exploitation of indigenous Guatemalans, and on continued low-cost access to Guatemalan land.  Arevalo had to contend with at least 26 coup attempts. Somehow he survived.

Interest and Threat:   Jacobo Arbenz and the Possibility of Communism in Central America. 

Arbenz on the cover of Time, June 28 ,1954

In 1952, after democratic elections, term-limited Arevalo was succeeded in the Guatemalan Presidency by Jacobo Arbenz.  By this time – to use the terminology of the National War College – “the global context” had changed considerably.  FDR was dead and his benevolent Good Neighbor Policy had been replaced by a Cold War containment strategy. Arbenz took office at the peak of national security anxiety in the United States.

Arbenz had pledged to continue with the reform agenda of the Guatemalan Spring. Land reform was the key pending agenda item.  By 1950, 2% of Guatemala’s population owned 72% of the arable land; The U.S.-based United Fruit Company (UFCO)  was the largest landowner.   Preoccupied with fending off coup attempts, Arevalo had not attempted to address this problem.  Proclaiming “The Second Government of the Revolution,” Arbenz took up this pending challenge and made land reform the priority for his new administration. He said he would buy back fallow land held by UFCO – at the tax assessed value.  UFCO found Arbenz and his land reform plans deeply disturbing. 

Indeed, for the Guatemalan business elite and for a U.S. government worried about Communist expansion there were many disturbing things about Arbenz:  He had legalized the Communist Party.  Under his government Communists became active in the Guatemalan labor movement.  His wife was a member of the Salvadoran Communist Party.  The most prominent conservative in the October Revolution – Colonel Arana – had been killed by Arbenz’s security forces. Under Arevalo and Arbenz, Guatemala had become a haven for communists from throughout the hemisphere, including a young Argentine named Che Guevara.  Defenders of Arbenz rationalize that he needed all the allies he could muster in his battle for land reform,  and that this search for support explains his seemingly pro-communist moves.  But nonetheless, there were things about Arbenz that raised real concerns in Cold War Washington. 

U.S. Domestic Context: Fear of Communism

It is easy today to dismiss fear of communism as the irrational paranoia of right-wing ideologues, but the world looked different in the early 1950s.  The trauma of Pearl Harbor and World War II was fresh in the minds of the American officials.   The Soviets had detonated an atomic bomb in 1949 – in August 1953 they exploded their first hydrogen bomb.  Thousands of American soldiers were being killed by North Korean and Communist Chinese troops. At the beginning of the decade, Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union.  The Soviets openly espoused an ideology that scorned the idea of communism in one country – they embraced the notion of world communism. In the early 1950s fear of communism was real;  it was not irrational. Writing about concerns regarding communism in Guatemala, the CIA Historian Nicholas Cullather (who as we will see went on to become a critic of the 1954 coup) observed: “These were not manifestations of McCarthyite paranoia but of a fear shared by liberals and conservatives, academics, journalists and government officials, that a Soviet conspiracy aimed to strike at America in its own backyard.” 

 U.S. Domestic Context –  Routine Racism

Kennan

George Kennan’s is the most prominent of Roosevelt Hall’s Cold War ghosts; indeed, in all of his portraits he seems quite pale, almost ghost-like.  A career Foreign Service officer, he had been one of the driving forces behind the creation of the College, and was working as the school’s Deputy Commandant when he wrote his famous “Origins of Soviet Conduct” article, the article that soon became the basis of our containment strategy.  

It is easy for a Foreign Service officer at the War College to become a Kennan fan.  You are working in a War College on an Army base in a building filled with military memorabilia.  State Department has a foothold in the school, but it is really more of a toehold. Each of the corridors in the building is devoted to a military service or government agency.  State Department’s corridor is in the basement.  Most of the students and most of the faculty are military officers. The building seemed like one big military “I love me” wall, but at least we had Kennan.  In a school devoted to strategy, it is useful for a Foreign Service officer to be able to remind colleagues that the strategy that won us first place in the Cold War was crafted by a Foreign Service officer.   When it came time to discuss Cold War issues, I took my seminar down to the first floor and conducted the class in Kennan's old office. 

Kennan was also useful when it came time to remind students of the need for language skills and regional expertise.  He was able to develop a winning strategy because he had a very deep understanding of Russia. But as I looked back on Central America, a strange shift took place:  Kennan  morphed from the archetype of a regional expert into an example of the danger of charging into strategy development without regional expertise.  

In February 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson, trying to figure out how to deal with Cold War challenges, sent Kennan south.  Kennan seemed to recognize the absurdity of sending a Russia hand to evaluate Latin America. He noted that  his brief “cooks’ tour” (his words) of the region wouldn’t make him an expert.  Nevertheless he sent Acheson a 22 page report that reminds us of the way ignorance, prejudice, racism, and bigotry can become important background factors in U.S. strategy development.   From Kennan’s report to Acheson:  

“It seems to me unlikely that there could be any other region of the earth in which nature and human behavior could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of human life than in Latin America…

Here is the true illustration of the crimes of the fathers being visited on their progeny; for, as the Spaniards intermarried with these native peoples the course of whose history had so ruthlessly been interrupted, they came to share the scars and weaknesses which they had themselves inflicted.

Elsewhere in Latin America, the large scale importation of Negro slave elements into considerable parts of the Spanish and other colonial empires, and the extensive intermarriage of all these elements, produced other unfortunate results which seemed to have weighed scarcely less heavily on the chances for human progress.

In these circumstances, the shadow of a tremendous helplessness and impotence falls today over most of the Latin American world. The handicaps to progress are written in human blood and in the tracings of geography; and in neither case are they readily susceptible of obliteration. They lie heavily across the path of all human progress;  and the answers which people have suggested to them thus far have been feeble and unpromising…”

These were not off-hand comments muttered after drinks at some cocktail party.  This was Kennan expressing his thoughts in an official memorandum for the Secretary of State.  And the picture they paint of a cynical, racist George Kennan is supported by the work of his biographer John Gaddis, and by Kennan’s own now-published diaries (which contain quotes far more damning than those in the memo to Acheson).

Kennan’s racist beliefs about Latin America must have made it easier for him to recommend that we abandon support for democracy and that we be prepared to embrace dictatorship.  From his memo to Acheson:

“We cannot be too dogmatic about the methods by which local communists can be dealt with. These vary greatly, depending upon the vigor and efficacy of local concepts and traditions of self-government. Where such vigor and efficacy are relatively high, as in our own country, the body politic may be capable of bearing the virus of communism without permitting it to expand to dangerous proportions. This is undoubtedly the best solution of the communist problem, wherever the prerequisites exist. But where they do not exist, and where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak to absorb successfully the intensity of the communist attack, then we must concede that harsh governmental measures of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedure; and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternatives, to further communist successes.”

The racist cynicism that we see in Kennan’s report to Acheson probably was shared by many in Washington, and this cynicism probably played an important role in determining our response to possible communist moves in Central America.  

U.S. Domestic Context – Joseph McCarthy

McCarthy

Another major U.S. domestic context factor was the “Red Menace” campaign of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.   Launched in 1950, McCarthy and his accusations of communist subversion in the U.S. government became a factor in Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign for President.  Eisenhower and the Republicans claimed that President Truman had been soft on communism.   Not even General Eisenhower was safe from McCarthyism – Eisenhower feared losing Wisconsin in the election and this caused him to placate the demagogue from that state.  

McCarthy’s vitriolic campaign clearly created an incentive for Washington officials to take action against communists or suspected communists.  McCarthy’s slander had led Secretary of State Dulles to actually fire a number of distinguished Foreign Service officers. Dulles even fired George Kennan, in part because of McCarthy's pressure.  This would certainly have a chilling effect on some Foreign Service officers who may have otherwise been inclined to report in a balanced way on Guatemala.   We can see this in the comments of the Guatemala Desk Officer at the State Department, Edward W. Clark:  “This was the first time there had been anything like a possible or real communist government in our hemisphere and that was pretty upsetting at the time.  And it was very real regardless whether Arbenz was a communist or not, and it was very shocking to us at that time.   After all you had Senator McCarthy and all of us ‘communists’ in the State Department.”   

U.S. Domestic Context – Government Ties to United Fruit Company 

In Guatemala, Arbenz’s land reform had stirred the ire of agro-export elites, and their de facto leader, the  United Fruit Company.  UFCO’s influence can be seen in the nickname it was given in the region – El Pulpo – The Octopus.  The company  was extremely well connected in Washington.  Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had – as a partner in the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell – negotiated UFCO’s deal with Guatemala during the 1930s.  CIA director Alan Dulles had also done legal work for the company. Eisenhower’s UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge owned a large amount of UFCO stock. UFCO’s public relations man was married to Eisenhower’s personal secretary.  The head of Eisenhower’s National Security Council staff, General Robert Cutler, was a director of UFCO.  Spruille Braden, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs went on to become another UFCO director.

Over the years UFCO had grown accustomed to working with the pliable and supine governments of Guatemalan military dictators.  But they found that things were different under Arevalo and even more-so under Arbenz.  In response, using their impressive arsenal of contacts,  the company turned to Washington for help.  Cold War anxiety in Washington combined with Arbenz’s communist connections making it easy for the company to lobby for regime change.  “The company hired a corps of influential and talented publicists to create a public and private climate in the United States favorable to Arbenz’s overthrow.” UFCO’s lobbying was very effective, but with the Dulles brothers in two of the most important foreign policy jobs in Washington, in many ways UFCO was pushing on an open door. 

Goodpaster

Around 1980, while still in college, I went to an academic conference that featured General Andrew Goodpaster, the very distinguished officer who had been on General Eisenhower’s staff.  Goodpaster is another of the Guatemala ghosts in Roosevelt Hall; he served as 8^th Commandant of the National War College, and his portrait hangs in the main stairwell.  During a break in the conference, I had asked General Goodpaster if our action in Guatemala had been driven by the Dulles brothers’ business ties to UFCO.  The General bristled at what must have seemed to be an impertinent question from a college kid.   I remember him scoffing at the idea that a great statesman like Dwight David Eisenhower would allow his policies to be driven by the Dulles brothers and “some fruit company.”  Looking back, I think Goodpaster was partly right and partly wrong.   I don’t think that Eisenhower acted – as some on the left allege – in defense of the interests of UFCO.  Eisenhower acted in an effort to protect the national security interests of the United States.  But UFCO’s lobbying and their publicity campaign in the United States seems to have been what made the tiny country of Guatemala suddenly rise to a position of importance on the U.S. national security agenda.  It was this rise to geostrategic prominence that paved the way for the 1954 coup. 

Intel:  Sherman Kent and his National Intelligence Estimates

The CIA’s Sherman Kent is another Guatemalan ghost in the War College.  His portrait hangs in the basement “Intelligence Corridor.”  He is now sort of the patron saint of intelligence analysis.  The CIA’s school for analysts is named for him. 

On May 19, 1953 the CIA office led by Kent circulated National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 84.  The timing of this document suggests it was produced in anticipation of the launch of President Eisenhower’s Project Solarium (see below).   The first paragraph reads, “The current political situation in Guatemala is adverse to U.S. interests.  The Guatemalan communists exercise a political influence far out of proportion to their small numerical strength.  Their influence will probably continue to grow as long a President Arbenz remains in power.” 

The NIE laid the groundwork for Arbenz’s removal from power, but the authors obviously struggled with the rationale for doing so – they admitted that the Guatemalan government was pursuing laudable goals while enjoying popular support:  “The present political situation in Guatemala is the outgrowth of the Revolution of 1944… From it there developed a strong national movement to free Guatemala from military dictatorship, social backwardness, and ‘economic colonialism’ which had been the pattern of the past. These aspirations have inspired the loyalty and conformed with the self-interest of most politically conscious Guatemalans. The Arbenz government still derives some strength from its claim to leadership of the continuing national revolution.” 

In April 1954, just two months before the coup,  Kent’s office reviewed NIE-84. This review offered a far more dire assessment of the situation in Guatemala:  “The Communists now effectively control the political life of Guatemala… time is on the side of the Communists in Guatemala.” But the evidence offered in the NIE review seemed to be contrived and imaginary:  “The Communists are probably also capable of mobilizing up to 20,000 of these workers as an armed militia available to support the regime in an emergency. We cannot confirm reports of the existence of such a para-military force but would consider it a logical development in the circumstances.”  CIA was saying that the communists could probably mobilize 20,000 workers, but CIA could not confirm the existence of such a force. 

We have remarkably good access to CIA thinking and decision making on Guatemala. In 1992, CIA Director Robert Gates, acting perhaps in the spirit of post-Cold War optimism, ordered that all documents more than thirty years old be reviewed for declassification.  A young graduate student named Nick Cullather was hired by the CIA to assist in this effort.  Over the course of his one year at CIA, Cullather wrote a book entitled “Operation PBSuccess – The United States and Guatemala 1952-1954.”   In 1994 the History Staff of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence circulated a version of Cullather’s book within the CIA, but with a “SECRET” classification that kept it inside the USG. Complaints about the CIA’s failure to follow-through on Gate’s promise of more openness eventually led to the declassification and release of Cullather’s book.  Much of what I say here about the actions of the CIA in the Guatemala coup of 1954 are based on the CIA’s own history of the event, as written by the CIA’s Nick Cullather.

Summer School:  Project Solarium 

In May 1953, Dwight David Eisenhower, five months into his administration, initiated an interagency strategy review.  In the beginning they used the solarium on the third floor of the White House (thus, the effort became known as Project Solarium).  In June, they moved the discussion to Roosevelt Hall. It was summertime, and the War College students were gone.  The interagency staff was divided into three teams;  they spent six weeks studying how best to handle the Soviet threat.  (George Kennan led one of the teams; Andrew Goodpaster was on another of the teams.)   The perceived Soviet threat to countries like Iran and Guatemala was part of the discussion.    Much of the grand strategy that led to our intervention in Guatemala was hammered out during that summer of strategic thinking in Roosevelt Hall.  No wonder, as I walked the corridors of that building I could almost feel the presence of the Ghosts of ’54. 

During Solarium, Eisenhower’s team looked at ways for him to fulfill his campaign pledge to resist global communism while controlling the growth of the federal budget.    The result was a paper known as NSC 162/2 also referred to as the “New Look.” “The new policy placed greater emphasis on covert action.  Eisenhower saw clandestine operations as an inexpensive alternative to military intervention.  He believed the Cold War was entering a period of protracted, low-level conflict. Relying too much on the military would exhaust the economy and leave the United States vulnerable.  In his mind, finding creative responses to communist penetration of peripheral areas like Guatemala posed one of the critical tests of his ability as a leader.” Ike’s explicit link between resisting communist advances while also controlling the budget deficit played out in operations that sought regime change on the cheap.

 In terms of strategic wisdom, Solarium had mixed results. It can be seen as an admirable effort on the part of Eisenhower to take a systematic look at Cold War strategy.  On the other hand, shortly after this systematic examination, the United States made what now appear to have been strategic blunders in Guatemala and other countries. Understandably the focus of Solarium was on the Soviets and the Chinese, but in light of what happened over the next decade – Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam – it seems clear that that additional attention to third world problems would have been wise.  With its focus on the Soviet geo-strategic situation,  and its use of a very small team (21 people), Solarium might have – in effect – prevented this kind of additional, broader attention.  It may have usurped the kind of careful interagency process that could have raised red flags about the Guatemalan coup.  The State Department did not seem to have a prominent role in Solarium, other than that provide by George Kennan, who had been temporarily brought back into government after having been brutally fired by John Foster Dulles just two months earlier.    Solarium is a cautionary tale: even the most diligent and thoughtful of strategists – like Eisenhower – can make strategic mistakes. 

Global Context:   Operation TPAjax 

Kim Roosevelt (infant) with TR

On the same floor as Kennan’s old office, there is another bit of history related to Central America, another ghost, this one of a real spook.  In Room 102 there is a photograph of an elderly TR with a baby in his arms.  That baby was his grandson, Kim Roosevelt.   Thirty-five years after that picture was taken, Kim Roosevelt made a clandestine border crossing into Iran.  It was 1953, he was working for the CIA,  and his mission was to overthrow the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh.  

Roosevelt’s “Operation TPAjax” was a quick and inexpensive success.  Mossadegh was deposed and the Shah of Iran was placed back in power.  Kim Roosevelt was brought back to Washington to brief President Eisenhower.  Ike gave him a medal.  

Kim Roosevelt

The Iran coup seemed to provide Washington with a model for how to deal with worrisome third-world governments. Impressed, CIA Director Alan Dulles offered Kim Roosevelt command of the CIA’s next coup:  Guatemala. In his 1979 book “Countercoup” Roosevelt concludes by asserting that CIA had been successful in Iran only because both the Iranian populace and the Iranian Army also wanted Mossadegh deposed.  Roosevelt believed that these prerequisites did not prevail in Guatemala. So he turned Dulles down and resigned from the CIA. 

The reasons for Roosevelt’s refusal to lead the Guatemalan coup are not entirely clear. His decision is sometimes presented as the result of his belief in the democratic legitimacy of the Arbenz government. That may have been a part of it, but it is not clear if his decision was driven by morality or by practicality.  In his book “Countercoup” he seems less concerned with righteousness than with the possibility of success – if the army and the people do not share in the USG’s desire for regime change, Roosevelt recommended “sending in the Marines.” Putting the moral issues aside, his strategic logic about the repeatability of the Iran success seems flawed – in Guatemala the army and the people did not appear to support regime change, yet the CIA coup succeeded, and we did not have to send in the Marines.  Nevertheless, the fact that someone like Kim Roosevelt had serious misgivings about the Guatemalan coup says something about the shaky foundations upon which it was built. 

On the last page of his book about the Iran coup, Kim Roosevelt describes his post-coup briefing to President Eisenhower: “It was, I thought, very well received. In fact, one of my audience seemed almost alarmingly enthusiastic. John Foster Dulles was leaning back in his chair. Despite his posture, he was anything but sleepy.  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 he was planning as well. What was in his mind I could not guess.  Would it be a future employment of the same counter revolutionary – or revolutionary – approach?” 

Domestic Context:   CIA’s New Turf

During the domestic context portion of the National War College curriculum, we covered bureaucratic factors in strategy development.  I think the 1954 coup is a good example of the importance of these factors.   In the wake of World War II and the Korean war, the USG would clearly have been very receptive to offers of effective low-cost responses to Communist threats around the world.  Direct confrontation with the Soviets was off the table.   Our Communist enemies seemed to be experts at covert subversion.  Then suddenly in Iran a relatively new agency of the U.S. government seemed to have demonstrated great skill at fighting fire with fire.  

Documents and memoirs from the period indicate that CIA did understand that being seen by the President as the USG’s low-cost coup-makers would be very good for them as an agency.  Hence Kim Roosevelt’s recollection of John Foster Dulles “purring like a cat.”  Nick Cullather wrote, “The Eisenhower administration saw this (TPAJAX) success as proof that covert action could be a potent, flexible weapon in the Cold War.  King’s aides (CIA) were anxious to prove it again in Guatemala.” 

Indeed, the CIA took pains to present its covert operations as being carefully planned and expertly executed successes.  Immediately after the coup in Guatemala, CIA launched a follow-up operation called PBHistory – an attempt to document the nefarious Soviet-linked nature of the deposed Guatemalan government.  The effort failed – their “historians” could not find sufficient evidence and in several cases arrived at the opposite conclusion.  Nevertheless, in briefings to the President and in the books that CIA eventually authorized its officers to publish (for example “Countercoup” by Kim Roosevelt and “Night Watch” by David Atlee Phillips) mistakes in planning and execution are not mentioned, and CIA is presented as an organization capable of performing strategic miracles.  This gross exaggeration of CIA capabilities, combined with the cut-off of outside scrutiny that comes once a proposed operation is classified as “Top Secret” led American presidents into disastrous operations in Cuba (the Bay of Pigs), in South Vietnam (the coup against Diem) and in other areas. 

Coming soon after their success in Iran, Guatemala would provide the CIA with an opportunity to prove to the Eisenhower administration the effectiveness of their covert action techniques. It was simply not in the CIA’s interest to have the Guatemalan crisis resolved peacefully by a skillful application of the diplomatic instrument. CIA was the covert action instrument, and they wanted their instrument to win in Guatemala. 

The fact that the CIA was a new organization was likely a factor here.   In Guatemala CIA was working to derail a revolution that was older than it was. The October Revolution had been launched in 1944, Arevalo was elected in 1945.  CIA had been created by Truman in 1947.  Wisdom is a virtue not usually associated with youth.  As the USG moved toward launching the 1954 coup in Guatemala, we see the CIA chafing under State Department reluctance to formally support the coup – the agency seems to be chomping at the bit, anxious to launch the operation.

Opportunity Lost:  Embassies Staffed for Overthrow, Weakness at State

At the War College, we tried to encourage a skillful use of all of the instruments of national power, including the diplomatic instrument.   The pre-coup situation in Guatemala seemed to call for the use of diplomacy, or at the very least the strategic insights that diplomats could provide. The CIA’s own history of the coup shows that agency personnel were very poorly informed about conditions in Guatemala and about Arbenz’s motivations.  They knew very little about the views and positions of important Guatemalan institutions (like the army).  Revealing their institutional bias, they complained about the lack of “human intel assets” in these institutions, as if these kinds of assets (spies) were the only means by which an understanding of Guatemala could have been obtained.  We see no effort to make use of Embassy reporting or the work of academics or journalists. 

The October Revolution and the Guatemalan Spring were very poorly understood in Washington.  This was an era in which diplomatic cables played a big role in forming Washington’s views – thoughtful cables from our Embassy in Guatemala  might have put Arbenz’s actions in context and made them more understandable.   If Washington had concerns about Arbenz’s actions and his apparent connections to Communism, that is clearly a problem that might have been addressed diplomatically, perhaps by an effective U.S. Ambassador in Guatemala City.  

Peurifoy

Unfortunately we did not have such an Ambassador – we had John Peurifoy. Peurifoy had spent two years at West Point, but had left the Military Academy for what were described as a combination of health issues (pneumonia) and family financial problems.   Peurifoy started in the State Department as a clerk and quickly maneuvered his way up in the organization.  In 1949 he ingratiated himself with Senator McCarthy by complaining of a “homosexual underground” in the State Department – this sparked a wave of anti-gay actions that became known as the Lavender Scare.  Peurifoy is sometimes presented as a highly unusual diplomat, but he is actually quite typical of a small subset of diplomats:  ambitious non-Foreign Service civil servants  who maneuver and ingratiate their way up the hierarchy in State Department headquarters and then arrange for assignment as an Ambassador.  They are a kind of hybrid – part career person (but not in the Foreign Service) and part political appointee.  In 1950  Peurifoy was assigned as our Ambassador to Greece.   In Greece he took a very interventionist approach, so much so that his last name became part of the Greek lexicon: a foreigner who interferes in Greek politics is called a “Peurifoy.”  When it was announced later that he was being assigned to Bangkok,  there were concerns in Thailand that his posting might herald a coup in that country.  

Peurifoy arrived in Guatemala in November 1953.  He was intolerant of disagreement; in testimony to Congress he had said, “Communism is directed by the Kremlin all over the world, and anyone who thinks differently doesn’t know what they are talking about.” Upon arrival at post, he cabled to Washington that, “I have come to Guatemala to use the big stick.” After meeting Arbenz, he reported “I am definitely convinced that if the president is not a communist, he will do until one comes along.”  Peurifoy did maintain a somewhat normal diplomatic relationship with Arbenz’s Foreign Minister, but seemed focused on getting the Guatemalan government to agree to UFCO’s price demands on the land seized in the agrarian reform project. 

Even before Peurifoy, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala appears to have been in agreement regarding the supposedly irredeemable nature of Jacobo Arbenz.  On October 28, 1953 Peurifoy’s predecessor, Ambassador Rudolf E. Schoenfeld was debriefed in Washington. Schoenfeld said that “Guatemala represents in miniature all of the social cleavages, tension, and dilemmas of modern Western society under attack by the communist virus. Conditions will worsen considerably before we can improve them and we should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating communism.”  The Embassy’s economic section was very focused on a narrow interpretation of U.S. interests – they seem to have defined these interests as coinciding with those of the United Fruit Company.  We can see this the comments of Edward Clark who was the State Department Desk Officer for Guatemala at the time of the coup: 

“In any event he (Arbenz) was a communist for the United Fruit Company and they were not only lobbying in the State Department but were up on the Hill. They wanted him out because he was affecting their interests very severely…. There wasn’t any question about the fact that they were hurting the United Fruit Company and there wasn’t any question that some of the things that were being done down there were, even if not communist-inspired, off the wall and the United Fruit Company was going to be driven out of there one way or another. So, certainly you had to be sympathetic to their problem. They were getting screwed. So what to do?” 

U.S. Ambassadors who would support the coup effort were also placed in Honduras and Nicaragua. Conveniently, these new Ambassadors reported to the CIA through the former Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith; Eisenhower had appointed Smith Under Secretary of State.   

Eisenhower appointed attorney Henry Finch Holland as Assistant Secretary of State.  Holland took up his post in March 1954 and quickly found out about the by-then ongoing CIA operation in Guatemala.  Holland considered resigning over the operation, but in the end decided to stay on.  In speaking privately to Eisenhower about a meeting in which Holland had opposed air support for the  coup,  Allen Dulles mocked Holland, saying that he (Dulles) knew that Holland would lose the argument when he saw him come in with law books under his arms. In a bureaucratic fight with Allen Dulles, Holland was clearly outgunned.  Holland was a mere Assistant Secretary going up against a CIA Director whose brother was the Secretary of State.  CIA officer (and later Watergate conspirator) E. Howard Hunt later wrote, “A word from one [brother] to another substituted for weeks of inter and intra-agency debate.” 

Bad Strategic Aim

At the War College, we told the students that one of the most important parts of strategy development involves clearly  identifying the U.S. interest at stake in a problem. It might seem like the U.S. interest in Guatemala in 1954 was obvious.  But in fact it was far from clear.  United Fruit and its “publicists” tried to equate the interests of the company with the interests of the United States, but that was highly questionable.  Some would take an enlightened, long-term view and say that the U.S. interest was in seeing Guatemala become more democratic, peaceful, and prosperous.  But others took a more short-term, Cold War view and said our interest was limited to keeping Guatemala out of the Soviet camp.  

Unsafe Assumptions

Guatemala 1954 is a sad example of the consequences of big mistakes early in the strategy development process. We warned the students that mistakes at this point are often the result of bad, unsafe assumptions.  In the Guatemala case, there seems to have been a lot of them: 

Was Arbenz a communist? At higher levels, in some the National Intelligence Estimates, we see uncertainty on this key point. But at lower, more operational or tactical levels there is a clear assumption that Arbenz was a full-blown hard-core member of a global communist conspiracy, with its headquarters in Moscow. 

Were the communists about to take power in Guatemala?  Here we see deeply conflicted assumptions:  The Guatemalan army was assumed to be loyal to Arbenz.  But it was also assumed that the army would NEVER permit a communist takeover of Guatemala. Yet somehow even with the profoundly anti-communist Guatemalan Army on the scene, the threat of a communist takeover somehow required the United States to overthrow Arbenz.   There was not a lot of coherence on this key point.  

  

U.S. strategists working on Guatemala seemed to assume that the best or only way to address the perceived threat to U.S. interests in Guatemala was by removing Jacobo Arbenz from power.  But was this a safe assumption? There was legitimate concern about Arbenz, but did that concern mean that the best way to protect U.S. interests was to remove him from power?   Might it have been better for U.S. interests to try to use diplomacy to convince Arbenz to take steps to assuage U.S. concerns, perhaps by firing the communists in his government who were causing so much concern? 

Even if U.S. officials concluded that Arbenz had to go, they also seemed to assume that it would be in the U.S. interest to also roll-back the reforms of the Revolution of 1944. But again, was this a sound assumption?  Might it have been better for the United States to find some way to secure – following an ouster of Arbenz – a continuation of the reform process that the Guatemalans had begun in 1944? 

“Elephantine Delicacy” — Dissent in the Senate

Not everyone bought into the Cold War coup logic and its shaky assumptions.  In late June 1954, Senator William Langer of North Dakota raised questions about U.S. concerns regarding Guatemala:  

“I do not think the United States should jump into the Guatemala situation, a sensitive and very grave threat to world peace, with such elephantine delicacy. I do not believe that the Members of the Senate have been adequately informed as yet as to what is going on in Guatemala. We have had inadequate time to consider such a major declaration on foreign policy.... Is there a foreign invasion of Guatemala, or is there a civil war? If it is a foreign invasion, exactly who are the invading forces, and who are behind them? I ask any Senator if he can answer those questions, and answer them intelligently? ...There has been much talk about the malevolent influence of the $548 million United Fruit Company in Guatemala, which some have charged is bigger than the government itself… Of course we are opposed to external interference with the affairs of any nation, especially so with regard to our sister republics of Latin America. But even more, we will, or we ought to be, committed to the principle that every sovereign nation has a right to determine for itself its own form of government.”

Trigger Pulled: Operation PBSuccess

There are several versions of what happened during June of 1954 in Guatemala.  Those who wish to heap praise on the CIA will present it as a brilliant, well-executed psychological operation in which a small number of clever CIA officers managed to trick President Jacobo Arbenz into believing that an invading force led by Carlos Castillo Armas was about to move in to Guatemala City; this deception, they claim, caused Arbenz to resign. This version focuses on CIA radio stations that peddled “fake news” about Castillo Armas’s advancing army and air force. 

 A more realistic version of the story focuses on U.S. efforts to convince the Guatemalan military to abandon Arbenz. Under this version, cowardly Guatemalan officers became convinced that unless Arbenz was removed, they would soon be forced to fight against U.S. Marines.  Frightened by this possibility, to save their own skins they abandoned Arbenz. According to this version of events, it was this abandonment that caused Arbenz to resign.  The shameful and treasonous behavior of the Guatemalan Army was widely recognized. Historian Piero Gleijeses notes that on August 1, 1954 (shortly after the coup) Guatemalan troops on parade in the capital were jeered and scorned “by the masses and by the upper class, by the defeated and by the victors alike, seen as traitors by the former and cowards by the latter.”   

A third interpretation – espoused by former CIA senior officer Richard Bissel – attributes Arbenz’s resignation to Arbenz’s realization that he was up against the full hostility of the United States, and that he simply could not survive it.   

Brilliant Strategic Leader? Eisenhower’s Role 

At the National War College, Eisenhower is often cited as an example of an effective 20th century American strategist.  He is seen as someone who understood the need for national level strategy, and who knew how to make effective use of staff to develop it.  On Guatemala, It is therefore tempting to think that after he authorized the operation, David Eisenhower must have been too busy with the Soviets and China to pay attention to a banana republic coup d’etat.  But the documents do not allow us to absolve Eisenhower of responsibility in this way.  Instead we see an Eisenhower deeply involved in the operational and even tactical aspects of the operation. John Ranelagh, author of “The Agency – The Rise and Decline of the CIA” notes that, “The President took a very close interest in the operation throughout. He was after all, a soldier by training and was interested in covert operations.”   He was a believer in the power of psychological operations – he had seen them used to good effect in World War II; this appears to have helped keep him interested in the Guatemalan operation.  When the CIA-appointed coup leader Castillo Armas was having trouble in the field, Allen Dulles went personally to Ike for air support – Eisenhower called a supporter who arranged for the needed planes.  When the operation was over, Eisenhower was  briefed by the participants.  He congratulated them for “preventing the establishment of a Soviet beachhead in the Americas.” 

The fact that POTUS was so deeply involved in this small operation may have impeded a more thoughtful consideration of our options, and of the repercussions of the coup.  At times it seemed that there were two levels of decision making at work in PBSuccess: POTUS level and CIA case officer level, with the other levels of the U.S. government not as involved as they should have been.  

Ooops!  Another Phase IV Fail? 

In 1984 I was a U.S. Army Lieutenant in the Foreign Area Officer course at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. For my research paper I looked  at the long term impact of the 1954 coup on U.S. interests.  I concluded that Operation PBSuccess was a “short term success, but a long-term failure.”  Looking beyond the removal of Arbenz (which I concluded was probably justified) I wrote that,  “Every effort should have been made to replace him (Arbenz) with a non-communist reformer who would have been able to continue the reforms initiated by Arevalo.”  When I wrote my research paper, Cullather’s look at CIA operations was ten years in the future – I sensed that we had made a mistake, but until I read Cullather’s book I didn’t realize how bad a mistake it was. 

In my presentation to War College students in March 2019, I noted that many of them would be dismayed by yet another example of a “Phase IV” or "post-conflict" failure (our post-conflict failure in Iraq being, for the students,  a painful recent example).   

David Atlee Phillips writes about the coup follow-up in his book “Night Watch.”  “Carlos Castillo Armas after serving briefly in a three man junta, selected himself as president.  This was possible because one facet of CIA planning that had gone awry in a development beyond control – the moderate civilian who had been groomed to become interim President had contracted a fatal illness.  Armas (sic) was a bad President, tolerating corruption throughout his government and kowtowing to the United Fruit Company more than to his own people.  The United States could have prevented this with the vigorous exercise of diplomatic pressure on Castillo Armas to assure that he pursued social reform for the many rather than venal satisfaction for the few. Instead, Washington breathed a collective sigh of relief and turned to other international problems.“   However,  in Cullather’s review of CIA documents we see no evidence of such a proposed “moderate civilian” leader.  In fact, Cullather convincingly describes a CIA intent on turning back the clock to the authoritarian military rule of 1943.

“OUR RECOMMENDATION IS 

THAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1944 BE DECLARED DEAD.”  

Cullather’s book  makes our follow-through “Phase IV” failure even more infuriating, because he shows that this failure was not an oversight, nor the result of senior officials being distracted by larger issues, nor by the untimely demise of the “good leader” who we really hoped to put in charge.    We now know that CIA officials had carefully considered a post-coup continuation of the reforms, but had instead decided to push Guatemala back into brutal authoritarian rule, back to a regime similar to the military government that had been overthrown ten years earlier by the October revolution.

“Rejecting tactics aimed at merely severing Arbenz’s tie to international communism, (CIA) aimed to produce a radical, revolutionary change in Guatemalan politics.  They sought the reversal of the Revolution of 1944, the termination of land reform, and the replacement of Arbenz with a liberal, authoritarian leader.” (Cullather is using the word liberal in its Central American meaning: there “liberal” had come mean supportive of the agro-export elite.) 

CIA made an extremely important strategic decision based on very tactical – almost marketing – considerations. Cullather notes that “The program and rhetoric of the Revolution of 1944 retained their appeal for many Guatemalans, and LINCOLN (the CIA Headquarters near Miami) had briefly considered appropriating its themes.  But by April (1954) they rejected the idea ‘that a genuinely fervent and lasting revolutionary movement can be based on the principle program of the incumbent regime.’ It would be difficult to loosen Arbenz’s identification with the revolution [                    ] thought, and it might not be worth the effort.  Claiming that Arbenz had betrayed the ideals of 1944 weakened the argument for action ‘because we are only pleading for reform of the present system and there is a world of difference between reform and revolution.” Case officers also felt they needed more conservative themes to appeal to the groups in Guatemala most likely to  take action against the regime:  the army, conservative students, and landowners.  “Our recommendation,” cabled agents in the field, ”is that the revolution of 1944 be declared dead.” 

The decision to have the U.S. government declare the revolution of 1944 to be “dead” is clearly the kind of decision that should be made at the highest levels of the U.S. government.  In today’s terms, this is something that should be taken up at least at the Principals Committee of the NSC.  Instead, we see decisions of this importance apparently being made by CIA case officers in Miami or in Central America.  And in making these decisions they seem to have been looking for an option that would have made it easier for them to sell their coup to skeptical Guatemalans, not for the option that would have been best for the long-term interests of the United States.  This may have been another consequence of the weakening and intimidation of the State Department that took place early in the Eisenhower administration. 

Coup Makers' Remorse

Richard Bissel had been a very senior CIA officer 1954, working as logistical aide to Allen Dulles for the Guatemala coup, rising in the late 1950s to the leadership of the clandestine service as Deputy Director for Plans.  In Leonard Mosley’s book “Dulles” Bissel is quoted:  “Guatemala was a complete success in the sense that the tactical objective was achieved. It was done more or less on time and on budget.  But all you could do with a paramilitary operation like Guatemala was to place in power a friendly individual. Whether, having placed a friendly political leader in power and having got rid of the Communist influences, you can turn the situation around in the country concerned is open to question. We got Arbenz out.  We substituted Armas.  But I think most people would argue that from the day he was installed, nobody has been able to make much of a success of Guatemala.” Bissel went even further in his own book. He wrote: "U.S. interests over the years might have been better served if Arbenz had remained in power."    Having overthrown Arbenz, he wrote, we had a  great "moral obligation" to "try to do something about the underlying situation" in Guatemala.

Phillips

David Atlee Phillips was in charge of the CIA radio stations that were at the heart of the coup operation.  In his book “The Night Watch” he recounts his initial reaction to a CIA briefing on coup plans: 

“But Arbenz became President in a free election,“ I said. “What right do we have to help someone to topple his government and throw him out of office?” On the coup, Phillips worked closely with someone who would later rise to prominence during the Watergate scandal:  E. Howard Hunt.

When I was a young Army Lieutenant, David Atlee Phillips came to Fort Bragg as a guest speaker.  Wanting to talk to him about Guatemala, I arranged to be his host.  Over dinner at the Officers’ Club, I asked him if he felt guilty about the consequences of the coup.   He chuckled and said that he did not.  He dismissed the idea that he and his colleagues were responsible for Guatemala being a violent place – he noted that it was violent long before he got there.  And he reminded me of the Cold War imperatives that the U.S. government was operating under; he noted that when planning for the coup began, Joseph Stalin – and not one of his relatively benign successors – was the leader of the Soviet Union.  At the time, I was willing to accept Phillips’ “cold warrior” explanation for the coup – after all, I was at the time getting ready to head to Central America for what turned out to be the final tropical round of Cold War struggle.  But years later, National War College caused me to reevaluate what Phillips and his colleagues had done. That reevaluation was what I was sharing with the War College students in my lecture. 

Consequences

Of course, the most devastating consequences of the 1954 coup were suffered by the people of Guatemala, especially its indigenous population.  The coup ended a promising and necessary reform process that could have put Guatemala on a much better path.  It set the stage for a wave of urban political violence that became the precursor for the infamous death squad operations that tore through  Chile, Argentina, and many other Latin American countries. Indeed Guatemala appears to have been the origin of the term “los desaparecidos” (“the disappeared").   It led to a counterinsurgency campaign in Eastern Guatemala during the 1960s that shamefully included significant U.S. military involvement.  And it perpetuated conditions that led to the genocidal war against Guatemala’s indigenous population during the 1980s and early 1990s.  

Meir

I described all of this to the students in Roosevelt Hall.  In an effort to make it all a bit less abstract and to connect them to the mayhem, I shared with the students one final ghost story:  I pointed out into the audience and told them that the violence had taken the life of a person who had once sat where they were seated.  On August 28, 1968 John Gordon Mein, National War College Class of 1954,  was killed during a kidnapping attempt by leftist guerrillas.  He was the first U.S. Ambassador in history killed in the line of duty.  Mein had arrived at the War College just as Solarium was wrapping up.  He graduated just before the launch of the coup,  and he died 14 years later in the violence that the coup had ignited. This made him, for me, another of the Ghosts of ‘54.  

The killing of Ambassador Mein clearly got their attention, but overall my lecture that day got a mixed reaction from the students.  Some told me they liked the frank exploration of a misguided U.S. policy, of bad moves made by us on the strategic chess board. They saw this as an opportunity to learn from our mistakes. But the American exceptionalists in the audience seemed to resent hearing about our far-from-exceptional actions in 1954 Guatemala.   I’m sure some of the students disliked the lecture because they correctly saw it as a rejection of the MAGA world-view.   

1954 and 2020 

Unfortunately many of the ugly U.S. domestic cultural factors that played a role in 1954 are still with us today.  The racism that made its way into Kennan’s memo to Acheson is still with us. The scorn and cynicism about prospects for decent democratic government in countries like Guatemala is evident when we hear Trump describe them as “shit hole countries,” or when he slanders the migrants as “murderers and rapists,” or when he keeps people like Steven Miller in the White House.  Racism also helps explain the cruelty with which the migrants – even migrant children – have been treated:  If you are trying to appeal to a base that is xenophobic and racist, cruelty toward immigrants is a feature, not a bug.  So deciding not to give detained children flu shots is – within this twisted worldview – seen as a wise and reasonable move. 

Demagoguery is something else that our current time has in common with 1954; Trump’s persona and shtick are reminiscent  of Joseph McCarthy. Indeed,  McCarthy’s henchman, Roy Cohn, went on to become Trump’s lawyer and mentor – he apparently encouraged Trump to be a bully and to always hit back “ten times harder.”

Roy Cohn and Donald Trump

I think the mistakes we made in 1954 were made possible in part by McCarthy’s weakening and intimidation of government institutions.   Today the situation is far worse.  In his book “On Tyranny Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”  Timothy Snyder discusses a tactic often used by regimes that seek authoritarian power: “Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.”  

In 1954, elements in the U.S. government that might have successfully opposed the coup were, in essence, outgunned by the lobbyists of the United Fruit Company.  Guatemalan economic elites seem to have learned from UFCO's 1954 success;  today, when USG actions threaten the elite’s hold on power or economic advantage, rich Guatemalans hire Washington lobbyists to push back. We saw this in 2017-2018 when a U.N. Anti-Corruption organization launched corruption investigations against Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales and members of the country’s business class. Soon Washington lobbyists were advising the Guatemalans on how to push back.  Morales announced that Guatemala would move its Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and that he had decided to maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan.  That was apparently enough for a very cynical, transactional,and short-sighted U.S administration to drop its support of the UN anti-corruption watchdog.  That effectively ended the anti-corruption investigation.  The Washington swamp obviously has not been drained.  

In the national debate about how to deal with the migrants arriving at our southern border,  Trump and his supporters often act aggrieved and offended, as if the United States is the innocent victim of corruption, crime, and poverty south of the border. They sometimes sound like indignant residents of a prosperous “gated community,” outraged by desperate poverty-stricken outsiders trying to get in.   But a look back at our actions in 1954 makes it clear that we are not innocent victims – we bear at least some responsibility for the conditions driving many of the migrants north.  Perhaps if we had been a bit wiser, a bit more strategic in our thinking, a bit more willing to make effective use of all of the instruments of national power – maybe the reforms of the revolution of 1944 would have continued, and maybe  hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans would not now find themselves forced to flee for their lives. 



End notes

Introduction
Washington Post, November 28, 2019, page 1: “More than 250,000 Guatemalans – at least 2% of the country’s population – have migrated to the United States in the last two years.”

Strategic Framework 
For a more complete look at the framework see: https://nwc.ndu.edu/Portals/71/Documents/Publications/NWC-NDU-Primer.pdf?ver=2019-07-30-105821-630

Guatemala Background
See Chapter 4 of “The Guatemala Reader – History, Culture, Politics” Edited by Grandin, Levenson and Oglesby, Duke University Press, 2011

Interest and Threat – Jacobo Arbenz and the Possibility of Communism in Central America “Central America – A Nation Divided” by Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr.  Oxford University Press 1999, page 201 and 243.

"Bitter Fruit – The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala" by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Doubleday 1982 Pages 38 and 15

 U.S. Domestic Context: Fear of Communism
 “Secret History – The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954” Second Edition, by Nick Cullather, Stanford University Press 2006, pages 26-27

U.S. Domestic Context: Routine Racism Kennan’s memo to Acheson: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v02/d330
 Review of the Diaries: https://newrepublic.com/article/117174/george-f-kennans-diaries-reviewed

U.S. Domestic Context – Joseph McCarthy
 Interview with Edward Clark: https://adst.org/2016/06/cleaning-americas-backyard-overthrow-guatemalas-arbenz/

U.S. Domestic Context – Government ties to the United Fruit Company
 “The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of intervention” by Richard H. Immerman, University of Texas Press, 2010, page 125
"The company hired..."  Schlesinger and Kinzer, page 77

Intel: Sherman Kent and his National Intelligence Estimates
Cullather ibid

Summer School: Project Solarium
“George F. Kennan and the Origins of Eisenhower’s New Look – An Oral History of Project Solarium” Edited by William B. Pickett.  Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University 2004.

 "The new policy placed greater emphasis..." Cullather pages 36-37

Global Context: Operation TPAjax
"Countercoup – The Struggle for Control of Iran" by Kim Roosevelt, McGraw-Hill, 1979

Domestic Context: CIA's New Turf
 Cullather page 39.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBHistory#Aftermath_and_analysis


Opportunity Lost – Embassies staffed for Overthrow, Weakness at State
 Some sources claim that Peurifoy “passed his Foreign Service test” shortly before being assigned as Ambassador to Greece.  I doubt this is true.  These accounts may be the result of confusion about how political appointee Ambassadors are categorized by the State Department.  During their service overseas they are temporarily in the Foreign Service, but they are not career Foreign Service officers and they would not have had to pass the Foreign Service exam.

 Bitsika, Panagiota (26 April 1998). Οι αμερικανοί πρεσβευτές στην Αθήνα[The American ambassadors in Athens]. To Vima (in Greek). Retrieved 18 March2013. Το όνομα «Πιουριφόι» έγινε σύντομα σύμβολο για τον άθλιο και ωμό τρόπο με τον οποίο οι Αμερικανοί φέρονταν στους... υποτελείς τους. Ο βιογράφος του μάλιστα σημειώνει: «Ο Πιουριφόι εννοούσε να φέρεται προς τις ελληνικές κυβερνήσεις σαν να ήταν υποταγμένες, όπως στα πολεμικά χρόνια του 1946-49»." "The name "Peurifoy" soon became a byword for the vile and brutal way the Americans treated their... subjects. His biographer notes that: "Peurifoy intended to behave towards the Greek governments as if they were subservient, as in the war years of 1946–49"."

 Schlesinger and Kinzer page 228 “Before 1954 was out, Dulles gave the flamboyant envoy a new ambassadorial assignment in Thailand. Diplomats in Bangkok familiar with his record in Greece and Guatemala immediately wanted to know: “Is a coup about to occur?”

 Schlesinger and Kinzer page 15

 U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954”, The American Republics Volume IV

 Interview with Clark: https://adst.org/2016/06/cleaning-americas-backyard-overthrow-guatemalas-arbenz/

Robert F. Woodward recounts conversation with Holland: https://adst.org/2016/06/cleaning-americas-backyard-overthrow-guatemalas-arbenz/

 “The Agency – The Rise and Decline of the CIA” by John Ranelagh Touchstone Books 1987 see footnotes on pages 266 and 267.  

 "A word from one brother to another..." Schlesinger and Kinzer, page 108

Elephantine Delicacy – Dissent in the Senate
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol44no5/html/v44i5a03p.htm

Trigger Pulled – Operation PBSuccess
 Piero Gleijeses in his Afterword for Cullather’s “Secret History…”  page xxviii



Brilliant Strategic Leader? Eisenhower's Role
 Ranelagh, footnote, page 266
 "... preventing the establishment" Ranelagh page 268


Ooops! Another Phase IV Fail?
"The Night Watch – 25 Years of Peculiar Service" By David Atlee Phillips, Atheneum 1977
 William R. Meara,  Research paper, John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center
 Phillips page 53

"Our Recommendation Is that the Revolution of 1944 Be Declared Dead"
 Cullather page 60
 Cullather page 61



Coup Makers' Remorse
 Leonard Mosley “Dulles – A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and their Family Network”  The Dial Press, New York, 1978 page 459
 Bissel's comments in his own book: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/14/books/notes-from-under-cover.html
 David Atlee Phillips “Night Watch – 25 Years of Peculiar Service” Atheneum Press 1977  pages 34-35
 William R. Meara “Contra Cross – Insurgency and Tyranny in Central America, 1979-1989”  Naval Institute Press 2006 pages 22-23

Consequences
 See memo by State Department officer Viron Vakey; Grandin, Levenson and Oblesby page 270 

1954 – 2020
Timothy Snyder “On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century” Tim Duggan Books, 2017 page 24


Copyright 2020 by William R. Meara. All rights reserved.