Compare the differences in the US foreign policy to Guatemala between the Bush II and Trump administrations.

Review: The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record Reviewed Work(s): Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954: Guatemala by Review by: STEPHEN G. RABE Source: Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5 (November 2004), pp. 785-790 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24914824 Accessed: 09-12-2019 10:53 UTC

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STEPHEN G. RABE

FEATURE REVIEW

The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record

U.S. Department of State. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954: Guatemala.

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2003. 461 pp. $41.00 (hardcover).

"Bomb repeat Bomb" telegraphed a panicky JMBLUG to Ascham. Calligeris was in danger; his "assets" were "too small." If "we fail to bomb," JMBLUG warned, we will be guilty of "what William James called 'atrocious harmless ness.'" The 19 June 1954 telegram went through the CIA station chief in Guatemala City to CIA headquarters. The author, ambassador to Guatemala John E. Peurifoy (JMBLUG), implored CIA Director Allen Dulles (Robert A. Ascham) to drop the pretense of nonintervention and openly aid the tiny, hapless invading army led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (Calligeris) (p. 352). Operation PBSUCCESS, the U.S. campaign to destroy the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala (1950-54), depended upon persuading or intimidating Guatemalan military officers into overthrowing President Arbenz. Ambassador Peurifoy's reasoning carried the day. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized supplying aircraft to the Guatemalan rebels. On 27 June 1954, President Arbenz announced his resig nation. In the happy postmortem on Operation PBSUCCESS, CIA analysts concluded that "Air Support provided the clincher to the operation" and that "the psychological effect of fighter air support was tremendous and added to the myth that Calligeris's Army was an organized, unbeatable force" (p. 424).

The two documents cited above are among approximately three hundred documents now available to scholars in this new volume in the U.S. State

Department's Foreign Relations (FRUS) series. In this volume on Guatemala, the State Department's Office of the Historian addresses an appalling incident in the history of its distinguished series. In 1983, it released the volume on the American Republics, 1952-1954, which included a section on U.S. policy toward Guatemala.1 The documents did not demonstrate, however, that the CIA had

intervened in Guatemala. In the 1980s, the Ronald Reagan administration had

i. FRUS, 1952-1954, vol. 4: The American Republics (Washington, DC, 1983), 1027-1239.

Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5 (November 2004). © 2004 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

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786 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

sharply restricted what the public could read about the nation's foreign policy past. President Reagan's Executive Order 12356 (1982) permitted the contin ued classification of documents relating to intelligence activities, foreign gov ernment information, and even to the "foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States"—the very purpose of the FRUS series. The order also allowed for the reclassification of public material. Blanche Wiesen Cooke, who among others in the 1970s had used the Freedom of Information Act and the mandatory declassification process to open records on the Eisenhower administration's attack on President Arbenz, estimated that two-thirds of the

Guatemala material was reclassified "during the informational slash and burn years of the Reagan administration."2 The esteemed Bryce Wood sadly con cluded that the listed editors of FRUS volumes had been reduced to mere anno

tators or compilers. The real editors were State Department, CIA, and NSC officials who decided which documents would remain classified.3

In the pretace to this new volume, the Historical Uffice concedes the obvious about the American Republics, 1952-1954 volume, noting that "the historian who collected and prepared the volume knew that the compilation on Guatemala as published was incomplete and flawed." The Historical Office asserts that its staff actually debated whether the volume should include a disclaimer indicating that the Guatemalan section provided "an incomplete and distorted history" (p. iv). Although the professional staff of the Historical Office undoubtedly regretted the omissions, this historian recalls William Z. Slany, the then editor in chief, defending the volume and the similarly suspect volume on Iran, 1952-1954 at professional meetings of historians.4 In any case, persistent lobbying by schol ars and concerned citizens, the winding down of the Cold War, and perhaps public disgust with the Iran-Contra machinations of the Reagan administration combined to force a major change in declassification policies. In 1991, Presi dent George H.W. Bush reluctantly signed legislation mandating that the FRUS series be a "thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record" of U.S. foreign policy and requiring that other government agencies open their records to Department of State historians. In the 1990s, the Historical Office gained access to the CIA records on Guatemala even as the agency was identifying the intervention in Guatemala as one of eleven covert operations it acknowledged conducting during the early Cold War.

Under the aegis of the new declassification rules, the Historical Office is "convinced" that it gained access to all relevant CIA documents. Only two documents were withheld in full from publication, and nine documents have a paragraph or more excised. Most documents have excisions of names and places (pp. v-vii). The editors included handy lists of abbreviations and cryptonyms and persons and pseudonyms. Not all identities of pseudonyms were released.

2. Blanche Wiesen Cooke, "U.S. Foreign Relations History—Is There a Future at All," Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter 29 (November 1991): 11-14.

3. Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin, TX, 1985), 263-65. 4. FRUS, /952-J954, vol. 10: Iran (Washington, DC, 1989).

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The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record : 787

CIA officers apparently preferred pompous, silly-sounding names tor their covers. Richard M. Bissell, deputy director of the CIA, went by "Pinckney E. Lynade." "Walter C. Twicker" was E. Howard Hunt of Watergate notoriety inn. xix-xxi).

Although a wealth of new detail can be found in the Guatemala volume, the documents will probably not substantially change the basic scholarly interpre tations of the CIA's role in Guatemala. For more than two decades, scholars

have been skillfully dissecting the covert operation. In 1982, journalists Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer and historian Richard H. Immerman respec tively published remarkable studies of the U.S. war against President Arbenz. Both Bitter Fruit and The CIA in Guatemala drew on State and Defense Depart ment and FBI records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and

on memoirs and on interviews with U.S. and Guatemalan officials. The two

studies differed slightly in their analysis of U.S. motivations. Immerman noted that, within the prevailing Cold War ethos, U.S. officials believed that by understanding the nature of communism they could identify Communists. Guatemalan radicals reminded U.S. officials of Communists that they had encountered in Europe and Asia. After his first conversation with Arbenz, Ambassador Peurifoy reported that "if the president is not a Communist, he will certainly do until one comes along."5 In contrast, Schlesinger and Kinzer emphasized economic imperatives to explain the U.S. hostility to the Guatemalan revolution. Through Decree 900 (1952), Arbenz expropriated the landholdings of the United Fruit Company of Boston. Numerous Eisenhower administration officials, including CIA Director Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, had once worked for United Fruit.6 To emphasize either strategic or economic motives in analyzing U.S. policies toward Guatemala is perhaps to draw distinctions without differences. Guatemalan leaders seemingly violated both the national security decisions and foreign economic policies of the United States. The Eisenhower administration encapsulated those concerns when it began a comprehensive assessment of Guatemala with the telling ob servation that "the current political situation in Guatemala is adverse to US interests."7 Nonetheless, the new documents lend credence to Immerman's con

clusions. As one CIA official noted, agrarian reform made "land available to Guatemalans in the Communist pattern" (p. 20). The State Department's Office of Intelligence Research added that agrarian reform furnished "a basis for the strengthening of political and Communist control over the rural population" (pp. 70-71).

5- Peurifoy to State Department, 17 December 1953, FRUS, 7952-7954, 4:1095-97. See also Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, TX, 1982), 101-5.

6. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York, 1982), 106-7.

7. National Intelligence Estimate, "Probable Developments in Guatemala," 19 May 1953, FRUS, 1952-1974, 4:1061. See also Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 57-59.

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: DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

Impressive analyses of the U.S. role in Guatemala followed the work of Schlesinger and Kinzer and Immerman. In Shattered Hope, Piero Gleijeses, who is a researcher of amazing energy and dedication, went to Guatemala and inter viewed President Arbenz's enemies and supporters, including Maria Villanova de Arbenz, the president's widow. Gleijeses discovered that Arbenz relied on Guatemala's small Communist party and that he was comfortable with Marxist ideology. Gleijeses rejected, however, U.S. allegations that Arbenz or the Guatemalan Communist Party had ties to the Soviet Union. Gleijeses also asserted that Decree 900 represented the most successful agrarian reform in Latin America's history.8 In Revolution in the Countryside, Jim Handy found that

the transfer of land to perhaps one hundred thousand peasant families posed a challenge to the traditional patterns of rural life. The new landowners, includ ing the historically oppressed Mayan Indians, felt empowered and demanded control over their lives. Wealthy Guatemalans, military officers, and prelates of the Catholic Church reacted with fear and loathing to the idea of the dark skinned, rural poor exercising power.9 The work of Gleijeses and Handy under scored the need for scholars to put the CIA intervention within the context of Guatemala's tumultuous political, social, and racial milieu. It also demonstrated that the CIA could identify Guatemalans who would, for their own purposes, join the U.S. conspiracy against President Arbenz.

in 1999, in nis concise secret ntstory, iMCk 1 .unatner, wno worKea in 1992-93

for the history staff of the CIA before moving to Indiana University, enriched scholarly understanding of the covert intervention. While at the CIA, Cullather won an assignment to write a history of the intervention. The CIA presumably intended to use Cullather's study for training purposes. The CIA subsequently agreed to release Cullather's study and fourteen hundred pages of supporting documents. This represented only a fraction of the records on Guatemala, for Cullather located over 260 boxes containing over 180,000 pages. Some of these documents now appear in this FRUS volume. Cullather decided to limit his study to asking how the CIA defined "success" in PBSUCCESS. The opera tion went into CIA lore as an unblemished triumph. But Cullather found that PBSUCCESS was plagued by shortcomings in intelligence and logistics and the "hopeless weakness" of Castillo Armas's troops. CIA analysts and operatives lacked hard evidence to conclude that President Arbenz resigned because he "lost his nerve" over the show of air power. Guatemalan military officers, who could have readily crushed Castillo Armas, forced Arbenz from power for both international and domestic reasons. They feared that President Eisenhower might send U.S. marines, and they perhaps opposed the pace and direction of change in the Guatemalan countryside.10

8. Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-7954 (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 3-7, 361-87.

9. Jim Handy, Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala, 7944-7954 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), 202-7.

10. Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 7952-7954 (Stanford, CA, 1999), vii-xv, 97-110.

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The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record : 789

Although scholars have a fair understanding of the CIA intervention, the new documents point to areas for thought, speculation, and wonder. After Arbenz's resignation, the CIA vowed to "collect for later study and exploitation the mass of documentation which undoubtedly exists in Guatemala attesting to activities and workings [of] international communism" (p. 408). In Operation PBHIS TORY, the CIA ultimately gathered about 150,000 documents but could find no link between Guatemalan radicals and international Communists. The

imbroglio over Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" was not the first time that the CIA had trouble finding evidence to sustain ideological convictions. Prior to June 1954, the best the CIA could offer was that Guatemalan radicals attended international meetings organized by international Communists (pp. 65-66, 242). In fact, the CIA apparently felt obligated to manufacture evidence to prove a link. In "Operation WASHTUB," the agency planted Soviet arms on the coast of Nicaragua (p. 280). It also spread rumors of Soviet commissars landing in Guatemala and planted stories in Time magazine to discredit the reporting of correspondent Sydney Gruson of the New York Times (pp. 327-29). The CIA's "disinformation" specialists became especially creative under stress.

When, in January 1954, the Arbenz government exposed key elements of PBSUCCESS, the headquarters of the operation, which was based in Florida, recommended responding by fabricating a "big human interest story, like flying saucers, birth of sextuplets in remote area to take play away" (p. 178). Begin ning in 1952, the CIA also compiled lists of Guatemalans meriting "elimina tion," "disposal," or "assassination." On 1 June 1954, an unnamed CIA officer lamented that the disposal list had not been kept "up-to-date." Displaying lit erary flair, the officer noted that "no real analysis has been made to date to determine who is 'to be and not to be'" (p. 302).

The CIA intervention in Guatemala marked a critical moment both in the

history of Guatemala and of inter-American relations. The destruction of the Arbenz government triggered a ghastly, four-decade-long cycle of terror and repression that led to the death of perhaps two hundred thousand Guatemalans. Many Guatemalans were murdered at the hands of right-wing "death squads." In 1999, President Bill Clinton publicly apologized to the people of Guatemala for the U.S. intervention and subsequent support for Guatemala's murderous military and intelligence units. Historians now have the challenge of building on the past scholarship and writing a comprehensive history of the U.S. role in Guatemala during the Cold War that gives proper attention to the dynamics of Guatemala's political and social culture.11 The intervention in Guatemala also bears study because it became a model for the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) and set a precedent for covert interventions in British Guiana (1961-1963), Brazil

11. Stephen M. Streeter has begun this process with his excellent Managing the Counter revolutioni: The United States and Guatemala, içgg-igôi (Athens, OH, 2000). A conference on the consequences of CIA interventions in Iran and Guatemala took place in November 2003 at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. For an account of the conference see Stephen Kinzer, "Revisiting Cold War Coups and Finding Them Costly," New York Times, 30 Novem ber 2003, 4:3.

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790 : DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

(1962-1964), and Chile (1970-1973). Scholars wanting to analyze the planning for the invasion of Cuba or the destabilization tactics used against Cheddi Jagan, Joäo Goulart, and Salvador Allende would be well served by examining the documents in this volume on Guatemala. Tactics developed in Guatemala— psychological warfare and "controlled penetrations" of the military, labor unions, religious organizations, student groups, and media outlets—would be employed throughout the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War (pp. 113-14).

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