The CIA’s biography on its Twitter handle (yes, the CIA tweets) reads: “We are the Nation’s first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go.” This self-characterization is rather astonishing not because is it is true or untrue, but because, especially the latter, it is true in ways that the CIA may not have intended; in ways that have damaged the U.S.’s soft power, as well as damaged other nations with negative effects often reverberating for decades.
The CIA perhaps accomplished what others could not do 61 years ago in Guatemala. In the summer of 1954, the Central American country underwent a coup d’etat that was pushed for by a private American company, The United Fruit Company (UFC), through its ties to Eisenhower’s administration. Ike’s administration and Congress would later sell the “war” under the banner of helping “roll back” communism, as Secretary of State Dulles said. The CIA was charged with ordering the overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan government in a wild and surreal mission of smoke and mirrors, code-named, Operation PBSuccess.
The newly founded secret force put together a covert and political and paramilitary unit that included a Guatemalan puppet dictator named Castillo Armas, a small force of four hundred men, a few planes and a few outlandish schemes that, together, would trick the Guatemalan government and people into believing that their country was being invaded by a large, overwhelming force. Operation PBSuccess was designed and executed, officially, as said before, to roll back communism. Many, even in the U.S. government, believed that. But in reality, it was designed and executed to roll back a few land reforms enacted by the democratically elected Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz, which financially hurt the UFC and helped the Guatemalan people.
For more than a week, the CIA dropped smoke bombs from outdated Beechcraft planes. They jammed radio stations, leaving only their own stations to broadcast fake reports of an Armas rebel invasion of 5,000 men. During one air raid on Guatemala City, the “Americans played a tape recording of a bombing attack over large loud-speakers set up on the embassy roof that heightened the anxiety of the capital’s residents,” wrote Stephen Schlesinger in his book, “Bitter Fruit”. Finally, on June 27th, 1954, Arbenz said goodbye to a Guatemalan people, although they likely did not hear him since it was a radio address.
“Guatemala was very important because it was so successful, “ said Walter LaFeber, author of “Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America”, over the phone. “The result of all this was – this and the Iranian business a year before, restoring the Shah of Iran in 1953 – that it led the CIA and the State Department to believe that these things could be done, and they could be done efficiently, quickly…and they denied it the whole way through both of them.”
As LaFeber said, the CIA was also instrumental in the Iranian coup d’etat in 1953 (born in 1946, it was the CIA’s first such action), once again overthrowing a democratically elected Prime Minister. However, “the British had been heavily involved in Iran and controlled Iranian oil,” said LaFeber, and were thus our allies in the overthrow, perhaps the principal instigator. Consequently, the CIA’s toppling of the Guatemalan government in 1954 set an important, unsettling precedent that it could not only execute such missions but also do it unilaterally.
These rather perfidious types of international moves (Iran, Guatemala, Laos in the ‘60’s, Cuba in 1961) are rarely beneficial to the United States, not to mention the victimized country, LaFeber said. They weaken U.S.’s soft power and diplomatic relations (the U.S. and Cuba are just now getting relations back together), and often leave the now broken country hobbling into the future for any number of years. And furthermore, in an even more disturbing twist, they are devised and carried out at the behest of private corporations seeking higher profits.
In light of this history, and how it connects to the present day, one may find themselves wondering: “What exactly is the CIA trying to accomplish and where are they trying to go?”
