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For more than a week, the CIA dropped smoke bombs from outdated Beechcraft planes.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 27^th, 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?”

Although considered at the time to be grandiose hearsay, General Smedley Butler’s testimony concerning the “Business Plot” to overthrow the Federal government was found credible in 1934 by a special McCormack-Dickstein congressional committee.

In his testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein committee, in which Butler accused many powerful business tycoons and politicians – such as DuPont, J.P. Morgan, even Prescott Bush (father to George H.W. Bush) – of attempting to persuade him to lead 500,000 soldiers in taking the reigns of government from FDR and his progressive proclivities. One year later, the Marine Corps major general wrote a 39-page treatise, “War is a Racket”.

Butler was a war hero. In fact, he was the most decorated Marine of his time, receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. So it may have been a shock for some Americans to hear their famed general accuse powerful people of treason, or the country of racketeering. Or to read sentiments such as this in magazines:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate in three districts. I operated on three continents.” (Common Sense, 1935)

In “War is a Racket”, Butler focuses mainly on the actions of the United States, but one of his main arguments is that all wars are rackets, in that all wars are “conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”

But “the claim that American foreign policy is dictated by economic interests…is a vast over-simplification,” said Michael Morgan, professor of history at UNC at Chapel Hill. “If you say that the [U.S.] only goes to war to help American corporations, well then, that’s an exclusively materialist explanation of foreign policy. There are many more factors other than material interests that influence foreign policy,” he added.

If Morgan is correct, and Butler’s argument lacks nuance, it may have been because of the age in which the general lived. “General Butler’s military experience – Nicaragua, Honduras, Philippines, Mexico – was among the most politicized and aggressive uses of the military advancing U.S. foreign policy interests in U.S. history,” said William Braun, a professor at the U.S. Army War College. With “the exceptions being actual war,” he added.

Whatever the case, whether war is sometimes or always a racket, the fact remains that war has at times been a racket. It remains that the U.S. has used it in such a way, and is arguably still. Economic interest is not the only variable in U.S. foreign policy; however, it is one that is, sadly, lucrative even for the Americans who detest it.