Operation PBHistory

On June 30, 1954, three days after the resignation of Árbenz, Wisner sent a telegram that later became known as the "shift of gears cable".[26][27] Two agents from the CIA, and two from the Office of Intelligence Research (OIR), arrived in Guatemala City on July 4. Castillo Armas had arrived in the capital on the previous day to assume the presidency.[28] One of the CIA officers was Lothar Metzl, who was on the counterintelligence staff of the CIA. Metzl was an Austrian, who had studied communist movements since the 1930s, including in Europe.[26][28] In Wisner's words, the agents were supposed to perform a "snatch job on documents while the melon was freshly burst open".[26]

The initial targets of the operation were the personal possessions and documents of Árbenz and those of Carlos Enrique Díaz (who had been chief of the armed forces under Árbenz, and briefly his successor as president), the offices of trade unions, known front organizations, police agencies, and the headquarters of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT).[28] The results of the initial searches were disappointing for the CIA; many of the offices had already been plundered both by the Guatemalan army and by other looters.[25][26][28] The CIA were particularly interested in finding documents that mentioned the Árbenz government's purchase of weapons from Czechoslovakia, but they were unsuccessful. They were also unsuccessful in finding any evidence that the Soviet Union had controlled the communist movement in Guatemala.[28]

Despite these difficulties, the agents collected 150,000 documents, in addition to a number of government files, which the agency judged to be useful. The CIA received assistance in collecting these from Castillo Armas's junta, and from the Guatemalan army. The haul was described as the "greatest catch of documents ever left behind by a Communist Party and its auxiliaries".[29][30] Most of these had nothing but "local significance".[30] Although no documents were discovered demonstrating Soviet influence, the CIA hoped to use the large number of papers to show that the communists in Guatemala had had a large influence over the government, through institutions like labor unions, peasant organizations, student unions, and youth groups.[29][30]

On July 20, the CIA agents presented the results of their first two weeks of work in Washington. At Wisner's request, Tracy Barnes—principal manager of CIA operations in PBSuccess—created a booklet from these documents to show to US President Dwight Eisenhower.[31] The 23 documents in the booklet included communist literature owned by Árbenz, such as a Chinese study on agrarian reform and some Marxist volumes, as well as diplomatic records implying communist sympathies, and a biography of Joseph Stalin belonging to Árbenz's wife Maria Cristina Villanova.[30][31] After the presentation, Wisner decided that the examination of the seized documents needed to proceed faster, and so expanded the group of agents working in Guatemala.[31]

One of the aims of the new team was to help Castillo Armas establish an intelligence agency that would be able to fight communism in Guatemala. Castillo Armas was pressured to create an anti-communist task force, which he did on July 20—creating the National Committee of Defense Against Communism (Comité de Defensa Nacional contra el Comunismo). The purpose of this group was to create an anti-communist bureaucracy and intelligence service and to organize records and facilitate PBHistory. The Comité secretly received funds from the CIA, with the understanding that this fact could prove "very embarrassing" and that a new source would eventually need to be found.[32] Although the Comité was theoretically an intelligence agency, it also had some police powers. It could order the arrest of anybody suspected of being a communist, and had oversight over all army and police authorities. The CIA team was supposed to help it set up by creating a nucleus of information about people associated with the PGT.[32]

The Comité was not, however, granted the power to arrest or search the house of prominent government officials who had served under Árbenz. This was largely because Castillo Armas and other military leaders lacked trust in the Comité.[33] Nevertheless, the Comité was able to conduct personal searches of exiles as they left the country. This proved to be ineffective as very few documents proved to be revealing.[33]

On August 4, a new and larger US contingent was deployed to Guatemala. In order to remain covert, this group identified itself to Armas as the "Social Research Group", composed of businessmen and experts from universities. It consisted of eight CIA officers, three men from the State Department, and one from the US Information Agency.[31] It was led by an officer working under the pseudonym "Francis T. Mylkes," and included David Atlee Phillips, who was fluent in Spanish and had been part of the PBSuccess team. The group presented itself as unaffiliated with the US government in order to avoid nationalist backlash and to maintain plausible deniability.[32] The new PBHistory group worked directly with the new Guatemalan Comité training its 25 agents and using them to procure documents; the training covered topics including screening, organizing, and classifying confiscated documents, as well as "the rudiments of mail control, logging, abstracting, and cryptic reference".[32]

Eventually, the 25 personnel of the Comité joined the CIA officers in sorting and processing the seized documents. The CIA officers had a separate side entrance to the building in which the operations took place, in order to maintain the image that the operation was a Guatemalan internal affair.[33] The task of sorting through the papers proved to be daunting: by September, the main index of the material contained 15,800 cards. All hand-written material was preserved, and multiple copies of printed material were kept. Every document had to be reproduced, because the original copies of each one were to remain in Guatemala.[33] Approximately half of the paper that had been gathered was incinerated. The CIA gave the highest priority to the documents seized from the PGT.[33]

By September 1954, the PBHistory agents had found only a few top secret documents. Some documents showed that government officials and communist party leaders had been able to dispose of most of the sensitive material before they left.[33] In the period of uncertain leadership that followed Árbenz's overthrow, a member of one of the series of ruling juntas had prevented the Comité from searching the homes of private citizens, and from arresting them, which potentially reduced the number of sensitive documents the CIA had access to. Additionally, Castillo Armas stated after taking power that the intelligence information of the army had been completely destroyed.[33]

The CIA finished processing documents on September 28, 1954. By this point, the agents had parsed through more than 500,000 unique documents. Photostatic copies were taken of 2,095 important documents, 750 photographs of the material were published for the use of the media, and 50,000 documents were microfilmed.[33][34] Copies of a handful of important documents were distributed to the various agencies that had been a part of PBHistory, as well as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.[33]

Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The CIA opened a file on him as a consequence of Operation PBHistory and Operation Kufire, while he was still only known as a physician.[37]

Operation Kufire was a wide-ranging effort to track communists from various countries across Latin America who had come to Guatemala during the presidency of Árbenz.[36] The CIA expected that these individuals would return to their home countries, or to other countries that had liberal policies about political asylum, and by tracking them, the CIA hoped to disrupt their activities.[36] During the course of this operation, a CIA analyst asked Philips whether to open a file on a 25-year-old physician, who did not at the time appear to be particularly threatening. Philips said yes, thereby opening a file on Ernesto "Che" Guevara, which would quickly become one of the thickest files the CIA had on a single individual.[37] Che's name was added to a secret CIA kill list of individuals targeted for assassination.[38] Few other documents resulted in files that were of enduring value to the CIA.[37]

Operation Kugown was the name given to the psychological warfare operation that had played an important part in the overthrow of Árbenz. During the coup, its primary targets had been the Árbenz government. After the conclusion of the coup, Kugown continued, targeting the rest of Guatemala, and the wider international audience.[37] The aim of the operation was to disseminate derogatory information about Árbenz,[37] and to convince Guatemalans—and the rest of the world—that Árbenz's regime had been communist-dominated.[39] The use of documents from PBHistory for Operation Kugown began in August 1954. The standard method employed by the CIA was to select a document that could be portrayed as incriminating and write an explanation covering it. This would then be released to the press by the Comité, so that the local agency could receive some credit.[40] The Comité also released a short documentary film, titled Después Descubrimos La Verdad ("Later We Discovered the Truth"). Through these avenues news media in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America were saturated with stories of how the Árbenz government had been controlled by communists.[40]

While the press releases had a substantial impact within Guatemala, the CIA was unable to staunch the continued criticism of the US role in the coup, which came from virtually all countries except for West Germany and the US itself. Very few news agencies chose to run the press releases from the Comité, even though a number of them were put out.[40] Information was sent to press agencies worldwide describing infiltration by the PGT and links among Communists elsewhere; nonetheless, their impact remained minimal.[40] The lack of attention frustrated the PBHistory agents to the point where they planned to stage a false flag attack on their own headquarters, which would later be described as the work of Guatemala's remaining communists.[41] However, the CIA decided that such an attack would need the cooperation of too many "indigenous" people, and the plan was scrapped as being too risky.[41] Operation Kugown also released a large quantity of communist propaganda material that had entered Guatemala from countries within the Soviet sphere of influence; these convinced American journalists such as Donald Grant, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that there must have been a connection between Árbenz and the Soviet government.[41][42][43] Ultimately, these operations were unsuccessful in convincing Latin America that the 1954 coup was justified.[44]

CIA Director Allen Dulles, who channeled information to the Kersten committee to prevent the committee unintentionally disrupting CIA operations

Charles Kersten, head of the Kersten Committee

Information from the PBHistory documents was disseminated by the officials of both the US and Guatemalan governments. US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge made use of 21 documents in a speech he made at the United Nations.[45] Information was also funnelled to US ambassadors and Congresspeople. The US Congress in 1954 was among the few Republican controlled Congresses in many years. Republicans sought to use an anti-communist push to generate support for themselves and to erode the voting base of the Democratic Party. Anti-Communist members of the US Congress, such as Charles J. Kersten and Patrick J. Hillings of the Kersten Committee, enthusiastically involved themselves with PBHistory.[46] By August 1954, Kersten was receiving PBHistory documents from Dulles so he could use them in speeches to Congress about the Soviet Union's influence in Guatemala.[47] In September and October 1954, the Kersten Committee held hearings purportedly investigating the penetration of communist influence. PBHistory documents were used in this process, and Castillo Armas became the first head of state to testify before a US Congress committee (although he did so through the use of a tape recording of his testimony).[48] Although the hearings did little to unearth information about communist presence in Guatemala, they provided Operation PBHistory with huge publicity within the US.[48]

At the same time, the involvement of the Kersten committee and of Kersten and Hillings caused concern for the CIA. Dulles constantly worried that their investigation would damage CIA operations, particularly when Hillings visited Guatemala shortly before PBSuccess was to begin.[47] Congresspeople had not officially been informed of the CIA's role in the coup, and Dulles wished to keep them uninformed. By supplying them with PBHistory documents, Dulles hoped to forestall them from inadvertently exposing the CIA's other projects.[47] Following the hearings, a subcommittee headed by Hillings produced a final report. In addition to stating without evidence that the Guatemalan government had been acting under orders from the Soviet Union, this report falsely claimed that Soviet weapons had been brought covertly to Guatemala by submarine.[49] This unintentionally drew attention to Operation Washtub, a CIA effort to foist incriminating weapons on the Guatemalan government.[49][50]

Once the CIA had stopped using the documents for propaganda purposes, the agents in charge of PBHistory decided that the best use of the documents they had uncovered would be to record the growth of the communist movement in Guatemala. This research was undertaken by the US State Department's Office of Intelligence Research.[51] The OIR produced a 50-page report after five months of work; the State Department considered it the "definitive answer" to the question of how communism had arisen in Guatemala.[51] The government of Honduras, which had allowed its territory to be used as a "staging area" for the coup against Árbenz, also made use of the PBHistory papers to justify its position. It argued that it had been facing interference in its internal matters from communists in Guatemala.[41]