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When Dwight Eisenhower assumed the presidency in January 1953, the press campaign aimed at Guatemala had not yet caught his interest. His most pressing foreign policy problem— outside of winding down the Korean War and dealing with the Soviet Union—was Iran, where Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh had nationalized the British oil companies and was publicly threatening the Shah's rule. A few months after entering the White House, the new President, at the urging of his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, gave the signal to launch a CIA coup in Iran. In August, CIA agents under the leadership of Kermit Roosevelt threw Mossadegh out of office and brought the Shah back from exile to the Peacock Throne.

Eisenhower's decision to use the CIA as a blunt instrument of

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political intervention marked a break from the practices of President Truman, who had used the CIA principally to collect intelligence.

Kermit Roosevelt, as he himself later conceded, could not have undertaken such a mission in the previous administration. In his account of the Iranian operation, Roosevelt recalled that when British intelligence approached him in 1952 about overthrowing Mossadegh, he told them: "We had, I felt sure, no chance to win approval from the outgoing administration of Truman and Acheson. The new Republicans, however, might be different."¹

The newcomers were different indeed. Eisenhower had assailed Truman's foreign policy during the 1952 campaign as "soft on Communism." Republican vice-presidential nominee Richard Nixon accused the Democrats of "twenty years of treason." Dulles, the likely Secretary of State, confidently told audiences that the Republicans would "roll back the Iron Curtain" in Eastern Europe. Privately, his brother Allen—already thought of as the probable Director of the CIA—informed associates that if Communists threatened to take over a country, he wouldn't "wait for an engraved invitation to come in and give aid."²

To accomplish their goals, the Republicans once in office acted to liberate the CIA from its Truman-imposed restrictions. The agency's original legislative charter in 1947 contained a phrase authorizing it to

"perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." Under this provision in 1948, the NSC had allowed the CIA to set up a covert political and paramilitary unit, which began its work directed by an intense New York lawyer named Frank Wisner, but otherwise the NSC kept the unit under tight control. With Dulles' ascension, however, the CIA embarked on an activist course.³

Kermit Roosevelt, on his return from Iran late in the summer of 1953, himself sensed that the agency's free-wheeling policy was already getting out of hand. When Roosevelt made his presentation at the White House about how the coup in Iran succeeded, he noted to his dismay that the Secretary of State's "eyes were gleaming; he seemed to be purring like a giant cat. Clearly he was enjoying what he was hearing, but my instincts

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told me that he was planning [something else] as well." Roosevelt decided it was important for him, as the acknowledged expert on covert operations, to warn the group—which included President Eisenhower—

that future coups wouldn't work unless the people and the army in the country "want what we want." Dulles "did not want to hear what I was saying," Roosevelt remembered. "He was still leaning back in his chair with a catlike grin on his face. Within weeks I was offered command of a Guatemalan undertaking already in preparation. A quick check suggested that my requirements were not likely to be met. I declined the offer."⁴

Secretary of State Dulles was not the sort of person who would have taken much notice of Roosevelt's admonitions in any case. Once set on a course, he was not the type to be budged. He was, Winston Churchill once said, "the only case I know of a bull who carries his china shop with him." His objective was to demonstrate forcefully that the U.S.

could "roll back" Communism and reverse "Marxist-Leninist takeovers"

anywhere on the globe. Dulles, like religious zealots he often resembled, viewed the world in stark black and white; those countries not for him were against him. No distinctions among variants of neutralism, nationalism, socialism or Communism ever entered his head. Yet Dulles had enough of a survival instinct to realize that he could not, as he had promised during the campaign, simply force the Soviets out of Eastern Europe without provoking a world war. So he set out to do his "rolling back" on safer terrain.

Dulles had also ignored Kermit Roosevelt's warnings for another, more potent reason: he was currying political favor with the crusading right-wing constituency which had helped put Eisenhower into office in 1952. Dulles was determined to placate the recognized leader of American "super-patriots," Senator Joseph McCarthy. Soon after he took office, indeed, he hired a McCarthy associate, Scott McLeod, as Personnel and Security Officer for the State Department and assigned him to check the "loyalty" of all present and incoming department officials, especially new ambassadors. With this gesture to McCarthy, Dulles helped make the Wisconsin senator's view of the bipolar world respectable among State officials.

Among those pleased with the turn of events in Washington

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was the United Fruit Company, so long frustrated by Truman's aversion to covert operations. In 1952, it had as noted earlier secured Truman's tentative backing for a plot against the Guatemalan government called Operation Fortune, originally promoted by the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza Garcia. "Just give me the arms and I'll clean up Guatemala for you in no time," Somoza had told State Department officials. They paid little attention, but one of Truman's military aides, a Colonel Marrow, decided the plan had merit and persuaded Truman to endorse it.

Without telling the State Department, Truman gave General Walter Bedell Smith, then chief of the CIA, a go-ahead to proceed with the plot. Smith put Colonel J. C. King, Western Hemisphere director for the agency, in charge. Weapons were gathered and loaded aboard a boat owned by the United Fruit Company, whose chief officers were friendly with King from past operations, as "agricultural machinery" in cases to be shipped to a group of Guatemalan exiles and mercenaries in Nicaragua. Thomas Corcoran, the Fruit Company's counsel, acted as liaison with the CIA during Operation Fortune. Dictators Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Marcos Perez Jimenez of Venezuela, both right-wing anti-Communists, put up cash for the conspirators. But David Bruce, Undersecretary of State, learned of the freighter's sailing and was aghast. He went to his boss, Dean Acheson, who shared his misgivings and quickly persuaded Truman to abort the mission.⁵

After Eisenhower took office, United Fruit sought to resurrect an anti-Guatemalan plot, again using Corcoran as its emissary. The Dulles brothers—Secretary of State John and CIA Director Allen—were responsive to the idea. The Secretary of State had already approved a confidential memorandum stating: Unofficially we can support well-organized counter-revolutionary operations mounted from neighboring countries, if such support would contribute to their success." The brothers gave the job to Colonel J. C. King once again. Bruised by his first venture, King tried a new tack.⁶

The first expropriations of United Fruit land were just occurring in Guatemala. King approached disgruntled right-wing officers in the Guatemalan Army and arranged to send them CIA

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small arms. The United Fruit Company donated $64,000 in cash. Then just two weeks after Spruille Braden's incendiary speech at Dartmouth College in which he called for American intervention against the Arbenz regime, on March 29, 1953, two hundred raiders seized Salama, a provincial capital not far from Guatemala City, and held it for seventeen hours. They were soon crushed by government forces, and uprisings planned in other villages fizzled. The government killed four of the captives during an "escape attempt" and jailed the rest. The rebels were quickly put on trial and revealed United Fruit's role in the plot, though not the CIA's.⁷

Following the abortive Salama revolt, the U.S. government hardened its attitude toward Guatemala. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs John Moors Cabot (brother of Thomas Cabot, one-time president of United Fruit) had already —just a few days before Salama—sent the Guatemalan government a blistering diplomatic note condemning its seizure of United Fruit land and demanding "just"

compensation. He repeated this demand forcefully during a visit to Guatemala in April. On his return he informed the State Department:

"The Foreign Minister was a complete jackass who talked endlessly without making any sense. President Arbenz had the pale, cold-lipped look of the ideologue and showed no interest in my suggestions for a change in his government's direction. He had obviously sold out to the Communists and that was that."

Cabot asked the State Department's intelligence unit to assess the impact of U.S. arms sales to countries near Guatemala. The study, in which the CIA also participated, was completed in June and concluded that providing arms to nearby countries hostile to Arbenz would be a clear enough threat to the Guatemalan military to induce it to withdraw support for Arbenz.⁸

Around the same time, Adolf Berle, Roosevelt brain truster and a leader of the New York Liberal Party, sent his own proposal on Guatemala to the White House. Ambassador to Brazil during the Truman administration, Berle had a long-standing interest in Latin America. His New York law firm represented several U.S. corporations operating in Central America, and he had friends at United Fruit—

though he was not aware of the Administration's plans to overthrow Arbenz. Berle's memo proposed

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setting up a network of U.S. ambassadors in the five Central American nations and placing a "theater commander" in the area. Berle argued that the Guatemalan situation represented a "genuine penetration" of Central America by "Kremlin communism" following the "advance planning"

of the Russian ambassador to Mexico in 1945, Constantine Oumansky.

Berle agreed with President Jose Figueres of Costa Rica that Arbenz, though "not a communist," was "weak" and "probably a fellow-trav-eler." Though it is unclear whether Berle's memo ever reached the Dulles brothers, the final plan to depose Arbenz incorporated some of his suggestions.⁹

The Guatemalan ambassador in Washington, Guillermo Toriello, sensed the quickening pace of U.S. activity. He intensified his efforts to reach some sort of accommodation with the Eisenhower administration over the land expropriations. He met repeatedly with State Department officials—at a rate of once a month in the first half of 1953, talking with almost every major figure in the State Department's Latin America bureau— to no avail. In each meeting, Toriello tried to explain the ra-tionale for his nation's agrarian reform act, but each time his ex-planations were rejected.¹⁰

Toriello's basic pitch was that the land reform law, having a general character applicable to Guatemalan and foreigner alike, was within the sovereign rights of the republic. He denied it discriminated against the Fruit Company as the firm charged, and asserted that the compensation offered was fair since it was based on the company's own valuation of the land's worth for tax purposes. He noted that the expropriations benefited a large number of landless peasants who lived in terrible poverty and also ended the unfair concessions given to the Fruit Company under Estrada Cabrera and Ubico. While Communists were few in number and generally "discredited" in his country, he added, they nonetheless had the right to exercise their civil liberties under the Guatemalan constitution. He urged the United States to lift its ban on selling arms and airplanes to Guatemala—a ban imposed in 1948 when the United States began to protest some of the social legislation of the revolutionary Guatemalan government—and hinted that a new arms arrangement might be the basis of an overall settlement between the two countries.¹¹

Guatemala's 1944 revolution brought the downfall of the nation's last old-style military dictator, General Jorge Ubico. (Credit: Jose Francisco Mufioz)

Until elections could be held, the country was ruled by a triumvirate made up of (left to right) Major Francisco Arana, businessman Jorge Toriello and Captain Jacobo Arbenz.

The two young officers led the revolt that toppled the dictatorship hut later broke over the course of the new government. (Credit: Rafael Morales)

Juan Jose Arevalo was forty-two years old when he became Guatemala's first popu-larly elected President in 1945.

He is seen here on the day he took office. Wearing the ceremonial sash, he declared in his inau-gural address that his

administration would he "a period of sympathy for the man who works in the fields, in the shops, on the military bases, in small businesses."

(Credit: Rafael Morales)

Arevalo s successor was one of the heroes of the 1944 uprising, Jacobo Arbenz. He wanted to transform Guatemala "from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state."

(Credit: Rafael Morales)

Sam "the Banana Man" Zemurray of United Fruit standing an one of the two sprawling plantations the company maintained in Guatemala. After President Arhenz took over some of United Fruit's unused land, the Boston-based company asked the CIA to overthrow him. (Credit: Eliot Elisofon, Life, 1951 Time, Inc.)

Charges of Communist influence dogged the Arhenz regime. The two leading Guatemalan Communists in the early 1950s were young organizers Victor Manuel Gutierrez (left) and Jose Manuel Fortuny (right). (Credit: Rafael Morales)

Arbenz's wife, Maria Vilanova, skillfully manipulated on behalf of her husband's career and sometimes seemed more ambitious for him than he was for himself. The couple is shown here while Arbenz was President. (Credit: Wide World Photos)

When the United States decided to overthrow Arbenz, the State Department replaced the mild-mannered American ambassador to Guatemala with tough-talking, flamboyant John E. Peurifoy, seen here holding copies of leftist newspapers. (Credit: Wide World Photos)

The most forceful defender of Guatemalan

democracy in international forums was Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello, seen here with President Arbenz. (Credit: Wide World Photos)

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (seated at right) personally led the American delegation to the Tenth Inter-American Conference at Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1954.

He spent two weeks there lobbying for passage of a resolution condemning Communism in the Americas—a proclamation Dulles thought he might need to justify the Guatemalan coup he was planning. Among those present in Caracas was Guatemalan Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello (left). (Credit: Wide World Photos)

CIA Director Allen Dulles was the godfather of Operation Success, the plot to overthrow Arbenz. (Credit:

UPI Photo)

American pilots paid by the CIA flew air raids for the rebel forces. One struck a gasoline storage depot (top) and another bombed Fort Matamoros, a key military installation in the capital (bottom). (Credit: Top—Wide World Photos; bottom—Leonard McCombe, Life, Time, Inc.)

The military government of Honduras, which strongly supported the U.S.-backed rebels, complained at the height of the battle that it had been bombed by Guatemalan planes. But photographers who visited the site of the "attack," the small Honduran town of San Pedro de Cobdn, found only this unexploded bomb and no damage. (Credit: Wide World Photos)

OPERATION SUCCESS 105 American officials replied each time that the disagreements between the United States and Guatemala had nothing to do with the United Fruit Company, but rather concerned the failure of President Arbenz to oust Communists from his government. Until Arbenz did so, they said, relations would remain strained and there would be no American military supplies for Guatemala. As for the United Fruit controversy, the United States made clear its feeling that the seizure of Fruit Company land was "discriminatory" since of the first 337,000 acres taken over under the program, about two thirds belonged to the company. Moreover, the United States argued, the company required generous amounts of extra fallow land as protection in case banana diseases ravaged existing plantations. Without the additional acreage—

85 percent of the company's land in Guatemala was uncultivated—the firm said, it might not be able to continue its operations. State Department officers also complained that compensation in bonds did not constitute "prompt or effective" payments under international law and that evaluation of land based on tax assessments was unfair since those assessments were below fair or real value. There was no indica-tion of compromise in the U.S. approach, nor was there any hesitaindica-tion on the part of the American government to act as an agent for the private corporation.¹²

Some American officials, though, argued for a more temperate course. Major General R. C. Partridge, who visited Guatemala in May 1953 to inspect the U.S. military missions in the country, wrote Cabot afterward that Arbenz's "land and other reforms [are] no basis to quarrel" and we should "approve [them] in principle" while making clear the U.S. desire that the Communists be eliminated from the regime. In a similar vein, a top-secret policy memorandum on Latin America produced by the National Security Council in March 1953 argued for a "hemisphere-wide" approach to problems like Guatemala and warned against unilateral intervention. Jose Figueres, the influential liberal (and fiercely anti-Communist) President of Costa Rica, also argued repeatedly against armed intervention in favor of collective political pressure.¹³

But such approaches, it was clear, did not appeal to the Dulles brothers. In their view, Arbenz's policy proved his regime

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Communist in all but name. The Arbenz government's continuing employment of Communists in low-level posts was taken as a demonstration of bad faith and evil intent. But the takeover of United Fruit land was probably the decisive factor pushing the Americans into action. Without United Fruit's troubles, it seems probable that the Dulles brothers might not have paid such intense attention to the few Communists in Guatemala, since larger numbers had taken part in political activity on a greater scale during the postwar years in Brazil, Chile and Costa Rica without causing excessive concern in the U.S.

government.¹⁴

United Fruit could also count on an especially receptive audience in the Eisenhower administration, particularly among the main players in the Guatemalan drama. John Foster Dulles had been a senior partner of the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which did legal work for the international financial house J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation. Schroder bank was the key financial adviser to the International Railways of Central America (IRCA), which owned most of Guatemala's train lines. In 1936, the United Fruit Company, holding a small interest in IRCA, sought to take over the railroad company to ensure its power to set transportation rates, as well as to block the entry of any rival banana operation into Guatemala. Dulles, as general counsel to Schroder, handled the negotiations, arranging a cozy deal with United Fruit at the expense of his putative client, IRCA, and reaping a tidy profit for the Schroder Banking Corporation.

Allen Dulles also did legal work for Sullivan and Cromwell in the

Allen Dulles also did legal work for Sullivan and Cromwell in the