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ebclUashiNton Post intuAint . ai in ivmsolpmu • rt .71 4 3 F The CIA's handiwork: A triumphal procession for the handpicked new leader of Guatemala in 1954. Page 111, FEATURES DEPARTMENTS 1 UNCOMMON SENSE ,171 By Jeanne Mane Lasks 11r1 3 41.1 10 Faith and miracles Nl Are Americans becoming more violent? Debased? Desensitized? REAL TIME 1:111 111 Has popular culture sparked a kind of national moral decline? To enter 1 5 Br Lon Montgomery 14. the world of 14-year-old Aaron Wolf—a nice kid who swims, bowls, gets Have gun. will travel 111 41. 1 good grades and says, "I just really like watching violence"—is to confront DINING NB. f these questions in their most disturbing form RV DAVID FINKEL n1 By Phyllis C Richman N 23 ut Life with noodles n ler- THE PUZZLE , 33 By Arthur S Verdesca m11 - u 01 Box Me Flops 101 11 WITS END wool 36 By Dove Barry Dave & Colin reiv, 11 1 111 1. .1. 4 18 47 Nl At a time when new CIA Director John Deutch is calling for stepped-up covert operations to battle post-Cold War threats such as .41Arll terrorism, the full story of Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala in 1954 11 41, 1 provides a reminder of what the CIA can accomplish—and how the agency's most dangerous illusions were born BY EVAN THOMAS phro,,cranh h. Djnwl 5.ffn. Solunon io but rek's putt on piv 24 kic rt.) A1 1991 Last month, CIA Director John Deutch fired two spies for failing to report properly `Yo about human rights abuses in Guatemala. The scandal made headlines and provoked heated debate inside OwnM the CIA headquarters. For old agency hands, it was a bittersweet reminder that there was a time, World not so long ago, On June 15, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to launch an opera- when a spy could tion code-named PBSUCCESS, an attempt to overthrow the communist-leaning, reform-minded government of the small Central American nation of Guatemala 1 do just about want you all to be damn good and sure you succeed," the president told his CIA director, Allen Dulles. what he pleased When you commit the flag, you commit it to win." The CIA's "field" headquarters for the covert oper- in a little country ation were on an abandoned Marine air base in Opa- Ludo. Fla., in a suite of offices over a former nursery. like Guatemala ... In the dusty old barracks, determined men moved swiftly, impressive maps and a 40-foot chart lined the walls, phones rang, By Evan telexes chattered. To Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes, the Ivy League- Thomas In promoting the Guatemalan coup. Tracy B. I COPYRIGHT MIA fir RYAN THOMAS FROM THE THE URI' REST MfiN, PURL'S/AO 67 SINION k SCHUSTER INC PRINTED NY PERMASION in coup, "'retry Barnes, far left, relied on psywar devices, including this photo op. wrier* CIA-recruited rebels hold an effigy of the president at gunpoint. OCTOBER :11. 1991 19 spreading on the map. It was his personal action arm: All he needed to do was call his brother, Allen, the CIA director. So the new battleground would BI be back alleys and restless bar- mil racks from Cairo to Havana. The Third World beckoned as an eas- 11 a ier place to operate than the East I I %6 di. Bloc. The communists were the --11? insurgents, not the government. h The Kremlin had long tentacles, tit' It ti .1 but they became attenuated with distance; local communist move- ments were easier to penetrate than ones close to Moscow Cen- ter. Third World strongmen were already dependent on American and British companies to run their economies, and the services of many public servants south of the border and east of the Levant were for sale. By judiciously dis- pensing cash and favors, an American CIA station chief could gain the kind of power enjoyed by a colonial proconsul. The odds for intervention seemed so encouraging that the men who ran the CIA overlooked one shortcoming: They knew al- most nothing about the so-called Developing World. In Guatemala. the CIA had pulled together a rebel "army" of 200 men, which it trained on one of Gen. Anastasio Somoza's Nicaraguan plantations. The chief CIA trainer was an American sol- dier of fortune named William "Rip" Robertson. The rebel corn- ° mander—the "liberator"—was a disaffected Guatemalan army offi- cer named Carlos Castillo Armas. Robertson regarded his recruits as "10th rate" and sarcastically said that Castillo Armas "might bred senior CIA operatives sent to supervise the attempted coup, it make sergeant in the American Army." Tracy Barnes had his all looked like a smoothly run, crisply efficient organization. doubts about Castillo .Armas, whom he called a "bold but incompe- Artful, quick, inexpensive coups d'etat Here was a role for the tent man.' But he tried to put a brave face on Castillo Armas's rag- CIA that really worked, or so Bissell and Barnes believed. At the tag soldiers, calling them "the hornets." time, Eisenhower was trying to cut back his military budget, which On June 18, three days after Eisenhower's order, Castillo Armas, had been bloated by the Korean War. The Republican platform had dressed in a checked shirt and driving his command vehicle, a beat- made some grand statements about liberating the "slave states" of up old station wagon, pushed across the Guatemalan border with Eastern Europe. but Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John with about 200 "hornets," whom he had met for the first time a Foster Dulles, had no desire at all to go to war to deliver on this week before. promise. "Eisenhower didn't trust the military," said historian Once the invasion began, the "Voice of Liberation," a phony ra- Arthur Schlesinger Jr. "He knew too much about it" The CIA beck- dio station set up by the CIA, broadcast false bulletins, breathlessly oned as a promising alternative. It was small, relatively cheap, elite, reporting pitched battles and heavy casualties. The CIA front used nonbureaucratic and, best of all for a political leader, deniable. classic disinformation techniques to start rumors and spread fear. Secretary of State Dulles had made the most noise about rolling "It is not true that the waters of Lake Atitlan have been poisoned," back the Iron Curtain. But he did not really believe his own rhetoric. began one broadcast "At our command post here in the jungle we He was content to contain communism, which seemed a large are unable to confirm or deny the report that Castillo Armas has an enough task in the early 1950s. The place it was growing fastest was army of 5,000 men." in the Third World, where colonialism was giving way to chaos. He Barnes and Bissell were back at CIA headquarters in Washing- saw the CIA as a convenient tool that could stop the Red stain from ton when the invasion began, fomenting insurrection via coded 20 THE WASHINGTON POST HAGAZINE PHOTOGRAPH ON PAGE IS COURTEST JANE IIARNES: PAGE HA AND THIS PAGE IT SPITMANIN telexes to their operatives spring when a Guatemalan colonel on the CIA's payroll was linked under cover in the field. The to human rights abuses, ;ncluding the death of an American. And two men, who had been last month. Deutch fired two senior agency officers and disciplined `What right schoolmates at both Groton eight others for their handling of the reporting of the incident and Yale, were completely The ubiquitous meddling of the agency in its early years has cre- sure of their place and pur- ated a permanent climate of suspicion in some parts of the world. do we have pose in the world. Neither Many foreigners—and not a few Americans—see CIA plots every- man had any experience where. Most of these conspiracy theories are pure fiction. But the to help someone with failure during a large- culture that Bissell and Barnes helped create is still alive today in scale covert operation—or, the CIA's Directorate of Operations, where the old boys still toast for that matter. much experi- their secret coups, Guatemala prominent among them. to topple his ence with failure of any kind. The secret war against SOME HISTORIANS USE a corporate conspiracy theory to explain why government and Moscow was still in its in- the CIA sought to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954. fancy in the early 1950s. For The story, as it is usually told, begins in 1936 on Wall Street with a throw him out young Ivy League activists at deal set up by John Foster Dulles, then a lawyer with Sullivan & the CIA like Bissell and Cromwell. to create a banana monopoly in Guatemala for his client Barnes, there was still a United Fruit Co. In 1952, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Guatemala's presi- of office?' sense of Big Game anticipa- dent, expropriated United Fruit's holdings. To get his company's tion about the emerging ri- land back, Sam "The Banana Man" Zemurray. the head of United Phillips asked. valry with the Soviet Union. Fruit hired Washington lobbyist Tommy "Tommy the Cork" Corco- Having just won the Second ran. His case was sympathetically heard, in part because just about World War against fascism, everyone in a position to do something about Guatemala was, in one Barnes ducked they were prepared to wage way or another, on United Fruit's payroll. Both Dulles brothers had a larger, if more shadowy, sat on the board of United Fruit's partner in the banana monopoly, the question.

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