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From the document
Nick Cullather joined CIA and the History Staff in July 1992, soon after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.
In fact, Arbenz was deposed in a military coup, and neither the radio nor the air attacks had much to do with it.
All of these were swept away by Arbenz's resignation, and PBSUCCESS went into Agency lore as an unblemished triumph.
Ironically, by attaining its short-term goal—removing Jacobo Arbenz—PBSUCCESS thwarted the long-term objective of producing a stable, non-Communist Guatemala.
Excerpts are passages from a US government work (public domain), quoted exactly as they read in the scan, and checked against the full text on every rebuild.
Most agency histories are written by long-serving insiders. This one was written by a young academic on a one-year stint. According to the foreword by the CIA's chief historian, J. Kenneth McDonald, Nicholas Cullather joined the CIA and its History Staff in July 1992, straight from a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, and left in July 1993 to teach diplomatic history at Indiana University; the history was published inside the agency in 1994 as "an official publication of the CIA History Staff", with the usual caveat that the views are the author's1. He was a CIA employee when he wrote it. The hosted file is the agency's sanitized release of that 1994 text.
What it covers
Cullather worked from the collection the CIA had assembled when the journalists Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer sued for its Guatemala files, Job 79-01025A, and from the scholarly literature1. Four chapters follow the operation against the elected president of Guatemala, PBSUCCESS. "America's Backyard" sets out the Revolution of 1944, Arbenz's land reform, United Fruit's lobbying and Washington's growing alarm. "Reversing the Trend" covers the abortive 1952 plot, PBFORTUNE, and the decision to try again: on 9 December 1953 Allen Dulles authorized $3 million and put Frank Wisner's Directorate of Plans in sole charge, with a headquarters in Florida code-named LINCOLN1.
"Sufficient Means" is the operation itself: the psychological campaign, the SHERWOOD radio station, the Czech arms ship Alfhem, the small rebel air force, and Carlos Castillo Armas's crossing of the border near Esquipulas on the evening of 18 June 19541. Arbenz announced his resignation on 27 June. The closing chapter traces the aftermath: Castillo Armas's corrupt and violent rule, his assassination, United Fruit's decline, and how the story leaked out from Eisenhower's 1963 memoir onward. Appendices give a timeline, an organization chart and a glossary of codewords1.
Its verdict
The book's distinctive claim is that PBSUCCESS nearly failed. Cullather lists chronic lapses in security, no plan beyond the first stages, a poor understanding of the Guatemalan army and a rebel force too weak to win; Arbenz fell because his officers turned on him, and the agency never learned why1. The lessons drawn from this apparent success, he argues, led straight to the Bay of Pigs, where the same team reused radio, airpower and an exile army (The Bay of Pigs invasion)1. He also records that Eisenhower was told at a White House briefing that the rebels had lost only one man: "a briefer lied"1.
Release and use
Cullather ended by noting that the Guatemala records were due for declassification review from 1994. The CIA released its Guatemala documents, including this history, after reviews in 1997 and 2003; they are now also at the National Archives1,2. The State Department's 2003 retrospective FRUS volume on Guatemala lists this history among its published sources3. Names of officers and some passages remain blacked out. The copy hosted here leaves out the cover and every page carrying a photograph we cannot show to be the government's: Associated Press (Wide World) photographs, a reproduction of Diego Rivera's mural of the coup, and six photographs whose credit is missing or blacked out. The text on those pages is in the CIA's full release. For the 1953 operation that preceded it, see Operation Ajax (TPAJAX).
Sources
- CIA Nicholas Cullather, Operation PBSUCCESS: The United States and Guatemala, 1952–1954 (CIA History Staff, 1994; DOC_0000134974), Central Intelligence Agency, FOIA Electronic Reading Room (1994).
- National Archives The CIA in Guatemala (The Text Message blog), National Archives and Records Administration (2012-02-13).
- FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Guatemala: Sources, US Department of State, Office of the Historian (2003).
- Wikipedia 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, Wikipedia.