Fifties (62 page)

Peurifoy took his time in meeting with Arbenz, as he cabled back to Washington, because, “I had the psychological advantage of being new and government feels I have come to Guatemala to use the big stick. We have been letting them stew ...” What Washington felt about the Arbenz government’s land reform was made clear from Peurifoy’s first warning to foreign minister Toriello: “Agrarian reform had been instituted in China and that today China was a Communist country.” Essentially, the Guatemalan government had no room to maneuver other than to end its social revolution. The
United States had handed an unspeakably poor country a tough ultimatum.

Actually, the United States did not think Arbenz would change, and it was not unhappy with the idea of using Guatemala to show other Latin-American countries the limits of their freedom. A few months after Peurifoy arrived, someone asked him about Arbenz’s future, and the ambassador answered, “We are making out our Fourth of July reception invitations, and we are not including any of the present administration.” From then on, he openly encouraged dissident military leaders to rise up against Arbenz. In December he sent a long cable to Eisenhower, which removed any of the President’s remaining doubts. “If Arbenz is not a Communist,” he cabled, “he will certainly do until one comes along.” Nothing could be done to change the Arbenz policies, he reported. “The candle is burning slowly and surely, and it is only a matter of time before the large American interests will be forced out completely.”

All that was left was for the administration to find a rationale that would justify American action. It came in mid-April 1954, when a CIA agent in Poland noted the suspicious manner in which a Swedish ship named the
Alfhem
was loaded in the Polish port of Szczecin. The agent thought its cargo was Czech arms. Allen Dulles had another agent check the ship as it passed through the Kiel Canal, and the Agency became convinced that it was carrying arms. On May 17, the
Alfhem
reached Puerto Barrios, Guatemala’s main port on the eastern coast. There Peurifoy and his staff were at the dock waiting for it. Unable to buy arms from the West, despite a series of desperate pleas to Washington, and fearing the mounting pressure from hostile surrounding dictatorships, the Arbenz government had secretly moved to buy arms from the East bloc. It was a critical mistake: That, if anything, was the smoking gun Washington wanted, proof that Arbenz was playing with Communists. The Congress was enraged.

That a coup was coming was by now an open secret in Guatemala. Mercenaries at the two CIA training camps were so well paid—about three hundred dollars a month, or ten times the going wage for United Fruit workers—that they had boasted rather openly and told of their plan to invade the capital. The day before the coup occurred, Peurifoy greeted his staff in the morning by saying, “Well, boys, tomorrow at this time we’ll have ourselves a party.” In fact, the news was so public that Peurifoy’s son came home early from school, announcing that there would be no school in the afternoon because there was going to be a revolution at 5:00
P.M.

There was one crucial ingredient left for the success of the coup
and that was the cooperation, voluntary and involuntary, of the American press. This meant it was necessary for the press corps to tell the public that the coup was the work of an indigenous Guatemalan force. In general, given the tensions of the Cold War, the obvious sins of Eastern European Communism, and the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism, most editors and reporters tended to accept Washington’s side in any dispute involving Communism. In effect, the men controlling an operation like this wanted the same trust that had existed between journalists and public officials during World War Two. United Fruit had already achieved considerable success in putting out its side of events, thanks principally to the skills of Edward Bernays, a pioneer in public relations who was well connected in the world of print media. He convinced United Fruit to sponsor a series of press junkets for selected reporters to Guatemala: These emphasized the benign aspect of the fruit company and the sinister purpose of the Arbenz government.

But in 1954, however, the administration hit a snag with the press when it barred a talented
New York Times
reporter from the venue. Sydney Gruson was then thirty-eight years old and he was based in Mexico City, which meant that his beat included Guatemala. Gruson had no particular ideological bent: He had previously reported from Eastern Europe, and watching the harsh ways of the Communists as they solidified their power there had made him something of a hard-liner. Both Irish and Jewish, born in Dublin, Gruson was a man of unusual personal charm, with a joie de vivre rarely seen in
Times
correspondents. In fact, if in the past he had ever gotten in trouble with his bosses, it was not because there was a radical bent to his reporting but rather because his employers felt he was having altogether too much of a good time. When Gruson had first arrived in Mexico City, the
Times
was not particularly interested in Central America, so he could cover it, he assumed, without great exertion. Mexico City was not, he once noted, “an onerous assignment.” He began to live the high life, rubbing shoulders with a number of the city’s wealthiest citizens, including a member of the Du Pont family who owned a string of horses and who had decided to buy the local racetrack. Since that meant she could not own her horses anymore, she gave one, Candice Ann, to Gruson as a gift: “You’re crazy,” Gruson’s wife, the journalist Flora Lewis, told him. “You know you won’t be satisfied owning just one.” She was absolutely right—Gruson quickly went out and bought four more. Shortly after that, Turner Catledge, the
Times
managing editor, showed up for an inspection tour of his man in the field. Gruson greeted Catledge at
the airport, drove him to the palatial residence where he lived, and then said, “Turner, we can do this one of two ways. We can go to the office every day and I can make a lot of phone calls to Mexican bureaucrats whom I would not be interviewing if you were not here, for stories I would not be filing if you were not here, or you can do what I do, which is go to the racetrack every day because I own five racehorses, play golf four days a week, and go to the bullfights once a week.” Catledge chose authentic Mexican life as Gruson lived it; he had a thoroughly good time, and upon his departure, he warmly praised Gruson for showing him such a good time. But soon Gruson was recalled to New York.

During his sojourn in Mexico City, Gruson had written several stories about the Arbenz government that had pleased the embassy and irritated the government, and he had been expelled from Guatemala by Arbenz in November 1953. Peurifoy himself had argued for Gruson’s readmission, and in time, he was readmitted to the country. This time, however, his stories angered Peurifoy, particularly those implying that Latin American nations were rallying to Arbenz’s side after the
Alfhem
incident. That directly contradicted the embassy line. American attacks on Arbenz, Gruson reported, did not necessarily hurt the Guatemalan leader in Latin America, and “the reaction [to them] has served to remind observers that the dominant feeling among articulate Guatemalans is not pro- or anti-Communism, or pro- or anti-Yankeeism, but fervent nationalism.” In the eyes of the embassy people, that made Gruson a radical.

After filing the stories, Gruson eventually returned to Mexico, but as the date for the coup neared, he asked permission to return to Guatemala. He found, much to his surprise, that his foreign editor, Emmanuel Freedman, ordered him to stay in Mexico to cover the Mexican angle on the story. Gruson knew there was no Mexican angle to the story. His phone conversations with Freedman over the subject became heated: “Sydney,” Freedman said. “We want you to stay in Mexico to cover the spillover there.” “Manny,” he answered. “I know Mexico and I know Guatemala, and there isn’t going to be any spillover in Mexico.” “But the
publisher
wants you to cover the spillover,” Freedman said. Suddenly, Gruson became aware that he was being iced on a very big story—a story that quite properly was his. “Goddamnit, Manny, I know more than the publisher about both Guatemala and Mexico, and I want to go back to Guatemala,” Gruson said. “Sydney,” Freedman had said, closing the case. “There is nothing I can do. This is beyond my control. I cannot let you go back.”

There was a reason why Manny Freedman’s decision was set in stone. Unknown to Gruson, Allen Dulles of the CIA was wary of his reporting and a series of cables from Peurifoy had made him even warier. Dulles had gone to his main contact at the
Times,
his Princeton classmate General Julius Ochs Adler, the nephew of the founder and the cousin of the then publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Adler worked on the business side of the
Times
and was rarely involved in news decisions. A company commander during World War One, he had served with Douglas MacArthur during World War Two and had ended the war with the rank of major general, a title he still liked. In his postwar incarnation, he was, Harrison Salisbury once noted, “a major general, a no-nonsense patriot, an ardent anti-Communist, sometimes coming on like an American Colonel Blimp, but with an inner warmth which made him dear to his children despite the fact that, as a close friend once said, ‘he treated his family as he would his regiment in battle.’” Julie Adler was less than impressed with many of the
Times
foreign correspondents, and he sometimes let the publisher know he thought they might as well have been in collusion with the enemy.

Dulles invited Adler to meet with him in Washington in early June, some two weeks before the coup was supposed to start. At dinner, Dulles had explained that some very delicate events were coming up in Guatemala and that he and his brother, Foster, would feel a good deal more comfortable if Sydney Gruson did not cover the story. Dulles added that the CIA had certain information about Gruson that had caused its top people to question Gruson’s political reliability. Nothing that Dulles said greatly surprised Adler: He himself had already decided that Gruson was a dangerous radical. Adler passed on his information to Sulzberger, who was very upset by the charges, and in a rare act of interference with the news division, he ordered Manny Freedman to keep Gruson out of Guatemala.

Gruson was furious about being kicked out of Guatemala and missing the story, and when the coup took place a few days later he was sure that Peurifoy had been behind the
Times
’s strange behavior. Sulzberger, having accepted Dulles’s very serious charges at face value, began to feel uneasy with them. He began to press the head of the CIA for more information, as Harrison Salisbury later noted, politely and sympathetically. He did this even before the coup took place, and he made it clear that the matter was not going to rest until he got more information. If Gruson was really a subversive, Sulzberger did not want him on the paper, and if he was not a subversive, then there was no reason he should be barred from Guatemala or any other country.

The CIA coup began on June 18 and was acted out by a ragtag army that seemed ill prepared to conquer. In fact, the liberator, Castillo Armas, moved a few miles across the border from Honduras and then did not budge. One of the CIA’s main responsibilities was to keep American journalists out of the area lest they find out how pathetic Castillo Armas’s army really was. Two of the three airplanes from the liberation air force were soon out of action, one of them downed after its American pilot failed to pay attention to his gas gauge and had to crash-land. The CIA air force was puny and extremely primitive; in once case a CIA pilot leaned out of the cabin of his aged plane to lob hand grenades on military installations below. Against the forces of any developed country, the invading forces would have quickly collapsed. But Guatemala’s institutions were so weak that Arbenz was largely paralyzed and could not even get his (equally puny) air force into the air. Nevertheless, three days into the coup it appeared likely to collapse. The CIA people on location had to demand more planes—without which they would surely fall.

A meeting was called in the White House to deal with the request. Henry Holland, a State Department official who opposed the coup, showed up lugging three tomes on international law. But in the end, Ike decided to go with Allen Dulles’s request for the additional fighter bombers. “Mr. President,” Dulles said with a grin on the way out. “When I saw Henry walk into your office with those three big law books under his arm, I knew he’d lost his case already.”

Two new airplanes were assigned on June 23, and that reinforcement, marginal though it was, helped turn the tide. Day after day, as the old-fashioned planes made their runs over Guatemala City, the powerless residents watched in fear. Arbenz’s army neither joined the rebels nor fought them, and almost no one was killed. Later, Ike asked the CIA operatives how many men they had lost. One, an agent answered, a courier who had infiltrated Guatemala before the invasion and had tried to join a partisan group. Thinking of the terrible losses in war as he knew it, Eisenhower paused a moment and said, “Incredible.”

The key to the victory was the CIA’s radio station, based outside the country. The Agency had jammed the government station and deftly created a fictional war over the airwaves, one in which the government troops faltered and refused to fight and in which the liberation troops were relentlessly moving toward Guatemala City. If anyone was a hero of the coup, it was David Atlee Phillips, a
former actor, recruited by the Agency for his good looks and his ability to speak Spanish. The broadcast war became all the more important because the real war barely took place. By the night of June 27, the radio claimed that two huge columns of Castillo Armas’s soldiers were almost on top of Guatemala City and that the final battle was about to take place. Arbenz promptly resigned.

Peurifoy loved it all. He spent the coup running around Guatemala City, brandishing his pistol and demonstrating his courage and fearlessness to the handful of foreign journalists in the city. (Peurifoy had little reason to be afraid, since he knew what was happening at all times and where the bombings would take place.) “People are complaining that I was 45 minutes off schedule,” he boasted after it was all over. He played his official role to the hilt, though. When Toriello came to negotiate surrender terms and accused Peurifoy and the United States of complicity in the coup—after all, the weapons used by the rebels were American-made—Peurifoy was properly indignant, he later boasted to Washington. He pointed out angrily that these weapons could be purchased anywhere in the world, and “that if he had brought me to his house to make accusations against my government, I would leave immediately.”