The Fish That Ate the Whale (29 page)

He was flown to Florida, then driven to a CIA base in a palmetto grove, where he sat with the clean-cut young men running Operation Success. The outlines of the plan were explained: Castillo Armas would be placed at the head of a liberation movement invented by the CIA, given $3 million in cash, guns, grenades, and, at the right time, technical and air support. If he needed more guns, these would come from the United Fruit Company. Castillo Armas would train his army on island bases in Lake Managua, Nicaragua. A handful of American pilots were meanwhile stationed in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the same strip later used during the Bay of Pigs invasion. CIA operatives were scattered among a dozen locations, in camps and safe houses, where they prepared the psychological tricks crucial to Operation Success. Exiled Guatemalan newspapermen wrote fake stories that warned of the swelling ranks of the rebel army; printers made up flyers to be dropped from airplanes in the first hours of the war; engineers recorded sound effects—Hunt called them “terror broadcasts”—to be played during the invasion. Panicked newsmen, terrified crowds, exploding bombs—the same sort of tricks Orson Welles used during his
War of the Worlds
radio drama.

Equally important was the part played by John Foster Dulles's State Department. Meetings of the Organization of the American States, discussions at the UN, American calls for investigation and sanction. Weapon sales to Guatemala were banned. At Dulles's insistence, Eisenhower replaced his ambassador to Guatemala (just as Bernays wanted) with John Peurifoy, who arrived in Guatemala City in late 1953 with a single mission: convince Jacobo Arbenz that he has just one more chance to moderate.

Peurifoy, who had become the American ambassador to Greece after that country's civil war, dressed in gaudy neckties, loud sports jackets, and candy-colored slacks. He was a specialist, a symbol as much as a diplomat. His coming heralded the end of a regime. If he behaved like a man trying to prove something, it's because he was. When Joseph McCarthy made his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming the State Department was filled with Communists, it was a smear of Peurifoy, who was State's head of personnel. He cabled McCarthy asking for the names: if he did not trust the State Department with such information, wrote Peurifoy, McCarthy should at least give the names to the FBI. McCarthy never acknowledged the cable and accused the State Department of covering up instead. In the years that followed, Peurifoy was a man in search of vindication. Whether he was in Athens or Guatemala City, he seemed determined to prove he was the fiercest Communist fighter in the world.

A few weeks after Peurifoy arrived in Guatemala, Arbenz invited the ambassador and his wife, Betty Jane, to the official residence for dinner. It was the only time the men would ever meet. The meal, later known as the six-hour dinner, was a decisive encounter. I could go into great detail setting the scene—it was, for all the talk of the peasant ethos of the regime, a palace affair—but I believe it enough to set the names of the principals side by side. John and Betty Jane Peurifoy seated across from Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and María Cristina Villanova Castro.

The dinner started with cocktails just after eight p.m. By the time Ambassador Peurifoy and his wife stood to leave, it was two in the morning. Arbenz did most of the talking. It was as if he had just this one chance to state his grievance. Did he talk too much? Of course he did. He was like one of those James Bond villains who give away every detail because they know, just know, they've brought it off. It was not only the topic of conversation that bothered Peurifoy—it was the manner. No matter the subject, Arbenz always found his way back to the United Fruit Company, whose railroads are greased with blood and whose ships run on burning souls. The ambassador objected, refuted, argued, scoffed, and bickered with the president and the president's wife as Betty Jane sat quietly.

According to Flora Lewis, who profiled Peurifoy in
The New York Times Magazine
, the ambassador tried “to make the Guatemalan Government see that whether it whipped or embraced the United Fruit Company, the United States cared supremely about only one thing—ousting Communists from positions of control.”

Peurifoy was supposed to figure out whether Arbenz was in league with the Communists, was a Communist, or was just a dupe. By the end of the evening, with the black sky glowering over the spires of the capital, he was more certain than ever. “Peurifoy came away convinced that, far from being an unwilling and unwitting tool of the Communists, Arbenz was firmly established as the determined leader, not the follower, of developments in Guatemala,” Lewis wrote.

Peurifoy got back to the embassy at two thirty. By three, he was at his desk, writing his report. Addressed to John Foster Dulles, it would be passed from the State Department to the CIA to the White House. A five-page memo sent by secure cable, the report chronicled the dinner with Arbenz. “The President stated that the problem in this country is one between the Fruit Company and the Government,” wrote Peurifoy. “He went into a long dissertation giving the history of the Fruit Company from 1904; and since then, he complains, they have paid no taxes to the Government. He said that today when the Government has a budget of $70 million to meet, the Fruit Company contributes approximately $150,000. This is derived solely from the one-cent tax applied to each stem of bananas which is exported.…

“If Arbenz is not a Communist,” Peurifoy added, “he will certainly do until one comes along.”

You can read this last sentence in two ways. Either the way Peurifoy probably intended, which is jaunty, full of attitude—hey, this guy is trouble—or you can deconstruct it, thus seeing what the ambassador was really saying, even if he did not realize it:
Arbenz is NOT a Communist, but let's treat him like one anyway.

Peurifoy ended the memo with a bit of wee-hour lyricism that was picked up and quoted in diplomatic circles: “The candle is burning slowly and surely, and it is only a matter of time before the large American interests will be forced out [of Guatemala] completely.”

If you want to fight a preemptive war, you should probably have a casus belli, a triggering episode or event—best if it can be photographed—that you can point out to your public and say,
This is why!
In Guatemala, it was a shipload of military equipment sent from Czechoslovakia but seized by the U.S. Navy before it could land in Puerto Barrios. The ship, a Swedish vessel called the
Alfhem
, had falsified its papers and switched flags at various ports, but the CIA tracked its every move. Its holds were inspected, its contents seized: bombs, rifles, ammunition, antitank mines, and artillery that seemed to prove Soviet support of the Guatemalan government. Arbenz said the
Alfhem
proved only that no other nation would sell him weapons, because of the American-led embargo. He said he needed weapons to fight the imminent invasion of Castillo Armas and his army. “Arbenz's emissaries had been busy behind the Iron Curtain procuring large quantities of Czech arms and munitions,” wrote E. Howard Hunt. “This development was watched with apprehension, for if the armaments reached Arbenz before we were able to mount an invasion, the odds would be even more heavily weighted against Castillo and his men.”

Never mind that the above passage shows the invasion was fixed
before
the guns were seized. Never mind, too, that most of the weapons were junk that never would have worked. Spread on the deck of the seized ship, the guns proved the perfect photographic evidence, whipping the American public into a frenzy. As Bernays said, the masses are led by symbols, the most primary of which—you can get as Freudian with this as you want—is the steely shaft of a Commie's pistol.

On April 26, 1954, President Eisenhower, addressing Congress, said, “The Reds are in control in Guatemala, and they are trying to spread their influence to San Salvador as a first step to breaking out of Guatemala to other South American countries.”

On June 15, the CIA was given the final go-ahead for Operation Success. “I want you all to be damn good and sure you succeed,” Eisenhower told Allen Dulles and a few others. “When you commit the flag, you commit it to win.”

*   *   *

Che Guevara had arrived in Guatemala City less than a year before. He walked for hours, talked all night. He described it as the place where a person could breathe the “most democratic air in Latin America.” It was here that he met the tough young Cubans, the leaders of Fidel Castro's army, whose cause he would take as his own. Castro was in prison in Isle of Pines, Cuba, but his soldiers had been granted refuge by President Arbenz. In these men, Guevara found the perfect mix of theory and action, ideology and bravado. He moved into their apartments, can be seen in photos sharing sleeping bags and meals with the exiled army. In this way, the seizure of U.F.'s land did more than damage the ledger books of the fruit company. It lit a fuse that burned through the continent. It gave Guevara a cause. It was the Cubans who first called him “Che,” which means something like “Hey!” As in,
Hey, Guevara, let's go overthrow the Ubico flies!

*   *   *

Sam was in New Orleans, monitoring the action from afar. Each morning, he read the papers and met with underlings. Each afternoon, he got the news from Bernays and Corcoran and others, took it all in, then offered ideas and suggestions of his own, saying,
Fine, fine, fine.

*   *   *

Operation Success was not a war—it was a shadow play, a farce. It was three weeks of smoke and mirrors, flash and noise. It was the United States making a point about communism and Eisenhower drawing a contrast with Truman. It was the United Fruit Company getting back what it had lost.

It began with a couple of Second World War fighter props piloted by retired air force men flying low and loud, dropping smoke bombs and paper flyers (
GET OUT!
) on Guatemala City. This was followed by strafing runs, bombs. If you saw three planes in the sky, you were seeing the entire rebel air force. Then came the psychological tricks meant to confuse the people and terrify Arbenz and his loyalists. Hidden speakers boomed out the sound of guns and shells. Fake newscasts filled the entire bandwidth, some calling for the overthrow of the dictator, some claiming the dictator had already been overthrown. Others heralded the arrival of Castillo Armas and his men in the capital, where they were being greeted by jubilant crowds.

Arbenz went on the radio to explain the nature of the struggle. It's not about ideology, he said, it's about money. It's not about the United States, it's about El Gringo, the Banana Man. “In whose name have they carried out these barbaric acts?” he asked. “What is their banner? We know very well. They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company.”

Castillo Armas, having mustered his army on a U.F. banana plantation in Honduras, marched across the border into Guatemala. His soldiers and weapons were carried on U.F. trains and U.F. boats. He met little resistance. It was less a war than a walk in the country, afternoons of daisy picking, a parade in the mountains. Guatemala 1954 would be the last of the easy overthrows. Because the peasants did not want war, because the government believed it could not win, because Arbenz was willing to go farther than anyone had gone but was still not willing to go all the way.

Arbenz aged ten years in the last five days. Retreating to the presidential palace, he spent these hours in a drunken stupor, wandering the halls, muttering about gringos. He was disheveled and could not sleep. Now and then, he went on the radio. “Our enemies are led by the arch-traitor Armas,” who is leading a “heterogeneous Fruit Company expeditionary force” against the country, he said, his words obscured by the static of CIA jamming. “Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which affected the interests of the United Fruit Company.”

He was buffeted by news, some of it real, some of it fake. He could no longer tell the difference. The cord that ran from his soul to his brain, which had always been taut as a guitar string, snapped with a twang. He was not sure if he should surrender, or retreat to the hills, or take his own life. He was not sure anyone would notice or care. That was the beauty of psychological warfare—it devoured the enemy from within. He ordered the army to open the arsenals and give the guns to the peasants. The leaders of the army, aristocrats who feared the gringo less than they feared the mob, refused. When the officers stopped responding to Arbenz's orders, he knew it was time to go. On June 27, 1954, he addressed his people for the last time. “For fifteen days a cruel war against Guatemala has been under way,” he said on the radio. “The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us.”

He resigned as soon as he got off the air, turned control of the government over to General Carlos Díaz, crossed the street to the Mexican embassy, and asked for asylum. By that time, Castillo Armas was on the outskirts of Guatemala City.

John Foster Dulles spoke to the American people a few days later. He said he wanted to explain the news from the isthmus, but he seemed less concerned with the progress of the war than with disassociating the Eisenhower administration from the United Fruit Company. Arbenz had clearly hit a nerve. “The Guatemalan government and Communist agents throughout the world have persistently attempted to obscure the real issue … by claiming that the United States is only interested in protecting American business,” said Dulles. “We regret that there have been disputes between the Guatemalan government and the United Fruit Company.… But this issue is relatively unimportant.”

John Foster Dulles called John Peurifoy.

Here is what he said: “Magnificent job!”