The 'new, open' CIA
By Barry Sheppard
The Central Intelligence Agency recently declassified 1400 pages from its files on the coup it engineered in Guatemala in 1954, installing a corrupt military regime that waged war on its citizens for the next four decades.
With US backing and military aid, more than 100,000 civilians were killed in the dirty war. Top officers were in the pay of the CIA during the war, which ended only five months ago with a negotiated settlement that left the military still with the essential power.
The declassified documents represent less than 1% of the agency's file on the coup. In 1983, a CIA official testified that the agency's records ran to more than 180,000 pages.
The CIA also deleted the names of the US citizens who carried out the coup. "Those whose titles show up, but whose names were stricken from the records", reports the New York Times, "include agency officials whose identities have long been public, like Frank Wisner, then the agency's chief of covert operations, and his field commander for the coup, Col. Albert Haney".
While 99% of the CIA's records remain hidden, the newly released papers do give some information. They show the existence of a plan to assassinate at least 58 Guatemalan civilian leaders, aspects of the propaganda campaign waged as part of the coup and the agency's early efforts to recruit members of the Guatemalan military.
The coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, a mildly leftist nationalist, who had promised to help the country's impoverished workers and peasants. His moves to implement a partial land reform entailed confiscation of some lands owned by the United Fruit Company, actions that especially enraged the US government.
The planning of the coup began in 1952, after the US-installed dictator of Nicaragua, Somoza, proposed to President Truman that they work together to overthrow Arbenz, who had been elected in 1950. Truman told the CIA to go forward. A plot it organised with Guatemalan exiles was exposed and collapsed, but the plan continued.
In 1953, under President Eisenhower, the CIA drew up the plans for assassinations, sabotage and propaganda to overthrow Arbenz. Late that year, the National Security Council gave the green light. The State Department, led by John Foster Dulles, worked closely with the CIA, which was headed by Allen W. Dulles, his brother.
The official CIA history of the coup claims that the assassinations were not carried out, but only because they weren't necessary. "Until the day that Arbenz resigned in June 1954 the option of assassination was still being considered", the history states.
The CIA plan for assassinations was discussed "in great detail at very high levels of the agency and the State Department, the records show", reports the New York Times.
"No record of the formal approval or disapproval of these plans by President Eisenhower or the Dulles brothers has been made public. None likely exists. The newly released files include a 22-page how-to manual on murder that says, 'No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded'."
The Times also reports that the "1954 coup was the first in the CIA's long and continuing liaison with the Guatemalan military. Those ties deepened over the decades during a scorched-earth campaign" against the workers and peasants, especially the indigenous population. Resistance to the military regime flared up many times in the form of guerilla warfare and never completely died out.
The CIA historian who wrote its official history was Nick Cullather, who now teaches at Indiana University. Commenting on the CIA's release of the 1400 pages, he said, "The CIA is presenting the Guatemala release as evidence of good faith and openness , but it's the exception".
He said the records on which he based his work were preserved only by a quirk of history: a lawsuit seeking the documents had been filed under the Freedom of Information Act by another scholar in 1982.
The day after releasing 1% of its Guatemala files, the CIA had to admit that its files on other dirty deeds were burned — including the 1953 coup that overthrew another democratically elected President, the mildly leftist and nationalist Dr Mossadegh, in Iran, and installed the US puppet Shah Reza Pahlavi; secret missions in Indonesia in the 1950s; and another coup against Guyana in the early 1960s.
"Iran — there's nothing", Cullather states. "Indonesia — very little. Guyana — that was burned."
Two successive directors of the CIA, Robert Gates in 1992 and James Woolsey in 1993, pledged that the CIA's records on Iran would be released as part of the CIA's new "openness". It took five years for the CIA to admit that there were no such files.