The Fish That Ate the Whale (28 page)

*   *   *

The campaign began with a media blitz, a press junket, a pamphlet, a film. “The Public Relations Department had only one task,” wrote Thomas McCann, “to get out the word that a Communist beachhead had been established in our hemisphere.”

U.F. financed the publication of
Report on Guatemala
, a sliver of a book written by a journalist who later asked to have even his pseudonym removed. It was delivered to every member of Congress. You could see them in their chairs, feet up, reading the opening line: “A Moscow-directed Communist conspiracy in Central America is one of the Soviet Union's most successful operations of infiltration outside the Iron Curtain countries.”

(Ed Whitman, the head of U.F.'s in-house public relations department, produced a film called
Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas
. When a new generation came to power at the company, every print was searched out and destroyed.)

Bernays planted stories in big publications in New York, which were picked up across the country.
The Herald Tribune
,
The Atlantic
,
Time
—all ran pieces. “The core of Bernays's strategy was the selection of the most influential media communications in America,” wrote McCann, “the
Times
, several other newspapers, two or three major newsmagazines, the wire services and the electronic networks—followed by a high-level saturation campaign to expose those media's reporters to the company's version of the facts.”

Bernays had great influence at
The New York Times
. According to
The Father of Spin
by Larry Tye, Bernays's wife, Doris, was related to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the newspaper's publisher. This put Bernays and Sulzberger in the same social circles, at the same openings and parties, where Bernays approached the publisher, took him aside, made the case.
It's the biggest threat in the world, Arthur, and for God's sake, it's not being covered!
“He brought the Guatemalan situation to the attention of
Times
publisher Sulzberger as early as 1951,” wrote McCann. “The
Times
agreed to have one of their leading editors look into the matter closely, and Sulzberger himself made an inspection tour at the company's invitation.”

Sulzberger sent the reporter Crede Calhoun to the isthmus, resulting in a series of articles about the Red menace, articles that Bernays called “masterpieces of objective reporting,” that were clipped and sent to other reporters across the country, resulting in still more “masterpieces of objective reporting.” When the
Times
staffer Sydney Gruson, the paper's bureau chief in Mexico, became suspicious of these stories and wrote a piece of his own with a pro-Arbenz spin, Frank Wisner, a CIA operative heavily involved in Guatemala, complained to Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA and previously a member of the U.F. board of directors; Dulles spoke to his friend General Julius Ochs Adler, the business manager of the
Times
, telling Adler that Gruson and his wife, Flora Lewis, were liberals who could not be trusted on this subject. Adler had a conversation with Sulzberger, who then kept Gruson off the story, ordering him to stay put in Mexico, claiming, dubiously, that there might be a Mexican angle to the Guatemala affair. (You following this?) According to
Bitter Fruit
, Sulzberger described it as a patriotic act.

Shades of Vietnam, shades of Iraq, shades of every war in which the consent is manufactured, in which people are cattle-prodded down the warpath with words like MENACE (
zap!
), CONTAGION (
zap!
), DOMINOS (
zap!
). “In almost every act of our daily lives,” wrote Bernays, “whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

Bernays's plan began to show results by the summer of 1951. The situation on the isthmus, unheard of a few months before, moved onto the national agenda, where it was described not as a threat to a corporate interest, nor as a threat to the region, but as a threat to the American way of life. “As a result of many recent articles and editorials, a point of high visibility has now been temporarily achieved as regards the deplorable pro-Communist conditions prevailing [in Guatemala] and the potential dangers stemming there-from, both to the United States and the United Fruit Company,” Bernays wrote in a memo dated July 23, 1951. He added, “[But it's] an axiom in government and politics that for publicity to be effective, it should be translated into an action program.” He suggested three steps: “(A) a change to US ambassadorial and consular representation, (B) the imposition of congressional sanctions in this country against government aid to pro-Communist regimes, (C) US government subsidizing of research by disinterested groups like the Brookings Institute into various phases of the problem.”

Who was Edward Bernays's real audience?

Whom did he need to sell?

It was, in my opinion, less the American people than the American government, and less the American government than a handful of men working for the CIA.

*   *   *

If the system had been working correctly, the Office of Strategic Services would have been disbanded at the end of the Second World War. That's how it had always happened in the past—when the war ends, the spies are defrocked and sent home. But the system was not working correctly or, more accurately, the war never really ended—it instead faded into another war, the cold war, the way, in a disco, one song bleeds into the next and the people never stop dancing.

In 1947, when Greece was threatened by a Communist takeover, President Harry Truman, who had planned to disband the OSS, turned it into the CIA instead, creating a new feature of national life, the civilian spy agency. (The only comparable institution had been Naval Intelligence, which grew out of the Spanish-American War.) The CIA was created by the National Security Act, which, in addition to making the organization permanent, changed its mission. Expanded it. Blew it up. Whereas the OSS had been authorized “to collect and analyze strategic information and to plan and conduct special operations,” the CIA was given a mandate at once vague and ambitious. The new agency, Truman told Congress, will “help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose on them totalitarian regimes.” In this way, the spy agency went from being a guy who knows stuff to a being a guy who does stuff about the stuff he knows. In this way, the agency, which had been ears and a brain, became ears and a brain and hands.

Remember what Pinocchio did as soon as Geppetto carved him a pair of hands?

He reached out and pinched the toymaker.

Allen Dulles, who served in the OSS in the Second World War, was the second man to head the CIA (Beetle Smith was the first). Before joining the government, Dulles worked various legal jobs, including as a counselor to United Fruit, in which capacity his brother John Foster Dulles also worked. Despite this, the banana lands remained something of terra incognita for the CIA. The OSS had not operated in South America, which had been under the jurisdiction of the FBI. When planning operations in the region, which became increasingly important during the cold war, the CIA had just one useful model: the banana companies, which had been behaving like spy and paramilitary agencies on the isthmus for generations. Some experts consider Zemurray's overthrow of the Honduran government a model for almost all the CIA missions that followed. In 1911, Sam deployed many tactics that would become standard procedure for clandestine operations: the hired guerrilla band, the phony popular leader, the subterfuge that convinces the elected politician he is surrounded when there are really no more than a few hundred guys out there. Like the CIA, Zemurray did a lot with a little because that's the best way to leave no fingerprints—and because a little is all he had.

It was, in fact, hard to distinguish United Fruit from the CIA in those years. The organizations shared personnel as well as equipment and intelligence. Throughout the Guatemala affair, the CIA used United Fruit ships to smuggle money, men, and guns. When the CIA's funding fell short of its budget, U.F. made up the difference. After all, the organizations had a common goal: to drive anyone who threatened the status quo off the isthmus. It did not take much to convince the CIA that Jacobo Arbenz was a threat. The agency was founded with just such situations in mind. “As long as Khrushchev or his successors use their subversive assets to promote ‘wars of liberation'—which means … any overt or covert action calculated to bring down a non-Communist regime,” Allen Dulles explained later, “the West should be prepared to meet the threat.”

The CIA began operating in Guatemala in the early 1950s, cultivating dissidents and smuggling weapons aboard the Great White Fleet. Guns and bombs were shipped to Nicaragua in boxes marked
AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT
. Men working for the dictator Anastasio Somoza (FDR: “He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch”) loaded the weapons onto banana mules and walked them across the border to Guatemala. There were other efforts, too, including a failed attempt to bribe Arbenz, to pay him from a Swiss bank account to moderate his policies. Truman put a stop to all such covert programs. In his final years as president, he seemed to become alarmed by his creation, by this rogue Pinocchio, which, given feet as well as hands, ears, and eyes, increasingly operated on its own initiative.

The situation escalated in 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower became president. (U.F.'s chief obstacle had not been Arbenz, but Truman.) Eisenhower's policy was more aggressive. Whereas Truman pledged to contain the Communists, Eisenhower promised to confront them. He called the policy “rollback.” He reexamined the Guatemala situation soon after he arrived in the White House. Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for Guatemala in August 1953, at a meeting of something called the 10/2 Committee. Operation Success would replace the Arbenz government, defeating communism on the isthmus. The go-ahead did not make the overthrow inevitable—exit ramps were built in along the way, in case Arbenz buckled or things changed—but the long black train had left the station.

Soon after Operation Success was green-lighted, Tommy Corcoran, who served as Zemurray's go-between with the CIA, met with a member of the 10/2 Committee named Albert Haney. U.F. then began funneling money to agents working on Guatemala. “We always had to be careful,” Corcoran said later. “We had to know what was going on but we couldn't [seem to] be in on it because if the plan failed, this could hurt us.… The Fruit Company didn't refuse to tell the CIA what it thought, but it couldn't afford to let itself be caught.”

By then, there was a perfect model for the overthrow of Arbenz: Operation Ajax, in which CIA agents deposed the prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, after Mossadegh nationalized oil fields belonging to British corporations, specifically British Petroleum. Approved by Eisenhower at the urging of John Foster Dulles, Operation Ajax returned the shah of Iran to power. The success of this operation, carried off as the overthrow of Arbenz was being planned, must have encouraged the 10/2 Committee. It suddenly seemed so easy. It was, in fact, a near-exact parallel. Just cross out the old names and write in the new ones: bananas instead of oil, U.F. instead of B.P. (Like Ajax, Operation Success would be a military coup disguised as a popular revolt.)

Command of Operation Success was offered to Kermit Roosevelt Jr. (Teddy's grandson), who had led Ajax. Roosevelt gave it a pass, later saying he came to fear the hubristic mood of the Eisenhower administration. Describing John Foster Dulles in a debriefing, Roosevelt wrote, “His eyes were gleaming; he seemed to be purring like a giant cat. Clearly he was not only enjoying what he was hearing, but my instincts told me that he was planning [something].”

Backroom control of Operation Success was given to Tracy Barnes (Yale '34), who tapped a number of other agents to participate, including E. Howard Hunt (Brown '40), who chronicled the mission in
Undercover.
The first order of business was finding a replacement for Arbenz, a dissident with roots in the country who could be plugged into the engine after the defective piece was removed, à la Manuel Bonilla. Estranged Guatemalan military men and exiles were interviewed. Among the early favorites was Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, a general who opposed Arbenz in the presidential election. In his book
My War with Communism
, Ydígoras Fuentes recalled a visit to his house by three men—two agents from the CIA and an executive of the United Fruit Company. The agents promised to make Ydígoras Fuentes president of Guatemala if he agreed to purge the Communists and restore United Fruit's property, among other things. The general turned down the offer, calling the terms “abusive and inequitable.” He said it would seem like a naked takeover by the banana company.

The CIA eventually selected Carlos Castillo Armas, a thirty-nine-year-old disaffected officer in the Guatemalan military living in exile in Honduras. Because he agreed to all the conditions and because, according to Hunt, he “had that good Indian look…, which was great for the people.” What's more, Castillo Armas had an interesting biography, always a helpful distraction for the media. (If you don't want them to find the truth, give them a better story.) Here was a poor Indian who found his calling in the military, a religious man who opposed communism because it was godless. In 1950, Castillo Armas led a group of soldiers against Arévalo. He was defeated and sixteen of his men were killed, himself among them. Or so it seemed. While being dragged across a field to the cemetery, he moaned. He was taken to a hospital, put back together with string and glue, tried for treason, sentenced to death. He escaped six months later, just two days before he was to be executed, slipping out of prison through an abandoned tunnel of the International Railways of Central America, which had been founded by Minor Keith, whose dream was to build a train from New York to Tierra del Fuego. Think about it! Here was Keith, the former vice president of U.F., collaborating through the ages, with Zemurray, providing the tunnel that saves the general who overthrows the president and restores the banana land. Castillo Armas went to Colombia, then Honduras, where he took many jobs, eventually finding steady work as a salesman in a furniture store, which is where the CIA tracked him down in 1953.