Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (review)

Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954. By Nick Cullather (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 142 pp. $39.50

This book is the officially declassified account of the role and operations of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (cia) in designing, planning, and executing the overthrow of the constitutional government of Guatemala, led by President Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954. The cia hired the author to write the history; the History Staff at the cia's Center for the Study of Intelligence published the classified account in 1994. It was intended as a "training manual, a cautionary tale for future covert operators" (xiv); it was not designed to be an official history. The cia declassified a sanitized version in May 1997; the title of that version is Operation PBSUCCESS: The United States and Guatemala, 1952-1954. The book under review is the exact reproduction of that redacted version of the text: "[B]lank spaces in the text, notes, and appendixes represent excisions of approximately the same length in the sanitized version" (frontispiece).

One discouraging note for future historians is that it is difficult to find "anything in the trackless storehouse of agency records," because "indexes listed materials by office of origin, not by topic, and offices frequently took vague titles (like the 'Office of Survey Information' to deflect inquiries." Records had been destroyed routinely, and there was often "no way to tell which files had been burned and which preserved" (x).

The author had a methodological purpose. He notes that the cia-sponsored invasion of Guatemala was one of the best-studied covert operations. What, then, could cia documents offer? The answer is important. The cia documents show that the operation had been marked by "chronic lapses in security, the failure to plan beyond the operation's first stages, the Agency's poor understanding of the intentions of the [Guatemalan] Army, the pgt [the Guatemalan Labor Party e.g., the communist party], and the government, the hopeless weakness of [invasion leader Carlos] Castillo Armas's troops, and the failure to make provisions for the possibility of defeat" (109). Indeed, this book's key contribution is to detail these issues in crisp, informative prose.

The author concludes that Operation pbsuccess' success was "curious and magical," because "just as the entire operation seemed beyond saving, the Guatemalan Government suddenly, inexplicably collapsed. The Agency never found out why" (97). Herein lies the cautionary tale in what was intended as a training manual. In the mid-1950s, the cia and its supporters drew the inference that pbsuccess had succeeded thanks to the Agency's superior wisdom and performance. This author argues, instead, that much of what the cia had done was headed toward a fiasco from which the United States and its allies were rescued by exogenous factors over which they had little control.

This crucial argument is debatable, however. From the author's own account, it could be claimed that the cia-sponsored invasion and related U.S. influence on the Guatemalan government--no matter the bumbling behavior of the Castillo Armas forces and cia field agents--put so much pressure on the Guatemalan government that it collapsed. At a minimum, nevertheless, this book seriously undermines extravagant claims once made for cia covert operations because it shows that even this "model" covert operation was littered with stupidities, rigidities, lack of foresight, and counterproductive effects in decades yet to come.

Jorge I. Domínguez
Harvard University

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