Fake Histories & True Mysteries lingering from cia Operation PBSuccess

Perhaps the most difficult part about investigating a story about propaganda and fake news is figuring out which source material to trust. In addition to the new things that our investigation revealed, throughout the process, we also uncovered a few big—and a lot of small—things that the history books had gotten wrong, or jumped to conclusions, regarding the American overthrow of Guatemala’s president in 1954. (Learn about the story here.)

On this page, we’ve laid out some of the history that we think is worth correcting—or at least adding an asterisk to.

A note before reading this: We owe so much of what we do know about this story to past journalists and historians who genuinely sought the truth with the resources they had available to them. So though we will pick out errors below in some past historians’ work, in particular the exhaustive works by Cullather and Gleijeses, we want to acknowledge that we have enormous respect and gratitude for what they’ve done. We’re certain that future historians will find things to nitpick in our work as well—and as long as we keep getting closer to the truth, that’s okay by us! Speaking of which, if you are a researcher with documentation that can help us build out or clarify elements of this website further, please contact us.

Questions:

What was the Actual name of the fake news radio station the C.I.A. broadcast?

C.I.A. agent David Phillips (codename: LANGEVIN) was tasked with running the radio station that would convince the Guatemalan people to rise up or give up. In his memoir, Phillips referred to the station as La Voz de Liberación. (In English: The Voice of Liberation.)

Articles and history books, from the journalistically rigorous Bitter Fruit to the nuanced and thorough Shattered Hope have referred to the radio station as The Voice of Liberation for more than 65 years.

But the recordings of the actual broadcasts reveal that the station was simply called Radio Liberación. For hundreds of broadcasts, the DJs used that name and not La Voz de Liberación. It appears that Phillips, when he wrote his memoir decades later, misremembered the name. And the rest of us repeated it.

Even the C.I.A.’s own historian, Nick Cullather, when he had access to all the leftover documents from the operation, referred to Phillips’ memoir, The Night Watch, for his information on the radio station—and repeated the wrong name in the process.

(In his 2007 memoir published around the time of his death, E. Howard Hunt referred to the station as La Voz de la Liberación. In this memoir, Hunt writes about having recently read Phillips’ book, The Night Watch, in which Phillips gives the incorrect name for the station. Although, interestingly, in an interview Hunt gave before his 2007 memoir came out, he correctly remembered the name of the station as Radio Liberación.)

What else did the propaganda men, David Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, get wrong in their memoirs?

The names of the Radio Liberación DJs:

• David Phillips called them Mario Lopez Otero, Jose Toron Barrios (known as Pepe), and one other young man whom he would not identify. (E. Howard Hunt referred to them as “journalists” from Guatemala.)

• Records show that a Mario Lopez Villatoro was a journalist who founded a student group with a man named Lionel Sisniega Otero, the latter of whom later claimed that he was one of the DJs for the clandestine radio station during the Árbenz overthrow.

• The ladies who appeared on the radio who were left unnamed by Phillips and Hunt, were, according to historian Dan Saxon, sisters Sonia and Sara Orellana.

• We couldn’t find a record of a Mario Lopez Otero from that time, but Mario Lopez Villatoro would have been 21 years old at the time and matched the description that Phillips gave. It’s probable that Phillips mis-remembered the last names, and juxtaposed Lionel Sisniega Otero’s surname onto Mario Lopez.

Censorship and civil liberties Violations by Árbenz:

• Phillips claimed that President Árbenz had censored all of the media in Guatemala before Radio Liberación even launched. This was patently untrue.

• Phillips and Hunt both talk about Árbenz suspending civil liberties, but they do so without the context that the suspension was (a) limited in scope, (b) legal according to the Guatemalan constitution in a time of emergency, (c) were done with the approval of Congress, and (d) had been done numerous times by Árbenz and his predecessor Arevalo during other coup attempts. The C.I.A. agents may not have understood these details, but their accounts make it sound like Árbenz threw out Gautemala’s Constitution.

• Phillips claimed that Guatemalan police were arresting people wantonly, and that they would execute anybody who broke curfew or lit a candle in protest during it. These were actually lies that Radio Liberación broadcast, not the reality.

The Guatemalan Air FOrce

• Phillips claimed that one of the radio’s goals was to neutralize Árbenz’s air force. Truth was there wasn’t really an air force—just a few old planes.

• Phillips describes an air force defector who flew his plane out to meet the rebels, and whom Mario and Pepe—who were in Nicaragua at the time, while Castillo Armas and the rebels were in Honduras—got drunk and tricked into delivering a speech over the radio exhorting his fellow military men to abandon Árbenz.

• Hunt describes the same story differently, claiming that agents in El Salvador got the defector, Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza, drunk and recorded him denouncing Communism, to be broadcast later.

• Upon reviewing the broadcast tapes, we could find no such speech. However, Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza (or someone claiming to be him) actually did read several messages over the radio. Radio Liberación actually declared him the leader of the rebel air force.

• It appears likely that the fun story about getting Mendoza drunk and secretly recording him was a fabrication.

The Carlos Castillo Armas Prison Escape Story

• Phillips recounts in his memoir how he was briefed by Tracy Barnes about Carlos Castillo Armas’s escape from prison by tunneling out.

• This was a story that the C.I.A. knew was false, but spread in order to lend more mystique and credibility to their chosen Liberator (Castillo Armas). Phillips, however, apparently wasn’t told it was fake.

• Hunt, in his memoirs, wrote that Castillo Armas tunneled out of prison “with his bare hands.”

• Historian Richard Immerman repeated the tunneling story in his book The CIA In Guatemala, apparently based on an interview with E. Howard Hunt (though in the end notes of his book, Immerman indicates that he thinks the tunneling story was false).

• The tunneling bit is still mentioned in Wikipedia as of this writing. (August 25, 2020)

“Allowing” Che Guevara to Leave

• In his memoir, Hunt claims that after the overthrow, agents called him up where he was stationed in Japan to ask what they should do about all of the Árbenz supporters who were holed up in embassies. Hunt writes that he advised agents not to commit any bloodshed and let them leave into exile, but he would later “regret my decision to allow an asthmatic Argentine medical student named Che Guevara to leave with them.”

  • It is unlikely that Hunt would have been phoned for advice after being reassigned out of Guatemala—especially given how many higher-level C.I.A. agents were involved in the operation. (And especially if Hunt was indeed SEEKFORD, as we theorize below.)

  • Even if he was asked for advice, Hunt certainly did not “allow” Guevara to leave. He had no authority to do so.

  • In each of his memoirs, Hunt refers to Guevara as a “medical student” (and an “asthmatic” one). Guevara had already graduated and received his medical license by January 1954, so he was a doctor, not a student.

Admitting to making up names and details

• In his final memoir, Hunt calls Phillips out for allegedly making up a story about him in The Night Watch, and in doing so, reveals that Hunt and other agents routinely made things up in their stories:

What other inaccuracies or falsehoods made it into the official C.I.A. history?

False reports of Soviet influence in Guatemala

• As we documented in our Narratively story, the kickoff materials the C.I.A. used to brief its agents on the operation were pre-populated with falsehoods about Árbenz and Guatemala. (See Setup documents for details.)

• As we also documented, false and exaggerated reports commissioned by the United Fruit Company about the influence of Moscow and Communists in Guatemala made it into C.I.A. and other government records. The most egregious of these were the John Clements Report on Guatemala 1952 and Report on Central America 1954.

• Princeton student Ronald Schneider, who was allowed by the C.I.A. to examine the PBHistory documents, concluded that there was no Soviet influence in Guatemala. He nonetheless based much of his history book on information supplied by the C.I.A. Schneider’s book, Communism in Guatemala 1944–1954 is quoted extensively by other historians.

• Documents indicate that the PBHistory operation could not find any connections between the Soviet Union and Guatemala, with the exception of one time that the Soviets tried and failed to buy some bananas from the country. And yet, C.I.A. records and agents continued to claim that Árbenz and Guatemala were under Soviet influence. (However, in the official C.I.A. book Secret History, Nick Cullather did take pains to point out that these claims were not true.)

Assumptions & Errors Treated as fact

• C.I.A. historian Nick Cullather, when he was assigned to study PBSuccess as a fresh history graduate hired by the agency, wrote in the C.I.A.-sponsored book Secret History that “time, space, and sloppy record-keeping” were constraints on his ability to get the full story. Given the time he was allowed (one year), he would have to read 500 pages of documents per day in order just to get through everything that was already known—and that would leave no time to hunt for unknown or undiscovered information. He did not have the luxury of digital files, metadata, or search tools to help him.

  • This explains why, for example, he leaned on David Phillips’s memoir for info on the propaganda efforts instead of digging into them via original C.I.A. records. And yet, Cullather wrote that the agency invested “more effort and creativity than any other aspect of the Guatemala operation.”

  • Cullather wrote that he came across cables from the Guatemala C.I.A. station complaining that the radio station’s signal was too weak to be heard in the capital. Yet, Guatemalan newspapers were reporting on the radio station, and C.I.A. documents that Cullather apparently did not review show that radio propaganda orders were given from the Guatemala C.I.A. station throughout the campaign. Clearly, people could hear and were listening. We couldn’t find the exact cables Cullather referred to, as he didn’t cite them in Secret History, but we did find records showing that the station ended up being broadcast for short wave radio receivers. This was outdated technology in the U.S. but had high penetration across Guatemala at the time; it may explain the cables Cullather was talking about.

• Cullather points out in Secret History that the C.I.A. would routinely give history classes to its agents, but because of poor record-keeping and/or internal research about prior operations, the history of operations like PBSuccess was taught based on outside sources rather than classified documents. “For Operation PBSuccess, for example, we assigned an article that I later learned was based on disinformation the agency itself spread in 1954. The CIA was reabsorbing its own hype.”

• Secret History says that anti-Árbenz dissidents were rounded up, and “many were tortured.” The book gives no source for this specifically, though in the same paragraph it says that a member of the anti-Communist student group CEUA found a mutilated and charred body in the city morgue—the source of which information was “Informal Memorandum” by “Unsigned”. Then, without a source, Secret History says that “some 75 detainees were killed and buried in mass graves in the regime’s final days.”

  • We now know that the photos of these mass graves that the C.I.A. circulated internally (and that the press circulated externally) were photos of charred bodies that the United Fruit Company PR team dug up, having no idea where they came from. They were specifically designed to deceive people into believing that Árbenz and Communists were committing mass murder. But by the time United Fruit’s PR man revealed this, the falsehood about the murders and mass graves had already become part of official C.I.A. documentation—and therefore made it into its official history later.

  • As for the tortures and the body found in the morgue, given that the source was “Unsigned” and the report appeared to be based on a CEUA student who was part of the propaganda and rumor network, whom declassified documents show were assigned to make up character-killing stories about Árbenz and Communists—it’s hard to conclude (a) if there actually were tortures and/or a charred body found in the morgue, and (b) who was responsible for the body, if so. The rebels blew up a fort and dropped various small bombs, which could well explain a burned body. Or any kind of everyday fire. (We even encountered the theory that these were volcano victims, as there are active volcanos in the region.)

  • E. Howard Hunt, in his memoirs—which Secret History referred to for some information—wrote hyperbolically about Árbenz tortures and gave the figure of 75 detainees killed.

• Though many of them are inconsequential, the hand-written and type-written records kept by the C.I.A. are full of misspellings, some of which have ended up in further histories. For example:

  • C.I.A. docs repeatedly misspell the ship Alfhem as “Alfhelm”

  • The C.I.A. history Operation PBSuccess: The United States and Guatemala 1952–1954, misspelled the name of the key Paramilitary and Psychological operative Tracy Barnes as “Tracey”

  • Secret History at one point misspelled the name of the book Shattered Hope by Piero Gleijeses as “Shuttered Hope”

Everybody makes mistakes; historians and journalists are not exceptions. The point of highlighting minor mistakes like these is to show how easily misinformation can be copied and repeated.

Treating secondary sources as primary sources

• The C.I.A.’s official book Secret History references the book Shattered Hope more than 40 times, Schlesinger and Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit and Immerman’s The CIA in Guatemala each a dozen times, Phillips’ The Night Watch half a dozen times, and Hunt’s Under-Cover once.

  • These books each rely on their own sources, some of which are accurate (Bitter Fruit in particular), some of which are based on deliberate C.I.A. misinformation, and some of which are incomplete, have errors, or express the author’s opinions.

  • To treat a book as source material without fact-checking the book’s own sources means trusting the accuracy and bias of the author and the materials that the author had available.

  • This appears to be how historians (and the Internet) have inadvertently laundered information about PBSuccess over the years that may or may not be accurate.

The big one, of course, is the way the agency tried to hide its fake news activities and rewrite history in Operation PBHistory. Explore that here.

Who was “Seekford"—the C.I.A. agent who almost blew the operation by leaving secret documents in his hotel room?

One of the most telling scenes in the story from a fake news perspective occurred a few months after the operation kicked off. An agent who went by the codename SEEKFORD left some secret documents about the plot in his hotel room, where a Panamanian attaché named Jorge Isaac Delgado took them. Delgado turned out to be a double agent, and he brought the documents to Árbenz’s people, who then published the documents in the newspapers. However, the C.I.A. was able to ensure that the international press did not take what Árbenz had published seriously. In today’s parlance, many called it “fake news.” The irony, of course, being that that C.I.A. was engaged in its own fake news campaign against Árbenz.

For over 65 years, the identity of this agent SEEKFORD has been a mystery. As we were triangulating and decoding the codenames and cryptonyms of the various characters in the story (using declassified government documents), we went down a rabbit hole trying to identify SEEKFORD.

At first, we thought SEEKFORD’s description, and the meetings that documents indicated he had been part of, might mean that his true identity was Tracy Barnes, who was the Special Assistant for Paramilitary and Psychological Operations. However, cable reveal that after the document leak, SEEKFORD was sent home and likely reassigned, with his duties redistributed to other agents; meanwhile, Tracy Barnes remained active in the operation. By process of elimination, we removed agents Henry Hecksher, Jack Stewart, “Rip” Robertson, and David Morales from the list of possibilities. The only agent left after this with the approximate ranking and responsibility of SEEKFORD was the one underneath Tracy Barnes who played the role of propaganda coordinator and in-country political liaison with key conspirators: E. Howard Hunt.

Not only does Hunt fit the general description, but several minor details line up in favor of SEEKFORD being Hunt.

Key facts about SEEKFORD, according to C.I.A. and U.S. State Department documents, include:

• Seekford apparently was assigned to PBSuccess from the beginning in fall 1953, and was acting as liaison between anti-Árbenz leaders in the region since 1952.

  • Hunt was traveling throughout the region as a CIA liaison during this same time period, and was assigned to PBSuccess from the beginning.

• Seekford became the liaison between Tachito Somoza and Castillo Armas, and negotiated with Anastasio Somoza. He was involved in coordinating propaganda efforts between the C.I.A., Somoza, Castillo Armas, and leaflet-dropping planes.

  • Hunt in his memoirs and interviews said he was the liaison for the Somozas and Castillo Armas, and coordinated the leaflet-dropping messages.

  • In his memoirs and interviews, he gets key details wrong about things that happen after March…

• Seekford was the one who left the documents unguarded.

  • Hunt, as the agent liaising with Tachito Somoza, Castillo Armas, and others whom the documents exposed, would have known about the source of and fallout over the leak. However, in his memoir, Hunt says that the leak was due to “Russian bugs and spies placed in the notoriously lax U.S. embassy”—which is a total fabrication. (And begs the question, why would Hunt fabricate that story?)

• Seekford was criticized for being unreliable, professionally and personally.

  • Hunt was criticized throughout his career for being sloppy and unreliable.

• Seekford had been in Washington earlier.

  • Hunt lived in Washington D.C.

  • More than that, this eliminates the possibility of several agents who were living in Latin America and were not sent to Washington for meetings.

• Seekford was removed from the operation in March. It was suggested that he could be reassigned to Alaska or the Northwest, and that he might hang out in Chicago.

  • Hunt was in Washington in March, according to his memoirs. He claimed it was “by luck.”

  • Hunt claims that he was reassigned immediately to Japan, but his son, Saint John Hunt, told us that the family did not move to Japan for about six months. Meaning: Hunt’s story about being reassigned immediately is false.

  • The Hunts had family in Chicago.

  • No other important C.I.A. operative appears to have left the operation in March.

  • The one question about this is whether Seekford would have been eventually allowed back into C.I.A. good graces and reassigned somewhere, as Hunt had. One cable suggests that Seekford might be given a government job as a fire watcher in the Northwest‚ though it does not say whether that happened or for how long.

• Seekford was a mid-high level rank, with a salary level of GS-12.

  • Hunt would have been around this salary rank.

• Seekford was initially operating in Honduras. 

  • Hunt had been operating in Mexico and Honduras.

• Seekord suffered from ulcers. (See excerpt of redacted PBSuccess report below.)

  • E. Howard Hunt suffered from ulcers: https://www.politico.com/story/2012/11/us-government-releases-once-secret-watergate-files-084464

  • Hunt would be hospitalized for ulcers, or at least use it as an alibi later: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/178-10002-10363.pdf (page 6)

  • Hunt’s son, Saint John Hunt, told us in en email exchange that as long as he could remember, his father suffered from ulcers.

Whereas we don’t know for sure if the mastermind of the Watergate break-in was also the propaganda man who screwed up in Guatemala 18 years before, there would have to be a lot of coincidences for it to not be the case.

It would have been in Hunt’s best interest, being the embellishing sort that he was, to write in his memoirs that he’d been reassigned to Japan as a job promotion instead of pulled from the operation after blowing his cover. It is curious, however, that someone who’d made such a mistake wouldn’t have been fired entirely.

In the end, Operation PBSuccess prevailed (and the stolen documents didn’t have much of an effect)—and Hunt was a smooth operator—so it’s plausible that he would have been told to lay low for a few months and then get re-assigned to another part of the world where nobody knew his face. After all, these were the early days of the C.I.A.

Did Jacobo Árbenz become a Communist after his overthrow?

Even the C.I.A. plotters acknowledged that President Árbenz was not a Communist while he governed Guatemala. He’d run for office as an independent, under a Moderate party. As a military colonel with progressive policy goals, he had knit together a coalition of left- and right-wing groups. And his signature policies, including Agrarian Reform Decree 900, could be called “liberal” but certainly were far from Communism.

But some historians—and Wikipedia itself at the time of the publication of our investigation—have said that Árbenz joined the Communist party (the Guatemalan Worker’s Party, or PGT) in 1957, three years after being overthrown and exiled.

We could not find any primary or secondary source for this.

No record exists of his membership in the PGT or any other Communist party. Árbenz never made a public statement about becoming Communist, though he did make public statements that he was not Communist. Even if, as Guatemalan Communists have said, Árbenz had agreed with Communism in his heart, he appears to have never said so out loud.

The source for the Wikipedia assertion, and for other historians who repeat the “Árbenz became a Communist in 1957,” is historian Piero Gleijeses’ 1992 book Shattered Hope. The book is an excellent and thorough analysis of the overthrow from the point of view of Guatemalans who survived it—primarily from the Communist party members and their associates.

In the book, Gleijeses casually mentions that Árbenz didn’t join the Communist party until 1957—but he doesn’t cite a specific source.

When we asked Gleijeses what his source was, he said that no documentation existed to back it up. Rather, he had become convinced of it after conducting interviews with Communist leader Jose Manuel Fortuny. Gleijeses told us in a recorded interview that he had become personal friends with Fortuny, and he wanted people to know that, “in Guatemala, the Communists were the good guys.” He said that circumstantial evidence had led him to believe Fortuny at his word.

We pressed Gleijeses (in a second interview and again in writing) to clarify the reasons for asserting that Árbenz had become a Communist in 1957, given that there was no first- or second-hand evidence for it. His answer was that in his opinion, “Fortuny had absolutely no reason to lie.”

Fortuny passed away in 2005, so we can’t assess his reliability ourselves, but it’s fair to say that the C.I.A. is not the only party capable of using propaganda when it came to Jacobo Árbenz. As historian Roberto Garcia Ferreira told us, “Fortuny is not a reliable source” on this matter.

Would a Communist leader have a reason to embellish about his relationship with his nation’s most famous President? Would the Communists have reason to tell people, after Árbenz was dead, that Árbenz was one of them? At the very least, they would certainly have reason to read into their history with Árbenz and receive the confirmation bias that yes, he was.

Whether Fortuny believed what he was saying or not, he said that Arbenz had joined his political party at a time when Árbenz could not dispute it.

While he was alive, Árbenz never came out as Communist. As a politician, he’d spent many years carefully building a coalition that included Liberals, Catholics, Conservative military men, and Communists. But as an exile who was already being painted as a Communist by the C.I.A., he would have little to lose by publicly endorsing Communism if he truly believed it—and potentially could have gained by being embraced by Soviet leaders. Yet he did not, and the Soviet Union never claimed Árbenz as one of their own—at a time when having high-profile people on their side would have been advantageous for public relations. Even after his death, no Communist nation has acknowledged Árbenz as one of theirs.

The reasons Gleijeses said he became convinced that Fortuny was not lying about Árbenz joining up in 1957 were that, (A) other Guatemalan contemporaries who lost touch with Árbenz thought he became a Communist, (B) Árbenz had leaned on Guatemalan Communist leaders as advisers while President, and (C) Árbenz’s widow Maria Vilanova had privately told Gleijeses in a letter that she and her husband thought Guatemala would one day probably become a Communist country.

As for (A), secondhand, verbal accounts are not a reliable source, especially given that the C.I.A.’s own documents indicate that the agency was actively spreading rumors about Árbenz as a Communist in 1957. (Gleijeses did not have access to these documents, as they were declassified after his book, so he wouldn’t have known.)

As for (B), President Árbenz also had political advisers who were non- or anti-Communists—such as Foreign Affairs Minister Guillermo Toriello—not to mention a presidential cabinet with no Communists in it. (By the same logic, this would make Árbenz both Communist and anti-Communist.)

As for (C), Maria Vilanova was quite upset by Gleijeses' claims in his book. In her memoir, Mi Esposo El Presidente Árbenz, Vilanova outright denied them.

Though Vilanova is not necessarily a reliable source either, according to Dr. Garcia Ferreira, as she would have had a vested interest in making her own story look as good as possible, her words are the closest source to Árbenz himself. And if she had indeed written about thinking Guatemala would one day become Communist, even that would not be conclusive evidence that Árbenz was a Communist; believing that something is inevitable is not the same thing as believing that thing is preferable. When we asked Gleijeses if he could share the letter where she wrote this, so that we could see the context of this quote, he declined.

In other words, it’s a he-said, she-said.

At the end of the day, historians we interviewed each said—Gleijeses included—that whether Árbenz joined the Communist party after his overthrow doesn’t matter. He was not governing Guatemala as a Communist when he was overthrown.

But, given the lack of primary evidence, it seems clear that whether Árbenz became Communist in 1957 is at the very least an open question. There is simply not sufficient evidence to meet the burden of proof.

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