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PBSUCCESS: The Playbook Is Written in Guatemala
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In June 1954, the CIA toppled Guatemala's democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz using a fake radio station, a handful of exiles, and a blueprint that would define covert regime change for decades. This is how PBSUCCESS worked — and why the lessons the agency took from it were the wrong ones.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what the CIA believed in nineteen fifty-four: that a small, poorly resourced Central American government could be toppled through psychological pressure, a fake radio broadcast, and a handful of exiles who'd never actually fought. And they were right.
To understand Guatemala in nineteen fifty-four, you have to go back a few years. Jacobo Árbenz came to power through a democratic election in nineteen fifty.
The Eisenhower administration looked at Árbenz and saw a Soviet asset. The evidence for that was thin. Árbenz had legal communists in his coalition, but he wasn't controlled by Moscow, wasn't receiving Soviet direction, and wasn't implementing a Soviet-style program.
What the CIA built for Guatemala was a layered operation. It had a military component, a psychological warfare component, and a propaganda component.
The debrief on PBSUCCESS generated institutional conclusions that would shape the CIA for years. The agency believed it had found a formula.
One of PBSUCCESS's quieter contributions to American intelligence practice was the refinement of plausible deniability as a doctrine. The goal wasn't just to hide U.S. involvement after the fact.
The generation that lived through the Guatemala coup didn't forget it. Árbenz went into exile. He spent years moving between countries, a former president without a country, his democratic government destroyed by a foreign intelligence service in the name of anti-communism.
By the late nineteen fifties, the CIA was planning against Cuba using the same framework it had built for Guatemala. A local exile force.
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