The CIA’s mission, codenamed Operation PBSUCCESS, did not follow a cookie-cutter model of government coup d’états. In fact, many of the methods used in the Guatemalan affair were experimental. For one, the operation did not seek to unseat an unpopular, dictatorial leader as was the case in most CIA-sponsored coups. Arbenz enjoyed fairly widespread popularity, although anti-Communist propaganda aided by United Fruit was beginning to eat at that popularity. Neither did the operation have a viable opposition force to back. There was no dominating competitor to Arbenz. Therefore, the CIA had to essentially create an insurrection from scratch. They chose exiled Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to lead their operation in Guatemala. Castillo Armas led a ragtag group of rebels, but did not possess any legitimate opposition power before being chosen by the CIA. CIA operatives began training and equipping rebel soldiers in Central America.
Operation PBSUCCESS depended almost entirely on a “psychological rather than military” type of warfare . The CIA did not believe that Castillo Armas’s force could overthrow Arbenz’s government. Instead, the plan was for the rebel force, along with other CIA tactics, to inspire enough doubt that the Guatemalan Army would turn against Arbenz. The CIA believed that the Army would turn if they believed that “Castillo Armas was the head of a major insurrectionary force…[with] United States support waiting in the wings.” Although Arbenz had long held the Army’s favor due to his prior service as a colonel, many Army officers were growing disenchanted with the social mobilization occurring under Arbenz’s reforms. They viewed the social change as a challenge to their place in society. Propaganda also served a part in the psychological battle waged by the CIA. The United States envisioned anti-Communist citizens militarizing and joining rebel forces as they marched toward Guatemala City. Therefore, the United States set about creating as much anti-Communist propaganda as possible. This was mostly done through young people, especially students. Students plastered anti-Communist stickers all over the city, broadcast a secret insurgency radio show, and slipped pamphlets under doors. This propaganda worked beautifully. The propaganda methods themselves helped turn the popular sentiment against Arbenz, and the government’s response to the student propaganda was damaging. The government forcibly stopped some students using nefarious thugs, and then clamped down on freedom of speech rights in order to restrain future actions. By April 1954, Guatemala had morphed into “the type of repressive regime the United States liked to portray it as”.
Another element of the psychological warfare was the use of aircraft. The CIA hired mercenary pilots to fly planes for the remainder of the operation, in order to strike fear into the Arbenz government and more importantly, the people of Guatemala. Guatemalans, wowed by aircraft in general since they rarely saw them, viewed the planes as a sign that the rebels had an overwhelming military supremacy. Although the planes were old and obsolete, the desired psychological impression was achieved. Radio use was the final, and perhaps most important, method of psychological warfare waged on Guatemala. Guatemalans received most, if not all, their news from the radio, because much of the country was illiterate. The CIA set up a radio transmitter in Honduras, beaming into Guatemala, and broadcast a radio station they called La Voz de la Liberacion. The radio station had Guatemalan announcers even though it was run by the CIA and in fact recorded in Florida. The station ran constant anti-government propaganda, while at the same time announcing that the strength of rebel forces was stronger than ever. It had an enormous effect on the perceived strength of the rebel cause.
In June, Castillo Armas’s forces finally invaded. The already low number of troops were divided even further to appear as though several different fronts were attacking, increasing confusion and fear. The rebel forces were beaten back on several occasions, and in reality Castillo Armas and his military was losing rather badly. However, the CIA did not hinge the success of the mission on the rebel groups. The “air attack was so crucial” to the mission that when Guatemalan antiaircraft artillery succeeded in shooting down several of the planes, Eisenhower agreed to send more even though it risked revealing the United States’ role in the coup. The importance of aircraft would be one of many things mirrored in the Bay of Pigs Invasion several years later. Some days after the invasion was launched, Arbenz received word that his Army was no longer sympathetic to him and was ready to remove him from power. Arbenz resigned, leading the way to a Castillo Armas dictatorship.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion seven years later echoed many of the same strategies used in the Arbenz coup. Fidel Castro had just come to power in Cuba and brought with him the beginnings of a Communist government. Again fearing a Soviet staging ground in the hemisphere, this time even closer to the United States, the United States and the CIA decided to act. The operation had been put in motion by Eisenhower, but fell into the lap of newly elected President John F. Kennedy. It would become one of his greatest failures. Kennedy was plagued by a reluctance to use direct military support, fearing an overt United States intervention would anger the world community and have negative foreign policy implications. The CIA on the other hand, assumed that in the heat of battle the president “would end up authorizing whatever was required for success”, just as Eisenhower had done when sending extra planes to Guatemala. When Kennedy balked and refused to send in direct air support during the invasion, the mission failed, leading to a strengthened and emboldened Castro government.
The Guatemalan affair had been a victory dependent on a large amount of circumstance and luck. The psychological tactics essential in the victory could very well not have worked, and without the defection of the Army, the CIA would have failed. When the tactics used in Guatemala were not effective, the conflict became a simple military battle, which the United States did not have the strength to win. The CIA knew that there were differences between the two situations, and anticipated that the Cuban military would not capitulate as the Guatemalan had. But the CIA had put too much stake on their “Plan B”, which was direct American intervention. Unexpectedly, however, the resolute Kennedy dashed that option, to the CIA’s dismay. Both attempted coups had CIA-backed rebel groups made mostly out of exiles, and in both cases these rebel groups were overmatched by the governments’ trained military forces. However, the “victory in PBSUCCESS [the Guatemalan mission] reinforced the ‘can do’ feeling… the CIA was to Castro as the CIA had been to Arbenz." It gave the CIA a false sense of confidence.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion draws many parallels to the 1954 coup. For one, the United States trained many of the rebels for the Bay of Pigs in Guatemala, with the blessing of the CIA-installed regime. The CIA again set up a secret radio station broadcasting resistance bulletins and news, and also distributed propaganda inside of Cuba. The radio station “became the symbol of the anti-Castro effort”, just as it had in Guatemala. Air support was also viewed as essential in both situations: military superiority on the ground by both Guatemala and Cuba meant that winning the battle by air was the only solution. When the “continuous massive air superiority” imagined by the CIA was nixed by Kennedy, the whole operation was left out to dry. The two missions were approached in the same way, but the two situations were not the same. Guatemala had had a peaceful ten years of civilian presidency after Arbenz and Francisco Arana had displaced the former dictator. Castro had seized power recently using rebel fighters. The difference meant that the country of Cuba had just been militarized and was in a much different mindset than the Guatemalans. The state of mind of the Guatemalan Army was especially important, because they were growing restless after so many years at peace and were more easily convinced to turn against their president. United States officials who worked on the project later admitted that, “If the Agency had not had Guatemala, it probably would not have had Cuba,” and that “the relative success in dealing with…Guatemala tended to blind” them into thinking that Cuba “could be dealt with to some degree like the Guatemalan problem was dealt with.”
The Bay of Pigs was clearly modeled after the 1954 Guatemalan coup. Both operations were covert and orchestrated by the CIA. Both utilized rebel exiles from the countries and relied on them to be the ground troops in the operation. In both cases, these rebel groups were poorly trained and not expected to win. Rather, the CIA hoped that psychological tactics including propaganda and underground radio would help recruit the people and military to the rebel cause. Until that happened, and in case it did not, the CIA relied heavily on air support provided by the United States. This was especially the case in Cuba, where the potential to turn the Cuban military away from Castro was much slimmer. The Bay of Pigs affair was doomed because of the reluctance of President Kennedy to send in the necessary air power, lest he reveal the United States’ role in the events. By having so much faith that Kennedy would capitulate to their requests for more firepower, as Eisenhower had in 1954, the CIA was mostly to blame for this failure, even though Kennedy received much of the flack. The situation in Cuba was also different because of the political and social mindset in the country at the time, which had essentially just completed a revolution two years earlier. Lastly, the methods used in Guatemala were simply too unpredictable to be counted on. They had worked, barely, in 1954 based on a confluence of factors and to a certain extent, luck. In 1961, the psychological methods did not work as planned, the air support was not acquired as planned, and the United States suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hand of Cuba.
Wilkinson, Daniel. Silence on the mountain: stories of terror, betrayal, and forgetting in Guatemala. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, 182.
Cullather, Nick. Secret history: the CIA's classified account of its operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954. 2nd ed. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006, 18.
Bowen, Gordon. "U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954." Latin American Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1983), 91.
Immerman, Richard. The CIA in Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982: 162.
Vandenbrouke, Lucien . "Anatomy of a Failure: The Decision to Land at the Bay of Pigs." Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 3 (1984): 479.
Gleijeses, Piero. Shattered hope: the Guatemalan revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992: 41.