Description It is 1954 and you are an advisor to President Eisenhower. You have been asked to write ...
Description It is 1954 and you are an advisor to President Eisenhower. You have been asked to write a position paper on whether he should order a covert action that will most certainly topple the government of Guatemala. Using examples from the book defend why or why not the government should go forward with this plan. Consider these questions: What are the possible immediate risks? What are the long-term consequences? How was information about this country gathered? What other outside influences could be affecting the decision-making process? 1 attachments Slide 1 of 1 attachment_1 attachment_1 UNFORMATTED ATTACHMENT PREVIEW "Schlesinger and Kinzer have done the greatest service to truth and justice by presenting the untold story of the CIA coup. BITTER FRUIT may open the eyes of many Americans to the poisonous mixture of ignorance and arrogance which has characterized United States foreign policy in Central America. The authors bring detail and knowledge, scope and concern to their extraordinary achievement. They prove themselves to be, at the highest level, both journalists and historians. BITTER FRUIT is an extremely important, valuable, and exciting work." — Carlos Fuentes BITTER FRUIT is an astounding story of CIA adventurism. It tells the story of Operation Success, in which the CIA, the U.S. State Department and the Executive Branch conspired on behalf of the United Fruit Company to overthrow the government of Guatemala. Based on scores of CIA and State Department documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, it is a dramatic rendition of a beautifully planned treachery that may be the most important episode in the history of both the CIA and modern Central America. Indeed, it was the seed of later secret operations in Cuba as well as of the bloody revolutions now convulsing El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. With President Eisenhower's approval, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, Director of the CIA, conceived and orchestrated a plot that would put in power a government "compatible" with United Fruit. The plot included a pistol-packing ambassador, a propaganda campaign mounted in the American press, a ragtag "nationalist" army hired by the CIA, a disinformation campaign conducted through clandestine radio stations and mercenary American pilots who bombed Guatemala City. BITTER FRUIT is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why Central America is in flames today. It considers important questions of U.S. intervention, the role of multinational corporations and the mandate of the CIA. It is also a fast-paced adventure with as much action and intrigue as any spy novel. Stephen Schlesinger is a graduate of Harvard Law School, served as a speechwriter for Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign in 1972 and was deputy director of issues for Senator Edward Kennedy's campaign in 1980. He has edited and published The New Democrat and has served as a staff writer for Time Magazine. He taught at Harvard University and the New School for Social Research. He is the author of The New Reformers. Stephen Kinzer is the Latin-American correspondent of the Boston Globe. His articles have appeared in major magazines and newspapers including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The Nation. He lives in Truro, Massachusetts. TO THE PEOPLE OF GUATEMALA PREFACE Numerous individuals and institutions were helpful in the writing of this book. We would like to thank the congressional authors of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), who provided us with an indispensable tool to review the inner workings of United States foreign policy. The FOIA enabled us to obtain documents from the State Department, the National Archives, the Naval Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation which described many details of American policy and conduct in Guatemala. Pursuant to our FOIA request, the State Department released to us over 1,000 pages of material. Three individuals serving on the Information/Privacy Staff in the State Department's Bureau of Administration were particularly helpful: Deborah M. Odell, Mary Spruell and Kathleen Siljegovic. At the Department of the Navy, Rear Admiral USN (Ret.) John Kane, Jr., director of the Naval Historical Center, was most cooperative in retrieving papers from the Navy's archives explaining the movement of U.S. ships, submarines and planes during 1954. At the National Archives, Gibson Smith of the Modern Military Branch of the via PREFACE Military Archives Division provided important documents from the Defense Department. In addition attorney Mark Lynch of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project provided us continuing legal counsel in our attempt to win release of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency. Our experience with American libraries was at all times worthwhile. Of special value for our research purposes were: the Eisenhower Library and its director, John E. Wickman, and his assistant director, Martin M. Teasley, who were most cooperative in providing us with important documents from the Eisenhower collection; the Princeton University Library, which houses the John Foster Dulles papers, and the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, at the same university, containing Allen Dulles' papers; the Boston Public Library; and the New York City Public Library, which harbored a significant trove of materials on the coup. As well, the New York Public Library provided a research office in the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room. In Guatemala, the Biblioteca Nacional offered important sources. We also wish to thank Richard Harris Smith, who generously permitted us to quote from his forthcoming biography of CIA Director Allen Dulles, called Spymaster's Odyssey: The World of Allen Dulles which will be published in 1983. Among special friends who read and commented upon the manuscript, we want to make mention of Judy Elster, Mrs. Ilona Kinzer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., all of whom spent several days reviewing the manuscript. The authors take full responsibility for all information contained in the book. CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 by Harrison E. Salisbury MAPS Guatemala The Voyage of the Alfhem The Invasion Route THE BATTLE BEGINS A TEACHER TAKES POWER AN AGE OF REFORM THE CLOUDS GATHER THE OVERLORD: THE UNITED FRUIT ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF OPERATION SUCCESS THE LIBERATOR THE PROCONSUL THE SECRET VOYAGE OF THE "ALFHEM" THE FINAL COUNTDOWN ARBENZ FIGHTS BACK THE LONGEST DAY THE LIBERATION THE AFTERMATH NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX vii xi 1 3 5 7 25 37 49 65 79 99 119 131 147 159 173 191 205 227 256 293 307 INTRODUCTION The time has come for a basic reappraisal of American policy in the Western Hemisphere. For deep psychological, political and economic reasons U.S. relations with its neighbors tend to receive low priority regardless of President or party in power. This has been true for almost a hundred years and not even the sudden spotlight focused on El Salvador in the first days of the Reagan administration has changed things very much. The results are obvious and dangerous. We festoon Hispano-America with garlands of flossy verbiage and pay little or no attention to what is going on there. Then when something happens to shock Washington, to violate its imprecise notion of status quo, or threatens American interests, we reach for our gun. Wilson did it when he sent "Black Jack" Pershing into Mexico chasing Villa and when the Navy bombarded Veracruz. Harding and Coolidge sent the Marines into Latin America like riot squads. They stayed in Nicaragua so long they grew beards. Our forces have routinely moved in and out of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The use of American force in Central America and the Caribbean has become a way of life since the INTRODUCTION xii days when newspaper competition between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst touched off the Spanish-American War. "How do you like the Journal's war?" Hearst asked his readers in bold headlines. The record of unilateral use of force by the United States would fill a book. Not for nothing were the Central American republics long known as banana republics, fiefs of an American fruit-vending outfit based in Boston. So what else is new? What is new is that with the rise to power of the Central Intelligence Agency the task of keeping Latin America "safe for democracy" has more and more passed into the hands of a great clandestine bureaucracy. One must presume that National Security directives exist which define the role of the CIA and its mission in the Western Hemisphere. One supposes the directives make a case for a hemisphere safe and secure for American interests (an updating of the Monroe Doctrine, which kept Europe out of our backyard); an imperative to keep the Soviet Union and its agents out; and, it can be hoped, a commandment to further the development of democratic ideals and friendly democratic governments compatible with U.S. principles. It is in the light of this presumed U.S. policy that the case history of Guatemala assumes such striking importance. If the above words faithfully represent the essence of U.S. policy our conduct in Guatemala violates its every provision. Guatemala bears a special distinction. It is one of two countries where the CIA boasts it carried out a successful clandestine military operation. The other, of course, is Iran. Indeed, it was in the rosy afterglow of Iran that the Agency was authorized by John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower to carry out the plan which removed Jacobo Arbenz, the legally elected President of Guatemala, and replaced him with a regime headed by a little-known military man named Castillo Armas, whose friends regarded him as a well-meaning, rather stupid little man. These qualities were not necessarily seen as negatives by the CIA operators. It was enthusiasm over Guatemala and the CIA operation there which encouraged Mr. Dulles, General Eisenhower and Richard Nixon to believe the Agency could rid the United States INTRODUCTION xiii of the "threat" of Fidel Castro by duplicating "Operation Success," as the plot to overthrow Arbenz was code-named. As Bitter Fruit makes clear, Operation Success worked. It achieved its objective. Arbenz was overthrown and after some pulling and hauling Armas was seated in the presidential chair. The operation did not go very smoothly. It required bluster, strong-arm tactics, doubledealing, tough talk by American Ambassador Peurifoy to put it over. And there was an unprecedented trick in which Foster Dulles and his brother Allen collaborated to blind the eyes of the American press (and the American people) as to what was going on. They deliberately deceived the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, feeding him false and misleading information about one of the Times's best men, Sydney Gruson, to get him off the scene. Gruson was too good a reporter. He might spill the beans. Still and all, Arbenz was taken out of play as planned. So it was not the technique, so carefully reconstructed by the authors of Bitter Fruit, which was at fault. True, the tactics came within a blink of blowing up. The same thing happened in Iran, and at the Bay of Pigs the whole operation would go down the drain because of bad planning and this would be the case in many other, lesser-known CIA operations, for example, that against Sukarno in Indonesia, the pitiful sacrifice of Tibetans in a botched conspiracy against Lhasa, the wholesale slaughter of Russians and Ukrainians parachuted into the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Still and all, the question is not one of technique. Presumably the United States with all its capabilities should be able to get its act together and mount a clandestine plot anywhere in Latin America. The question is: Was Operation Success necessary and did it really advance U.S. interests, in the long range and in the aggregate? This is the question which has almost never been examined. Bitter Fruit looks very hard at the case of Arbenz. Did he genuinely represent a threat to the United States or was he really only a kind of secondary threat to a leading U.S. monopoly, the United Fruit Company? Did his successors actually provide a firm and reliable base for U.S. policy? Was the whole thing just a charade, a tragic charade, which actually weakened our pres- xiv INTRODUCTION tige and deceived American policy makers into thinking they had found a new, convenient weapon, a kind of all-purpose CIA gimmick to achieve difficult or unattainable ends? Did we not merely repeat in more elaborate, more expensive, more complicated technological form the old pattern of entrusting our interests to greedy colonels, petty dictators who sowed the soil with ingredients in which radical and Communistic sentiment was bound to flourish? The answer seems to be yes. If we take a census of genuine democracies in Latin America today we come up with a short list, a very, very short list—Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, maybe one or two more if we are very generous. Can we really trust the tin-pot colonels for anything other than an overwhelming desire to enrich themselves at our expense? Is Latin America today a citadel of democracy? Or has it sunk into a swamp where horror now prevails—in Guatemala itself and in adjacent El Salvador, with its fine-honed neofascism, in the Argentine and in Chile, where the CIA also had a hand in overthrowing a man presumed to be a threat to democracy, Salvador Allende, opening the way to a loathsome dictatorship? After thirty years of relying essentially upon the CIA and other conspiratorial agencies, black warfare subdivisions of the U. S. Army, "police training" programs to instruct Latin-American bullies in the use of U.S. electronic and other technology for coercing prisoners, it is difficult to see what gains we have achieved. Perhaps, as some in Washington have argued, Communism has been kept out, but if so it is at the price of turning the area over to fascist and neofascist thugs. There is little difference to the man to whose testicles the electrodes are applied whether his torturer is "totalitarian" or "authoritarian." What Operation Success suggests is that we have for two or three generations been stumbling down the wrong trail south of the border, helping to turn Latin America into a quagmire and nourishing a revolutionary spirit birthed by hopelessness. It is even hard to see the value of Operation Success to the elites and to Big Business. The elites of Guatemala have suffered along with everyone else. The fruit company has long since gone elsewhere. INTRODUCTION XV The moral of Bitter Fruit is that Operation Success should have been called Operation Disaster. It was conceived by men who did not understand what was happening in Guatemala, who did not understand the nature of Latin America and its problems and who had no understanding of the consequences of the events they set in motion. But like all bureaucratic ventures, once started it was engraved in gold and its successor projects were as well. Men on the inside, intelligent, skilled men within the CIA, questioned it from the start, as they did the Bay of Pigs. They were simply ridden over roughshod. No doubt the same thing is happening today. If the Guatemala model is to be applied today to other countries—for example, to El Salvador—and with appropriate variations, if the Bay of Pigs is to be repeated in Cuba, we will simply sink ourselves deeper into the mud of militaristic adventurism. What is needed today is some thought as to what kind of a Western Hemisphere the United States wants and needs. Can true security be found in an area overrun by brutalizing dictators leagued with the worst elements in capitalism—for example, as Batista was leagued with the Mafia before Castro came along? Or is true security not more likely to be found in a Latin world which is inspired by the best elements in American democracy rather than its worst, in the Bill of Rights and not in some secret directive for another Operation Success. The time for choice, it would seem, is close at hand. HARRISON E. SALISBURY The invasion route. Guatemalan rebels crossed the border from Honduras (1) and set up headquarters in Esquipulas (2). Clashes between rival forces took place at Chiquimula. Rebel planes also bombed the Guatemalan capital (3) and Zacapa. 1 THE BATTLE BEGINS As dawn broke over Guatemala City, a C-47 transport plane lumbered low in the sky, flying from the south over nearby mountains. It was still early on the morning of June 18, 1954. The sun's rays were weak in the east. The weather was cool and hazy. The plane steered a direct course for the sleeping capital. As it reached the outskirts, the aircraft abruptly dove from its flight path toward the capital's center where the stately National Palace stood. It swooped over the plaza facing the Palace, then swerved upward again, suddenly spewing thousands of small leaflets into the air. It veered away and sped out of the city, disappearing beyond the horizon. The leaflets fluttered in the wind and gradually floated down, 8 BITTER FRUIT settling onto city streets, market stalls, store roofs, courtyards and gutters. Passersby scooped some up; Guatemalan police retrieved others. The printed notices, in large block letters, carried a bold demand: Guatemala's President, Jacobo Arbenz, must resign immediately. They warned further that the mysterious plane would return that afternoon and blow up the city's main arsenal to assure Arbenz's swift departure. If he had not quit by then, the circulars added, the aircraft would also bombard the Palace. The leaflets were signed "National Liberation Forces."1 News of the craft's morning visit spread quickly. The event deeply rattled an already shaken city. Every eleven days for the past month a plane—usually a U.S.-made Beechcraft—had made similar raids, first on May 26, next on the night of June 6 and then today. Each time, the ghost ship had descended like a hawk from the sky, scattered its leaflets and vanished. The messages grew more ominous with every call. In the earlier trips, the circulars had addressed the Guatemalan Army, warning its officers about a supposed secret plan by President Arbenz to replace the military with a citizens' force and urging soldiers to rise up against the President. This latest leaflet was the first to demand that the President surrender.2 A great fear was overtaking Guatemala. Ominous and mysterious events had multiplied over the past few months. On May Day, traditionally a festive workers' celebration in Guatemala, a new radio station suddenly appeared on the air broadcasting from "somewhere in Guatemala"; it demanded Arbenz's overthrow. Most Guatemalans already knew enough to link the "Voice of Liberation" with the exile forces of Carlos Castillo Armas, a forty-year-old former army colonel and longtime enemy of President Arbenz who had been plotting against the government from neighboring Honduras. In recent days, Castillo Armas had grown bolder and issued appeals, declaring, "I am certain that 90 percent of the people of Guatemala are thoroughly ready to rise up and fight against the government."3 Meantime Guatemalan newspapers printed reports of Castillo Armas' men walking down the streets of Tegucigalpa, the Hon-duran capital, talking openly of a forthcoming invasion of Guatemala. Some of the "troops" admitted they were receiving handsome wages, usually paid in American dollars. Many were not THE BATTLE BEGINS 9 Guatemalans, but foreign mercenaries. Several times Guatemalan President Arbenz had demanded that Honduras round up Castillo Armas and his followers, but nothing had happened. Foreign correspondents and photographers, especially from the United States, began to converge on Tegucigalpa, apparently aware that a battle was imminent.4 The Guatemalan government was understandably jumpy. It had survived more than thirty attempted coups by right-wing Guatemalans in the past nine years under Arbenz and his predecessor, Juan Jose Arevalo. Now the incidents were accelerating. Recently, the unknown dissidents had been scrawling the slogan "32" on city walls, referring to the constitutional clause prohibiting any political party from having a foreign affiliation and thus protesting the existence of a Communist party in the country. Raiders had tried to blow up Guatemala's main railway to the Atlantic Ocean. At the end of May, the Guatemalan police uncovered a secret conspiracy to overthrow Arbenz. They arrested several plotters, and others quickly took refuge in foreign embassies. On June 8, President Arbenz invoked the constitutional provision allowing him to suspend civil liberties for thirty days during an emergency. Six days later, an unmarked plane parachuted arms on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, and villagers, who recovered some of the rifles, noticed Soviet markings suggesting that somebody was trying to frame Arbenz as a Soviet puppet, or that the Russians were somehow involved in a bizarre espionage stunt. The President now sent his children out of the country to Mexico City. He began to call for loyalty from around the country. Everyone could feel tension in the air; a confrontation appeared imminent.5 As the breakfast hours passed on June 18, President Arbenz strode tight-lipped along the underground tunnel that led from his living quarters via an elevator to the presidential office on the second floor of the National Palace. A vigorous forty-one, he was in the fourth year of his six-year term. He was only Guatemala's second President elected under a democratic constitution in 133 years of independence.6 Arbenz arrived at his suite. Grim-faced, he heard fresh news from aides: a plane or planes had just attacked the Pacific port 10 BITTER FRUIT of San Jose, strafing buildings and puncturing holes in the sides of some gas storage tanks; the aircraft also hit the inland city of Retalhuleu. Worse, Honduran newspapers had reported that chartered DC-3S were airlifting troops loyal to rebel leader Castillo Armas from Tegucigalpa to camps near the Guatemalan border. Some of these insurgents had that morning crossed into Guatemala and overrun the frontier post at La Florida, advancing into the country under a banner of "God, Fatherland and Liberty" ("Dios, Patria y Libertad"). Arbenz and his advisers recognized that the long-promised National Liberation offensive led by Castillo Armas heralded by the morning leafleting was finally underway along the Honduran border.7 The reports were still sketchy. President Arbenz talked at length with his military commanders, Foreign Minister Guil-lermo Toriello and various political advisers. Acting as befitted a former commander of the armed forces, Arbenz decided to place his 6,000-man army and 3,000man police force on alert, but he determined to hold the army strength in reserve, confining most troops to their barracks until further notice. As the midday conference thrashed out different alternatives, Foreign Minister Toriello, a liberal landowner-turned-diplomat and spokesman for his country's cause abroad, urged an immediate appeal to the United Nations Security Council. He also suggested that Guatemala send a message to the Inter-American Peace Committee of the Organization of American States (OAS) requesting a fact-finding mission to set up a truce.8 Toriello argued that Guatemala must first consider how its actions might be seen overseas before it took any military action. His small country was in an extremely delicate position. A month earlier, an international outcry had arisen over Guatemala's purchase of arms from Czechoslovakia. The United States had leaked the story to the press as the weapons were being unloaded at a Guatemalan seaport. Arbenz's government had reluctantly acknowledged the accuracy of the American report but defended its need to re-equip its army. At a press conference on May 19, President Dwight Eisenhower had escalated the verbal jousting between the two nations by castigating Guatemala for accepting the Czech weapons, THE BATTLE BEGINS 11 warning of a possible Communist "outpost on this continent." Soon afterward, Eisenhower publicly authorized large airlifts of military aid to Honduras and Nicaragua, Central American dictatorships closely allied with the United States. The U.S. press began to print accounts of mass arrests and tortures allegedly perpetrated by the Arbenz regime. On June 15, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that Guatemalans were living under a "Communist-type reign of terror" while carefully adding that only they themselves possessed the "capability of cleaning their own house."9 Hoping to show the world the untruth of the U.S. assessments, Foreign Minister Toriello did not wish Guatemalan troops to engage the invaders that morning, either on the ground or in the air. He wanted to make clear that the Guatemalan government was not the cause but the victim of the invasion. Nor did Toriello, a shrewd former ambassador to Washington, want to give the United States an opportunity to capitalize on any inadvertent frontier infraction to accuse Guatemala of aggression against Honduras. Instead, Toriello recommended that Guatemala indict its neighbors, from whose territory the unmarked planes and invading soldiers were apparently coming. Honduras never seriously denied the obvious: that its territory was the jumping-off point for the men crossing the border. And Honduras or Nicaragua seemed the most likely base for the mysterious aircraft, since the small planes had limited range and could only have flown from close by. Toriello and Arbenz, with the assent of the other participants, quickly agreed to single out Honduran President Juan Manuel Galvez and President Anastasio Somoza Garcia of Nicaragua, the latter a longtime foe of Arbenz's, for measured denunciations. Toriello began to draft stern diplomatic notes demanding that Honduras and Nicaragua prevent any further border incursions by Castillo Armas' followers. He also prepared a protest to the United Nations accusing both countries of aggression against Guatemala.10 But the divisions between Guatemala and the United States ran too deep and were too advanced for Toriello's overnight repair. The Arbenz government had embarked on a land reform program that included expropriation of some of the vast acreage 12 BITTER FRUIT belonging to the United Fruit Company. The land reform was not popular either in the company's Boston boardrooms or in Washington, where the firm had enormous influence. United Fruit controlled directly or indirectly nearly 40,000 jobs in Guatemala. Its investments in the country were valued at $60 million. It functioned as a state within a state, owning Guatemala's telephone and telegraph facilities, administering its only important Atlantic harbor and monopolizing its banana export. The company's subsidiary, the International Railways of Central America (IRCA), owned 887 miles of railroad track in Guatemala, nearly every mile in the country.11 The Eisenhower administration had taken action in early March 1954—weeks before the much-publicized Czech arms shipment—to give Guatemala a final warning of its displeasure over the land seizures. At the Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas, Venezuela, Secretary of State Dulles had exerted heavy pressure on Latin states to endorse a resolution condemning "Communist" infiltration in Latin America. It was directly aimed at Guatemala, though no nation was named. Only Guatemala voted in opposition to it, with two others abstaining in meek protest. A show of diplomatic correctness and conciliation, even pleading, now seemed Guatemala's only hope in dealing with the United States. What made this tactic exceedingly difficult for the Guatemalans was the character of the formidable U.S. ambassador in their country. John Peurifoy, a prickly and heavy-handed diplomat, had been especially chosen to exert pressure on Ar-benz and, if that failed, to overthrow him. Peurifoy was an old State Department hand. A West Point dropout, he had worked his way up through the ranks from clerk to service on the Economic Warfare and War Production Boards in World War II to the post of chief American organizer of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in 1945. Later, in 1949, he was Deputy Undersecretary of State and from 1950 to 1953 U.S. ambassador to Greece. Within days of his arrival in Guatemala in late 1953, Peurifoy had gone out of his way to lecture President Arbenz on his tolerance of Communists and to warn him that American-Guatemalan relations would remain strained so long as a single Communist remained on the public payroll. After that, Peurifoy THE BATTLE BEGINS 13 and the President seldom spoke, though Peurifoy and Foreign Minister Toriello conferred regularly. Arbenz now instructed Toriello to meet with Peurifoy about the invasion and appeal to him to defuse the crisis. At one o'clock in the afternoon that June 18, Toriello left the President's office. He told a dozen foreign correspondents and thirty local reporters waiting for him on the first floor of the Palace: "The battle of Guatemala has begun. We stand as one man against this criminal invasion. We will not take one backward step."12 So far the United States had given no formal reaction to reports of the rebel invasion. The State Department remained strangely silent in Washington. There was an undisclosed reason for the Department's circumspection. What Arbenz and Toriello might have feared was true: the United States government was in fact the secret creator and sponsor of the "Liberation" movement. That morning John Peurifoy arrived at his embassy office in an ebullient mood. The night before, he had told his staff: "Well, boys, tomorrow at this time we'll have ourselves a party." He knew that the invasion he had helped plan was underway, and he was eagerly anticipating its outcome. Peurifoy was a blunt, politically ambitious self-described "tough guy" from South Carolina sent to Guatemala with a single mission: to change the direction of the reformist government, no matter how. He had been unable to convince President Arbenz to cooperate, and now Arbenz was about to receive his just deserts. The dawn leafleting and the early radio reports of air attacks and troop movements reassured Peurifoy that the plan, called Operation Success, was working. He sat down and dictated a stream of dispatches to Washington reporting the play-by-play from Guatemala City.13 After the unmarked C-47 disappeared from sight, the capital settled into an uneasy calm. By midday, uncertainty was growing about whether the reported invasion was real or not. The "Voice of Liberation" radio was broadcasting repeated bulletins claiming that Castillo Armas was advancing swiftly; the government, on the other hand, asserted it had stopped the enemy. Reporters were confused, not knowing what or whom to believe. Rumors spread everywhere. In the afternoon, President Arbenz 14 BITTER FRUIT received reassurances of support from the four political parties that formed his bloc in Congress, including the three center-left parties and the small Communist party. In a flurry of appeals, he also sought support from unions, peasant leaders and military officers.14 At midday, Toriello cabled his country's appeal to the UN Security Council in New York. His two-page plea attacked the United States for "false" accusations concerning Communism in Guatemala, reviewed the past days of military incidents and then implored the Security Council to seek a cease-fire and work for the withdrawal of "aggressor governments"—Honduras and Nicaragua—from Guatemalan soil. Castillo Armas and his men were working "at the instigation of certain foreign monopolies," it declared. In private messages, Toriello directed Guatemala's UN representative to request a special session of the Security Council and simultaneously ordered his charge d'affaires in Washington, Dr. Alfredo Chocano, to ask the OAS Peace Committee to dispatch a fact-finding mission to Guatemala.15 Around four that afternoon, Guatemala City's anxious quiet was shattered by the drone of two planes approaching from the south. The aircraft, P-47S never seen before in any Latin Air Force, drew close, dove, fired a few .50-caliber machine-gun rounds at houses near the Guardia de Honor barracks—one of five forts in the city—and dropped five-pound fragmentation bombs, creating a series of loud explosions. Apparently fulfilling the threat contained in the morning circulars, one plane swerved about and machine-gunned the National Palace. After scattering m
