Robert Gates and CIA history in Guatemala

Image: "Two former CIA directors, George Bush, Sr. and his long-serving acolyte and protege, Robert Gates."

A good place to begin, GWU's National Security Archives file on Robert Gates: Link.

First, the man nominated by President Bush to lead the Pentagon advocated bombing Nicaragua in 1984:

The memo from Gates to his then-boss, CIA Director William J. Casey, was among a selection of declassified documents from the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal posted Friday on the website of the National Security Archive.

In the memo, Gates, who was deputy director of the CIA, argued that the Soviet Union was turning Nicaragua into an armed camp and that the country could become a second Cuba. The rise of the communist-leaning Sandinista government threatened the stability of Central America, Gates asserted.

Gates' memo echoed the view of many foreign policy hard-liners at the time; however, the feared communist takeover of the region never materialized.

Link to Nov. 25, 2007 LA Times article by Julian E. Barnes.

Snip from "CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents," by Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh, from the GWU National Security Archives, printed on 14 August 1997:

These documents, including an instructional guide on assassination found among the training files of the CIA's covert "Operation PBSUCCESS," were among several hundred records released by the Agency on May 23, 1997 on its involvement in the infamous 1954 coup in Guatemala. After years of answering Freedom of Information Act requests with its standard "we can neither confirm nor deny that such records exist," the CIA has finally declassified some 1400 pages of over 100,000 estimated to be in its secret archives on the Guatemalan destabilization program. (The Agency's press release stated that more records would be released before the end of the year.) An excerpt from the assassination manual appears on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Saturday, May 31, 1997.

The small, albeit dramatic, release comes more than five years after then CIA director Robert Gates declared that the CIA would "open" its shadowy past to post-cold war public scrutiny, and only days after a member of the CIA's own historical review panel was quoted in the New York Times as calling the CIA's commitment to openness "a brilliant public relations snow job." (See Tim Weiner, "C.I.A.'s Openness Derided as a 'Snow Job'," The New York Times, May 20, 1997, p. A16)

Arbenz was elected President of Guatemala in 1950 to continue a process of socio- economic reforms that the CIA disdainfully refers to in its memoranda as "an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the 'Banana Republic.'"

The first CIA effort to overthrow the Guatemalan president--a CIA collaboration with Nicaraguan dictator Anastacio Somoza to support a disgruntled general named Carlos Castillo Armas and codenamed Operation PBFORTUNE--was authorized by President Truman in 1952. As early as February of that year, CIA Headquarters began generating memos with subject titles such as "Guatemalan Communist Personel to be disposed of during Military Operations," outlining categories of persons to be neutralized "through Executive Action"--murder--or through imprisonment and exile.

The "A" list of those to be assassinated contained 58 names--all of which the CIA has excised from the declassified documents.

Link to story.

Snip from a related New York Times story from 1997 about the CIA records release announced by Gates in the '90s (thousands of documents about the CIA's history with Iran were "lost" by the agency, but critics said they were methodically destroyed):

The CIA has proved that it can release history-altering documents. On Friday, it declassified 1,400 pages on the Guatemala coup in 1954 and two historical papers, including [historian and former CIA staffer Nick Cullather]'s 116-page account of the operation.

Cullather said the records on which he based his work were preserved only by a quirk of history: a lawsuit seeking the documents, filed under the Freedom of Information Act in 1982 by Steven Schlesinger, an author of "Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala," (Doubleday, 1982).

"The CIA is presenting the Guatemala release as evidence of good faith and openness," Cullather said, "but it's the exception."

He said the breadth and depth of the documents' preservation "generally doesn't happen with CIA operations."

Using the documents preserved by the lawsuit, Cullather produced an astonishingly frank account, written in 1993 and printed in 1994, which may be a high-water mark in CIA openness.

His account says the CIA directly lied to President Dwight Eisenhower when it told him that only one of the agency-backed rebels had died in the Guatemala coup. In fact, at least 43 rebels were killed. The account also says the Guatemala operation, which "went into agency lore as an unblemished triumph," was marked by poor security, bad planning and third-rate reporting.

It describes the leaders installed by the CIA as repressive and corrupt. The coup, it says, destroyed the political center in Guatemala, which "vanished from politics into a terrorized silence," and led to a series of brutal military governments and a "cycle of violence and reprisals" that "claimed the lives of a U.S. ambassador, two U.S. military attaches and as many as 10,000 peasants" in the 1960s.

"The CIA never learned from the experience," Cullather said, so the Guatemala coup became a model for the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. "Legend replaced reality. It's a classic case of the CIA not learning from its own history," a history that was secret.

Link to "CIA Destroyed Files on 1953 Iran Coup" by Tim Weiner in the May 29, 1997 issue of The New York Times.

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