Disturbing History - Dwight Eisenhower: The Secret Coup Machine

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Dwight Eisenhower is the president most Americans remember as the calm grandfather of the nineteen fifties. The general who beat Hitler. The man who built the interstate highways.The smile under the bald head. But underneath that famous reassurance, his administration ran something most Americans were never told about. A young intelligence agency, a brand-new doctrine called plausible deniability, and a willingness to overthrow elected governments halfway around the world if Washington decided they were a problem.This episode takes you inside two of the operations that built the template. Iran in nineteen fifty-three, where a CIA officer named Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of a president, ran an unauthorized coup with a million dollars in cash and a network of paid mobs in the streets of Tehran. And Guatemala in nineteen fifty-four, where a fake army, a fake radio station, and a real corporate giant called the United Fruit Company combined to take down a reform-minded president named Jacobo Árbenz.Both operations succeeded. Both were sold to the public as spontaneous popular uprisings. Neither was anything of the kind.You'll meet Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Iranian prime minister buried under his own dining room floor so the regime that hated him could never control his grave. You'll meet Árbenz, the soldier-reformer stripped to his underwear on the steps of the Mexican embassy and forced into seventeen years of wandering exile that ended in a bathtub in Mexico City.You'll meet the Dulles brothers, the two men running American foreign policy at the same time, one in daylight and one in shadow, both with corporate ties to the very interests they were defending overseas. And you'll see how a doctrine designed to win the Cold War quietly became something else entirely, a machine that kept running long after Eisenhower left office and is, in many ways, still running today. The disturbing part of this story isn't that Eisenhower was a monster. He wasn't. The disturbing part is that he was exactly what he looked like. A decent, well-meaning man who signed off on operations that ended in dead bodies and broken countries, quietly, repeatedly, year after year. And the bill for those choices came due decades later, in the Iran hostage crisis, in the Guatemalan civil war that killed two hundred thousand people, in refugees at the southern border, in the long generational recognition that you cannot take a country apart in secret and expect the wreckage to stay buried.This is the hidden side of the smile on the postage stamp. The shadow behind the grandfather.The story your high school history class skipped. Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner, of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.

Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull it threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.

victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. It's August 19, 1953. Tehran. The sun is brutal, the kind of heat that comes up off the pavement and waves and makes the air shimmer above the rooftops. And the crowd is off. Not the size of it, although it's big, the shape of it. Wrestlers from the gyms in the south end of the city are mixed in with men carrying clubs, men carrying knives, men chanting slogans they were paid to chant the night before in American dollars that they don't even know are American. They're moving through the streets like a tide, and the tide is heading toward the home of the prime minister of Iran. They're tearing down posters. They're shouting for the Shah.

And somewhere in a basement office not far away, an American intelligence officer named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of a president of the United States, is handing out cash and, orders and waiting to see if the thing he's been building for weeks is finally going to break the right way. By nightfall, the elected prime minister of Iran will be running for his life through a hail of gunfire. By the end of the week, the Shah will be back on his throne. And the American people, the people whose tax dollars paid for that crowd, will never be told what their government just did. Now jump forward 10 months. Different country, same playbook, Guatemala City. A small plane comes in low over the rooftops, just at sunset, and drops leaflets and a couple of small bombs that don't do

much damage but do exactly what they're supposed to do, which is rattle every nerve in the country. Radio broadcasts crackle through the static all night, every night, claiming that a great rebel army is rolling in from the east. The broadcasts give battlefield reports. They name towns that have fallen. They describe troop movements, and most of it is fiction. The rebel army is barely an army, a couple hundred men, a handful of second-hand planes, and a stage set put together by Americans in a rented house in Florida. But it works. The country panics. The military hesitates. The president, the second freely elected leader in his country's history, walks into the radio station, sits down at the microphone and resigns. And both times, the same man is in the Oval

Office back in Washington, smiling for the cameras, going to church on Sunday, playing God off at Augusta, plausibly deniable, calm. That man is Dwight David Eisenhower. Today we're going somewhere most Americans have never been asked to go, which is straight into the gap between who we think Dwight Eisenhower was

and who he actually was. Most people, when you say his name, picture a kind of national grandfather, the bald head, the wide smile, the five-star general who beat Hitler and came home and got drafted into the presidency by a country that was tired of crisis,

and wanted somebody steady to drive the car for a while. He built the interstate highways. He warned us about the military industrial complex on his way out the door. He played a lot of golf. He's the man on the postage stamp and the carrier and the high school named after him in the next town over. He's safe. He's settled. He's history class.

But underneath that smile, there was a different administration. One that took a young, half-formed American intelligence service and turned it into a global instrument. for getting rid of governments that Washington didn't like. One that built a doctrine of covert action so carefully hidden that most of the country didn't even know it existed. One whose decisions are still rippling through our world right now, today, in headlines you read this morning.

The Iran hostage crisis of 1979. The decades of bloodshed in Central America. The word blowback, which most Americans first heard in the days after September 11th, 2001. All of it has roots that run straight back through the calm, prosperous, supposedly peaceful Eisenhower years. This isn't a story about a bad president. That would be too easy. This is a story about how a decent man, an honest man, a man who genuinely believed he was protecting the free world, signed off on operations that ended in dead bodies and broken countries that he probably never thought about for more than an hour total in his entire life. It's a story about. It's a story

about how secrecy becomes its own kind of policy. How plausible deniability stops being a tactic and starts being a way of governing. And it's about the cost, the long, slow, generational cost, paid by people in places most Americans couldn't find on a map. We're going to Tehran, we're going to Guatemala City, and we're going inside the mind of the calmest president this country ever had. And the shadow machine he built and ran behind that famous, reassuring smile. Let's start with the smile itself. If you want to understand the trick Eisenhower's administration pulled off, you have to understand the public image first, because the image is what made everything else possible. In 1952, the country was tired. World War II was only seven years in the

rear view. Korea was still bleeding. Joe McCarthy was on television waving papers and naming names. People were building bomb shelters in their backyards. school children were ducking under their desks for civil defense drills. And out of all that anxiety, the country reached for the calmest, most reassuring man it could find. Eisenhower was perfect for the part. He'd commanded the largest military operation in human history, and he didn't seem to need any credit for it. He spoke plainly. He smiled easily.

He liked sports and golf and grandchildren. He was the small town Kansas boy who'd grown up and saved the world and then come home to mow the lawn. The campaign slogan was three words. I like Ike. That's it. No platform. No promises. Just the feeling that this guy, of all the available guys, would not crash the car.

And he won in a landslide. Twice. The public Eisenhower was exactly what the country needed him to be. He balanced the budget. He ended the Korean War. He sent federal troops to Little Rock when nine black students tried to integrate Central High School and the governor of Arkansas tried to stop them. He launched the Interstate Highway System, the biggest public works project in American history, and changed the way the country

was physically put together. He created NASA. He warned on his way out the door in 1961 about the dangers of a permanent arms industry growing too powerful for the country's own good. That speech, the farewell address, is one of the great pieces of presidential writing in American history, and it came from a man who'd spent his whole life inside that very machine and knew exactly what it could become. That's the Eisenhower most Americans carry around in their heads. The grandfather, the general, the closer of files and the keeper of the peace. And here's the thing. None of that is wrong. All of it is true. But it's not the whole picture. And the part that's missing isn't a minor part. It isn't a footnote. It's a wholesale revolution in how the

American government does business overseas. A revolution that Eisenhower not only approved but actively designed and that has never been undone. To see how that happened, you have to look at what was sitting on the desk waiting for him when he showed up in the Oval Office in January of 1953. Because by the time Eisenhower took the oath, the United States already had something it had never really had before. A peacetime spy service with the authority to do almost anything, almost anywhere, in almost complete secrecy. That spy service was called the Central Intelligence Agency. To understand why it existed, you have to back up to World War II.

During the war, the Roosevelt administration set up an outfit called the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. It was run by a Wall Street lawyer turned colonel named William Donovan, a man who went by the nickname Wild Bill, and who'd won the Medal of Honor in World War I. The OSS did sabotage. It ran agents behind enemy lines. It blew up bridges in France and dropped men into Burma and ran propaganda operations across Europe.

It was, by any honest description, the first real American spy service. And when the war ended, President Truman shut it down. He didn't trust it. He didn't want what he called an American Gestapo. So in October of 1945, the OSS was dissolved. Donovan was sent home. The files were scattered across other agencies. That was supposed to be the end of it.

It wasn't. Within two years, the Cold War was on. The Soviets were tightening their grip on Eastern Europe. Greece was in a civil war. The communists were on the march in China. American officials looked around and realized they were essentially deaf and blind in a world that suddenly seemed full of enemies. So in 1947, Truman signed the National Security of,

Act, the same piece of legislation that created the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. And buried in that act, in language so vague it almost seemed accidental, was the authorization for a new agency, the Central Intelligence Agency. On paper, the CIA was supposed to coordinate intelligence, gather it, analyze it, hand it to the president in a tidy folder so he could make better decisions. That was the public job description. The private one was different. A clause in the act and a follow-up directive in 1948 called NSC-10-2 authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations.

The phrase in the document was that these operations had to be so planned and executed that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. That's the founding sentence of everything we're going to talk about for the the rest of this episode. Plausibly disclaim any responsibility. That is plausible deniability. That is the doctrine.

And it was baked into the agency's DNA from the first day. By the time Eisenhower walked into the White House, the CIA had been in business for about five and a half years. It had a few small operations under its belt, some propaganda work in Italy, some funding of opposition movements in Eastern Europe, nothing the public knew about, and nothing on a scale that would show

shock anybody if they did know. The agency was young. It was hungry. It was looking for something to prove. What it needed was a president who would let it off the leash. That president showed up in 1953. Eisenhower didn't trust covert action the way some people might have expected him to fear it. He trusted it for the same reason a five-star general would trust it, because he'd seen what conventional war looked like. He'd walked through the ruins of cities. He'd signed the orders for the D-Day land, and watched young men die by the thousands. He'd helped liberate concentration camps. He had no romantic illusions about what large-scale military action did to human beings.

And he had a new problem to solve. The Soviet Union had the atomic bomb. They'd tested their first one in 1949. Within a few years, they'd have the hydrogen bomb, too. Eisenhower took office and looked at the math and decided that the country could not afford, financially or strategically, to fight the Cold War the way it had fought the Second World War, with huge standing armies and massive deployments and endless military budgets. His answer was something his administration called the new look.

Cheaper in dollar terms. Deadlier in nuclear terms. The threat of massive retaliation would deter the Soviets from major aggression. And in the gray spaces in between, in the places where the Cold War wasn't being fought with tanks but with influence and money and ideology. The CIA would handle it. That was the deal. Nuclear weapons at the top, covert operations underneath, and in between, very little. The man Eisenhower put in charge of the CIA was a fellow named Alan Dulles. The man he put in charge of the State Department was

Alan's older brother, John Foster Dulles. Two brothers running American foreign policy at the same time, one in the open and one in the shadows. It was, if you stop and think about it, an extraordinary concentration of power. And before they came into government, both brothers had been partners at the same New York law firm, a firm called Sullivan and Cromwell, a firm whose clients included some of the biggest American corporations doing business overseas. A firm whose clients included, for example, a company called the United Fruit Company. The Dulles Brothers deserved their own money. moment here, because they're the connective tissue between Eisenhower's good intentions and the operations that ran underneath them. John Foster Dulles, the older one, was a serious Presbyterian,

deeply religious, deeply convinced that the Cold War was at its heart, a moral struggle between Christian civilization and atheist communism. He saw the world in black and white. He had a famous line about how neutralism in the Cold War was an immoral and short-sighted position, which is the kind of statement a man makes when he genuinely cannot understand why every country on earth would not want to line up behind his side. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Alan Dulles, the younger brother, was a different animal. He was charming, a bit of a rake, fond of pipe smoke and good bourbon.

He'd run the OSS station in Bern, Switzerland, during the Second World War, where he'd handled some of the most sensitive intelligence work of the war. including back-channel contacts with anti-Hitler Germans. He loved espionage the way some men love sailing. He thought it was elegant. He thought it was clever. He thought it was the future. Between them, the Dulles brothers ran American foreign policy in a way no two siblings ever had before or since.

They met for breakfast. They talked on the phone constantly. When a problem came up in some corner of the world, Foster handled the public diplomacy and Allen handled the private operation, and they coordinated as easily as a married couple finishing each other's sentences. Eisenhower trusted them both.

He delegated heavily. He'd spent his career running the Allied command in Europe by trusting subordinates and letting them work, and he ran the executive branch the same way. But first let's go to Iran. Iran in the early 1950s was a country in the middle of something it had never tried before. Democracy.

For most of its history, the country had been ruled by shahs, kings, in one form or another. The current shaw was a young man named Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, son of the previous shaw, a soldier king who'd been pushed out by the British and the Soviets for being too friendly with the Nazis. The young Muhammad Reza had inherited the throne in 1941 as kind of a constitutional monarch. He had power, but he wasn't an absolute ruler. The country had a parliament called the malls, and the parliament had real authority, including the authority to pick the prime minister. And in 1951, they picked a man named Muhammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh was something the American foreign policy establishment didn't

quite know what to do with. He was a lawyer. He was a nationalist. He came from a wealthy family. He'd been educated in Europe. He held a doctorate in law from a Swiss university. He was deeply patriotic, deeply religious in his own quiet way, and deeply convinced of one core idea, which was that the oil under Iranian soil belonged to the Iranian people. For about half a century, that oil had been controlled by a British company, originally called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British government owned a majority share. The company was wildly profitable, and the contract it had with Iran was, to put it

plainly, a scandal. The Iranians got a tiny royalty. The British got the rest. The refinery at Abadon, the largest in the world at the time, was a kind of small empire within an empire, with its own roads and houses and country clubs and rules. British workers lived in nice neighborhoods. Iranian workers lived in slums. It was the kind of arrangement that, by the middle of the 20th century, was starting to look exactly like what it was, which was a leftover piece of 19th century colonialism. In 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize the oil industry. To take it back, they wanted to renegotiate the deal. The British refused to renegotiate. The Iranians went ahead and nationalized anyway. The British responded by pulling their workers out,

sending warships to the Persian Gulf, freezing Iranian assets, and organizing a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil. Mossada, who'd been the architect of The architect of the nationalization became prime minister in the middle of all this, and he became almost overnight, an international figure. Time magazine named him Man of the Year for 1951. He went to the United Nations and made his case in front of the Security Council. He went to Washington and met with President Truman. He wept in public when he spoke about Iran's suffering. He took meetings in his pajamas, lying on a cot, because he had a chronic illness, and because frankly, it played.

played to a certain image of him as a man too pure for the trappings of office. Some American observers thought he was a crackpot. Others thought he was a saint. Almost everybody underestimated him. Truman, to his credit, tried to broker a deal. He sent envoys back and forth. He pressured the British to compromise. The British wouldn't budge. They wanted Masada gone. The British position is the thing that put this whole story in motion. Britain in 1951 was a wounded Empire. The war had bled the country white. India was already independent. The colonies in Africa and Asia were stirring. The oil revenue from Iran was, in a very real sense, propping up the British standard of living. The pound sterling was weak. The treasury was thin. If Iran kept its own oil, the model that the

British Empire had been built on for a hundred years was finished. Other countries would watch and follow. Egypt was already watching. Within a few years, an Egyptian colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser would nationalize the Suez Canal and proved the British were right to be afraid. Mossadegh wasn't just a problem for British oil profits. He was an example. He had to be erased before anybody else got the same idea. The British Prime Minister at the time was Winston Churchill, back in office for his second go-round.

Churchill had been hammering Truman and private cables, asking, sometimes begging, for American help against Masada. Truman wouldn't give it. Truman knew the British case was self-interested. He also genuinely liked Masada, who'd come to Washington in 1951 and stayed at the Truman residents and made his case in person,

in fluent French, sitting up in bed because he was too tired to stand. And then, in November of 1952, Truman lost the election. Eisenhower won. In Washington, the conversation should, shifted overnight. The British had been trying to convince the Americans for two years that Mossadegh wasn't really a nationalist. He was a stalking horse for the communists. The Iranian Communist Party,

called the Tudai, was real and active in the country. And the British argument was that if Mossadeg kept going, sooner or later he'd lose control, and the Tudai would take over and Iran would fall into the Soviet orbit. From there, the dominoes would start to fall. The Persian Gulf, the oil, the whole region. Truman didn't buy it. He didn't think Mossadegh was a communist, and the evidence didn't support it. But Eisenhower and especially the Dulles brothers were a different audience. They were already primed to see the Cold War in every conflict, everywhere, all the time.

They didn't need much convincing. Within weeks of the inauguration, the wheels started turning. The operation got a code name. The Americans called it T-P-A-J-X. The British, who'd been working on their own plan for months, called theirs Operation Boot. In the spring of 1953, the two services merged their efforts. The CIA took the lead. The man on the ground for the Americans was named Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of Theodore Roosevelt.

Nephew of Franklin's wife, Eleanor, a graduate of Groton and Harvard. The kind of well-connected, well-spoken East Coast operator, the early CIA, was full of. He went into Iran in the summer of 1953 under a false name with a budget of about $1 million in cash. That money would go a long way in Tehran in 1953. The plan was layered. There were several pieces. First, you had to turn the Shah against Mossadegh. The Shah was a nervous, indecisive man, and he'd been letting Mossadegh run the country. Roosevelt needed him to sign two documents, one dismissing Mossadegh as Prime Minister, one appointing a replacement,

a hardline general named Faislola Zahadi. These documents had to be signed and ready to deliver at the right moment. Second, you had to control the streets. That meant paying mobs. The CIA, working through Iranian agents, hired wrestlers and street tufts from the south end of Tehran. Some were paid to pose as communists and run wild, breaking windows and burning religious icons to make the two-day look terrifying.

Others were paid to pose as monarchists and chase the communists out. The idea was to create the impression of chaos so total that only the army could restore order. And once the army restored order, it would do so on behalf of the Shah, not Mossadeg. Third, you had to control the message. The CIA bribed newspaper editors. It planted stories. It produced cartoons mocking Mossadegh. It paid clerics to denounce him from their pulpits.

By the time the operation was ready to move, the whole information environment in Tehran had been quietly poisoned. The first attempt happened on the night of August 15, 1953. An officer from the Imperial Guard tried to deliver the dismissal order to Mossadegh's house. Mossadegh was tipped off. He had the officer arrested. The coup on its first try had failed. The Shah panicked and fled the country.

He flew first to Baghdad, then to Rome. He literally checked into a hotel and started reading newspapers, trying to figure out what was going to happen next. He thought he was finished. Back in Tehran, Mossadegh thought he'd won. He thought it was over. He called his supporters into the streets to celebrate. He even sent word to the Americans that the conspiracy was crushed.

And in Washington, the CIA's leadership panicked too. A message went out to Roosevelt telling him to get out of Iran. The mission had failed. Cut your losses and come home. Roosevelt ignored the message. This is one of those details that, when you read it, makes the whole story feel like a movie. The CIA officer running an unauthorized coup against an elected government

after his own bosses had told him to stand down because he thought he could still pull it off. And he did pull it off. Over the next four days, he worked the phones, moved his agents, paid out more money. Some of the most colorful scenes in the history of American intelligence come out of those four days. Roosevelt sleeping a couple hours a night in a safe house, ferrying cash across the city,

meeting with army officers in back rooms, drinking bourbon out of a hidden bottle. He worked through a small network of Iranian agents, brothers named Rashidian who had been on the British payroll for years and were now on the Americans' payroll too. He met with Iranian generals. He met with clergy. He paid out money that in some cases was just handed across in brown paper bags.

There's a story, possibly improved over the years in the telling, of Roosevelt running into one of his own paid mob leaders on a Tehran street, and being recognized and pulled into an embrace as if they were old college roommates. Whether or not that exact moment happened, the spirit of it is right. The man running the operation was by the last few days, practically on a first-name basis with half of the criminal underworld of southern Tehran. On August 19th, the crowds went back into the streets, this time bigger, this time better organized. They marched on the prime minister's residence. The army moved in to support them.

There was a gun battle that lasted hours. Tanks rolled into the streets. The fighting around Mossadegh's home left somewhere between 200 and 300 people dead. The exact number was never really. reliably counted. Mossadeg escaped over the back wall of his garden with a few aids. He'd surrendered the next day. He'd spend three years in prison, then the rest of his life under house arrest at his country estate in Ahmadabad, dying in 1967, without ever being a free man again.

By his own request, he wasn't buried in a national cemetery. He was buried in his own dining room, under the floor, so that nobody could turn his grave into a shrine, and so that the regime that hated him could not control where his body lay. The Shah came back from Rome. General Zahidi was installed as prime minister. The oil industry was reorganized so that British, American, and other Western companies all got a slice of the pie.

The British gave up their monopoly, but they'd traded it for permanent partial access, which was more than they'd had under Mossadegh. And in Washington, Eisenhower opened his diary on October 8, 1953, and wrote a few quiet lines. He wrote, and I'm paraphrasing because the exact language is dry, that the United States had been working with the Shah and that things had taken a turn for the better in Iran. He noted that the situation was now much improved.

He didn't gloat. He didn't celebrate. He just wrote it down. The way you'd write down that the new transmission in the car was working better than the old one. The State Department's office of the historian, which is the official government keeper of these records, has published that diary. You can read it now.

It's a few lines. Calm. Bureaucratic. Done. For the public, nothing happened. The American newspapers ran stories that mostly accepted the version of events the CIA had helped invent. The Shah had been restored by a spontaneous popular uprising against a communist

leaning prime minister. The United States had played no significant role. The whole thing was a Persian affair. That was the story for the next two and a half decades. Then came 1979. But before we get there, let's go back across the Atlantic. Because while Iran was settling into what would become an increasingly brutal, increasingly Western-aligned monarchy,

the Dulles brothers were already looking at their next problem. Smaller country. Closer to home. Same template. Guatemala. Guatemala in the early 1950s was a, a small Central American country trying to grow up. For most of its modern history, it had been run by dictators of one kind or another, men in uniforms who ran the country as a kind of personal

fiefdom for themselves and a small ruling class. Most of the land was owned by a tiny number of people. Most of the people lived in poverty. A huge percentage of the population was indigenous Maya, and they were treated by the people who ran the country as something just barely above livestock. tune for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Then in 1944, there'd been a revolution, a peaceful one mostly. A coalition of students, teachers, junior military officers, and middle class professionals pushed out the latest dictator and held the first free elections in the country's history. A philosophy professor named Juan Jose Aerevolo won. He served a six-year term. He passed labor laws. He set up a social security system.

He built schools. He survived more than 20 attempted coups. And in 1950, his vice president, a former army colonel named Jacobo Arbens Guzman, was elected to succeed him in another free election. Arbins was not the wild-eyed radical that he was later painted as. He was a soldier. He was the son of a Swiss pharmacist who'd married a Guatemalan woman. He'd graduated from the military academy at the top of his class. He was married to a wealthy woman. He was married to a wealthy woman, from El Salvador named Maria Christina Villanova, who was politically active and probably more left-leaning than he was. He read widely. He believed his country could be modernized. He thought the way to do that was to start with the land. That was the key issue. Land. In Guatemala, in 1950, about 70% of the agricultural land was owned by about 2% of the population.

Vast estates, much of its sitting idle, owned by either wealthy Guatemala, or by foreign corporations. The biggest single landowner in the entire country wasn't even Guatemalan. It was an American company headquartered in Boston, the United Fruit Company. If you've ever eaten a banana that wasn't grown in Florida or Hawaii, you've eaten a piece of the United Fruit Company's legacy. UFC, as people called it, was the largest banana producer in the world. It owned plantations across Central America, Cuba, Columbia.

It owned the railroads that moved the bananas. It owned the ships that carried the bananas to American ports. It owned the docks where the ships unloaded. It set the prices. It paid the workers. It hired and fired local officials. In a lot of countries where it operated, including Guatemala, it was more powerful than the actual government.

The phrase banana republic wasn't a joke or a clothing brand. It was a literal description of countries whose entire political and economic life was organized around the banana trade and the corporations that ran it. In Guatemala, UFC owned roughly half a million acres of land. Most of it wasn't being farmed. The company kept it in reserve, partly to control supply and partly to prevent competitors from buying it. In 1952, Arbin signed a law called Decree 900, the Agrarian Reform Law. It said, in essence, that if you owned a large estate and most of it was sitting in,

idle, the government would take the unused portion and redistribute it to landless peasants. The government would compensate you for the land. How much would you get? Whatever amount you had declared the land was worth in your most recent tax filing. This was clever. Almost everyone, including United Fruit, had been underreporting the value of their land for years in order to avoid taxes. Now Arbenz was going to use those same underreported numbers to calculate compensation. United Fruit lost its mind. The company had declared its Guatemalan holdings to be worth a little over $1 million. The Guatemalan government offered them just under that, based on their own tax filings. United Fruit insisted the land was actually worth over $15 million. The argument went back and

forth. Eventually the U.S. State Department weighed in on behalf of United Fruit. The State Department by that time was being run by John Foster Dulles, whose old law firm had represented United Fruit, whose brother was running the CIA, whose family had business ties going back decades. What happened next was not subtle, but it was hidden. The Eisenhower administration decided that Arbans had to go. The justification, at least the one used in cables and meetings, was communism. Arbans had not outlawed the Guatemalan Communist Party. Some communists held positions in the labor unions and in some agencies of the government. None of them were in the cabinet. The party itself had only a few thousand members in a country of three million

people. There was no evidence that Arbins himself was a communist. He was a nationalist and a reformer. But to the Dulles brothers and to a CIA that was looking for another quiet win after Iran, that distinction didn't matter. The operation was codenamed P.B. Success. The plan was put together by a man named Frank Wisner, the head of the CIA's covert operations branch, with day-to-day management by a young officer named Tracy Barnes. Working under Barnes were two men whose names would surface again later in American history. David Atley Phillips, who would later become one of the agency's senior officers, ran the propaganda piece.

E. Howard Hunt, who would much later end up in the middle of the Watergate break-in, was part of the political action team. Peeb success had several moving parts. There was a small invasion force, about 150 to 400 men depending on which day you counted. Mostly Guatemalan exiles trained in Honduras and Nicaragua. Their commander was a Guatemalan army officer named Carlos Castillo Armas, an exile who'd been trying to mount his own coup attempts for years and who was in the agency's view, a manageable figure.

There was a small air force, a handful of second-hand World War two aircraft, P-47s and others, painted up and ready to fly bombing runs. There was a radio operation. Phillips set up a clandestine radio station, broadcasting from a transmitter in Nicaragua, and presenting itself as the voice of liberation, supposedly coming from inside Guatemala. The broadcast described an enormous rebel army on the march, gave fictional reports of battles, named towns that supposedly had fallen, and called on the Guatemalan military to abandon in Arbans. There was a propaganda campaign in the United States. United Fruit hired a public

relations man named Edward Bernays, sometimes called the father of public relations, to plant stories in American newspapers about communism in Guatemala. He'd take American reporters on company-paid tours of UFC's facilities. He'd hand them pre-written material. The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the major weekly news magazines, all ran stories. that fit the framing UFC wanted them to run. And there was a pressure campaign at the United Nations and the Organization of American States, designed to keep Arbenz isolated

and to prevent any country from coming to his defense. The operation kicked off in earnest in June of 1954. On June 18, Castillo Armas crossed the border from Honduras with his small force. They didn't get very far. They were poorly equipped and outnumbered by even the lightly armed Guatemalan men. Guatemalan military.

But the invasion wasn't really the point. The radio was the point. The aircraft buzzing the capital were the point. The slow drumbeat of fear was the point. For about ten days, the situation hung in the balance. Arbans tried to rally the country. He went on the radio. He pleaded with the military to fight,

but the senior officers in the Guatemalan army had been quietly approached by the CIA, and they'd been told, in essence, that if they removed Arbans, the United States would be satisfied. If they fought to defend him, they'd face the full weight of American power. They believed it.

They made their choice. On June 27th, Arbans walked into the studios of the national radio station, sat down at the microphone and resigned. His voice on the recording is quiet, exhausted. He spoke about the country he tried to build. He spoke about the foreign interests that had decided to tear it down. He named the United Fruit Company. He named the United States.

Then he left the building. He went to the Mexican embassy. He sought asylum. There's a photograph from that night that's worth looking up if you can find it. Arbens is standing in the Mexican embassy, surrounded by a small group of Guatemalan officials who'd resigned with him. He's been forced on his way in to strip down to his underwear, on camera,

supposedly to prove he wasn't smuggling out money or documents. It was a humiliation, deliberate and recorded. and the image of it would follow him for the rest of his life. He'd spend the next 17 years moving from country to country, never staying long, never feeling welcome. Mexico, Switzerland, France, Czechoslovakia. Cuba briefly, where Fidel Castro received him as a kind of cautionary lesson in what could happen to a Latin American reformer

who tried to do what Arbans had tried to do. Uruguay. Back to Mexico. His marriage frayed. His daughter took her own life. He drank more and more heavily. In 1971, he was found dead in a bathtub in a Mexico City apartment. The official cause of death was listed as an accident, drowning, possibly while intoxicated.

His own family was never entirely sure. The country he left behind was handed over to a military junta. Within a couple of weeks, Castillo Armas was installed as president. He immediately rolled back the land reform. He outlawed political parties. He set up a national security court that could imprison anybody on suspicion of being a communist. He registered more than 70,000 people as politically suspect. Many of those names would be passed over the following years to the death squads.

And he set in motion something that would last for the next 36 years. But before we get to that, before we count the cost, we need to talk about the technique. Because Iran and Guatemala weren't just coups. They were inventions. They were the place where the modern American art of covert influence was perfected. The single most important weapon in both operations wasn't the gun. It wasn't even the cash. It was the story.

In Iran, the agency's job was to convince Iranians and then the rest of the world that the popular uprising against Mossadegh was real. That his fall was the work of his own people, that the United States was just a bystander. The mobs in the street were the head. headline image. The bribed newspapers were the supporting evidence. The cooperative Western journalists, who'd been quietly fed details by intelligence sources, were the closers. In Guatemala, the same playbook scaled up. The fake radio station, the fake battlefield reports, the fake

army, the fake popular uprising. By the time Arbenz resigned, even people inside his own government weren't sure what was true and what wasn't. The country had been buried under a story. This is what intelligence officers in the 1950s called psychological warfare. We'd probably call it disinformation now, or influence operations. The names change. The method is the same. You don't have to defeat your enemy if you can confuse him. You don't have to convince a population if you can exhaust them. You don't have to outnumber the opposition if you can make the opposition believe they're already outnumbered.

David Attlee Phillips, the man who ran the radio operation against Arbins, wrote about all of this years later in a memoir. He described with what reads now as a kind of cheerful professional pride, the trick of broadcasting fictional battlefield report so confidently that the real Guatemalan army started moving troops to defend towns that were not actually under attack. He described the technique of putting two voices on the air at once on slightly different frequencies, to make it sound like the rebel forces had multiple stations operating in multiple locations. He described, almost as an afterthought, the moral comfort he and his colleagues took in believing they were saving Guatemala from communism. The book is, in its way, a deeply revealing

document. It's the operating manual for a kind of warfare that, in the decades since, has gone from being an exotic specialty practiced by a handful of intelligence officers in rented houses to being a routine feature of the global information environment, available in cruder forms, to anyone with an internet connection and a willingness to lie. The most striking thing about both operations, when you look back at them, isn't how clever they were. It's how cheap they were. Iran cost about $1 million. Guatemala may be two or three million. For the price of a single fighter jet, the United States overthrew two governments and reshape two regions of the world. To the Eisenhower administration, that math looked like a miracle. Compared to the cost of fighting a conventional

war or even of running a long diplomatic campaign, this was almost free. And here's the thing that made the math work, the deniability, the plausible deniability. If anybody asked, the Eisenhower administration could say, with a straight face, that the United States had nothing to do with either coup. Press secretaries could deflect. The State Department could issue carefully worded statements. The president himself could appear on television, smile, and talk about the importance of self-determination for free peoples. None of that was a lie in the strict sense, because the actual operations were so compartmented, so hidden inside the agency, that the men who needed to deny them could do so honestly. They literally didn't know. Or at least, they could pretend they didn't know.

This is what plausible deniability is for. It isn't really about lying to your enemies. Your enemies usually figure out what happened. The Soviets knew what the United States had done in Iran. The Guatemalan exiles knew. The British knew. The French knew. Plausible deniability is about lying to your own citizens. It's about creating a layer of protection between the public and the policy,

so that the public doesn't get a vote on what's being done in its name. Eisenhower wasn't the first American president to authorize covert action. Truman did it. but Eisenhower was the first to industrialize it, to turn it into a routine, normal, everyday option on the policy menu. By the time he left office, the National Security Council was hearing covert action proposals on a regular basis. The CIA had stations in dozens of countries. Operations were running simultaneously on every continent.

Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. And the public, by and large, had no idea. The argument for this kind of secrecy is straightforward and not entirely crazy. If you tell the public everything, you tell your enemies everything. You can't run an intelligence service in the daylight. There are things a government has to do, in the world as it actually is, that it can't talk about. Most people, if you laid that out for them honestly, would probably accept it as a general principle.

The problem isn't the principle. The problem is what happens when the principle becomes the practice. when deniability stops being a tool for protecting individual operations and starts being a way of governing. When the public is permanently kept in the dark, not just about specific missions, but about the entire shape of what its government is doing. By the end of the 1950s, that's where things stood. The CIA was running operations in Indonesia, in the Congo, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in places most Americans couldn't have pointed to on a map. some of those operations would fail spectacularly. The attempt to overthrow Sikarno in Indonesia in 1958 collapsed when a CIA pilot was shot down and captured.

The attempts on Castro's life in Cuba became eventually embarrassing public disclosures. The Bay of Pigs planned during the Eisenhower years and executed three months into the Kennedy administration would be the first really visible failure of the model. But Iran and Guatemala were the prototypes. The war. The ones, wins. The places where the doctrine looked for a while like it actually worked, and that brings us to the part of the story most Americans were never told, which is what happened after the cameras stopped rolling. We'll start with Iran. When the Shah came back in 1953, he was a grateful man. He understood that he owed his throne to the United States and Britain. He set out over the next

26 years to build a country that would reflect his vision of what Iran ought to be. a modern, secular, westernized monarchy with himself at the top. In some ways, he succeeded. Iran in the 1960s and 70s looked on the surface, like one of the great success stories of the Cold War. The oil money flowed. The cities grew. There were universities, highways, a national airline, a growing middle class. Women in Tehran wore many skirts.

Western businesses opened offices. Americans came in to advise, to train, to build. Under the surface, something else was happening. In 1957, with help from American and Israeli intelligence, the Shah set up a secret police agency called Savak, the Organization of National Security and Information. Savok was, by every honest account, a torture organization. It arrested critics of the regime. It tortured them. It killed them. It maintained a network of informers so dense that no Iranian could be sure who was listening at any given moment. It had branches at every Iranian embassy abroad, watching Iranian students in Paris and London and California. The Shah's land

reforms and modernization programs, which the United States supported, often hurt the very people they were supposed to help. Small farmers were displaced. The traditional clergy lost influence in money. The bizarre merchants, a powerful traditional class, were shoved to side in favor of modern industries connected to the royal court. People who would otherwise have been spread across many different factions started slowly to find common cause. A coalition was forming. A coalition of religious clerics, secular intellectuals, leftist students, and ordinary working people. All of them tired of the Shah. All of them tired of his secret police. All of them tired of a government that seemed to take its orders from Washington. The leader of that coalition,

Eventually, would be a religious scholar named Ruhola Khomeini. In 1979, after months of strikes, demonstrations, and street violence, the Shah's regime collapsed. He fled the country. The Iranian revolution turned almost immediately, in a direction the United States had not predicted and was not prepared for. The new Iran was anti-Western, anti-monarchical, and explicitly committed to the idea that the United States, which Khomeini called the Great Satan, was the source of most of the country's problems. On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran. They took 52 American hostages.

They held them for 444 days. They released them on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. The image of that crisis, the blindfolded Americans, the angry crowds outside the embassy, the failed military rescue, the long humiliation, helped end the Carter administration, and reshape American politics for a generation. And if you were inside that embassy, if you were a hostage, and you'd ask the people holding you

why they were so angry, why their country had turned against yours so completely, they'd have told you. They'd have started in 1953, with Mossada, with Roosevelt, with the mobs in the streets, with the choice the United States had made on behalf of Iranians, without telling Iranians,

26 years before any of this happened. That's blowback. It's a word the CIA itself coined in an internal report on the Iran operation, written in the 1950s. The original document used the word to describe the long-term, unpredictable consequences of covert action. The idea that you could pull off a clever operation today and pay for it, in some unrelated and unexpected form, 20 or 30 years from now. The CIA invented the word, and it kept using it. and the world kept proving it right. Now look at Guatemala.

Castillo Armus, the man the agency installed in 1954, lasted three years before he was assassinated by one of his own palace guards. What came after him was a long, ugly procession of military governments, junta's, and strongmen, broken occasionally by brief experiments with civilian rule that were always reversed. The land reform was undone. Most of the land that had been redistributed under decree 9, was given back to the original owners.

The peasant cooperatives were broken up. The labor unions were crushed. In 1960, junior officers in the Guatemalan military, dissatisfied with the corruption and the foreign domination, launched a failed coup. The survivors fled into the countryside and started a guerrilla movement. Other groups followed. By the mid-1960s, Guatemala was in a civil war.

It would not end for 36 years. The cost is hard to put into words because the numbers are almost too big to feel. According to the Historical Clarification Commission, set up after the war ended in 1996, more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared. Most of them were civilians. Most of them were indigenous Maya. Entire villages were wiped out, sometimes by army units that had been trained by the United States. Sometimes acting on intelligence the United States had helped provide.

The Commission, which was sponsored by the United Nations, used the word genocide in its final report, not as a metaphor, as a finding of fact. In 1999, President Bill Clinton went to Guatemala City and apologized. He said, and I'm summarizing, that American support for military forces and intelligence units that had engaged in violence and widespread repression had been wrong, and that the United States must not repeat that mistake. It was an extraordinary statement for a sitting president to make. It got in the United States almost no attention.

It barely made the front pages. Most Americans had no idea what Clinton was apologizing for because most Americans had no idea any of this had happened. That right there is the heart of it. Iran and Guatemala were the founding texts of a new kind of American foreign policy. A foreign policy that the American people in any meaningful sense were not allowed to participate in. They couldn't debate it because they didn't know about it.

They couldn't vote on it because it wasn't on any ballot. They couldn't even disapprove of it. Because how do you disapprove of something you've never been told? And the bill came due, eventually, in places and forms, most Americans would never connect back to the original choices. The Iran hostage crisis, the Iranian-American hostility that has driven American policy in the Middle East for almost half a century.

The Iran-Iraq war, which started in 1980 when Saddam Hussein invaded the new Islamic Republic, encouraged by an American government that desperately wanted somebody to bleed the new regime in Tehran. That war went on for eight years and killed roughly a million people on both sides. It ended in a stalemate that left Saddam in power, in debt, and looking for his next move. His next move in 1990 was to invade Kuwait. The United States went to war to push him out. Twelve years later, in 2003, the United States went back to finish him off. The road from Tehran in 1953 to Baghdad in 2003 is not a straight line, but it's a real one,

and you can trace it if you're willing to. The decades of war and refugees and dictatorship in Central America. The flow of people fleeing those wars who ended up at the southern border of the United States. in the 1980s and again in the 2000s, often described by American politicians as if their presence at our border was somehow unrelated to anything we'd ever done to their countries. The training pipelines that produced future Death Squad commanders, many of them schooled at a U.S. Army facility once located in Panama, and later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, where it operated for decades under the name the School of the Americas.

Graduates of that school included senior military, figures from across Latin America who would later be implicated in massacres, disappearances, and political killings in their home countries. Salvadoran officers tied to the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Guatemalan officers tied to the Highland massacres of the 1980s. Argentine officers tied to the dirty war. The institutional habits inside the CIA and the National Security Council and the Pentagon of solving problems by overthrowing governments and assuming the concept of the

consequences would sort themselves out. All of it, in some form, traces back to the small, neat, deniable operations of the Eisenhower years. And here's the thing that's hard to sit with. Eisenhower himself wasn't stupid about any of this. He wasn't blind. He wasn't a fanatic. In his farewell address, the famous speech he gave on the 17th of January, 1961, three days before he left office, he stood in front of the country and warned about the danger of a permanent military establishment, growing too large for its republic. He used the phrase, military industrial complex, and he meant it as a warning. He talked about the risk of misplaced power. He talked about the need for an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. It was, in many ways, the speech of a man trying to tell the

country something he didn't quite have the words to say outright, that he had spent eight years building a machine that he was no longer sure could be controlled. That the doctrine of secrecy and covert action that had served him so well in Iran and Guatemala was going to be inherited, intact, by people who might not be as careful as he had been. That the same plausible deniability that had let him sleep at night in the White House was going to let other presidents and other administrations do things that nobody would ever account for. He was right about that. The CIA he expanded would within five,

years of his departure be running the Phoenix program in Vietnam, an assassination campaign that killed thousands. It would be involved in the killing of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, the planning of coup in Brazil and Chile, the support of dictators across South America. The methods refined in Tehran and Guatemala City would be exported, retooled, applied again and again. And the public, the people in whose name all of this was done, would mostly remain exactly where I Eisenhower's doctrine had placed them. Outside, in the dark. Reading what they were told to read in the newspapers, hearing what they were told to hear from the briefing room, and finding out decades after the fact that things they thought they knew about the world weren't actually true.

So when we picture Eisenhower now, the smile, the golf clubs, the grandkids on his lap, the careful warning at the end of his presidency, it's worth picturing one more thing. small rooms somewhere in Washington in the summer of 1953, men in suits leaning over a map of Tehran, marking the roots the mobs will take. Another room a year later, a propaganda technician adjusting the dials on a radio transmitter that's about to broadcast lies in Spanish to a country it isn't even located in. A diary entry, calm and brief, noting that things in Iran are much improved. A young Iranian boy in 1953 growing up under the Shah's restored rule, becoming an angry young man in the 1960s, becoming by 1979 one of the people

climbing the wall of the American embassy in Tehran, a Mayan grandmother in the Guatemalan highlands in 1982, watching soldiers come up the dirt road toward her village, soldiers carrying weapons trained for them by people who'd never heard of her, weapons paid for, in part, by tax dollars from Iowa and Ohio and Georgia. That's the picture. The smile of stability, and the shadow it cast. Eisenhower was, by most measures, a successful president. The country during his years was prosperous and peaceful, and on the surface, calm. There's a reason people look back at the 1950s with such longing. For a lot of Americans, those years really were good ones. The economy was growing. The middle class was expanding.

The war was over. The future seemed open. It's just that the calm wasn't free. somebody, somewhere, was paying for it. A Persian Prime Minister dying under house arrest never allowed to speak in public again. A Guatemalan reformer drinking himself to death in a foreign hotel. A generation of Iranians growing up under a secret police that had been trained in part by Americans. Villages in the Guatemalan mountains burned to the ground by soldiers trained at American military schools. And eventually, Americans themselves paying the bill in ways they would never. quite understand. In hostage videos broadcast on the evening news, in refugees at the border,

in the long, slow, generational recognition that you cannot take a country apart in secret and expect the wreckage to stay buried forever. The disturbing part of this story isn't that Eisenhower was a monster. He wasn't. The disturbing part is that he was, by all available evidence, exactly what he looked like. A decent, well-meaning, deeply patriotic man who believed he was doing what needed to be done to protect his country and the wider free world. He didn't enjoy this stuff. He didn't dwell on it. He kept his diary entries short. He went to church. He played golf. He worried about the future. He just signed off on it, quietly, repeatedly, year after year. And the system he built, the doctrine he established, the precedents he set,

kept running long after he was gone, are still running. The next time you see a story in the news about American involvement, or rumored American involvement, in some political crisis on the other side of the world, and you find yourself thinking that whatever we're doing now seems sort of new, sort of unprecedented, sort of out of character for the country you were taught to believe in. Remember Tehran in August of 1953. Remember Guatemala City in the summer of 1954? Remember the cheerful old general in the White House, the man on the campaign button,

signing off on plans drawn up by men in offices most of the country didn't know existed. The truth is, this isn't out of character for us at all. It's been the character for over 70 years. We just don't talk about it that way. We don't put it on the postage stamps. We don't teach it in the high school assemblies. We don't carve it into the marble at the memorials. But it's there.

Underneath the smile. in the shadow, where it's always been. Take care of yourself out there. And when somebody tells you that the past is settled and that history is just history, do me a favor. Look a little harder. Ask the second question. Ask the third one.

Find out who paid and who got paid and whether anybody was ever asked. Most of the time, you'll find that the answer to that last question is no. Because some of it, the most important parts of it, are still very much alive. Before we wrap up, there's something I'd really love to ask of you. When you press play on this show, whether it's while you're driving, getting through the workday, taking a walk, or just needing a familiar voice in the background, that means more than I can probably put into words. Your time is valuable, and the fact that you choose to spend some of it here is what keeps

this whole thing alive. And here's the reality. Podcasts like this don't grow because there's some giant promotion team behind the curtain. They grow in the most human way possible. One listener telling another, I think you'd really like this. That kind of recommendation matters more than any ad ever could. So if someone comes to mind while you're listening,

someone who would enjoy these stories, these conversations, or the feeling of being part of this community, send them an episode, mention the show, invite them in. Also take a second to follow or subscribe wherever you listen and turn on auto downloads, so each new episode, is ready when it comes out. It may seem small,

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and feel like they found their place here too. This show grows because you help carry it forward. I don't take that lightly. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of this. And thank you for helping this community reach the next person

who needs to find it.