The Rest Is Classified - 141. Trump’s Latin America Playbook: How the CIA Toppled a Regime (Ep 2)

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

How did the CIA mastermind one of the most audacious coups in world history? What does it take to remove a world leader? And what does the future hold for Latin America with Donald Trump now at the helm of US foreign policy? Listen as David and Gordon recount the story of the 1954 Guatemalan coup and delve into whether Cuba will be the next state on Donald Trump's hit list. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ ⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified Club at the rest isclassified.com. The U.S. is trying to affect regime change in Central America. But it's not 2026. It's 1954. And it's not Cuba or Venezuela. It's Guadabala. Welcome to The Rest is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And dear friends, we are now on the second episode of our exploration of the CIA's coup in Guatemala in 1954. We left off last time, Gordon, with the primary weapon in this covert war against the obviously despicable red communist Guatemalan regime of Arbens. the main tool being the radio station, Gorda, the airwaves. Yeah. And we left off last time with this radio station that the CIA had set up that is actually

in the outskirts of Miami, getting ready to broadcast and getting ready to spread disinformation across all of Guatemala. That's right. We're in the optimistically entitled Operation Success. You dress for the job you want, Gordon. which the CIA is planning to use psychological operations, a little bit of paramilitary operations and covert action to overthrow this regime in Guatemala,

a optimistic? Let's see how optimistic it is as the story unfolds because it is going to be a remarkable tale of a close-run operation, a bit like Iran, to try and overthrow the regime. But with this idea of propaganda and the media at the heart of what's going on. This episode is sponsored by HP. Most people are not counter-espionage experts,

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When Westcham first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us

and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Where are my gloves? Come on, heat. Any day now. Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be. This winter, stay warm. Tap the banners who are,

order your groceries online at walla.ca. Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. So you get to the 1st of May and this new radio station, the Voice of Liberation, starts broadcasting. It appears on the airwaves. And the idea, as we said last time, was to divide the population, to create panic, to undermine support for the government, particularly in the army, in six, weeks to prepare for a coup around June the 18th. And now the station is made out to be operating secretly from a rebel base in the jungle, which always sounds to me like a kind of Star Wars base. But really, the programmes are first made in Miami with the couriers taking the recordings on a Pan Am flight to a neighboring country where they're beamed into Guatemala on a mobile

transmitter. But later, they actually move the broadcast to a dairy farm. This is all code name Sherwood. But the broadcasts are quite interesting. It's a mix of humor and anti-government propaganda. I'm not sure we could relate it to any of our podcasts, but it's not, you know, I'd like to think it was an early version of The Restis Politics, maybe, with Rory and Alistair chatting about local politics, but with a particular regime change bent on it. I think feels like that's what it was. I'm pretty sure that they record the rest of politics from a Miami airbase and then the recordings are brought to the UK and beamed in by a mobile transmitter

to make it appear as though Alistair and Rory are actually doing this from the UK. Yeah, they're really in a Star Wars style, jungle base, yeah. But the idea of this is to target propaganda at different groups remind soldiers of their duty to protect the country against foreign communist interference. They're there to warn women to keep their husbands away from communist trade union meetings, deeply subversive.

all these kind of things. The aim is to prepare the ground and give just that sense that this regime is doomed to end. And then the idea is when the right moment comes, when you've prepared the way with all your, you know, rest is anti-communism talk, then finally you push them over the edge with a panicked broadcast that there's an invasion coming. Kind of bit like Awesome Wells' is famous War of the World's broadcast where people started thinking, You're the aliens are coming. Here it's the rebels are coming. One of the things you realize, especially in those days, was just how few information sources there were.

Because, of course, there was no TV then in Guatemala. They're incredibly lucky because by chance, government radio goes off air for three weeks when the rebel radio station start broadcasting because their government station is having its antenna replaced. So they effectively have the airways to themselves for at least a good chunk of this period. So you have control over one of the...

most significant forms of information flow going into this country. And I think only one in 50 people owned a radio in Guatemala at that time. And most of those are in the capital. But the word's going to spread. It's one of the only ways you could have an impact. So it's very interesting that you could do it at that point, I think. The other piece of this pressure campaign that's interesting is the use of aircraft. This was another thing which was obviously new because that went a lot of aircraft in Guatemala at the time, but the rebels have got some war surplus old aircraft, which is the CIA of supplied through cover of a charitable medical foundation. And so, Armas, who remember is our Hitlerian-mastashed rebel leader, the bold but incompetent

leader, he's been given three old B-26 bombers and some cargo and fighter planes, mainly flown by mercenaries, but they are also actually about psychological pressure. because there's not much of a Guatamalan Air Force either and what they're primarily being used is to fly over places and to drop leaflets. So rather than drop bombs, they're dropping leaflets from the skies for the six weeks ahead of June the 18th, including leaflets to the army telling them not to fight.

And I think it is this psychological effect that seeing these airplanes in the air, they just project power, I think, to the local population, as well as dropping leaflets which are pursuing a certain message. And Howard Hunt, later Watergate Burglar, who's the political warfare officer for the CIA in this, says, what we wanted to do was have a terror campaign. Interesting words, isn't it? I mean, you wouldn't say that these days.

One of those quotes that holds up well over time, doesn't it? Yeah. But his point is, you're going to use air power and radio to create terror, to scare people, into thinking something's coming. But then there's a few incidents which also, I do think, help the American and the rebel side, particularly in May, so the radio broadcasts had started May the 1st, but something else important happens, which is a shipment of arms, of foreign weapons, turns up in Guatemala. The country had been under an arms embargo, but Arbenz, who's running the country, the one the US wants to topple, had sent one of his ministers to Prague in January of 54,

on a secret mission to buy 2,000 tonnes of former weapons from the Czechs. This is actually former Nazi weapons that the Czechs have got left over from the war. And the Americans find out about this. It's interesting. Dulles claims that they had this agent in Poland who poses a birdwatcher, sees a freighter leaving, and then sends a message to CIA via Microdot in Paris, and they track it. It's a little bit exaggerated, because actually, it seems they did learn of the plan to ship these arms, but then they lose track of the boat as it's heading over the Atlantic. because even the captain of the boat doesn't know he's heading for Guatemala. He only learns that two days before he arrives,

and he's being told to keep changing the route as he goes. And so it's only after it's docked in Guatemala, and they're uncrating the weapons under conditions of great secrecy. The boxes say optical laboratory equipment that the US Embassy learns that the weapons have now actually arrived. Amusingly, most of the weapons are rusting and useless, and some of them still have swastikas on them, which is not great. CIA actually at first is worried about this and a thought, well, could we mine the ship,

so to blow it up? Or then they think, well, maybe we could sabotage the weapons as they're moving in the country and the team plants detonators on a railway line, but there's a torrential downpour and it soaks them. But they then realize, I think, quite usefully, that the fact the weapons have arrived, they can use it as part of this propaganda campaign by making it public. Yeah, because they're weapons arriving to help hasten a communist takeover of Guatemala. It's better to have the weapons in the theater than to have stopped them in the first place. Yeah, especially because they're rusting. And so they go big on this, and the State Department really does go to town on it.

John Foster Dulles makes a big statement. The threat of communist imperialism is no longer academic. It's arrived. The Washington Post writes, the Speaker of the House says, and this is a great analogy, The cargo of arms is like an atom bomb planted in the rear of our backyard. A bunch of rusting weapons sent from Czechoslovakia. Yeah. Good grief.

You know what it does remind me of, Gordon, is some faint echoes of the justification for kidnapping Maduro. Maduro is a narco-terrorist. The legal basis for the kidnapping having been, you know, Maduro's connections to drug trafficking, which I think because we talked about in the series we did on that raid back in January, are pretty loose kind of specious connections. Here we have a similar dynamic of a trumped-up, exaggerated, somewhat fabricated threat

that is being used as political grist to justify the covert action in the first place. They use it quite cleverly within the country as well, because the US says, and the radio station particularly says, these weapons are not for the army, not for the military, but therefore a people's militia that Arbentz is going to put together in order to fight, and it's undermining the army. So you can see why that's quite a clever move if your overall strategy is to pull the army away from the regime. It's part of the tension.

So President Eisenhower also speaks out publicly, and this also helps some of the neighbours like Honduras and Nicaragua to become quite worried as well and to get on board with the US because they can see communist arms are to summit. extent, even if they're a bit crappy, coming into Guatemala. And the US then imposes this naval blockade, which it says is to stop more arms, but that adds to the pressure on the regime. What is Arbin's doing throughout all of this? He seems to not be particularly active up to this point. Yeah, he does feel like a more of a passive participant in this story. And it's interesting because he starts to actually reach out to the US ambassador in Guatemala to try and get talks going.

He's saying we can de-escalate this, we can deal with this. He obviously doesn't realize that this is part of a strategy to overthrow him, and so those talks aren't going to go anywhere. The US is deliberately turning up the heat and avoiding those talks, but he seems to think, well, I can just manage this. And the US naval blockade becomes a big thing because they start searching ships because they say, well, maybe more arms shipments are coming into Guatemala. So 24th of May that comes in. It's actually not legal unto international law, which if you worry about international law,

I'm not sure anyone does these days, because they even board, David, British and French ships transiting the Panama Canal, looking for weapons. And in London, they are particularly angry about this because they say, what about the special relationship? I love the fact in London, they go,

there's a special relationship. It's okay boarding the French ships, but we're supposed to be your allies. We're being treated like the French. You can't treat us like the French and board our boats. So there's deep anger, I think, in London at this. I guess by the 26th of May, so we've had the blockade going, our Ben's tried to reach out, get something going, that's not working.

More pressure as Armas and his CIA Air Force of, you know, a few B-26s begin to buzz the capital, dropping leaflets, specifically going... for areas where the, you know, the presidential guard, the more elite Praetorian force that Arbinz would have, you know, trying to tell them to fight against communism and join Armas and, you know, his force. Interestingly, I mean, again, it's this kind of the psychological dimension of trying to claim that Arbin's is undermining the military with his own militia. So you're trying to, you're trying to crack the military, break pieces of the military off. from supporting Arbans. The message is interesting, but also just the fact that they can even fly planes over the

capital and do that with impunity is its own message, you know, to show how potentially strong Arbas is relative to Arbans. And they're targeting the Air Force, the Guatemalan Air Force as well with some of this propaganda. June 5th, there's an interesting event where a retired chief of the Air Force senior pilot defects and he flies to Nicaragua where the, at this point, the radio broadcast, the Sherwood radio station, CIA run is coming from the rebel station in the jungle.

They get this Air Force guy drunk and they ask him, would you persuade others to defect as well? And he says, no, won't do it. They keep plying him with drink. And then they say, so hypothetically, if you were to give a speech to persuade more

of your former colleagues from the Air Force to defect, how would you do it? And they secretly record him giving a grandiose speech about how he would persuade his colleagues to defect. So he delivers this speech. They then edit it, taking out the bits where they're prompting him, and they play it on the radio as if he has given that speech.

I mean, poor guy. I mean, talk about being used, but the perils of drink. It actually has an impact, because Arbenz in Guatemala City, here's this broadcast next morning. He gets really angry. And so he grounds his own air force to stop any more pilots defecting and flying their planes out, having heard this message. I mean, there's not much of an Air Force, just a few planes built before 1936.

But it's part of our Ben's becoming paranoid. And I think that's what they're doing, is they're making him paranoid. He starts raiding homes of anti-communist students. The sense of fear of things closing in on them is growing. There's false propaganda spread on the radio station, that labor conscription is coming, that 16-year-olds will be sent to special labor camps, that there'll be indoctrination in the camps to break the influence of the church and family on young people.

There's just this sense that they're spreading that the rebels are growing strength in Naveens is panicking. And then on the 8th of June, he actually suspends civil liberties and puts in place a state of emergency because of the fears that are growing, even though not much is actually happening. And the police round up people,

hundreds are round up, some are tortured, some, maybe 75 are killed. The US papers start to talk about claims of mass arrest and torture. John Dulles, Secretary of State, says Guatemans were living under a communist-type regime of terror. I think Nicolato, one of the historians on this, this is an interesting point.

He said, agency propaganda operations succeeded in making Guatemala into the type of repressive regime the United States liked to portray it as. In other words, they've made it into what they want it to be. It reminds me, obviously, this is a very imperfect analogy, But in the very early days of the Syrian rebellion, the Assad regime really wanted the opposition to be armed and to be sort of Zalafi extremists, like politically extreme Islamist. That's what they were calling the opposition. It wasn't quite that.

They had to, in part, release people that they had captured. They had to release terrorist leaders that they had captured into the opposition to kind of cede it so that it would eventually become the thing that they had. had always been portraying it as. So it is this very effective political tactic, I think, that sometimes, in order to be fighting the thing you were always saying, you were fighting, you have to do some things first, I guess. And make them that. To make them that. Yeah. And then the government is going to order a blackout in Guatemala, the city, in large towns, possibly to stop people listening to the radio, cut the electricity.

They send people out to hunt the transmitters. The radio station fakes the idea they're on the move at what, point they do. I love this. On air, they pretend it's the sound of shots and muffled orders of people, someone shouting hands up to make it sound like they're being raided. But then triumphantly, they come on air the next day from a new location, but it's all a lie. It's all made up. Maybe we should ask, get Rory and Alistair to try that. Maybe it's part of their rest of this politics campaign. We've moved to a new secret location in the jungle. But I guess by the 15th of June, Gordon, The agency is hoping for either a coup to take place in the capital, maybe paired with an uprising,

or for Aramas to actually invade and take the capitals. There's kind of two tracks moving in order to get this regime change done. And at 7 a.m. on the 15th of June, the CIA is chief of station in Guatemala City, cold calls a military officer at his house. So literally shows up, rings the doorbell, and asks him to start a coup, which feels a little bit on the nose. But, hey, I mean, at this point, you've got the information environment under control. You might as well just wander out there and see what you can make happen. But the guy says, not yet.

And I think they still feel like they need a show of force. They need to feel like the rebels are for real in order to be able to take that step within the military. So there's still this sense that it's the pieces are getting put in place, but is it going to work? Six weeks was the plan. By June the 18th, they are ready for the big invasion. Maybe there, Gordon. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see if the big invasion can pull off the regime change coup that the CIA has wanted, or if it's going to devolve into farce, maybe a little bit of both.

We'll see you after the break. Well, welcome back. It's now June 18, 1954. The six-week timeline to prepare the ground for the coup Gordon is up, and now we are ready for the assault to begin. The radio announces that Armas and his force have invaded, but the reality is that there aren't 5,000 troops, as the radio claims. there's in fact at most 480 troops who are coming over from Honduras and El Salvador in waves, but as we'll see, those waves aren't very big or very successful, but the idea is, I suppose, they're going to spread out

small rippling waves of a few dozen people at a time, which don't go very far. They spread out over a long distance to make it look like there are more of them. But even here, with this tiny number, it doesn't go well. I mean, one group get arrested the day before they're supposed to go over,

so on June 17th, by El Salvador and policemen who spot them with a load of guns hidden in their car. And so they get arrested, you know, one of the four military forces which are supposed to cross the border. And eventually they're going to get out, but without their weapons. Then there's another 122 of them

who head towards an army garrison, but all but 30 are going to get killed or captured. Armass, and I love this idea, he's in a leather jacket and a checked shirt in a battered station wagon. Again, it's the slightly, you know, Graham Green comic element to this whole thing, but he's leading 100 men from Honduras over the border.

But the radio is saying there's battles, there's rebel uprisings. None of it's true. I mean, rebel planes are flying and sandbags are going up in the capital and the stores are shuttered because everyone is waiting for this rebel force. But the truth is, it's not really going. anywhere. And this is what I find so interesting is it's an invasion, but there's not actually much fighting because Armas doesn't actually have the men to take the capital or to fight the

army. He doesn't want to also engage the army directly in battle, because the whole point is you're trying to get the army to change sides, so you don't really want to start killing too many of them. And the government also is worried and doesn't have the ability to fight the rebels off and is a bit nervous about the army's loyalty. So it doesn't want them to get in a fight. So, Abenz is hoping that international diplomacy and the UN can save the day because neither side actually wants to fight. So it's a kind of weird invasion, isn't it? The scale of this whole story, I find to be very frustratingly small.

We're talking about a few hundred guys, essentially who enter Guatemala in station wagons with their fearless leader, having recently been a furniture salesman in his leather jackets, It's kind of urging them onward and then fake, fake strafing runs of the Capitol with dilapidated B-26 bombers. It's mad, isn't it? It's wild. But I guess by June 19th, so the next day, the U.S. ambassador gets on a secure comms line that the CIA can use at the embassy and writes directly to Dulles.

And I presume to John Foster Dulles, or is he writing to Alan Dulles? I guess, yeah. To Allen, I guess. Maybe, I don't know. Yeah. Bomb, repeat bomb. So he's wanting something to happen, I guess. Yeah. It does sound kind of desperate when you're writing to either the sector of state or the CIA director going,

bomb, repeat, bomb, because you'll know your invasion is not going well. And Al Haney, who's one of the commands of the operation, says to Frank Wisner, another CIA guy, are we going to stand by and see the last hope of free people in Guatemala submerged to the depths of communist oppression? But Wisner kind of freezes. I think they're not sure about how involved. they want to get because they don't want the US itself to do any bombing because the whole point is this is supposed to be a rebel uprising and the US is not supposed to be intervening in Latin America and they don't want to play into communist propaganda. This is all US regime change. At the moment, they're thinking, well, we're not going to bomb. We'll just see how it goes. And by the 20th,

so the next day, the CIA is reporting that Arbenz is recovering his nerve. I mean, the stores are still shuttered, but the worry shifts to diplomacy because he's taking his case of the United Nations. John Foster Dulles is pretty worried because there's resolutions from the French saying, you know, this is a terrible, this uprising. Oh, the UN, God forbid our regime change effort, be deep-sixth by a French, a French UN resolution. Good God. It's fair to say these were different times, but international opinion is seeing the US is probably behind this. And, you know, British left-wing politicians are like, it's United French. It's big fruit.

So I think there is a bit of tension at the CIA because it's all looking in doubt, isn't it? I mean, it's not looking like it's going to work. And I guess, I mean, it gets worse, doesn't it? Because Alan Dulles, CIA director, gets a phone briefing the afternoon of the 20th from Al Haney, who's down in Florida. And he's lost three planes. Armas had three F-47s to kind of maintain deniability. Two of those are out of action after being shot.

One ran out of fuel and it crashed landed in Mexico. And Haiti's saying, you know, we'd need more planes. And so Dulles, and again, it has weird echoes of what is going to happen at Bay of Pigs with this struggle over air cover and all of that. Dulles will authorize one air strike, one air strike over the Capitol, presumably not for any military gain, but to kind of demonstrate the power of the rebel force. So one of the rebel pilots was targeting the government radio station, which by the way, Gordon, the government radio station, it feels like it's been rather feckless throughout this entire series. They've not got go-hanger level of output, I think.

They are, I don't know who our rivals are. I'm not going to insult any of our rivals. But, yeah, they're not in the game. They've not got the mixed of humor and news. They're the BBC podcast to goal-hanging. Is that what you wanted to say, Gordon? That is not accurate. No.

The point is, this rebel pilot is going to target the government radio. But he's warned that just down the road, there's the transmitter of an American evangelical station, which has a red tile roof. And he comes back and he's asked, did you, did you bomb the right place? And he says, absolutely, you should have seen them red tiles flying. He's bombed the evangelical radio station rather than that. I mean, no one dies, we should say. No one dies.

So that was one of the targets? That was the bombing target? Well, no, the target was the government, but that's what they got wrong. You blew up an evangelical radio station in Guatemala. By mistake. By mistake. So, it's not going well. So after three days of the four invasion forces, and I should say, you really should

have used scare quotes of forces in your outline here, Gordon, because it's a couple hundred guys drive it in station wagons. Two are turned back, including one by the Salvadoran police. and another one is halted and prevented from actually entering Guatemala. And then on June 21st comes news of another big defeat for the rebels, because they've attacked the port, Perto Berrios, on the Atlantic coast by boat, but they are defeated by policemen and dock workers. I mean, they are literally, they arrive by boat,

and the policeman and the dock workers turn them back. So things do look pretty bad. Within three days, more than half of Armass's forces for about 480 are gone. who are off out of the fight. And his forces are still pretty close to the border. They barely moved inland. They're not attracting that many defectors from the army as the plan it was based on. The army is kind of wavering, staying in its barracks, not taking sides.

And they're struggling. And occasionally, you know, the local peasants fight him off. So you can see why by the time you get to the 22nd, the arguments in Washington are about what more can we do? Because this is looking bad, isn't it? It is. It is looking bad. the afternoon of the 22nd. Dulles goes into the Allen Dulles, CIA director, goes into the Oval Office to brief Eisenhower. Eisenhower asks him, what are the chances of success? Tulles says zero,

zero, Gordon. And then with more bombs and planes, you know, Eisenhower asked him, what could you do with more? Dulles increases the odds to 20 percent, which again, I'm just thinking of the Bay of Pig series, when all of these numbers were so inflated by the time we get to Cuba, you know, which is just six, seven years later. It's crazy, isn't it? It's remarkable. They thought the odds in Cuba were almost like a near certainty, whereas here it's actually much more realistic, like, that's basically not going to happen to very unlikely. So much for P.B. success. I mean, like, that's the thing. It's like normative determinism didn't work there, although does it? Because Eisenhower tells one of his political advisors,

who's quite rich, to get planes to them. And this guy, it's so interesting how. It's so interesting, this works. He calls Riggs Bank and draws out $150,000, which is a lot of money, you know, in 1954, goes to see the Nicaraguan ambassador at the Pentagon. And then they give the cash to the U.S. military who transfer ownership of three planes called Thunderbolts to Nicaragua. And they all do that. They do that in a day. They basically get the money and get the planes to Nicaragua. So by the next day, the planes arrive fully armed in Panama from Puerto Rico and then, you know, they go onwards from there that evening. So that's all happening in a day. And so by the 23rd, they've already got these new planes ready to go into combat. And they start to actually do things like strafes

from troop trains. But again, when I was reading this, I was like, wow, you know, air power comes in. But you realize when they talk about bombing rums, they are dropping sticks of dynamite and hand grenades out of the planes. I mean, that's the kind of bombing rum we're talking about. It's not modern laser guided munitions and, you know, smart bombs. And one of these planes then drops a bomb on a freighter at a port they think is unloading weapons turns out to be a British freighter. It probably wasn't a mistake. It probably wasn't a mistake. I mean, it blown up evangelical radio stations and British freighters. They have to pay the Brits of $1 million in restitution for blowing up the plane.

Which is a third of the entire covert action budget, by the way. That was on paying the Brits for burning up one of their freighters. Remember, this whole thing was $3 billion. bucks. Yeah, I think they might have blown the budget. They blew the budget. They blew the budget. Yeah, out of the water. So they're not actually having that much impact, but it's so interesting. Again, the combination of air power and propaganda is the thing, because they have loudspeakers on top of the U.S. Embassy broadcast the sound of fighter planes. So you are giving the impression that there are loads of planes flying over Guatemala, the city, when there aren't. And the planes are actually called the laxative. for the effect they have on Arbenz and other people in government. The idea is they are loosening them, let's say they're loosening their bowels, or however you want to put it, because of this fear that air power is now going to be used against them. And this is part of that pressure strategy.

And now it really does start to work, because the tide turns as government forces seem to be less willing to fight. And the voice of liberation, the radio station in the jungle, is sending messages that troops are heading to the capital. They're gaining volunteers on the way. not true. I mean, Armas, it is leather jacket and Czech shirt, is still basically keeping his head down near the border. He's basically in Honduras still, right? I mean, he's over the border. Let's give him something. He's not marching around the streets of the Capitol engaged in kind of like close combat with Arbenz's troops though. No, no, not at all.

I mean, he's a long ways away. He's way out. Yeah. And Arbenz is drinking heavily. He thinks he's under attack. He's not sleeping. You know, huge stress. He's a wreck. June 25th, they hadn't bombed the capital much, but they have a rebel pilot drop one bomb, just one bomb on a military parade ground, which leads to smoke above the capital and many people fleeing. That, again, starts to have an impact on the officer corps who are starting to think, you know, this could get bad for us. So then by June 26th, our bends is hunkered down in the palace. He's fearful. Some of those around him are telling him things, you know, the tide is turning, even though it's clearly not.

And then you get to Sunday the 27th, the crucial day. One more crucial piece of propaganda on the Sunday morning of June 27th. The rebel radio station claims two columns of rebel soldiers are converging on the capital. Now, in fact, Amassan is a small group of miles away, but people start to flee. You know, the radio station is creating this illusion that the city is under attack. It actually broadcast messages telling people who are on the highways to make ways. for rebel trucks, you know, because they're incoming, make way for all of these rebels who are heading there. There are, Eddie. I mean, it's wild, isn't it? I would imagine that at this point,

I mean, Arbenz is getting, has to be getting some counsel from the military, because this is becoming an intolerable situation. He's cracking, he's drinking, he's not sleeping. And obviously, you know, one other, I think, thing that strikes me is Arbenz must have terrible intelligence about what's actually going on, even though he got pieces of the plan from the CIA officer that left papers behind at his hotel room, you know, as we discussed last time. It's not like he, unlike Castro, who has the exiles, the Bay of Pigs exiles, basically penetrated from the get-go. Arbinz doesn't know what's going on here. He's got no picture for what's actually happening. The plotting is also starting here because he's got his chief of staff, a guy called Diaz, who's been talking to the American

ambassador. The American ambassador is kind of getting into the game here politically. And Diaz says to the Americans, he says, I might be able to ask Arbenz to go, but I'm not going to support your guy Armass. You know, he's obviously maneuvering for himself. And so he goes then to see Arbenz, and this is Chief of Staff Diaz, and says, look, it's time to go. I'll continue to fight for you. The army will continue to fight, but you're, you and your, you and your, you and your, you and your kind of communist friends. It's just too much for us. It's going to destroy everything we've built. And our bends at that point. He agrees. I mean, he resigns on that day, Sunday, June 27th, nationwide speech. He gives up because he's convinced that there's no hope for him. And it is

that thing, I guess, which is the regime has cracked. And we've been hearing a lot about that in other kind of context and other countries, haven't we, with regime change. Once you get that crack, especially at the very top of the elite within the army and you have your chief of staff and the military coming to you and saying, I think you better go. It's game over, isn't it? It is. And Arbin's doesn't seem to be the most elegant or honorable of departures either, because he literally walks out of the presidential palace, like literally walks out. goes out the front, a guard outside asks where he's going, he says out front, the guard thinks he's going to go fight.

On the front, yeah. Because obviously they're in the middle of this conflict. And he says he can't do that. He just means he's literally walking out the front of the palace. But he actually goes out the side door, walks across the street into the Mexican embassy, and he's gone. He ends up in Mexico, I guess he's strip searched at the airport on the way out. Yeah, humiliated deliberately.

Just to make sure he's not taking any. any liquids with him. And this is quite sad. I mean, he drowns in his bathtub at the age of 58 years later, which seems like a suspicious way to go, but maybe he'd been heavily drinking and just slip beneath the water. Yeah, but it's still not done because the US, of course, want their man in. And you've had this Diaz, the chief of staff, who's come in in Arbenz's place, but he says he's going to continue to fight against Armass, the Americans guy. And so the US ambassador is kind of angry at him and the Ambassador Cables, Washington, to urgently recommend bombing Guatemala City.

I mean, it's like constantly people are just like, bomb, bomb, bomb, because they're like, well, we still haven't got the regime we want. So next morning, two CIA officers go to see Diaz and deliver a message to him. And it's, I mean, this message is, is, it's just so simple. It's like, Colonel, Colonel Diaz, you are not convenient for American foreign policy. At least it's direct. It is direct. I mean, they're not walking around, you know, and they take him to see the US ambassador.

And he's basically told, nope, you're not our guy. We don't want you. So soon he is forced out by the ambassador. And it's so interesting because there's this, now the ambassador really kicks in because he just spends the next, I think, 11 days maneuvering, getting one leader after another removed, telling them what's acceptable and what's not. I mean, he's told by Dulles, crack heads together. And so it takes 11 days after our bends resigns.

Five successive junters take power, each successively more amenable to Washington. But eventually, after two months, maneuvering, armas, their man, is in as president. It is kind of fascinating mix of regime change at the moment you get rid of Arbenz, but then still the political maneuvering afterwards to get your guy and the regime in, which takes months, but they get it. There's a difference between regime change and then a regime being changed into one that you actually want. Isn't that right? And the latter is a lot harder to engineer.

Armas gets a state dinner at the White House. He's welcomed by Vice President Nixon, who says, we in the U.S. have watched the people of Guatemala record an episode in their history, deeply significant to all peoples, led by the courageous soldier who is our guest this evening. Oh, that courageous soldier. Sort of whitewashed the station wagon that he appeared in Quadabal City while driving. But Armas becomes quite dictatorial, I guess, although the ineptness carries through, doesn't it? Yeah. He outlaws political parties, brings back an old dictatorial police chief. I would say Washington doesn't really care.

I think that'd be fair to say. They move on to other things. And then Armas will be killed by a member of his palace guard in 1957. series of dictators will follow. Hundreds of thousands of peasants are killed by anti-Garilla death squads in the following years. Per capita becomes one of the most violent places in the entire region. U.S. has to start doing handouts to prop up the economy.

So, it's not happy. An example here of maybe some of the unintended consequences of regime change. And the pottery barn rule, Gordon, which I think is always fun to talk about in these kind of situations. You broke it, you own it. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, I think, I mean, we should.

shouldn't gloss over how bad it gets. I mean, you know, there's death squads, peasants are killed. It's actually one of the worst periods of violence that you see in central and Latin America. And you get this thing, which we saw in the Cold War, where the US is not really caring about democracy. It's backing whoever's anti-communist, you know, even if it's a nasty bunch of dictators who don't care about human rights who are killing lots of peasants and workers. What matters is it's anti-communists. So it's a pretty dark outcome for Guatemala that comes out of this, out of this coup. I think one of the other interesting things is, you know, we talked about United Fruit, big fruit. It doesn't even do that well out of it, which is also, I think, goes back to, you know,

how much was it all their plan? Because land reform does get cancelled, but back in Washington, there's a big antitrust suit and it gets eventually kind of broken up. It never gets back into Guatemala to quite the same extent it was before. They start using nasty chemicals to improve yields. That doesn't work. And by 1972, they sell the last of their land in Guatemala to Del Monte Corporation, the man from Del Monte. He says yes. So, you know, it doesn't even work out that well for United Fruit as well as Guatemala. Well, and I guess the CIA team, though, Gordon, it is interesting as they're debriefing with Eisenhower afterward, that the revisionism around this starts almost, almost immediately, because Eisenhower asks, okay, well, as he's being briefed, you know,

how many men did Armas lose? And Eisenhower's told he lost one man, a courier before the invasion, which is totally false. It's a lie. At least 43 of Armas's people were killed, maybe more. But nobody contradicts the person who says that. And Eisenhower shakes Alan Dulles' hand. It says, thanks, Alan, and thanks to all of you. You've averted a Soviet beachhead in our hemisphere. So this is a massive. P.B. success is what they sold it to be.

It's a success. And I think the annals of the White House and the CIA at the time, it is seen as a success. I mean, there is a lot of criticism for it because I think even though it is covert, as we've said all along, it's barely covert. And so you get a lot of criticism from allies in Europe, which may matter to some people. Churchill actually, you know, says, you know, there's a lot of people in London who are kind of worried about this, because the UK is particularly in this time, and quite a lot of interest in that region, less so now.

And Churchill says, I'd never heard of this bloody place, Guatemala until my 79th year, he says, and he basically said, let's not get that worried about it. But I think where it does matter is the damage to the US reputation. across Latin America because it creates that resentment against the US. I mean, we talked about this in the Iran episode, didn't we, that Ajax, the coup in Iran in 53, creates a resentment against the US and the UK in that case that lasts for decades, I mean, through to today. And I do think that this operation shapes a generation of left-wingers in Latin America

to see America as their enemy or as an adversary, because it's the one getting rid of democratically elected governments and putting in dictators who don't care about human rights. So it creates a perception of America, which is quite influential in Latin America for years. I mean, this is interesting. Even a 25-year-old Argentine physician happened to have been in Guatemala for some of these events trying to help the Arbenz regime before he had eventually moved on. And it's Che Guevara, who got to Guatemala in January of 1954. He had, been there supposedly studying health care, but actually trying to organize resistance to support our bends. And it's kind of, to some degree, I think Guatemala is kind of a crucible for some

of these CIA guys who see this as now a tried and true template, Iran. It's now Guatemala. We can do this elsewhere. We can do this in Cuba. And it's kind of a mirror image for Latin American leftist slash communist guerrillas like Che who see the U.S. now as kind of of an implacable adversary throughout much of the region and are trying to resist this kind of this hemispheric domination that we've been talking about. Yeah, because Che Guevara flees and ends up meeting Fidel Castro. And you're right, the threads from Guatemala lead very directly, don't they, to Cuba and to the Bay of Pigs, which we've done in previous episodes, because there's this myth of

success. You know, it spreads within the CIA. People are being told, this is how you can do it. You can use this information, quite a small force. You can overthrow a government. And it creates the confidence, which is going to draw a direct line to other covert action, including Vietnam, I think, in, you know, early 60s, but particularly Bay of Pigs, as we talked about. The idea you can use radio exiles and just a bit of air support overthrow regime, no problem. Did it in Guatemala in 54. The mention of Bayer Pigs brings us to Cuba, which is part of where we started this series, which is looking at Cuba today as a potential country in the sights of Donald Trump, who's more or less actively talking about regime change in Cuba, who's economically and diplomatically squeezing Cuba right now

with that as kind of a stated goal. I mean, do you think, and this is, I think the big question is we've been talking about Guatemala and P.B. success. Are we back to a world similar to the 1950s, where we're doing these kind of almost as combination of gunboat diplomacy and covert action in order to regain, I guess you could say, hemispheric domination. It feels that way. What do you think? I think the ambition is similar, isn't it? To have regime change and to have hemispheric domination and remove regimes you don't like. I guess the differences are, well, a few, but one is, regimes are now much more aware of these dangers and do much more to prepare themselves for it.

I don't think you could get away with the amateurishness of the Guatemalan plot to do it. I also guess the US is being much more overt about it now. I mean, Donald Trump doesn't really do the covert action and let's pretend this radio station is somewhere else. He just broadcasts on truth social and social media what he wants to happen and says, you know, we want this regime gone. It's going to go. So the pressure is much more, you know, it is psychological. pressure. It is economic pressure. It is diplomatic pressure. But it's very overt, you know, on somewhere

like Cuba, isn't it? But the aim, I think, is similar to Guatemala, which is you try and fracture a regime and get some people to go, this is dangerous to be opposed to Washington. And a bit like Diaz did, the chief of staff, to Arbenz, you kind of, you get someone who's going to go to the leader and go, look, this policy is not working. I think you need to resign. And we need to put someone else in place, the Delci Rodriguez of Venezuela, who is going to be more amenable to Washington. So you can see, in a sense, without the kind of comic aspects of this plot and, you know, having a rebel force and all those things. But there are parallels, aren't there?

There are. I guess it raises the question then of, if we looked at Cuba, for example, today, is it in any way realistic that you could affect regime change with all the minimal force? Can you do it with economic sanctions and a blockade, plus the diplomatic pressure, plus a relatively on the cheap covert action plan that blends some mix of payouts to members of the military or elites to switch sides? Some of this information warfare we've been talking about to some degree, although I think it's much harder to do today, given how many more sources of information there are. But can you, you know, is that even feasible in Cuba?

I can see how the Trump administration would convince itself it could be. But you could even see in these cases like Guatemala, and frankly, I think this might be some of the attitude today. If you're Eisenhower or you're Dulles and someone comes to you with a plan and says, look, we think this is going to cost a few million bucks, we think it, maybe it's a coin flip, but we don't have to invest that much. And if it works, it's a big success. It's a P.B success.

And if it doesn't work, we're no worse off than we were before. So you can see how the logic of the kind of the risk and reward can make sense as seen from Washington, because all of the nasty outcomes that we talked about, the death squads, the fragmentation of Guatemalan politics and all these, all of those costs are born by other people who don't vote for American presidents. And I think you could make the same case in Cuba today where you could. and say, look, we might be able to do this on the cheap. And if it doesn't work, we're no worse off than we are right now.

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question because it definitely feels like the desire is absolutely there in Washington regime, changing Cuba. You know, Marco Rubio particularly, but also President Trump. But they don't want to do a Venezuela style, you know, remove the bleeder. They don't want to do an invasion. And so I think, in a sense, we're about to find out, you know, whether this works, whether that kind of economic pressure, particularly that's being placed on Cuba with the effective oil blockade and things like that, is going to be enough to fracture a regime and to get it to give up. I think it's going to be, I don't know the answer, but I think we may be about to find out. The Guatemala operation is

not so terrible of a template. I think there are real elements of it that still very much apply today. We will see. We should remind people, though, Gordon, I guess, as we come to a close here on this exploration of Guadabala in 1954. We want to remind listeners to send in any questions on social media or to email us at the rest is classified at goalhanger.com. We want your questions, or comments, your thoughts on this era of regime change. And, you know, as we look forward potentially to more to come in Cuba or in Iran, please send us your questions on what's going on the world right now because we'll be doing some Q&As soon to answer those. And don't forget to join the Declassified Club at the rest is classified.com.

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