COLONEL CASTILLO ARMAS, Hatchet Face to those close to him, found out the mercenaries from the Army of Liberation had started arriving in Tegucigalpa from all the hell they were raising in the city’s bars, whorehouses, gambling dens, and taprooms. The press and radio in the Honduran capital were filled with tales of the disgraceful behavior of those Cubans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Colombians, even a few “Hispanics” from the United States. It was a poor endorsement of the forces proposing to save Guatemala from the clutches of Jacobo Árbenz’s communist regime. When Howard Hunt, his contact in Florida, upbraided him for these headaches, Castillo Armas asked to go to Miami to speak in person with those members of the CIA who had contracted these so-called soldiers without looking deeply into their backgrounds; but Hunt, ever evasive and mysterious, told him it wasn’t convenient for him to be seen around those parts. The general relieved his ill humor by lambasting anyone who came across his path in that house in the suburbs of the Honduran capital that served as his headquarters. He had always had a nasty disposition. From a young age, when his classmates at the Military Academy had nicknamed him Caca, making creative use of his initials, he’d had the habit of secretly devising baroque, overwrought, generally insulting sobriquets for the people who sent him into tantrums. For these uproarious mercenaries he chose the name “fleabags.” Right away, he instructed the handful of Guatemalan soldiers who had deserted on his behalf to fine those guilty for disorder, and, if their infractions were grave enough, their contracts were to be canceled. But since it was their Stepmother—the CIA—who paid the Army of Liberation’s salaries, his orders had little effect.
It was an outright scandal that such a thing was only happening now, after Eisenhower had taken office in 1953 and the United States had finally resolved to set aside political intrigues and to remove Árbenz by force, as Hatchet Face had been urging. With Truman in power, it had been impossible to convince the gringos that military action alone—action of the kind that the CIA had undertaken in Iran not long before, to liquidate Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh’s regime—would put an end to the communists’ growing influence in Guatemala. But at last, thanks largely to the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and his brother, the new CIA head, Allen Dulles, both former representatives of United Fruit, the North Americans had decided to give the armed invasion the support Castillo Armas had sought ever since he’d escaped from the dank, decrepit Central Penitentiary of Guatemala into exile in Honduras. The Stepmother, the CIA, had backed Operation PBSuccess, as they dubbed it, from the beginning, and they were the ones who entrusted Hunt and others to support it on the ground. In the early days of the Army of Liberation, when they were still gathering troops, the mercenaries’ scandals in Honduras were a provocation to President Juan Manuel Gálvez (the Sleaze), who had been hesitant to support the planned coup; he only ceded in the face of great pressure from the American government and United Fruit, which was even more powerful in Honduras than in Guatemala. Castillo Armas was certain this would suffice for the gringos to come to an agreement at last with President Anastasio Somoza to begin training the mercenaries on Nicaraguan territory. So why the hell were the negotiations taking so long? He had spoken with Somoza and was certain the general was fully behind the invasion.
It’s the gringos who are slowing everything down, he thought. From his office he could see a landscape dotted with trees and pastureland, the outline of one of those dun hills that surrounded Tegucigalpa, and farther off, peasants in straw hats bending over their crop rows. He couldn’t complain about the house United Fruit had set him up in, or the workers or the cook they paid for, they took care of the upkeep as well, even his driver and the gardener. It was good the gringos had finally decided to act, but they shouldn’t try and do everything themselves, pushing him aside—not when he’d risked his life bringing to light the communists’ infiltration into Guatemala from the time of Colonel Francisco Javier Arana’s assassination through the three years of Árbenz’s administration. He had complained to the management at United Fruit, but they tried to convince him that the best thing was to keep his distance from the Americans, so the journalists on Árbenz’s side wouldn’t accuse him of being a mere tool of the Stepmother. He didn’t buy it: being kept out of the major decisions made him feel like a patsy of Washington and the CIA. Sons of bitches! he thought. Puritan scum! He closed his eyes, sucked in a deep breath, and tried to calm his ill mood, remembering that soon he would depose (and maybe even kill) Jacobo Árbenz (the Mute). He’d hated him since they were cadets at the Politécnica. Back then, it was for personal reasons: Árbenz was white, handsome, and successful, whereas Castillo Armas was poor, a bastard, his Indian features a sign of his humble origins. Then Árbenz had married María Vilanova, a beautiful, rich Salvadoran, while his own wife, Odilia Palomo, was a homely teacher as destitute as he. But it was their political differences that were fundamental.
It enraged him that he couldn’t communicate with the CIA or its intermediary, Howard Hunt, who disappeared for long stretches—Castillo Armas hadn’t heard from him for months—without giving the least indication of where he’d gone; he couldn’t even reach the people from the State Department in charge of preparing the invasion. He felt humiliated, degraded, ignored in matters crucial to his country. For a long time, before Howard Hunt came on the scene, his only contact was Kevin L. Smith, the director of United Fruit in Honduras. Smith was the one to tell him they had finally settled on him to lead the Army of Liberation. The very same Smith took him to Florida in his private plane, to the former Naval Reserve base at Opa-Locka, eleven miles north of Miami, where he would oversee Operation PBSuccess. There he met Colonel Frank Wisner, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, hired by Allen Dulles to supervise the project of overthrowing Árbenz. He was, as Castillo Armas understood things, Howard Hunt’s immediate superior. Wisner told him he had been chosen over General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes (the Toady) and the lawyer and coffee grower Juan Córdova Cerna, and it was he who would take the lead in liberating Guatemala. What he didn’t tell him was the words Howard Hunt had used to defend his candidacy: “Mister Caca looks a bit Indian, and don’t forget, the vast majority of Guatemalans are Indians. They’ll love him!”
His euphoria at his appointment was brief, quickly overshadowed by the infinite precautions the gringos took before every step. Their hope was to keep up appearances so the UN couldn’t accuse the United States of being the true agents (and above all, financiers) of the future war of liberation in Latin America’s first communist republic beholden to Moscow. As if you could just cover it up! For Castillo Armas, the gringos’ scruples were all a product of their religious puritanism. He told his men this often, in every meeting where they gathered in his office: “The gringos’ puritanism makes them dawdle, and when they finally do take action, they move at a snail’s pace.” He didn’t really know what he meant by that, but he felt proud of himself for saying it, and he considered it a weighty, philosophical insult.
In contrast, his gratitude toward the president of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, was without limits. Somoza was a real ally, generous and aware of everything that was at stake. He had allowed the soldiers of the Army of Liberation to train in his country—he even offered El Tamarindo, one of his haciendas, and Momotombito Island for the purpose—and he’d authorized the CIA to take off from Nicaraguan airports to throw leaflets over Guatemala’s cities and bomb strategic targets once the operations had begun. He’d let the military campaign run its command center out of Managua. The CIA had already placed its airmen there, along with the North American soldiers who would dictate the invasion’s strategy. Somoza had named his son Tachito liaison between his government and the American administrators who would map out battles and acts of sabotage. Trujillo (the Spider) was a different matter. He’d been generous with his armaments and his money, but Castillo Armas didn’t trust him. The powerful and vain Dominican caudillo made him nervous, even afraid. His nose told him if he depended too heavily on Trujillo in his struggle for liberation—he had already received sixty thousand dollars from him in person, apart from two more consignments of cash and arms through intermediaries—he would have to pay a high price in return once in power. The only time the two men had spoken, in Ciudad Trujillo, he’d been repelled by the man’s smarmy way of eliciting recompense once victory had been achieved. Moreover, he was aware that the Generalísimo’s preferred candidate to decide the destiny of a future Guatemala was his friend and confidant General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes.
Everything was well underway, but Hatchet Face remained more or less in the dark. He had the unpleasant feeling that the gringos were hiding their intentions ex professo, because they didn’t trust him or quite simply didn’t respect him. Frank Wisner had even upbraided him for exaggerating the number of volunteers he’d recruited for the Army of Liberation in Guatemala: he promised five hundred and had delivered just shy of half that. This was how the CIA began recruiting fleabags from assorted Latin American countries: the men now causing so much disorder in Tegucigalpa. The best thing would be to cart them all off to Nueva Ocotepeque until they could begin their training in Nicaragua. He called Colonel Brodfrost of the U.S. Army, Frank Wisner’s second-in-command and his new contact in Managua, who assured him that they would start training at the hacienda and on the island that upcoming Monday, and that he would begin the transfer of soldiers from the Army of Liberation to Nicaragua that very afternoon. The CIA had sent Howard Hunt to another country on a new mission, and he wouldn’t see him around there anymore, he said. And to save Wisner further inconvenience, Brodfrost told Castillo Armas he would be his sole contact from then on.
Another major problem had been Radio Liberación, the underground radio station. The gringos had bought a powerful transmitter that would allow the station to reach every region of Guatemala, even though they were broadcasting from Nueva Ocotepeque, a Honduran city not far from the border. When Castillo Armas tried to name the station director, Brodfrost informed him that the CIA had already chosen one, a gringo by the name of David Atlee Phillips (the Invisible Man). Radio Liberación was meant to coordinate its broadcasts with the Army of Liberation, which Castillo Armas represented, but still, he never managed to speak to Phillips personally. From its very first transmission, on Saturday, May 1, 1954, there were problems. The colonel had asked for the programs to be recorded inside Guatemala, but was told they would be produced instead at the Panama Canal, where the CIA had set up a “logistical center” devoted exclusively to the invasion of Guatemala at France Field, the U.S. military installation. Weapons flowed from there along with the recordings; the tapes were sent directly to Nueva Ocotepeque with the approval of Phillips. The colonel was horrified when he heard the first broadcast: only one of the speakers had a Guatemalan accent; the rest (including one woman) were Nicaraguans and Panamanians, as their cadences and turns of phrase made instantly apparent. Castillo Armas’s complaints reached central command, but nothing was done until the fourth or fifth day, by which time many Guatemalans and Árbenz’s government knew that Radio Liberación’s broadcasts came not from somewhere deep in the jungles of Guatemala, but from outside the country, at the behest of interests outside the country. And who could be behind all that except the Americans?
What had functioned well was the campaign on the radio and in the press accusing the Árbenz government of having turned Guatemala into a beachhead of the Soviet Union with plans for taking control of the Panama Canal. That had been the work not of the U.S. government or the CIA, but of United Fruit and its publicity genius, Mr. Edward L. Bernays. Castillo Armas’s jaw dropped as he listened to him explain how publicity could change a society’s way of thinking or suffuse it with hope or fear. In Guatemala, it had worked perfectly. With United Fruit’s money, Bernays had managed to convince North American society and even the government in Washington that Guatemala was already in the grips of communism and that Árbenz was personally pulling the strings. Colonel Castillo Armas felt that things would have gone much better if United Fruit alone had been in charge. But alas!—as Generalísimo Trujillo had told him that time—everything had to pass through the Stepmother and Washington.
All those precautions the CIA and the State Department took to keep the United States free from suspicion of instigating the upcoming invasion were pointless in Castillo Armas’s eyes. Árbenz and his minister of foreign affairs, Guillermo Toriello, would level accusations against them at the UN with or without proof. Why waste time with measures that would slow down their plans and allow errors like the one made with Radio Liberación? It took whole days to send the tapes from Panama to Nueva Ocotepeque. Then, unexpectedly, the president of Honduras, Juan Manuel Gálvez, announced the station had been discovered and that they would have to close it down or move it out of the country. The CIA decided to take it to Managua. Not only did Somoza not object, he arranged a location for them. Later, without offering Hatchet Face the least explanation, the CIA decided to move it again, and began sending its clandestine broadcasts from Key West, Florida.
The weapons for the Army of Liberation took a similar meandering trajectory before reaching Honduran territory, where the invasion would begin. They were stockpiled at the U.S. military base in Panama, and from there, the airplanes the CIA had purchased for the Army of Liberation transported them to various points along the Honduran border. The expeditionary forces would begin their march from there. Some of these weapons and explosives were air-dropped into Guatemalan frontier villages where—in theory, if less in practice—clandestine sabotage and demolition groups had gathered. There were numerous problems with the Army of Liberation’s fleet. Castillo Armas had always imagined these planes would come from the Guatemalan air force, whose men would desert their base in La Aurora to join him. But an exultant Brodfrost told him one day that Allen Dulles had gotten approval from his brother John Foster and perhaps even from President Eisenhower to buy three Douglas C-124Cs on the international market for Operation PBSuccess. They would drop leaflets and acquaint the civilian population with the purpose of the invasion. And once it began, they could take weapons, food, and medicine to the Liberationist forces and bombard the enemy. Just as with all the other preliminaries, the gringos wouldn’t let Castillo Armas send a single airman under his command to accompany the buyers, let alone to look for crewmen. The colonel was further displeased to discover that one of the pilots hired to fly the Army of Liberation’s planes was an adventurer and psychopath named Jerry Fred DeLarm (the Nutcase). He was good behind the stick, but was known throughout Central America as a smuggler and a blowhard. When he was in his cups, he liked to brag at the top of his lungs about his unlawful jaunts, saying he’d take off and land wherever he damn well pleased, no matter what measures a country took to supervise and protect its airspace.
Mr. Caca wasn’t the only one to feel slighted by the gringos’ rudeness; the same was true for the small group of Guatemalan officials who had deserted, either from friendship with the colonel or from irritation at Árbenz’s reforms, and constituted the rebels’ General Staff. His stomach in knots, Castillo Armas told them the puritan gringos’ prudence was due to the delicate diplomatic situation Washington would find itself in if the United Nations confronted it with conclusive evidence that it had invaded a small country like Guatemala, deposing a government elected by the people. The gringos were bunglers in the best of cases. But they couldn’t forget that these “bunglers” were the ones giving them the weapons, the airplanes, and the money that made this invasion possible. Castillo Armas said these things, but even he didn’t believe them, and he shared his officers’ frustration and skepticism.
And if all this weren’t enough, the colonel’s headaches multiplied dramatically with the testimony of Rodolfo Mendoza Azurdia, head of the air force, the highest-ranking officer to join the Army of Liberation and the holder of an important post in the Árbenz government. Castillo Armas had gone to receive him in person, embracing him at the airport in Tegucigalpa, aware of the complex machinations Colonel Mendoza—who had been Árbenz’s deputy minister of defense until the day before—had employed to escape Guatemala and make common cause with the forces of freedom.
Mendoza Azurdia and Castillo Armas had attended the Military Academy together, but they hadn’t been friends. Assigned to different garrisons, they had seen each other little and had pursued their careers separately. Hatchet Face’s two prior attempts at subverting the governments of Arévalo and Árbenz had failed to draw Mendoza in. And so he was surprised when this leader of the diminutive Guatemalan air force, whom he’d numbered among Árbenz’s allies, sent him an emissary who discreetly informed him that he was considering quitting the government and fleeing Guatemala. Would he be welcome in the ranks of the Liberationists? Castillo Armas responded that they would receive him with open arms. And at the airport in Tegucigalpa, in plain sight of the journalists, he congratulated Mendoza Azurdia for his bravery and his patriotism. The attacks the official press levied against him would be his highest endorsement in the Guatemala of tomorrow.
Castillo Armas’s hair stood on end when Colonel Mendoza revealed to him and his general staff the intimate secrets of Árbenz’s government. He was getting stabbed in the back, and this time by the person he least expected: the new U.S. ambassador in Guatemala, John Emil Peurifoy, whose confirmation he had celebrated because the CIA had informed him that John Foster Dulles had handpicked him for his hardness. He’d won the nickname the Butcher of Greece for his exemplary work helping the monarchist soldiers crush the communist guerrillas. To make matters worse, after presenting Árbenz with his credentials, Peurifoy had handed him a list of forty communists employed in Guatemala’s public administration, demanding they be expelled from their posts and imprisoned or shot. Apparently, this gave rise to a diplomatic uproar. Since that time, Guatemala’s leftist press had attacked Ambassador Peurifoy, referring to him as the Viceroy and the Proconsul. No one knew that the leader of the Liberationists had privately taken to calling him the Cowboy.
What most worried Castillo Armas was that, according to Colonel Mendoza, Peurifoy had immediately begun conspiring with officers in the army, inviting them to the U.S. Embassy or meeting them at the Officers’ Club, the Equestrian Club, or in private homes. He demanded they undertake an “institutional coup,” overthrowing Árbenz or forcing his resignation and imprisoning all the communists who were turning the country into a Soviet satellite—exactly the same thing that had happened in Greece. Mendoza Azurdia told him Ambassador Peurifoy took a dim view of Castillo Armas’s planned invasion and thought a civil war could bring bad consequences, because it was far from evident, once military operations were underway, that the Liberationists would triumph. There were many imponderables, he said, and the invasion could easily founder. It was safer, from his perspective, to infiltrate the army and encourage it to pursue a coup on its own. In the most recent meeting between the gringo ambassador and the Guatemalan heads of the military, the latter, with Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz (the Dagger) as their spokesman, told him that in principle they accepted the idea of an institutional coup, but with two conditions: first, that Castillo Armas surrender and bring his military projects to an end, and second, that he occupy no post in the government that would come after Árbenz. Ambassador Peurifoy seemed to be in agreement, and he sent extensive telegrams in code to Mr. Allen Dulles and the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles seeking their approval of his strategy. Carlos Castillo Armas felt the thing he had been building up scrupulously for all these years now crumbling to pieces. He’d end up a fifth wheel if the ambassador got his way. That was when he started hating the Cowboy almost as much as the Mute.
These discoveries had made him anxious, but the CIA, in the form of Colonel Brodfrost, soon lifted his spirits: the invasion would cross the Guatemalan border and initiate military actions against Árbenz at dawn on June 18, 1954.