Page "1954 Guatemalan coup d'état" Paragraph 8

The Guatemalan coup d ’ état began with Operation PBFORTUNE ( September 1952 ), the partly implemented plan to supply exiled, right-wing, anti – Árbenz rebel groups with operational funds and matériel, to form a counter-revolutionary army of liberation to depose the Árbenz Government.

The Guatemalan paramilitary invasion was contingent upon the confirmation, by the secret intelligence agencies of the US, that President Árbenz was a Communist ; lack of proof cancelled Operation PBFORTUNE.

Nonetheless, two years later, in June 1954, Operation PBSUCCESS realised the anti – Árbenz coup d ’ état, and installed Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as President of Guatemala.

Afterwards followed Operation PBHISTORY ( July 1954 ), with the intelligence-gathering remit to find and publish documentary evidence — from the Árbenz Government and from the national Communists of the Guatemalan Labour Party — that would confirm the geopolitical opinion of the CIA: under the Árbenz Government, Guatemala was a pro – Communist puppet state of the USSR, and part of the Soviet hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

In the event, the CIA document-analysis team of Operation PBHISTORY failed, because they found no government or communist documents that supported the mistaken, ideologic assumption, by the US, that the Árbenz Government had been infiltrated by Guatemalan Communists controlled from the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, the PBHISTORY intelligence analyses of the Árbenz Government documents contradicted the CIA ’ s pro-communist-infiltration assumptions ; the document analysis team reported that President Árbenz Guzmán had abided Guatemalan constitutional law by respecting the right of national Communists to form political parties and to participate in national politics, in the senate of the Republic of Guatemala ; and reported that Guatemalan Communists were nationalists, ideologically independent of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.