The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  But when they filed into the East Wing theater for their Guatemala slideshow, the PBSUCCESS team was at the height of its glory. The room was filled with the administration’s top dignitaries, including the president himself, his cabinet, and the vice president. Afterward, Eisenhower, ever the soldier, asked Dulles how many men he had lost. Just one, Dulles told him. “Incredible!” exclaimed the president.

  But the real body count in Guatemala started after the invasion, when the CIA-backed regime of Castillo Armas began to “clean” the nation of political undesirables, labor organizers, and peasants who had too eagerly embraced Arbenz’s land reforms. It was the beginning of a blood-soaked era that would transform Guatemala into one of the twentieth century’s most infamous killing fields. The “stainless” coup, as some of its CIA engineers liked to call it, would actually result in a tide of gore, including assassinations, rampant torture and executions, death squad mayhem, and the massacres of entire villages. By the time that the bloodletting had run its course, four decades later, over 250,000 people had been killed in a nation whose total population was less than four million when the reign of terror began.

  The U.S. press coverage of the Guatemala coup offered a sanitized account, one that smacked of CIA manipulation. The leading newspapers treated the overthrow of Arbenz’s government as a tropical adventure, an “opéra bouffe,” in the words of Hanson Baldwin, one of Dulles’s trusted friends at The New York Times. Nonetheless, reported Baldwin, the operation had “global importance.” This is precisely how Dulles liked his overseas exploits to be chronicled—as entertaining espionage capers, with serious consequences for the Cold War struggle. New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was extremely accommodating to Dulles throughout the covert operation, agreeing to keep foreign correspondent Sydney Gruson, whom Dulles considered insufficiently compliant, out of Guatemala and even assuring the CIA director that Gruson’s future articles would be screened “with a great deal more care than usual.”

  The strangely lighthearted tone of U.S. news dispatches about Guatemala would seep into history books about the CIA and Dulles biographies for years. But, in truth, Guatemala was less opéra bouffe than Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.

  The murderous intrigue began long before the actual coup. As early as January 1952, the CIA started plotting to eliminate the top officials of the Arbenz government. Howard Hunt might have wanted to avoid the embarrassment of an Arbenz assassination in full public view, but the CIA had no qualms about compiling a secret “disposal list” of at least fifty-eight key Guatemalan leaders during the planning for the coup. The assassination memo was among several hundred documents relating to the 1954 coup released by the CIA in 1997 during one of the agency’s occasional exercises in carefully managed “openness,” which one critic labeled “a brilliant public relations snow job.” Still, the documents were revealing enough to send shock waves through the international press.

  In one of the declassified documents, an unnamed CIA official expressed his confidence on the eve of the Guatemala coup that “the elimination of those in high positions of the [Arbenz] government would bring about its collapse.” Another document—a chillingly detailed, nineteen-page CIA killing manual titled “A Study of Assassination”—offered the most efficient ways to butcher Guatemala’s leadership. “The simplest tools are often the most efficient means of assassination,” the manual helpfully suggested. “A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.” The manual also advised assassins which parts of the body to strike for the most lethal effect, noting that “puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. . . . Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region.” The authors of the manual did make a passing reference to the morality of killing elected leaders of a sovereign nation. “Murder is not morally justified,” the manual briefly acknowledged. “Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.”

  The CIA compiled its death list with bureaucratic diligence, circulating the names of those nominated to die within agency departments and among Guatemala’s military plotters, and asking for comments (as well as suggestions for the names of additional targets) like an interoffice memo. Because the CIA deleted the names on the list when it declassified the document, there is no way to tell how many—or if any—of the fifty-eight or more prominent Guatemalans were eventually assassinated. But what is known is that by training and encouraging Guatemala’s new military masters in the art of political murder, the CIA injected a death spore into the nation’s bloodstream that would wreak havoc for decades.

  As soon as the dictator Castillo Armas was installed in the presidential palace, the CIA began pressuring him to purge Guatemala of leftist elements. His army rounded up some four thousand suspected Communists. As they revealed under interrogation, few of the prisoners had ever heard of Karl Marx and none belonged to the Communist Party—but they were guilty of belonging to democratic political parties, labor unions, and farmworker associations. They all had been infected with dangerous ideas during the Arbenz era because, in the words of one observer, “they believed [that] in a democracy the people chose the government, Guatemala needed land reform, and workers deserved protection under the law.”

  For the rest of his regime, Castillo Armas would do everything in his power to purify Guatemala of these thoughts. The CIA, enamored of making ominous lists, helped the new regime assemble a lista negra of subversives that soon grew to seventy thousand names. Eventually the names on the blacklist amounted to a staggering 10 percent of the country’s adult population. Many of the names came from the Arbenz government documents that the CIA had seized when it raided the presidential palace. In August 1954, Castillo Armas announced Decree 59—the beginning of Guatemala’s fascist legal architecture—which gave his regime the right to arrest those on the blacklist and to hold them for up to six months without trial. Those unfortunate enough to be rounded up were put in the care of José Bernabé Linares, the notorious chief of the Guardia Judicial, who was known for extracting confessions from prisoners with electric-shock baths and steel skullcaps.

  Guatemalan journalists who attempted to report on the regime’s abuses were themselves thrown into prison and tortured. But as Castillo Armas consolidated his brutal reign, with the CIA’s energetic support, the U.S. embassy in Guatemala City continued to cover for the regime, insisting that there was “little basis for apprehension that the country could become a harsh police state very soon.”

  Meanwhile, the barbarism spread to the countryside, where peasant leaders were summarily executed, setting the stage for Guatemala’s future death squads. Exiles reported that the regime was encouraging the rise of vigilante groups, telling them, “You can go and rob and kill in such-and-such sector, at this address, and you can be sure there won’t be any police around to bother you about it.” The worst massacre at the time took place in Tiquisate, a center of farmworker activism, where as many as a thousand peasants were seized by soldiers from plantations owned by United Fruit and local despots, lined up, and machine-gunned into open trenches.

  Castillo Armas’s own bloody end came in July 1957, when he was assassinated by one of his own palace guards. But his death did nothing to abate the slaughter, which continued on and off for decades, reaching new heights of ferocity during the Reagan presidency. One of the military dictators who succeeded Castillo Armas vowed, “If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so.”

  The enormous suffering of the Guatemalan people weighed heavily on Jacobo and Maria Arbenz during their long exile. “It haunted my grandparents every day,” said Erick Arbenz. “That was another reason there was so much depression in our family. They lived and felt the Guatemala holocaust every day. They had tried to bring about a Guatemala Spring—and then to suffer not only their own defeat, but to see everything that was done to their people .
. . it was an overwhelming tragedy.”

  The anguish of the Arbenz family seemed to have no end. In 2004, the Arbenzes’ other daughter, Maria Leonora, followed the path of her sister and killed herself. “She felt as if she were being pursued and persecuted her whole life,” said Erick. “Those feelings never went away from her.”

  After the Eisenhower administration overthrew Jacobo Arbenz, U.S. officials boasted that they would turn Guatemala into “a showcase for democracy.” It became, instead, a bottomless well of sorrow.

  11

  Strange Love

  The 1951 World Series was an epic sports event. The “subway series” not only featured two exciting New York teams, the Yankees and the Giants, but it marked the climax of what became known as “The Season of Change.” Joe DiMaggio, the legendary “Yankee Clipper,” would bow out of baseball after the series. And two young future Hall of Famers—Yankees rookie Mickey Mantle and Giants rookie Willie Mays—would make their World Series debuts. The twenty-year-old Mays, who idolized DiMaggio, finally had a chance to exchange a few words with his hero when photographers urged the two sluggers to stand together for a picture. “It was a dream come true,” said the rookie, who played the series in a daze.

  Game 6, which was played on October 10 in front of nearly sixty-two thousand people in Yankee Stadium, would assume mythic proportions in baseball fans’ memories. The Yankees withstood a thrilling ninth-inning comeback charge by the Giants, winning the game 4–3 and taking the series. As DiMaggio trotted off the field to the roar of the crowd, he was already fading into history. “I’ve played my last game,” Joltin’ Joe told his teammates, who gathered around him in the locker room, handing him baseballs, bats, and other mementoes for him to sign. At thirty-six, DiMaggio’s body was failing him and he didn’t want to let down his fans and fellow players. “He quit because he wasn’t Joe DiMaggio anymore,” his brother Tom later said.

  Among those sitting in the stands on that bittersweet day at Yankee Stadium were two well-dressed German gentlemen in their forties, accompanied by a younger man who was their CIA handler. Like DiMaggio, the older German, Reinhard Gehlen, was a legendary figure, but his achievements were of a completely different order. Gehlen did not look like an imposing figure. He was slightly built and had a receding hairline, brush mustache, and ears that were as sharply peaked as a bat’s. His skin was so pale that it seemed “translucent” to his CIA companion. Only his striking blue eyes gave any indication of the intense ambition that had driven Gehlen throughout his career.

  During the war, Gehlen had served as Hitler’s intelligence chief on the eastern front. His Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost) apparatus relentlessly probed for weaknesses in the Soviet defenses as the Nazi juggernaut made its eastward thrust. Gehlen’s FHO also pinpointed the location of Jews, Communists, and other enemies of the Reich in the “bloodlands” overrun by Hitler’s forces, so they could be rounded up and executed by the Einsatzgruppen death squads. Most of the intelligence gathered by Gehlen’s men was extracted from the enormous population of Soviet prisoners of war—which eventually totaled four million—that fell under Nazi control. Gehlen’s exalted reputation as an intelligence wizard, which won him the Führer’s admiration and his major general’s rank, derived from his organization’s widespread use of torture.

  Though many in the Yankee Stadium crowd that day would have been deeply displeased to learn Gehlen’s identity, the German spymaster, wearing his trademark dark glasses, sat undisturbed in the stands, enjoying the carnival exuberance of the afternoon. The game itself was of little interest to Gehlen—it was his German companion, Heinz Herre, who was the rabid baseball fan. Herre, who had served as Gehlen’s indispensable deputy ever since their days together on the eastern front, became so enamored of America’s favorite pastime after the war that he could spit out players’ statistics like the most obsessive of baseball card collectors. During the war, Herre had studied the Soviet enemy with equal intensity, learning the Russian language and immersing himself in the country’s politics and culture. Now his compulsive curiosity was focused on all things American.

  Herre, a tall and lean man with an appealing smile, had a knack for ingratiating himself with his U.S. colleagues. Though the socially awkward Gehlen lacked his deputy’s facility with Americans, he knew it was an essential skill. In the final days of the war, Gehlen astutely concluded that the U.S.-Soviet alliance would inevitably break apart, providing an opportunity for at least some elements of the Nazi hierarchy to survive by joining forces with the West against Moscow. He knew that his own fate depended on his ability to convince his new American masters of his strategic value in the emerging Cold War. Gehlen did this by trekking into the Bavarian mountains, as U.S. forces approached, and burying cases of microfilm containing Nazi intelligence on the Soviet Union. The German spymaster then leveraged his expertise and underground connections in Eastern Europe, convincing U.S. military officials of his indispensability as an authority on the Soviet threat.

  Gehlen’s canny maneuvers won him and his top staff a flight out of war-ravaged Germany on a DC-3 military transport to the United States, where they were moved into comfortable quarters at Fort Hunt in Virginia. Here Gehlen was introduced to his American intelligence counterparts, including Allen Dulles, who, after listening to the German spymaster’s pitch, decided that the U.S. government should bring the former Nazi intelligence operation under its supervision.

  Instead of being handed over to the Soviets as war criminals, as Moscow was demanding, Gehlen and his top deputies were put on a troop ship back to Germany.

  Back home, Gehlen’s spy team was installed by U.S. military authorities in a compound in the village of Pullach, near Munich, that had once served as the headquarters of Hitler confidante Martin Bormann. Gehlen’s dream of reconstituting Hitler’s military intelligence structure within the U.S. national security system was about to be realized. With the generous support of the American government, the Gehlen Organization—as it came to be known—thrived in Pullach, becoming West Germany’s principal intelligence agency.

  In 1948, after a heated internal debate, the CIA decided to take over supervision of the Gehlen Organization from the U.S. Army, which had growing concerns about the type of agents Gehlen was recruiting and the quality of their intelligence work. Gehlen had promised Army officials that he would not hire former SS or Gestapo officials. But as his organization grew, it absorbed some of the most notorious figures of the Nazi regime, such as Dr. Franz Six. A former professor at Berlin University, Six left the classroom to become an intellectual architect of the Final Solution as well as one of its most enthusiastic enforcers, personally leading an SS death squad on the eastern front. After the war, Six was hired by the Gehlen Organization but was later arrested by U.S. Army counterintelligence agents. Convicted of war crimes, Six served four years in prison. However, within weeks of his release, Six was back at work in Gehlen’s Pullach headquarters.

  Many in the CIA vehemently opposed any association with such a stigmatized organization, including Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the agency’s first director, who in 1947 strongly urged President Truman to “liquidate” Gehlen’s operation. The following year, the CIA station chief in Karlsruhe, Germany, expressed his own disgust at the prospect of a merger with Gehlen’s group, calling it an old boy’s network of ex-Nazi officers “who are in a position to provide safe haven for a good many undesirable elements from the standpoint of a future democratic Germany.” But Gehlen had his influential supporters in Washington.

  Gehlen’s backing came primarily from the Dulles faction within the national security establishment—and once again, this faction would prevail. In October 1948, James Critchfield, the new chief of the CIA’s Munich station, was given the task of evaluating Gehlen’s operation and recommending for or against it. The thirty-one-year-old Critchfield was a Dulles man: he had been identified as a talented prospect by Eleanor Dulles while serving with Army intelligence in postwar Vienna, and he was la
ter recruited into the CIA by her brothers. In his final report, Critchfield firmly concluded that the CIA should fold Gehlen’s group under its wing. It was the beginning of a fateful relationship that would shape Cold War politics for decades to come.

  The CIA officially assumed responsibility for the German spy organization in July 1949, with Jim Critchfield taking over as Gehlen’s supervisor. Critchfield moved his base of operations to Pullach, setting up his office in Bormann’s former bedroom. Gehlen had turned Pullach into its own separate world, with over two hundred of his top staff and their wives and children living and working in the compound. Before Critchfield moved in, the German spymaster himself had lived with his wife and four children in Bormann’s two-story house. Known, ironically, as the “White House,” its décor still retained touches of Nazi kitsch, including a stone German eagle looming over the front door, whose claws were now empty after U.S. soldiers chiseled away the swastika they once held.

  As Critchfield’s CIA deputies and their families moved into Gehlen’s gated community, an intimate social fusion began to develop between the former enemies. The Germans and Americans worked and partied together, their children attended the same one-room school, and their families even went on ski trips together in the nearby Bavarian Alps. By 1953, the CIA and Gehlen Organization were so entwined in Germany that some Washington officials, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger Keyes, expressed strong concern.

  Just a few years before, Gehlen and his top men—who included high-ranking officers of the German General Staff, FHO, and even SS—had been dedicated warriors of the Third Reich. And yet Critchfield convinced himself that, except for “some borderline cases [who] worked in peripheral areas of the organization . . . [Gehlen’s] key people . . . had come out of the war and the Nuremberg Trials with reasonably clean slates.”