Operation PBHistory was a covert operation carried out in Guatemala by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. It followed Operation PBSuccess, which led to the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in June 1954. PBHistory attempted to use documents left behind by the government and by organizations related to the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour to demonstrate that the government had been under the influence of the Soviet Union. The mission was inspired by the October revolution of 1944 in Guatemala.
About Operation PBHistory in brief
Operation PBHistory was a covert operation carried out in Guatemala by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. It followed Operation PBSuccess, which led to the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in June 1954 and ended the Guatemalan Revolution. PBHistory attempted to use documents left behind by the government and by organizations related to the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour to demonstrate that the government had been under the influence of the Soviet Union. The CIA also hoped to improve its intelligence resources about communist parties in Latin America, a subject on which it had little information. Operation PBHistory did not succeed in its chief objective of finding evidence that the Guatemala communists were being controlled by the Soviet government, and was unable to counter the international narrative that the U.S. had toppled the government to serve the interests of the United Fruit Company. The documents uncovered by the operation proved useful to the Guatemala intelligence agencies, enabling the creation of a register of suspected communists. The operation helped set up the Guatemala National Committee of Defense Against Communism, which was covertly funded by the CIA. The team studied over 500,000 documents in total, and finished processing documents on 28 September 1954. It was led by Frank Wisner, who had worked in the US intelligence services since World War II. The mission was inspired by the October revolution of 1944 in Guatemala. Juan José Arévalo was elected President of Guatemala, who initiated reforms based on liberal capitalism.
The US government was predisposed to see communist influence in the government, particularly after the legalization of the PGT. In 1952 the US-based United Fruit company, which had large landholdings in Guatemala, intensively lobbied the US government for ÁRbenz’s overthrow. On 18 June 1954 Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan Colonel in exile, led an invasion force of 480 men into Guatemala. The invasion was supported by psychological warfare, which presented Castillos Armas’s victory as a faiti to Guatemalan people. Worried by the possibility of a US-controlled invasion, the Guatemala army refused to fight the army and resigned on June 27, 1954. The coup was put out by the media in communist-controlled countries, but was influenced by the coverage put out in countries that were joining the Social Democratic Party of Britain and Swedish Labour Party. This included the UK, Sweden, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The U.N. accused the US of sponsoring a coup to reverse the agrarian reform in Guatemala in 1952. In response, the US. government issued a series of statements denouncing the Guatemala government, alleging that it had been infiltrated by communists. In 1952 Á rbenz began an agrarians’ reform program that transferred uncultivated land from large landowners to poor laborers in return for compensation. In 1953 the US President Dwight Eisenhower authorized a Central intelligence Agency operation to overthrow Álbenz, code-named Operation PBSUccess.
You want to know more about Operation PBHistory?
This page is based on the article Operation PBHistory published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
