After the Iranian project, Kim Roosevelt returned to headquarters as assistant deputy director of the Directorate for Operations. Under Frank Wisner, Roosevelt led the political action staff and supervised that component’s field operations. He tried to use a White House debriefing to critique Project Ajax.

  “If we, the CIA, are ever going to try something like this again, we must be absolutely sure that the people and army want what we want.

  “If not, you had better give the job to the Marines.”

  Roosevelt wrote later that John Foster Dulles did not want to hear such advice. This was true. Within weeks of that occasion, Roosevelt was offered command of a similar covert action being planned for Central America, in Guatemala.

  Kim Roosevelt turned down this offer: inquiries showed that his criteria were not likely to be met in Guatemala. But he would not escape—instead, as a senior official of the DO he became a frequent participant in meetings held to consider the new plan. The Psychological Strategy Board, in its capacity as arbiter of America’s secret war, approved the concept on August 12, 1953. Two weeks later a PSB luncheon further decided to give Guatemala the highest priority among U.S. initiatives.

  Guatemala became the showcase for one of Allen Dulles’s favorites, C. Tracy Barnes. A spook from the annals of the law, Barnes was a lot like Frank Wisner, another of those young hires by Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. Tracy had other social sacraments as well—Law Review at Harvard, Groton a year behind Dick Bissell. His undergraduate degree, from Yale, made Barnes a full-spectrum member of CIA’s Ivy League clique. He had also married into money, which did not hurt, though his own family could hardly be described as poor.

  The connection with Allen Dulles came with the Big War, which for Barnes embodied glory eternal. Commissioned and assigned to London, to the U.S. air attaché, Barnes strove to get into the field and transferred to Lord Mountbatten’s Special Forces headquarters, then the OSS. He made parachute drops over British air bases for sport. Barnes twice dropped into France to work with the resistance. The second time he made it to Switzerland just ahead of German pursuers. There Allen Dulles reigned as OSS station chief. For the rest of the war Barnes did odd jobs for Dulles, most especially helping arrange the surrender of German troops in northern Italy, involving some pretty dangerous forays to meet undercover with Nazi officers who above ground were still fighting the war. The highlight was probably smuggling out the widow of Mussolini’s foreign minister and the manuscript of his diaries. Dulles told others that Tracy Barnes was the bravest fellow he knew, and Barnes had a Silver Star and two French Croix de Guerres (one with Palm, the other with Star) to prove it.

  With the peace, Barnes worked for a time with the National Labor Relations Board (preceding Bill Colby at that institution), then came home, as it were, spending three years with a Providence, Rhode Island law firm. It was Gordon Gray who brought Barnes back to Washington in 1950 as a special assistant to the secretary of the army. Gray left his position as secretary just as Barnes arrived, but Barnes stayed on under Clifford Alexander. A year later Gray reappeared as director of the Psychological Strategy Board and pulled Barnes in as deputy. By then Allen Dulles’s star, rising meteorically over the agency, shone so bright that Barnes sought out the CIA official soon to be its boss. Tracy could see that the Strategy Board led nowhere in terms of power and influence. The nation’s premier Cold War agency beckoned. Barnes moved over to CIA. A few months before TP/Ajax in Iran, Director Dulles put Barnes in charge of a new unit within the DO, the Paramilitary and Psychological Operations Staff, to coordinate the agency’s most muscular Cold War activities.

  The first key meeting on the Guatemala project took place in Frank Wisner’s office around Labor Day 1953. Barnes and J. C. King of the Western Hemisphere (WH) Division went over the existing networks and operations in Central America. The agency already had a recruit for “our man in Guatemala,” but his position remained weak, his assets outside the country negligible and those inside nonexistent, and his plan depended entirely upon anticipated popular support the CIA judged remote. Wisner could see formidable challenges.

  The government in Guatemala, of a social democratic bent, had been elected in November 1950 with more than half the vote in a free election. President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman thereafter acquired even greater popularity. Peasants fully supported his ardent efforts to reform Guatemala’s agriculture and economy.

  Like the Iranian affair, the Guatemalan operation had its economic angle. This time an American firm, United Fruit, was involved. It too had used the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. United Fruit, the largest landowner in Guatemala, owned some 550,000 acres plus a controlling share of the country’s only railroad. La frutera, as it was known, trembled at the Guatemalan government’s land redistribution program. Beginning in February 1953 Arbenz expropriated almost 400,000 acres of land to parcel out to peasants. The Guatemalans offered compensation—twenty-five-year bonds at 3 percent guaranteed interest for the exact book value of the assets la frutera claimed for tax purposes. United Fruit rejected this settlement out of hand and, like AIOC, went to its home government for relief.

  The lawyer Thomas G. Corcoran had been a lobbyist for Civil Air Transport and also for United Fruit. Tommy “The Cork” acted as intermediary now, selling la frutera’s scheme to the CIA. He met with Undersecretary Walter Bedell Smith that summer. Smith already knew of CIA’s efforts and had no difficulty hearing out the lobbyist. A key difference would be that United Fruit, a principal purveyor of the charge that Jacobo Arbenz Guzman constituted a Communist threat to the Americas, and a participant in earlier plots, this time wanted nothing to do with the action itself.

  Allen Dulles became the executive agent for Project PB/Success. He kept in close touch with the planning through personal assistants. Jim Hunt was Dulles’s man for field operations, much as Tom Braden had been for international organizations. By the fall, definite action impended. The plan for Success, embodied in a September 11 paper, went right to Director Dulles. Based on the premise that the Guatemalan army, a poorly trained, indifferently equipped force of fewer than seven thousand troops, functioned as arbiter of the country’s politics, Success aimed to inundate Guatemala with propaganda undermining loyalty to President Arbenz. At the same time the CIA would provide its own alternative, an ostensibly independent force under a former army officer, Col. Carlos Castillo-Armas. A CIA air force would bomb as necessary and drop leaflets while a CIA radio station purporting to be the voice of the rebels would convey the impression the movement had mass support. The concept envisioned the army defecting to Castillo-Armas as his rebel force entered Guatemala. In effect, the DO paper argued, “the task headed by the CIA calls for a general, over-all plan of combined overt and covert action of major proportions.” The Directorate for Operations estimated the money required at $2.735 million. Dulles read the paper, as did the deputy director of central intelligence, air force General Charles P. Cabell. On September 15 he asked DDO Wisner for a brief memorandum to use with the Bureau of the Budget to obtain the necessary money.

  The key conversations took place in Allen Dulles’s own office. In mid-afternoon of Friday, September 18, the DCI brought together the players and many of the concerned observers. Those present, besides Dulles, included General Cabell, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, Kermit Roosevelt, and J. C. King. Also on hand were Sherman Kent, the CIA’s senior analyst, and Hans V. Tofte, returned from Korea to become Barnes’s chief of operations. Allen Dulles told the group the basic plan seemed sound, and he’d already discussed it with several of the group.

  Colonel King offered a detailed prospectus on the ground Project Success would need to traverse, commenting on CIA’s stations in Central America, action needed to build up networks, psywar requirements, and personnel shifts. King advised that diplomatic measures could put pressure on Arbenz. The group agreed to press for State Department action. The colonel said he needed $50,000 right away. Allen Dulles replied he could have it at once. Washington planned to change some ambassadors in the area, and the group also talked about that. For Guatemala the CIA preferred a strong ambassador to work with the agency. Some also thought CIA station chief Birch O’Neil too cautious for a swashbuckling covert action, so pressure developed to transfer him also. Criticized as too ready to accept the ambassador’s dictates, objecting to the use of propaganda created elsewhere, deficient in reporting on labor, and tolerating poor security, O’Neil’s days were numbered. He would be replaced by John Doherty, cryptonym “Tranger.” For Honduras, where the agency would locate some of its forward bases, especially a “black” radio station and certain air bases, the readiness of diplomats to work with the spooks was even more crucial. The CIA-State relationship also lay at the heart of the project where Nicaragua was concerned—there the CIA would have both ground and air bases and needed to move in tandem with the Nicaraguan government. Castillo-Armas, the Guatemalan rebel chief, had long been in touch with Nicaraguan leaders about their “friends to the North.”

  General Cabell advised Dulles to double the skimpy $300,000 programmed for unexpected developments (“contingencies”). Director Dulles, fine with that, rounded off the CIA project budget to a cool $3 million when he went to the White House to ask for the money.

  Frank Wisner had the task of selecting the field commander for Project Success. Once Roosevelt turned the job down, Wisner got Allen Dulles to recall the Korea station chief, former army colonel Albert Haney. Haney had set up CIA guerrilla units in Korea, and Guatemala was to have a paramilitary component. The provenance of the appointment remains unclear: Hans Tofte, who became a Barnes protégé at CIA, had worked under Haney in Korea. Tofte himself had recently come on board and thus could have been pulling Haney in after him. Briefed in late October, Haney accepted on the spot. A few weeks later he proceeded to Opa Locka, Florida, to begin setting up a forward base code-named Lincoln. Haney exercised general supervision over CIA chiefs in the nations surrounding Guatemala plus direct control of forces assembled for Success. He took the pseudonym “Jerome B. Dunbar,” and at a certain point Allen Dulles ordered that all cable traffic be sent to Lincoln for Dunbar, rather than to headquarters to be repeated to Opa Locka.

  Al Haney had lots of problems. Many were with the CIA’s own Western Hemisphere Division. Its director, like Haney, was a counterintelligence man, but from the FBI, not the army. Within the DO, Joseph Caldwell King’s division had formal control over the stations Haney needed to use. King privately thought Project Success daffy and anyway did not want some task force poaching on his turf. Haney’s deputy, Jacob Esterline, proved more equable and tried to play buffer between the two. Haney, soon endowed with his own nickname, “Brainy Haney,” also raised hackles with Tracy Barnes, who tried to be decent and civilized where Haney threw himself around like a loose cannon. Within his own task force, Haney quickly won the enmity of psywar chief Howard Hunt, with the two baiting each other over who drove the better car, for longer, or had achieved more (Haney claimed to have been the youngest bank vice president in America). To compensate, Frank Wisner devoted much time to Success, leaving a great deal of business in the hands of Dick Helms. Allen Dulles soon decided that Al Haney had to be insulated and his opportunities to rankle the top echelon limited. Dulles began flying Haney up for weekly private meetings at his Georgetown home. Richard Bissell, whom Dulles had brought in as a special assistant, also found himself acting as go-between, shuttling among Tracy Barnes, J. C. King, and Haney. Bissell soon concluded that Haney was doing a lot of the right things, he just rubbed people the wrong way.

  More familiar with the area than Al Haney, whose experience had been in the Far East, King called in the task force chief one day to suggest a meeting with Tommy Corcoran. La frutera had plans and weapons CIA could use.

  Haney did not like the idea and was blunt about it.

  “If you think you can run this operation without United Fruit,” King rasped, “you’re crazy!”

  Wisner and Allen Dulles, however, backed Haney and gave him a free hand.

  In the end, United Fruit decided not to take part in Project Success. If the operation failed, the company would be grievously damaged, not only in Guatemala but globally. Agency representatives met with United Fruit officials in New York and elsewhere as the project revved up but found la frutera reluctant. It did wish to be informed, though, and Corcoran retained a liaison role, keeping la frutera executives up to date.

  Despite United Fruit’s preferences, in at least one respect the agency was carrying on with its program. That is, there had already been one CIA effort aimed at Guatemala, and that one had involved la frutera. Under a project code-named PB/Fortune in the waning months of the Truman administration, CIA had passed weapons to United Fruit for anti-Arbenz rebels. Project Fortune proved abortive, but the cast of PB/Success—Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Honduran officials, and so forth—was almost identical. The main CIA operative would have been Colonel Castillo-Armas, and the CIA had been meeting with him since November 1951 and had had a contact officer assigned to him from the next year. Truman’s secretary of state at the time, Dean Acheson, had objected, and the initiative had been put on hold. When the agency resumed the project the following summer, it changed the code name to Success.

  By early October the Eisenhower administration had reached final agreement on dispatching John Peurifoy to Guatemala as ambassador. Whiting Willauer’s name had already been entered on the list for a security clearance investigation, so he could be sent to Honduras as ambassador there. Peurifoy assumed his post late in 1953.

  In November the CIA task force prepared an outline plan divided into five phases. The first stage would be staffing and assessment, by then well along. The Guatemala station had been strengthened to almost a dozen, with three case officers under the station chief in the embassy and two undercover outside it. Honduras had only a pair of DO people in place, but seven were sent from Washington, Caracas, or Panama, and a couple more were awaiting approval by headquarters. Stage Two provided for “Preliminary Conditioning” of the target, with efforts to discredit Arbenz internationally and sow dissension at home, inducing defections. Project headquarters would move to the field, and cooperation agreements would be reached with Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. The initial delivery of fifteen tons of equipment for Castillo-Armas had already been prepared. Stage Three, to begin seventy-five days before D-Day, envisioned buildup of the mission forces and continued softening of the Guatemalan target. Stage Four, beginning at minus twenty-five days, CIA planners considered critical. Maximum economic pressure and an intensive rumor campaign were to sharpen divisions in the target, passive sabotage would become evident, and the CIA-backed paramilitary force would attain readiness. Stage Five would be the “Showdown.” The plan enumerated a sixth stage, but that was to be the initial actions by the CIA-installed successor regime (to be “dramatic”) and the termination of the project.

  Reviewing the plans, Frank Wisner told Dulles they were vague, but this posed no difficulty since detailed plans would inevitably need to be modified later. Wisner recommended that Dulles approve PB/Success for execution. Director Dulles did just that. Eisenhower completed the circle on November 11, approving the money for the CIA operation.

  Allen Dulles had the agency senior leadership in his office for one of those late-afternoon sessions he seems to have preferred for sensitive business. It was November 16, 1953. Present were General Cabell, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, Kermit Roosevelt, and J. C. King. Dulles worried that President Eisenhower wanted quick results. The historians Richard Immerman and David Barrett have shown that the White House itself was being pressed by Congress. “This is a top priority operation for the whole agency and is the most important thing we are doing,” the CIA director exhorted. Then Dulles averred, “I am under pressure by others to get on with this.”

  Success moved forward, though not without developments portending an outcome different from its name. The CIA organization for the project, which Richard Helms confirmed in mid-November, still had not completely filled out. Some doubted the fealty of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and J. C. King wanted to use the first arms delivery to Castillo-Armas, based in Nicaragua, to deepen Somoza’s commitment. Another part of the plan involved using U.S. military assistance officers from several Central American countries, but the Pentagon resisted—the assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations refused to permit CIA to bring the military into the plan. Hans Tofte took that frustration to Tracy Barnes, but the PP Staff chief could do no better. One of the oil companies told the CIA it would be feasible secretly and gradually to reduce stocks of fuel in Guatemala to a point where an oil crisis would result, but company executives refused to proceed without cooperation from competitors. Later the State Department refused to intervene, fearing any multicorporation move would be identified as U.S.-inspired.

  Just before Christmas command post Lincoln went operational at Opa Locka. Al Haney covered several walls of his operations center with a complex flow chart tracking the many distinct parts of Success, showing current status and what needed doing before other portions of the project could move ahead. The charts impressed Richard Bissell when Dulles’s man went to Florida on his ever-more-numerous visits. In mounting fury, King complained that Haney considered himself directly under the DCI and that psychological warfare had been critically slowed by obstructions, such as a two-month delay in moving mimeograph machines to Castillo-Armas, as well as Lincoln’s intention to craft its own psywar plan regardless of what had already been arranged.