The (Literally) Unbelievable Story of the Original Fake News Network

Civil Guard Chief Rogelio Cruz Wer and his commandos lay flat on the jungle floor, trying not to make noise as they breathed.

For weeks, the rebel radio had pummeled the police chief personally — as a power-abuser, a murderer, a Communist. Cruz Wer was one of Radio Liberación’s favorite targets. So he had been especially eager when Árbenz finally gave the order to find and destroy the station.

 And now, mere days later, they’d located the rebels’ little shack. In the dark, Cruz Wer and the 12 special forces soldiers with him could see moonlight glinting off the antenna sticking up from the claptrap building’s roof. A light was on inside, and the hum of a generator harmonized with the nighttime jungle sounds. 

Cruz Wer signaled with his hand.

The DJ, Mario López Villatoro, was midway through reading his regular evening monologue, “Nuestra Campana Radial,” when his partner, Pepe, and the others started frantically motioning toward the window. He kept reading the script. By the time he realized what was happening, Cruz Wer’s men had kicked in the door.

Or that’s the story they hoped people would believe.

Truthfully, Cruz Wer and his men never found the station. In fact, it’s unclear if Árbenz had even dispatched his police force to find the station at all; the main source of that rumor was the radio itself.

What actually happened went more like this:

Back in April in Opa-Locka, Florida, Mario, Pepe, Sonia, Sara and company recorded several broadcasts in which they claimed Árbenz’s forces were looking for them, leading up to a special tape to be aired three weeks into the campaign. On the special tape, the crew recorded themselves pretending to be raided by mysterious attackers — using pots and pans for sound effects. David Phillips, the actor/playwright/radio manager, was pleased.

After the public heard Radio Liberación get cut off mid-broadcast the night before, newspapers reported that the station had been found and captured by Guatemalan authorities. Details were scant, of course. Some of the radio crew may have been arrested by Guatemalan authorities, the papers said. Clearly, at least some of the equipment had been destroyed, the press declared.

President Árbenz and his military leaders were surely confused by the reports. Whoever it was that had “attacked” the station on May 24, it hadn’t been Árbenz’s men.

The airwaves — and intelligence channels — sat silent for two days.

And then, suddenly, Radio Liberación was back.

There it was on the same channel as usual. The same familiar anthem, the same familiar voice of the DJ saying the same slogan, “God, Fatherland and Justice” — transmitting as usual from a secret location within the republic.

“Before beginning our transmission, we want to let you know that our last broadcast was interrupted by circumstances outside of our control,” they said, in Spanish. Government thugs, they said, “who are forever searching for and trying to destroy our transmitters, almost succeeded.”

But, the DJ added, “since we are prepared to shed our blood in defense of the fatherland, their plans were frustrated.” The revolution would continue!

David Phillips, still an actor at heart, was particularly proud of the fake attack ruse. “Credibility enhanced, the Voice of Liberation [sic] was accepted as authentic by foreign newsmen in Guatemala City who were scratching for facts,” Phillips wrote, bragging that, “The New York Times ran a story based on rebel information.”

Even skeptics now had reason to believe that the station was indeed operating inside of Guatemala and that the Árbenz administration was afraid of it. And now that the media had validated the news of the “attack” — and therefore the station itself — the public could now more easily believe the things Radio Liberación broadcast.

Around that time, the station upped the fear factor. Radio Liberación started leveling more serious accusations, even bolder fake news — and it actually started a new daily news segment, “La Notica Atravez de Radio Liberación.” They claimed the government was financing Communist radio stations and “other mind-control programs.” They falsely quoted government officials and announced death threats against “Communist traitors” like Guatemalan Ambassador Toriello. One segment detailed a fake story about Toriello luring Guatemalan boys to casinos to sully themselves with illicit foreign women — and using the revenue to fund Árbenz’s expensive lifestyle and orgies. And of course, there was news that the Liberation Army was growing and planning.

The radio campaign was supplemented by fake “evidence.” Planes made parachute drops in the distance within sight of towns around the country, which the radio indicated were supplies for the rebel army.

And brazenly, a few days before the fake attack on the radio, the CIA planted a small, unmarked submarine with a cache of weapons on the Nicaraguan shore near the border of Guatemala. The weapons had Soviet stamps on them and were also accompanied, conspicuously, by a pack of Guatemalan cigarettes. CIA agents leaked the news to the local press (and Radio Liberación, naturally). But reporters saw through the “evidence” and declined to report on it. Disappointed, CIA Station Chief John Doherty gave orders on May 19 to the propaganda team to “make a cautious effort to obtain added publicity for this story in the Guatemalan press and public opinion.” Ideally, he added, they could get a member of Congress to write an official letter about it.

Though reporters who visited the weapons cache could not be fooled, the CIA doctored photographs of the submarine and weapons and managed to trick at least one American newspaper reporter who asked to see photo evidence.

These activities were all part of Stage 4’s “intensive rumor campaign,” which included influencing foreign correspondents in Guatemala to use inflammatory language when they wrote for U.S. and European audiences. Ambassador Peurifoy held meetings in the U.S. Embassy with newspaper reporters, and reported up the chain as their articles changed their tone to favor the U.S. version of the story. And reporters who wrote skeptically — or who seemed to be telling Árbenz’s side of the story — were dealt with. Allen Dulles himself called New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and persuaded him to deport a correspondent out of Guatemala after the correspondent’s reports threatened to undermine the story the CIA wanted told. (And later on, when the British ambassador shared an inconvenient version of events with the press in Britain, Peurifoy asked the ambassador to Honduras to get him to shut up, and to remind him “of our generous and costly support of British on their recent trouble in British Guiana.”)

The other main propaganda activity in Stage 4 was to “accentuate divisionist activity within target.” So, as the plot entered this critical period before the eventual showdown, the CIA started to accentuate the fault lines in Guatemalan society.

If you want to overthrow a country’s leader using only information, you want to “figure out what intense fault lines are in that country,” explains fake news expert Craig Silverman. You want to know: “What are the psychological buttons you can push with people?”

In Guatemala (as in the United States in 2016 and 2020), those fault lines fell first along race, religion and class. The indigenous and poor masses mistrusted the largely Ladino (considered “white”) upper class — and vice versa. In the rapidly secularizing 1950s, rifts deepened between Guatemala’s Catholics, nonreligious and indigenous religions. And there was mistrust between the military and organized labor; as a political independent, Árbenz had been able to tenuously sew these groups together, but the alliance could easily rip open.

And the big psychological button of the day was fear of American imperialism. Ever since Guatemala had overthrown its dictator in 1944 in favor of democracy, a chasm had emerged between those Guatemalans who wanted more American corporate and political influence and those who desired a more independent Guatemala.

Guatemala’s relatively new policy of freedom of speech made each of these divides ripe for exploitation.

The more these different groups in Guatemala leaned away from each other, the harder it would be for Árbenz to maintain a coalition and defend against a hostile takeover. “The sweet spot is when contemporary events get people riled up about historical grievances,” Silverman says.

This was, of course, key to the disinformation strategy employed by Russia in 2016.

“Polarization is our number one vulnerability,” explains Jessica Brandt, head of policy and research at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonprofit that has spent the last several years tracking Russian efforts to “accentuate divisionist activity.” Brandt says that there are three reasons for this: “One, because it creates an environment where disinformation is ripe to spread. The second is because so often misinformation is about listing out the most extreme narratives already out there and making them more salient. And the third reason is because it keeps us from seeing the bigger picture and organizing ourselves in a way that we can respond.”

The “group polarization” strategy explains reports about Russia trying to intervene to help both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2020 election. And from this perspective, recent reports that Russian social media trolls have been attempting to further stoke racial tension in America lines up as well.

“To the extent that we are doubled over on ourselves, left going at right, left going at other parts of the left,” Brandt says, “all of that leaves us confused [and] divided and [makes it] more difficult for the United States to pursue foreign policy objectives that may not be in line with Russian foreign policy [goals].”

That’s precisely what Stage 4 of the PBSuccess playbook hoped to do — confuse and divide Guatemalans against one another, so that there wouldn’t be a unified front against the pitiful “Liberation Army.” (One CIA cable literally used the words “playing both groups simultaneously” when discussing fault lines among the Guatemalan right wing.)

So, the propaganda team pushed news and rumors meant to rile Guatemalans up in their echo chambers.

The rumor network began targeting housewives with specific fear-based gossip. This was supported by a new, regular Radio Liberación segment called “La Mujer y La Patria,” (literal translation: “The Woman and the Fatherland”), which contained ominous music and frightening speeches by the Orellana sisters. These segments warned women that the Communists wanted to take their children to indoctrination camps, that Árbenz was acting schizophrenically, and that housewives were the ones who needed to pass the anti-Communism message along — but to be sure to leave no paper trail when doing so.

The radio also repeatedly played up fearsome stories about foreigners invading Guatemala and threatening its way of life. Segments repeatedly reported that Mexicans were exporting Communist rabble-rousers into Guatemala. One report announced that Árbenz had invited 2,000 poor Salvadoran families into the country and given them each a tract of Guatemalan land. And they reported that many Europeans were moving to Guatemala to support this new haven for Communism.

And the radio’s messaging increasingly targeted the military. If the CIA could persuade Árbenz’s army to stand down, the game would be over. So Radio Liberación played on the army’s fears: They warned that Árbenz was planning on disbanding the army, that he was planning to give weapons to peasants, so that they could mount a Bolshevik-style assault on the wealthy. And they announced that the government was giving free alcohol to the “Indians” — specifically to get the white upper classes riled up.

When a retired Guatemalan pilot named Mendoza defected to Castillo Armas, Phillips and his crew had Mendoza read anti-Communism scripts on air. Having the voice of one of the Guatemalan military’s own exhort the army to defect was brilliant from a divisiveness standpoint. And, the radio crew soon realized, they didn’t need real defectors to make those points in the future; they could have actors play the parts.

Árbenz’s military men became increasingly agitated. Radio Liberación repeatedly levied allegations about various military leaders and cabinet ministers defecting to the Soviets, embezzling government money, and secretly creating plans to escape with Árbenz, all in order to drive wedges between officers in Árbenz’s coalition.

But these were not even the most dramatic parts of the divisionary effort.

As the anti-Árbenz operation escalated, the nation’s Archbishop Mariano Arellano was increasingly disturbed by what he’d been seeing. Operating from the majestic Catedral Primada Metropolitana de Santiago, the archbishop was the shepherd of Guatemala’s millions of Catholics — by far the largest religion in the country — and he was worried. Not just for the church members, but for the soul of the country itself.

 After weeks of prayer, and a consultation with Pope Pius XII himself, Archbishop Arellano sat down alone at his desk to write.

No stranger to the suffering that often accompanies writing, the archbishop poured his heart into his work for the better part of a month — finally producing a 13-page letter to the church expressing what God wished for his people in this time of war and disruption.

It would be the manifesto that called Guatemala’s spiritual warriors to finally stand up and participate in the defense of their country. Against Communism. And against the nation’s fallen president.

Only … once again, that’s not how it happened.

Somebody indeed spent a long time writing that manifesto; it just wasn’t the archbishop.

For months, CIA agents had been working on a plan to distribute propaganda via Guatemalan churches for purpose of riling up the public along religious lines. To do so, agents worked their way into the graces of New York–based Catholic Cardinal Francis Spellman, who helped agents reach Archbishop Arellano and persuade him to help them.

By April, the timing was right to drop some metaphorical bombs from on high. To that end, the CIA arranged for a letter to be written in Arellano’s name, titled, in the English translation, “Pastoral Letter Concerning the Rise of Communism in Guatemala,” which they then handed to the Archbishop, who read it from the pulpit. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, co-author of the book Bitter Fruit, told us that he believes David Phillips himself wrote it. Of the CIA plotters, “Phillips was,” he said, “the only one who knew Spanish and Latin America.”

In it, Arellano explained, in biblical language, that Communism was a “false redeemer” that would easily trick Guatemalans into becoming enslaved. The 13-page denouncement ended with the words, “All Catholics must fight against Communism because they are Catholic.”

After Arellano read the letter to his congregation, the CIA had copies of it distributed to churches throughout the country. (E. Howard Hunt said in an interview 45 years later that with Spellman’s help, the CIA was able to write additional scripts and leaflets for Catholic clergy across Guatemala, “and this information was going out in the pastorals across the country, and in radio broadcasts.”)

The CIA claimed to have lost the archbishop’s letter, but our research assistant Luis Pablo Rizzo found a copy.

Brandt, of the Alliance For Securing Democracy, explains that one of the most successful types of information warfare in our social media era is “finding existing points of division, finding existing antiestablishment sentiment and exacerbating it, whipping it up into a fervor … throwing a little bit of accelerant on an already burning fire.”

The pastoral letter had indeed created a fire — and now Radio Liberación began aggressively throwing accelerant on it. The station pressed the “Christianity or Communism” case in its broadcasts. They also announced that the pope had backed the archbishop up. Among the fears murmured within the walls of the Catholic church and stoked by the radio were: (a) Chapels would be turned into Communist meeting halls, (b) Communism would replace religious instruction in schools, and (c) photos of saints would have their faces replaced by Lenin.

In an official State Department report, Ambassador Peurifoy reported that the archbishop’s letter “has reached the man in the street and is well received.” The ambassador suggested that the propaganda campaign “continue to exploit the letter and tie it into other opportunities.”

In the same report, Peurifoy falsely claimed that two elected members of Congress representing the Labor Party of Guatemala (the country’s small Communist Party, known in Spanish as the “PGT”), Carlos Pellecer and Victor Manuel Gutierrez, were “in fact running the country.” (Radio Liberación would soon say it too.) This fake news was added to the official U.S. record that would continually inform decision-making by government leaders and agents.

To ensure the success of the operation, Peurifoy also recommended that his counterpart, Guatemalan Ambassador Toriello — a favorite punching bag of the rebel radio’s — “be eliminated.”

The Árbenz administration fought back against the fake news with press interviews and its own government radio station, TGW. They pointed fingers at United Fruit, and did so credibly enough that the CIA created a specific propaganda plan to counter it.

So, Radio Liberación began regularly smearing TGW — picking it apart as fake, unreliable news.

Despite this, Árbenz’s refutations of Radio Liberación’s more brazen claims helped keep his coalition together.

But a stroke of luck gave the rebels a wedge with which to finally start splitting it apart.

The Eisenhower administration had ensured that Guatemala could not buy weapons from any of its neighbors. The U.S. had banned arms sales to the country in 1948 after President Arevalo passed reform legislation that was unfriendly to U.S. corporations. After Árbenz was elected, the Dulleses used threats of withholding aid to extort Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and Switzerland into refusing to sell arms to Guatemala as well. Further, the U.S. made public hay of selling arms to Guatemala’s neighbors.

With a battle brewing — and uncertainty about whether the U.S. might find an excuse to send its own troops in at some point — Árbenz needed weapons. So he bought some from the Czechs. Historian Cole Blasier described it as a “kind of last resort.” Rifles, ammunition and artillery pieces were loaded onto a Swedish cargo ship named Alfhem in late April, to arrive on May 15.

Though perfectly legal, buying weapons from a Soviet satellite was a risky PR move at a time when he was being smeared as a Communist. Árbenz was not a good PR guy. But he did keep the purchase top secret.

The CIA found out about the purchase and tracked the Alfhem on its voyage. Initially, the agency planned to intercept the ship, but the U.S. Navy failed to do so. After the ship landed, CIA mercenaries attempted to sabotage the cargo with dynamite, but a rainstorm ruined the fuses. Ultimately, the CIA decided that the propaganda value of letting Árbenz have his weapons would be worth it — especially since their fake Soviet arms cache hadn’t fooled reporters.

The CIA sent out “editorial guidance” to its agents to get news publications to cover the story.

Journalists confirmed that a shipment of weapons from Prague, via Poland, had indeed landed. Eisenhower declared in a White House press conference that the discovery of Czech weapons in Guatemala could lead to a “Communist dictatorship … on this continent.”

Árbenz had stepped on a PR landmine. The government’s rebuttal, which amounted to “it’s not what it looks like” was much less effective than Radio Liberación’s “see, we told you so.” They’d been saying that news like this was coming. Of course, Radio Liberación embellished too, stating that the Alfhem was the first of three ships. The disclosure further shifted the media agenda inside Guatemala. Local media pontificated about what Árbenz would do with the weapons, and whether there was a potential Árbenz-USSR connection.

CIA cables show that U.S. agents were gleeful about their luck with the Alfhem incident. Until this point, they had serious doubts that PBSuccess would live up to its name. After this, they were overjoyed. Radio Liberación began bringing up conspiracy theories about the Czech weapons as often as it could — including a series of fake reports “outing” specific people who were stashing Alfhem weapons to distribute to Communist peasant armies.

A remarkably close 2016 parallel to the Alfhem incident is the Wikileaks release of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s stolen emails.

Like the Czech arms purchase, the content of the Podesta emails was not illegal. But the news was embarrassing — and both the Kremlin’s fake news network and unwitting American propaganda spreaders made continual, conspiratorial hay of it.

The Podesta documents were released strategically in order to keep Americans and their news reporters talking about what Russia wanted, and away from news it didn’t want discussed. For example, when the Access Hollywood footage of candidate Trump bragging about committing sexual assault came out on October 7, 2016, Wikileaks released emails in which candidate Clinton talked about having “both a public and a private position” on Wall Street reform. Only the first of those news stories was an admission of a heinous crime, but the way the second was selectively released and widely spread by social media had the effect of curbing the negative story about Trump by diluting it with lots of negative headlines about Clinton. (Shane, one of the authors of this piece, has a close family member who had never even heard about the Access Hollywood scandal until Shane told her about it two years after Trump had won the election.)

Alliance for Securing Democracy’s data shows that Russian social media accounts were also promoting pro–Roy Moore stories during the senator’s predatory underage sex scandal, and anti–Al Franken stories in the wake of the senator’s butt-grabbing scandal. This selective amplification made certain news items seem more serious, and other news items more doubt-worthy — all in line with the Kremlin’s wishes.

Mixed together with the blatantly false news that Russia promoted during the critical stage of its 2016 disinformation campaign, the Podesta disclosures served to change the media agenda around the election to focus on analyzing Clinton’s so-called sins instead of Trump’s.

And as with the Alfhem disclosure, an enemy government’s fingerprints weren’t on the Clinton leak story. Wikileaks released its documents selectively, and independent news organizations reported on them as if they’d come directly from Wikileaks — without knowledge that the true purveyor of the information was an enemy of the state.

“Audiences evaluate messages in part by evaluating the source of the message,” Dr. Kathleen Jamieson, the media data expert from UPenn, told us. “So it’s a very different message if it’s coming from a trustworthy source as opposed to an unreliable source, or [if] it’s a source that you would actively distrust.”

In other words, if the Guatemalan people had known that it was really a United States intelligence agency that was behind the pastoral letter warning of Communism, they would have treated the information differently. If they would have known that it was the CIA that leaked the Alfhem news, they would have thought twice about the narrative of who the “bad guys” were. Similarly, many Americans in 2016 would have treated the Wikileaks disclosures differently if they’d known that the information had come from the Russian government.

But instead — in both cases — the sources of the damaging information were not scrutinized, and the trusted press took the story and framed it exactly the way an enemy of the state wanted.

Peurifoy’s reports to the State Department indicate that he saw the benefit of countering pro-Árbenz news — especially anything that threatened to rally Guatemalans together — with anti-Árbenz disclosures that would hijack the media narrative. For instance, when the Árbenz administration pushed information about United Fruit’s involvement in trying to damage the Guatemalan government, Peurifoy sent a telegram to the State Department suggesting that the U.S. accordingly “play down the fruit company” and “concentrate on the commie issue.”

Árbenz’s ambassador Toriello pleaded with Peurifoy to arrange a meeting between Árbenz and Eisenhower himself to sort out a solution between the two nations. Peurifoy told Toriello that he’d see what he could do, then did nothing. A few days later, he sent a note to Allen Dulles saying, “We have gone as far as we can with talk” and “Many people have been to see me saying one bomb on [the] palace would do the job.”

Indeed, telegrams reveal that Ambassador Peurifoy made more suggestions that the CIA bomb things than he did suggestions about diplomacy.

As June approached, the U.S. Information Agency, in coordination with Peurifoy, used CIA source material to write more than 200 guest articles about Guatemala in Latin American newspapers; it also distributed tens of thousands of copies of anti-Communist cartoons and “Communism in Guatemala” pamphlets.

On June 8, Opa-Locka telegrammed Doherty, the CIA station chief, that it was time to start intensifying the radio, leaflet and sabotage campaigns.

And so the plan moved to Stage 5.

After legitimizing your fake news channel, transition into all-out information warfare. (And bring in a few real guns, too.)

Soon after Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, “The Liberator of Guatemala,” crossed the border from Honduras into his home country on June 18, he stopped in the town of Esquipulas for a photo shoot.

Over the past month — with all of the broadcasts depicting the chaos at home and exhorting patriots to join the revolution — the ranks of the Liberation Army had swollen remarkably. Dozens of former National Army officers wore gleaming uniforms, now with the Liberation insignia.

There weren’t enough uniforms for the thousands of soldiers and volunteers, but there were plenty of machine guns.

It was an impressive sight to see them all gathered in one place. The news photographer who happened to be in Esquipulas and convinced Castillo Armas to let him take pictures struggled to capture the full magnitude of the surprising growth of the movement in a single shot.

Or so the CIA hoped the newspapers would say.

The actual group with Castillo Armas in Esquipulas was tiny. The total membership of the Liberation Army would never end up being very large at all — and it would consist of mostly mercenaries under CIA pay. Even if civilians had wanted to join up, “The Liberator” had been hiding out in Honduras in secret; how would thousands of defectors have even known where to show up, especially without Árbenz finding out where the hiding spot was?

So the photographer, arranged by John Clements, the right-wing PR man working for the United Fruit Company, had to get creative.

Because Castillo Armas didn’t have enough men for a good photo, much less anyone who looked like a “volunteer,” they put rifles in the hands of some local townsfolk to build out the “army.” They gunned down some mules for good measure, to make it look like the place had seen a battle.

Photos were flown back to the States, where United Fruit distributed them to newspapers.

The invasion had begun!

Now that the CIA had legitimized its propaganda channels in the eyes of the Guatemalan public, and riled the public up, it was time for what the agency called “The Final Big Lie.”

That day, June 18, Radio Liberación announced triumphantly that the rebel army was on the march. The CIA wrote bullets for Castillo Armas to deliver in a “press conference” on Radio Liberación, which he did.

A week earlier, the Opa-Locka headquarters had sent orders to begin the final phase of the propaganda campaign. “Rumors, combining fact and fiction, which ought to be circulated,” included:

• Soviet officers, led by the Moscow Politburo, have landed in Puerto Barrios.
• The government has devalued the currency, so “Use your money immediately to buy food and durable goods.”
• Communist Party leader Manuel Fortuny is about to take over as president of Guatemala.
• Árbenz is issuing a decree that teen boys and girls be sent to labor camps for political indoctrination.
• Árbenz has left the country, and a Soviet double is currently pretending to be him.
• Freedom of religion is being suspended, and mandatory instruction in atheism will now take place in schools.

These instructions ended, helpfully, with, “Add rumors of your own, following the day-by-day changes in the situation.”

Now that the “invasion” had begun, Radio Liberación began broadcasting every hour, on the hour, for 15-minute news announcements.

In addition to the typical station broadcasts, Mario and Pepe started mixing in “coded” messages intended for Liberation Army units — codes like “Measurement. Rafael. Factory. Forty days. Artist should arrive. Olga” and “My house has six doors. All are green except for one, which is red.” The radio also relayed orders to various units of the rebel army: “Attention 12th brigade: Congratulations. Today at 1,800 we will get together with you at the appointed place.” “Attention Group 17 of the Liberation Army in Sector 045: Advance to the northeast 12 kilometers; the area is clear. Await Patrol 8 from the Arcadia Group. Good luck.”

As time went on, the brigades got bigger numbers and more ammo. “Hello, Brigade 62. Final details for Operation Magda are ready. Carry out the assault per instructions already received by your radio operator. You will have strong air support.” “We advise Carmelo that the 50,000 rounds requested are on the way and may be arriving right now for a full attack on Sector R1-6. Proceed per plan, and good luck!”

The radio “tracked” the deployment of thousands of rebel soldiers, and reported on the number of “volunteers” who were joining Castillo Armas each day. It kept the public up to date on gruesome battles and bridges being blown up. (According to declassified documents, several targets around the country were being detonated to back up the assertions in these broadcasts; this was being done by a CIA field agent named William “Rip” Robertson, not Liberation Army sabotage teams.) The radio also called out and harassed individual supporters of Árbenz by name, calling them traitors and hinting that citizens might take them out if they encountered them. (These names may have been chosen from CIA-prepared dossiers for the purpose of “character assassination” of known Árbenz supporters and Communists.)

The radio also used reverse psychology to foment rumors. “Rumors have reached us that a yellow fever epidemic has broken out,” Radio Liberación reported on June 20. “Other rumors have it that the capital’s water supply has been poisoned. We categorically deny these rumors, there is no yellow fever, and no poison in the water. These rumors are from a desperate government.”

As the “invasion” ramped up, the radio reported bombings and victories in various “sectors,” which the DJs said they couldn’t reveal details about for secret planning reasons. But the news reports made clear that the battle was closing in on Guatemala City. Meantime, the barrage of fake news was endless.

Árbenz has ordered the Catholic Archbishop Arellano assassinated!

The Kremlin has ordered Árbenz to devalue the national currency, the quetzal — so take your money out of the banks!

A brigade of Communist peasants has been captured, and they’ve been using some of the Alfhem arms, which, by the way, when you shoot them often backfire and permanently blind you!

There was even a fake story that Árbenz had “declined to repudiate the statement” that Guatemala “needs no concentration camps since we will chop off heads of all anti-Commies,” and had therefore adopted the quote as his own. CIA instructions for that one “suggested that attribution above can be based on wire service stories or ‘overheard on shortwave.’” Long before social media, the CIA learned that by saying, “many people are saying X,” an influential broadcaster can make sure that many people will say X.

To top things off, Radio Liberación began reporting “news” from foreign newspapers, claiming that Árbenz had been censoring international papers. For days, the station reported what The New York Times and other publications were allegedly saying — hoping that people would spread the “news” and attribute it to established outlets, not the rebel radio.

With our modern ability to record and study audio, we can hear, in retrospect, that Radio Liberación gave away plenty of clues that they were making things up. Why, for example, would the public radio station broadcast orders for army units, especially when, as at least one broadcast gives away, the rebel brigades had the ability to receive radio orders directly? “Carry out the assault per instructions already received by your radio operator.”

In another broadcast, the DJs pretend that the government is trying to interfere with their radio signal; static and choppiness interrupt the music throughout the broadcast — even as the DJs’ voices come through perfectly clearly. At one point, the DJs gave a report of the sectors that had been “captured” and accidentally said “Sector Y” when they were supposed to read “y” as in the Spanish word for “and.” And in one broadcast the announcer relayed a message for the Liberation Army brigade to attack at 10,000 hours — instead of 1,000 hours, military time for 10 p.m. But the DJs talked quickly and cleverly, making it nearly impossible for a mere listener to fact-check them — similar to how the 2016 barrage of Kremlin-produced fake news stories about electoral fraud and Clinton conspiracies traveled across social media faster than it could be debunked.

To corroborate the radio’s news of these “war” proceedings, the CIA hired several American mercenary pilots to terrorize Guatemalan towns with crude bombs and machine gun strafing runs. Though there were only two or three planes in the air at any given time, they gave the impression of a larger army and produced the desired effect: terror.

On June 19, President Árbenz addressed the nation over the radio, declaring in no uncertain terms that “it is completely untrue that Communists are taking over the government,” and that Castillo Armas’s attacks were an “expeditionary force” backed by the United Fruit Company. “Ever since we received arms for our defense [from Czechoslovakia], officials in Washington and the U.S. press have redoubled their attacks on Guatemala in a strident campaign meant to bewilder the American people.”

“Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which affected the interests of the United Fruit Company,” Árbenz continued. “Our crime is wanting to have our own route to the Atlantic, our own electric power and our own docks and ports. Our crime is our patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win economic independence to match our political independence.”

Though Árbenz had spelled out exactly what was happening, no international press outlet reported his side of the story. After his speech, Radio Liberación took to the air to call each of Árbenz’s talking points lies.

Ambassador Toriello repeatedly petitioned the U.S. via Peurifoy to help stop the terror attacks. Peurifoy said that there were “no reliable reports” of such attacks. When Toriello brought up that the planes that had been attacking were U.S. aircraft, Peurifoy countered that he hadn’t seen any planes attacking.

Toriello also sought help from the United Nations, but it was the U.S.’s turn to run the schedule for the U.N. Security Council meetings, so Toriello got no audience and no hearing. (The U.N. Secretary General Hammarskjold later allegedly considered resigning over the U.S.’s manipulation here.)

Some of the strafing runs and sabotage activities had caused fires to break out — or at least, that’s what the Guatemalan government’s TGW radio reported, and Ambassador Toriello repeated in his plea to the U.N. On June 23, the CIA propaganda team was instructed to spread word that Toriello’s reports of these attacks in Guatemala were false, and that the Guatemalan government itself “had been caught setting fires to houses.” Radio Liberación obliged.

While foreign press and diplomats idled, Guatemalan newspapers reported the same stories that Radio Liberación reported — to the point that not only did the public believe a real war was happening but many in Árbenz’s own military also began to become convinced that the rebel army was more than the charade the government had told them it was. After Radio Liberación reported that the rebel army had placed mines along the highway from Zacapa to the capital in order to slow government forces, a National Army garrison commander named Bernardo Ordoñez, who was based in Zacapa, sent a message warning government trucks to be careful on that road because the enemy had planted mines.

Meanwhile, reports that the U.S. Navy was intercepting Guatemalan ships off the coast (true, and illegal), along with Árbenz’s speeches implicating the U.S., were starting to make his own colonels think that fighting Castillo Armas was asking for the worst.

Also, around this time, the CIA had amped up its infiltration of the military. The agency had earlier tried and failed to bribe Árbenz’s chief of the armed forces, Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, with $200,000 to turn on the president. Cables show that the CIA now dangled offers for jobs in the new regime, among other pressure tactics, to get key Guatemalan military leaders to spread the word that fighting Castillo Armas would be suicide.

As Allen Dulles wrote to President Eisenhower on June 20, “The entire effort is thus more dependent upon psychological impact rather than actual military strength … the use of a small number of airplanes and the massive use of radio broadcasting are designed to build up and give main support to the impression of Castillo Armas’ strength.”

In preparation for the CIA’s final move, Castillo Armas sent several dozen men to “seize” the towns of Puerto Barrios, Chiquimula and Zacapa. A couple of real takeovers could seal the deception and pave the way for Árbenz’s fall.

By June 26 — eight weeks after the launch of the pirate radio station — residents of Guatemala City were hiding in their homes, waiting for war to arrive on their doorsteps. As far as the public knew, two heavily armed columns of rebel soldiers would arrive in the capital any minute.

While the Guatemalan public panicked over the “invasion,” Árbenz ordered his troops to stop Castillo Armas in the two places where real fighting was actually happening: Zacapa and Puerto Barrios.

In Guatemala City, a 26-year-old Argentine named Ernesto “Che” Guevara who’d arrived in the country in January, shortly after receiving his medical degree, had volunteered to join the front lines, floored by the injustice of what he saw happening. But Árbenz had given strict orders that only full-time military personnel would be allowed to fight. He did not want to arm civilians, for fear that it would be construed as a sign of Communism — a Bolshevik-style arming of the proletariat.

Even though the actual rebel attacks were “half hearted” and a “farce” according to the CIA’s own report, by this point Árbenz’s military had given up (much like the would-be Clinton voters of 2016 who decided not to cast ballots after being barraged with divisive and fake news). Scared, confused and demoralized, commanders were refusing to deploy — or even answer Árbenz’s calls.

With the army refusing to fight, Guevara tried to organize a coalition of amateur fighters to guard the capital. The most he was able to do was transport some weapons to a resistance brigade and wait — and watch. The watching turned out to be useful to him when, five years later, he would help lead a revolution in Cuba using the same guerrilla radio tactics he’d witnessed in Guatemala.

Without military reinforcements to help them, the residents of Puerto Barrios defeated Castillo Armas’s men using broomsticks and shovels. A garrison of 30 soldiers stationed in Zacapa killed or captured around 90 of Castillo Armas’s main group of attackers. But reinforcements never arrived. Árbenz’s commanders in Guatemala City were refusing to mobilize. Defenders in Zacapa and Puerto Barrios wondered if the next rebel attack would overwhelm them. They had no idea that they’d just mopped up a huge portion of Castillo Armas’s fighting force.

With the military refusing to act, Guatemala had effectively given up its power to stop the foreign government that was bent on installing its preferred man as president. In the middle of the night, members of Árbenz’s administration began kissing up to Peurifoy and jockeying each other for positions in the new government — rather than trying to stop it. The final days of the “invasion” were filled with exhausting power battles — not actual ones. (The New York Times would later report that Peurifoy played a key role in negotiating a “truce” — which is certainly one way to look at it.)

Árbenz himself could have continued to fight. His wife, Maria Vilanova, supported him in gathering the political party leaders who still supported him and maintaining their resistance. But by the time the chief of the armed forces, Colonel Diaz, had delivered the news that the U.S. would put a stop to the aggression only if Árbenz resigned, Árbenz no longer had it in him to keep exercising his power either.

On Sunday, June 27, 1954, Jacobo Árbenz stepped down as Guatemala’s second and final democratically elected president.

And when he broadcast his resignation speech to the stunned nation, some Guatemalans only heard static. The CIA was jamming the signal.

Once you have obtained the future you were fighting for, it’s time to rewrite history.

After Jacobo Árbenz went into exile, CIA agents took reporters on a tour of his abandoned home. Journalists from The New York Times and several other newspapers showed up, having been promised juicy evidence that a Communist foothold in the Americas had been averted.

This was part of the final task that David Phillips and others from the CIA propaganda team had been assigned: Prove to the world that ousting Árbenz had been a good idea.

In his memoir, Phillips described the assignment as a “pleasant” month involving games of bridge and golf with Ambassador Peurifoy, along with gleaning “information to be disseminated abroad … which would demonstrate the extent of Soviet involvement with the regime of Árbenz.”

The ultimate stage of the CIA’s info-war playbook against Guatemala, “Consolidation,” was designed to make sure that the U.S.’s preferred version of the events came true — or rather, that it became the official story that journalists and historians would reference moving forward. This effort became its own official CIA operation, dubbed PBHistory.

The very day that Árbenz resigned, CIA headquarters telegrammed orders to broadcast something on Radio Liberación to make sure that Guatemalans didn’t think that Castillo Armas was a “UFCO man.” (UFCO had been supplying him and the CIA with transportation, telegraph and radio relays, and publicity assistance from the beginning.) CIA Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner released a press release–style memo stating, “The United Fruit Company simply does not figure into this at all.” Two days earlier, the CIA had telegrammed the State Department requesting that the U.S. government itself release an official statement in support of agrarian reform somewhere else in the world, so that they could refute the story about the U.S. intervening because of Árbenz’s reforms.

The CIA needed to bring forth “evidence” of Árbenz’s guilt, so that the U.S. could officially recognize Castillo Armas’s new regime as Guatemala’s legitimate government. And that meant that Guatemala needed to release official documents and bold declarations into the domestic and international media in order to control the narrative.

First, CIA agents raided Árbenz’s residence to try to find legitimate evidence that Árbenz was under Soviet control. Inside the agency itself, few people were aware that the Árbenz-Moscow connection had actually been concocted by United Fruit and the Dulleses.

As such, the CIA agents who rifled through Árbenz’s possessions were unable to find evidence that he was a Communist or in communication with Moscow. The only thing that came close was a biography of Lenin that they found on Árbenz’s bookshelf, alongside books about Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and other world leaders.

CIA documents indicate that the agents seemed genuinely surprised that they couldn’t find hard evidence of Árbenz being a Soviet ally, which speaks to the effectiveness the disinformation campaign had in creating plausible deniability, even among the U.S. players.

It seems quite likely that the Dulles brothers hoped that Árbenz actually would prove himself to be a Communist, so that they wouldn’t need to use Communism as simply a pretext to intervene in Guatemala. Intervening would be good for United Fruit, and therefore America; wouldn’t it be doubly good if it also became a win against Communism for Eisenhower’s administration?

But by framing this hope as fact in the official materials used to launch PBSuccess, the Dulleses ensured that future agents would use confirmation bias to see Communism even in flimsy evidence — such as when they learned that Guatemala’s freedom of speech laws protected Communists, or when they parsed bombastic statements by the Communists themselves, who had their own PR interest in inflating their status.

Coming up rather empty — but still certain of their conclusion — the CIA decided to plant some “evidence” in Árbenz’s home before the press arrived. One PBHistory report reassured CIA higher-ups that photos would be prepared, “slanted” articles would be written, and “[n]aturally there will be other on-the-spot innovations and preparation of black material whenever possible.” In an attempt to make Árbenz out to be some sort of Soviet-fetishizing collector, the agents brought in stacks of Soviet schoolbooks and some bags of dirt labeled with the names of different Soviet republics. A CIA telegram from its headquarters about false materials that had been “discovered” (they actually put “discovered” in quotes) asked, “what can we cite as the source of these documents?” and instructed that “[t]his ‘sourcing’ should of course be in form acceptable to regime.”

But when the journalists showed up, they recognized that owning Communist history books was not proof of Communist allegiance — if the books were even his — and that the bags of dirt were either fake evidence or flimsy proof at best. It certainly wasn’t enough to counteract four years of evidence that Árbenz had governed as a left-leaning reformist from an independent party.

This didn’t, however, stop the CIA from planting stories of this “proof” of Árbenz’s Communist allegiance in the press, which in turn were referred to in future history books.

Though some of the Guatemalan public had believed the accusations of Communism by Radio Liberación and the rumor campaigns, much of the public remained unconvinced that it would have been a bad thing. Guatemala’s public Communists had supported agrarian reform and showed no desire for an authoritarian system like Moscow’s.

Since the CIA was unable to make a persuasive enough case on the Communism front to Guatemalans, the anti-Árbenz coalition began feeding the press conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of Árbenz’s rise to power in the first place. U.S. Justice Department records reveal that by 1955, Castillo Armas’s government had paid United Fruit’s right-wing public relations firm John Clements Associates $18,370 (more than $176,000 in today’s dollars) to run PR on its behalf.

For the Guatemalan public, the thinking went, it wouldn’t matter whether Árbenz was a Communist or not if the press could convince the people that he had been a villain regardless.

So, immediately after Árbenz stepped down, the front pages of Guatemalan newspapers began relentlessly discussing two things: First, for the left, that Árbenz was a quitter who didn’t care about his country. And for the right: a conspiracy theory that had previously been put to bed, in 1949, about the death of Árbenz’s partner in the revolution, Colonel Francisco Arana, who had been killed while resisting arrest for trying to overthrow the government of Árbenz’s predecessor, President Arevalo.

The newspapers pointed out that Árbenz had benefited from Arana’s death, because Arana would have been a chief rival in the election had he run for president. The papers rehashed the mysterious circumstances of Arana’s death again and again — even though if anyone was implicated, it was Arevalo. But the Castillo Armas–controlled punditry continued stoking the conspiracy until the press could come to the CIA’s desired talking point: Árbenz was a quitter and a murderer.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the United Fruit Company supplied photos to international reporters of mutilated bodies about to be buried in a mass grave and cited them as evidence that Árbenz’s government had been killing dissidents. For decades afterward, historians noted that Árbenz had blood on his hands for these extrajudicial killings; the CIA kept the photos and eventually gave them to the U.S. National Archives as official history on Árbenz. But United Fruit publicist and eventual vice president Thomas McCann, who had helped distribute the photographs, later confessed that he had no idea where they had come from. For all UFCO’s PR team knew, the photos could have been of people that Castillo Armas had killed — or earthquake victims. But, McCann wrote in his memoir, “they were widely accepted for what they were purported to be.”

There is a chilling corollary in what happened post-Árbenz to what Russia did after interfering in the U.S.’s 2016 election. Once Russia had succeeded in changing the American media narrative and suppressing Clinton voters, the Kremlin embarked on its own effort to rewrite history.

Fake news articles and conspiracy theories poured out alleging that Hillary Clinton was a murderer, a criminal and a thief. The infamous “Pizzagate” story that falsely claimed that Clinton was running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., continued to percolate after the election — to the point that a 28-year-old man brought an assault rifle to the pizza parlor in December to “rescue” the children. The Pizzagate lie bears a striking resemblance to an official field memo that the CIA circulated on March 2, 1954 (during the early stages of Operation PBSuccess), entitled “Idea to Discredit Árbenz.” The memo outlined a plan to seed a (false) story in the Guatemalan press about Árbenz having a habit of hosting secret “morphine parties” and “girl orgies” where he and his friends would dope up girls and take turns having sex with them — “according to Commie tradition” — until the men were exhausted. The story, according to the memo, “Would be strictly character killing including fake photos.”

To further rewrite 2016’s history, Russia’s own state-controlled media company RT reported that “studies” proved that Russia had not meddled in the U.S. election. Donald Trump had won all on his own, according to Putin. Just like Castillo Armas had overthrown Árbenz all on his own, according to Dulles.

Like Castillo Armas and his supporters, President-elect Trump and his team were glad to promote stories defending the legitimacy of their win. Whether they knew about the extent of Russia’s influence or not, the Special Counsel’s investigation found that they were eager to accept any help they could get, and eager to play up even fake news that bolstered Trump’s image. And why not? Once again, human confirmation bias made people see what they wanted to believe.

When vote tallies showed that Clinton had won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Kremlin-backed news and social media networks promoted fake news about how millions of people had voted illegally. The Trump team eagerly quoted this fake news.

The aggressiveness of the anti-Árbenz newspaper campaign in the weeks following his exile is suspicious at best — and as CIA documents indicate, malicious on the part of Castillo Armas and his American co-conspirators. The goal was to carve the story into stone that Castillo Armas was not the usurper: Árbenz was.

This blame reversal is perhaps one of the most ingenious parts of the playbook: Pin your own crimes on your enemy. Even better, let a third party with a vested interest do the pinning.

Even after being caught red-handed by U.S. intelligence investigations in the years following the 2016 meddling, Putin was delighted to support efforts to blame Ukraine for the Russian interference in the U.S. election. And because it was in President Trump’s interest for the story of Russian interference to turn out not to be true, Putin didn’t even need to push hard; Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani could play up the Ukraine-blame story, and Russia could simply support it.

Even more head-spinning than the Blame Reversal is the Blame-Blame Reversal. This is when the guilty party, upon being blamed, deflects by blaming whoever pointed out their guilt.

When the international press began asking questions about the U.S.’s involvement in the 1954 regime change in Guatemala, the U.S. threw the blame onto the Russians by claiming that Moscow had helped the Guatemalans “stage a frameup” against the U.S. Embassy and U.S. companies. They accused Russia of providing arms to Guatemala, and pointed to a Soviet veto of a U.N. vote to condemn Communism in Latin America as further “proof” that the Kremlin was trying to undermine the U.S.

In an ironic twist, when the American press called out Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, Russia claimed that by blaming Russia, U.S. Democrats were showing that they were actually the guilty ones.

The result of this is enough confusion to get people to give up — in this case to give up on knowing the truth. And in that vacuum, the story promoted by those in power has an outsize opportunity to become official history.

To that end, the CIA drafted “pronouncements” for Castillo Armas to make upon taking power, like declaring that Árbenz had been a Soviet puppet, and calling the public to arms to “kill” the widespread Communism that had taken root in the country.

Within the U.S. government itself, the “official” CIA version of events was passed down until it retroactively became true as well.

Perhaps the biggest evidence of PBHistory’s success is the fact that so much of the propaganda from the operation has been repeated by independent historians as fact — and that those historians have become the authorities that are now referenced by other historians — which means that untangling the truth often leads modern investigators to throw up their hands and say “whatever.” For example, we noticed that Wikipedia today says that Árbenz became a Communist in 1957 after his overthrow — despite the fact that Árbenz’s widow, Maria Vilanova, denied any Communist affiliations in her memoir. Wikipedia’s source is historian Piero Gleijeses’ 1991 book Shattered Hope. When we asked Gleijeses what his source was, he told us that there was no primary documentation. Though there were no Communist Party records, and no statements from Árbenz himself, Gleijeses told us that he had become convinced by the circumstantial evidence — that people were saying it at the time — and because the Communist leader José Manuel Fortuny, whom Gleijeses was personally friends with, had told him that he believed that Árbenz had always been a Communist at heart.

We found CIA documents that show that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted the world to believe. In 1957, extensive instructions were sent for a discrediting campaign as Árbenz moved to Uruguay, based on reports sent by a spy known as “INLUCK,” a.k.a. the former Communist Carlos Pellecer. The information was to be given to politicians and news reporters in-country, and it included extensive information about Árbenz’s correspondence with Communist Party leaders in Guatemala, the mass murder photographs, and an order for a fake psychiatrist evaluation.

Uruguayan historian Roberto Garcia Ferreira, perhaps the leading expert on post-exile Árbenz history, expressed skepticism when we asked him to help clear up the detail about Árbenz joining the Communist Party. Though some sources indicate that Árbenz did become a Communist, Dr. Garcia Ferreira told us, in Spanish, “Fortuny is not a good or trustworthy information source about this.” Really all we know for sure is that Árbenz was eventually invited to take asylum in Communist-friendly countries, where he was “alone, cornered, with mental health problems,” as Garcia Ferreira put it. Even if Árbenz did align with Communists as the CIA chased him around the globe — or even if he’d secretly believed in Communism all along while governing more moderately — Garcia Ferreira noted, “the overthrow was motivated by other issues.”

In other words: Who knows? And yet, the CIA spent years making sure people believed something Árbenz never publicly said or took action on.

Compartmentalization within the CIA made it easier to rewrite — or muddy — the history. When David Phillips wrote about Radio Liberación in his memoir, he said that Árbenz had distributed arms to a peasant army, had illegally suspended civil liberties and murdered dissidents, and that documents left behind by Árbenz showed evidence that he was working to establish a Soviet beachhead in the Americas. These claims were all false. Phillips’s account (along with his boss E. Howard Hunt’s) became the primary material in the propaganda campaign for Nick Cullather’s official CIA history, Gleijeses’ Shattered Hope, and journalists Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer’s 1982 investigative book Bitter Fruit — all of whom were sincerely working to get to the truth. And yet, falsehoods and errors that Phillips made in his memoir, such as misremembering the radio station name as Voice of Liberation instead of Radio Liberación, made their way into all of these official history books. (The actual recordings reveal that the station was not called Voice of Liberation, or in Spanish, La Voz de Liberación.)

But the fact that CIA propagandists’ false accounts have become the primary source material for so much of the history that the world has believed for 70 years ironically lends believability to the most dramatic claim Phillips made in his recollection of PBSuccess. He summarized it in a quote he attributed to the British ambassador:

“The war was won by that radio station.”

The next step in creating an alternate history was to round up any Árbenz supporters who would be likely to expose the U.S.’s involvement.

After Castillo Armas took power, the CIA handed him a list of Guatemalans whom he might want to make disappear. Though the CIA to this day claims that they did not assassinate anyone in Guatemala, the agency’s own documents indicate that the CIA made a list of people for Castillo Armas to kill. And during the operation itself, CIA agents routinely recommended assassination as a solution. To that end, the agency produced a handy manual on how to conduct such assassinations. Even U.S. diplomats discussed assassination in at least one State Department meeting, suggesting, “The best way to bring about the fall of the Árbenz government would be to eliminate 15-20 of its leaders with Trujillo’s trained pistoleros.”

During Castillo Armas’s time in power, hundreds of dissidents and former Árbenz supporters did disappear. The members of the Communist Party who didn’t escape the country were rounded up and executed. This cleansing became a pattern for the dictators who took power from each other after Castillo Armas as well. Over the next 30 years, as many as 200,000 civilians were rounded up and disappeared by the Guatemalan government.

Soon after PBSuccess and PBHistory wrapped up, some of the U.S. conspirators with the biggest mouths — and intimate knowledge of the most public CIA lies — met untimely deaths too. Ambassador Peurifoy, whom Hunt had called “expendable,” was transferred to Thailand and soon thereafter was killed when a mysterious truck ran him off the road in the jungle. Historians have noted the suspicious timing and circumstances of Peurifoy’s death — and the fact that he had loose lips — but we couldn’t find evidence to support conspiracy theories that claim he was killed as part of a cover-up. Mario and Pepe were gunned down in random acts of violence relatively soon after they returned to their homes in Guatemala, though long enough after the coup that it’s less likely they were part of a cleanup operation. CIA Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner soon suffered a mental breakdown and left the agency. He killed himself a few years later.

The only surviving conspirators with full knowledge of the facts — the Dulleses, Tracy Barnes and a few others — went on to plot similar overthrows in Cuba, Chile and elsewhere. The fake history of Operation PBSuccess — which became solidified as the official U.S. history of the operation — led to false confidence in future CIA missions, such as the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.

Perhaps the saddest part of the CIA’s information cleanup operation was what it meant for Jacobo Árbenz. To maintain the official story, the CIA needed Árbenz to forever be a Communist and not become a martyr.

So agents chased Árbenz around the globe. Every time he and his family tried to put down roots — first in Mexico, then in Switzerland, then France — the U.S. managed to twist foreign leaders’ arms to expel him. As Uruguayan historian Roberto Garcia Ferreira has noted in his exhaustive studies of Árbenz’s post-exile history, the CIA did so in order to “demonstrate the supposed communist connections of the deposed regime.” By locking Árbenz out of democratic countries, they could force him to relocate to somewhere within the Soviet Union, and therefore “associate Árbenz’s supporters with Moscow.”

The Árbenzes eventually did go to Russia, but were sent away, finally landing in Uruguay, where Árbenz supposedly returned to alcoholism (he had been sober since getting into politics) — a detail that CIA rumor agents made hay of — and reunited with the exiled Guatemalan President Arevalo. He would move to Cuba, where the budding Castro regime did not make him feel at home, then eventually back to Mexico.

Meanwhile, the CIA pulled out of Guatemala. Castillo Armas cracked down on liberals and peasants, and gave United Fruit its land back — for free. And the democratic vacuum left by Árbenz’s departure was quickly filled.

With chaos.

Carlos Castillo Armas was the luckiest man in Guatemala.

He had been neither the CIA’s first nor second choice for Árbenz’s replacement. Various CIA memos and cables during PBSuccess were devoted to talking shit about the colonel. As one declassified memorandum put it, “He is a firmly stubborn man who in the face of indisputable evidence is prone to maintain his own point of view.”

Yet he was an easy man for a powerful foreign government to manipulate — and he was willing to follow any anti-Árbenz lead that was handed to him. And so he became, against all odds and with relatively little effort, the president.

However, the same things that made Castillo Armas an excellent CIA tool — his ignorance, his ego, and his desire for absolute power — made him a disastrous head of state.

Political infighting took a front seat over policy. Crime escalated nationwide. The economy tanked. And whereas the U.S. had invested just $3 million in overthrowing Árbenz, within a year it had to plow at least $53 million in aid into Guatemala — and eventually much more — in order to keep it from collapsing (which would have cast doubt on the wisdom of removing Árbenz).

Castillo Armas wasn’t lucky for very long. In the third year of his presidency, he was assassinated. His successor, a right-wing general named Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, whom the CIA had originally rejected as a candidate for “Liberator” and later described as a “moody, almost schizophrenic, individual” won what was believed to be a fraudulent election and put an iron fist down. Thousands of people disappeared before Ydígoras Fuentes was defeated by a rival and fled into exile. Over the next 30 years, between 40,000 and 50,000 more people disappeared as Guatemala descended into a civil war that cost over 200,000 civilian lives, kept millions in poverty, and allowed drug cartels to exert control over the government.

These conditions have led millions to leave Guatemala since the fall of Árbenz. Many have immigrated (or attempted to immigrate) to the U.S. — meaning that much of the immigration crisis at our southern border stems from the very chaos that PBSuccess set in motion.

But the destabilization of Central America wasn’t the only legacy left by the CIA’s operation to overthrow Árbenz.

Five years after witnessing Radio Liberación’s role in the fall of democratic Guatemala, Che Guevara launched his own guerrilla radio station in the jungle of eastern Cuba to fight an information war against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. He took the CIA’s tactic of using the radio to deliver a counter-narrative directly to the public and thereby subvert the government. (Though Guevara had a strict rule about only telling the truth on the radio.) In other words, the CIA indirectly helped put a soon-to-be enemy of the state in power in Havana. (After Fidel Castro took power, slid left into socialism, killed his allies, and eventually sent Guevara to his death in Bolivia, this radio station became a propaganda channel for Castro’s regime in the same way that the Kremlin uses RT and Sputnik to fill its country with pro-government falsehoods.)

And of course, the outcome of PBSuccess led the CIA to attempt similar operations in Chile, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere. And all of this in turn has informed Russia and its web of black PR operators as they’ve continually worked to undermine American interests.

Operation PBSuccess didn’t invent the idea of information warfare — or even guerrilla radio. But it honed both to a science. And 15 presidential elections later, in 2016, when that same science was used against America, the U.S. government still hadn’t developed a mechanism to counter its own 60-year-old playbook.

It was as if the U.S. had hit itself in the head with its own boomerang.

Not long after President Trump assumed office, U.S. intelligence began sounding alarms about the coming avalanche of 2020 election manipulation. In testimony to Congress after his two-year investigation into the 2016 election interference, Special Counsel Robert Mueller warned that Russia was continuing its electoral meddling: “They’re doing it as we sit here.” In October 2019, Facebook revealed that it had taken down 75,000 posts from foreign-run Facebook and Instagram accounts that were attempting to interfere in the 2020 race. By August 2020, U.S. intelligence officials had publicly announced that not only were several countries interested in influencing the 2020 election but also that Russia was actively interfering in a repeat of what it did against Hillary Clinton in 2016. “We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden,” said William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.

Even if it’s in a modern leader’s electoral interest to let a foreign government interfere on his behalf, some experts believe that the American press and public will now be more vigilant when a state actor tries to pull wool over our eyes. As former President George W. Bush said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me … You can’t get fooled again.” Though the U.S. has been using disinformation to influence elections in other countries for decades now, 2016 was the first time that it so clearly happened to us. So, hopefully, knowing that these campaigns work — and how they work — can help us be more discerning in the future.

But bad actors evolve too, as fake news expert Craig Silverman points out. “They have to up their game to a certain extent,” he says. “At the same time, there is a tremendous amount of innovation and conflict in American society right now, and that is the raw material to use.”

And, unfortunately, the American public may have to do its discerning without much help from the social media platforms on which the fake content goes viral. Though Facebook, for example, has claimed that it’s taken action to prevent election news manipulation in the future, a damning recent report shows how the site was unable to prevent the spread of fake news about the coronavirus — revealing how underprepared the company is to handle new, evolving types of misinformation. “Facebook is absolutely terrified of having the same kind of situation happen in 2020 that happened in 2016 and having the blame and frustration focused toward it,” Silverman told us. “But I don’t think the stuff that we’ve been seeing from them lately has been inspiring a lot of confidence.”

In particular, Silverman says he worries about Facebook Groups, which are often more local, more private, and more trusted by the people who belong to them. “The big concern is that rumors or consciously created misinformation can really catch fire in these groups. And then by the time a journalist or an investigator at Facebook or someone else realizes what’s going on there, it’s already really taken hold,” Silverman told us. “They’re arguably even more of an issue in 2020 because Facebook has made Groups content even more pronounced in the feed.”

Emboldened by the visible success — and getaway — of the Kremlin’s 2016 interference campaign, Russia, China and other American foes have become “more adept at using social media to alter how we think, behave and decide,” according to the U.S. intelligence’s Worldwide Threat Assessment. Perhaps even more concerning, American political operatives “are beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare,” as McKay Coppins recently put it in The Atlantic — which further complicates things for would-be voters.

Senators Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen have introduced a bipartisan bill to Congress called the DETER Act, which would create automatic sanctions on any country that meddles in U.S. elections — sanctions that the winner of the election would not be able to lift. The bill has stalled, but it points to what Dr. Kathleen Jamieson of UPenn says is a big part of the solution: “Make the costs so high that you’ll disincentivize these practices.” Such aggressive action against meddling could lead to a global cyber treaty that Jamieson believes even Russia would sign.

While it’s conceivable that we could rally the world together to outwardly agree to “no meddling allowed,” the fact of human psychology is, as Silverman points out, “We are biased to believe things that align with our worldview.” So as long as there are Castillo Armases to benefit from misinformation campaigns — and ways to create plausible deniability — there will be fake news.

Given the uncanny parallels between 1954 and 2016, there are plenty of lessons we can take from this story: The power of public appearance, the vulnerabilities that democracy creates if people don’t remain united in favor of it, the power of information weapons — and how they’re most effectively wielded.

But if there is a most important lesson to remember, it might just be this:

Winning at psychological warfare isn’t about convincing people to do things they’d never do. It’s about getting them to give up.

“The misunderstanding people have about the electoral impact of the trolls and hackers is that they think that they were trying to change votes — that they were trying to make Democrats into Republicans,” Dr. Jamieson told us, regarding 2016. “But they weren’t. They were trying to mobilize and demobilize.”

In a 2018 analysis of the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency’s media manipulation efforts, University of Wisconsin’s Dr. Young Mie Kim found that that’s exactly what happened: “The IRA operated voter suppression campaigns,” Kim reported, and “deliberately targeted nonwhite voters, especially African Americans” in an attempt to get them to vote for a third-party candidate or to not vote at all.

The Kremlin’s campaign — starting with seeds of doubt and culminating in strategically timed disclosures, amplified divisionary content, and damaging fake news stories — had an aggregate effect of demoralizing voters who intended to vote for the candidate that Russia didn’t want.

“Polling data suggest they were effective at stopping people from voting for Hillary Clinton,” Dr. Jamieson explained. “If the disinformation in any combination dropped Hillary Clinton by one percent nationally, then we don’t even need to ask about the battleground states. They’ve already decisively affected the election.”

No matter the decade or the technology, in other words, the media manipulation playbook for undermining democracy is not about persuading people to switch sides in a battle. It’s about persuading people to not exercise their power.

Jacobo Árbenz was by no means a perfect president. He made decisions that made his overthrow easier — like the Alfhem arms purchase. His politics may have been further left than the kinds of allies he needed could get on board with. And his outspoken Guatemalan nationalism and tolerance toward democratic communists in his country provoked the United States.

But none of that is illegal. He was elected democratically. Árbenz governed with integrity. He’s widely considered Guatemala’s best president, its least corrupt in history. He was a principled defender of freedom of speech, religious and political tolerance, and dignity for working people.

And the U.S. government destroyed his life and his country for it.

After being harassed by American spies and diplomats for more than a decade, Árbenz finally settled down back in Mexico City, where he sunk into depression and alcoholism. Following his daughter’s suicide in the mid-1960s, his relationship with his wife, Maria, became depressed too. They still loved each other — and stayed together, despite spending long periods of time apart — but he’d lost the quiet intensity that had once made him so compelling.

“Some people have their moment in history,” Piero Gleijeses told us in an interview, remembering his talks with Árbenz’s widow before her death. “Jacobo and Maria Árbenz’s was 1950 to 1954.”

This man who was on track to become a legend in Latin American politics — a statesman who had liberated his country from a dictatorship and ushered in democracy and reform — hadn’t just lost his power. He’d let go of it too.

Truthfully, the American government and all its radio hoaxes and cockamamie spy games didn’t overpower Jacobo Árbenz. They tricked him and his supporters into giving up.

And on January 27, 1971, at the age of 57, Jacobo Árbenz climbed into his bathtub, slipped beneath the surface, and drowned.

MORE: See all the original research and behind-the-scenes stories of how this project came together.

Special thanks to our researchers Mayari Rizzo and Luis Pablo Rizzo in Guatemala City for their help making this story possible. While we were finishing this project, Maya began chemotherapy for ovarian cancer; we’ve set up a GoFundMe to help with her treatment here.