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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nick Cullather. Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. xl, 142. Cloth $39.50, paper $14.95.

"Operation PBSUCCESS," the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán's Guatemalan government in 1954, has been examined with greater depth than any covert project in the history of U.S. foreign relations. Indeed, a boomlet of literature began in 1982 with the publication in rapid succession of Stephen C. Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer's Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala and my The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Based on hundreds of documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, both books presented detailed narratives and critiqued U.S. policy as wrongheaded. But whereas Schlesinger and Kinzer attributed the Eisenhower administration's motives to a commitment to protect U.S. economic interests, especially those of the United Fruit Company, I emphasized strategic concerns and misperceptions rooted in a "Cold War ethos." Then, in Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (1991), Piero Gleijeses, using extensive interviews with Guatemalans, revealed the previously overlooked culpability of Arbenz's military. He also argued that the president's relationship to Guatemala's Communists was much closer than previous students of PBSUCCESS had suggested. 1

All of these works were handicapped by the continued classification of the archives of the CIA itself. Following the end of the Cold War, however, the agency announced a policy of "openness." It organized a series of conferences with scholars, most accompanied by the release of documents for the first time, and pledged to make public many more in the near future. It also hired skilled historians to write histories of pivotal covert operations. . . .

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