Death Notice

Assassinations, Kill Lists, Training Assassins and the Violent Remaking of a Client State

CIA Director Allen Dulles was seated before the gathered operatives at Opa-Locka Marine Air Base in Miami, Florida, puffing on his pipe. He was there to give them a pep talk, to instill a sense of the importance of their venture against the government of Guatemala. In the audience that day in March 1954 was Philip C. Roettinger, a Marine Corps Colonel who had fought in the Pacific Theater of World War II. He was now a CIA case officer assigned to the secret project. He later recalled what Dulles had to say that day about their work: “It was explained to me that it was very important for the security of the United States, that we were going to prevent a Soviet beachhead in this hemisphere...and that the Guatemalan government was communist and we had to do something about it.” He would never have guessed at the time that the outcome of what he later learned would amount to: “Dulles had lied to us.”

Within weeks of the speech, Roettinger was stationed along the Honduran border with a gang of rebels bent on overthrowing the Guatemalan government. Their motivation was “the prospect of power and wealth, not ideology,” Roettinger remembered. He watched them as they rested before the battles that were expected to ensue; they were laughing at the thought of what they planned to do “to the sonsofbitches after they [took] over.” Roettinger was training the soldiers-in-exile to invade their own country.

Now that Guatemala had shed their previous dictator and become a democracy, they needed to learn their role in the eyes of the U.S. government. The CIA was there to teach them; the U.S. had previously requested that Guatemala remove certain ministers in a previous administration and the government then had refused, a worrying sign. Now under the leadership of Jacobo Arbenz, elected in 1950, Guatemala was pursuing a course of self-determination, which was completely unacceptable. As the head of covert action for the CIA, Frank Wisner explained to a Department of Defense colleague that Guatemala was “touchy” with their status of being subservient to the United States: “Essentially a primitive, rural country the size of Louisiana, with a population of 3.5 million, Guatemala is currently engaged in an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the ‘Banana Republic,’” he wrote. Though the land reform was later termed as a “moderate, capitalist reform” that earned dividends for the United Fruit Company, which owned most of the country, the idea that workers could own what had rightfully been given them by a previous Guatemalan dictator did not sit well with United Fruit. The U.S. company, based in Boston, “considered its rights in Guatemala superior to those of Guatemalans,” Roettinger later wrote. The U.S. government was in the midst of their own anti-trust action against the company to sell of their monopolistic assets in the region, but this was placed on hold as the future direction of Guatemala was paramount on the agenda.

The attitude of the United States was impatiently described by Albert Haney, Wisner’s field commander for the operation, writing under the pseudonym Jerome C. Dunbar. He provided key points to the Guatemalan Army, which amounted to a “lecture on political reality.” This involved offering an explanation that Guatemala was “in the United States sphere of influence” and that they needed to understand that the size and power of the U.S.: “If they think that a people of 3,000,000 is going to win in a showdown with 160,000,000 they need psychiatric help.” They also required instruction in terms of the ways of the Americans, in other words, to explain the modus operandi of the gringo: “If they think that the U.S. will never come to a showdown, they don’t understand gringos. It might be useful to explain gringos in the way that foreigners see them and point out that force is the follower of reason, in the American pattern.” There would never be an opportunity to be truly independent, Haney wrote, and therefore, Guatemalans should accept that the U.S. was the kindest of all world rulers: “If they are unhappy about being in the U.S. sphere of influence, they might be reminded that the U.S. is the most generous and tolerant taskmaster going, that cooperation with it is studded with material reward, and that the U.S. permits much more sovereignty and independence in its sphere than the Soviets, and so forth...If they wish to commit political suicide, that is their own business.”

Arbenz was viewed by U.S. State Department as a “conservative,” not a communist, but this was besides the point. As Roettinger later recalled, “Of course, there was no—not even a hint of communism in his government. He had no communists in his cabinet; he did permit the existence of a very small communist party.” Guatemalans had voted the wrong way and he needed to be removed. “This was sudden death for him,” Roettinger acknowledged, “I mean, there was no chance of him winning this fight, because of the fact that he had done this to the United Fruit Company. Plus the fact that he was overthrowing the hegemony of the United States over this area, and this was dangerous, it could not be tolerated. We couldn’t tolerate this.”

Kill Lists

A later CIA study indicated that “most high-level US officials recognized that a hostile government in Guatemala by itself did not constitute a direct security threat to the United States,” but the government had to be removed anyway. The internal opposition to the Guatemalan government at the time was “inept, disorganized and ineffective” and the CIA was brought in to beef up oppositional forces. Part of this role involved planning for assassinations of key individuals. Even before the official initiation of the first overthrow initiative, codenamed PBFORTUNE, significant work went into planning work for assassinations.

Months before the work had officially begun, a kill list was assembled based on a 1949 register of known communists according to the Guatemalan Army and information sent from the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. The Agency’s Directorate of Plans, the euphemistically named clandestine services, in headquarters compiled the list and requested on January 26, 1952 that Guatemala station develop a “firm list [of] top flight Communists whom the new government would desire to eliminate immediately in event of successful anti-Communist coup” based on the suggestions. The response that came back to headquarters contained additional suggested names and the caveat that the station could not confirm that all on the list were “commies but their leanings are such that [they are] considered dangerous [to] our interests.”

The CIA’s Chief of Station in Guatemala lamented the fact that the Agency lacked a journalist asset in the country and sent a request to headquarters that they establish one, since all of the reporters in the country were unreliable in terms of printing their propaganda. None of the reporters currently assigned to the country, he explained, were worth recruiting by the CIA as assets. The correspondent for Time magazine in whom the Agency had “no confidence,” was an American citizen, the son of Russians, and the CIA suspected he “may be secretly unsympathetic to our cause.” The Reuters reporter was even worse and described as “completely untrustworthy, not from an ideological point of view but for the reason that he cannot keep his mouth shut and sometimes drinks very heavily and becomes involved in brawls.” The locally stationed reporter from the Associated Press was “the same” as the Reuters journalist, the Chief of Station complained.

By September 18, a finalized list of personnel “to be disposed of” was compiled, with an attached 18 pages of biographical notes. The disposal list’s “Category I” featured a list of 58 people intended for “executive action,” a CIA euphemism for assassination. A further 74 names for “Category II” included “persons to be disposed of through imprisonment or exile.” The overall plan included the disposition of arms and $225,000 to the United States’ preferred leader for Guatemala, Castillo Armas (codenamed in documents as “John H. Calligeris,” “RUFUS,” and “PANCHO”), whom they believed to be malleable and receptive to their ideas. Neighboring Nicaragua and Honduras were expected to provide air support. The same day, the Agency’s Chief of the Western Hemisphere at headquarters was informed that Rafael Trujillo, leader of the Dominican Republic, was prepared to provide Armas with “arms, aircraft, men, and money” with the stipulation that “four (4) Santo Dominicanos, at present residing in Guatemala, be killed a few days prior” to Armas’ invasion. Armas “stated that he would be glad to carry out the execution action, but that it could not be done prior to D-Day for security reasons. He pointed out that his own plans included similar action and that special squads were being designated.” As a compromise, Armas committed to performing the executions on the day of the invasion.

In December, a summary of Guatemalan government and Armas forces boasted that the latter possessed thousands of troops and civilians at the ready to attack the government, although not all were armed. In the city of Quetzaltenango, a group of 50 commandos was organized into sub-units of five men each with the mission “to kill all political and military leaders in the city.” In Guatemala City, assassination or “K” groups were formed with the same goal, the summary adding that the kill “list has already been drawn up. I have in my home a city map showing the location of the homes and offices of all targets,” an Agency officer wrote. On December 12, Armas was reported as proposing “to make maximum use of ‘K’ Group.” Guatemala City also had saboteurs ready to “sabotage communications, utilities, all headquarters, transportation, military installations and equipment,” as well as document teams to “capture and impound all documents in government office[s], party headquarters, and labor unions.” The seizure of the documents could help the team prove their psychological warfare campaign, which in part sought to promote the idea that the “Guatemalan government is only a tool of the USSR.”

Armas was to study the “use of liquidation lists” for psychological warfare purposes, careful to prevent the “rise of Communist martyrs.” A detailed plan for propaganda actions in the month of November included fake meeting minutes “of a Communist session” that called for the “elimination of the clergymen who oppose the realization of a National Church.” Later fabricated notes would clarify that the Communist national church’s purpose would be to “worship Stalin.” The CIA sent daily “death notices” in 30-day batches beginning on April 15 and repeating on June 15, 1953 to four individuals. Bearing a cross, the death notice cards would first indicate that their associates had died, asking that they “pray for the soul of the particular communist victim.” After 30 days, the names of the addressees themselves were added to the cards, telling the receiver that they had died to “hint [at] forthcoming doom to recipients.” According to the CIA, the point was to “implant a feeling of insecurity among the target individuals and their associates.” The Agency was unsure whether this method worked, having not identified any “reported or observed reaction” to the death notices. If Agency management wished to repeat the operation, the field operators committed to “observe and report the results and reactions.”

Following the initiation of PBFORTUNE, a source confirmed to the operation that neighboring countries’ soldiers dressed in civilian clothing would “assassinate unnamed communist leaders.” The plan also included creating a fake story that a government official was preparing to “oust the Communists” and this leader would be assassinated soon afterwards; his killing would then be “laid to the Commies and used to bring about a mass defection of the Army officers group who still support him.” To provoke further discontent, the Agency planned to “send threatening messages to the small fry among the known Communists, follow up with damage to their homes and, in some cases, with physical violence.”

PBFORTUNE was canceled nearly a month after its commencement due to the operation being exposed. Its planning papers had included the consideration of important future-oriented questions such as: “If the proposed military operations bring about a prolonged state of civil war, is Headquarters prepared to support [Armas]?” and was the Agency “prepared to support him financially, if necessary, during the period of consolidation by his government?” Firm answers were not forthcoming.

Assassination Training

In the fall of 1953, the U.S. government looked to restart the effort of overthrowing Arbenz as the expropriation of United Fruit Company land continued. The plan, developed by the CIA in coordination with the State Department, called for the covert removal of the Guatemalan government “without bloodshed if possible,” but at the same time, the CIA covertly continued its extensive assassination planning. The initiative, given the cryptonym of PBSUCCESS, included the creation of a temporary station codenamed LINCOLN in Opa-Locka, Florida, where efforts could be coordinated and undertaken. A “special paper on [the] liquidation of personnel” was requested on January 5, 1954 for the training chief before he left on January 10 to begin training Armas’ forces in Honduras. The next day, a request was sent for the Technical Services Staff (TSS) to “investigate [the] possibility [of] obtaining 20 silencers for .22 cal rifle[s] and adapting them to single shot second hand rifles.” If these silenced rifles could be made by March 10, the instruction was to “proceed with development.” The TSS later reported on September 27 that the 20 “silenced weapons” delivered for PBSUCCESS cost a total of $1,835 ($21,500 today).

The pouch manifest outlining the material that was sent from the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division at headquarters to LINCOLN on January 8 showed that the assassination training was sent as promised to train Armas’ exile force. The training was to commence on January 11 and produce “four staff men, ten organizers, ten shock troop leaders, four sabotage experts and two assination [sic] specialists….The assassination specialists would be utilized to return to [Armas’] teams for instructional purposes.” On January 19, according to a CIA summary, “27 men” participated in the “9-week training course.” The killers-in-training were to be taught the many methods of assassination, in excruciating detail.