“Secret History,” Nick Cullather’s fast-paced story is an insider’s account of the CIA covert operation that deposed President Jocobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala in 1954. From the 1944 Revolution that culminated in the election of Juan José Arevalo through the ascension of Arbenz in 1951, to the events that spawned PBSUCCESS (code name for the covert operation), and the demise of Arbenz in favor of Carlos Castillo Armas, and ultimately to Castillo Armas’s assassination in 1957, the book reads like a thriller. Even the blank spaces that obviously protect the identity of major actors of the events do not take away from the compelling character of the story. Cullather supports his account of PBSUCCESS with a host of primary and secondary sources that show clearly the Agency’s strategies and tactics geared to overthrow Arbenz’s government. Reading through the story, I was most engaged by the ways and means the CIA utilized to depose a democratically elected and popular government at the behest of the interests of an American company, United Fruit. My reading concurred with a question CIA Chief Historian J. Kenneth McDonald stated in his forward to the book, namely whether we “are perhaps less certain today than most Americans were at the time that this operation was a Cold War victory”?
PBSUCCESS as covert operation clearly indicates that the United States foreign policy remains staunchly Wilsonian in its commitment to regime change. Obviously, U.S. foreign policy makers do not take into account past mistakes; they will not come to terms with the evidence that regime change cannot go on forever. The case in point is the defiant attitude of the North Korean regime that appears to have learned from the overthrow of such recent figures as Saddam Hussein, Mohamar Kaddafi notably. From the downfall of Saddam and Kaddafi, North Korean leaders have obviously inferred that only a nuclear deterrent could stop the hegemonic design of the United States toward their country. As I read through Secret History, I kept seeing it through the lenses of Walter L. Hixson’s observation as expressed in his essay on Culture, National Identity, and the ‘Myth of America.’ He writes the following: "Undertaking derives not only from gleaming new knowledge, but also from unpacking and dispensing with some of the old. “Truths” must be interrogated and often delegitimized. I argue that the Myth of America and the pathologically violent foreign policy it inspires cannot remain unchallenged. The costs are too high, the consequences too great, both at home and abroad, to remain acquiescent."
I would recommend the book to diplomats, students of Latin America, and anyone interested in learning more about the actors of US foreign relations.
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