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The same goes for the CIA-run coup in Guatemala the following year. American media initially sold both operations as victories over leftist leaning governments vulnerable to Communist blandishments.
It was about really oil in Iran, as it was about land claimed by the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. But the kind of suffering in store for the people of both countries was the same.
Having learned from the British how this kind of thing is done, CIA operatives were ready to try out their newly acquired skills and succeeded in overthrowing the government or Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who had been elected President in 1950 with 65 percent of the vote.
His offense was giving land to the peasants--unfarmed land that private corporations earlier had set aside for themselves. The United Fruit Company was allergic to real land reform in Guatemala and lobbied hard for Washington to remove Arbenz.
The Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster, who happened to be shareholders of the United Fruit Company, took the line that Arbenz' actions smacked of "Communism." Then-CIA Director Allen Dulles stoked fears by describing Guatemala as a "Soviet beachhead in the Western hemisphere."
The overthrow of Arbenz in 1954 made Guatemala safe for United Fruit, but not for democracy. The coup ended a hopeful decade-long experiment with representative democracy known as the "Ten Years of Spring." The outcome's implications for democracy in Central American were immense.
Other examples could be adduced, but let us stop here with the two with which Harry Truman would have been most familiar--from a statecraft point of view. (I doubt that he held stock in either Big Oil or United Fruit.)
At the end of his op-ed, Truman puts his conclusion right out there with characteristic straightforwardness:
"I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President"and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere."
Media Un-Reaction
A blockbuster op-ed, no?
Well, no. Investigator Raymond Marcus is among those struck by the curious lack of response--one might say embargo--regarding Truman's Washington Post article. Marcus has written:
"According to my information, it was not carried in later editions that day, nor commented on editorially, nor picked up by any other major newspaper, or mentioned in any national radio or TV broadcast."
What are we to make of this? Was/is it the case, as former CIA Director William Colby is quoted as saying in a different connection, that the CIA "owns everyone of any significance in the major media?" Or at least that it did in the Sixties? How much truth lies beneath Colby's hyperbole?
Did the CIA and its White House patrons put out the word to squelch a former President's op-ed already published in an early edition of the Post? Or is there a simpler explanation. Do any of you readers perhaps know?
The tradecraft term of art for a "cooperating" journalist, businessperson, or academic is "agent of influence." Some housebroken journalists have previously worked for the CIA. Some take such scrupulous notes that they end up sounding dangerously close to their confidential government sources.
