PBFORTUNE

Opening

PBFORTUNE was the CIA's first plan to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, the elected president of Guatemala, whose land reform had taken unused holdings from the United Fruit Company and alarmed US officials about communist influence. Formally approved on 9 September 1952, it would have armed the exile officer Carlos Castillo Armas, with Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza and Honduras's president Juan Manuel Gálvez helping from outside.

It lasted about a month. Somoza talked, other diplomats heard, and on 8 October 1952 Secretary of State Dean Acheson had it called off while a freighter of arms labelled as farm machinery was already on the way. Planning papers from that year include lists of Guatemalans to be killed or jailed after a coup. The operation that did remove Árbenz came two years later.

Timeline

March 1951Árbenz takes office.

January 1952Officers in the CIA's Directorate of Plans compile a list of "top flight Communists whom the new government would desire to eliminate immediately in the event of a successful anti-Communist coup", drawing on a 1949 Guatemalan Army list.

April 1952Somoza, on a visit to Washington, tells Truman and his staff that with weapons he would "clean up Guatemala". Truman's military aide, Major General Harry H. Vaughan, urges him to look into it, and Truman asks Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith to follow up.

Spring and summer 1952Colonel Cornelius Mara flies back to Nicaragua with Somoza and returns with a favourable report. A CIA contact codenamed SEEKFORD meets Castillo Armas, who proposes invasions from Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador.

June 1952Decree 900, the land reform law, comes into force.

Summer 1952J. C. King, head of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, proposes $225,000 for Castillo Armas plus arms and transport, with Somoza and Gálvez providing air support.

9 September 1952PBFORTUNE is officially approved.

About September 1952SEEKFORD forwards Castillo Armas's own list: 58 people to be executed and 74 to be jailed or exiled.

Early October 1952A United Fruit freighter, refitted in New Orleans, is loaded with the arms and due to sail for Nicaragua.

8 October 1952With word spreading among Central American officials, Acheson summons Smith and the operation is called off. The freighter is diverted to Panama.

23 May 1997The CIA releases about 1,400 pages on its Guatemala operations, including Gerald Haines's 1995 study of the assassination proposals.

Key figures

Jacobo Árbenz, the target.

Carlos Castillo Armas, the exiled officer the CIA backed.

Anastasio Somoza García, who proposed the idea and then helped expose it.

Walter Bedell Smith and J. C. King of the CIA, who approved and ran the plan.

Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State who stopped it.

Gerald Haines, the CIA historian whose study made the lists public.

Physical and documentary trail

The two main sources are CIA histories built from the Agency's own files. Haines's "CIA and Guatemala Assassination Proposals, 1952-1954" (June 1995) covers the lists. Nick Cullather's Secret History, written for the CIA and later published, covers the operation itself, including the arms: 250 rifles, 380 pistols, 64 machine guns and 4,500 grenades taken from stocks seized at the port of New York. Both are heavily redacted, and the names on the lists are blacked out.

Haines records that headquarters also held a list of people to be imprisoned. On Castillo Armas's list of 58, he says there is no record that headquarters acted on it, and PBFORTUNE was cancelled before any coup. What happened to those named after 1954 belongs to the later operation, covered in the report on Operation PBSUCCESS.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. The list of 58 names marked for killing was not drawn up by CIA planners. It was Castillo Armas's list, sent on through SEEKFORD around September 1952. The CIA's own list from January 1952 was separate. Formal approval came from the CIA on 9 September 1952 after Truman's go-ahead, and historians disagree over how fully the State Department was told beforehand.

Things you might not know

• The guns travelled as tractors. The arms on the United Fruit freighter were labelled as agricultural machinery.
• A son gave it away. Somoza's son Tacho casually asked Assistant Secretary of State Edward Miller whether "the machinery" was on its way, at a meeting in Panama.
• The rebel went on salary. After the cancellation, Castillo Armas was paid $3,000 a week, which kept a small force together and, some historians argue, stopped him acting early.
• Another dictator had a price. SEEKFORD reported that Rafael Trujillo's support depended on killing four Dominicans then living in Guatemala.
• The weapons were kept. King had them unloaded in Panama and held there in the hope the project could be revived.
• Medal before the plot. Somoza's 1952 trip included public speeches praising the US and a medal from New York City.

Competing explanations

A Cold War anti-communist operation. US officials believed Árbenz was opening Guatemala to Soviet influence, and the plan was presented as low-cost support for local anti-communists who would move anyway.

Corporate and political interests. United Fruit lent the ship, and its losses under Decree 900 were central to the hostility in Washington. On this reading the communist threat was exaggerated to justify protecting a company.

Regional dictators using Washington. Somoza, Trujillo and Gálvez each had their own reasons to want Árbenz gone, and the initiative in April 1952 came from Somoza. Trujillo's condition about the four Dominicans shows their aims were not identical to the CIA's.

Later life of the case

PBFORTUNE is usually told as the first attempt at what the 1954 operation finished, and many of the same people, Castillo Armas, King and the neighbouring dictators among them, reappeared. The 1997 release made the assassination planning public. The coup that followed opened decades of military rule and civil war in Guatemala.

Finding

Admitted and documented. In 1952 the CIA planned to overthrow an elected government, shipped arms for it under false labels, and kept lists of people to kill and jail if it succeeded. The plan was cancelled after a month because its cover was blown, not because anyone objected to its aims.

What still will not resolve: the names. Both lists are still redacted in the released histories, so who was marked in 1952, and whether any of them died in the violence after 1954, cannot be checked from the public record.