The Secret Army

Show notes

The secret army began as a trespass. Before the end of February 1960, Guatemala’s President Ydígoras offered the CIA training facilities in the Petén, and the project chief, Jacob Esterline, flew into Guatemala illegally with the president’s right-hand man to draw up what he called a Status of Forces Agreement. Asked whether Dulles and Bissell knew, he said: “Oh, hell yes! Oh, hell yes! — I went on specific instruction from Bissell and Dulles.” When the DCI briefed the government’s own oversight group about the deal, “the Petén area in Guatemala” came out as “a secure remote area of a friendly Latin American country.” The deniability was written into the paperwork before the first Cuban arrived — and the text of that base agreement is not in the record. It survives only as Esterline’s recollection inside the CIA’s own official history, written nineteen years later.

The camps rose fast. By mid-July 1960 construction had begun on the communications training base; Retalhuleu, a graded dirt strip favored by Ydígoras himself, was expanded to five thousand feet of asphalt, and on 13 September the Guatemalan president flew his own planes in to officially inaugurate it. The infantry camp at Finca Helvetia was, in Colonel Jack Hawkins’s verified description, “a small shelf of land on the side of a volcano barely large enough for comfortable accommodation of 200 men” — a camp engulfed in clouds where, in the autumn of 1960, supplies had to be hauled up the mountain with tractors, and where mortars were fired from the company street over the roofs. Recruitment ran through the exile front, the FRD, masked so the Cubans believed the money came from private businessmen; the brigade took its name from the first trainee to die in Guatemala — Carlos Rodríguez Santana, number 2506, whose burial cost about a thousand dollars in “gifts” to local officials. Note the Agency’s own history spells him “Carlos Rafael Santanya,” a spelling no other source uses; we use the congressional name.

The pivot came in November 1960. On 4 November, headquarters cabled Guatemala to scrap the small-team concept — guerrilla teams were cut to sixty men and everyone else retrained as an amphibious assault force of at least 1,500. Eleven days later a staff paper declared the new concept unachievable too: a 1,500–3,000-man beachhead was impossible “except as a joint Agency and Defense Department action.” The official historian later noted, in a footnote nobody followed up, that neither the Inspector General nor the Taylor Committee ever confronted that paper. On 16 November the principals met on the eve of briefing President-elect Kennedy: a Zone of Interior facility for 800 men, Canal Zone use for 200, strikes from Nicaragua, one Navy landing ship, a tentative launch of 1 February 1961, and a tentative budget of about $42 million. This is the one contemporaneous memorandum in the corpus that reads like a machine briefing itself — and its own attachments show the machine straining: State worried the Guatemala base was endangering Ydígoras, and the air crews it listed as combat-ready by 23 November flew bombers Hawkins said couldn’t do the job without American pilots leading them.

For most of 1960 the camp ran on almost nothing: four CIA civilian instructors, then a stopgap trio from the Army. Hawkins warned on 4 January 1961 that without the requested Special Forces teams the brigade “cannot be readied for combat by late February as planned” — “If this is not done, we will be courting disaster” — and recommended abandoning the operation if Washington wouldn’t provide adequate tactical air support. The trainers arrived 12 January. The Joint Chiefs’ inspection team, visiting 24–27 February, found sixteen B-26 pilots at mixed hours, 92% of the aircraft in commission, live-fire morale “superior” — and the greatest problem to be the long confinement: AWOL cases including a platoon commander, twenty-one men slipping away to a fiesta, a card-carrying-communist mayor of Retalhuleu, and Communist leaflets in Guatemala City with accurate details. “It can therefore be presumed that Castro knows practically all about the operation except when, where, and in what strength.” Surprise odds: about 85 to 15 against. Bissell’s 11 March paper for the White House answered with confidence — a reinforced battalion at 850, combat-ready by 1 April, “a good chance of overthrowing Castro… without the necessity for the United States to commit itself to overt action” — while conceding it was “infeasible to hold all these forces together beyond early April.” Every assessment in the file from the confident period reads, straight, as an inventory of reasons not to go.

Which is the episode’s closing question: what were the exiles promised about American backing, and who promised it? The record gives five answers. The March 1960 authorization said the hand of the United States should not show; the men were told the money came from businessmen. Hawkins’s own January 1961 war plan assumed the opposite as a planning contingency — if no uprising came, a provisional government could get “overt military assistance,” paving the way for “United States military intervention” — written for Washington, never told to the men. The chief American trainer swore to the Taylor Committee that no promises were ever made: diplomatic and logistical support, open lines of communication, and “no support could be expected from the United States.” Exile leader Miró Cardona claimed Adolf Berle had promised him 15,000 to 30,000 American troops — no American paper backs it up. In October 1960 a CIA officer privately assured Nicaragua’s Somoza that the U.S. would not back out once the operation started; the Agency’s paramilitary chief testified under oath that no such high-level promise was ever given. And then, on 29 March 1961, Kennedy instructed that the brigade leaders be told, before the invasion, that U.S. strike forces would not participate or support the invasion in any way — and asked whether they still wanted to go. The answer that came back was yes. What was said to the men in the Guatemalan camps, in the months before that, has no contemporaneous paper in the record at all. The paper trail is complete at both ends and silent in the middle. That silence is the document.