By Max Holland
PBHISTORY was the cryptonym for a CIA covert operation dedicated to the gathering and exploitation of Guatemalan Communist documents following the agency-supported overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.
There were few, if any, sensational disclosures from this effort, although PBHISTORY supplied the U.S. intelligence community with a ground-level look at a Communist takeover by slow motion. But the covert operation did not succeed in its most vital purpose: to persuade Latin America to look at Communist penetration of the hemisphere from the standpoint of the United States.
The article about PBHISTORY orginally appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2004), and may be purchased from Taylor & Francis by clicking here.
