Friends in High Places By A.F.- Excerpt
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In May of 1954, at Stettin, a port in East Germany, dock workers loaded crates labeled in Czech onto Alfhem, a Swedish merchant ship. They were being observed by a German businessman and amateur birdwatcher, sitting on a nearby hill with a pair of binoculars and a bagged lunch. After double-checking what the crates carried, the businessman took some notes and, from his office later that day, had his secretary write a long, detailed letter to an automobile parts concern in Paris, filled with specifications of eastern-bloc machines that were cheaper than British-made ones, citing exact amounts that the buyer would save, etc. The innocent-looking letter was approved by the commissar and mailed to Paris. There, the recipient brought it to a CIA microfilm expert who scraped at every period on the page with a tiny razor until one fell off the paper. This was a microfilm dot which had been glued to the letter and hidden by the ink of the typewriter when a period was typed over it. The microdot contained the twenty-second prayer of David from the Book of Psalms, which began, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” The recipient in Paris sent the message to Washington, D.C. via radio. In Washington, a C.I.A. agent copied down the message and brought it to Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence. It was concluded that night that a shipment of Communist-made weapons was headed for Guatemala.
Two days after the ship had arrived at Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, Dulles’ brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, held a press conference announcing the shipment. The Senate declared that the arms shipment was “part of the master plan of world communism.” After an Intelligence Advisory Committee Meeting, chaired by Allen Dulles, official permission from the National Security Council to stage a coup in Guatemala was given, and the coup, the climactic component to the plot against the country, was scheduled for the following month. This plan was carried out in the name of stopping communism. While the Guatemalan government had never officially been communist, Communism had taken root in Guatemala. Although it was hard to measure the degree to which it had done so, its presence was quite evident. However, the United Fruit Company, which had vital interests to protect in Guatemala, strong ties to crucial people within the US government and a group of talented and powerful people on its payroll, pulled quite a few strings to ensure that their interests were indeed protected. The CIA’s operations in Guatemala, although partially justified by the threat of communism, were influenced by United Fruit and those connected with it.
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To read the full version of “Friends in High Places” email vjb229@nyu.edu.
