Anyone read NYT article about CIA's '54 overthrow of Guatemala

[AP]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/weekinreview/06WORD.html

One of many interesting parts: when the government figured out some of the CIA's strategies and tried to get them into the news, the CIA instructed their agent to try to get a story in the press about UFOs or a birth of sextuplets so that people wouldn't notice the real news.

[deutsey]

1. I didn't read this (registration)

but I'd be interested in learning if they mention how the NYT buckled to pressure from Dulles and reassigned a reporter who refused to go along with the CIA line.

From an article I wrote:

Practically all American reporters cooperate (with the Guatemala operation), with the exception of NYT reporter Sydney Gruson. After CIA director Allen Dulles puts pressure on the Times, Gruson is removed from covering Guatemala. "It was an important moment," writes Halberstam (author of "The Fifties"), "a warning to the paper's top executives about the potential difference between the agenda of the secret government and that of serious journalism."

http://www.bartcop.com/coupsp.htm

[RandomKoolzip]

2. Very cool article.

I just spent last weekend reading Gaeton Fonzi's "The Last Investigation," about the Church Committee hearings 1976-1977. Yeah, I'm a Kennedy (assassination) nut. Anyhoo, Fonzi writes a lot about CIA disinfo campaigns waged to get Assassination Researchers off the right trail...the one that starts at Langley, Virginia, heads south to Guatemala, detours near Key West, and ends up in Dallas '63.

Arbenz and Guatemala figure prominately in this book; The Anti-Castro crusades undertaken by the CIA (Bay o' Pigs) were assumed to end successfully, because they worked against Arbenz in '54. Fonzi talks of finding evidence that the CIA "single handedly" orchestrated the uprising, and of all the stuff mentioned in the NYT article. The really odd part is that it's ususally the same names that pop up when reserching the particularsof all the above cases, and... and Kennedy in '63 Allende in Chile '73, and Sukarno in '75, Cambodia too, etc. It's like the same team of ten guys is behind everything sucky.

[mistertrickster]

3. Thanks for the post . . . my nephew just got back from there

Haven't heard from him yet.

[kshimpi]

4. put on your tin foil hats...

this is going to sound nuts, but it's factual:
The CIA has in the past and continues to have agents that are reporters in various news agencies around the world, but mainly in the US. They've even had congressional hearings about it in the past as some felt that it was an overextension of the CIA's boundaries. I can't remember where I originally learned about it (some site that actually had decades worth of CIA operatives' names that used to distribute booklets of them), but the information is out there. It was especially big in the news in 1996.

This journalist has a bunch of links and exerpts dealing with the topic: http://public.srce.hr/~mprofaca/ciapress1.html