Plot Within a Plot

For more than a week, Guatemalan anti-Communists had been mysteriously disappearing into jail, scrambling to asylum in embassies, hopping over the border. Was there a rebellious plot afoot? Not at all, said the Red-wired government soothingly. Then, at the end of last week, the government swung all the way around, announced that a fearsome plot had indeed been uncovered, and issued a 5,000-word white paper to tell all about it.

Nicaragua's President Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza, the government charged excitedly, was scheming with Guatemalan anti-Communists to invade Guatemala.

The plot, the white paper hinted, had the support of the U.S., Venezuela, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and the U.S. -owned United Fruit Co. Its ob ject: to overthrow the government of President Jacobo Arbenz.

Operation Devil. The white paper then spun out the details of a so-called "Operation El Diablo." Rebel and mercenary "saboteurs, assassins and criminals," it said, were being drilled on Momotom-bito, a tiny island in Nicaragua's Lake Managua; radio technicians were being trained on Somoza's Tamarindo estate.

Machine guns, mortars, napalm bombs and even jet planes were to be bought through the import-export firm of H. F.

Cordes & Co. of Hamburg, Germany.

When the time was ripe, the invaders would make a landing on Guatemala's south coast, joining with local uprisings and a simultaneous invasion across the Honduran border.

As proof, the white paper offered fac similes of letters allegedly written by two exiled Guatemalan rebels, General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes (now in El Salvador) and Lieut. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (in Honduras). Even if authentic, the letters appeared to prove nothing but the well-known fact that both officers would dearly love to oust their enemies in the Arbenz regime.

The rest of the white paper seemed completely fanciful. TIME Correspondent Harvey Rosenhouse, who by chance had visited Tacho Somoza's Tamarindo estate a fortnight ago, toured the whole area and was able to vouch for the fact that there was nothing like a training camp there.

H. F. Cordes & Co. has sold arms to Guatemala--but to Arbenz' government rather than to any rebels.

Operation Moscow. The U.S. State Department's first reaction was to ignore the white paper. Later State changed its mind and issued a sharply worded statement calling Guatemala's charges "ridiculous and untrue." But State also offered a coolly reasoned explanation of why the white paper had been published at this time. Pointing out that the charge "is perhaps connected . . . with the return from visits to the Soviet Union and Iron Curtain countries of Guatemalan Communists Victor Manuel Gutierrez and Jose Manuel Fortuny," State said: "The United States views the issuance of this false accusation immediately prior to the Tenth Inter-American Conference as a Communist effort to disrupt the work of this conference." In other words, the real plot in the situation was less of a plot than a scenario --a sort of Reichstag fire in reverse, masterminded in Moscow and designed to divert the attention of the forthcoming Inter-American Conference in Caracas from Guatemala as the Western Hemisphere's Red problem child.

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