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The CIA Tactic to Oust Unfriendly Foreign Leaders Is Now Being Used Against Americans

Once again, fake news is being weaponized to undermine our elections

Shane Snow
GEN
6 min readSep 21, 2020

Misinformation newsstand in Manhattan. Person holds magazine that has “Misinformation” on the cover.
A “misinformation” newsstand in New York. Photo: Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

About 66 years ago, the United States ousted the democratically elected president of Guatemala, the popular reformer and FDR fan, Jacobo Árbenz. That story is well-known by now. But over the past year, my research team and I investigated a more obscured aspect of that coup that has taken on surprising relevance today: The primary weapon the U.S. used to overthrow Guatemala’s democracy was fake news. A key part of why the plot worked tells us something important about what Americans need to watch out for as the Russian government tries to interfere with our democracy in 2020.

To get rid of Árbenz in 1954, CIA agents and U.S. State Department officials created a hoax radio station in the style of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds. CIA director Allen Dulles, in a now-declassified memo to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, explained the plan. “The entire effort,” Dulles wrote, was “more dependent upon psychological impact rather than actual military strength.”

Pretending to be Guatemalan patriots, the Americans aired false news reports and what they called “terror broadcasts” for months. At first, the CIA radio station broadcast music and political…

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GEN
GEN

Published in GEN

A former publication from Medium about politics, power, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Shane Snow
Shane Snow

Written by Shane Snow

Explorer, journalist. Author of Dream Teams and other books. My views are my own. For my main body of work, visit www.shanesnow.com

Responses (14)

What are your thoughts?

It’s shameful how you managed to write this piece without a word of condemnation for the US' involvement in Guatemala.
CIA is a terrorist organization.

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It seems you're overlooking the elephant in the room. If the CIA did this elsewhere, what's to stop them from doing it here? Yeah, it might technically be illegal, but that never stopped the CIA before. And Congress basically allows it all to…

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The CIA Tactic to Oust Unfriendly Foreign Leaders Is Now Being Used Against Americans - by the CIA - using it's media outlets which are CNN, NYT, MSNBC, WaPo, The Atlantic etc.

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