The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

Such coups were not without cost. After taking power in 1979, Iran’s Islamist revolutionaries would cite the anti-Mossadeq uprising, which actually had been supported by the clerical establishment, to justify their anti-American animus. And among those embittered by the overthrow of Arbenz was a young Argentinian physician named Ernesto “Che” Guevara who was in Guatemala City as it was being bombed by unmarked American aircraft; this experience helped turn him into a Marxist revolutionary. But the Eisenhower administration never imagined that its regime-change operations would eventually produce such “blowback.” To the contrary, the CIA campaigns in Iran and Guatemala were seen as proof that covert action was an economical and effective alternative to waging war. As one of Eisenhower’s biographers put it, he had a “fundamental belief that nuclear war was unimaginable, limited conventional war unwinnable, and stalemate unacceptable. That left the CIA’s covert action capability.”