Liberation

The Radio Liberación broadcasts

In May and June 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency broadcast a daily fake-news radio program into Guatemala. The mission was to create a “terror program” in the style of Orson Wells that would convince the Guatemalan public and military that a popular revolution was underway. This was a key component to the United States’ plan, authorized by President Eisenhower himself, to remove the democratically elected President of Guatemala and install the U.S.’s chosen leader in his place.

The CIA claimed to not have any of the recordings of these fake-news broadcasts. Through a series of improbable events, recordings of the original reels ended up preserved on cassette tape and archived outside of the CIA’s hands. In 2020, we verified and digitally catalogued those tapes so that anyone can access them now.

To our knowledge, historians who have pieced together the story of the 1954 overthrow over the years had never had access to these recordings. And to our knowledge, the few radio hobbyists and journalists who have managed to listen to some of these recordings after the major histories (including the CIA’s own) were published by the 1990s have not studied them alongside the thousands of documents that the U.S. government declassified in the mid-2000s.

Below, we share digitized versions of key broadcasts in this U.S.-sponsored information warfare operation, so you can listen to them yourself—along with detailed descriptions of each broadcast, including those that have not yet been digitized.

Copyright (c) 2020, Snow Media