Liberation

Additional Sources

Documents, databases, & BOoks

We assembled the Liberation story from original interviews, found documents and audio footage, declassified files, and historical accounts of various levels of credibility—and checked them against each other. For those who want to dig into the source material themselves, here’s where you can start.

Noteworthy Documents Dump

Even once the CIA and State Department allowed documents concerning Operation PBSuccess to be declassified and viewed by the public, two problems have hampered researchers: First, declassifying documents and making documents easy to find are two different things. One notices that the CIA’s Freedom of Information Reading Room’s search and browse functions are a far cry from Google, and that file names are jumbles of letters and numbers with no particular relation between numerical values and dates or subjects. For this reason, we’ve decided to lay out the most relevant documents that we collected after countless hours of trolling through these archives.

Click here to view the document dump.

Key Liberation Documents

Here’s our curated collection of documents that tell the Liberation story.

Government Document Databases

Foreign Relations of the United States Archives (1952–1954 Guatemala)

HistoryLab Project (searches gov. databases that are more difficult to browse)

CIA Freedom of Information Reading Room

Relevant Histories, Memoirs, & Other Books

Part of the difficulty in unpacking what really happened in the Liberation story is the fact that the propaganda men embellished or falsified information in their own CIA reports and memoirs, which then went on to be referenced in histories and studies by more neutral parties. Here, we lay out the main books that have been used as source material for news reports, official U.S. histories, other books, or encyclopedia entries, along with relevant information about their issues.