As jittery President Jacobo Arbenz saw it, every sign spelled plot. Volunteers reportedly were signing up in a "liberation army" gathering across the Honduran border under exiled Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. A retired air force colonel, pretending to check the engine of a sports plane, zoomed mysteriously off to El Salvador, landing in a meadow en route to pick up a friend. Independent newspapers were reporting the hemisphere's growing sentiment against Arbenz' Communist-coddling with a factual thoroughness that the Reds regarded as downright traitorous. One midnight last week, with pressure building up, Arbenz assembled his Cabinet, which decreed a...
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