Observing our hermanos de armas: United States military attaches in Guatemala, Cuba, and Bolivia, 1950--1964

The military attache system dates from the pre-World War II period. In those years, policymakers in Washington had limited information on the latest overseas military innovations. Attaches reported on these advances at selected embassies abroad. After the war, the U.S. substantially increased its diplomatic and military presence around the globe. This expansion included Latin America, where the U.S. had attaches stationed at every embassy in the hemisphere. Attaches reported mostly on political-military developments because Latin American militaries were heavily involved in politics. Reporting accurately on these matters required that attaches possess language and cultural awareness, skills that hitherto they had not necessarily needed.; This study analyzes the effectiveness the U.S. military attache corps in Latin America from the end of World War II to the Johnson Administration. Until now, there has not been a historical study on attache effectiveness, their training and education, or utilization of their reports by policymakers in Washington. An analytical framework is used to test the effectiveness of this intelligence gathering system and applied in the case studies of: Guatemala, 1950--1954, Cuba, 1954--1958, and Bolivia, 1960--1964.; This study finds that the training and education system of the U.S. Armed Forces did not prepare attaches to report accurately on complex political-military issues. The exceptions were those attaches who brought "skills to the table" that they obtained outside the services, training system---such as language fluency. The Washington bureaucracies that analyzed and disseminated attache reports proved effective in that they utilized attache reports in the formulation of foreign policy. However, this had more to do with the redundancy of information flow than the quality of one particular intelligence agency.; Data for the dissertation draws heavily on interviews with attaches and on the diverse military archives located at National Archives, the Washington National Records Center, the DIA History Office Archive, the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Presidential Libraries, the Military History Institute, and the U.S. Air Force Air War College Library.