It was just past midnight in Guatemala City in May 1954 when a station calling itself the Voice of Liberation cut into the airwaves.
It told terrified Guatemalans that a rebel army was already inside the country, advancing fast, unstoppable, and that resistance was pointless.
Families gathered around their radio sets that night, listening closely to catch every word, certain they were tuned into a genuine voice of the resistance. They pictured a ragged band of patriots crouched somewhere in the highlands, transmitting between gunfights, risking their lives to warn the nation of what was coming.
The truth is, they weren't.
The signal was coming from a CIA facility outside Opa-locka, Florida, three thousand kilometres away. The "unstoppable" invasion force it described was, in reality, a few hundred men who had barely crossed the border.
And that deception was not incidental to what was happening in Guatemala. It was central to it.
