and search) and the development of a "joint operations plan" for inter-agency coordination. A major feature of the new pacification strategy was the synchronization of the military and police forces in carrying out extralegal counter-terror activities. With money and support from US advisors, President Enrique Peralta Azurdia established a Presidential Intelligence Agency in the National Palace, under which a telecommunications database known as the Regional Telecommunications Center or La Regional existed, linking the National Police, the Treasury Guard, the Judicial Police, the Presidential House and the Military Communications Center via a VHF-FM intracity frequency. La Regional also served as a depository for the names of suspected "subversives" and had its own intelligence and operational unit attached to it. This network was built on the 'Committees against Communism' created by the Central Intelligence Agency after the coup in 1954. The Guatemalan army general staff launched "Operation Limpieza" -Operation Cleanup-, an urban counterinsurgency program under the command of Colonel Rafael Arriaga Bosque. This program coordinated the activities of all of the country's main security agencies (including the Army, the Judicial Police and the National Police) in both covert and overt anti-guerrilla operations. Under Arriaga's direction, the security forces began to use extralegal tactics against the PGT. In 1966, the CIA station in Guatemala addressed the capture and execution of five people who reportedly had entered into Guatemala from Mexico, illegally. These men were tortured for two days and then executed by security officers. Among the victims was the leader of the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajadores (PGT), Victor Manuel Gutiérrez . These actions occurred within the context of a series of coordinated joint raids by combined forces of the Judicial Police and the G-2 (the operational unit of military intelligence, S-2) in which 28 PGT members and associates were seized by Guatemalan security forces in early March 1966 and subsequently vanished. The incident became famous as the first case of mass "disappearance" in Guatemala's history and one of the first uses of forced disappearances as a counterinsurgency tactic in Latin America. In July 1966, president Julio Caesar Mendez Montenegro signed a pact which gave the army and security services the green-light to apply "any means necessary" in fighting insurgents and internal opposition groups. The Army General Staff subsequently assumed all control over the security forces and appointed Vice-Defense Minister, Col. Manuel Francisco Sosa Avila as the main "counterinsurgency coordinator". In addition, the Army