Editing CIA A Study Of Assassination (1953) (section)

==PREFACE==

Here you find a transcript of the CIA file titled 'A Study of Assassination'. This 
unsigned and undated (estimated publication date: Dec 31 st , 1953) 19-page 
typewritten file was part of a collection of CIA documents pertaining to 
Operations PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS and was declassified under the 
Freedom of Information Act on May 15, 1997. 

After years of answering Freedom of Information Act requests with its 
standard "we can neither confirm nor deny that such records exist," the CIA 
has finally declassified some 1400 pages of over 100,000 estimated to be in 
its secret archives on the Guatemalan destabilization program. An excerpt 
from this assassination manual appears on the Op-Ed page of The New York 
Times on Saturday, May 31 , 1997. 

Operations PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS were the CIA code-names of the 
1952-54 attempts to topple the Guatemalan government under the 
democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. 

Arbenz Guzman was elected President of Guatemala in 1950 to continue a 
process of socio-economic reforms that the CIA disdainfully refers to in its 
memoranda as "an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the 
touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the 'Banana Republic.'"* The first 
CIA effort to overthrow the Guatemalan president - a CIA collaboration with 
Nicaraguan dictator Anastacio Somoza to support a disgruntled general 
named Carlos Castillo Armas and codenamed Operation PBFORTUNE - was 
authorized by President Truman in 1952. 

As early as February of that year, CIA Headquarters began generating 
memos with subject titles such as "Guatemalan Communist Personnel to be 
disposed of during Military Operations," outlining categories of persons to be 
neutralized through "Executive Action" (= murder) or through imprisonment 
and exile. The "A" list of those to be assassinated contained 58 names, all of 
which the CIA has excised from the declassified documents. 

PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953, carried a 
US$2.7 million budget for "psychological warfare and political action" and 
"subversion," among the other components of a small paramilitary war. But, 
according to the CIA's own internal study of the agency's so-called "K 



That Arbenz Guzman confiscated two-thirds of United Fruit Co.'s land did not endear him to the 
USA. In these days, anti-communist paranoia was at its highest, and a politician who took away 
United Fruit's land (even if to improve the lives of the plantation workers, who were living in 
slavery but by name) hadto be a closet Ruskie. 



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program," up until the day Arbenz Guzman resigned on June 27, 1954, "the 
option of assassination was still being considered." 

While the power of the CIA's psychological war, codenamed "Operation 
SHERWOOD," against Arbenz Guzman rendered that option unnecessary, 
the last stage of PBSUCCESS called for "roll-up of Communists and 
collaborators." 

Although Arbenz Guzman and his top aides were able to flee the country, 
after the CIA installed Castillo Armas in power, hundreds of Guatemalans 
were rounded up and killed. 

Between 1954 and 1990, human rights groups estimate that the repressive 
operatives of sucessive military regimes killed more than 180,000 individuals. 
Among them are the Mayans massacred in 626 documented government- 
sponsored or government-committed attacks on native villages, today only 
rebembered by a rather small number of people abroads as the cause for 
1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, an ethnic Mayan, to start 
her struggle for civil rights and peace in the region. 

This document has been carefully reformatted (and in instances where the 
HTML transcript had obvious errors not related to the original document, 
corrected ) and put into e-book format to be read onscreen or printed out and 
read at leisure by sokol. This introductory text has been in most parts adapted 
from George Washington University's National Security Archive website at 
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ 

sokol, June 2002 



like the doubled lines in the 'Explosives' section. 



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