A Study of Assassination
This document is an instructional guide on assassination found among the CIA’s training files for “Operation PB Success” –– the agency’s covert 1954 operation that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in June 1954. The CIA released it to the public on May 23, 1997, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Assassination was indeed a part of the CIA’s plans in Guatemala. According to an internal CIA history, the agency drafted lists of Guatemalans “to eliminate immediately in event of [a] successful anti–communist coup.” Planning for assassination included budgeting, training programs, creation of hit teams, drafting of target lists of persons, and transfer of armaments. The CIA history states that “until the day that Arbenz resigned in June 1954 the option of assassination was still being considered.”
According to the official history, the assassination plans were never implemented. But names of the targeted individuals were deleted when the documents were made public, making it impossible to verify that none of them were killed during or in the aftermath of the coup.
In the 1970s, revelations about CIA assassination plots led to strict prohibitions against U.S.–sponsored assassinations.