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Proposals for assassination pervaded both PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS, rather than being confined to an early stage of these programs. Even before official approval of PBFORTUNE, CIA officers compiled elimination lists and discussed the concept of assassination with Guatemalan opposition leaders. Until the day that Arbenz resigned in June 1954 the option of assassination was still being considered.
Discussions of assassination reached a high level within the Agency. Among those involved were is known to have been present at one meeting where the subject of assassination came up. It is likely that was also aware in general terms that assassination was under discussion. Beyond planning, some actual preparations were made. Some assassins were selected, training began, and tentative “hit lists” were drawn up.
Yet no covert action plan involving assassinations of Guatemalans was ever approved or implemented. The official objective of PBSUCCESS was to remove the Guatemalan government covertly “without bloodshed if possible.” Elimination lists were never finalized, assassination proposals remained controversial within the Agency, and it appears that no Guatemalans associated with Arbenz were assassinated. Both CIA and State Department officers were divided (and undecided) about using assassination.
Discussion of whether to assassinate Guatemalan Communists and leaders sympathetic to Communist programs took place in a historical era quite different from the present. Soviet Communism had earned a reputation of using whatever means were expedient to advance Moscow’s interests internationally. Considering Moscow’s machinations in Eastern Europe, role in the Korean War, sponsorship of subversion through Communist surrogates in the Third World, and espousal of an ideology that seemed to have global hegemony as the ultimate objective, American officials and the American public alike regarded foreign Communist Parties as Soviet pawns and as threatening to vital US security interests.
Cold War realities and perceptions conditioned American attitudes toward what political weapons were legitimate to use in the struggle against Communism. It would be over two decades after the events in Guatemala before DCI William Colby prohibited any CIA involvement in assassination and a subsequent Executive Order banned any US government involvement in assassination.
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