A staff historian, Gerald Haines, was assigned to write this brief history of these operations. Planning for assassination included budgeting, training programs, creation of hit teams, drafting of target lists of persons, and transfer of armaments. The CIA, according to this history, did not implement its assassinatio n strategy. But the declassifiers of this study, and other related documents, have deleted the names of the targeted individuals, making it impossible to verify that none of them were killed during or in the aftermath of the coup. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.
Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region.
One of the many assassination lists compiled by the CIA during planning for Operation Success. Before releasing this document to the public, the CIA deleted every name, leaving only the rows of numbers to indicate how many people were targeted. A narrative history of the CIA's role in planning, organizing and executing the coup that toppled Jacobo Arbenz Guzm n on June 27, 1954. Cullather, now a diplomatic historian at the University of Indiana, worked on contract for one year with the CIA, where he was given access to thousands of agency records and secret operational files in order to produce this overview. The result is a surprisingly critical study of the agency's first covert operation in Latin America.