Here you find a transcript of the CIA file titled ‘A Study of Assassination’. This unsigned and undated (estimated publication date: Dec 31st, 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.

This book is a synthesis of information gathered through observation, discussion, investigation and experience over the last ten years.

Having compiled this volume I did not easily discover any method of distributing it since my own facilities and finances are, as is customary with professors, necessarily limited.

Further, the placement of this volume in anyone’s hands constituted to some degree a considerable risk to myself until I realized that there actually were two American groups in the field of mental science who were entirely above suspicion, particularly since they were often mentioned as Soviet targets by my informers and were mentioned in the actual text of this book as being antipathetic to this Soviet programme. These two groups were the Christian Scientists and the Dianeticists. Christian Science is an American Religion, intensely patriotic. Dianetics is the only entirely American development in the field of the human mind.