The JFK assassination bears remarkable resemblance to a coup d’etat in Guatemala engineered by the CIA under the direction of Allen Dulles during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, contends WND senior writer Jerome Corsi, author of the newly released "Who Really Killed Kennedy? 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations about the JFK Assassination."

The CIA plan was to shoot and kill the Guatemalan head-of-state and place the blame for the assassination on a “patsy,” a person innocent of the crime, who in turn would be murdered to frustrate any subsequent criminal investigation or trial.

Both assassins, as Corsi points out, were ex-military who left the service expressing distinct sympathies for communist Russia.

As WND reported, Corsi raises the provocative question of whether the JFK assassination was a revenge killing masterminded by CIA Director Allen Dulles. Corsi's extensive research shows JFK may have signed his death warrant the day he fired Dulles, accusing his spy chief of lying and manipulating him in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Corsi presents evidence that the Bay of Pigs invasion had been planned by the CIA during the Eisenhower administration as an eleventh-hour “October surprise” designed to catapult Vice President Richard M. Nixon into the White House over his Democratic Party rival, Kennedy.

"Who Really Killed Kennedy," released last month as the 50th anniversary of the assassination approaches, is bolstered by recently declassified documents that shed new light on the greatest "who-done-it" mystery of the 20th century. Corsi sorted through tens of thousands of documents, all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission's report, hundreds of books, several films and countless photographs.

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In the 1950s, the United Fruit Company, then the world’s largest importers of bananas to the United States had some powerful friends in Washington, D.C.

Secret details of JFK's assassination are finally unlocked. Get your autographed copy of "Who Really Killed Kennedy?" by Jerome Corsi now!

Allen Dulles, appointed by Eisenhower to head the CIA in 1953, had ties with the United Fruit Company back to 1933, when it hired Sullivan & Cromwell, the prestigious Wall Street firm in New York where Dulles was a lawyer.

After being retained as legal counsel, Dulles bought a large block of United Fruit stock.

In Washington, Thomas G. Corcoran, the prominent New Deal attorney known as “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, was Harvard-trained, a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and a confident of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Since the 1940s, the company had also retained Edward L. Bernays, the genius consultant credited for inventing public relations as a profession, whose 1928 book "Propaganda" was openly admired by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

The problem began in March 1951 when Jacobo Arbenz, a professional Army officer who was the son of a Swiss pharmacist father who migrated to Guatemala, took over the leadership of the country after a successful military coup.

CIA operative E. Howard Hunt described Arbenz as “a man of modest intellect” who “had married the daughter of a prominent San Salvador family, and she, a doctrinaire Communist, had guided has career from army ranks to the presidency of Guatemala.”

Arbenz’s great sin was to initiate land reform, expropriating 225,000 acres of property from the United Fruit Company, then Guatemala’s largest employer. Ultimately, Arbenz nationalized more than 1.5 million acres, including some of his family land, to turn over to the nation’s peasants. Much of that land belonged to the United Fruit Company.

Finally, President Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon ordered the National Security Council to overthrow the Arbenz regime in Guatemala.

The CIA offered the assignment to E. Howard Hunt.

“I was told that this was currently the most important clandestine project in the world,” Hunt wrote, “and that if I accepted the position, I would be the head of the project’s propaganda and political action staff.”

In discussing his plans for Guatemala, Hunt was particularly open that his assignment included authorization for using covert methods to combat in Guatemala the spread of communist influence in the Western Hemisphere.

To provide the Eisenhower administration the required “plausible deniability,” Hunt determined that within the CIA the Guatemalan operation would be conducted on a “need-to-know” basis.

A cover program was set up under the code name “PB/Success." Hunt’s unit had its own funds, communications center and chain of command within the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division.

See a clip of on the Guatemalan coup from the 1992 A&E special "Spies":

The CIA-engineered Guatemalan coup d’etat

In Honduras, Hunt and the CIA trained a small band of mercenaries under Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan military officer who had escaped from prison after an unsuccessful coup attempt against Arbenz in November 1950, as Arbenz was assuming power.

On June 17, 1954, Armas and his band of mercenaries crossed the Honduran border into Guatemala.

For several days, Hunt and the CIA organized American jets and American pilots to strafe and bombard Guatemala City, the capital of Guatemala.

The truth is that Carlos Castillo Armas did not lead a popular uprising against a communist regime, he lead a mercenary army financed and trained by the CIA in a CIA-engineered coup d’etat.

Behind the scenes were John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his brother Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA.

The propaganda campaign designed by Hunt and Bernays was designed to make Arbenz and his government appear to be an “instrument of Moscow," “a pawn in the communist propaganda campaign” and a “spearhead of the Soviet Union,” as the Arbenz government complained to the United Nations.

On June 25, 1954, Arbenz resigned and went into exile in the Mexican embassy.

On July 3, 1954, Armas returned to Guatemala City aboard a U.S. Embassy airplane. He received a hero’s welcome, all orchestrated by the CIA, from 100,000 cheering Guatemalans who gathered at the palace balcony to usher him into power.

Five days later, a Guatemalan military junta elected Armas to power. In August 1954, Armas suspended all civil liberties. Within a week of taking power, the Armas government arrested 4,000 people accused of participating in communist activity. Within four months, some 72,000 Guatemalans were registered as communists.

Armas proceeded to reverse the reforms put into place by Arbenz. Land appropriated in nationalization efforts was taken away from the peasants and returned to the United Fruit Company.

The assassination and the patsy

Within three years, the United States soured on Armas.

On July 26, 1957, Armas was assassinated at around 9 p.m. as he and his wife prepared to enter the dining room of the Presidential Palace.

Two bullets, one of which severed his aorta, struck him down, killing him instantly.

The assassin, identified as 20-year-old Romeo Vasquez Sanchez, was said to have committed suicide immediately, using the same rifle he had used to kill Armas.

The Guatemalan government identified Sanchez as a disgruntled soldier dismissed from the military in June 1955 because of his “communist ideology.”

Yet, somehow, Sanchez managed to rehabilitate himself sufficiently to have been a member of the Presidential Palace Guard when he committed the assassination.

Little noticed by the international press at the time, Armas was assassinated just four days after trying to close a casino owned by an associate of U.S. mob figure Johnny Rosselli. At the time, Rosselli and Carlos Marcello, the “godfather” from New Orleans, were expanding their presence in Guatemala.

The Guatemalan Army claimed to have a 40-page handwritten diary in which the assassin referred to “a diabolical plan to put an end to the existence of the man who holds power.”

The diary reportedly read: “I have had the opportunity to study Russian communism. The great nation that is Russia is fulfilling a most important mission in history … the Soviet Union is the first world power in progress and scientific research.”

The Guatemalan government LAO claimed to have evidence that linked Sanchez to Moscow. The evidence produced was a card from the Latin American service of Radio Moscow that read: “It is our pleasure, dear listener, to engage in correspondence with you. We are very thankful for your regular listening to our programs.”

Yet, no evidence was ever produced to prove Sanchez was ever a member of the Guatemalan Communist Party.

Parallels with Lee Harvey Oswald

There are many parallels between Sanchez and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Both were ex-military who left the service expressing distinct sympathies for communist Russia.

Assassination researchers Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, in their 2005 book “Ultimate Sacrifice,” point out that Oswald was “a seemingly communist ex-Marine who was able to get a job at a sensitive firm – a Dallas company that helped prepare maps on U-2 spy plane photos – even after he returned from his ‘defection’ to the Soviet Union.”

Waldron and Hartman note that in comparison, the “Guatemala patsy” was described by the Guatemalan government as a communist fanatic who was expelled from the Guatemalan Army only six months before he assassinated Armas. Yet somehow Sanchez had still been allowed to join the Presidential Palace Guard.

How was that possible? Surely the Presidential Palace Guard would have been a sufficiently elite military unit to require a background check before they were hired. Waldron and Hartman further note both were ex-military who were described as communist nuts that killed a president with a rifle, conveniently leaving behind diaries rambling in communist propaganda.

There is no photographic proof that either Sanchez or Oswald were the assassins who pulled the trigger.

Neither had any witnesses who were in the room with them when they pulled the triggers.

Neither made any confession of their crimes.

Both were soon killed themselves – with Jack Ruby shooting Oswald and Sanchez shooting himself, obviating any need for a criminal investigation or trial.

Both the Armas assassination and the JFK assassination were considered open-and-shut cases in which responsible government and law enforcement authorities declared the guilt of Sanchez and Oswald was obvious, such that doubters could be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”

Both assassins were dead and buried a short time after the assassination, avoiding a prolonged time for grief or for unanswered questions to surface.

In neither case has any written record been produced of government interrogation. Oswald was questioned by Dallas Police, the FBI and/or Secret Service after his arrest. Sanchez was interrogated prior to being released from the military because of suspicions he was a communist.

In both cases, Sanchez and Oswald made perfect patsies because authorities openly proclaimed their guilt before trial, and their deaths made sure neither would have the opportunity to counter accusations.

The suicide of Sanchez closed the investigation of the Armas assassination, just as Jack Ruby murdering Oswald closed the investigation of the JFK assassination.

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Secret details of Kennedy's assassination are finally unlocked. Get your autographed copy of "Who Really Killed Kennedy?" by Jerome Corsi now!