Assassination as Foreign Policy

If the allegations that the CIA fostered assassinations as an instrument of policy were to be proved true, the U.S. would be put in rather rare historical company. Although killing rulers and leaders is a human practice that sometimes seems commonplace, it has usually been the work of individual fanatics, rival factions within a nation, insurrectionists, nationalists seeking to throw off external government, or citizens moved to eliminate a tyrant. Seldom have governments set out to kill the principals of other governments as a matter of cool policy, even with the bloodiest provocation.

According to Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, a senior British intelligence officer during World War II, Winston Churchill issued a directive forbidding his intelligence agencies to get involved in assassination plots against Hitler and Mussolini. Churchill is thought to have feared such attempts would be counter-productive and certain to provoke reprisals of the kind the Nazis visited on Lidice in 1942.

The precepts and precedents for assassination as foreign policy are muddy, as a sampling of history demonstrates. In the 4th century B.C. martial classic The Art of War, Sun Tzu mentions the value of secret agents to a sovereign "in the case of people you wish to assassinate." The Book of Judges describes how Ehud, acting in behalf of the defeated Israelites, assassinated Eglon, the King of Moab. There is the story of the widow Judith saving the Israelites by cutting off the head of Nebuchadnezzar's general, Holofernes, who was besieging Bethulia. Such killings, however, were defiant acts against a conqueror and thus not strictly foreign policy assassinations. Rome was sufficiently bloody with assassinations--the murders of Julius Caesar and Tiberius Gracchus, for example--but these were factional acts, intramural mayhem.

History's classic murders for policy purposes were committed by the 11th-century Moslem sect of Assassins, founded by the fanatically ambitious Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah. Established in a rocky fortress in the Elburz mountains, Hasan propagated his autocratic rule by a program of systematic murder. His killers were the Fida'is (devout ones), young men trained from adolescence in a sort of Green Beret tradition to murder with a variety of weapons.

The Moslem conception of paradise made an ideal recruiting device. An account written by Marco Polo reported that Hasan educated the Fida'is to believe every conceivable bodily pleasure awaited them after death. As a foretaste, he had them heavily drugged and transported to magnificent gardens constructed near his palace; there, under the influence of heavy doses of hashish,* the Fida'is were ministered to for several days by beautiful women, then drugged unconscious again and returned to real life convinced they had seen paradise. After that, they would undertake any suicide mission.

The Thugs in India were another murderous sect, but they killed not for political control but in devotion to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, and for gain. Like the Assassins, the Thugs bore some resemblance to modern spies in their undercover operations, methods of infiltration and disguise.

Political assassination was frequent in highly civilized 8th century Spain. Most murders were committed by rival factions. So, too, in the Ottoman Empire, where assassination was used for political consolidation and transfer of power. When Sultan Murad III died in 1595 leaving 20 sons out of 47 surviving children, Murad's successor, Mohammed III, eliminated his competition by murdering his 19 brothers.

European rulers rarely resorted to assassination abroad, partly because of a sense of fair play inherited from the medieval chivalric code, partly because assassinating rival monarchs inevitably invited retaliation. In the Italian city states of the Renaissance, of course, the Medicis, Viscontis and Sforzas practiced murder against rivals in politics, love or family quarrels with satanic ardor. The first and possibly the worst was Ezzel-ino da Romano, the 13th century despot of Padua and Verona. "Here for the first time," wrote Historian Jacob Burckhardt, "the attempt was openly made to found a throne by wholesale murder and endless barbarities." Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), with his children Cesare and Lucrezia, used assassination for political ends when they eliminated the son of the King of Naples in the 16th century.

As part of a church-state struggle, four knights assassinated Thomas a Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170, believing (with some reason) that Henry II wanted his former friend eliminated. The Reformation brought with it assassination as an instrument of religion, if not foreign policy, especially in the struggle between Roman Catholics and Huguenots in France. Before his accession to the throne, Henry III helped his mother, Catherine de Medicis, plot the assassination of Admiral Coligny and other Huguenot leaders. He himself was assassinated in 1589 by a monk; his successor, Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot who later became a Catholic, was murdered in 1640 by a Catholic religious fanatic.

Elizabeth I of England survived a number of plots on her life, including some morally backed, if not specifically commissioned by the Vatican and Philip II of Spain. But the English monarchs themselves tended to rely on executions under law rather than assassinations. Mary, Queen of Scots, Thomas More and others were thus dispatched.

The seismic collapse of Europe in 1914 brought on the modern age of political assassinations. Russia's Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin had already been killed in 1911 by Dimitri Bogrov, who may have been acting as a revolutionary or a police agent. Then Serbian nationalists assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand--a dissident act that brought on the first World War.

Stalin murdered millions, but seldom assassinated to enforce foreign policy. It might be argued that the elimination of Leon Trotsky in his Mexican exile in 1940 was an act of policy, but he was a Russian. A better example was the death of Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk in 1948, a defenestration that the official report described as suicide but was almost surely an act of the Kremlin.

Hitler's myriad executioners sometimes operated abroad. One early victim was Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, killed in 1934 by Austrian Nazis. A Croatian secret society called the Ustachis, with possible assistance from Mussolini's and Hitler's governments, killed French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou and King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseille in 1934.

But all in all, it is surprising how few clearly government-ordered assassinations of foreign leaders are recorded in history. In some cases, doubtless the bloody trail leading back to a rival capital or throne was simply successfully covered. But in most cases, it seems morality or pragmatic politics allowed the targets, however tempting, to remain untouched. Like modern urban murder, assassination seems historically either a family affair or a psychotic act.

*The word assassin is commonly thought to be derived from hashshashin (consumers of hashish), although it may also come from the Arabic root hassa, which means, among other things, to kill or exterminate.

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