The Wars of Assassination

By Roger Rosenblatt

Shortly before noon on the morning of July 22, the sort of day when Washingtonians go Southern and fan themselves and sigh, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, late of the Shah's employ, strode to answer the bell of his contemporary rustic two-story home and found Iran standing in the doorway. You may imagine his surprise. Who would have thought to find Iran in such a place; in tasteful suburban Bethesda, Md., no less; dressed up as a postman, of all things; with a gun in its hand to boot? But there it was, large as death for Mr. Tabatabai to contemplate in the second or two before his homeland in disguise made its special delivery to his abdomen. Assassins are not what they used to be.

What has changed, especially in the past few years, is that assassination has become an official form of warfare. National leaders like Libya's Gaddafi and Syria's Assad announce open season on their enemies, and whether or not they actually hire the hit men or, more likely, merely encourage assassins by their lusty rhetoric, they leave little doubt of their connivance. Not far from where Mr. Tabatabai met his postman, former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier was blown apart on Embassy Row in 1976. The day before the Tabatabai assassination, former Syrian Prime Minister Salah Eddin al-Bitar was shot to death in Paris. Two days before that, former Prime Minister Nihat Erim of Turkey was murdered in a suburb of Istanbul. That brings to nearly 1,000 the number of people killed in these "wars" since 1970--not all under the tutelage of governments, yet enough to create a problem. There is not much the world can do about a lone screwball or a roving band, but is it equally powerless to deal with an assassin state?

Of course, in order to stop these assassinations one must first sincerely want to do it. One big reason that places like Libya, Syria and Iran may get away with murder in other countries is that those other countries have decided that they prefer oil to order. The absence of sanctuaries in the modern world must be of general help as well. He who would mow down an archbishop saying Mass in a chapel in San Salvador (or storm a mosque, or sack an embassy) would hardly hesitate to invade Bethesda. The public heart recoils at such goings-on, but briefly. Before Mr. Tabatabai's murder, someone suggested to his neighbors, the Milks, that they paint a purple arrow on their garage, with the message: "The Milks live here--Tabatabai lives over there." Just funning, of course, but on the money.

To many, assassination appears to have become a kind of international adventure serial, available both in paperback and next door, and so is to be considered as something quasi-fictional, set apart by razzle-dazzle technology and melodrama from the life of real grief and real blood. The bestselling Matarese Circle has at the base of its plot the idea of the original assassins, the hashshashin, a bunch of hashheads who practiced contract murders at the behest of an "Old Man of the Mountains." We have had Three Days of the Condor, one Day of the Jackal, even a Day of the Dolphin--all equally preposterous and plausible, thanks to the strapped imaginations of real-life bureaucrats. Who but a hack could have thought up 1978's Bulgarian defector "poison umbrella" caper in London? The first time a dolphin is hauled in for questioning, who will giggle?

Perhaps fiction writers have hit on a truth that murderous regimes have always known: that many people secretly admire murders, even real ones, provided they can be kept at a respectable distance and performed with a touch of class. After all, murder can be the most romantic, if temporary, solution to a problem, which is why the Romantics could not get enough of it. Thomas De Quincey, the Romantic essayist, went so far as to propose "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." Historian Franklin Ford observed, in a brilliant article in Harvard magazine (February 1976), that throughout most of the 18th century there were no important political murders in Europe or America (until the final decade, when the Age of Reason could no longer contain itself) primarily because that period was notably short on fanaticism. Not so the 20th century. It has given birth to a cause a minute, and causes make heroes, and heroes targets.

It may also be that the world has never really shaken its revolutionary cast of mind since that final decade of the 18th century, when the French Reign of Terror wed murder to freedom. All the revolutions since have sealed the knot, if only theoretically, and somewhere in the modern mind may lie the automatic connection of assassination with something good and hopeful. That would be especially true of places where corrupt administrations are unseated at gunpoint. The assassin states in turn may depend on that connection, trusting that the elimination of ex-employees of defunct governments will be held akin to the expunging of the Tsars.

The leaders of those states might argue that assassination is booming because it is in fact better than bona fide warfare, better for everybody for being relatively neat (a black van, a bloody lawn) and involving fewer losses. That is the practical argument, and on the surface it holds. The moral argument is much harder to make because the justifications will vary with particular situations. Yet tyrannicide has had strong moral defenders throughout history. In the years following the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, in which 20,000 French Huguenots were slaughtered on the hysterical command of Charles IX, a famous treatise called Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos was drawn up by a group of French political theorists known as the Monarchomachi (bearers of the sword against monarchs) that specifically outlined the circumstances for doing in a tyrant. Assassins have even been rewarded. Ching Ko, who made a stab at ending the hegemonic ambitions of Emperor Ch'in Shih Huang-ti (259-210 B.C.), was elevated to Chinese folklore. Those who killed Trujillo in 1961 have long been honored by the Dominican Republic.

In fact, America is one of the few places that has taken a consistently dim view of assassinations, perhaps because the country came to life without a reign of terror, perhaps too because those who have yelled or thought "Sic semper tyrannis!" in America have murdered some of the country's best-loved leaders. Hardly an American can hear the word assassination without silently mourning the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. When the American public learned of the CIA's brainstorm to poison Castro's cigars, the laughter covered the shame. Still, there are plenty of Americans among others who, looking backward, would gladly have seen Hitler and Stalin knocked off in their prime, and then fretted about the moral issue later. The trouble is that tyrannicide can be habit-forming. A member of the Argentine federal police recently told TIME's George Russell: "If the U.S. had not been blind, how much it could have saved by killing Khomeini in France. All that was needed was $2,500 for the contract and a good meal. But they did not have the necessary vision."

The main flaw in the tyrannicide argument these days, of course, is that the current brand of murder-by-government has nothing to do with tyrannicide. Khomeini may claim that the execution of those who served the Shah is killing a tyrant by proxy, but, as is the case with so many claims from the frenzied quarters, that is deadly nonsense. The purpose of such murders, which is one of the two principal purposes of modern assassinations, is revenge--revenge affixed to an insurance policy against past enemies having a future. When Stalin engaged a fellow to place an ice ax in Trotsky's head, he was making a similar point.

That kind of killing is only distinguishable from pure terrorism, the other principal purpose of modern assassinations, by a matter of intention. Like the assassin state, the outlaw terrorists, even those who destroyed 83 innocents in the Bologna train station on Aug. 2, might also claim that their work is superior to conventional warfare. On moral grounds, they have their all-encompassing, all-justifying cause. And at the level of effectiveness they may point to whole sections of cities reduced to battle zones because of their bloody diligence. The real difference between assassin states and terrorists is that the states are not out to menace other countries as much as they are their own citizens. In a way, the leaders of these states have the best of both odd worlds: they are in power, and they act as if they are continually trying to usurp it.

Apparently these leaders believe that murder will ensure their longevity. They could be right, but history is discouraging on this point. Though a natural target for tyrannicide, Charles IX died of tuberculosis at the age of 23; but his brother Henry III, who was responsible for a couple of assassinations of his own, was stabbed to death by a fanatic, and his cousin and successor, Henry IV, who deserved much better, met the same end. In South America, Pizarro, who assassinated the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, was himself assassinated, thus setting a trend on that continent. Jean Paul Marat, who advocated bloodbaths for the French Revolution, wound up with a bloodbath to himself. Nestled in his suds, he assured Charlotte Corday, before she stabbed his heart, that his enemies "shall soon be guillotined."

If history does not favor assassins, literature offers no encouragement either. Characters like Brutus and Macbeth admitted such impediments to the success of their dark deeds as guilt and contemplation. One of the most interesting studies in assassination, Alfred de Mussel's Lorenzaccio, offers a bit more hope to Gaddafi & Co. in that everyone agrees that the murdered Alessandro de Medici was a first-class scoundrel. Yet, like Hamlet, the assassin Lorenzo goes to pieces in the play. The real Lorenzo was judged as much a traitor as a liberator. And De Mussel's Lorenzo, like his real-life model, is assassinated in turn, presenting yet one more example of lethal pigeons coming home to roost.

But an appreciation of the humanities is not the long suit of political murderers. Simple folk on the whole, they traffic mainly in the capacity of human fear, especially the fear of sudden death, and they trust the raddled citizenry to watch and sit still. The claiming of credit for assassinations is thus at once a show of force and a philosophy. The governments of Syria, Libya, Iran and elsewhere are not to be counted on for pity, or for maintaining a sense of international community. They may, however, be counted on for killings, which often give governments a stature they might never earn by more subtle or complex means.

If such attitudes were perceived in an individual, he would be exported to the lunatic fringe of whatever society he sought to live in. Feverish, volcanic, he would appear to be emotionally out of this world, existing in something very close to a social vacuum, in which his personal or political cause may mature and fester until it is both ripe and rotten for some terrible act. Love and respect are probably beyond his reach; he merely wishes to be noticed. If society should notice him by putting him away, his dreams would be both dead and complete.

When a government proves to function in a social vacuum, the process of putting it away is more of a problem. Short of war there are words of protest, but in the middle distance the assassin has free rein. The rein might be shortened considerably if the words of protest were harsher or more frequent, or, better still, if they were attached to an economic quarantine. To treat killer governments as pariahs would only be fair, after all, and the purpose of a quarantine is to prevent contagion. To date, however, the world seems to be going on the hope that the postman always rings twice, that the assassins of Mr. Tabatabai and others may eventually turn on their masters. So it opens the door and awaits the mail. By Roger Rosenbaltt

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