Finer points of murder
On the recent history of political assassination
Kwame Nkrumah survived at least five assassination attempts. The first three were bombings targeting his car or house. A grenade was thrown at him, causing minor injuries. In January 1964 an assailant entered the Ghanaian presidential residence, Flagstaff House, and fired five shots from close range. A security guard was killed but Nkrumah was unscathed. “Business went on as usual in Accra”, the New York Times reported. The trouble with many attempted assassinations is that the subject refuses to die. A more recent example was the attack on the then presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, in São Paulo in September 2018. Adélio Bispo de Oliveira stabbed Bolsonaro at a rally, piercing his liver and lungs, but Bolsonaro was up and campaigning again within a couple of weeks and went on to win Brazil’s presidency in October. Would-be assassins consistently overestimate the lethality of their chosen tools, believing it easier to kill a man than it really is.
A Study of Assassination was an anonymously authored CIA handbook for covert political murder written in 1953 and declassified in 1997. The handbook was produced as a “training file” for operation PBSUCCESS, the codename of a CIA plot launched by the Eisenhower administration to topple the Guatemalan government. The CIA planned to assassinate Guatemala’s democratically elected President, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, before opting for a coup in 1954 and the institution of a military regime that went on to kill tens of thousands. But the Study is not only a practical guide. It is also a thorough exploration of assassination with a scholarly, if macabre, sensibility in which the author spends nineteen pages contemplating the finer points of murder.
The handbook begins by classifying assassinations according to the victim’s level of awareness – essentially whether they’re expecting it or have any guards. It further categorizes according to whether the killing needs to be secret or must be seen to be an assassination, and by whether the killer can be treated as expendable. The figure of the lone assassin, it turns out, is not purely a creation of fiction. Ideally an assassin ought to act alone to reduce the chances of the plot being uncovered. Different circumstances call for different kinds of assassin. They all require courage, determination and resourcefulness, but in cases where the killer won’t be slipping away to safety a fanatic is needed. “Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives.” Most of the manual is devoted to the technique of the coup de grâce. Every kind of killing is considered and assessed according to the sureness of death – an outcome that the analyst believes is too often glossed over by would-be assassins who may be “emotionally unstrung” by the pressures of the job. According to the handbook the standard choices of firearms and explosives have more shortcomings than one might think. Contemporary studies agree: in 2007 the National Bureau of Economic Research, an independent non-profit organization in Massachusetts, conducted a survey of assassination attempts on national leaders since 1875. In 298 cases it found only fifty-nine resulted in the target being killed. Firearms and explosives were overwhelmingly the most popular methods, used in more than 85 per cent of attempts. The firearms had a success rate of just 30 per cent and explosives a dismal 7 percent. After all, the CIA analyst says, “the obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded”.
I have reported on three assassinations in the past few years: the killing of the Egyptian prosecutor general, Hisham Barakat, in Cairo in 2015, the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara, Andrei Karlov, in 2016, and last year the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. The circumstances and methods of each were quite different. In Cairo, a group of young Muslim Brotherhood supporters conceived and planned a complex operation to kill the prosecutor general, who was then a central figure in the Egyptian dictatorship. A surveillance team watched Barakat’s movements for weeks. A separate team supplied high explosives made from ammonium nitrate and acetone peroxide. The group parked a used car filled with the explosives on the prosecutor general’s regular route to work and detonated it as his car passed by. The plotters were careful and well organized (the men who detonated the bomb were not told who the target was until days before the operation). But ultimately too many people were involved, which led to the arrest and sentencing to death of almost the entire cell. They were also lucky. As the CIA analyst notes, “time delay or booby-trap devices are extremely prone to kill the wrong man”, or no one at all. Eight others were wounded in the attack and only Barakat, hours later and in hospital, died of his injuries.
The assassination of Ambassador Karlov was less convoluted. Russia’s support for the loyalists in Syria had provoked a good deal of protest in Turkey and Russian diplomats were generally avoiding public appearances. By December 2016, however, the battle for Aleppo had been over for months and some of the anger was dying down. Karlov had been invited to the opening of a photography exhibition in the centre of Ankara. In the terms of the Study he was both aware of potential danger and “guarded”. Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, an off-duty police officer, entered the gallery using his police ID and posed as the ambassador’s bodyguard. He waited until Karlov was giving a speech and shot him several times in the back. There are eerie photographs from before the shooting of Altıntaş standing calmly behind Karlov, looking smart and clean-shaven. Afterwards there was no thought of escape. The killer chanted some verses from a popular jihadist nasheed and shouted “do not forget Aleppo” before being shot dead by the Turkish police. It still isn’t entirely clear whether the killer was part of some wider organization, and if so which one. Perhaps that’s because he followed the strictures of the Study in acting alone and leaving no record of any instructions. He did, however, opt for a gun – a weapon the author says is often used and overrated in its effectiveness. Worse, he used a pistol, and according to the handbook, pistol assassinations “fail as often as they succeed”. If a pistol must be used the author advises expanding rounds for their “extravagant laceration”, advice that Karlov’s shooter must have missed.
The Khashoggi affair was almost entirely botched. Khashoggi was a prominent critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and when he visited the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul to request a marriage certificate he was told to return four days later, when he was ambushed and killed, his body smuggled away. The killing was so brazen that the Saudi state was eventually forced into admitting it. The operation had been led by one of the Crown Prince’s security detail, it took place in the Saudis’ own consulate, and the team used the Saudi government’s own planes, which were easily tracked. They brought along an autopsy pathologist and a body double of doubtful resemblance. Worst of all, the consulate was bugged and the killers left behind a recording. That the Saudis flouted the principles of sound assassination so recklessly in Istanbul, a city in which one could hire a young chancer with a gun and a motorbike for a few hundred dollars, is all the more curious. In the end what was meant to be a covert assassination became an international intrigue – in part because the story seemed like the plot of an airport thriller.
Assassination makes one of its first appearances in English literature in Act one of Macbeth, where it is accompanied by some prudent advice: “if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”. The word entered English from the Arabic Hashasheen, literally “hashish-users”, which was a term of disparagement applied to the Nizari Ismailis, a Shia sect that acquired a reputation in eleventh-century Persia for infiltrating enemy camps and dispatching their commanders with daggers. (In Arabic the word for assassination, ightiyal, is different, coming from an archaic root that means both “to slay using deception” and “a tangled thicket in which a lion may hide”.) With this tactic the Ismaili followers of Hassan-i Sabbah established a statelet in what is now the Qazvin province of Iran and held it using mountain fortresses. They were overthrown when Hulagu Khan overran their stronghold at Alamut in 1256. The Ismailis’ approach would have pleased the CIA’s analyst, who approves of edge weapons. He writes, “a reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe”.
What about poisons? The CIA’s specialist was unable to imagine the strange details of the attempted assassination in Salisbury of the former Russian spy turned British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. Poisons can be very effective, he writes, but their possession can be incriminating. Spraying a door handle with a late Soviet-era Novichok chemical agent – most likely A-234 – may be creative but it led back to Russia too readily. The agents involved, Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, were photographed dozens of times travelling from London to Wiltshire and both ended up with their cover blown. They had unwisely left the poison in a charity collection bin. Aside from the discovery of the assailants, the Novichok proved much less effective than the assassins had hoped. Neither of the Skripals died (though the poison did kill an unrelated victim, Dawn Sturgess). The Study would have recommended a morphine overdose instead – “two grains will suffice”.
Assassins have often resorted to the bizarre and fanciful over the mundane but effective. Mossad tried exploding phones to assassinate Palestinian leaders. In 1978 the Bulgarian dissident writer, Georgi Markov, was killed in London with a ricin-tipped umbrella. The most common method of assassination, according to the handbook, is the contrived accident. Best of all is “a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface”. Done well it apparently causes scant excitement and there are seldom any clues. A push through an unscreened window or down an elevator shaft is ideal if the subject can be lured to an appropriate place. A bridge will also serve, so long as it isn’t over water, and the victim should be tipped over the edge by the ankles. The assassin can then escape or play the horrified witness. If their habits allow for it, the handbook’s author recommends getting the subject drunk beforehand.
I have long thought strangulation to be under-appreciated by killers, particularly in cases where the deed requires a lack of detection. The advantages are plain: it is almost silent, the assassin needs no equipment, and there is no murder weapon to discover. The CIA’s specialist is sceptical, preferring the less refined solution of a blow to the temple using “a hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy”. It is possible to kill a man with bare hands, he writes, “but very few are skillful enough to do it well”. Here there have been some advancements since the 1950s. The growth internationally of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has shown that with little instruction even an unathletic individual can use the Mata Leão, or Rear Naked Choke to great effect. The technique is simple. From behind the subject, one arm is passed under the chin so that the jaw is lined up with the crook of the elbow while the other makes a figure-four behind the neck. once locked, there is no effective defence. Unconsciousness comes in four to six seconds and death within a minute.
Assassinations have technically been illegal under United States law since 1981. As a result US assassinations are called “targeted killings” and most of them are now carried out using the MQ-9 Reaper drone. Over the past two decades the US has used drones to carry out a global assassination campaign on a scale never before seen. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia, US drone strikes have killed thousands, most of whom have never been named. The US government maintains secret kill lists that are ruthlessly checked off using drones (see Clive Stafford Smith, TLS, June 30, 2017). Living in one of the places where the US drone assassination programme operates means knowing that at any moment a missile could descend out of the sky. Barack Obama bears much responsibility for the expansion of drone killings, which took place under his presidency. While the US is the main proponent of drone assassination, it is not the only state to engage in them. In 2015 the UK government assassinated two British citizens, Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, in Syria with a drone strike. The new technology has if anything expanded the tendency to overestimate precision and efficacy. Drone strikes are generally indiscriminate and are at least as prone to kill the wrong person as traditional explosives. In attempting to assassinate the al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, with drones, the US has killed at least 105 people, including seventy-six children. Zawahiri remains alive.
Drones do offer solutions to some of the traditional problems of assassination. At close quarters, assassins often come to an unpleasant end. Assassination is primarily a tool of repressive governments which may not care about killing enemy combatants and civilians en masse, but do prefer their own soldiers to survive. Then there’s the problem of conscience. The CIA handbook has relatively little to say on this point, but it does note that killing is an unpleasant business and “persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it”. With a drone, the operator is put at a distance of thousands of miles from the victim and observes events on a monitor. only the aircraft “sees” the target. The technology needed for autonomous drones does not currently exist, but defence researchers and high-tech industry are working on it. Presumably an autonomous drone would carry out whatever orders its programming defines. Machines are not squeamish.
