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How to Kill Your Enemies
706 Plays3 days ago
Today, we speak with Professor Luca Trenta on assassinations, targeted killings, and the history of such tactics.
Dr Trenta is an Associate Professor in International Relations in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and International Relations, Swansea University. His research focuses on the US government’s involvement in the assassination of foreign officials from the Cold War to the present day. He is widely published in the field of covert action, foreign policy, risk, and presidential decision-making. His latest book, “The President's Kill List: Assassination in US foreign policy since 1945” is available from Edinburgh University Press and will be linked in the show notes.
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Transcript
Series Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. um In each episode, we'll sit down with leading experts to discuss dangerous activities. From assassinations and airliner shootdowns through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the Dangerous Act to seeking to conduct these operations and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them. In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions.
00:00:34
Speaker
However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
Expert Introductions
00:01:01
Speaker
back correct nine one one what the I'm Louis A. Poussin, the founder and co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm a researcher in the field of intelligence and espionage with a PhD in intelligence studies from Loughborough University. I'm an adjunct professor in intelligence at Science Pro Paris. And in my day job, I provide geopolitical analysis and security focused intelligence to private sector corporations. My name is Colin Reed. I am a former US intelligence professional now working in the private sector to bring geopolitical insights and risk analysis to business leaders.
00:01:36
Speaker
So today we're discussing how to kill your enemies with Dr. Luca Trenta. Dr. Trenta is an Associate Professor in International Relations in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and International Relations at Swansea University. His research focuses on the US government's involvement in the assassination of foreign officials from the Cold War to the present day. He's widely published in the field of covert action, foreign policy, risk and presidential decision making.
00:01:59
Speaker
And his latest book, The President's Kill List, assassination in US foreign policy since 1945, is available from Edinburgh University Press and will be linked in the show notes. Luca, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
The Genesis of Interest in Assassinations
00:02:13
Speaker
so The question we always like to ask our guests is, how did you get into your line of work? you know This is such an interesting topic of research, and I imagine quite a challenging one. so how How did you find yourself researching covert assassinations? I think it probably started between the end of my PhD and my first sort of academic post. At one point, the Obama administration became so the the drone presidency. There was a clear peak in the number of drone strikes conducted by President Obama in his first term. And you and your listeners might recall at one point the administration also came out with a series of so-called national security speeches. Quite a few US officials gave speeches at the National Defense University and other organizations to justify the conduct of drone strikes. And what struck me at the time was that of course there was an international legal component to this.
00:03:06
Speaker
but There was also a component that i had to do with US domestic law. and The argument that was repeated all the time was that targeted killings via drones did not amount to assassination because for the US government, assassination was prohibited by um a ban contained in an executive order.
00:03:25
Speaker
And so that's what sort of picked my interest because i thought this targeted killing sure look a lot like assassination but at the same time we're saying that we're not doing assassination because they are prohibited so my first question was how how did this prohibition on assassination come about what happened.
00:03:44
Speaker
to make ah the US government put on paper a prohibition on assassination. and So I started to look into it and it became quite apparent that it was one of the consequences of the mid-1970s media and congressional investigations on the conduct of the CIA, which we can talk about later on if interested.
00:04:06
Speaker
But it also became apparent that pretty quickly and especially starting in the 1980s with the Reagan administration, this prohibition started to be either eroded or circumvented. And so that's what really became my interest.
Book Development and Assassination Concepts
00:04:19
Speaker
In all honesty, I had no intention of writing a book on the topic, but at one point there was a prize by a somewhat famous trade publisher.
00:04:30
Speaker
for academics wanting to write their first book. And so I submitted a book proposal there. I was shortlisted. But I'm not really sure what happened, if either if if it's because of the pandemic or some other reason. After the shortlisting, the prize was actually never assigned. It completely disappeared. And at that point I thought, well, already have a book proposal, I might as well see who else might be interested. And that's how basically I came to write a book on the topic. And I decided to go back all the way to the so-called golden age of assassination and trace the process somewhat to the present day.
00:05:06
Speaker
So you've you've kind of given us a little teaser there in that in that intro. Let's scene set, let's start with the definitions. What do we mean when we use the term assassination? This has been a very difficult question throughout my research. I think both my research for the book and my current research, because it is an incredibly contested concept. And if you see in recent years, there have been a lot of trade books published on assassination. I think the Day of the Assassin, Assassin's Deeds, plenty of books have covered the history of assassination.
00:05:39
Speaker
But what they tend to do, which I i don't particularly agree with, is to conflate an assassination conducted by the sort of and know the lone wolf lunatic who wants to assassinate a political leader or a particularly prominent individual with what I would rather call state-sponsored assassinations. So assassinations in which there is the involvement of a state or a state intelligence agencies or in any case proxies who are acting on behalf of the state. So to my mind, I think what I'm interested in is really state-sponsored assassinations, and I would define those as the killing or the attempted killing of a politically prominent individual. And in these cases, I am interested in those that take place outside an armed conflict, so in a context of keystime, if we can call it that.
00:06:32
Speaker
And for the purposes of my book, I think primarily to make the book manageable, I've made an additional decision to only focus on the killing or attempted killing of foreign officials. So leaders or officials of another state, as opposed to the leaders of, say, insurgencies, terrorist groups, or other prominent individuals.
00:06:57
Speaker
Sticking with that definition, know your book is called The President's Kill List. If we focus on US foreign policy, is it always a presidential decision when it's at that level of target?
Presidential Involvement in Assassinations
00:07:07
Speaker
I would say that in most cases, it is either a presidential decision or something the president that does not express opposition against, for lack of a better a better way of putting it. in In a couple of examples, we come really, really close to have a presidential order in archival documents, perhaps the most famous case and the the the moment in which we get closest
00:07:31
Speaker
to a presidential order there is with Patrice Lumumba of Congo in the 1970s. A couple of National Security Council people testified that they were convinced that they had heard President Heisenauer give the order to assassinate Lumumba. In other cases, we can be fairly confident that the president was in the room when assassination was discussed.
00:07:54
Speaker
Or the president had been told that the most likely outcome of US actions would be the assassination of a foreign leader. For example, in the case of Godin Diem of South Vietnam,
00:08:07
Speaker
U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Harry Cabot Lodge clearly tells President Kennedy that the most likely outcome of the the troubles in South Vietnam and of a potential coup is an assassination, and Kennedy simply seems to move on. and Another case that is very much at the center of all the Kennedy conspiracy theories whether Kennedy knew or not about the the assassination plots against Fidel Castro. We have at least a couple of cases in which the president is clearly in the room when assassination is discussed with only a sort of thinly disguised euphemisms or sort of circumlocutus language, but it is fairly clear. In other occasions, I think it it is less
00:08:54
Speaker
less of an option for researchers and much harder to pinpoint a presidential responsibility because the United States has been really effective in creating not only plausible deniability surrounding the role of the US government. so conducting covert operations in a manner that the role of the US government can be plausibly denied, but also in creating presidential deniability that is a situation in which in these covert operations, the role of the president should not be apparent. And of course, in in most cases, nothing or very, very little is put to paper. It's unlikely that it will find an order to assassinate a foreign leader either put to paper or recorded.
00:09:39
Speaker
And certainly if it if it has been put to paper and it has been recorded, that document would not be declassified for us to ever read. Just to add that I think the situation has been somewhat clearer in more recent times, you might recall,
00:09:53
Speaker
For example, under the Obama administration, it was clear that drone strikes, especially against high value targets, were decided by the president in what were called, at the time, terror Tuesdays. So the president would meet with his counter-terrorism advisor, John Brennan, and together they would decide whether a certain target deserved to be killed by a drone strike or not.
00:10:18
Speaker
So you've been telling us quite a bit there about the sort of methodological similarities you've seen in these assassinations being approved. Are there other similarities in the methods of assassinations over time that you see? Is there commonality in process or in methods or in tools that you've observed?
00:10:35
Speaker
I mean, although it's ah it's a word that I don't actually use in the book, i we are using it in an upcoming volume that we look at more generally as state-sponsored assassination. I think it's interesting to make a distinction between certain modalities and methods. So with modalities, we generally mean what actors are involved in the assassination, and with methods, we generally mean what weapon was used to actually kill the target.
Methods and Cases of Assassination
00:11:01
Speaker
And I think they have tended to vary over time. I think very direct assassination attempts have been rare. We've had a few occasions in which, for example, poison or rifles were passed to a CIA chief of station for the CIA chief of station to give to his individual conduct a contact for them to be used against.
00:11:25
Speaker
a target, again, the case of Lumumba is particularly important. Here you have Sydney Gottlieb, who is the chief scientific officer of the CIA traveling to Congo, meeting directly with CIA Chief of Station Richard Devlin, and giving Richard Devlin poison to be put in food or toothpaste to kill Lumumba. The poison plot never actually materializes primarily for issues of access to Lumumba, but this is a very direct assassination plot. You have similar plots either developed or at least, if not implemented, at least thought about in again in the case of Fidel Castro, in which you have various sorts of light poisons and explosive devices um that are considered for Fidel Castro.
00:12:16
Speaker
But I think overall, more generally, the CIA has been much better and the US government has been much more willing to support assassination more indirectly, to provide weapons training or at times very specific advice to law collectors who had been involved in efforts to overthrow a particular leader. At times, this advice is very, very specific. It looks at specific assassination methods. It they'll almost provides feedback on assassination plots. For example, there is a famous case of CIA officials meeting with individuals in the Dominican Republic who are plotting the overthrow of dictator Rafael Trujillo in the early 1960s.
00:13:06
Speaker
And they discuss what the best methods for the assassination might be. Poison is considered, a pills routine is considered in which poison pills that look exactly the same as the pills Trujillo is taking are put in the same box for him to get a poison pill while he's getting his normal pills. But at other point, you have CIA officials reviewing options as to where to place a car bomb, for example.
00:13:35
Speaker
They have pictures sent back to headquarters in Langley to say, do you think this is a good spot for for a car bomb or is it better to put it somewhere else? Eventually, they both settle on actually not using a car bomb, but using a shootout of Trujillo when he comes back from visiting one of his one of his mistresses. So this indirect approach has been much more much more common and generally in the context of what we would call covert regime change, so efforts to replace violent, most of the times violent efforts to replace ah a certain leader. But I think in more recent times, we also have much more direct
00:14:16
Speaker
options to assassinate. So we can't really say that the direct approaches sort of decline over time because an option that has been used especially starting in the 1980s has been aerial bombing. So the bombing of military targets or command and control facilities associated with a certain leader with the assumption that the leader will be present at these targets when when we are bombing them, or with intelligence, that kind of confirms in most cases that the leader will be present, although in many cases it's not been present. And in one particular case, in the case of Mahmar, Gaddafi of Libya, I have an argument in the book that they the maybe the reason why it wasn't present is not the one we generally considered.
00:15:06
Speaker
so That's fascinating. you know One question that leads me to want to ask, you sort of teased it there the idea of you know explosive devices targeting Castro. We've all heard about you know some pretty outlandish methods of of assassination, such as exploding cigars. In the book, you talk about the idea of things like mind control being experimented with as a potential method. Tell us more about that and some of these kind of more out there methods that various agencies have toyed with.
00:15:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. There are plenty of, I mean, how to say, exotic assassination methods that that are considered the The mind control one, I think, comes about in the early 1950s. You have the whole set of experiments that would eventually become MKUltra, so efforts at mind control, brainwashing, and this type of thing. And the large component of these projects, at least initially and under a different codename, under the codename of Artichoke,
00:16:06
Speaker
is the use of hypnosis to either gather information from individuals or to make individuals commit acts ah that they would not normally commit. And one of the experiments that is posed is whether we can convince an individual to kill a politician of a foreign country, or as the document suggests, of the US government. ah Where it says US government, there is a star and a note at the bottom that says only as an experiment or this sort of things. So the idea is is basically to convince through a combination of hypnosis and drugs, an individual to kill somebody both either as ah as a standalone operation or as a part.
00:16:52
Speaker
of a broader plot. And there is a key distinction, I think an interesting distinction here between experiments within a controlled environment. For example, the CIA and CIA officials carry out a lot of experiments on unwitting secretaries. So they hypnotize one secretary and they convince her to shoot another secretary, of course, with an unloaded gun. And these experiments actually work. The secretary does shoot.
00:17:19
Speaker
the other secretary or they carry around boxes and have no recollection and so on. The idea of would be to create the perfect assassin who doesn't know that he has been involved in an assassination plot.
00:17:33
Speaker
ah When this controlled environment is actually transferred in real life, in a real life case, it becomes much, much harder. A so-called artichoke team, so a team of individuals working for this project are asked whether they would be able to sort to convince an individual to carry out this this type of operation. And their response to what ah is defined as an hypothetical problem is actually no. They will not be able to control an individual in such a manner to make him carry out an assassination and have no recollection of doing so. Of course, this artichoke document has also been at the center of a lot of conspiracy theories, particularly for the reference to a US government official
00:18:20
Speaker
if your listeners are into conspiracy theories, the one surrounding Robert Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan, the killer of Robert Kennedy, seemingly in the moments after the assassination, the killer had no recollection that he had just pulled the trigger. And so the combination of these documents coming out and these events happening as sort of nurture the whole series of conspiracy theories and Connected to the same program is also the Charles Manson murders and the connection between Charles Manson and the MK ultra program so it's always very difficult in these sort of circumstances to distinguish between fact and fiction and fiction and conspiracy it's always very very tricky exercise.
00:19:08
Speaker
The other sort of exotic devices come up primarily in the context of Fidel Castro and you've mentioned some of them you have explosive cigars at one point and explosive seashell is considered to exploit Castro's passion for scuba diving.
00:19:25
Speaker
in the same context, a poison scuba diving suit is considered, and a guy is picked to deliver to Castro a poison scuba diving suit, but he admits that he had just given another one non-poisoned to Castro, so it would look odd if he were to gift him sort of two scuba diving suits in the space of a week, it would look a bit suspicious. But you have plenty of these of these plots, and I think an important component here is that they tend to to exploit a specific passion of the victim, whether it is cigars, scuba diving, or this sort of thing. We've seen it also in the practice of other states. Israel, for example, has conducted assassinations using poison chocolates because they knew that the target liked chocolates and a specific type of chocolate, and so they poisoned chocolates. So I think when it comes to these exotic methods, there is a keen element of
00:20:20
Speaker
getting to know the target and being able to exploit their passions, their taste to create assassination devices. It should be said that none of the very exotic assassination devices developed against Fidel Castro worked. And according to some accounting, Castro survived about 600 assassination attempts on his life. So those didn't work.
00:20:47
Speaker
So in the president's kill list, you talk about how the US policy on assassinations went from direct to indirect over time, you know moving from 600 exploding cigars to a more sort of implicit version of of assassination. Can you talk us through how that transition happened and and why it happened?
00:21:04
Speaker
I'm not entirely sure it is it is a chronological transition. There isn't really a decline in direct assassination attempt and arise in other methods. and This is actually something that I discovered as I was researching the book. Initially, my idea for the book was to divide the book into two halves, one on direct assassination attempts and another one on indirect assassination attempts.
Evolving Tactics in Assassination
00:21:27
Speaker
But as I started to research each case, it actually became apparent that I could not possibly divide in such a neat manner each episode because the two the two methodologies, so to say, tended to go and hand in hand. You would have direct efforts that went alongside indirect efforts or indirect approaches being a sort of backup plan in case a direct one the direct one failed.
00:21:53
Speaker
And even in more recent times, for example, in the confrontation between the Clinton administration or the George H. W. Bush administration before it, and Saddam Hussein, you have the same combination of approaches. There is a more indirect one which relies on fostering a coup within Iraq in the early 1990s or creating the conditions for an internal sort of silver bullet type of operation in which somebody high up in the Iraqi military would get rid of Saddam Hussein and do the US a favor. But at the same time, you have the development of i aerial bombing operations that try to target infrastructure and command and control buildings under the assumption that either Saddam or individuals who are key in the survival of his regime will be present.
00:22:45
Speaker
at these military targets. So I'd like to follow this up by talking a bit more about how people find themselves in scope to be targeted for assassination. you know how How does someone find themselves on a ah kill list? It's a very interesting question. I think one of the things that I found um in my book and And by all means, it's always difficult to say that the book is an exhaustive list of all the assassinations that the United States has conducted because there is an element of we can only talk about what we know something about. And there were a few cases that didn't make it to the book ah because I could not find sufficient evidence. So I left them out. We can talk about them later in the episode if this is of interest. But I'm also guessing that there are a lot of sort of
00:23:32
Speaker
unknown unknowns to use Donald Rumsfeld, the famous dictum. So there are cases that we don't know about because there is no material to know about them. But the ones that come up, I think there is a clear pattern in which targets for assassinations have been predominantly foreign leaders and officials from what used to be called the third world or is currently called the Global South. And this for a whole series of reasons, I think. First, for reasons of access, leaders of main enemies of great powers are much harder targets to get to. It's much easier to kill Patrice Lumumba than it is to kill Joseph Stalin, for example, at at in the same in the same decades. Second, I think there is an effort by the United States
00:24:25
Speaker
to interfere or intervene in process of decolonization this is true between the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties so assassination forms part of broader. Policies of covert regime change sometimes it is a first option sometimes it is a last resort but it does always feature to a certain extent as a contingency.
00:24:52
Speaker
And sometimes assassination comes about, even against former U.S. allies, for example, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Godin Diem of South Vietnam.
00:25:05
Speaker
When they've become a sort of strategic liability for the United States, when they pose a problem for the United States either in the region or they are an obstacle to the pursuit of ah the preferred policies of the United States, for example,
00:25:23
Speaker
The United States had become really keen to convince the organization of American states to do something against Fidel Castro because he was a dictator. But other governments in the region were telling the United States, how can you but can you possibly complain about Castro being a dictator while you are supporting Rafael Trujillo, who has like a brutal dictatorship that has been going on for decades.
00:25:45
Speaker
And so, removing Trujillo became a strategic priority for the United States. In South Vietnam, the regime of Goten Siam is perceived by the United States as actually being detrimental in the conduct of the war against the North, and it is considered that the generals who are plotting against them will be much better at conducting such conflict. It doesn't actually prove to be true.
00:26:11
Speaker
But this is the thought at the time so there is an element certainly of. Access which defines leaders within the global south there is an element of intervening in the fight for the colonization and preventing certain countries from siding with.
00:26:30
Speaker
the Soviet Union, there is an um element of individuals who are considered a threat to the US preferred policy option or a strategic interest. and General Renation, neither of Chile, is also a case in point because it was considered the leading figure that would prevent a military coup in Chile. So he had to go in one way or the other. And I think more recently, there is a sense that assassination has reemerged when the leader has been perceived and one should point out that there is also a certain racial element here, has been perceived to be absolutely irrational or impossible to deal with. Noriega is a case in point. Saddam Hussein, and Gaddafi, they're all considered the leaders that you cannot possibly negotiate with. They are untrustworthy. They are either behind terrorism in the case of Gaddafi
00:27:25
Speaker
or they have proven to be brutal dictators willing to kill their own people. So it's impossible to negotiate with them. It's impossible to remove them peacefully. So assassination becomes an option.
00:27:39
Speaker
So you mentioned this at the top, and I want to come back to it because in season two, we spoke to Dr. James Patton Rogers about how to conduct a drone attack.
Post-9/11 Policy Shifts
00:27:46
Speaker
I'm curious to hear more about how the use of drones in the global war on terror changed this bureaucracy around you know targeted killing or assassination, however you want to describe it. you know Does the US s national security apparatus view this question of assassination differently now than it did before because of what happened in the in the global war on terrorism?
00:28:05
Speaker
I think the um my answer to that would be yes and no. My argument in the book is that 9-11 changed something, but it didn't change everything, for lack of a better way of putting it. I argue that many of the political and legal precedents that permitted the targeting and the killing of terrorists, of terrorist leaders, and of state leaders involved in terrorism had already been set in the 1980s and 1990s. So the fact that the US president could use force overtly or covertly against individuals, against terrorists, and against leaders of state supporting terrorism had already been accepted.
00:28:52
Speaker
by the 1980s and certainly by by the 1990s. There is some reluctance in the 1990s about giving full authorities to the CIA to rely on local proxies to conduct these operations. There is no reluctance at all about using US military force, for example, in cruise missiles or aerial bombing and so on. But there is a bit of reluctance in giving the CIA full authority to um rely on local allies and local proxies.
00:29:22
Speaker
This is visible, especially in the in the pre-9-11 hunt for Osama bin Laden. and What 9-11 changes, I think, is remove any institutional resistance. For example, there is some resistance pre-9-11 in the CIA when it comes to being um to being in charge or pulling the trigger.
00:29:43
Speaker
This comes particularly from CIA Director George Tenet at the time, who's very much opposed to the idea of the CIA being in charge of the kill chain, of what would become known um as the kill chain. So 9-11 certainly removes these institutional constraints and these moral qualms, so to say.
00:30:04
Speaker
It also creates certainly a situation in which financial constraints are no longer a problem. So, ah pre-9-11, the CIA was struggling to get funds for covert operations. After 9-11, this goes completely out of the window. The CIA can probably get more money that it needs.
00:30:24
Speaker
There is also a sense in which 9-11 permits the CIA to unleash a global manhunt and a global war on terror. So after 9-11, Tenet goes to George W. Bush and presents basically two elements of the plan. One is for the war in Afghanistan or what would become the war in Afghanistan. But one is to transform the CIA in the in a global manhunting machine.
00:30:49
Speaker
initially without drones and eventually with drones. And I think the the rise of drones from the very start makes clear that the United States consider itself able to target individuals in a global battlefield. The first successful drone strike occurs in Yemen, a country where the US government is not at war, is not one of the hot battlefields.
00:31:14
Speaker
And of course, by the time Obama comes to office, both the intelligence infrastructure created by the United States and the number of drones available has increased radically. So for a whole set of reasons, including Obama's issues with enhanced interrogation techniques or torture, drones really become the weapon of choice in Obama's version of the war on terror.
00:31:39
Speaker
We're talking to Dr. Luca Trenta about his research in the field of assassinations in US foreign policy. After the break, we'll talk about how states defend against assassinations, how oversight around assassinations works, and how these kind of actions are seen internationally.
00:32:01
Speaker
You have been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist, the podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. If you like this show, don't forget to check out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica, which you can find at howtogettontowatchlist.com, where you can find our analysis on various geopolitical issues, as well as reading lists covering topics like those discussed in the podcast. Please also consider subscribing to the podcast on your streaming platform of choice, giving us a rating, and joining our Patreon.
Defense Against Assassinations
00:32:43
Speaker
So how do states counteract assassination campaigns targeting their citizens or their leaders? Are these treated as typical crimes, or there are there more advanced defensive tools available? This is very interesting, and it's actually an area of research that we're moving into. I currently have a ah grant application pending to look at the extent to which state-sponsored assassinations have become normalized in international politics. And and by normalized, we mean that intelligence agencies of various states routinely rely more often on assassination as a tool of covert foreign policy. And at the same time, there is a reduced international reaction when these assassinations happen. I think there are multiple ways in which
00:33:30
Speaker
states could protect. And in certain cases, these methods have worked and have created a sort of a cost to be paid for the state perpetrating assassinations. An option certainly is government or individual sanctions that could be imposed on both individuals, intelligence agencies, and more broadly, the government of a state conducting assassination.
00:33:56
Speaker
There is certainly a discussion here, and I think Don Casetta has done quite a lot of work in the area of making states better at collecting evidence, storing evidence, and and using it in trials and to confirm responsibility of a certain actor or a certain state. So this also helps.
00:34:18
Speaker
Of course, hardening the targets or the suspected targets of assassination is also um a very important element. And I think we have seen recently there have been a lot of foiled plots or alleged foiled plots in the United States.
00:34:34
Speaker
and In Canada, for example, there were quite a few plots conducted by Iran ah that failed in both the United States and Canada. and We know this due to the legal documents that came out of various proceedings against individuals for linked to the Iranian state.
00:34:53
Speaker
Allegedly, some of these assassination attempts were also against former members of the Trump administration as a form of revenge for the assassination of Kasem Soleimani. I think ah Mike Pompeo and John Bolton were among the two former Trump administration officials who had been targeted in assassination attempts by Iran.
00:35:15
Speaker
But I guess the Soleimani case, I think, brings me to what is a main concern of our research, and it's the idea that I think democratic states, precisely because they are democratic states, have a sort of increased responsibility when it comes to assassination, in not conducting assassination and not legitimating such practice, because then it's it's very easy for other states to either adopt the same practices or adopt the same language in a manner that we might not particularly like. Russia can do the same. Iran can do the same. And also there should be, I think, a certain recognition that state-sponsored assassinations are bad regardless of the perpetrator. They're bad for international politics. They're bad for international human rights.
00:36:04
Speaker
And so we shouldn't shy away from criticizing states for their conduct when they are friendly to us and only criticize a very similar conduct when it is part of the foreign policy of a state we don't particularly agree with.
00:36:21
Speaker
So we're kind of talking about controls and about the international perception of assassination. What sorts of controls you know historically have been put in place as well as now around assassination orders? you know Is the US government aware of the fact that this sort of assassination policy could come back to bite it?
00:36:38
Speaker
I think historically there was an attempt to put controls or prohibition and assassination on a very strong legal footing. One of the outcomes of the mid-1970s investigations that we discussed earlier was a recommendation by Congress to establish a law or a statute that would prohibit assassination. And there was an an effort to specify what assassination meant, ah which targets were protected, under what conditions, and so on. And between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, you have various efforts
00:37:14
Speaker
to establish a new law a reforming the intelligence community, which contains a prohibition on assassination. At one point, there is even an option that any form of covert killing of any individual would be prohibited, ah regardless of the context, the circumstances, and so on. But really, none of these laws or proposals actually take effect.
00:37:36
Speaker
Within the United States, the only prohibition is the one present in an executive order that was first published by the Ford administration in the 1970s and was later repeated with changes to the text, but not to not so much to the text of the prohibition and assassination by the Carter administration and the Reagan administration. And this seemingly remains, this Reagan era executive order seemingly remains on the books.
00:38:04
Speaker
And yet at the same time, the US has been able to carve out quite extensive exceptions to this ban in order to be able to conduct assassination or, as now they're called, targeted killings. It is quite interesting in terms of the US posture on this.
00:38:23
Speaker
that the united states continue to maintain the view that they were not engaging in assassination and they found the whole set of political and legal arguments to get away with it but they were very opposed at least before nine eleven to the idea of such a thing as targeted killings.
00:38:41
Speaker
Israel was the first government that tried to push internationally ah the idea of conducting targeted killings. And before 9-11, the United States was critical of this policy defining it as extrajudicial killings and so on. But after 9-11 and based on both intelligence collaboration between the United States and Israel and more broadly diplomatic collaboration, the United States and Israel came to accept targeted killings and to push, we now know make a positive effort to push an international fora, an international legal fora, the idea that targeted killings should be permitted. So I think the United States has basically come to accept this policy, especially as part of counter-terrorism. And in their case of the Trump administration policies, the boundary between counter-terrorism operation and the killing of a state official has been somewhat blurred, I think.
00:39:39
Speaker
with the killing of Qassem Soleimani, of course, the Iranian general who was killed by a drone strike at Baghdad airport, I think, in 2020, if I'm not mistaken. So since we're on this topic, anyway, you've kind of mentioned this already. I want to put
Ethical and International Repercussions
00:39:57
Speaker
it to you bluntly. Should assassinations be used as a tool of foreign policy by a democratic state, or are they always sort of counterproductive in the long term?
00:40:05
Speaker
My answer would be, no, they should not be used. Throughout my research, I have often encountered a sort of utilitarian argument in favor of assassination. This came up in the confrontation with Saddam Hussein in the 90s, and then again in the pre-9-11 hunt for Bin Laden, and the utilitarian argument goes somewhat along the lines of If we can solve our problems by killing a single individual, why should we instead decide to not try and kill this specific individual but go to war against a certain country or conduct a much less precise aerial bombing that would of course create more casualties and so on?
00:40:49
Speaker
i I can see the sort of purchasing power of this utilitarian argument, especially when it comes to saving lives. But I think there are also problems with this argument. One is that whether it happened via assassination or by other means, the US government has a very poor record when it comes with ah covert ah to covert regime change, either because they have failed or because the consequences of such regime change have been not in line with what the United States expected or or they have been incredibly detrimental to the local populations of the country where the regime change took place. So already in the utilitarian argument, I'm not entirely convinced. I think there is also a problem in democratic states conducting assassination.
00:41:39
Speaker
because it is seen as legitimating a practice that should not be seen as legitimate. Whether democratic states do it by manipulating or reshaping international law or whether they do it as more recently adopting a rhetoric of justice that the killing of a certain individual was simply something that was just, that was the right thing to do. I think it sets the precedent for other countries to do the same. And more broadly, I think democratic states should be as forceful in condemning the assassinations perpetrated by states they're friendly with as they are in condemning the assassinations of states that we perceive as enemies. I think there is a certain double standard here
00:42:27
Speaker
especially if we compare assassinations conducted by Russia with assassinations conducted by countries who are on much more friendly terms with the United States and with the West, broadly understood, for example, either Saudi Arabia or Rwanda. I think the treatment of assassination is very different depending on whom the perpetrator is. And I think this is also a problem in the conduct of democratic states.
00:42:53
Speaker
I'm glad you brought that point up because I wanted to to ask again about the Gaddafi killing in 2012, the Libyan leader of Muammar Gaddafi. In that case, while he was sort of not directly killed by the United States or by a European government or anything like this, there's quite a bit of compelling analysis that says that you know the Russian government viewed the West as very much responsible for for his death, for his removal, in the same way that sort of they viewed us responsible for the regime change of of Saddam Hussein that you've brought up as well.
00:43:24
Speaker
I wanted to ask about other governments' perceptions of US assassination of political leaders. how How does that inform even in these non-democratic states, how does that inform their foreign policy responses to the West when they observe these things happening and they sort of assume that that's a de facto policy position of the West?
00:43:42
Speaker
I think it does inform their foreign policies, whether in a sort of unconscious manner or in an objective manner and sort of showing the West that they can play the same game and sort of sometimes also adopting the same language.
00:43:58
Speaker
For example, this extends beyond assassination, but when the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 adopted the global war on terror framework, you could see that autocrats in in various countries were more than happy to support this new understanding and jump on the bandwagon of a global war on terror framework. But then, of course, they ended up defining as terrorists group that they considered terrorists, whereas the West didnt didn't or again the west broadly understood ah didn't necessarily consider them terrorists. So they adopted the same framework to pursue their strategic interests, their political interests.
00:44:39
Speaker
putting the West in the odd position of not possibly being able to criticize them because they had been doing the same thing. On the Gaddafi episode, I think I haven't i haven't included these actual killing um after the sort of Libya uprising or the Arab Spring. I think there was some intelligence sharing that would have pointed to a certain role or contribution of Western intelligence agencies, I think, particularly France and Britain. But Gaddafi does feature in my book with an attempted assassination in the 1980s, which I think set an important precedent both in terms of
00:45:19
Speaker
the self-defense argument that the United States was reacting to Gaddafi's sponsoring of terrorism in self-defense, which has become the backbone really of US government targeted killing policy. And also interesting arguments that were developed at the time surrounding intent or surrounding the legitimacy of targeting military command and control infrastructure buildings With the expectation that a leader would be present in these buildings, I think this played another prominent role in setting the political and legal precedents for assassination. So we're trying to switch topics slightly to zoom out and look more at the research angle. You know, covert action, assassinations, this this is something that is is a core secret to
Research Challenges and Concerns
00:46:02
Speaker
most governments. So I imagine researching it is is quite a challenging thing.
00:46:06
Speaker
yeah Having gone into this research, what what were the biggest challenges? How how did you approach something such a difficult and and murky subject? I think there were two major challenges. One had to do with the archival research to be conducted for the topic.
00:46:23
Speaker
With few exceptions, assassination as a word kind of never makes it on the historical record, unless the United States is distancing itself from a assassination.
00:46:37
Speaker
The key exception here, I think, is Harry Dearborn, who for a time was US Consul and CIA Chief of Station in the Dominican Republic. He sends very explicit, very open telegrams back to the State Department calling for the assassination of Trujillo and basically making the argument, yeah, assassination is bad.
00:46:58
Speaker
But so was using nuclear weapons. So we might as well do assassination. Here is very much the exception in a long history of assassination being either removed completely from the historical record, not being put to paper. So when somebody is taking minutes and there is a debate surrounding assassination during a meeting, the whole debate will not appear. And we only know about it for due to later testimonies or later confessions and so on.
00:47:28
Speaker
And the whole set of documents that probably contain discussions of assassination very often were destroyed in the aftermath of the covert operation. Again, Dearborn is given the order to basically destroy all the documents of the two weeks preceding the assassination of Trujillo, is given the order by the State Department to do so and to basically only keep those documents that put the United States in a positive light.
00:47:56
Speaker
when it came to regime change. So I think there is certainly an archival challenge, and I've traveled to many archives. I've looked at various collections, presidential archives, national archives, the JFK assassination records, which interestingly are not limited only to the assassination of JFK, but to a lot of activities that were going on in the 1960s.
00:48:19
Speaker
um The second challenge, I think, is, and this applies to more recent episodes, to get people to talk about such a controversial topic and to get especially practitioners or and people involved in the decisions to talk about certain decisions. I've interviewed a lot of former US officials, including national security advisors, former CIA directors, and so on.
00:48:46
Speaker
But it has been it has been quite tricky, first of all, to convince them to talk and second, to cover certain aspects of foreign policy. At times, they would not even confirm their awareness of documents that have been declassified. So that was really quite a challenge because I think.
00:49:03
Speaker
I will be expecting a U.S. official not to disclose any information that is not already in the public record, but the idea of not even confirming things that are already in the public record I found always quite interesting and in in certain cases somewhat challenging. And I think as always for any research on not only ah covert operations, I think more broadly US s foreign policy or any archival research, the closer you get to the present time, the less archival material you will find and the less
00:49:37
Speaker
documents you will find that only in certain cases you're able to compensate for the lack of document material with interviews or elite interviews and so on. It has to be said that I think all not all cases that I could have included ended up being included in the book somewhere for editorial choices and in other cases I simply could not find a sufficient amount of evidence to include in in the book. um I wasn't able to triangulate a certain type of source with a certain other. For example, there are some references in a congressional report about the US s government providing weapons with the intent of assassinating Duvalier in Haiti in the 1960s.
00:50:23
Speaker
but I wasn't able to find much of the confirmation in either secondary sources or archival material. At the same time, there is a famous episode of a coup in Bangladesh in 1975 and the assassination of the leader of Bangladesh, Mujibur Rahman, who was assassinated during the coup. And there is a book As a case in itself, it makes a very persuasive case that the CIA was involved, and in particular, the CIA chief of station at the time in Bangladesh was involved, and there's certainly Harry Kissinger, who at the time was working in the Ford administration, was aware of what was going on, but I couldn't find any archival material to confirm this, so the case didn't make it to to the book.
00:51:08
Speaker
you know it's a very It's a very deadly topic that you research. So the question we always like to ask, I guess, I think works very well in this case. What what keeps you up at night? What is the nightmare scenario in a topic like this?
00:51:21
Speaker
If we exclude my assassination, because I've been trying to uncover something that I shouldn't have uncovered, especially as I move away from the United States and start looking at the practices of other states, I think my main concern at the moment is that assassination becomes a common practice in international politics.
00:51:40
Speaker
that we get to a situation in which ah the assassination of prominent political leaders by states is something that becomes a routine, that states rely upon more and more frequently to either pursue their foreign policy objectives or to send signals to enemies or to strengthen their own regime at home. There is an extensive debate in the literature regarding the rationale behind state-sponsored assassinations, whether it has to do with retribution, sending a signal, regime security, all sorts of things. But I think the main concern is that it would simply become something that states do as irregular covert activity. And I think this would be a problem not only for the conduct of international politics, but also for the safety of the individuals involved, and also because it would create always a risk
00:52:36
Speaker
of military escalation. If we consider the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, which in my mind was a very unwise escalation, we can consider Qasem Soleimani as the third highest authority in Iran at the time. If we flip the image and think about Iran conducting a state-sponsored assassination of a sitting Secretary of Defense or Vice President, just think of the escalatory potential or so of something like this, and this is where my concern comes from. Well, Luca, you've given us a lot to think about there, so thank you very much for joining us. ah Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
00:53:16
Speaker
You've been listening to Dr. Luca Trenta discussing how to kill your enemies. Dr. Trenta's excellent book, The President's Kill List, Assassination and US Foreign Policy Since 1945 is out now and linked to the book can be found in the show notes. Our producer for this episode was Edwin Tram. To all our listeners and Patreon supporters, thank you so much for listening and supporting how to get on a watch list.
00:53:37
Speaker
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