No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.
--Executive Order 11905, signed by President Gerald Ford (February 18, 1976)
No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Governmentshall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
--Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan (December 4, 1981)
In December 28 of last year, former U.S. Labor Secretary (and national editorof TAP) Robert B. Reich told the audience of CNN's Crossfire that he hoped upcoming confirmation hearings of Bush appointees would not be a study in "the politics of character assassination." It seems that Reich's last word may have lodged itself a bit too literally in the mind of his guest that night, Bob Barr, Congressman of Georgia, because six days later, the ultraconservative Republican Barr introduced a piece of House legislation designated as HR 19. Its aim: Restore the currently illegal use of assassination as a tool of U.S. foreign policy.
While grandiloquent posing is a common affliction of legislative titles, it'srare that one is as to the point as Barr's "Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001."Save the second word, however, HR 19 is masterfully Orwellian; nowhere in thebill's paltry text do precise-but-messy words like "assassination," "death,""liquidation," or even the more benign "neutralization" appear. The onlyreference made to them is oblique and indirect, in the bill's final section,which calls for the nullification of the pertinent presidential executive ordersthat explicitly ban assassination.
Instead, using classic right-wing political correctese, Barr coins a neweuphemism for murder-as-statecraft: "swift, sure, and precise action needed bythe United States to protect our national security." The presidential bans onassassination, the bill holds, have unduly limited "effective ways to combat themenace posed by those who would murder American citizens simply to make apolitical point." Indeed, HR 19 laments that "on several occasions the militaryhas been ordered to use a military strike hoping to remove a terrorist leader whohas committed crimes against the United States," only to meet with a lack ofsuccess. With the passage of HR 19, the swift, sure, and precise action that "ourcountry must maintain" would be restored--though it will only be used, Barrassures us, "sparingly."
Barr's understanding of history is weak. Though assassinations were historicallythe province of the civilian Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Barr saysprevious orders have "severely limited the use of the military [emphasis added]" in the hit department. Furthermore, Barr seems to have failed to grasp the fundamental fact of U.S.-sponsored assassinations: They usually fail--worse, whatever their outcome, their aftermath ultimately undermines foreign relations. "We really haven't been doing diplomacy well for a long time," says Melvin Goodman, a former senior analyst on the CIA's Soviet desk who is now a professor at the National Defense University. "Things like an assassination policy only make it worse. Every time we have done something like this in the past, it's gained us nothing but ill will in the rest of the world. Unless you can really control the succession of events that happens after an assassination or coup, maybe you can justify this in extreme situations. But from Africa to Vietnam to Chile to Cuba, all we've done is made bad situations far worse."
In the World War II heyday of the CIA's forerunner, the Office ofStrategic Services (OSS), assassination was a much more palatable, and evenpractical, method for dealing with the Nazis and their collaborators; aconvincing case can be made, for example, that if the OSS hadn't taken outVichy's Admiral Jean François Darlan, the Allies never would have gotten afoothold in North Africa. But in the 15 years following World War II, the nascentCentral Intelligence Agency shied away from practice. While it had no compunctionabout orchestrating coups that might result in the death of a foreign leader,actually pulling the trigger was something to be avoided.
That changed with the ascension of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. Obsessedwith eliminating Castro, Kennedy told the CIA to be as creative as possible.Reading over now-declassified documents, it's hard not to chortle at the myriadoptions the CIA considered in the service of taking out the Cuban leader:exploding and toxin-spiked cigars, exploding conch shells, even a wet suitslathered with fungus spores. Langley's operatives start to seem less like steelyagents and more like Maxwell Smart. But however Keystone Kopsish they may havebeen, the numerous attempts to kill Castro have made rapprochement with Cubavirtually impossible. "Suppose," Jonathan Kwitny wrote in Endless Enemies, his book about U.S.foreign-policy ineptitude, "Castro was behind the assassination of John Kennedy. Would Kennedy and the people of the United States have a just complaint, considering what we tried seventeen times to do to Castro?" The point is that assassinations only exacerbate international problems by encouraging escalation. Look at Israel: Whether hits were carried out by the paramilitary Irgun or Stern Gang at odds with the early Israeli government or--in later years--by the government itself, it's hard to make the case that assassinations of Palestinians have made Israel a safer place.
Assassinations, both failed and successful, also complicated affairs inIndochina. A CIA operative from 1952 to 1962, Paul Sakwa ended his career aschief of covert operations for Vietnam. He was effectively bounced out of theagency for critiquing its approach to Vietnam, including its role in fomentingthe fatal coup against the Diem brothers and setting up the infamous Phoenixprogram, an assassination program that extrajudicially killed at least 20,000Vietnamese civilians. Years later, Father Robert Drinan--then a U.S.congressman--would cross paths with Sakwa during his own investigation ofPhoenix, and both ended up testifying against the confirmation of CIA DirectorWilliam Colby, who set up Phoenix. "You don't use the word assassination whenyou've killed tens of thousands of people--that's a massacre," seethes Sakwa, nowa retired pensioner living in Washington, D.C.
After leaving the CIA, Sakwa was hired by the State Department's Bureau ofIntelligence and Research. Coming out of State's main entrance one evening in1962 , Sakwa bumped into an effusive Larry Devlin, an old colleague from theCIA's French desk and now chief of the agency's Kinshasa station in Congo. Whenhe asked Devlin why he was so happy, Sakwa was sickened by Devlin's response: Hebegan to brag gleefully about having arranged the assassination of Congoleseleader Patrice Lumumba.
Originally, Devlin had planned to take out Lumumba himself, using a poison gundeveloped by the notorious head of the agency's Technical Services Division, Dr.Sidney Gottlieb. (Obsessed with finding ways to control and incapacitatepotential targets, the late Gottlieb stands as another good reason to forgoassassinations: Most of his experiments were performed on unwitting Americancitizens, and one, Dr. Frank Olson, killed himself while under the influence ofLSD.) Before Devlin could do the deed himself, native Congolese killed thenationalist leader. But as John Stockwell, head of the CIA's Angola task force,noted when he resigned in 1978, "Eventually we learned that Lumumba was killed,not by our poisons, but beaten to death apparently by men who were loyal to menwho had Agency cryptonyms and received Agency salaries. In death he became aneternal martyr and by installing Mobutu in the Zairian presidency, we committedourselves to the other side, the losing side in Central and Southern Africa."Assassination, Stockwell said, is one of the ways the United States cast itselfin foreign affairs as a "dull-witted Goliath in a world of eager young Davids."
The significance of Barr's bill is not so much that it provides yetmore evidence (as if we needed any) that he's a right-wing loon--his proposal hasnot attracted a single co-sponsor from either party, and the chances of it evengetting a hearing this session are slim. The really disturbing question is this:What does it say about both the anemia and the hubris of U.S. foreign policytoday that Barr believes assassination-asforeign-policy actually has a seriousconstituency. "We have a habit of approaching foreign policy as, we will do whatwe want to, regardless of obvious realities," sighs the National DefenseUniversity's Goodman. "If this includes going back to assassination, it shows areal desperation in U.S. policy." Father Drinan, now at Georgetown University LawCenter, agrees. "You can't kill an idea by killing the person. If he has aconstituency, they'll be inflamed at what you've done, whether they realize it atthe time or find out for sure later. It's counterproductive in so many ways. Youjust end up creating new monsters and new problems."
