The politics of assassination

Contemplating the crimes of the Idi Amin regime in Uganda in the mid-1970s, Harold Wilson summoned his press secretary Joe Haines to discuss a desperate potential remedy. After seeing reports that the Ugandan president was killing up to 7,000 of his citizens per week, “Harold called me up to his study and said that he was very concerned about this. He asked me my view about killing Idi Amin, as he thought that was the only way of stopping the slaughter.” Haines agreed, whereupon Wilson took up the matter with the Foreign Office. “They said, ‘We don’t have anybody to do things like that.’ Apparently, the Foreign Office has a strong line, that if we do that to them, they will do it to us.”

Assassination is as old as Cain and Abel. In the 20th century it was used occasionally by democratic governments and much more frequently by autocratic ones, while some who aspired to power regarded it as indispensable. But as Wilson’s diplomatic advisers were clearly aware, assassination is not so much a blunt tool as an unpredictable and often ineffective one. For a start, the plot might miscarry, as happened when two Puerto Rican assassins bungled an attempt to murder President Truman in 1950, leaving one dead and the other apprehended. Then there is the risk of what US officials called “blowback”, as when Hezbollah operatives, probably working for Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, killed the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri with a massive car bomb in Beirut in 2005, which led to Syria losing its position as de facto power in Lebanon.

More fundamental is the question of whether killing an individual will actually solve the problem. Geopolitical confrontations are often reduced to a single, malevolent figure, a Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi. But as the history of the Middle East has repeatedly shown, a despotic or murderous enemy is as much a symptom as the cause of a security problem. Removing them often turns out to be the easy part.

As Simon Ball argues in his book Death to Order, individual assassinations have rarely changed the geopolitical weather except as catalysts in situations already in crisis. The canonical instance is the murder by Gavrilo Princip of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. Assassination was hardly unknown in central Europe and the Balkans in the decades leading up to 1914: assassins had accounted for a tsar of Russia, kings of Italy and Greece, a king and crown prince of Portugal, a French president, a Spanish prime minister and Franz Ferdinand’s aunt, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. But what turned the murder in Sarajevo from a political tragedy into a global catastrophe was the great power competition in the background: “The assassination was the spark, but any spark would have done.”

Sarajevo was a turning point, Ball argues, for the dark art of assassination itself. He examines the various explanations that circulated during and after the first world war and concludes that the Kingdom of Serbia, through its secret nationalist military society known as the Black Hand, was probably behind the murder of Ferdinand. From this point, assassination became a geopolitical tool for governments, rather than a revolutionary action – “propaganda of the deed” – as practised in previous decades by European anarchists. Ball traces outbursts of assassination throughout the subsequent decades in countries experiencing political and social unrest, such as Mexico after the first world war, and Cuba and Puerto Rico in the 1930s.

Geopolitical shifts, such as Japanese expansionism in the 1930s, also created waves of assassinations, making Shanghai the political murder capital of the world, where communists, nationalists, warlords, terrorists and criminals from China, Japan and Korea killed their enemies and each other at a remarkable pace. Assassination also became a tool of anti-colonial movements, although Ball seems sceptical about whether the murders of figures such as Lord Moyne in Cairo by the Zionist Lehi group in 1944, or Sir Henry Gurney, Britain’s high commissioner in Malaya in 1951, made much of a difference to the probably inevitable processes of European decolonisation.

Ball’s book suffers from being too broad and too shallow. He treats assassination as any murder for a political purpose, which is reasonable enough in theory but gives him a vast number of incidents to examine. His stated aim is to explore the political effects of assassination, but his analysis is light, and some of the most major incidents – including the murders of Trotsky, Gandhi and John F Kennedy – merit just a few sentences each. It makes for an exhausting and frustrating read. A deeper exploration of case studies would have brought us closer to understanding why assassinations became so common in some places and not others, and what they really did – and can – achieve.

The book comes closest to this in its discussion of assassination policies by democracies, notably the French during the Algerian war of independence and the US during the cold war. Despite being a matter of longstanding public record, it is still extraordinary to consider just how normalised techniques such as exploding cigars and poisoned toothbrushes became in Washington from the 1950s to the 70s. This was not just the province of enthusiasts within the CIA but was endorsed by the State Department, the White House and presidents themselves, until Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning political assassinations in 1976. This ban has not stopped the US eliminating its enemies, such as Osama bin Laden and Qassem Suleimani, the erstwhile mastermind of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but at least it now does its killing in the open.

Despite the official enthusiasm for covert assassination in the cold war, some within the US government machine nevertheless recognised its limitations and drawbacks. In 1961, the head of the CIA’s euphemistically named “executive action” capability recognised that political murder is “the last resort beyond the last resort and a confession of weakness”. But if assassination “has never changed the history of the world”, as Disraeli remarked, then why do states, including democracies, increasingly engage in what is now called targeted killing?

Israel has employed assassination from its foundation, but in the 21st century it has become a prolific practitioner. The government uses its armed forces alongside its feared intelligence service, Mossad, while claiming that international law, which evolved to regulate interstate conflict, has proven to be inadequate in an era of terrorism and covert nuclear weapons programmes. For the Israeli state, assassination is not so much the removal of individuals as a counter-terrorism technique that only works at scale: its own grisly metaphor for this is “mowing the grass”. The 2024 operation in Lebanon using pagers and walkie-talkies – nicknamed Operation Grim Beeper – reportedly incapacitated 1,500 Hezbollah operatives in just two days. Israel has also inspired the US to adopt a more systematic approach to assassination, first under George W Bush and then Barack Obama, who held “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the White House to select targets.

Ball suggests that this turn to targeted killing by democracies may arise partly because of advances in technology, such as drones and air-to-ground missiles. But there are surely more fundamental causes. Disraeli was operating his statecraft in an era before mass communication. The purpose of 21st-century targeted killing is not just to remove a political obstacle. It is to send a message of strength and resolve to friends and foes alike.

Andrew Glazzard is a professor of national security policy and practice, and author of books including The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction

Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination by Simon Ball is published by Yale University Press (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £22.50. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph depicts a Lebanese police officer amid the carnage following the killing of Rafik Hariri in Beirut, 2005. Courtesy of AFP/Getty Images