The CIA is licensed to kill

By David Wise - Special to the Los Angeles Times

Back in 1960, the CIA hatched a plan to kill Patrice Lumumba by infecting his toothbrush with a deadly disease. The Congolese leader would brush his teeth and, presto, in a few weeks he would be gone.

Around the same time, the CIA's Health Alteration Committee — who thought that name up? — sent a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief to Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, the leader of Iraq.

And the CIA's “executive action” unit plotted for years to murder Fidel Castro. It hired the Mafia to poison his food and tried to give him a diving suit contaminated with Madura foot, a rare tropical disease that starts in the foot and moves upward, slowly destroying the body. The CIA also considered offing the Cuban leader with an exploding cigar, a poison pen and a seashell that would blow up underwater when he touched it.

Not one of the plots was successful. Lumumba and Kassem were executed by their foes, and Castro is still alive. But the plots make clear that the CIA has been licensed to kill for decades.

Congress was outraged earlier this month when it was disclosed that, apparently on orders from Vice President Dick Cheney, the CIA for eight years concealed from Congress a program to assassinate the leaders of al-Qaida, starting with Osama bin Laden. But they shouldn't have been surprised that such a plan was being hatched.

The CIA's involvement in planning assassinations goes back at least to 1954, when it prepared a manual for killings as part of a U.S.-run coup against the leftist government of Guatemala. The 19-page manual, which was declassified in 1997, makes chilling reading. “The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject,” it declares, noting that although it “is possible to kill a man with the bare hands … the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, ax, wrench, screwdriver, kitchen knife, lamp stand or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.”

The agency's manual recommends “the contrived accident” as the best way to dispose of someone. “The most efficient accident … is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve.” The manual suggests grabbing the victim by the ankles and “tipping the subject over the edge. … Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing.”

The manual goes on to discuss “blunt weapons,” noting that “a hammer can be picked up almost anywhere in the world” and that baseball bats are also excellent. The manual explains the best place in the body to stab people or how to bash their skulls in and the pros and cons of rifles, pistols, submachine guns and other weapons.

After the plots were publicized by a Senate committee, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order in 1976 barring political assassination. President Ronald Reagan broadened the ban, dropping the word “political” and extending the prohibition to contract killers.

Although the ban remains in effect, it largely has been ignored on the premise that it does not apply in a military setting. Consider the following:

In 1986, Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya in retaliation for a terrorist attack on a Berlin disco that killed three people, including two U.S. servicemen, and wounded more than 200 others. In the air strike, Libya's leader, Moammar Gadhafi, escaped unharmed, but his 2-year-old adopted daughter was killed.

During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, when the first Bush administration bombed Baghdad, Robert M. Gates, the former CIA director and current Defense secretary, said White House officials hoped that “Saddam Hussein would be killed in a bunker.” At an air base in Saudi Arabia that year, Cheney, then secretary of Defense, signed a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb destined for Iraq. “To Saddam with affection,” Cheney wrote.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike on al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan after the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa. The White House was clearly disappointed when the strike failed to kill Bin Laden, who reportedly left one of the camps shortly before the attack.

A year later, again during the Clinton administration, NATO bombed Belgrade after Serbia forced ethnic Albanians to flee from Kosovo. A cruise missile was lobbed into the bedroom of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader and Yugoslav president, but he was not sleeping there and escaped injury.

The problem with assassination, morality aside, is that the U.S. is not very good at it. It seems unlikely that the CIA will kill bin Laden with a baseball bat. And there is the real possibility of retaliation. President John Kennedy was quoted as saying, “We can't get into that kind of thing or we would all be targets.”

Perhaps CIA Director Leon Panetta had that in mind when he canceled the program.