Ryan Lucas (2:26)

In the first few decades of the Cold War, the United States wanted to keep all options on the table, including assassinations in its global struggle against the Soviet Union. Luca Trenta is a professor at Swansea University in the UK and the author of a book on assassinations in US Foreign policy.

Luca Trenta (2:42)

There was certainly a sense that assassination was just another contingency, something that the United States could not entirely exclude in the confrontation with the Soviet Union that was seen as this sort of all powerful and terrible enemy.

Ryan Lucas (2:57)

Trenta says in the early Cold War, the US Often set the stage for the removal or killing of a foreign leader, but local allies pulled the trigger. That was the case, he says, in the 1961 assassination of the Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo.

Interviewee (e.g., expert or official) (3:10)

As dictator Rafael Trujillo is shot down

Ryan Lucas (3:13)

by seven assassins, the CIA in this era also of course, plotted to assassinate Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. This was all done in the shadows and it came tumbling out in public in the mid-1970s when revelations of CIA abuses led to congressional investigations, including one known as the Church Committee. That panel issued an interim report that declared assassinations incompatible with American principles, international order and morality, end quote, and said they should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.

Luca Trenta (3:44)

Again, Trenta, I think the investigations of the Church Committee really provide a brief moment of self reflection for US politicians, for the US public, in which there is a sense that maybe if we are a democracy and if we are to be different from the enemies that we are supposedly fighting, we should not be doing these things.

Ryan Lucas (4:03)

In 1976, President Gerald Ford did exactly that. He issued an executive order banning the US Government from engaging in political assassinations. Timothy Naftali is a historian at Columbia University.

Historian or Analyst (e.g., Timothy Naftali) (4:16)

Gerald Ford felt that this was not a tool that he wanted to use. And what's really interesting is that his successors expanded the ban. So Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter both felt that the United States should not be in the assassination business.

Ryan Lucas (4:31)

And for the next 20 plus years, the US was not, although with an asterisk or two. In 1986, the US bombed several sites in Libya, including leader Moammar Gaddafi's family compound. And twice in the 1990s, the US struck Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's palaces. Brent Scowcroft was President George H.W. bush's national security adviser. Here is Scowcroft talking to ABC News Peter Jennings about the U.S. targeting of Saddam in 1991.

Sponsor Voice (BetterHelp, Cachava) (4:57)

Do you want him killed?

Interviewee (e.g., expert or official) (5:00)

Well, we don't do assassinations, but yes, we targeted. We targeted all the places where Saddam might have been.

Ryan Lucas (5:06)

So you deliberately set out to kill him if you possibly could?

Interviewee (e.g., expert or official) (5:13)

I guess. Yeah, that's fair enough.

Ryan Lucas (5:16)

Naftali says these operations weren't cloak and dagger conspiracies to kill a foreign leader, but instead military operations against command and control facilities. But of course, the US Wouldn't have wept any tears, he says, if Saddam or Gaddafi had been killed.

Historian or Analyst (e.g., Timothy Naftali) (5:30)

I think that's how Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton got around the assassination ban.

Ryan Lucas (5:37)

That reflects at least in part, he says, that presidents themselves found assassinations distasteful and knew the American public felt the same way. That changed on September 11, 2001 with the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 people. Congress responded by authorizing all necessary means to go after the perpetrators of 9 11.

Historian or Analyst (e.g., Timothy Naftali) (5:57)

Naftali says, well, all necessary means includes assassination. And I think that the taboo, if you want to call it an elite and public taboo, against using assassination, disappears

Ryan Lucas (6:09)

in the post 911 world. The US adopted a new technology, the armed drone, to kill Al Qaeda leaders around the globe. But these strikes targeted alleged terrorists, not foreign government officials. President Trump blurred that line when he announced a deadly drone strike in 2020 against Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Interviewee (e.g., expert or official) (6:26)

Soleimani has been perpetrating acts of terror to destabilize the Middle east for the last 20 years.

Ryan Lucas (6:35)

While the US considered Soleimani a terrorist, he was a high ranking Iranian government official. Iran responded with plots of its own to assassinate Trump as well as senior administration officials. Now, six years later, a joint U. S Israeli operation has killed Iran's political and religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US Provided intelligence while Israel conducted the lethal strike. President Trump has crowed about the operation, saying on social media that Khamenei was unable to avoid our intelligence and and highly sophisticated tracking systems. Those sophisticated intelligence and military capabilities make it increasingly easy to kill foreign leaders, experts say, and that carries with it a whole host of strategic, philosophical and moral implications. And Swansea University professor Luca Trentis says just because a country can assassinate a foreign leader doesn't mean that it should.

Luca Trenta (7:26)

I think the Khamenei assassination is a major deal because democracies have killed a foreign heads of state because other countries might follow the same example and there will be nothing that democracies will be able to say when that happens, the

Ryan Lucas (7:43)

moral high ground is lost, he says, and perhaps along with it, the taboo against such assassinations. Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington.

Ilsa Chang (7:53)

This episode was produced by Mallory Yu and Erica Ryan with audio engineering by Jay Siz. It was edited by John Ketchum and Anna Yukinoff. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun. It's consider this from npr. I'm Ilsa Chang.

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