If the allegations that the CIA fostered assassinations as an instrument of policy were to be proved true, the U.S. would be put in rather rare historical company. Although killing rulers and leaders is a human practice that sometimes seems commonplace, it has usually been the work of individual fanatics, rival factions within a nation, insurrectionists, nationalists seeking to throw off external government, or citizens moved to eliminate a tyrant. Seldom have governments set out to kill the principals of other governments as a matter of cool policy, even with the bloodiest provocation.
According to Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, a senior British intelligence officer during World War II, Winston Churchill issued a directive forbidding his intelligence agencies to get involved in assassination plots against Hitler and Mussolini. Churchill is thought to have feared such attempts would be counter-productive and certain to provoke reprisals of the kind the Nazis visited on Lidice in 1942.
The precepts and precedents for assassination as foreign policy are muddy, as a sampling of history demonstrates. In the 4th century B.C. martial classic The Art of War, Sun Tzu mentions the value of secret agents to a sovereign "in the case of people you wish to assassinate." The Book of Judges describes how Ehud, acting in behalf of the defeated Israelites, assassinated Eglon, the King of Moab. There is the story of the widow Judith saving the Israelites by cutting off the head of Nebuchadnezzar's general, Holofernes, who was besieging Bethulia. Such killings, however, were defiant acts against a conqueror and thus not strictly foreign policy assassinations. Rome was sufficiently bloody with assassinations—the murders of Julius Caesar and Tiberius Gracchus, for example—but these were factional acts, intramural mayhem.
History's classic murders for policy purposes were committed by the 11th-century Moslem sect of Assassins, founded by the fanatically ambitious Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah. Established in a rocky fortress in the Elburz mountains, Hasan propagated his autocratic rule by a program of systematic murder. His killers were the Fida'is (devout ones), young men trained from adolescence in a sort of Green Beret tradition to murder with a variety of weapons.
The Moslem conception of paradise made an ideal recruiting device. An account written by Marco Polo reported that Hasan educated the Fida'is to believe every conceivable bodily pleasure awaited them after death. As a foretaste, he had them heavily drugged and transported to magnificent gardens constructed near his palace; there, under the influence of heavy doses of hashish,* the Fida'is were ministered to for several days by beautiful women, then drugged unconscious again and returned to real life convinced they had seen paradise. After that, they would undertake any suicide mission.
The Thugs in India were another murderous sect, but they killed not for political control but in devotion to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, and for gain. Like the Assassins, the Thugs bore some resemblance to modern spies in their undercover operations, methods of infiltration and disguise.