A Brief History of CIA Assassination Programs

Targets of CIA assassination plots

So the other night I got in a Beer-fueled argument in a bar with a former Wall Street moneyfuck I know.
He goaded me into this discourse by saying to me: “Now your hero Obama is ten times worse than Dick Cheney!”
I responded that Obama was not a hero of mine, but he was certainly not a “Dick Cheney”. I added that I was not at all a fan of the drone strike program if that’s what he ment, and that said Wall Street moneyfuck had no idea of the histoy of CIA assassination programs.
We’re talkin’ dark history here.
Let’s begin with the close of World War two. The “Office of Strategic Services” or OSS was being remodeled into the agency we now know as the CIA.
Anxious Nazi intelligence agents were hurriedly incorporated into the fledgling agency in anticipation of the cold war with the Soviet Union.
General Reinhard Gehlen, a German expert on the “Eastern bloc” and his entire intelligence operation were brought into the new CIA. Gehlen retained his full rank, and later went back to Germany to run their intelligence services.

From Wikipedia:
“Beginning with an article on 17 March 1952, Sefton Delmer, senior correspondent for London’s Daily Express, dragged Gehlen into the news. On 10 August 1954, Delmer would set the tone by announcing that “Gehlen and his Nazis are coming.” Delmer implied in his story that a continuation of nothing less than Hitler’s aims was at hand through this “monstrous underground power in Germany.”
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Through a “Ratline” that delivered Nazi collaborators (which will be described in detail in a future post), many new types of paramilitary operations were formed. This included the U.S. Green Berets, which owe their distinctive head wear to those former European Fascist emigres.
Operatives fanned out all over the world in an effort to fight Communism, Nazi scientists were recruited into U.S. rocket science programs and Fascist collaborators succeded in guiding American politics to their pinnicle in the Reagan and subsequent Bush administrations. More on that in future posts, but back to the “wet work”:

From an article by Alexander Cockburn:

“Before irrefutable evidence of its vast kidnapping and interrogation programme post-2001 surfaced, the CIA similarly used to claim, year after year, that it had never been in the torture business either. Torture manuals drafted by the agency would surface – a 128-page secret how-to-torture guide produced by the CIA in July 1963 called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, another 1983 manual, enthusiastically used by CIA clients in the ‘Contra’ war against central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan’s years – and the agency would deny, waffle and evade until the moment came simply to dismiss the torture charge as “an old story”.
In fact the agency took a keen practical interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi interrogation techniques avidly.
(snip)
“What about assassination attempts by the CIA, acting on presidential orders? We could start with the bid on Chou en Lai’s life after the Bandung Conference in 1954; they blew up the plane scheduled to take him home, but fortunately he’d switched flights.
Then we could move on to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961, to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, in which the CIA was intimately involved, dispatching among others the late Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the agency’s in-house killer chemist, with a hypodermic loaded with poison.
The agency made many efforts to kill General Kassem in Iraq. The first such attempt, on October 7, 1959, was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Husssein, was, spirited out to an agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second agency effort in 1960-1961 with a poisoned handkerchief. Finally they shot Kassim in the coup of February 8/9, 1963.
The Kennedy years saw deep US implication in the murder of the Diem brothers in Vietnam and the first of many well attested efforts by the agency to assassinate Fidel Castro. Reagan’s first year in office saw the inconvenient Omar Torrijos of Panama downed in an air crash. In 1986 came the Reagan White House’s effort to bomb Muammar Gaddafi to death in his encampment in 1986, though this enterprise was conducted by the US Air Force.
Led by that man of darkness, William Casey, in 1985 the CIA tried to kill the Lebanese Shia leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by setting off a car bomb outside his mosque. He survived, though 80 others were blown to pieces.
In his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Bill Blum has a long and interesting list starting in 1949 with Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader, going on to efforts to kill Sukarno, Kim Il Sung, Mossadegh, Nehru, Nasser, Sihanouk, Jose Figueres, ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, Gen Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic…
And we should not forget that the CIA is by no means the only player in the assassination game. The military have their own teams.”
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There is absolutely no doubt such operations have been illegaly carried out against U.S. citizens, some say even against U.S. politicians as in the Kennedy assassination. These may not be in the interests of official state policy, but once the dogs of war are unleashed it’s hard to get them back in the doghouse.
What may have changed however, is the management style of these operations.
From The Atlantic.com:

“It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. “The move was historic,” says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. “It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise.”

The quote is from his e-book How to Get Away With Murder in America, which goes on to note that “in the past, the CIA was subject to oversight, however tenuous, from the president and Congress,” but that “President Bush’s 2001 executive order severed this line by transferring to the CIA his unique authority to approve assassinations. By removing himself from the decision-making cycle, the president shielded himself — and all elected authority — from responsibility should a mission go wrong or be found illegal. When the CIA transferred the assassination unit to Blackwater, it continued the trend. CIA officers would no longer participate in the agency’s most violent operations, or witness them. If it practiced any oversight at all, the CIA would rely on Blackwater’s self-reporting about missions it conducted. Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible.” None of this is new information, though I imagine that many people reading this item are hearing about it for the first time.”
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From an article on the subject in Alternet:

“The idea that President Obama’s extrajudicial drone-assassinations of American citizens is “unprecedented” and “radical” is to ignore decades of recent history.”

Tags: Cia assassination programs, German intelligence, Nazis, Obama's drone strike program, the cold war

This entry was posted on February 24, 2013 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Hidden History, Tell the truth and run !. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.