In 1975, Senator Frank Church led the Senate Intelligence Committee in condemning political assassinations. It would be a crime for an American citizen to do it if Church had his way. President Gerald Ford doused the political fire around it by issuing an executive order telling government employees not to do it, but Church succeeded in establishing the principle that assassination was in the least immoral.
My how times have changed. The Russian leadership has never been bothered by such niceties. Stalin started the Soviets down that path by having Leon Trotsky assassinated. During World War II the Soviet Union's KGB formed Department 13 to specialize in assassination and sabotage. The department terrorized the Germans as their armies invaded the Soviet Union. For a time, Department 13 was far more successful than the Red Army in worrying German commanders. Department 13's activities were scaled back but not extinguished during the Cold War, and as evidenced by the recent prisoner exchange with the United States, Russian intelligence still employs assassination agents.
But the Russians today are not alone. Israel's government has regularly been resorting to assassination to eliminate its adversaries' leadership. And in complete defiance of President Ford's executive order, Donald Trump not only ordered Iran's Qasem Soleimani to be killed in a drone strike, Trump publicly bragged about it and took credit for it.
So where does that leave us? Is assassination a crime; is it murder; is it moral? Or is it now an accepted instrument of a nation's policy?
In an earlier post on this blog in August 2020, I pointed out that at the time of Frank Church's investigation, various CIA officers claimed that they had always opposed assassination, not for some goody-two-shoes reason like morality, but rather from what I called the Golden Rule of Assassination. If you do it to them, they'll do it to you. In the wake of the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the Secret Service went public with the claim that it had reason to believe Iran was trying to assassinate the former president. My August 2020 blog post warned that this might happen.
Surprisingly, there has been virtually no discussion of this in the media after the current wave of assassinations and attempts.
