Intelligence
WEEKEND EDITION
DECEMBER 19-21, 2014
Torture and
Assassination as Policy
The CIA’s Secret Killers
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Some time in early or mid-1949 a CIA
officer named Bill (his surname is blacked out in the file, which was surfaced
by our friend John Kelly back in the early 1990s) asked an outside contractor
for input on how to kill people. Requirements included the appearance of an
accidental or purely fortuitous terminal experience suffered by the Agency’s
victim.
Bill’s contact – internal evidence
suggests he was a doctor – offered practical advice: “Tetraethyl lead, as you
know, could be dropped on the skin in very small quantities, producing no local
lesion, and after a quick death, no specific evidence would be
present.” Another possibility was “the exposure of the entire
individual to X-ray.” (In fact these two methods were already being
inflicted on a very large number of Americans in lethal doses, in the form of
leaded gasoline and radioactive fallout from the atmospheric nuclear test
program in Nevada.) “There are two other techniques,” Bill’s friend
concluded bluffly, which “require no special equipment beside a strong arm and
the will to do such a job. These would be either to smother the victim with a
pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth, such as a bath towel.”
As regular as congressmen being taken in
adultery or receiving cash bribes, every year or two the Central Intelligence
Agency has go into damage-control mode to deal with embarrassing documents like
the memo to Bill, and has to square up to the question – does it, did it
ever, have its in-house assassins, a Double O team.
It just happened. In mid-July the news
headlines were suddenly full of allegations that in the wake of the 9/11/2001
attacks, vice president Dick Cheney had ordered the formation of a CIA kill
squad and expressly ordered the Agency not to disclose the program even to
congressional overseers with top security clearances, as required by law. As
soon as CIA offials disclosed the program to CIA director Leon Panetta, he
ordered it to be halted.
And regular as the
congressmen taken in adultery seeking forgiveness from God and spouse, the CIA
rolled out the familiar that yes, such a program had been mooted, but there had
been practical impediments. “It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to
do it, it’s not that easy,” one former intelligence official told the New York
Times. “Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be
sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?” The
C.I.A. insisted it had never proposed a specific operation to the White House
for approval.
With these pious denials we enter the
Theater of the Absurd. We’re talking about a US Agency that ran the Phoenix
Program, that supervised executive actions across Latin America, that …
Before irrefutable evidence of its vast
kidnapping and interrogation program in the post-2001 period 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 practical
interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi
interrogation techniques avidly and sheltering noted Nazi practitioners. As it
prepared its coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1953 the Agency
distributed to its agents and operatives a killer’s training manual (made
public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:
“The most efficient accident, in simple
assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator
shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. … The act may
be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject
over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the
“horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.
“…In all types of assassination except
terroristic, drugs can be very effective. An overdose of morphine administered
as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect.
The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using
narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.
“If the subject drinks heavily, morphine
or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause
of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.”
What about targets of 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 for him, though not
his fellow passengers, 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 Kassim 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. It was Lyndon
Johnson who famously said shortly after he took office in 1963, “We had been
operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.” 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 Q’addafi to
death in his encampment , 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 Shiite 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 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,
President of Indonesia, Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea, Mohammed
Mossadegh, Claro M. Recto (the Philippines opposition leader), Jawaharlal
Nehru, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, José Figueres,Francois “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 US government player in the assassination game. The US
military have their own teams. A friend of ours once had a gardener – “a
very scary looking guy” — who remarked that he’d been part of a secret unit in
the U.S. Marine Corps, murdering targets in the Caribbean.
In sum, assassination has always been an
arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, as in the Sixties,
it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true either
side of the executive order, issued by president Gerald Ford in 1976, banning
assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in,
or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” states Executive Order
11905.
One way to read the brou-ha-ha of the past
few days is as an effort at pre-emptive damage control by the CIA. Remember, in
the months following the 2001 attacks, Americans were looking for blood. They
wanted teams to hunt down Osama and his crew and kill them. They cheered the
reports – now resurfacing – of U.S., British and French special forces
presiding over and directing the slaughter in November, 2001, of about 1,000
prisoners of war by the Northern Alliance at Mazar-e-Sharif, with the Taliban
prisoners shut in containers left out in the sun with an okay by US
personnel, till their occupants roasted and suffocated. Over the next few
months and years, more terrible stories will probably surface. Attorney General
Eric Holder told Newsweek recently he was “shocked and saddened” after reading
the still secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the torture of
detainees at CIA “black sites.” “Shocked and saddened”, after what we know and
what we have seen already? It must be pretty bad. As William Polk remarks on
this site today of the evidence of sodomy, rape and torture captured in the
photograph collection that Obama first wanted to release and then changed his
mind: “Those who profess to know say that what these pictures show is truly horrible.
Some have compared them to the vivid record the Nazis kept of their sadism.”
The CIA death squads and kindred units
from the military killed and tortured to death many, many people and most
certainly there was extensive “collateral damage” – meaning innocent people
being murdered. As regards numbers, we have this public boast in 2003 by
president George Bush: “All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have
been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate.
Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and
our friends and allies.”
The CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief
of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, recently remarked that “There were
things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the
edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavory things going on. Now they
are a problem for the CIA,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now
and it’s going to handicap future activities.” Just because vice president Dick
Cheney may have been supervising Murder Inc it doesn’t mean that CIA officers
who became his operational accomplices shouldn’t be legally vulnerable.
President Obama continues to keep the lid on still secret crimes committed
by US government agencies in the Global War on Terror in the Bush years. The
CIA is clearly positioning itself for further disclosures. So is Dick Cheney.
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