How Bush and Cheney Revived the CIA's "Murder Inc."

The wink and nudge of assassinations: "Let's put it this way," President Bush said of thousands of suspected al-Qaeda operatives in his 2003 State of the Union Address, "They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

It's not for nothing that Lyndon Johnson called the CIA "Murder Inc." for its willingness to use assassinations as a tool. Johnson was retired from the presidency when he made that comment, though he was aware of Bobby Kennedy's order to the CIA to develop plans to assassinate Fidel Castro (plans that backfired tragically) and must have been well aware of the agency's long history of targeted assassinations.

In 1954 the CIA issued a booklet called "A Study of Assassination," distributing it to agents and operatives at the time of the coup it engineered in Guatemala to oust Jacobo Arbenz-Guzman, who had been democratically elected. In the booklet, which was acquired by the National Security Archive in 1997, you could read the following:

No assassination instruction should ever be written or recorded. Ideally, only none person will be involved. No report may be made, though the act will usually be properly covered by news services. [...] The techniques employed will vary depending on whether or not the assassin himself is to be killed with the subject. If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called "lost." If the assassin is to escape, the act will be called "safe." It should be noted that no compromise should exist here. The assassin must not fall alive into enemy hands. [...] Except in terroristic assassinations, it is desirable that the assassin be transient. In a lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion and revenge are about the only feasible motives.

The CIA, as Tim Weiner documents brilliantly in Legacy of Ashes, his recent history of the agency, has always been better at recycling old, and usually bad, habits than at innovating its way to more effective operations. Those secret prisons, or "black sites," we heard about during the Bush years weren't new after all but a retread of an experiment the CIA had conducted in the early 1950s ("Project Artichoke") to develop interrogation and mind-control methods while using human guinea pigs. Torture was the collateral necessity.

Assassinations? Ditto. It wasn't until President Ford signed an explicit order banning targeted assassinations that the practice, until then abused and dissimulated from Congress, ended, at least officially.

The Bush administration revived all those old habits--the secret prisons, the "enhanced" interrogations, the torture. It made no secret of its repeal of Ford's order, either. President Bush approved a return to targeted assassinations in a 2001 executive order. "President Bush," The Times reported in 2002, "has provided written legal authority to the C.I.A. to hunt down and kill the terrorists without seeking further approval each time the agency is about to stage an operation."

Bush himself could barely contain his triumphalism in his 2003 State of the Union message when he described the presumed success of assassinations he had ordered as no president had dared before: "All told," he said, "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. 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."

There was a lot of speculation late last week about what "secret" program Dick Cheney had ordered the CIA to conduct--and hide from Congress--and current CIA Director Leon Panetta had suspended. "The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy," The Times reported on July 12.

This morning the Wall Street Journal "broke" the story: the program was nothing more than a targeted-assassination plan directed at al-Qaeda figures. The Times followed up by evening, blaring in its lead, "Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior al Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials."

But that's not news. We've known all along that the Bush White House had OK'd assassination. There was no need to hide that from Congress. But there was a need to hide this, reported in the UK Guardian: "Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments."

The operation was inspired by a blend of past CIA practices and past and present practices by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service that has made a routine of targeted assassinations (although, ironically, the death penalty is illegal in Israel).

Remember "Munich," the Steven Spielberg dramatization of the hit squad ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to assassinate the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics? That, essentially, is what the Bush-Cheney plan to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders was to be like.

The plan supposedly never was executed because the CIA over the years, according to The Times, "ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles. How could the role of the United States be masked? Should allies be informed and might they block the access of the C.I.A. teams to their targets? What if American officers or their foreign surrogates were caught in the midst of an operation? Would such activities violate international law or American restrictions on assassinations overseas?"

None of those questions stopped the CIA from conducting, and usually botching operations in the past, which, in an odd twist of irony, suggests that the agency displayed more admirable restraint, at least on this score, during the Bush years than it had in its "Murder Inc." heyday of its the 1950s and 1960s. That's not much of a consolation. It's just as grave that the program was studied, planned and likely funded, all behind Congress' back--and with the approval of Cheney and Bush. Bush's name is chronically absent from the last few days' reporting on the matter, but it's one of many unsubtle dissimulations, that one by the American press, surrounding the scheme.

The skeletons are spilling out of the Bush years' closets. Barack Obama's evasions, conveyed as a pledge to "look forward, not back," are becoming less tenable by the day, though a truth commission may not be enough to clear the muck of lawbreaking in the name of national security. In a nation of laws, lawbreakers are punished. Yet one of them is getting $150,000 a pop on the lecture circuit while the other parades as his party's top dog.

But for 60 years neither party has ever held the CIA to account. To the contrary. Democrats and Republicans have used the CIA as that most ideal of scapegoats--an unaccountable agency that happens to shield the illegal behavior of presidents and vice presidents from accountability. Got a problem with that? Blame the CIA, the government's very own black site. Immune, irreverent, untouchable. The perfect cloak for Bush and Cheney's daggers, republic of laws be damned.

See Also:

• Review: Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side"
• Torture Memos and Accountability - Why Prosecutions Must Follow
• Guantanamo's Illegal Shame
• Mossad's Tunis Assassination of the PLO's "Abu Jihad"