APRIL 9, 2023
How Assassination Became Policy at the CIA
Annals of the Covert World
Frank Church holds CIA poison dart gun at committee hearing with vice chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975 (Source: U.S. Capital Archives. Photo by Henry Griffin)
The CIA’s role in assassination is one of those topics handled gingerly by the press or Congress from time to time and then hastily put aside, with the habitual claim that the CIA may have dreamed of it, thought about it and maybe even dabbled in it, but had never actually gone successfully all the way. But in fact, the Agency has gone all the way many times.
There’s no dispute that the CIA has used assassination as a weapon lower down the political and social pecking order, as no one knew better than William Colby. He had, by his own admission, supervised the Phoenix Program and other so-called “counter-terror” operations in Vietnam. Phoenix was aimed at “neutralizing” NLF political leaders and organizers in rural South Vietnam. In congressional testimony, Colby boasted that 20,587 NLF activists had been killed between 1967 and 1971 alone. The South Vietnamese published a much higher estimate, declaring that nearly 41,000 had been killed. Barton Osborn, an intelligence officer in the Phoenix Program, spelled out in chilling terms the bureaucratic attitude of many of the agents toward their murderous assignments. “Quite often it was a matter of expediency just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the paperwork.”
Those killed outright in Phoenix operations may have been more fortunate than the 29,000 suspected NLF members arrested and interrogated with techniques that were horrible even by the standards of Pol Pot and Mobutu. In 1972 a parade of witnesses before Congress testified about the techniques of the Phoenix interrogators: how they interviewed suspects and then pushed them out of planes, how they cut off fingers, ears and testicles, how they used electro-shock, shoved wooden dowels into the brains of some prisoners, and rammed electric probes into the rectums of others.
For many of the Phoenix raids, the agency employed the services of bandit tribes and ethnic groups, such as the Khmer Kampuchean Kram, the KKK. The KKK was comprised of anti-communist Cambodians and drug smugglers who, as one Phoenix veteran put it, “would kill anyone as long as there was something in it for them.” The KKK even offered to knock off Prince Sihanouk for the Americans and frame the NLF for the killing.
These American death squads were a particular favorite of Richard Nixon. After the My Lai massacre, an operation with all the earmarks of a Phoenix-style extermination, there was a move to reduce the funding for these civilian killing programs. Nixon, according to an account by Seymour Hersh, objected vociferously. “No,” Nixon demanded. “We’ve got to have more of this. Assassinations. Killings.” The funds were promptly restored, and the death toll mounted.
Even at the senior level of executive action, Colby was being bashful about the CIA’s ambitions and achievements. In 1955 the CIA had very nearly managed to assassinate the Chinese Communist leader Chou En-lai. Bombs were put aboard Chou’s plane as he flew from Hong Kong to Indonesia for the Bandung conference. At the last moment Chou changed planes, thus avoiding a terminal descent into the South China Sea, since the plane duly blew up. The role of the CIA was later described in detail by a British intelligence agent who defected to the Soviet Union, and evidence recovered by divers from portions of the plane, including the timing mechanisms for two bombs, confirmed his statements. The Hong Kong police called the crash a case of “carefully planned mass murder.”
By 1960 Rafael Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic, had become irksome to US foreign policymakers. His blatant corruption looked as though it might prompt a revolt akin to the upsurge that had brought Fidel Castro to power. The best way to head off this unwelcome contingency was to ensure that Trujillo’s political career cease forthwith, which in early 1961 it did. Trujillo was gunned down in his car outside his own mansion in Ciudad Trujillo. It emerged that the CIA had provided guns and training to the assassins, though the Agency took care to point out that it was not absolutely 100 percent sure that these were the same weapons that ultimately deposed the tyrant (who had been originally installed in power by the CIA).
At about the same time, CIA director Allen Dulles decided that the leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was an unacceptable threat to the Free World and his removal was “an urgent and prime objective.” For assistance in the task of banishing this threat, the CIA turned to its own Technical Services Division (TSD), headed by that man of darkness, Sidney Gottlieb “Gottlieb’s division housed a horror chamber of labs whose researches included brain-washing, chemical and biological warfare, the use of drugs and electro-shock as modes of interrogation, and the development of lethal toxins, along with the most efficient means of applying these to the victim, such as the notorious poison dart gun later displayed before the cameras by Senator Frank Church.
In Lumumba’s case, Gottlieb developed a bio-poison that would mime a disease endemic to the Congo. He personally delivered the deadly germs along with a special hypodermic syringe, gauze masks, and rubber gloves to Lawrence Devlin, the CIA chief of the station in the Congo. The lethal implements were carried into the country in a diplomatic pouch. Gottlieb instructed Devlin and his agents how to apply the toxin to Lumumba’s toothpaste and food. However, the CIA’s bio-assassins couldn’t get close enough to Lumumba, so the “executive action” proceeded by a more traditional route. Lumumba was seized, tortured, and murdered by soldiers of the CIA’s selected replacement, Mobutu Sese Seko and Lumumba’s body ended up in the trunk of a CIA officer who drove around Lumumbashi trying to decide how to dispose of it.
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