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An assassin is one who kills (assassinates) people primarily for money or loyalty to a leader or small trust circle, as distinct from a sniper or other soldier who may employ the same methods but within the rules of war between nation-states. The distinction blurs when a sniper, soldier, or spy is given a specific target, or if the orders come through unofficial channels. Terms such as "death squad" came into use to describe such unofficial killing.

The definition of an "assassin", as with "spy" or "terrorist", is politically loaded, and most commentators do not believe it has an objective definition.

Training

The original term "assassin" comes from the Arabic "Hashshashin," a term for a group of brigands on the medieval Afghanistan Silk Road. The word is thought to be derived from hashish; it is claimed by some to have been used in their indoctrinication and training.

Hashshashin raided caravans traveling between Europe and China. They subdued, kidnapped, drugged and seduced the fiercest caravan guards, convincing them with elaborate means that they had died and awakened in Paradise. Thereafter, on subsequent raids, they fought furiously, believing that their death would only return them to that Paradise. The training technique was sophisticated for its time, especially the use of Islamic dogma, drugs, and sex in contradictory combinations (as today practiced by Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which were also based in Afghanistan.

However, it was not unique, and the practice of killing for money long preceded that particular organization.

employed to promote policy

It has been common to the politics of most cultures to use strategic killings as a tool of policy, in particular to win or avoid wars, and paid killers have always been felt necessary to this practice.

Political killings are thus usually referred to as "assassinations" as it is difficult to distinguish motivations (money or loyalty, usually some of both being involved) for a clandestine act, or "covert action", in the parlance of military intelligence.

Profit motive

Individually, too, people have always found their reasons to arrange the deaths of others through paid intermediaries. The term "hired killer" or "hitman" is most often used to distinguish an assassin with no political motive or group loyalty, killing only for money.

Entire organizations have sometimes specialized in assassination as one of their services. Besides the original Hashishim, the ninja clans of Japan were rumored to perform assassinations. In the United States, Murder Incorporated, an organization with ties to the Mafia, was formed for the sole purpose of performing assassinations for organized crime.

Political motive

As there are few or no assassins who would kill friends or family strictly for money, it is argued, most could be said to have a political motive, or at least some significant inhibitions based on political or personal loyalty.

Before a United States executive order by President Gerald Ford in 1976, the United States federal government, in particular its Central Intelligence Agency, trained, hired, and employed assassins. The ban in 1976 came "following revelations by the Church Committee of CIA involvement in planned or actual assassinations of, among others, Cuban President Fidel Castro, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, Chilean President Salvador Allende, Dominican President Rafael Trujillo, and Che Guevara." (Human Rights Watch)

It was deemed at that time that the liability of engaging in this activity led in general to a reduced level of personal security for elected leaders of democratic countries, who are in general much more vulnerable to retaliation. President Ford himself had been the target of an assassination attempt, by a member of the Charles Manson Family, although her motives were not deemed to be financial or political. The still-controversial assassination of President John F. Kennedy thirteen years earlier in 1963 may also have been a factor in President Ford's executive order.

Moral high ground

Beyond this practical concern, there was the issue of moral equivalence: no state that deliberately trained, hired, sanctioned or harbored an assassin operating outside the rules of war could reasonably expect support even from its allies when caught--particularly those allies suffering "terrorism" against civilian targets, also outside the rules of war. For democratic nation-states to claim to be better rulers than their less democratic opponents, they could not seem to be employing any assassin against leaders of political movements--thus acknowledging inability to compete with their leadership ideologically--a fatal weakness for any democratic government.

The public pose of democratic governments in general, with the notable exception of the state of Israel, was to disdain "trial, conviction, and death by intelligence." (Anonymous US military officer).

Killers by proxy

However, the practice of training, hiring, and harboring assassins remained a common practice of many democratic governments and most undemocratic leaders through the 1990s. The School of the Americas, operated by the United States at Fort Benning, Georgia, trained many individuals from Latin American nations in the exact techniques that were no longer legal for Americans to employ. Israel employed weapons from the United States to attack specific individuals in Palestine who it believed sponsored suicide attacks. An assassin could be armed, trained, hired, hidden and harbored--but not openly and directly--by a developed nation.

Also, as CIA spokesman Bill Harlow asserted in 2001, "The CIA has never turned down a field request to recruit an asset in a terrorist organization." Such groups are known to execute people in custody, attack civilians, and employ banned weapons, raising the issue of whether the CIA or other nation-state military intelligence agencies recruiting them are morally liable for these actions, especially if they are committed after recruitment.

Executions in custody

U.S. National Security archive PDD 39 of June 1995, secret at that time, states that "...if we do not receive adequate cooperation from a state that harbors a terrorist whose extradition we are seeking, we shall take appropriate measures to induce cooperation. Return of suspects by force may be effected without the cooperation of the host government...", which seems to leave open the question of whether suspects in custody or about to escape custody could be killed, whether or not they present a clear immediate threat.

Current "international humanitarian and human rights law, as well as U.S. military and police doctrine, flatly prohibit executing anyone in actual or effective custody or targeting anyone who is not a combatant. To flout this prohibition during armed conflict would be a war crime." (Human Rights Watch, September 20, 2001).

Just another soldier?

However, during the 2001 Afghanistan War, local troops equipped, fed, and in some cases paid by the United States executed prisoners in their custody--without sanction--raising the question of moral and legal liability for this.

Some questioned whether the United States had avoided employing its own troops simply to avoid taking casualties--and over-exposing its opponents, the Afghan Taliban, to atrocities from its Afghan Northern Alliance allies, their bitter enemies. The issue in general got little attention.

Patricia Zengel, in "Assassination and the Law of Armed Conflict", 1991, concludes "...that there is no longer any convincing justification for retaining a unique rule of international law that treats assassination apart from other uses of force." The assassin, then, is just another soldier, and his sanction from a nation-state may well come before or after the fact, and may in fact come from some nation-state other than his own, in some cases.

Age of amateurs?

Global trade and mass movement of people, modern seduction and "brainwashing" techniques, religious fanaticism, the political futility of opposing undemocratic leaders or occupying powers by non-violent means, and other factors combine to suggest that the most likely future assassin is not a high-priced pro, but rather an ordinary citizen who has no prior record and whose political motive is obscure or incomprehensible.

Much like the late-19th-century anarchist assassins who killed six heads of state from 1880 to 1901, or the assassins of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, they will likely appear from nowhere, kill their target, and be quickly caught. Their families or loved ones may well benefit, as in the case of Palestinian suicide bombers in the West Bank during the Intifada. They may believe in some afterlife of pleasure--as the original "Hashishim" did--or simply seek to sacrifice self for a loyalty group.

The sheer numbers of such people in the developing world, plus the lack of education and opportunity, and an abundance of ruthless tactical leaders who will happily employ even children as tools, suggests that the age of highly trained professional assassins may well be over. The new assassin is every frustrated individual with nothing to live for, every true believer, and in some places every grieving man. This is, perhaps, the age of the amateurs.

See also Assassins, Hashshashin, assassination market, asymmetric warfare, terrorism, espionage.

External links:

• letter to President Bush by Human Rights Watch, September 20, 2001
• Constitutional and legal issues: assassination