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Weekend Edition December 19-21, 2014<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/19/the-cias-secret-killers/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/19/the-cias-secret-killers/</a></small></small></b><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big><big>Torture and Assassination
as Policy</big></big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">The CIA’s Secret Killers</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST.
CLAIR</div>
<div class="main-text">
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And regular as the congressmen taken in adultery seeking
forgiveness from God and spouse, the CIA rolled out the familiar
response 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.</p>
<p>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 …</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“…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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In his <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512526/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Killing
Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, </a>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…</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><strong>Alexander Cockburn’s</strong> <a
href="http://store.counterpunch.org/product-category/books/">Guillotined!</a> and <a
href="http://store.counterpunch.org/product-category/books/">A
Colossal Wreck</a> are available from CounterPunch.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>Jeffrey St. Clair</strong> is editor of
CounterPunch. His new book is <i><a
href="http://store.counterpunch.org/product/killing-trayvons/">Killing
Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence</a></i> (with
JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached
at: <a href="mailto:sitka@comcast.net">sitka@comcast.net</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>This column is adapted from a piece that ran in
CounterPunch in July 2009. <br>
</em></p>
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