Both the and the secret services have been involved in targeted assassinations worldwide, an investigative journalist claimed. Annie Jacobsen also said there’s “an element of sadism” among ’s henchmen that isn’t shown in operations. “We know from the historical record that the CIA was heavily involved in assassination during the Cold War, that’s non-negotiable,” she told podcaster . “Even the names of the programs that were assigned to perform assassinations are fascinating and now declassified. Eisenhower's, for example, was ‘The Health Alteration Committee,’ and modern drone strikes are essentially assassinations.” Annie says that for her book on the CIA – Surprise, Kill, Vanish – she interviewed John Rizzo, who was a top CIA operative from the mid-1970s until 2009. She recalled: “Rizzo was very forthcoming with me. Never sharing classified information, of course, but going up to the edge of what can legally be known. “Rizzo had a long career having started working under the Carter administration, and was responsible for the torture memos, was responsible for legally making sure the president's ass was covered, and then got thrown under the bus. “And so he was very forthcoming, not in a bitter way, but in a very earnest way about a lot of how these programs are made to be legal, because if the president of the
United States says they're legal, they're legal. Executive Order 12333, it says we don't assassinate, but it can be overwritten by another order, that's straight out of Rizzo's mouth.” The best example of an extrajudicial killing carried out by the US is the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Annie explained: “We were not at war with
Pakistan, so Title 50 doesn't apply. You can't have a
MILITARY operation in a country you're not at war with. The lines are really blurred, but even then they were a little more honoured." While covert action by US forces is as “clean” as any operation of that kind can be, Annie claimed the same can’t be said of actions by the
Russian FSB. “Having written about Russian assassination campaigns and programs since the earliest days of the Cold War, has a long history of assassinating, murdering dissidents,” she said. “In Surprise, Kill, Vanish, I tell the story of an actual KGB assassin named Khokhlov, who knocked on the door of the man he was assigned to kill…and the guy answers the door, and instead of killing him, he has like crisis of conscience, and says, ‘I can't kill you, even though that's what I'm supposed to do’ and then sits down with the guy and decides to defect.” After revealing “lots of incredible secrets about the Russian assassination programs and their poison labs”, Khokhlov himself was targeted by his former bosses. He was poisoned with radioactive polonium and only just survived. Russian assassins have become known for their signature use of poisons such as Novichok and Polonium. Polonium is 250 billion times as poisonous as cyanide – one gram of polonium-210 could be enough to kill 50 million people – but FSB hit squads have used the radioactive substance to target Putin’s enemies around the world. Polonium causes massive damage to the internal organs an, in particular, bone marrow – leading to a lingering and painful death. It was used to kill the former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, in
London in 2006. Shortly after meeting with two Russian agents in a London bar, Litvinenko began vomiting and later developed bloody diarrhoea. It was three weeks later, just hours before his death, that doctors realised that he had been dosed with polonium. This incident is thought to have exposed some 700 other people to hazardous radiation. Putin’s assassins targeted former Russian military officer
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in
Salisbury in 2018. They were ultimately unsuccessful, but several victims who had accidentally come into contact with the deadly nerve agent became very unwell and one woman died. Annie said the recent death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny shows that Russia’s methods remain as brutal as they were in Stalin’s day. She continued: “My feeling on that is that there's a thread somewhere in declassified documentation about these programs of America working to maintain a semblance of
Democratic ideals – however surprising that may be." She said the CIA are "always trying to, I wouldn’t say fight fair, because killing people isn't fair, but versus a certain ruthlessness, a real sinister, totalitarian type ruthlessness, certainly from Soviet
Russia.”