George W. Bush called a halt to the
operation, concerned by warnings from
C.I.A. officers that the blast might kill
civilians, especially students from a
nearby girls’ school. In 1985, the C.I.A.
had been blamed for a car bomb in
Beirut that had killed more than eighty
people and injured two hundred, mainly
civilians. The target, Sayyed Moham
mad Hussein Fadlallah, a popular aya
tollah close to Mughniyeh, had escaped
unharmed. “We have never quite got
ten over the ’85 attempt on Fadlallah,”
Baer said. “It hit our reputation.” Still,
Olmert was intent on proceeding, and
Mossad took him to a remote base in
the desert and conducted a test explo
sion on a replica of the kill zone, using
cardboard figures to represent Mugh
niyeh and schoolchildren passing by.
The results reassured him.
Olmert visited Bush in the White
House to argue for the resumption of
the operation. Afterward, he refused to
say what they had discussed, explain
ing that he was uncomfortable disclos
ing details even to Bush’s aides in the
Oval Office. “We always used to go out
to the Rose Garden and whisper to each
other,” he said. “So the answer to your
question is not even in the records.”
But, according to a former Israeli offi
cial involved in the operation, Bush and
Olmert agreed that “only Mughniyeh
would be the victim.” The C.I.A. sent
its station chief in Israel to the Mos
sad headquarters to monitor the kill
ing in real time. Bush gave the opera
tion a green light.A
s a tool of statecraft, assassina
tion has had a fluctuating repu
tation. In contrast to plainly political
murders—from Caesar to Lincoln to
Trotsky—killing a person in the name
of national defense rests on a moral and
strategic case. To its defenders, it is a
lethal yet contained means of defusing
a larger conflict. Thomas More, the
sixteenth century theologian who, in
1935, was canonized by the Catholic
Church as a saint, contended that kill
ing an “enemy prince” deserved “great
rewards” if it saved the lives of inno
cents. The Dutch philosopher Hugo
Grotius, who laid down early concepts
of rightful conduct in war, believed it
was “permissible to kill an enemy in
any place whatsoever.” But, over time,
political leaders came to reject the le
gitimacy of wantonly killing one an
other. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson, in a
letter to James Madison, described “as
sassination, poison, perjury” as uncivi
lized abuses, “held in just horror in the
18th century.”
In the twentieth century, however,
nationstates embraced lethal operations. During the Second World War,
British spies trained Czechoslovakian
agents to kill the Nazi general Rein
hard Heydrich, and many govern
ments—Soviet, British, and American
among them—plotted, in vain, to kill
Adolf Hitler. The Holocaust persuaded
some future leaders of Israel that hunt
ing down individuals was an unavoid
able tool of defense for a small nation
threatened by people who rejected its
right to exist. But, as Tom Segev, the
author of “A State at Any Cost,” a new
biography of David BenGurion, Is
rael’s first Prime Minister, said recently,
“BenGurion was against personal ter
rorism, against the assassination of
Germans—he thought it was more
useful to recruit former Nazis to the
Mossad. He could be sympathetic to
those who wanted revenge, even if he
thought revenge was not something
useful.” In the decades that followed,
terrorism eroded the distinction be
tween wartime and peacetime. After
the Black September group, a militant
wing of the Palestine Liberation Or
ganization, massacred eleven members
of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team in
Munich, Prime Minister Golda Meir
approved a mission to hunt down the
killers. “This was something in be
tween punishment, revenge, and de
terrence,” Segev said.
In 1954, during a mission to dislodge
the President of Guatemala, the C.I.A.
produced “A Study of Assassination,”
a classified howto manual on what it
called “an extreme measure,” which in
cluded detailed advice. “A length of
rope or wire or a belt will do if the as
sassin is strong and agile,” it noted. “Per
sons who are morally squeamish should
not attempt it.” Between 1960 and 1965,
the C.I.A. tried at least eight times to
kill Fidel Castro, including a ploy in
volving a box of poisoned cigars. “The
Game of Nations,” a classic defense of
power politics, by Miles Copeland, a
former C.I.A. station chief in the Mid
dle East, presented assassination as an
“amoral” tool in “the art of doing the
necessary.” In 1962, Zakaria Mohieddin,
the chief of intelligence under the Egyp
tian President Gamal Abdel Nasser,
said, “The common objective of play
ers in the Game of Nations is merely
to keep the Game going. The alterna
“Awkward—I was waving to eight fish behind you.” tive to the Game is war.” But every