I never gave assassination a lot of thought until the morning two buttoned-down FBI agents flashed me their credentials, drily read me my rights, then even more drily informed me I was under investigation for the attempted murder of Saddam Hussein.
It was of apparent indifference to them that I was a duly sworn federal agent, that Saddam at the time was this country’s number-one enemy, that I’d been sent to Iraq to get rid of Saddam. The way I looked at it, it was pretty much a blank check.
Things didn’t lighten up any when halfway into my “interview” one of the FBI agents let it drop that the Department of Justice might consider further charging me with a capital crime. That one also went back to Iraq when a guerrilla force serving under me overran a couple of army positions, leading to the death of who knows how many of Saddam’s soldiers.
I thought about asking the FBI agents to explain the difference between assassination and aiding a resistance movement organized to depose a sworn enemy. Aren’t they both meant to end up in the same place, the death of the enemy? But I knew I wouldn’t get an answer.
I also knew my employer wasn’t going to be much help either. Before I left for Iraq, I’d asked my boss at the CIA for a definition of assassination. He paused a beat and said, “It’s a bullet with a man’s name on it.” What did that mean? I asked myself.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been around political murder. The CIA had sent me to Beirut in the mid-eighties to track the most notorious assassin of modern times. I stopped at pretty much nothing trying to put the man out of business, but only managed to get away with my own life. And then years later someone else took care of him, another bride who got away.
The FBI’s heart was never really in the Saddam investigation, and they dropped it. Life returned to normal, but I never did stop thinking about assassination. Two misses don’t make me an expert, but I’m a firm believer that engagement is the easiest path to understanding.
And there’s this that’s been on my mind for a long time: Dostoyevsky said we can know everything we need to know about a society by taking a look inside its prisons. But it seems to me who and how we murder for political ends tell us a lot more.