State-Sponsored Assassins Tend to Get Away

(March 6) -- Details continue to trickle out about the assassination in January of Hamas military leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. And while Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement, everyone -- even Israel's friends -- suspects its intelligence service, Mossad, masterminded and carried out the hit.

The Mossad has conducted plenty of assassinations in the past. And so, too, have other countries. The only thing surprising about the latest hit is how quickly the details of the operation became public -- thanks to Dubai's release of the surveillance footage and (forged) passport information of the 20-plus agents believed to have carried it out. With all the advances in security and surveillance technology, "plausible deniability is out the window," Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal.

But don't be shocked if none of the highly identifiable operators is ever apprehended or brought before a court. For if there's one common trait of government-sponsored extrajudicial killings, it's that the perpetrators usually get off.

Let's begin with the United States. After a few bungled attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro under several administrations, President Gerald Ford in 1976 signed an executive order prohibiting "political" assassinations. And while that ban remains in place, since 9/11 the United States has conducted targeted killings, with drones and personnel, of suspected terrorists. Innocents have also been killed under this policy, and yet American soldiers or private contractors rarely face discipline in American courts, and never in foreign ones.

But it's not just the most powerful country in the world that can kill with relative impunity. At first, there was much ado about the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. A U.N. investigation was formed, arrests were made and all signs looked as if it was Syria, long the power player in Lebanon, that was behind the killing. But five years later, that investigation has all but petered out, and no Syrian intelligence official has been hauled before a court.

In 2006, former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died from poisoning in London. Someone had exposed Litvinenko to a fatal dose of highly radioactive polonium-210 -- not the most subtle of poisons. A Russian dissident, Litvinenko was also a British citizen, and there are signs that the Kremlin was behind the attack. Scotland Yard's prime suspect, former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi, has since become a member of the Russian parliament, and Moscow has spurned all extradition requests.

And just a couple of years earlier, in 2004, Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was pro-Western, was poisoned with dioxin. He survived (and won the election) but was left horribly scarred by the toxin. Again fingers were pointed toward at least some level of Russian involvement, which Yushchenko has accused of thwarting the investigation of the incident. But in neither poisoning case has any Russian been brought to justice.

But even if state-sanctioned assassins are caught red-handed, they're liable to get off. In 1997, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a mission against Khaled Mashal, a Hamas operative in Jordan. Though Mashal was injected with a toxin, he survived and two Mossad agents were captured. But they weren't prosecuted. Rather, they were returned to Israel as part of a prisoner exchange of Hamas officials, including the group's spiritual leader, in Israeli custody.

And while a Libyan was indeed convicted of murder and jailed in Scotland for the 1988 Moammar Gadhafi-sanctioned bombing of Pam Am Flight 103, he was released after serving just eight years. Even aiming at high-profile targets in powerful countries in the U.S. can result in relatively small consequences. After implicating Iraq in an attempted assassination of ex-President George H.W. Bush in 1993, President Bill Clinton sent 23 Tomahawk missiles into Iraqi intelligence headquarters. But the attack was launched in the middle of the night to limit casualties.

A pattern emerges and with it a discomfiting lesson: If you're going to murder someone, try to get government support.