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In the opening strike of their war on Iran, the U.S. and Israel killed the Islamic republic's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is an exceedingly rare instance of a democracy killing a foreign head of state. And not for the first time in U.S. history, it raises the question, should the United States be in the business of assassinating foreign leaders? NPR's Ryan Lucas reports.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: In the first few decades of the Cold War, the United States wanted to keep all options on the table, including assassinations, in its global struggle against the Soviet Union. Luca Trenta is a professor at Swansea University in the U.K. and the author of a book on assassinations in U.S. foreign policy.
LUCA TRENTA: There was certainly a sense that assassination was just another contingency, something that the United States could not entirely exclude in the confrontation with the Soviet Union that was seen as this sort of all-powerful and terrible enemy.
LUCAS: Trenta says in the early Cold War, the U.S. often set the stage for the removal or killing of a foreign leader, but local allies pulled the trigger. That was the case, he says, in the 1961 assassination of the Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: As dictator Rafael Trujillo is shot down by seven assassins.
LUCAS: The CIA in this era also, of course, plotted to assassinate Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. This was all done in the shadows and it came tumbling out in public in the mid-1970s when revelations of CIA abuses led to congressional investigations, including one known as the Church Committee. That panel issued an interim report that declared assassinations, quote, "incompatible with American principles, international order and morality," end quote, and said they should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy. Again, Trenta.
TRENTA: I think the investigations of the Church Committee really provide a brief moment of self-reflection for U.S. politicians, for the U.S. public, in which there is a sense that maybe if we are a democracy and if we are to be different from the enemies that we are supposedly fighting, we should not be doing these things.
LUCAS: In 1976, President Gerald Ford did exactly that. He issued an executive order banning the U.S. government from engaging in political assassinations. Timothy Naftali is a historian at Columbia University.
TIMOTHY NAFTALI: Gerald Ford felt that this was not a tool that he wanted to use. And what's really interesting is that his successors expanded the ban. So Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter both felt that the United States should not be in the assassination business.
LUCAS: And for the next 20-plus years, the U.S. was not, although with an asterisk or two. In 1986, the U.S. bombed several sites in Libya, including leader Muammar Gaddafi's family compound. And twice in the 1990s, the U.S. struck Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's palaces.
Brent Scowcroft was President George H. W. Bush's national security advisor. Here is Scowcroft talking to ABC News' Peter Jennings about the U.S. targeting of Saddam in 1991.
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PETER JENNINGS: Do you want him killed?
BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, we don't do assassinations, but yes, we targeted. We targeted all the places where Saddam might have been.
JENNINGS: So you deliberately set out to kill him if you possibly could.
SCOWCROFT: I guess. Yeah. That's fair enough.
LUCAS: Naftali says these operations weren't cloak-and-dagger conspiracies to kill a foreign leader but instead military operations against command and control facilities. But of course, the U.S. wouldn't have wept any tears, he says, if Saddam or Gaddafi had been killed.
NAFTALI: I think that's how Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton got around the assassination ban.
LUCAS: That reflects, at least in part, he says, that presidents themselves found assassinations distasteful and knew the American public felt the same way. That changed on September 11, 2001, with the al-Qaida terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 people. Congress responded by authorizing all necessary means to go after the perpetrators of 9/11, Naftali says.
NAFTALI: Well, all necessary means includes assassination. And I think that the taboo - if you want to call it an elite and public taboo - against using assassination disappears.
LUCAS: In the post-9/11 world, the U.S. adopted a new technology, the armed drone, to kill al-Qaida leaders around the globe. But these strikes targeted alleged terrorists, not foreign government officials. President Trump blurred that line when he announced a deadly drone strike in 2020 against Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Soleimani has been perpetrating acts of terror to destabilize the Middle East for the last 20 years.
LUCAS: While the U.S. considered Soleimani a terrorist, he was a high-ranking Iranian government official. Iran responded with plots of its own to assassinate Trump as well as senior administration officials. Now, six years later, a joint U.S.-Israeli operation has killed Iran's political and religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The U.S. provided intelligence while Israel conducted the lethal strike. President Trump has crowed about the operation, saying on social media that Khamenei, quote, "was unable to avoid our intelligence and highly sophisticated tracking systems," end quote.
Those sophisticated intelligence and military capabilities make it increasingly easy to kill foreign leaders, experts say, and that carries with it a whole host of strategic, philosophical and moral implications. And Swansea University Professor Luca Trenta says just because a country can assassinate a foreign leader doesn't mean that it should.
TRENTA: I think the Khamenei assassination is a major deal because democracies have killed a foreign heads of state, because other countries might follow the same example, and there will be nothing that democracies will be able to say when that happens.
LUCAS: The moral high ground is lost, he says, and perhaps along with it, the taboo against such assassinations. Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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