Free Beyond Bin Laden by Jon Meacham Page A

of a messy stalemate, an Afghanistan characterized by a mix of a weak central government, strong local officials, and a Taliban presence (supported out of Pakistan) that is extensive in much of the Pashtun-dominated south and east of the country. Resolution of the ongoing conflict by either military or diplomatic means is highly unlikely and not a realistic basis for U.S. policy. Walking away from Afghanistan, however, is not the answer. Instead, this country should sharply scale back what it is doing and what it seeks to accomplish, and aim for an Afghanistan that is "good enough" in light of local realities, limited interests, and the broad range of both domestic and global challenges facing the United States.
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    Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of
War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars
. This chapter is drawn from testimony he delivered to the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, on May 3, 2011.

The Trouble with Assassination
Evan Thomas
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    The director of central intelligence was narrating the show. On Sunday afternoon, May 1, the president and vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a host of senior officials crowded into the White House Situation Room as CIA director Leon Panetta, speaking on a video screen from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, described, in real time, the hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden. The nation’s top spymaster was appropriately cryptic and discreet. "We have a visual on Geronimo," he said, using the code name for Bin Laden. A few silent minutes passed. "Geronimo EKIA," intoned Panetta: Enemy Killed in Action. "We got him," said President Obama.
    It was just like the movies, or the umpteenth episode of
24
. Efficient and deadly; neat and tidy, in a spooky kind of way. But in the long history of the CIA, the United States government’s attempts to capture and kill enemies of the state have rarely worked so smoothly or so well. Assassination is a difficult business. Recall that in the opening moments of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, stealth bombers struck a target near Baghdad where Saddam Hussein was supposedly hiding. He was nowhere near there; the intelligence was faulty. It took U.S. Special Operations forces another nine months to find Saddam, even though the American military was occupying Iraq. Historically, assassination has been a double-edged sword, which can cut back in dangerous and unexpected ways.
    The Central Intelligence Agency, the spy service charged with doing our nation’s dirty work, once embraced assassination. In 1960, the agency, then in its high age of covert action, created an "executive action" capability, as assassination was euphemistically called. The code name was ZRRIFLE, and in the CIA’s labs a top scientist named Dr. Sidney Gottlieb brewed lethal toxins and developed James Bond-ish delivery systems like poison pens. (There was even a plot to make Fidel Castro’s beard fall out, using a woman’s hair remover.) But the CIA never actually killed anyone. The Communist dictator of Cuba will probably die in his sleep, a half century after the CIA hired the Mafia to try to slay him in a "gangland-style" murder.
    The murky and sometimes darkly comic reality of CIA assassination plots is best illustrated by the story of Lawrence Devlin, the Harvard-educated CIA station chief in the Congo in 1960. That summer, CIA headquarters cabled Devlin that he would receive a visitor identified only as "Joe from Paris." Joe was the mysterious Dr. Gottlieb, who arrived in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), the capital of the Congo, with a toothpaste tube of poison. Devlin was ordered to somehow administer the poison to Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s leader, who was believed to be under the sway of Communist Moscow. Devlin was told that the order came direct from President Dwight Eisenhower.
    Devlin thought that