Free Beyond Bin Laden by Jon Meacham Page B

trying to kill Lumumba was a bad idea—immoral, impractical, and possibly dangerous. So, like any clever and experienced government servant, he smartly saluted and proceeded to stall. He hid the poison toothpaste in his refrigerator and waited. Eventually, Lumumba was killed by his political rivals. Devlin threw the poison into the Congo River.
    During the mid-1970s, when the Watergate scandals forced the CIA to expose its "Crown Jewels," its record of secret dirty tricks, there was a public outcry. Assassination was outlawed, sort of, though the president could seek a congressional "finding" to kill a foreign leader. Presidents were understandably wary of the tool. During the late 1990s, as the CIA saw that Al Qaeda was a growing threat, President Bill Clinton asked why the military couldn’t get "some black ninjas" to attack Osama bin Laden in his hideout. General Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, threw up a host of excuses—the logistics were difficult, it might seem like an invasion of Afghanistan, etc. The CIA was, if anything, more reluctant to get back into the assassination game. CIA officials had become "risk averse," in bureaucratic jargon.
    That changed after 9/11. When President George W. Bush declared that he wanted Bin Laden "dead or alive," CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black responded that the agency would deliver Osama’s "head in a box." But in the end, it took a decade before the agency could find Osama "hiding in plain sight," as one intelligence official put it, in a house thirty-five miles from the capital of Pakistan.
    Intelligence gathering is much harder than it looks in the movies. American technology is good at eavesdropping and satellite reconnaissance. But terrorists sometimes use only couriers and carrier pigeons (Osama’s hideout had no internet connection). For critical human intelligence (HUMINT), the CIA depends on sometimes fraught or shaky liaison relationships with foreign intelligence services that use unsavory methods like torture and often distrust or mislead U.S. intelligence. Our relationship with the Pakistani intelligence service is so poor that we decided against tipping it off to the strike on Bin Laden.
    The problem is not just our allies. Risk aversion dies hard in bureaucracies. After 9/11 picked up the pace of covert actions, top agency officials began buying insurance policies to pay legal fees in case they were called to testify before the inevitable congressional investigations. They did not trust their bosses or their political leaders to take the fall. Experience has taught them that blame passes down.
    Working with the military, the CIA has gotten more efficient at targeting and killing suspected terrorists in recent years. Though the numbers remain classified, perhaps a thousand jihadists have been eliminated in their lairs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Sudan. The killing is usually done by unmanned airborne drones but sometimes by old-fashioned boots on the ground, like the Navy SEAL team that took out Bin Laden. But just because the intelligence and special operations community has become practiced at assassination does not make it a good idea. NATO forces specifically deny that they are trying to kill Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi by targeting his "command sites." But they killed some of his family members in a recent strike. Gaddafi is vengeful. In 1986, after U.S. warplanes killed some of his relations by dropping bombs on his family compound, Gaddafi ordered a terrorist attack on an airliner, the Pan Am flight blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Cornered, the half-mad Libyan dictator could lash out again, possibly with chemical or biological weapons.
    American political leaders need to think of the day when America no longer has a monopoly on drones with missiles. Throughout history, assassination has been a mode of revenge and a two-way street. It has never been clear if President Eisenhower actually