[D66] An Assassin’s Tool Kit: When Guns Are Not Enough

[A.O.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/world/assassination-ice-ax-poison.html

An Assassin’s Tool Kit: When Guns Are Not Enough

    By Richard Pérez-peña, Yonette Joseph, www.nytimes.com
    View Original
    March 17th, 2018

Investigators in Salisbury, England, after the former Russian spy Sergei
V. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were attacked with a military-grade
nerve agent.
Photo by: Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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In the ruthless worlds of espionage, global politics and the criminal
underground, there are many grim ways to die:

Tea laced with polonium. A face full of the nerve agent VX. A
gentleman’s umbrella that shoots ricin pellets.

Sometimes the assassination attempts leave a mystery in their wake, as
in the case of the Russian double agent Sergei V. Skripal and his
daughter, Yulia Skripal, who were poisoned by a military-grade nerve
agent called Novichok in Salisbury, England, this month.

The episode set off an escalating diplomatic row between Britain and
Russia, and is one in a long line of dastardly plots that have captured
the public’s imagination. Here is a selection, and the deadly implements
deployed.

Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, died of his wounds a day after
he was attacked in 1940 with an ice ax in Mexico City.
Photo by: Associated PressAssociated Press

Leon Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary who created the Soviet Red Army,
saw himself as Lenin’s heir, but when Lenin died, he was outflanked by
Stalin in the power struggle that followed.

Trotsky fled into exile and ended up in a leafy suburb of Mexico City in
1940. There, an agent of Stalin’s, Ramón Mercader, got into Trotsky’s
study with a mountaineering pick hidden under his clothes. When Trotsky
turned his back, he buried it in Trotsky’s cranium. The Russian died the
next day, Aug. 21.

In 2005, the lost ax — believed to have been stolen by the Mexican
police — turned up in the possession of the daughter of a Mexican police
commander. According to The Guardian, the woman, Ana Alicia Salas, said
her father had filched the bloodstained weapon to preserve it for
posterity. But now, she said: “I am looking for some financial benefit.
I think something as historically important at this should be worth
something, no?”

Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, a Mexican drug kingpin and former
leader of the Tijuana Cartel, was celebrating at a birthday party when
he was felled by armed men dressed as clowns.

The drug lord had hobnobbed with celebrities and sports stars, and his
family, known as the Arellano Félix clan, was said to have inspired the
film “Traffic.”

At the birthday party at a rented beach house in Los Cabos, Mexico, in
2013, assassins with red noses and bright orange wigs mingled among 100
guests. Footage of the scene captures Mr. Arellano Félix’s last moments.
As two bands played and a man sang, the clowns began shooting.

“He was hit by two bullets, one in the chest and one in the head,” Isai
Arias, a Baja California state government official, said at the time.
Mr. Arellano Félix died at 63. The clowns escaped.
Patrice Lumumba of Congo in New York in 1960. United States officials
feared he would become the African equivalent of Fidel Castro.

Photo by: Allyn Baum/The New York Times

Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the
Democratic Republic of Congo, was a champion of African unity and of
self-determination for his own country, which had been colonized by Belgium.

But Western governments, which had big stakes in his nation, wanted his
head. (The United States, which was believed to have used uranium from
Congolese mines for the Hiroshima atomic bomb, feared the charismatic
Congolese politician would become an African Fidel Castro.)

The C.I.A. considered poisoning his toothpaste. “I was totally taken
aback,” Larry Devlin, a former C.I.A. officer, recalled in The New York
Times in 2008 about being handed the toxic toothpaste in 1960 to carry
out the assassination. He stalled, believing that the killing would have
had “disastrous” global effects, he said.

Mr. Lumumba was deposed in 1960. He fled but was captured, tortured and
killed by Congolese fighters on Jan. 17, 1961. His murder is considered
one of the most important assassinations of the 20th century; it took
place seven months after Congo won independence.
Security cameras at the Kuala Lumpur airport captured Kim Jong-nam
looking up at the departure board before the attack, and a woman
attacking him, then walking away. After his attack, he approached
airport security officials and was taken to a medical clinic.
Photo by: Kuala Lumpur International Airport, via Fuji TV

Most do not see the attacks coming.

Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half brother of North Korea’s leader,
perished after getting the nerve agent VX in his face at a Malaysian
airport in February 2017, when he was set upon by two women who later
said they had been recruited for what they were told was a prank.

The Hamas leader Khaled Meshal was targeted in September 1997 by Mossad
agents who sprayed poison on his skin. The plot failed after Israel
handed over the antidote.

Two men waited until he was about to enter his office in Amman before
one walked up and tried to spray a lethal nerve toxin on his neck, but
missed and got him in his ear. He later said that a shivering sensation
raced down his spine “like an electric shock.”

At the hospital, the Hamas leader was given two days to live. A furious
King Hussein of Jordan demanded that Israel provide the antidote, saying
the Mossad agents could otherwise face execution. In an extraordinary
move, Israel had an agent hand it over, saving Mr. Meshal’s life.
A mural of Ahmed Shah Massoud in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2002, put in
place to commemorate the first anniversary of his assassination.
Photo by: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

• Gen. Ahmed Shah Massoud, an Afghan warlord, was assassinated in 2001
by two men posing as journalists. They entered his headquarters in the
Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan, where General Massoud sat on a
couch. The “reporter” detonated a bomb strapped to his waist. The
“cameraman” set off a bomb hidden in the camera and ran from the room,
jumping into the River Oxus, but the general ’s bodyguards pulled him
out and killed him.

• Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was sleeping in a room at the Grand
Hotel in Brighton, England, on Oct. 12, 1984, when an Irish Republican
Army terrorist cell set off a 30-pound bomb that ripped through the
building. The blast killed five people and seriously wounded 30 others,
but not Ms. Thatcher.

• Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, the first woman to lead a
Muslim country, was killed on Dec. 27, 2007, by a teenage suicide
bomber. She had attended an election rally in Rawalpindi when the
15-year-old approached her convoy, shot at her and blew himself up. The
Pakistani Taliban were blamed.
A Deadly Umbrella
Georgi Markov
Photo by: BBC, via Associated Press

The dissident writer Georgi Markov defected from his communist homeland
of Bulgaria in 1969 to start a new life in London, where he became a
reporter for the BBC.

Waiting to catch a bus to work on Waterloo Bridge on Sept. 7, 1978, he
felt a sharp pain on the back of his right thigh but continued on to
work. He developed a fever, was admitted to a hospital in South London
and died four days later.

An inquiry revealed someone had used a specially adapted umbrella to
inject a pellet containing the poison ricin into his leg. The culprit
was later identified as a Bulgarian spy, Francesco Gullino, a.k.a. Agent
Piccadilly.
Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. officer who became a critic of
the Russian government, died two weeks after being poisoned with a
radioactive isotope.
Photo by: Natasja Weitsz/Getty Images

Sometimes, the victim suffers terribly: Alexander V. Litvinenko, a
former Russian agent and Putin critic who lived in exile in London,
drank tea laced with polonium-210 in 2006 and died a slow, agonizing death.

Roman Tsepov, Vladimir V. Putin’s former bodyguard, began vomiting and
having diarrhea after drinking a cup of tea at a Federal Security
Service office in St. Petersburg on Sept. 11, 2004. He died at 42 two
weeks later. According to a BBC radio documentary, a post-mortem
revealed radioactive contamination in his body.

Why the former bodyguard was killed has never been publicly revealed.
The Cuban leader Fidel Castro denouncing the United States at the United
Nations General Assembly in 1960. He died in 2016, at the age of 90.
Photo by: Associated Press

Two figures stand out in assassination lore: Fidel Castro, the Cuban
strongman, and Rasputin, the wild-eyed, deeply reviled monk who
influenced Russia’s last czar.

The attempts on Castro’s life included:

• A contaminated skin-diving suit: According to a summary of the
C.I.A.’s assassination plots, an American lawyer, James B. Donovan, was
to give Castro a contaminated skin-diving suit while the two negotiated
for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners.

“The C.I.A. plan was to dust the inside of the suit with a fungus
producing Madura foot, a disabling and chronic skin disease, and also
contaminating the suit with tuberculosis bacilli in the breathing
apparatus,” the document states.

The lawyer chose instead to give Castro a clean skin-diving suit “as a
gesture of friendship,” and the modified one never left the laboratory.

• A booby-trapped seashell: C.I.A. experts were asked to consider
packing a seashell with explosives, so that it could be left in one of
Castro’s favored diving haunts, rigged to kill him if he picked it up.

    “It was determined that there was no shell in the Caribbean area
large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive which was
spectacular enough to attract the attention of Castro,” the documents say.

• Fatal cigars: The plan was to put a botulinum toxin into a box of his
favorite cigars. The cigars were delivered in 1961 — but never reached
Castro.

• Botulism, again: Marita Lorenz told Vanity Fair in 1993 that as
Castro’s lover in 1959, she was recruited to assassinate him by dropping
two botulism-toxin pills into his drink. She had reservations, and then
found out that by putting the pills in a cold-cream jar, she had spoiled
them. She said the wily Castro had her all shook up, anyway:

    “He leaned over, pulled out his .45, and handed it to me. He didn’t
even flinch. And he said, ‘You can’t kill me. Nobody can kill me.’ And
he kind of smiled and chewed on his cigar … I felt deflated. He was so
sure of me. He just grabbed me. We made love.”

Rasputin, who had gained enormous influence in the court of Nicholas II
with his claims to healing powers, survived several assassination
attempts before an elaborate conspiracy unfolded in December 1916 to
kill him once and for all.

Prince Felix Yusupov invited him to Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg,
where he was fed cake laced with potassium cyanide and copious amounts
of cyanide-spiked Madeira — but did not die.

He was shot, but ran. He was shot again and again. Some reports say the
conspirators even stabbed him. Finally, he was thrown into a car and
driven to Petrovski Island, where he was dropped into the Neva River and
drowned.

© 2018 The New York Times Company.