LONDON, 5 November 2003 — There was something uniquely British, and uniquely 1940s, about Operation Foxley, the wartime plot to kill Hitler: One strategy involved poisoning his tea, while an ingenious back-up plan involved poisoning the milk in his tea. (A third option was shooting him dead while he took his morning constitutional; the exploding-digestive-biscuit scenario cannot have been far behind.)
And yet the more that New York University Professor Paul Thaler studies the debate in Britain about whether to assassinate the Nazi dictator, the more parallels he keeps seeing with the present day. These are parallels with the Bush administration’s own internal debates, and the tactic, supposedly new in Iraq, of attempting to “decapitate” hostile regimes during conflict.
“I think the Foxley decision (not to proceed) has a real relevancy today in ways it might not even have had in 1998, when it came out,” says Professor Thaler, who is writing a book on the topic.
“We’re dealing with the very same issue today: Whether the assassination of leaders is actually a positive or negative idea, and whether their demise diminishes or facilitates the capacity for the enemy to commit warfare.”
Early on, a weak source urged the Allies to bomb a house in Perpignan, France, where, Thaler insists, Hitler was hiding out. Parallels with the start of the Iraq conflict are unavoidable — apart from the bit about not actually bombing the house, which proved (in both cases) to be dictator-free at the time.
Then there are the warring intelligence agencies, each struggling to control the information flow for their own ends. The head of the pro-assassination British wartime Special Operations Executive, with Rumsfeldian vigor and disdain for protocol — and with the tacit backing of the head of state — ordered all details of Hitler’s movements to be funneled directly to his agency. Meanwhile, the Special Intelligence Service bitterly opposed the plan, warning that it could make a martyr of the Fuhrer, re-energize the enemy or bring still worse leaders in his place.
