WASHINGTON, 23 March 2003 — Fidel Castro survived plots to poison his cigars and infest his scuba suit with TB and fungal spores. Muammar Qaddafi escaped the bomb dropped on his tent. Mohamed Farrah Aidid gave the CIA the slip in Mogadishu. Kaiser Wilhelm thwarted a madcap plan by American GIs to kidnap him, though he did lose an ashtray in the process.
And Osama bin Laden is still out there, perhaps hiding away in some cave.
Saddam Hussein is the current target of American forces, and whether he can survive remains to be seen. On Wednesday night, the United States fired missiles at a residence in southern Baghdad because Saddam might be inside.
In other words, the United States is once again trying to take out the Bad Guy. How hard is it going to be?
“You can have the greatest weapons in the world and your intelligence can be superb, but it depends on a good deal of luck,’’ says Bob Goldman, a professor at the American University law school and co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.
James Woolsey was CIA director from 1993 to 1995, when the agency tried to pinpoint Aidid in Mogadishu so the US military could capture him. He found doing that, while having little presence in that chaotic country itself, was fruitless.
“The questions are natural,” Woolsey says, “but insofar as anybody implicitly would give an answer that would suggest it’s relatively easy, well, I can guarantee you they’ve never tried to do it.”
But the truth is, much of the time the US gets its man.
Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, highest-ranking naval officer in the Japanese military during World War II, masterminded the attacks on Pearl Harbor: planned them, rehearsed them, executed them. American intelligence determined that Yamamoto was scheduled to fly from one island to another on a particular day, in a particular type of aircraft. Army Air Force pilots shot it down.
It took bad rock music to help flush Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of his palace in 1989, but he ended up on trial — and in prison — in Florida. Invading Grenada resulted in the ouster of Bernard Coard, a communist who seized the country, providing a threat to American medical students there, according to the Reagan administration. Hitler may have killed himself — but it was because Allied troops were closing in.
There was, though, the case of Kaiser Wilhelm, who was given asylum by the Dutch after Germany’s defeat in World War I. As the story goes, renegade American soldiers, set on capturing the kaiser and presenting him to President Woodrow Wilson as a war criminal, went to his Dutch castle masquerading as journalists. Not believed, they fled — but not without pocketing an ashtray as a memento.
Recent US experience has been frustrating. Woolsey says Bin Laden’s ability to elude captors is aided by two factors: the cave-strewn terrain of Afghanistan’s northwest frontier, where he is believed to be hiding, and his protection by the locals.
The hardest part about finding Saddam is the same difficulty the CIA faced in Mogadishu: They have little presence in the country. “You’re not hovering about with helicopters, you’re not dashing down the streets and talking to informants, and so, obviously, it’s a very difficult job to find Saddam,’” says Woolsey, now a vice president at the Washington-area consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton. “Since he’s a national leader and should have some of the accouterments of a leader, like guards, that might help. But it’s also a fact that he’s used to moving all the time, changes places with great frequency, hardly ever stays in his palaces. ...’’
It was CIA actions during the Cold War that led President Gerald Ford in 1976 to sign Executive Order 12333 banning assassinations, an order reaffirmed by Ronald Reagan: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Coupled with international law, which prohibits attacks on foreign leaders outside wartime, that order prohibits the United States from targeting a foreign leader unless it is in self-defense or the two countries are engaged in armed conflict.
The executive order was the result of a Senate investigation into a series of attempts by CIA operatives to assassinate Cuban leader Castro, as well as an examination of other attempted or successful assassinations of foreign leaders, including Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.
