The Great Game by Hitz Frederick Porter

Author:Hitz, Frederick Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307428707
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

Assassination

Political assassination is a dirty business, whether it be a mission assigned to the intelligence services or one assigned to a military authority. Historically, the intelligence services have recoiled from it, largely because the competencies required to pull it off are quite different from those required in classical espionage. And spies don’t like involving themselves in planning and carrying out political assassinations. It’s not what they were hired to do. Somerset Maugham states the old-fashioned objection succinctly, in Ashenden:

It was not of course a thing that the big-wigs cared to have anything to do with. Though ready enough to profit by the activities of obscure agents of whom they had never heard, they shut their eyes to dirty work so that they could put their clean hands on their hearts and congratulate themselves that they had never done anything that was unbecoming to men of honour. Ashenden thought with cynical humour of an incident in his relations with R. He had been approached with an offer that he thought it his duty to put before his chief.

“By the way,” he said to him as casually as possible, “I’ve got a sportsman who’s willing to assassinate King B. for five thousand pounds.”

King B. was the ruler of a Balkan state which was on the verge through his influence of declaring war against the Allies and it was evident that his disappearance from the scene would be extremely useful. His successor’s sympathies were indefinite and it might be possible to persuade him to keep his country neutral. Ashenden saw from R.’s quick, intent look that he was perfectly aware of the situation. But he frowned sulkily.

“Well, what of it?”

“I told him I’d transmit his offer. I believe he’s perfectly genuine. He’s pro-Ally and he thinks it would bust his country if it went on the side of the Germans.”

“What’s he want five thousand pounds for, then?”

“It’s a risk and if he does the Allies a good turn he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t get something out of it.”

R. shook his head energetically.

“It’s not the kind of thing we can have anything to do with. We don’t wage war by those methods. We leave them to the Germans. Damn it all, we are gentlemen.”1

Present-day objections would not be put in the language of the gentleman’s code (so strongly reminiscent of U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson’s oft-quoted statement in 1929, as he closed down his department’s fledgling but highly successful SIGINT operations, that “gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail”). But the result is the same. Current intelligence community leadership would echo the response that political assassinations are not what spy agencies should be about.

The pitfalls are further demonstrated in spy fiction, by, for example, the Jackal’s straight talk to his potential Organization for a French Algeria employers as they interview him, a professional assassin, for the assignment of shooting President Charles de Gaulle of France, in Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. The Jackal makes it perfectly clear that the earlier

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