Robert Maheu and the logic of Assassination

I noticed at the weekend that Howard Hughes's old bagman, and Watergate player Bob Maheu had died earlier this month. Howard Hunt, who passed away last year with one last gasp at muddying the waters of the Kennedy assassination with some confabulated hazy tale, now has a companion wherever he is. Maheu viewed his principal quality, in a quite feudal way, as loyalty, and his activities as essential to the maintenance of a free society. Freedom, of course, was defined in his own peculiar way.

Like a good many people, I truly despise war. Yet I have no existential need to make things righteous in order to do them. There are evil things in a flawed world, and even more evil things. I would prefer that bad things are done, if they have to be, and that I do not have to know about them, or be drawn into some attempt to pretend that they could be put on a legal footing.

Those who consider themselves enlightened secularists, however, have always had a dilemma in this regard. If it is a virtue always to be open, and always to act openly, what do you do when policy suggests that a person in command of some gang or state elsewhere is a threat to all you know?

Many of the post-Calvinists who consider themselves atheists would simply say that governments should have openly stated policies of 'pre-emptive' war, 'just war' or 'armed liberation' at their disposal. Some would go further and suggest that all surveillance and forceful interrogation should be put on a legal basis, and criminalised if it were not. That impulse, to my mind, reveals what is in fact their neo-Calvinism.

There is a different logic, which is darker and nearer to the way history works. That is, if states want to play the power game, and avoid war, assassination, counter-insurgency, and extra-legal behaviour which everyone involved knows will never be officially acknowledged and which will only barely be protected is the only alternative.

That's essentially how Eisenhower avoided the death of any American in uniformed combat after the Korean war for his entire administration. Instead of bombing the Congo, or Cuba, agencies of the United States appear to have been involved with organised crime and with sponsored assassinations which disposed of problems. Fairness requires that I point out they sometimes weren't, as with Lumumba.

Al Gore also understood this point about targeted violence; during the Clinton administration, it was he who strongly supported rendition. Gore's President, Bill Clinton, has tacitly referred to a capacity to assassinate which he did not exercise, compared to a capacity to bomb TV stations and drug factories and kill Janitors, which he did. Since Mr Clinton speaks often in anger, I wonder if his admission that he broke Carter's legal, executive order not to commit assassinations by having the capacity to do so gave him any pause at all.

Even the fear of assassination programmes can sometimes enhance a country's image. Not only is there absolutely no evidence that Israel carried out anything but a small fraction of the deaths of its avowed enemies, there is also a Middle Eastern premium in blaming its servants for killing. Nevertheless, how many middle eastern colonels, or generals, or leaders, have thought twice and relented when considering attacks upon Israelis or their government because of the personal threat to themselves?

Maheu was steeped in this culture, although he came to it from the FBI and, ludicrously, the Small Business Administration. He deepened his association with it via defense contractors and the need of domestic politicians for money. He was therefore not originally part of the strain normally associated with mafia killings and so forth in the conventional wisdom, that of the Office of Strategic Services and of parts of the early CIA.

Nevertheless, what we know of his activities suggest how fluid the borders between the baronies of America were. It also confirms the status of Las Vegas as some sort of Byzantium in the clandestine Empire which lay beneath Cold War America.

In passing, I note that the old, pre-1990s CIA often got a 'bum rap' as the embodiment of clumsy anticommunism and corruption when it wasn't. Nixon was right to think it a nest of liberals--the BBC with guns, in some ways--and that the FBI, sections of the defense department, and the military companies were those who could be relied upon for conservative badness. What would an FBI programme to sponsor expressionist artists (as the CIA covertly did) have looked like, other than a prison camp with instruction books on how to draw properly?

This in a week when Trade Unionists dressed as Mickey Mouse, Cinderella and others are being frisked and carted away at Disneyland. I apologise for the whim.

Sometimes, though, as it has acknowledged, the CIA did deserve its bogeyman status. And of course, the unanswered questions of Gary Webb's 'Dark Alliance' reporting, or of George Tenet's 'slam dunk' lies before the Iraq war, still require resolution. As does, I would also argue, the exact status of the long-dead Lee Oswald that caused Robert Kennedy to suspect CIA involvement, now virtually disproved, in the JFK killing. Tenet, incidentally, has attempted to rebut the picture being painted of him and you can read him doing that here.

I'm not a conspiracist in the proper sense--I'd like to think that I wasn't the credulous sort--but I do acknowledge that there is a dietrological history, a 'real story' of the things behind the curtains that is often only acknowledged long after anything politically meaningful can be revealed.

States will, so long as states exist, use men like Maheu. The danger of connexion with them is that their activities will blow back; that moral capital, which is a non-renewable vital resource, will be diminished if their activities are revealed; that others will organise clandestine and murderous efforts, and that the practice would soon become general; and that, as in the case of Cuba, the higher the profile of the target the less likely things are to work out and the likelier they are to blow back.

There is also an inevitable danger that, if they are successful, they will encourage the dark and goal-oriented amorality of politicians and callow flunkies who have never seen what war is, or who have some need to feel like tough men by behaving like weak, bad ones. Capacities will be drawn into domestic disputes, as international ones, and those who wish to serve their state will end up being hired killers whose existence undermines it's claim to any sort of civilisation.

The ethical dilemma, surely though, is that, if bad things are not sometimes done, even if everyone knows they are bad, then worse things can be done 'righteously'? In the past forty years, states in the west have taken an axe to the idea of international law and of restraint, and now, as we enter an age of recession, of competition for global resources, and of active wars along vast arcs of instability in the world, I think it behoves us all to think about what is done in our name.

War is murder. Assassination is murder. Are we interested in the absolute villainy of any killing, or are our decision-makers prepared to balance the amount of blood that flows from their choices?