Is there such a thing as an assassin?

Factual Questions
1

I’m talking about the Hollywood idea, of a lone assassin, who can infiltrate a location, take out a target, and get the hell out without being discovered? Appears all the time in films like Leon, Bourne films etc, but doesn’t actually seem to have a real world counterpart.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden apparently took several helicopters full of Seals to accomplish. In a movie, the CIA would have had someone on the payroll who could sneak into the house, put a bullet into OBL, and get out again, without having to kill everyone else in the house.

Similarly, in Libya, where we seem to be spending a fortune on dropping ordnance on Gaddaffi’s soliders, when he is the man we want. In fact, in this case, politicians seem to be actively distancing themselves from the idea, with Obama saying there are no plans to kill Gadaffi, which seem odd, seeing as we are quite happy to kill those who work for him.

Is it simply easier/more cost effective to go in all guns blazing, or is the idea of the lone assassin simply unworkable in the real world?

2

Certainly assassins exist. Ask the ghost of Leon Trotsky. Plenty of people have been killed by lone killers – they generally aren’t very high profile people, I suspect, so nobody’s got them well-protected, and they can be killed ananymously. Bin laden is high-profile and was living near the military college of a country who’s nominally an ally.

I’d like to think that any lone operators are more like Frederick Forsyth’s Jackal from Day of the Jackal – methodical planners who don’t look for publicity, and don’t do Jason Bourne-like superhero stunts. I’ve never heard of one like that (although, if I did, he obviously wasn’t successful at keeping quiet), and i suspect that such a perfect being is a novelist’s creation.

3

We seem to be quite happy killing his children and grandchildren, but the man himself is somehow exempt from targeting.

Actually, I suspect that the various NATO members are not really on the same page regarding Libya. Some countries are taking a broader role than others.

4

yeah, I suppose there are definite examples of the “taking out an enemy on the street” type assassin (such as Georgi Markov or Alexander Litvinenko), but I’m thinking more of the “infiltrate and take out” ninja version

Presumably its a lot harder to infiltrate these days than it used to be in ancient Japan. If this sort of person does exist, why weren’t they used to take out Saddam, Osama and Gadaffi?

5

I don’t think they really exist, for practical reasons. One person against a complex of guards would have little chance of success, and probably couldn’t be persuaded to go on a suicide mission. Even if they succeed, how are they going to escape?

In the case of the Osama killing, why on earth would you send a single person when you have an entire squad at your disposal?

6

Exactly. Why send one guy when you can send a bunch?

Sure, a lone assassin can succeed. He can also fail. Governments don’t like to gamble - if they give the order to kill someone, they want to make damn sure the mission will succeed. More men, especially highly trained men working as a team, mean a better chance of success.

Compare it to bank robbers. You have plenty of men with guns who walk into a bank alone and try to get out with the cash, but your more professional thives always work in teams - one to look go to the vault, one to watch the hostages, one to watch the door, one to handle the security systems, and of course, the guy in the getaway car. I can’t give you statistics, but it seems to me that teams of bank robbers tend to be a lot more successful than guys working alone. Assassinations are the same way.

7

Assuming that this kind of assassin actually does exist, he would have a much greater element of surprise than a squad of seals. Helicopters, even super secret stealth ones, make a hell of a racket, and could have tipped Osama off. If he had had a secret escape route in place, the seals might have ended up storming an empty building. Seeing as there didn’t seem to be much intention to take him alive, and there wasn’t a whole lot of concern for the other people in the building, you might as well just launch a cruise missile at the entire complex from a hundred miles away (I did read that this was plan B).

In the cases on Saddam and Gaddaffi, we are effectively killing the guys who we are supposed to be liberating, to get to the guy we actually want to kill. A surgical assassination would be a lot cleaner.

From the comments on this thread, I’m guessing that this type of assassination is to impractical to be real. Shame, cos they make for cool movies.

8

It seems to me that a hit man is an assassin. In that regard, I suppose they exist. But I don’t know of any infiltration-style hits rather than gunning a guy down in the street or sneaking up on him while he’s out in public. I’m not sure if this would satisfy the OP.

9

There are of course many lone assasins. We often call them hit-men. (ETA: as Hypno-Toad got the idea cross above too.) The success of gangland murder might suggest the scope and limits to the idea. An ability to totally blend into the neighbourhood is probably a good start. That and a fundamental understanding of how everything works, in a manner that only a local has. Count that against a lone stranger. Especially one who neither speaks the language as a first language, and is not familiar with the local setup. One can move around easily, the other sticks out from the moment they set foot. Infiltration of any sort is essentially impossible. Even looking back to the days of the Shogun, any stranger will be instantly noted. Infiltration requires not a lone assassin, but one of the other classics of spy fiction, the sleeper.

Drawing the parallel with mob warfare, assassinations also have another similarity. Not all mob hits were intended to be public. Wanting someone dead is not the same thing as wanting them publicly dead. A hail of bullets in a restaurant is good for scaring off rivals as well as getting rid of opposition. But drawing attention to a murder is not always smart business. Hence the litany of cheap movie favourites like concrete shoes, burial in building foundations, and other dissapperances. From this point we might note that many political assassinations may be of the sort we simply never hear of. Not people vanishing, but people dying in non violent ways. Indeed we do have a couple of well publicised examples of assassinations where the demise could easily have been put down to natural causes. Umbrella spikes injecting a pellet laced with ricin, and a massive dose of polonium. (There is however, I think, some justification to believe that the killing of Alexander Litvinenko was always intended to be discovered for what it was.) These were likely lone assassins.

We could imagine other possible scenarios for OBL. Imagine he was not holed up in a relatively open area where a helicopter could set down, but rather in a fortified apartment in a built up area of a reasonable sized city in Pakistan. There would be no possibility of a lightning raid. Assuming the US didn’t trust the locals, and still wanted to take out OBL. We could come up with a huge set of possible ideas. All very risky. But I would find it difficult to believe that something would not be attempted. Something that the episode has proven, and the US government is likely well pleased to promote. They have long memories and are very tenacious. And they have the resources to back that up. I very much doubt they would have blinked if the bill for finding OBL was in the hundreds of millions. I found a curious parallel with what I considered to be the two big news items that day. One was the assassination of OBL, the other was the recovery of the Air France flight and data recorders. Two years of painstaking search at huge depths in the middle of the Atlantic. Many many millions of dollars. But it was important. And they found it.

The point? If the situation was such that only a lone person could be expected to be able to settle in nearby to OBL and remain unnoticed by both OBL and the Pakistani security forces for long enough to work out a viable assassination attempt, I would suspect the US would try it. They would probably be deeply worried about the risk, but they would probably try. And it would probably fail. As they say, there is the plan, and there is what actually happens. As noted in other threads, it is planning for what goes wrong that saved the mission to assassinate OBL. A lone assassin simply doesn’t have that level of backup, and the likelihood of failure that much greater.

10

There’s some international agreement to the effect that governments aren’t allowed to deliberately take out the head of state of another country. This is why everyone keeps claiming that we’re not heaven forbid trying to kill Gheddafi, we’re just dropping every weapon we’ve got all over his immediate vicinity, and if a million-ton bomb happens to fall on his head then oopsie, our bad!

The same thing happened when Reagan bombed Libya back in the 80s. They nearly got Gheddafi, someone asked if that was what they were trying to do, and Reagan said, ‘We weren’t out to kill anybody.’ Obviously that was what they were aiming for, but he couldn’t come out and say it.

They did kill Gheddafi’s adopted infant daughter, but that was fine because she wasn’t a head of state.

11

I think it really depends on who/where the target is. If it’s a tinpot little African dictator then sure, send in the bombers, roll out the Green Berets to fuck shit up, who’s going to complain or care ?
If the target has been sighted in London however, it becomes eminently more practical to send in one guy with a Bulgarian umbrella.

12

Her head was in quite a state, though.

13

We were able to get OBL with guns blazing because we had no need to pretend otherwise. But sometimes we have to pretend that we don’t want to kill the guy. Several posters mentioned Ghaddafi, but Castro is the one who comes to my mind. My guess is that the USA has tried to get Castro many times in the past, and if they had ever succeeded, it would have been in a way which left little or no evidence.

If I’m right, it means that ninja-type lone assassins do exist, but by definition they’re hard to find.

14

There was probably a time when the world was much smaller and more innocent where you could do the sort of infiltration an assassin needs. In Day of the Jackal, foreginers in the countries of Europe were a common sight and unremarkable. Security devices on ID that an amateur could not duplicate are relatively modern; also the ability to check ID using cell phones and computers.

Back in the day, fake passports were easy. DotJ used the old “find a old dead baby and use that name for a passport”, a trick very common and since 9/11 much more difficult. Of course, with government resources a lot of fake ID’s are easy.

You still have the problem of blending in. A white guy in Pakistan or China is a lot more remarkable than an Englishman in Paris, especially a quiet one. Surveillance for preparation is especially tricky when the target is easily spooked. So, you will need a variety of assassins in all sizes and colours. When one of the neighbours got friendly and asked OBL’s courier for his cell number,I’m sure he had someone ask around to see if this was a recent import or someone who had a long history in the neighbourhood.

One thing I wondered was why the team did not, for example, fly in a jeep or something and drive up to the house from out of town to minimize the warning (Terrain dd not allow it, I assume). If some guy half a mile away was complaining about the helicopter noise, OBL and his guys must have known what was coming. (Surprising they did not have panic rooms with hidden doors, tunnels to next door etc.)

As a side note, it’s impossible to keep something quiet when 20 or 50 people know, epecially if there’s a $50M reward. I’m sure the reason OBL hid so well was that only the people in the compound, and maybe 1 or 2 others, had any idea even what area of Pakistan he was hiding in.

Plus, if you recall Iran-Contra or Watergate or any other inquiries and especially trials of organized crime, “special ops” or hit men outside of the army seem more often than not to be flaming nutbars, not cool professionals. It’s not like you go and recruit these guys, and I assume “lone assassin” is a very different animal than “Navy SEAL”. (According to the news, typically SEALs are BA or MA university graduates, not some street-smart punk)

15

OK, drive that jeep up to the 18-foot-high walls, and then what? Break down the door? No idea how strong the door is, and that gives quite a bit of warning, too. And then the soldiers have to run down a long alley with walls on both sides, overlooked by gunmen in the house, and face a second door at the end. How many would survive to reach that door, and how many would survive the wait while they blasted down that one, too. After all that, the surviving soldiers are now in the compound at the back of the house – the same place that they dropped into when they roped down from the helicopters.

no, it seems a lot simpler to have done it the way they did. After all, what did they care about giving them a few seconds warning? Was Osama going to call the local police to protect him (had no phone line, anyway)? Remember that the whole raid took only 38 minutes, and Osama was dead about 15 minutes into that.

16

In fact that trick became known as the Day of the Jackal loophole.

It’s a fascinating book to read now, just to see how much has changed since then.