When nation-states engage in the bloody calculus of killing, the boundary between whom they can target and whom they can’t is porous. On January 3rd, the United States launched a drone strike that executed Major General Qassem Suleimani, the chief of Iran’s élite special-forces-and-intelligence unit, the Quds Force. He was one of Iran’s most powerful leaders, with control over paramilitary operations across the Middle East, including a campaign of roadside bombings and other attacks by proxy forces that had killed at least six hundred Americans during the Iraq War.

Since the Hague Convention of 1907, killing a foreign government official outside wartime has generally been barred by the Law of Armed Conflict. When the Trump Administration first announced the killing of Suleimani, officials declared that he had posed an “imminent” threat to Americans. Then, under questioning and criticism, the Administration changed its explanation, citing Suleimani’s role in an ongoing “series of attacks.” Eventually, President Trump abandoned the attempt at justification, tweeting that it didn’t “really matter,” because of Suleimani’s “horrible past.” The President’s dismissal of the question of legality betrayed a grim truth: a state’s decision to kill hinges less on definitive matters of law than on a set of highly malleable political, moral, and visceral considerations. In the case of Suleimani, Trump’s order was the culmination of a grand strategic gamble to change the Middle East, and the opening of a potentially harrowing new front in the use of assassination.

The path to Suleimani’s killing began, in effect, with another lethal operation, more than a decade ago—on a winter night in February, 2008, in an upscale residential district of Damascus, Syria. The target was Imad Mughniyeh, a bearded, heavyset Lebanese engineer in his mid-forties, who could have passed for a college professor. Mughniyeh was the architect of military strategy for Hezbollah, the armed force that dominates Lebanon and is supplied with weapons and money by Iran. Mughniyeh had been blamed for some of the most spectacular terrorist strikes of the past quarter century, including the bombings that killed nearly two hundred and fifty Americans in Beirut, in 1983, and a suicide attack at the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, in 1992, in which twenty-nine people died. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer, said, of Mughniyeh, “We hold him responsible for doing more damage to the C.I.A. than anybody ever has—period.” Mughniyeh was also known for his success in evading surveillance. In 1985, the C.I.A. learned that Mughniyeh was passing through Paris, but when a French paramilitary team rappelled down the wall of his hotel and burst through the window, they found only a startled Spanish family enjoying an afternoon snack. “He was an artist in keeping himself below the radar,” Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli Prime Minister, said recently, at his office in Tel Aviv.

In 2006, after a brief, fierce war with Hezbollah, Israel launched a mission to hunt down Mughniyeh before he could regroup for more fighting. Olmert, the Prime Minister at the time, assigned the project to Meir Dagan, the chief of Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service. Dagan, a squat sixty-one-year-old war veteran whose body carried shrapnel from old wounds, disdained the crude romance that hovered around his profession. “There is no joy in taking lives,” he later told a reporter. “Anyone who enjoys it is a psychopath.” Dagan had a personal stake in the Mughniyeh operation. In 1982, he was serving in southern Lebanon when a suicide bomber, allegedly recruited by Mughniyeh, reduced Israel’s military-intelligence post to rubble. Dagan liked to say, “One day, I will catch Mughniyeh, and when I do, God willing, I will finish him.” (Dagan died in 2016.)

One of the most sensitive questions was where to carry out the killing if the opportunity arose. An assassination on ill-chosen terrain could trigger a political backlash or another war; an attack inside Lebanon might well force Hezbollah to retaliate. In 2007, Mossad caught a break. A Mossad agent hidden among Hezbollah leaders got access to Mughniyeh’s cell phone, allowing the organization to track his movements. Mughniyeh, Mossad learned, shuttled between two apartments near Damascus. One belonged to his mistress; he used the other, in the upscale Kfar Sousa neighborhood, for sensitive meetings. The Kfar Sousa apartment would be an opportune site for assassination—or, as Mossad calls such operations, “negative treatment.”

While Israeli operatives slipped into Damascus to prepare for the mission, Dagan enlisted the help of the C.I.A. Unlike Israel, the U.S. had an embassy in Damascus, which housed a C.I.A. station staffed by undercover officers. At Dagan’s request, the C.I.A. rented an apartment with a view of Mughniyeh’s meeting place, and Israeli operatives equipped it with small remote-controlled cameras, which fed live video back to the Mossad headquarters, in the Tel Aviv area. Mossad formulated the plan, which called for hiding a bomb in a parked car. Its technicians designed a so-called shaped explosive, which projects shrapnel in a conical five-metre “kill zone.” According to a former Israeli official, the C.I.A. smuggled in the explosive among ordinary shipments to the Embassy. The C.I.A. in Damascus gave the explosive to Mossad, whose agents installed it in the spare-tire holder of a Mitsubishi Pajero S.U.V.

But, at the last minute, President George W. Bush called a halt to the operation, concerned by warnings from C.I.A. officers that the blast might kill civilians, especially students from a nearby girls’ school. In 1985, the C.I.A. had been blamed for a car bomb in Beirut that had killed more than eighty people and injured two hundred, mainly civilians. The target, Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a popular ayatollah close to Mughniyeh, had escaped unharmed. “We have never quite gotten over the ’85 attempt on Fadlallah,” Baer said. “It hit our reputation.” Still, Olmert was intent on proceeding, and Mossad took him to a remote base in the desert and conducted a test explosion on a replica of the kill zone, using cardboard figures to represent Mughniyeh and schoolchildren passing by. The results reassured him.

“Awkward—I was waving to eight fish behind you.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein

Olmert visited Bush in the White House to argue for the resumption of the operation. Afterward, he refused to say what they had discussed, explaining that he was uncomfortable disclosing details even to Bush’s aides in the Oval Office. “We always used to go out to the Rose Garden and whisper to each other,” he said. “So the answer to your question is not even in the records.” But, according to a former Israeli official involved in the operation, Bush and Olmert agreed that “only Mughniyeh would be the victim.” The C.I.A. sent its station chief in Israel to the Mossad headquarters to monitor the killing in real time. Bush gave the operation a green light.

As a tool of statecraft, assassination has had a fluctuating reputation. In contrast to plainly political murders—from Caesar to Lincoln to Trotsky—killing a person in the name of national defense rests on a moral and strategic case. To its defenders, it is a lethal yet contained means of defusing a larger conflict. Thomas More, the sixteenth-century theologian who, in 1935, was canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint, contended that killing an “enemy prince” deserved “great rewards” if it saved the lives of innocents. The Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius, who laid down early concepts of rightful conduct in war, believed it was “permissible to kill an enemy in any place whatsoever.” But, over time, political leaders came to reject the legitimacy of wantonly killing one another. In 1789, Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, described “assassination, poison, perjury” as uncivilized abuses, “held in just horror in the 18th century.”