The CIA and a long history of assassinations

Jul 24, 2009

Alexander Cockburn

The official denial of a kill squad is disingenuous, says Alexander Cockburn, given what we know about the agency’s history of killing

Some time in early or mid-1949 a CIA officer named Bill (his surname is blacked out in the file, which surfaced in the early 1990s) asked an outside contractor for input on how to kill people. Requirements included the appearance of an accidental or purely fortuitous terminal experience suffered by the agency's victim.

Bill's friend - internal evidence suggests he was a doctor - offered practical advice: "Tetraethyl lead, as you know, could be dropped on the skin in very small quantities, producing no local lesion, and after a quick death, no specific evidence would be present." Another possibility was "the exposure of the entire individual to X-ray."

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The CIA and a long history of assassinations

The official denial of a kill squad is disingenuous, says Alexander Cockburn, given what we know about the agency’s history of killing

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The CIA and a long history of assassinations

The official denial of a kill squad is disingenuous, says Alexander Cockburn, given what we know about the agency’s history of killing

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