Hit squads,minus the hits

Killing a specific terrorist in a faraway country,using the up-close-and-personal methods that the secret programme was created to explore,turns out to be considerably more complicated than cinematic fantasy.

Few operations are riskier than a targeted killing,but the idea of eliminating a very bad guy has an alluring simplicity. Had the Clinton administration found a way to kill Osama bin Laden,might that have scuttled the 9/11 plot? Had a Bush administration hit team taken out Saddam Hussein,might Bush not have led the country into a messy,costly war?

But the logistical difficulty and political risk of picking off a terrorist away from a war zone are daunting. Consider the fallout from some of the CIAs more notorious operations to grab terrorist suspects.

When the CIA seized a radical Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003 and flew him to Egypt,Italian authorities tracked the whole operation through cellphone calls and hotel receipts,leading to a criminal trial for 26 Americans in absentia that is still going on. Another rendition team picked up a Lebanese-born German citizen in Macedonia and took him to Afghanistansetting off an international fiasco for the United States when it turned out the CIA had grabbed the wrong Khalid el-Masri.

Assassination is a word that still haunts the CIA. The most lurid of the volumes produced by the Senate committee in the mid-1970s detailed the CIAs plots to kill foreign political figures,including Cubas Fidel Castro and the Congos Patrice Lumumba. Such intrigues were overseen by the agencys so-called Health Alteration Committee,which once okayed the dispatch of a monogrammed,poisoned handkerchief to a left-leaning Iraqi colonel.

But those schemes were as ineffective as they were scandalous. Castro,now 82,has outlived most of those who plotted to kill him. Lumumba was killed by a rival Congolese group after the would-be CIA assassin balked. The Iraqi colonel suffered a terminal illness before the handkerchief could do its work.

Other nations schemes,too,have a checkered record. The Israelis have long used targeted killings against their Palestinian enemies,but Israeli agents killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway in 1973 after mistaking him for a Black September terrorist. Two Russians who killed a former Chechen leader in Qatar in 2004 with a bomb under his car were caught,tried and convicted of the murder.

Targeted killings are very difficult to pull off,and its politically toxic if youre caught, said Geneve Mantri,who tracks counterterrorism programmes at Amnesty International. This Jason Bourne stuff is great for the movies,but the history is that these cases often end up as a mess.