The Assassination Business: A History of State-sponsored Murder

The cost of a bullet can be as little as eight cents. Assassination has long been more common than anyone (particularly anyone in government) likes to admit—it is the great-untold secret at the heart of the nation-state. As President George W. Bush continues to introduce Hollywood cowboy terminology like “dead or alive” and “bring it on” into our international political discourse, we are entering a new era of assassination where the “eight-cent option” has been given a new and disquieting legitimacy.

Belfield’ s darkly fascinating exposé of the business, its hired killers, and their paymasters, includes excerpts from CIA, Al-Qaeda, and Soviet assassination manuals. Placing the most important hits of our time in their proper historical context and examining the business from a remarkably objective yet honest standpoint, Belfield shows how assassinations, while posited by governments and the United Nations as random, isolated acts of violence, are in fact quietly sanctioned examples of ruthlessly strategic statecraft. He offers an eye-opening account of how Kennedy made the Vietnam War inevitable by the elimination of President Diem; and clear evidence of assassinations where the official version simply is not true, including those of Bobby Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin, and WPC Yvonne Fletcher.