The Assassination Business: A History of State-Sponsored Murder

By Richard Belfield

Book Overview

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 expos? 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786713437
• ISBN13: 9780786713431
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

American Ostrichs

This author, Richard Belfield, stepped on a few toes with this book, and as is always the case, an ostrich will cry out when someone tries to pull his/her head out of the sand. Official documents from the U.S. government, formerly classified as Top Secret and Eyes Only for the President, were recently declassified, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (http://foia.fbi.gov/). These documents indicate that between October 1960 and April 1961, in Cuba alone, the CIA introduced 75 tons of explosives in 30 secret aerial missions, and 45 tons of weapons and explosives in 31 Marine infiltrations. These materials were used to perpetrate 310 attacks with bombs, derail 6 trains, and set fire to 150 factories and 800 plantations. Between 1959 and 2003, more than 800 terrorist attacks were performed, including 78 bombings against civil populations and 61 airplanes hijacked. (Now you know why the U.S. government was not too keen on putting air marshals on planes. They would have been killing our own CIA agents.) These documents also linked CIA agent and Cuban exile, Luis Posada Carriles, with many terrorist attacks, including the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 that killed 73 people. As for biological aggressions, the African Swine Fever Virus was introduced, forcing the sacrifice of half a million pigs. During the "Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations", the dengue hemorrhagic fever was introduced, affecting about 344,203 persons, with the record case of 11,400 who fell ill in a single day-July 6, 1981.