A Study of Assassination – CIA (1953) | Hacker News Reader

A Study of Assassination – CIA (1953)

gwu.edu

99 pointsferdo46 comments

"Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject's car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation."

This is 1953 though, a time when cars were still a very new and sometimes unreliable thing.

You do realize the modern automobile was first made around 1885?

I imagine s/he was referencing the fact that most modern cars have on-board computers, that are eminently easier to crack (and much less detectable) than through mechanical additions / tweaks.[1]

H.N. trawling the CIA's old files? How I miss thememoryhole.org. 2009, RIP.

For the record - I'm not going to comment on ancient cold war documents that could be Blue Sky Think-Tank work (and certainly don't look like professional training manuals). You'll probably want School of the Americas manuals for that[2](ahem).

[1]For example: Carshark http://jalopnik.com/5539181/carshark-software-lets-you-hack-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Americas_Watch

Sounds like Hitchcock knew what he was doing after all!

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_by_Northwest#Plot

For those who have not seen the movie, by the way-

1) Go watch it

2) Someone tries to do exactly what was just described as "reliable" to the protagonist

Let's think this further. Witness reports on Hastings are saying that the car was extremely speeding and going through red lights [1]. How about modifying a car so that as soon as it reaches 50m/ph a) goes to maximum speed and b) deactivates its brakes.

The driver will instinctively try to control the car as good as possible. But ultimately it will crash against something. Through the high stress situation chances are that there is relatively little chances of communication possible except that something is wrong with the car.

Any other wild speculations?

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/hastings-crash-witness-1...

That was probably true back in '53.

Since; the science of accident reconstruction and cause determination have improved vastly.

Back then the mafia (or whomever) might have thought, eh, cyanide, who's going to trace that? Nowadays tests would prove something untoward likely happened. It's how nowadays nurses are caught for 'easing terminally ill patients', back then, it would have seemed like, oh, that was the disease, "natural causes".

In other words, this option would be a desperate option, one where discovery of tampering would be revealed. Only someone really desperate and without other alternatives would be reduced to opting. Someone stupid.

A reply to this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5914243

>the science of accident reconstruction and cause determination have improved vastly.

My guess is the techniques have evolved accordingly. And federal authorities can take control of an investigation if it's in the interest of national security. The "magical bullet theory" is a great historical example of how federal authorities handle inconvenient evidence.

If this document contained modern TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, Procedures) it wouldn't be declassified. This is a historical document. This is also probably a repost. This document has been around for 2-3 decades.

If it's dated 1953, it's been around for six decades. Unless you mean it's been publicly available for 2-3 decades.

The changes in technology since then have been dramatic. I can't imagine anyone suggesting a falling-block rifle as a suitable assassin's tool today, and poisoning an alcoholic with morphine seems like it would alert any coroner immediately.

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006. I'm not sure why you are focused on "alerting the coroner." The dead body is also a easy way to alert the coroner that somebody's life was taken. The same can be said for a slit throat, giant hole in skull, ligature marks, etc. I imagine that in most situations the goal is a covert assassination not a clandestine assassination.

Litvinenko's assassin used Polonium, which is an obvious and disfiguring poison. The article mentions using morphine to poison a drunkard in order that his death might be mistaken for the effects of habitual alcohol abuse. Aside from causing the death of the target, those two methods have almost entirely opposite goals.

Litvinenko had supposedly gone to work for the UK. The fact that he "got got" in London was intended to be a big middle finger from the FSB to the UK, from what I've read.

The suggestion of falling-block was most likely not about what is technologically advanced, but about accuracy and power. It is still true today that a falling-block has good characteristics in this regard, even though they are no longer used much. You could use this advice perfectly well today- "Gee, it seems like this gun store has no falling-block action, only bolt. Well, it said bolt-action was acceptable too!"

Reading about the "conference table technique" was a bit too specific and caused me to promptly close the tab.

I vividly remember reading that several years ago when it was first put online someplace. o_O

CTRL+F didn't find it. Which one is it?

At the very bottom of the document (complete with diagrams, no less).

Too specific for what? Was it used in an actual political assassination?

"Poison was used unsuccessfully in the assassination of Rasputin and Kolohan"

Rasputin, most everybody knows about, but the second name is unfamiliar. I suppose it is this WW2 episode: "When an attempt to poison Holohan's soup failed, a toss of a coin selected LoDolce to go to Holohan's room where LoDolce shot him twice in the head.", in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holohan_Murder_Case

Proof, if it were needed, that the past was not the golden age that people sometimes make it out to be.

You're right. I'd take living in the US now over living in the US during the cold war, for any number of reasons.

In fact I'd guess any 20th decade was far worse than now on any number of measures, with the possible exception of the 1900s and 1910s, which I don't know much about, and the 1990s, which was great.

the 10's was world war 1, so i think it's pretty easy to say that was worse. the 20's were pretty good until the crash right at the end.

Iff you were rich and white protestant.

My grandma remembered the Great Depression as a time when life improved.

That's interesting. How did it improve for her?

Oftentimes the reason someone loses their shirt is cuz someone now got two two shirts.

Don't forget the Spanish Flu epidemic. That was pretty nasty.

The 1990's were great, leaving aside the U.S. use of cruise missiles, several random invasions, etc. E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_missile_strikes_on_Afgha..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_missile_strikes_on_Iraq_....

I do not understand why you mentioned those two events? As far as military operations go they seem fairly small. The Battle of Mogadishu (AKA Black Hawk Down) was 1993 and the losses on both sides were dramatically more.

I mention those two events because they're analogous to the drone strikes going on now that people suddenly seem to have a problem with.

I still think 1998 or 1999 to September 10 2001 was probably the best time. Shortly after ITAR decontrolled commercial crypto software, but before 9/11 and Patriot and such.

Hasan-Dan-Sabah's assassins were crazy: there was instances of them lying undercover for literally decades before their kill.

Interesting the '53 date too for the CIA as they intervened in Persia against Mossaddegh (but preferred to let angry local mobs do the assassinations rather than this James Bond shit...)

This is a pamphlet they would likely hand out to said angry mobs beforehand.

The illustrated "Conference Room Technique" at the bottom is almost straight out of a movie! Two assassins kill 12 targets in less than 30 seconds.

Great. I assume I'm on some sort of watch list now.

Along with the rest of HN. The signal to noise ratio for this page just dropped.

Is there another source that confirms that this document is legitimate?

Yes. These are part of the collection of the National Security Archive at GWU. The summaries in the first link give some better context on what this actually is (especially the one on Document 5, at the end)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/index.html

This is dark.

It's 60yrs later. Reality is darker, I'm sure.

I found it rather sensitive, urging against indiscriminate killing, and using the right tool for the job.

I'm interested to see reference to a failed assassination attempt on Churchill, using a pistol - I've not heard of this before, and can't immediately find it referenced anywhere else. Anyone?

Should have read this thru a proxy...

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