Killing foreign leaders is a western tradition
Iranian leaders are not safe. Israel has killed Iran's top military commander, Ali Shadmani, less than a week after they killed his predecessor. Although president Donald Trump has reportedly vetoed an Israeli plan to kill Iran's supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the ageing cleric clearly still feels in danger – he is said to be skulking with his son and heir Mojtabi in an underground bunker outside Tehran.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted that assassinating the Middle East's most durable religious and political leader remains an option that is still very much on the table. Questioned about the alleged assassination plan, Netanyahu replied that Israel 'will do whatever it needs to do'.
Assassinating foreign leaders perceived as enemies of western democracies may seem an extreme and undiplomatic act, but it is a method that has been used more than once in recent history.
In fact, President Trump himself ordered the killing of another prominent Iranian leader during his first term in the White House, when Major General Qassim Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, was blown to bits along with ten of his aides by a US drone outside Baghdad Airport in January 2020. Soleimani was the mastermind behind many terrorist acts by Iran's proxies across the Middle East, and paid the ultimate price for his activities.
Trump's apparent squeamishness about inflicting the same rough justice on the Grand Ayatollah comes from his fears that Khamenei's enraged followers would unleash a bloody revenge on US assets if their beloved leader is harmed. Such fears did not stop previous American leaders from paying back the worst humiliation in American history: Japan's deadly aerial assault on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, which brought a reluctant United States into World War Two.
In April 1943, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, chief planner of the Pearl Harbour raid, was flying over the Solomon Islands when his aircraft was shot down by US fighter planes. This was no accident but a deliberate assassination plan candidly codenamed Operation Vengeance. Japan's military cyphers had been cracked by Allied boffins, and Yamamoto's flight plans were known in advance.
Britain, too, has not been backward when it comes to killing foreign leaders deemed too dangerous to let live. In May 1942 Czechoslovak agents, trained and parachuted in by Britain, ambushed and assassinated the fearsome SS chief Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's 'man with the iron heart' in Prague. Heydrich – who had planned and ordered the Holocaust just months before his demise – is the perfect example of the dangers raised by such extrajudicial killings.
In retaliation for Heydrich's death, the Nazis razed the Czech village of Lidice to the ground and murdered its entire population of 600 innocent men, women and children. It was a high price to pay for eliminating such a monster.
Towards the end of the war an even more deserving and tempting target came into British crosshairs: Adolf Hitler himself. Britain's spying and sabotage agency the Special Operations Executive (SOE) devised Operation Foxley, a scheme to drop a 'Day of the Jackal' style sniper close to Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat, the Berghof , and shoot him on one of his daily exercise strolls.
The plan was only aborted at the last minute as it was thought that the Fuehrer was so manic by then that he was doing more damage to Germany alive than dead.
Even as late as 1956, a British prime minister was still attracted by the idea of assassinating a foreign enemy. During the Suez Crisis caused by Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser's nationalisation of the British owned Suez Canal, Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden rang his Foreign Office minister Anthony Nutting at the Savoy Hotel and demanded: ' Don't you understand? I want Nasser murdered'.
Later still, in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War, America's CIA Intelligence Agency devised numerous plans to kill Cuba's Communist dictator Fidel Castro. Poisoning Castro's cigars or his skuba diving suit were among the absurd options considered, along with more conventional killing methods. None succeeded, but the lethal intention was perfectly serious.
So does Khamenei deserve to die violently? According to Israel, very much so – whatever the consequences. After all, this is a man who since coming to power in 1989 has issued regular blood curdling threats to wipe the 'Zionist entity' and all its inhabitants off the face of the earth. He has made similar threats to the 'Great Satan', as Iran calls the US, and Iranian agents inside America have plotted to kill Trump.
Israel has already, within the past week, amply demonstrated its formidable expertise in the assassination game by killing much of Iran's political and military elite, along with the top scientists working at its nuclear facilities.
There is no doubt that their intelligence services and special forces have both the capacity and the courage needed to strike at the very top of the Islamic Republic should the order be given. For the Jewish state it is not a matter of moral or diplomatic scruples, but a question of sheer survival in the face of an existential and mortal threat.
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