Manhunters: How America Embraced Political Assassination

De: Jonathan Sloane

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

From the Mafia hitmen recruited to poison Fidel Castro to the drone operators who killed American citizens in Yemen, the CIA's assassination programs have shaped the modern world in ways most Americans never see. This book follows the complete arc of that hidden history, Sidney Gottlieb's poison kit to the Disposition Matrix, a database that institutionalized targeted killing as a permanent government function. Along the way, it reveals the exploding cigars, the contaminated wetsuits, the partnerships with organized crime, and the bureaucratic machinery that transformed assassination from a Cold War improvisation into an industrial-scale operation.

The Church Committee hearings of 1975 exposed plots that shocked the nation, leading to executive orders that supposedly banned assassination forever. That prohibition lasted a quarter century. After September 11, the legal theories were rewritten, the technology was perfected, and the killing resumed on a scale that dwarfed anything attempted during the Cold War.

The men who built these programs believed they were protecting America from existential threats. The consequences of their choices extended far beyond the intended targets, destabilizing governments, fueling insurgencies, and establishing precedents that other nations were quick to follow. From the jungles of Vietnam to the tribal regions of Pakistan, the decisions made in Washington boardrooms determined who lived and who died.

This is the story of how the world's oldest democracy came to embrace assassination as routine statecraft. It is a story of extraordinary secrecy and occasional exposure, of genuine threats and catastrophic miscalculations, of technologies that enabled killing at a distance and legal frameworks that sanctioned it. The infrastructure built over seven decades remains in place today, shaping a future that its original architects could never have imagined.