DEATH TO ORDER

A wide-ranging history of how assassinations have affected international relations over the past two centuries.

“Assassination makes states answer uncomfortable questions about violence, appeasement, collaboration and persuasion. In other words, the actual exercise of power in international politics,” writes University of Leeds historian Ball. It also roils the established order. Ball begins with the state-sponsored murder of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., at the hands of Cuban right-wing militants and agents of the government of Augusto Pinochet; he deems it perhaps the best understood of modern assassinations, because, thanks to an extensive congressional investigation, from it emerged answers to his four elements of assassination (“the procurers of assassination, the assassins, the tools of the trade, and the cover-up”). Other assassinations, notably those of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., have proven murkier. Ball clarifies some of history’s enigmas: His account of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which touched off World War I, establishes that it was indeed the result of an extensive conspiracy involving a Serbian secret society, the Black Hand, among whose members were the head of the Serbian military intelligence service. The rift that led to war began in next-door Hungary, with a sort of conspiracy of its own among imperial hawks, but also with an all-too-human dimension: “It was not as if anyone in Hungary cared about Franz Ferdinand’s death. They just disliked Serbs.” Assassination became a European commonplace in the years between world wars, as Ball chronicles, and it has been a tool in the toolbox of international statecraft ever since—witness, for instance, the many attempts on the life of Fidel Castro by the CIA and other American intelligence agencies and, more recently, Vladimir Putin’s use of assassination to silence his political opponents.

An agile account of official and freelance wetwork in the cat-and-mouse game of global politics.