1. Exposing A Long History Of Assassinations, Dr Luca Trenta

Hello, and welcome to Exploring Global Problems, a podcast where we talk to academics from Swansea University whose groundbreaking research is tackling global challenges, from health innovation to sustainable futures and the environment, from digital technologies to clean energy. My name is Sam Blacksland, and today I'm joined by Dr. Luca Trenta, Associate Professor in International Relations here at Swansea. Luca's research explores state-sponsored assassinations in international politics and the US government's use of assassination against foreign officials. Luca, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. The Cold War, modern US assassinations, drones, executive bans - it's a wide range of topics, isn't it? It is, it is. It is quite wide-ranging. I mean, how do you deal with researching such a big field? I try to narrow it down a bit. First of all, I could look at, like, every possible assassination, but in my work I try to focus on foreign officials. This is already an effort to sort of narrow it down. We don't look at assassination of anyone, but only someone who is an official or a representative of a foreign government, which is something the United States did quite a lot, especially in the early Cold War, and probably all the way up to the 1970s. Then there is a bit of a lull under the Carter administration in, which is very short, there's only one term, sort of mid-70s to 1980. And then as I try to demonstrate in my work, it actually picks up again and never leaves until we have, of course, 9/11, and really an explosion of this type of practice. So this is historical work, but also much more contemporary stuff as well? It is primarily historical work and somewhat at the intersection of international relations and history. I do primarily archival research or semi-structured or free interviews with former policymakers, former CIA officials, journalists, but I also try to have a sort of theoretical framework to understand this, and my theoretical framework is to consider a prohibition on assassination that was first established in the mid-1970s as what we call a norm, and look at how this norm has been understood, interpreted, contested, and I argue over time, sort of eroded in its power to constrain US behavior, basically. I'm a historian, I do archival work, I do interviews as well, and I know that some of what you find in an archival, what people are willing to tell you, is the stuff that wants to be found or people want to tell you, and obviously what you're working on, especially with the assassination stuff, is, I mean, it's quite secretive, it's shady, it's a bit murky, isn't it? I mean, that must pose challenges from the outset. Yes, archival research is very often frustrating because even in those occasions in which you think there is a document right there, then the document is completely blacked out, or the CIA would not release that particular paragraph you would be particularly interested in. And of course, our archives are limited, and to be honest, looking at the United States, everything posed to Reagan is difficult to find, even going to presidential libraries and so on, H.W. Bush presidential library, let alone Clinton, that contain very little material and it fits on a secretive topic, it's even less likely. And this also poses a problem for interviews because you have to be very vague about the topic you're researching, because if you're writing to a former CIA director asking, "Would you be willing to talk about the CIA and assassination?" He will not get an answer. So I tend to use, "Would you be willing to talk about the CIA and its counterterrorism policy?" And then as we are talking, I move slowly, slowly towards the topic that I want, but it is quite challenging to find interviewees. I think one of the things that helped is that if you find those that have already discussed these issues publicly, then you get a sense that maybe they are willing to talk and be on a record discussing even controversial topics and so on. In this country, with archives, all the state documents, there's broadly, for a long time there was a 30-year rule, wasn't there, where you couldn't see anything that had been produced in the past 30s? Similar with the U.S.? It's quite similar to the U.S., yes. Some archives are about 50 years embargo, some have 30, but then even after the embargo is finished, it is still in the power of presidential libraries or whatever agency to keep the document classified, to not release it, to release it only in part, to deny Freedom of Information Act requests. I got my nice pile of CIA letters, deny my request for freedom of information or send me documents that are exactly already available online without any change at all. This might just be a bit of a historian's question, but it must be cool to go to some of these particular libraries and archives. It's taking you to great places. Yeah, some great places and some less so, I guess. Presidential libraries, of course, are in the city in which the president was born. Some are in nice places, some not so much. For example, the Reagan Library is in a very nice side of California. Nixon Library is in a not-so-nice side of California, or Clinton Library is in Little Rock, which is in Arkansas. Yeah, it's not like, I mean, I don't know if we have that many listeners from Arkansas, but let's say I don't find particularly appealing in case we have a major constituency of listeners from Arkansas. But many of them are in Washington, Library of Congress, of course, it's a great place to do research. Carter Library is in Atlanta, so Johnson Library is in Austin, Texas, which is a very nice place. And again, I know from archival research that you very rarely find that absolute golden nugget that really stands out to you, but you must have nonetheless come across some really interesting stuff in these places. Yeah, it's always difficult to find your smoking gun, so to say, very often is. Especially with the old topic, yeah. Especially with my topic, yes, I haven't found any gun in archival boxes. It's always more of a matter of collecting sort of fingerprints and hints and so on. I guess it only happened twice that I found two documents that I found that I thought were really, really cool. One is one of the titles on my article with Harry Kissinger saying that it would be an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the president from conducting assassination, which you think, yeah, that sounds like something Harry Kissinger would say. Yes, bit of a hawk on these things. And then another one, which is also related to Kissinger, is more of a niche event, but Kissinger testified for years that the United States had stopped supporting a 1970 coup against Allende when it became clear that there would have been problems and so on. And basically the testimony said after the 15th of October, the White House stopped being involved in this. If the CIA continued, it continued independently, which was a way for the White House to say, if you want to blame someone, blame the CIA, not us. And I found a document in the Nixon Library with Kissinger 8 at the time, Alexander Haig, actually saying we are keeping a close eye on developments, continue plotting and so on, which again is smoking gun contradicting a testimony from Kissinger. But it is very rare. It is a rare occurrence that you find, ah, that's exactly what I want. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what are some of your overall arguments and conclusions then about the way that the US in particular has behaved on this topic? There tends to be a general consensus in most of the literature that the United States did assassination quite frequently in the early Cold War and up to the mid 1970s and after you have a ban on assassination, assassination basically stops until it is completely reinterpreted into targeted killings after 9/11. My argument is that actually assassination never really goes away. What the executive order banning assassination does is make the United States approach assassination differently. The US government starts talking about assassination differently and start deploying assassination differently, but it never stops. And so in the book that is about to come out, I look at various cases from the 1980s against Gaddafi against Noriega against Saddam. I also look at the pre-9/11 operations against Bin Laden, where it had already been concluded that the United States could easily target, kill or assassinate, I guess, a terrorist leader without violating the ban on assassination. This might sound like a simple question, but I suspect it's got, it's probably a difficult one to answer. But why does the US wants to do these things? It's always been sort of my view that in some ways you can still, you can take out a key figure, but there's always other people there who could either fill their shoes or who believe the same things. This is quite interesting. And it's interesting that it is recognized by the US government itself, very often even in the early cold where you have debates within the US government that say, "Well, even if we were to be able to kill Fidel Castro, he wouldn't actually make much of a difference because the people around him are like him or worse." Oh, his family. Yeah. And so one solution considered is let's kill them all. So there are some considerations of killing Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Raúl Castro. There is a famous attempt to down a plane on which Raúl Castro was flying through a CIA contact that was one of the pilots for the Cuban national airways, I guess. So that is one of the options, let's try and kill them all. The other option as to why the United States does it, I mean, the rationale changes, I guess, but it is a good way of looking at the changing priorities in US foreign policy. So in the early Cold War, the rationale is to prevent Soviet influence in that certain country. In the sort of mid-early Cold War is primarily to discredit or prevent the success of the Third World Movement and so on. And then in the 1980s, you start having a change in US rational, it starts being an assassination against rogue leaders or leaders of rogue states or leaders of states supporting terrorism. And generally, leaders that the United States does not want to or struggle to deal with. Of course, in the early Cold War, there is also a certain racial element here. Most of the targets are from the Global South for former colonial territories and so on. The idea about a sovereign state going into another sovereign state and trying to take out a very key person in that area, I mean, this is directly contradictory to international law broadly, isn't it? Does the US do it because might is right? In the early Cold War, the US does it covertly. So perhaps in an effort to avoid being seen as violating international law. And more recent times, the US does it in a way that builds a supposedly legal and international legal framework. So what becomes very prominent starting in the 1980s is that the US government does not do assassination, what they do is self-defensive strikes. There is a whole rhetoric and a whole set of linguistic maneuvers to get away from admitting that the US government is doing assassination. So for example, at one point, one of the legal advisors in the Reagan administration says, the fact that Gaddafi is a head of state does not actually give him any immunity if he is present at a targetable military infrastructure, which you think it does it. But this becomes one of the justifications used by the United States. So if a leader happens to be at that precise military infrastructure that we are bombing to the ground, then it's his fault. It's not our fault. It was not it was not our intent to assassinate that leader present at this military target. We're just bombing the military target. So there is a lot of linguistic maneuver. There is a lot of denial, sort of Cohen denial about the facts are not denied. It is denied is the interpretation surrounding the fact, are you surprised that sometimes it's not more controversial or hasn't been more controversial than than that it was? I think it has been fairly controversial, especially outside the United States. I think inside the United States, I found quite surprising that, for example, at times it was Congress trying to push whatever administration was in power to do more. Here we understand Congress as a sort of restraining force on intelligence activities, on the presidency and so on. But in many examples, it was actually Congress pushing the administration to do more for parties and reasons. But still, the end goal was asking for more aggressive policies against Noriega against Saddam, of course, outside the United States. It is very controversial. And to be honest, we are seeing the repercussions of controversial episodes like the killing of Soleimani, there has clearly been a spike in Iranian assassination attempts in various European countries in the aftermath of the Soleimani strike. And of course, there is plenty of debate in the UN. As you said earlier, it is a violation of international law, could be understood as violation of various domestic legal regimes as well. And if your work has an aim, I mean, obviously it's fascinating and it's really interesting stuff and that in and of itself is valid. But if your work had a wider purpose, is it almost to raise awareness of the fact that this is happening and has been happening for a long time? It is in part to raise awareness, certainly, to a certain extent, research in history and so on tends to be raise awareness about something that is perhaps lesser known. But I think there is a lot of tendency, especially in more recent times, to have works that are being published or think tanks coming out with pieces about how assassination used to be a thing of the past. But now there are all this rogue and crucially non-Western actors engaging in assassination. So one of the purposes of my work is to say, yes, that is very true, there are plenty of non-Western states engaging in assassination from Iran to Russia to Rwanda and so on. But the West is also culpable in this process because it has often engaged in assassination and has made an effort to legitimize and publicly legitimize practices that amount to assassination in all but name. So it is both to raise awareness and also to raise a better sense of perspective about the topic. Is this perhaps where the issue of drone strikes comes in as well? Because if we think about like with Soleimani, if you're taking out people, but maybe doing so in a slightly indirect way, I mean, there's a novel written by Owen Shears who works here about, I saw a man who, which is about this and about this sort of not just the complicated moral element of taking people out by drone strikes, by sitting in the US just controlling something and killing someone from afar. But also, that slightly muddies the water again about definitions, doesn't it, and what you're doing. I mean, ever since 9/11, it's interesting to see that before 9/11, the United States criticized Israeli policy of extrajudicial killings. After 9/11, the US starts doing the same thing, primarily via drones starting in November 2002, and then of course, the skyrocket under the Obama administration and so on. But they are done, or the US administration engages in drone strikes, having built a legal framework that distinguishes them from assassination. But of course, this legal framework might be persuasive for the US government or US audiences. It doesn't necessarily mean that it is persuasive for the international community or the UN and so on. And so there is a sense of like, well, if the United States is doing it, why can't I do it? It sets a precedent, and of course, it's a precedent set by the United States that for a very long time had a hegemonic pool on the international community. If such an actor does it, why can't I do it? It leaves you thinking, doesn't it? If you're broadly in favor of the United States, think it's a democratic, liberal democracy and you think, well, okay, they're probably broadly the good guys in the fight, so you might not think that, of course. But it does legitimize almost, doesn't it? Anyone could do it. And then if much less savory states are doing it, then they can say, well, you set the precedent. Or adopt similar justifications and so on. In my work, I've actually tracked how the US interpretation of self-defense, which is very, very broad, has started to be adopted by plenty of other countries. And in similar contexts, even if you look at, regardless of how crazy they are, but Vladimir Putin justifications for the Ukraine war, at least initially, I mean, now that the war is going badly, I started going back to this, I don't know, eighth century Russian princes, like he did in the Tucker Carlson interview. But initially it was the language used by the United States, used by the United States in Kosovo, for example, which was outside of the UN system. Everything was using the same language, humanitarian intervention, protecting people and so on. So there is a precedent-setting problem here. And we have seen other countries starting to use drones for assassination, as well as non-state groups, ISIS, narco-terrorists, and so on. Clearly, well, to me, anyway, raises wider questions about the availability or the lack of, I suppose, of pan-national or international bodies that, I guess, for want of a better word, police this or watch this. I guess you've got like the United Nations and things like that. Yes, I guess. And the United Nations has very often complained about extrajudicial killings. There have been plenty of reports over the years from special reporters at the United Nations. Is all they can do complain, though? Yeah, pretty much. The U.S. government has shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, okay, we'll continue to do it." We talked about the archive stuff, but you also mentioned interviews. And you also mentioned Kissinger, who's just died recently at the age of 100. Yeah. Did you ever manage to speak to him? No. This is a sort of almost off-the-record type of thing. But one of the interviewees one time gave me Kissinger's home number that he had from the '80s, but he would not allow me to say that he had given me the number. So I never really had the courage to call the number, because I thought, "What do I do pretend to be a pizza delivery guy and say, 'Oh, by the way, did you order pizza?' But also, did you try to overthrow Allende in Chile by any chance?" I never called. I mean, he's got such a distinct voice you'd have known, wouldn't you, when he had to the phone. Yeah, exactly. I mean, just the context. I mean, he was a foreign minister, I guess. Yeah. It was also national security. It was both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, something that never happened. Under Nixon? Under Nixon and then under Ford. Under Ford. Under Ford as well. Yeah. And a very, very significant figure and quite sort of, yeah, hawkish, like we said, on international affairs. So, but I do know that you met Jimmy Carter. I did. Yeah. Who, president of the late 1970s before Reagan, and against all alive, I think he's 99. Yeah. He's been in a hospice for the past few months, and his wife just recently died a couple of months ago, I think. But obviously, for the president, very significant. I have here on my notes that you cooked dinner for the family, so you've got to tell us about that. I mean, people that will know me will have heard this story for years, but I was doing research during my PhD at the Carter Library, and I was told by the secretary of the Carter Library that he was supposed to come and visit the cafe and so on. And so I spent all the day in the cafe, but he never showed up, and the secretary felt very guilty. And so she put me in touch with somebody who lived in Plains, which is where Jimmy Carter was born and where he has been living ever since leaving the White House. And these people were the ones managing an Airbnb where Carter had been born. So they had this historic house that they rented out and so on. So they invited me over once, and until, I think, last year, Jimmy Carter had been teaching Sunday school in the local church, and every tourist can go and take a picture with the Carter's and so on. And so I did. And then the following week, the same person invited me back and said, "But if you come back next time, you'll need to cook for us." And I never thought that I thought us, like the family, whoever was in the Airbnb. And so I was fairly relaxed in the way there and so on. And we are like 10 miles out of Plains, and she says, "Oh, by the way, the dinner is for 35. The Carter's are coming. The Secret Service is coming. Have you decided what to make?" And that threw me completely off. How did you decide to make? I mean, that's my terrible choice because I ended up settling for a carbonara at Italian and a tiramisu for dessert. The problem with this was that both dishes are based on raw eggs. So I had this dread of the Secret Service knocking on my door at one point and saying, "The president is sick because the eggs were not okay." But it was fine. The cute thing I thought was that Rosalind Carter never had a tiramisu before. It's the best dessert in the world. And I thought, "That's really odd." I don't know, never had a state dinner in Italy during the presidency in which somebody made a tiramisu or and so on. But they enjoyed it. And then we had sort of 10 minutes for me to ask him a couple of questions. And since it was only 10 minutes, I kept him as broad as possible just to let him talk because I thought, "When is it ever going to happen?" Indeed. And in fact, it has never happened since. So I peaked in my PhD, I guess, in terms of academic career and then it's been downhill from there. Was it useful? No. Was it amazing? Yes. Like, it's very rare to meet. I met a presidential candidate and I spoke to vice president. I met Bob Dahl, who had been the Republican presidential candidate. I spoke to Mondale, who was Carter's vice president and then candidate against Reagan. Against I think Reagan or Bush, I can't remember. But when does it ever happen that you meet a U.S. president, except from a distance, I guess, Bill Clinton visited a few months ago, the university here, but I never had the chance to ask him, "Did you try to kill bin Laden?" Whereas I had the opportunity to ask Carter at the time how he saw the Iranian Revolution and so on. That was the topic of my PhD. People tend to say he's very nice. Is absolutely amazing. You've not think he's a U.S. president. Is incredibly humble. Maybe that's right. He was a one-term president. Not cutthroat enough. Probably. I mean, it was very cutthroat in the White House and I think it's about time and literature is coming out that he was also very effective in several areas. I think there were of course, crisis going on during his time and people remember a lot of the crisis, but not much of issues that were put in place under Carter that were very effective later on in, for example, ending the Cold War and so on. But on a one-to-one perspective, I was incredibly freaked out because I was like a PhD student meeting Jimmy Carter, but it was super nice and the Rosalind was even nicer. Wonderful. I interviewed one of Margaret Thatcher's most senior ministers for my PhD and he fell asleep during the process, so you didn't have that with Carter. No, no. How old was he at the time? This was 2011. Okay. So it must have been early 80s. Yeah. Doing this kind of research, Luca, is obviously must come with an element of risks because you are looking at some quite, like I said at the beginning, quite murky episodes that some people might not want you to find out about. Do you ever have that sense that there is risk involved? It's funny you say that because it's something I've been considering in the past few weeks. After I tweeted a cover of my upcoming book, which is called The President Kill List, I said it's blood splatter on the cover, somebody tweeted something along the line, "Ah, this guy can publish a book on the US called The President Kill List. You've never be able to publish such a book if you were looking at, I don't know, whatever, other country." I think he mentioned Turkey because it was Turkey and so on. That's a really good point. And then more recently, I've been doing more and more research on state-sponsored assassinations conducted by other states. And so this has started to cross my mind in a sense that, okay, the worst that can happen to me if I look at the United States is, I don't know, I get put on the interest list by the TSA when I fly to the US and my bag gets searched. And as it is searched regularly when I travel to Washington, if I start looking at, I don't know, Rwanda, Iran, all of a sudden the risks might become higher. They haven't so far. And I'll take this as sort of, I don't know, I'm assuming the Iranian Secret Service has more important things to do that follow what I write. They strategically place banana skins on your doorstep or anything like that. I mean, if it's a banana skin, I'm quite happy if it is some cyber surveillance or, but we see, I mean, I was interviewing actually for my podcast, an author that has been writing on Rwanda and her life has been made miserable. After she published the book on Rwandan, Extra-Territorial Repression and Assassination, her life has been made miserable. In what way? Threats, surveillance, very odd participation at her events, cancelling of events, and so on. I've been writing primarily on the United States, and I think it's a safe space. But it is something that I will have to consider if I transition to a more broader approach as it put you off. And particularly, I guess, what there are also other considerations that come into play, because for example, if I were to look at other states, there would still be plenty of methodological challenges, there would be no archives, for example, or there would be even less people to interview and so on. So I think I will tend to primarily do research on those countries based on secondary sources or what has already been published or investigations that have already happened by other governments. I'm not in the position, even for the United States work, to be an investigative journalist that don't go out and dig stuff that nobody's ever talked about. I might give more prominence to something that wasn't particularly talked about, but we'll see how it develops. And the book, The President's Kill List, is out this year. It's out in May. Yeah. With Edinburgh University Press, before coming in, I was just checking the index for the final. Oh, that's always a hard job. But it has the potential to make a splash, doesn't it? Because it's a big, I guess in academic terms, for one of the better phrases, quite a sexy topic. It is quite a sexy topic. I mean, the price at the moment for the art cover edition is extortionate, but it will come out in paperback in a year for around £20, which I think is reasonable. For an academic book, that's good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, it's been great chatting about it, Lucas. Like I said, it's a cool topic. And yeah, I've learned a lot just from reading about it. So thank you. Cool. Thank you so much for having me. For Lucas Research, you can visit his staff profile page on Swansea University's website. To find out more about this podcast and Swansea University's research, visit swansy.at.uk/research. That's all from us today. Thanks for listening, and thank you again to my guest, Dr Luca Trenton. Thank you. If you've enjoyed this episode, please follow us. I'm Sam Blacksland, and that was Exploring Global Problems from Swansea University.