During the opening salvo of Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, the United States and Israel launched a series of airstrikes against Iran that intentionally killed Iran’s head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with several other senior Iranian officials. Given the intent, scale, and effects of the joint operation, the strikes constituted both an act of aggression and a violation of the international norm against assassination. Nonetheless, in a post on social media, President Donald Trump celebrated the killing, praising the death of one of the “most evil people in History.” He highlighted the close U.S.-Israeli cooperation, noting that Khamenei “was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems” and that “working closely with Israel there was nothing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him could do” [emphasis added]. Later reports indicated that the CIA had identified a gathering of Iranian leaders, intelligence that paved the way for Israel to launch the strike that killed Khamenei.
In the context of counterterrorism, the United States and Israel have cooperated on several assassinations. In 2008, for example, a CIA-Mossad covert operation killed Hezbollah military leader Imad Mugniyeh with a car bomb in Damascus. In 2020, the first Trump administration, working with Israel, escalated its use of assassination and killed a high-ranking Iranian State official: General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force. Over the past several decades, the U.S. government–at times with Israeli cooperation–also tried to kill foreign leaders with methods very similar to those used against Khamenei, but without succeeding or being so brazen about violating the U.S. ban on assassination. Sitting heads of state were widely viewed as belonging to a distinct and even more protected category under international norms as well.
In a recent piece for Just Security, Marko Milanovic and Michael Schmitt argued that Khamenei was a “lawful target” and that focusing on assassination is “misplaced.” We leave it to others to assess whether it was legal to target Khamenei under the Law of Armed Conflict, but we disagree that the term “assassination” can be so easily dismissed. The strike on Khamenei was a textbook case of a foreign political assassination. Its purpose was not merely to disrupt elements of Iran’s military command-and-control infrastructure, but to enable regime change or collapse—in other words, to alter the political relationship between the aggressor States (the United States and Israel) and Iran. A Reuters story has since confirmed that the timing of the attack relied on taking advantage of the gathering of the Iranian political leadership. Furthermore, as Gabor Rona writes, many of the political leaders killed in the initial and following strikes were undoubtedly civilians. Internationally, the U.S.-Israeli strike against Khamenei further erodes what Ward Thomas has described as the anti-assassination “taboo,” the long-standing prohibition against peacetime political assassinations of foreign heads of state and other senior officials.
More importantly for the purposes of our analysis, the killing of Khamenei and the acceptance of it in the United States put the final nails in the coffin of the U.S. domestic ban against assassination, which has been contained in executive orders since the 1970s. It also marks a radical escalation in U.S.-Israeli cooperation to kill. Most troublingly, it opens the door for other States to abandon the often frustrating work of diplomacy and instead embrace the use of force to eliminate foreign adversaries.
The History of the U.S. Assassination Ban
Neither the United States nor Israel ever fully embraced the international norm against assassination. According to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, Israel has launched more than 2,300 “targeted killing” operations since its founding—though these were largely directed against non-State actors. Before Khamenei, Israel had never successfully assassinated a sitting head of state. The United States, by contrast, engaged in numerous peacetime plots against foreign leaders during the Cold War. Yet, by 1975 there was a brief moment of introspection in Washington, when lawmakers publicly reconsidered the U.S. role in political assassinations and embraced a domestic ban.
The shift was driven in large part by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities—better known as the Church Committee—which investigated U.S. assassination plots during the early Cold War. During this time, members of the public and some in Congress were shocked and morally disturbed by the sordid details of U.S. government plots against foreign leaders including Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba.
The committee’s interim report on assassination made a series of interconnected arguments. First, it claimed that “short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality.” Second, it argued that when confronting totalitarian enemies, the U.S. government should refrain from adopting the “standards of totalitarians.” American standards, the report continued, “must be higher, and this difference is what the struggle is all about. Of course, we must defend our democracy. But in defending it, we must resist undermining the very virtues we are defending.” Third, the committee distinguished between assassination plots directly instigated by the United States, which should be clearly prohibited, and U.S. support for local actors in their efforts at regime change, which required a more careful case-by-case approach. This stance was far from a green light for such plots.
To prevent future abuses, the committee recommended legislation that would prohibit and criminalize assassination as a foreign policy option. The law would have protected both foreign State officials and foreign leaders of organized non-State groups from assassination. However, there were concerns raised by members of Congress against an absolute assassination ban. Importantly, the committee reached a compromise and stated that the ban would be suspended if the U.S. government was involved in a declared war or in “hostilities or situations pursuant to the provisions of the War Powers Resolution.” During peacetime, the committee was divided and acknowledged that it “may be faced with a dilemma that cannot be resolved: tyrannicide. The appalling atrocities committed by Hitler and Stalin raise a question which may be unanswerable but which needs to be carefully examined.”
Ultimately, the committee recommended that the president should maintain an assassination option during a “truly unusual national emergency.” But the committee made it clear that none of the cases it had examined during the height of the Cold War—including the Cuban Missile Crisis—met that standard. Furthermore, the exceptional presidential emergency powers to assassinate, the committee’s report made clear, “are checked and limited by Congress, including the impeachment power.” “As a necessary corollary,” the report continued, “any action taken by a President pursuant to his limited inherent powers and in apparent conflict with the law must be disclosed to Congress.” Only in this manner could it be ascertained whether the emergency truly imperilled the “life of the nation.”
The Ford administration deemed the proposed law as too restrictive and prevented its enactment. Some in the administration saw congressional action on intelligence activities as an encroachment on presidential power and, as Henry Kissinger quipped having a law prohibiting a president from conducting assassination would have been an “act of insanity and national humiliation.”
Instead, in an attempt to pre-empt congressional action, the Ford administration published Executive Order (E.O.) 11905, which reformed the Intelligence Community and included a ban on assassination. The E.O.’s language was vague. It simply read: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” More importantly, the E.O. left the prohibition on assassination entirely to the discretion of the executive, enabling future administrations to re-interpret, and thus circumvent the order, at will. The ban was confirmed in the Carter administration’s Executive Order 12036, which removed the adjective “political.” The Reagan administration included it in Executive Order 12333, which added a disclaimer against indirect participation: “No element of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”
And yet, while the text of the ban remained the same, a gap slowly emerged between compliance with the letter of the E.O. but not with its purpose. This widening gap grew through a history of contestation, of re-interpretations of the ban to permit the conduct of activities previously considered prohibited—or at a minimum controversial. The activities included the supply of weapons to insurgents (such as the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan) or to so-called counter-revolutionaries (the contras in Nicaragua). At these moments, Congress tended to push back against re-interpretations of the ban. As the years went by, however, the executive branch put forward new exceptions to the ban as they sought regime change abroad, including in episodes similar to the strikes on Khamenei.
New Exceptions to the Assassination Ban
In 1986, a bombing at a Berlin club killed two U.S. soldiers, an act of terrorism that U.S. intelligence believed had been supported by the Libyan government and its leader, Muammar Qaddafi. In response, the Reagan administration launched Operation El Dorado Canyon against Libya on April 15, 1986. Ultimately, the operation targeted Qaddafi’s compound and personal tent. The Libyan leader, however, survived, as U.S. and Israeli intelligence were unable to pinpoint his exact location. That uncertainty proved consequential. By this point, several senior figures in the Reagan administration, including CIA Director William Casey, and the Agency’s Legal Counsel, Stanley Sporkin, had concluded that actions taken in self-defense did not constitute assassination, especially when the U.S. government lacked an explicit intent to kill a foreign leader. Qaddafi’s survival and the administration’s denials of any intent to assassinate conveniently supported this claim. The strike permitted the administration to muddy the waters and deny that a strike on a foreign leader amounted to assassination.
At a congressional hearing, Representative Norman Dicks (D-WA) questioned Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, asking how the attack on Qaddafi’s “living quarters” could be defined in any other way but an attempt to assassinate a foreign leader. Weinberger suggested that “living quarters” was a “loose term” and that the United States had targeted the leader’s command and control building. The Pentagon later confirmed this view: “inasmuch as the entire complex was, in one way or another, related to Qaddafi’s command and control of terrorism, the entire complex was considered targetable.” Similarly, Secretary of State George Schultz argued that Qaddafi “was not a direct target . . . we have a general stance that opposes direct efforts of that kind, and the spirit and intent was in accord with those understandings.” The administration had even prepared a statement in case Qaddafi had been killed that presented the killing as a stroke of good luck. “Inadvertent” assassinations were thus no longer covered by the assassination ban.
Abraham Sofaer, then-White House legal counsel built on these arguments. After the strike, he claimed that actions taken in self-defense could not amount to assassination. Years later, in a public lecture, he elaborated further on the administration’s reasoning. Even if policymakers were aware that some of the targets were places in which Qaddafi lived, this did not make the strikes an attempted assassination. According to the Reagan administration’s reasoning, reported approvingly by Sofaer, Qaddafi’s position as head of state did not guarantee him “legal immunity” from being attacked when present at a proper military target. This view implied that – as long as the United States portrayed a strike as against a military target, infrastructure, and/ or command and control center, and not as a direct attack against a specific leader present at those targets – the action was legitimate and did not violate the ban. Not every lawyer agreed, as Bert Brandenburg wrote at the time, ‘‘if the ban cannot survive attempts to carve out exceptions for foreign leaders who are particularly despised by the United States, its practical value approaches worthlessness.”
The claims of Sofaer and others, though, prevailed. They permitted the U.S. government to conduct operations that amounted to assassination without explicitly violating the ban. Further narrowing of the ban emerged in 1989 when Hays Parks at the Department of the Army Judge Advocate General concluded that an overt or covert use of force in self-defense against “a legitimate terrorist threat” to protect U.S. citizens and interests was an exercise of self-defense and did not amount to assassination. In the same years, Congress was, again, active in the process of contestation. After a failed coup to overthrow Manuel Noriega of Panama, CIA director William Webster worked with Congress to re-interpret the ban and to give the CIA more leeway in its involvement in coups, even if they entailed a clear risk of assassination of a foreign leader. This (re)interpretation was finalized by William Barr at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Six DOJ lawyers and four CIA lawyers worked on it, reviewing files on assassination, the executive orders starting with Ford’s, as well as documents from the Ford, Carter, and Reagan years. Russell Bruemmer, the CIA’s general counsel at the time, argued that such an exception would be true even in cases in which U.S. officials and agents know that “coup leaders intend to use whatever force necessary to subdue opponents.” Only if U.S. government officials and agents become explicitly aware of the coup plotters’ intention to assassinate a foreign official should they desist from helping the plotters. If no explicit intent emerged, U.S. officials would be excused even if they had shared intelligence and technical assistance with the plotters.
A couple of years later, as operations against Saddam Hussein were ramping up, the administration of George H. W. Bush developed plans to target Hussein and the Iraqi leadership. When Air Force Chief of Staff General Mike Dugan admitted this publicly, he was fired by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. As Cheney told CBS News, “We never talk about the targeting of specific individuals who are officials of other governments (emphasis added).” When the war against Hussein started, though, and in a repeat of the 1986 Libya bombing, the U.S. targeted all the “command and control” buildings, including leadership targets. As National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft later admitted to Peter Jennings in a documentary on Hussein, “We don’t do assassinations, but yes, we targeted all the places where Saddam might have been.” The administration, Scowcroft conceded, had deliberately set out to kill him if they possibly could. He accepted Jennings’s characterization that this was ‘the nearest thing you can do to try to kill a foreign leader without saying you are going to set out to kill a foreign leader.”
The same effort to avoid accusations of violating the ban emerged during the early hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Although bin Laden was not a foreign leader, members of the Clinton administration worried about potential criticisms of violating the ban. Investigative journalist James Risen reported that the administration had concluded that strikes against bin Laden were legal since they were conducted in self-defense. At least some members of the administration, though, also went back to Sofaer’s “inadvertent” assassination argument. National Security Council spokesman David Leavy also stated that the “Command and control of an enemy is a justifiable target.” And a top U.S. counterterrorism official stated that in the case of terrorist groups, the infrastructure is mostly “human.”
After 9/11, as the “war on terror” and targeted killings against suspected terrorists escalated, consideration of decapitation of foreign regimes never entirely disappeared. In a repeat of 1991, the United States conducted another bombing—at the start of the 2003 Iraq War—of Hussein’s compound at Dora Farms, after U.S. intelligence suggested his presence there. The United States also considered a decapitation strike at various points in the confrontation with North Korea and Trump called for the assassination of Bashar al-Assad of Syria in 2017. And yet, these plots were set aside. At times, congressional and public opposition constrained the executive. At other times, strategic choices meant that the plans were shelved.
Trump’s Escalation: Just Assassinate
While the assassination efforts above failed or never got off the ground, they make clear the U.S. government’s effort to eliminate foreign leaders in the context of broader wars (the case of Hussein) or in the hope of regime change (the case of Qaddafi) never went away. They also highlighted the fact that an executive order prohibiting assassination that could be re-interpreted by executive branch lawyers at will, did not amount to a major constraint. Nonetheless, the cases, as well as the legal manoeuvres and congressional contestation surrounding them, reveal the U.S. government’s discomfort in being seen as responsible for the assassination of foreign officials. To prevent accusations that it had violated the ban, the U.S. government relied on legal and linguistic sleights of hand. The cases also reveal congressional involvement in shaping decisions surrounding the use of force and assassinations.
The first Trump administration successfully expanded the use of targeted killings to a State official (Soleimani) while he was present in a third country. The administration also showed an early disregard for (or lack of interest in) justifying its conduct through the lens of domestic or international law, quickly dropping claims that Soleimani represented an “imminent threat.” This disregard has intensified in the second Trump administration, as seen in the case of Venezuela and the U.S. strikes on boats that have murdered over a hundred suspected drug smugglers at sea. The second Trump administration is showing an appetite for reckless and blatantly illegal operations. It is also showing a willingness to entirely abandon international and domestic laws and norms, refusing to be constrained by even the already stretched interpretations adopted by previous administrations. The strikes on Khamenei (and the broader attack on Iran) also confirm a complete disregard for the domestic prohibition on assassination. Gone are any plausible claims of self-defense or of inadvertent killings.
What Now?
The stakes of abandoning the domestic ban on assassination and degrading the international anti-assassination norm could not be higher. Future U.S. presidents will feel even less constrained by the decades-old ban. Foreign leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, might seek to demonstrate that they can out-assassinate the United States and could prioritize assassinating opponents such as Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Iran has also shown a readiness to retaliate against U.S. and Israeli officials. The political vacuums that follow the assassination of heads of state can lead to civil war, chaos, unrest, and cycles of revenge. The Khamenei assassination has already turned into a regional war and sparked a global economic crisis. Simply put, a new era of political assassinations is likely to make the world less safe.
After the Church committee, Congress appeared to recognize the dangers of allowing the executive to hold a monopoly over decisions to assassinate. In the decades that followed, Congress often played a prominent role in asking questions of executive officials about actions that skirted or stretched the ban. Its oversight was uneven—and too often deferential—but Congress remained part of the discussion. In the case of the Khamenei killing, however, Congress has been shamefully silent, even as the costs of that reckless decision continue to increase. It is too late for the United States to lead a global strengthening of the anti-assassination norm, but Congress might be able to stop the bleeding. It should start by asking questions of the Trump administration on the Khamenei assassination. For example, did Iran pose an imminent threat of attack against the United States? Was Khamanei—who accepted a nuclear agreement with the United States in 2015—willing to continue to negotiate? As the Church Committee teaches: regime change and assassination plots paved the way for the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that crisis was resolved without assassination. Surely, there were lawful and less costly and reckless alternatives that the United States could have pursued with Iran.
When a new Congress is sworn in next year, it should open an investigation into the Khamenei operation, hold public deliberations on the role of assassination in U.S. foreign policy, and finally enact a statutory ban that unambiguously prohibits and criminalizes assassination once and for all.
