{"id":501134,"date":"2026-03-03T11:51:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T11:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/501134\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T11:51:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T11:51:10","slug":"analysis-has-the-us-ever-assassinated-a-world-leader-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/501134\/","title":{"rendered":"Analysis: Has the US ever assassinated a world leader before?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n A version of this story appeared in CNN\u2019s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\n The US government for decades shied away from targeting foreign leaders after embarrassing failures and unintended consequences from covert activities by the CIA.\n <\/p>\n

\n The targeting and killing of Iran\u2019s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which opened an undeclared war with Iran, is the first time in modern history the US \u2014 in this case working with Israel \u2014 openly killed the leader of a foreign country, according to CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali.\n <\/p>\n

\n For those keeping track, the US has now decapitated two foreign governments \u2014 both US adversaries overseeing vast oil reserves \u2014 in the past two months. Venezuela\u2019s Nicol\u00e1s Maduro is in New York awaiting trial and Khamenei is dead.\n <\/p>\n

\n There is actually a ban on US involvement in assassinations in US law \u2013 most recently in an executive order signed by Ronald Reagan<\/a>. It is still technically in effect.\n <\/p>\n

\n But since 9\/11, after which Congress gave presidents broad authority to use force to combat terrorism, there has been a slow but steady move toward this moment. Presidents from both parties have killed leaders of terrorist groups such as Osama bin Laden. President Donald Trump took another step when he ordered the killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani<\/a> by airstrike in Iraq in 2020. Now the US has killed a foreign head of state.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cYou can always come up with an individual who, by their power and their depth of depravity, whose removal benefits humanity,\u201d Naftali said, arguing few will mourn Khamenei\u2019s demise. \u201cBut making the decision to wipe out a foreign head of state should not be taken easily or quickly.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Neither President Donald Trump nor the Trump administration has publicly used that word \u2013 assassination \u2013 to describe the killing of Khamenei. They have offered multiple reasons for attacking Iran \u2013 lack of faith in Iran\u2019s leaders in negotiations over Iran\u2019s plans for a nuclear program; the potential for Iran to develop anti-ballistic missiles; Iran\u2019s sponsorship of terror groups in other countries, the recent killing of protesters in its streets.\n <\/p>\n

\"President<\/p>\n

\n When Trump announced the strikes in a video posted to his social media account at 2:30 a.m. ET Saturday, he said, without evidence, that Iran posed an \u201cimminent\u201d threat. But in a phone conversation with ABC News\u2019 Jonathan Karl, Trump offered a more personal reason for killing Khamenei.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI got him before he got me. They tried twice, well I got him first,\u201d Trump said, according to Karl.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump is likely referring to US intelligence from the summer of 2024 that Iran was plotting to assassinate<\/a> then-candidate Trump and other officials, around the same time a gunman with no known ties to Iran tried to kill Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Iran denied the claim.\n <\/p>\n

\n When the US military has been involved, foreign leaders have faced justice in their own countries.\n <\/p>\n

\n Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein<\/a> was hanged after a trial by authorities in Iraq after the US invaded and toppled his government.\n <\/p>\n

\n Libya\u2019s Moammar Gadhafi<\/a> was killed in crossfire after being captured by revolutionary forces, aided by a multinational bombing campaign<\/a> with allies.\n <\/p>\n

\n After World War II, allies put Nazi leaders on trial in Nuremberg.\n <\/p>\n

\n CIA involvement in coups and assassinations was previously kept secret\n <\/p>\n

\n The US was complicit in the overthrow and killing of Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem<\/a>, who previously had been propped up by US support.\n <\/p>\n

\n The CIA was directly, and secretly, involved in the 1973 ouster of Chilean leader Salvador Allende<\/a>, which led to his suicide.\n <\/p>\n

\n Other leaders overthrown with help by the US, like Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, were put in prison rather than killed. The US has since acknowledged its role in the coup<\/a>, undertaken because the US and Britain feared Iran, and its oil, would fall behind the Iron Curtain. It was Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of former President Theodore Roosevelt, who worked in Iran to help orchestrate the coup.\n <\/p>\n

\n After Watergate, a special bipartisan Senate committee was convened to assess abuses by the American intelligence community. The Church Committee, named for Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, issued a special report specifically on the issue of assassinations.\n <\/p>\n

\n Over hundreds of papers, it ticked through US efforts to undermine foreign leaders and assassinate them. Most notable are the failed assassination attempts against Cuba\u2019s Fidel Castro, first ordered by the Kennedy administration.\n <\/p>\n

\n During the Obama administration, the US revolutionized the use of covert drone strikes, as CNN national security analyst<\/a> Peter Bergen has written, to kill suspected terrorists.\n <\/p>\n

\n Technology has progressed since then. Israel Defense Forces released footage on its social media from a drone of what it said were the last moments<\/a> of the Palestinian leader Yahya Sinwar, when he was sitting alone in a bombed-out room while the drone hovered nearby.\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s not clear what technology was used in the strike on Khamenei. Last July, Iran claimed that another Palestinian, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Tehran by a \u201cshort-range projectile.<\/a>\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Israel appears to have fired the projectile that killed Khamenei and other leaders, but CNN reported Sunday that the CIA provided key intelligence on the Ayatollah\u2019s whereabouts that allowed him to be targeted.\n <\/p>\n

\n From CNN\u2019s report:\n <\/p>\n

\n (The CIA was) monitoring for his daily patterns \u2014 where he lived, whom he met with, how he communicated and where he might retreat under threat of attack, five people familiar with the matter told CNN. They were keeping tabs, too, on Iran\u2019s senior political and military leaders, who rarely gathered in the same place with the ayatollah, the country\u2019s supreme leader for nearly four decades.\n <\/p>\n

\n The attacks coincided with an opportunity to take out not only the ayatollah but also other Iranian leaders, who recent intelligence suggested would be at a Tehran compound that is home to the offices of the ayatollah, the Iranian presidency and the national security apparatus.\n <\/p>\n

\n In other words, the opportunity was there.\n <\/p>\n

\"Satellite<\/p>\n

\n The Church Committee concluded there were at least eight attempts to assassinate Castro between 1960 and 1965, including by mob hit<\/a>, according to the author Dan Bohning, who wrote for CNN<\/a> about the assassination attempts in 2008.\n <\/p>\n

\n Its conclusions express bipartisan opposition to assassinations. It quotes President John F. Kennedy, somewhat ironically given attempts to kill Castro and his own ultimate demise, as saying the US should not be assassinating foreign leaders.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe can\u2019t get into that kind of thing, or we would all be targets,\u201d Kennedy said, according to the Church report.\n <\/p>\n

\n More detailed quotes from the testimony of Richard Helms, who was involved in the 1953 Iran coup and also CIA assassination attempts before rising to be CIA director.\n <\/p>\n

\n In testimony, Helms explained both moral and practical opposition to assassination.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIf you are going to try by this kind of means to remove a foreign leader, then who is going to take his place running that country, and are you essentially better off as a matter of practice when it is over than you were before?\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Helms pointed to the assassination of Diem in Vietnam as an example.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat whole exercise turned out to the disadvantage of the United States,\u201d Helms said. At the time he made those comments, in the years before the Islamic Revolution, Helms was the US ambassador to Iran.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt isn\u2019t because I have lost my cool, or because I have lost my guts, it simply is because I don\u2019t think it is a viable option in the United States of America these days,\u201d Helms said of his opposition to assassination.\n <\/p>\n

\n Three successive US presidents, Republican Gerald Ford, Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican Reagan<\/a> would each sign executive orders making it illegal for the US government to engage in assassination.\n <\/p>\n

\n Reagan\u2019s order is still technically in effect, but Trump has been given broad immunity by the Supreme Court for his official acts while in office.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump is now seizing his opportunity to remake the geopolitical system, operating without seeking congressional approval in both hemispheres.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A version of this story appeared in CNN\u2019s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-501134","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}