The politics of murder

New Statesman​

30-07-2025

Photo by STR/HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF SARAJEVO/AFP via Getty Image
In Geoffrey Household's superlative thriller Rogue Male, from 1939, an English assassin-adventurer takes a potshot at Adolf Hitler and then flees for his life. An assassin's intended victim is usually a 'Hitler' of some sort. In July 2024, in Pennsylvania, an American youth aimed a rifle at Donald Trump from a rooftop and pulled the trigger. He was dispatched by a team of counter-snipers before he could take better aim and – conceivably – alter the fate of nations. What was his motive? Assassins are often seen as lone wolves with a sense of grievance against a perceived oppressor.
Gavrilo Princip, the teenage Bosnian Serb who espoused the anti-Austrian cause, saw a potential tyrant in Archduke Franz Ferdinand after Bosnia was forcibly occupied by imperial Vienna. In 1914, Princip shot dead the heir to the Habsburg throne in Sarajevo. Princip's was, by a long chalk, the most clamorous assassination in modern history: it precipitated the First World War. Through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine gun, the 1914-18 conflict killed and wounded more than 35 million people, both military and civilian. Yet, as Simon Ball points out in Death to Order, his impeccably researched history of assassination from 1914 to the present day, Princip did not himself foresee the war's terrible carnage. His aim, rather, was to liberate swathes of the future Yugoslavia from Austro-Habsburg dominance and create a united south Slavic state.
With Sarajevo as his starting point, Ball considers the impact of targeted murder on international politics over the past 110 years. The 'catastrophic detonator effect' of Princip's assassination led not only to the collapse of Vienna's double-headed eagle empire but also, Ball reminds us, to a vastly expanded Serb-ruled polity that was only finally dismantled in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. For Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, unsurprisingly, Princip was a nationalist hero who anticipated the Slav unification project under communism; for others (Hitler among them) he was a squalid stalker who shattered the equilibrium of Europe and represented a dangerous new type of assassin who shaped the exercise of power on the world stage.
As well as discussing the figure of the lone killer, Ball, a historian from the University of Leeds, introduces us to the techniques of state-sponsored assassination down the decades and to the leaders who have made use of murder, from Joseph Stalin to Augusto Pinochet. One of the most consequential of post-Sarajevo assassinations occurred in Leningrad in 1934 when an unemployed malcontent 'confessed' under torture that he had killed the local party boss Sergei Kirov as part of a vast anti-Stalin plot. This gave Stalin the excuse he needed to scythe down all perceived enemies. The Kremlin whipped itself into a frenzy as alleged conspirators were found guilty and executed.
Leon Trotsky, having helped to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in 1917, was now apparently a counter-revolutionary traitor whose time was up. In August 1940, the Spanish Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader struck Trotsky on the head with an ice pick while he was at work in his study in Mexico City. The monster that Trotsky had helped to create – the Soviet Union – had now destroyed him. As Stalin put it: 'No man, no problem.'
Ball asks if there such a thing as an 'honourable' assassin. He has some sympathy for the Anglo-Irish peer's daughter Violet Gibson who, in 1926, shot Mussolini in the face at close range in Rome amid a crowd of horrified fascists. The bullet snicked the tip of his nose. Mussolini's (surprisingly charitable) view was that Gibson was 'insane' and therefore could not be detained as a political criminal. She was an embarrassment to the British government, though, as the Duce was feted in most English newspapers and was on good terms with King George V. In 1928, two years after her attempt on the dictator's life, Gibson was transferred to Britain to a mental home in Northampton, where she remained until her death in 1956, unwept for and forgotten.
Assassination is a political instrument that can decide a nation's fate abruptly, says Ball. Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who put the bomb in Hitler's briefcase, was unquestionably an honourable failed assassin. Five people died from the blast in Hitler's GHQ in East Prussia on 20 July 1944 – yet the Führer sustained no more than damage to his eardrums and a pair of scorched trousers. It was the 43rd attempt on his life; the botched assassination only fortified his messianic belief in his invulnerability. The July Plot, though unsuccessful, became a foundation myth of Germany's postwar Federal Republic: there were Germans who had opposed Hitler after all.
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The 1960s American trinity of the assassinated – John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King , Robert F Kennedy – inevitably lies at the heart of Death to Order. On 4 April 1968, a petty conman named James Earl Ray shot the 39-year-old King with a hunting rifle from the window of a Memphis boarding house and fled the scene in a Ford Mustang. With more than 3,500 FBI agents on his trail, Ray became the subject of the largest and most costly manhunt in US history. For over two months he managed to evade capture until Scotland Yard tracked him down to a hotel in Pimlico, south-west London, from where he had planned to fly to Ian Smith's apartheid Rhodesia. Any American who championed the civil rights cause was made to feel threatened by King's assassination.
In his informative pages, Ball chronicles a number of professional hits that took place in London before Sarajevo. Curzon Wyllie, an India Office official, was shot dead in South Kensington in July 1909 by a Punjabi Hindu fundamentalist. Wyllie's was the UK's first ever imperial assassination, and the herald of a spate of extra-legal killings by Hindu terrorist cells who opposed British rule. State-sponsored killers became ever more brazen as a subculture developed between terrorism and what Ball terms 'regime survival'. In 1978, in broad daylight, Iraqi intelligence mortally wounded Saddam Hussein's long-term rival Abdul Razzaq al-Naif as he got into a taxi in front of the Inter-Continental Hotel on Hyde Park Corner. Later that year, in another spectacular London assassination, the Soviets used a poisoned umbrella to eliminate the Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov as he crossed Waterloo Bridge. The paranoid, spook-ridden world of Frederick Forsyth had come to the British capital.
Plastic explosives transformed assassination tradecraft as it could hit a target unerringly, Ball relates. In 1973 the Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco, an unrepentant Francoist, was killed by Basque separatists in an explosion so intense that it hurled his car up to the roof of a six-storey building. In the cruel humour of the British Foreign Office, Carrero Blanco was 'Spain's first man in space'. Premeditated political murders of this sort were occasionally bungled. One high-profile political assassination from 1973 shocked the inhabitants of the British dependency of Bermuda. In what Ball calls a 'post-imperial tragicomedy', Sir Richard Sharples, Governor of Bermuda, was ambushed during an evening stroll and, along with his dog and aide-de-camp, gunned down by members of a rackety anti-colonial group called the Black Beret Cadre. The assassins were captured and, in 1977, hanged, even though the death penalty had been abolished in Bermuda. Sir Richard's assassins, Erskine Burrows and Larry Tacklyn, were the last people to be executed anywhere in British-controlled territory.
Of course, no amount of state security can guard against the appearance of the rogue operator. The Islamists who stabbed to death the British Conservative MP David Amess in his Essex constituency in 2021 and knifed Salman Rushdie 15 times in upstate New York in 2022 were, manifestly, individuals operating on their own. Ball hesitates to call them assassins; they were not Day of the Jackal-style hitmen in the pay of states antithetical to the Western world.
Ball has written an exceptionally erudite and detailed history of assassination, packed with research drawn from government archives across the world. He begins and ends with Gavrilo Princip, who died of tuberculosis in a prison in Theresienstadt in 1918. The assassin was too young to be legally executed by the Habsburg state, being only 19 when his shot rang out that June a century ago in Sarajevo.
Ian Thomson's books include 'The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica' (Faber & Faber)
Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination
Simon Ball
Yale University Press, 408pp, £25
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[See also: 150 years of the bizarre Hans Christian Andersen]
Related
This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent