THE sophistication with which state-sanctioned assassinations are carried out these days has come a long way from the time Ramon Mercader plunged a rusty ice pick into the head of Leon Trotsky on Aug 20, 1940, on the orders of Joseph Stalin.
Trotsky was a Marxist revolutionary and had been instrumental in engineering the transfer of all political power to the Soviets with the October Revolution of 1917.
However, he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 after opposing Stalin’s rise and criticising his policies and was placed in exile by 1929.
For years, Trotsky was a constant thorn in the Soviet leader’s side.
When Mercader finally caught up with him in Mexico, the final moments were clumsy, the results messy and bloody.
After being stabbed, Trotsky grappled with Mercader, bit his hand and then staggered out of the room.
He died a day later.
Mercader was beaten up by Trotsky’s bodyguards, arrested and turned over to the Mexican police.
Unlike Trotsky’s assassination, the death of Kim Jong-nam, the exiled half-brother of North Korean president Kim Jong-un, at klia2 on Monday, was efficient, clean and quick.
Jong-nam, who had not yet passed through airport Immigration, was preparing to take a late-morning flight back to his home in Macau, when he was attacked.
Jong-nam reportedly told airport workers that someone had attacked him “from behind”.
“He asked for help and was immediately sent to the airport’s clinic. At this point, pain was setting in and he was on the verge of passing out.
“At the clinic, the victim experienced a mild seizure.
“He was put into an ambulance and was being taken to the Putrajaya Hospital when he was pronounced dead,” Selangor CID chief, Senior Assistant
Commissioner Fadzil Ahmat told reporters.
In his 1999 book, The Mitrokhin Archive, former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin details the Soviet Union’s forays into the dark world of political assassinations and the tools used to liquidate enemies of the state.
Mitrokhin spent 30 years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate.
When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, he brought the archive with him.
The KGB had a special team created exclusively for assassinations.
Its 13th Department was called the “Directorate of Special Tasks” and used “executive actions” or “liquid affairs” (targeted assassinations) to get rid of “persons of interest”.
Central to its existence were two special labs — one for creating unique weapons and explosives, the other for developing new poisons and drugs.
Poisons were preferred for exterminations because they attracted less attention and were often confused as natural deaths.
Of the array of poisons at the directorate’s disposal, ricin —a highly toxic, naturally-occurring lectin — was a particular favourite.
One of the more famous assassinations using ricin was in 1978 in London.
The target was Bulgarian dissident and Communist defector Georgi
Markov.
While waiting for a bus, a man next to him dropped his umbrella, hitting Markov in the leg.
It hurt, but Markov barely noticed.
The man apologised and they both went on their way.
Markov died four days later. His autopsy revealed a tiny, dimpled pellet in his leg which contained 0.2mg of ricin.
Vladimir Kostov, another Bulgarian defector, survived a similar fate with the pellet being stuck in his back.
He told the world about the attack on Radio Free Europe four days after his close call with death.
In the case of Jong-nam, intelligence officials in South Korea and the United States said he was “almost certainly” murdered by North Korean agents.
South Korea’s spy agency said yesterday that two women, believed to be North Korean operatives, poisoned the 45-year-old.
An unnamed Japanese government official was quoted by Japan’s Kyodo news agency as saying that the two suspected assailants might already be dead.
Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar, however, said that a suspect had been arrested.
The theory that Jong-nam had been targeted by spies from the country he left more than 15 years ago, gained traction after CCTV images, purportedly showing one of the alleged attackers as she waited for a taxi outside the airport shortly after the incident, went viral.
The grainy photo showed a young woman carrying a bag and wearing a white jumper that said “LOL” in large black print across the front.
South Korean intelligence officials claimed the North had been planning Jong-nam’s assassination for five years now.
In a report, The Guardian said South Korea had jailed a North Korean spy in 2012 who admitted to trying to organise a hit-and-run accident targeting Jong-nam in China in 2010.
In 2011, North Korean assassins reportedly tried to shoot Jong-nam in Macau, although details are still sketchy.
After another attempt to kill him in 2012, Jong-nam reportedly pleaded for his life, according to South Korean lawmakers who had been briefed by the head of the country’s national intelligence service.
“Jong-nam, in April 2012, sent a letter to Kim Jong-un, saying, ‘Please spare me and my family’,” Kim Byung-kee, a member of the parliamentary intelligence committee, told reporters.
While assassins have honed their skills and fine-tuned their tricks of the trade to perfection, the tools available to investigators and law enforcement have also improved, especially post-Sept 11 and now, with the emergence of the Islamic State.
High-definition closed-circuit television cameras, voice recognition and facial-recognition technology and their associated algorithms, iris recognition and biometrics, the interception of electronically transmitted information, (such as Internet traffic or phone calls — SIGINT, or signals intelligence) are all at the high-end spectrum of the equation.
At the other end are simple, no- or relatively low-tech methods such as human intelligence agents (HUMINT), postal interception or just the innocuous act of rummaging through one’s trash.
Bukit Aman said that the apparent assassination was the first time such an incid en t h ad happened in Malaysia and admitted that trying to monitor movement in high-traffic areas would be challenging, to say the least.
“This is why intelligence-sharing and inter-agency cooperation are vital,” it said.
Last July, police chiefs from the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) signed a historic pact first tabled a decade ago that would speed up the distribution of information, intelligence and assistance, in times of crisis.
Delegates at the 36th Aseanapol Conference in Kuala Lumpur signed the Asean Communication and Coordination Protocol for Crisis Management (ACCPCM) after 10 years of discussions.
The pact took on added urgency with the increasing threat posed by IS, and the IGP had said that the signing of ACCPCM would, in general, be a boost for the distribution of information, intelligence and assistance for the authorities.
While the death of Kim Jong-nam reads like a John le Carre thriller with all the attendant cloak-and-dagger stuff and intrigue, this episode is by no means an indictment of the security measures already in place in our most sensitive areas.
The very fact that investigators are already pursuing several solid leads is proof of that.