An Assassin’s Tool Kit: When Guns Are Not Enough

In the ruthless worlds of espionage, global politics and the criminal underground, there are many grim ways to die: Tea laced with polonium. A face full of the nerve agent VX. An umbrella that shoots ricin pellets.

Sometimes the assassination attempts leave a mystery, as in the case of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, who were poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent, Novichok, in Salisbury, England, this month.

The episode is one in a long line of dastardly plots that have captured the public’s imagination. Here is a selection, and the implements deployed.

Leon Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary who created the Soviet Red Army, saw himself as Lenin’s heir, but when Lenin died, he was outflanked by Stalin in the power struggle that followed.

Trotsky fled into exile and ended up in a leafy suburb of Mexico City in 1940, where an agent of Stalin, Ramón Mercader, got into Trotsky’s study with a mountaineering pick hidden under his clothes. When Trotsky turned his back, he buried it in Trotsky’s cranium. The Russian died the next day, Aug. 21.

In 2005, the lost ax turned up in the possession of the daughter of a Mexican police commander. According to The Guardian, the woman, Ana Alicia Salas, said her father had filched the bloodstained weapon to preserve it. But now, she said: “I am looking for some financial benefit. I think something as historically important at this should be worth something, no?”

Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, a Mexican drug kingpin and former leader of the Tijuana Cartel, was celebrating at a birthday party when he was felled by armed men dressed as clowns in Los Cabos in 2013.

The drug lord had hobnobbed with celebrities and sports stars, and his family, known as the Arellano Félix clan, was said to have inspired the film “Traffic.”

At the birthday party in Los Cabos, Mexico, in 2013, assassins with red noses and bright orange wigs mingled among 100 guests. Footage of the scene captures Arellano Félix’s last moments: As two bands played and a man sang, the clowns began shooting.

“He was hit by two bullets, one in the chest and one in the head,” Isai Arias, a Baja California state government official, said at the time. Arellano Félix was 63.

Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, championed self-determination for his country.

But Western governments, which had big stakes in his nation, wanted him dead. The United States, which was believed to have used uranium from Congolese mines for the Hiroshima atomic bomb, feared the charismatic Congolese politician would become an African Fidel Castro.

The CIA considered poisoning his toothpaste. “I was totally taken aback,” Larry Devlin, a former CIA officer, recalled in The New York Times in 2008 about being handed the toxic toothpaste in 1960 to carry out the assassination. He stalled, believing the killing would have been “disastrous” globally.

Lumumba was deposed in 1960, but was captured, tortured and killed by Congolese fighters on Jan. 17, 1961. His murder is considered one of the most important assassinations of the 20th century.

Most do not see the attacks coming.

Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half brother of North Korea’s leader, perished after getting the nerve agent VX in his face at a Malaysian airport in February 2017, when he was set upon by two women who later said they thought they were pulling a prank.

The Hamas leader Khaled Meshal was targeted in September 1997 by Mossad agents who sprayed poison on his skin. The plot failed after Israel handed over the antidote.

As Meshal was about to enter his office in Amman, Jordan, one agent aimed a lethal nerve toxin at his neck, but missed and sprayed him in his ear. The Hamas leader later said a shivering sensation raced down his spine “like an electric shock.”

At the hospital, he was given two days to live. A furious King Hussein of Jordan demanded that Israel provide the antidote, saying the agents would otherwise face execution. In an extraordinary move, Israel handed it over, saving Meshal’s life.

Gen. Ahmed Shah Massoud, an Afghan warlord, was assassinated in 2001 by two men posing as journalists. They entered his headquarters in the Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan, where Massoud sat on a couch.

The “reporter” detonated a bomb strapped to his waist and blew himself to bits. The “cameraman” set off a bomb hidden in the camera and ran from the room, jumping into the River Oxus. But the general’s bodyguards pulled him out and killed him.

Dissident writer Georgi Markov defected from his Communist homeland of Bulgaria in 1969 to start a new life in London, where he became a BBC reporter.

Waiting to catch a bus to work on Waterloo Bridge on Sept. 7, 1978, he felt a sharp pain on the back of his right thigh but continued on to work. He developed a fever, was admitted to a hospital in South London and died four days later.

An inquiry revealed someone had used a specially adapted umbrella to inject a pellet containing ricin into his leg. The culprit was identified as a Bulgarian spy, Francesco Gullino, aka Agent Piccadilly.

Sometimes, the victim suffers terribly: Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent and Putin critic who lived in exile in London, drank tea laced with polonium-210 in 2006 and died a slow, agonizing death.

Two figures stand out in assassination lore: Fidel Castro, the Cuban strongman, and Rasputin, the wild-eyed, deeply reviled monk who influenced Russia’s last czar.

The attempts on Castro’s life included:

— A contaminated skin-diving suit. According to a summary of CIA plots, an American lawyer was to give Castro a contaminated skin-diving suit while the two negotiated for the release of Bay of Pigs prisoners.

“The CIA plan was to dust the inside of the suit with a fungus producing Madura foot, a disabling and chronic skin disease, and also contaminating the suit with tuberculosis bacilli in the breathing apparatus,” the document states. The lawyer chose instead to give Castro a clean skin-diving suit “as a gesture of friendship.”

— A booby-trapped seashell. CIA experts considered packing a seashell with explosives and leaving it in one of Castro’s favored diving haunts. It would be rigged to kill him if he picked it up.

“It was determined that there was no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive which was spectacular enough to attract the attention of Castro,” the documents say.

— Fatal cigars. The plan was to put a botulinum toxin into a box of his favorite cigars. The cigars were delivered in 1961 — but never reached Castro.

— Botulism, again. Marita Lorenz told Vanity Fair in 1993 that as Castro’s lover in 1959, she was recruited to assassinate him by dropping two botulism-toxin pills into his drink. She had reservations and dropped the idea, and then found out that by putting the pills in a cold-cream jar, she had spoiled them, anyway.

Rasputin, who had gained enormous influence in the court of Nicholas II with his claims to healing powers, survived several assassination attempts before an elaborate conspiracy unfolded in December 1916 to kill him once and for all.

Prince Felix Yusupov invited him to Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg, where he was fed cake laced with potassium cyanide and cyanide-spiked Madeira — but did not die.

He was shot, but ran. He was shot again and again. Some say the conspirators even stabbed him. Finally, he was thrown into a car and driven to Petrovski Island, where he was dropped into the Neva River, where he drowned.