Assassins usually caught: For centuries, agents have given their lives to kill political opponents
by Gerald Owen www.nationalpost.com

Suicide bombers have a long prehistory. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the concepts of "assassin," "terrorist" and "suicide bomber" are essentially the same. Political murder has never been easy; the killers are usually caught. It was a stroke of genius by Hasan-i Sabah, the founder of the original Assassins, to grasp this nettle. The men he sent did not try to get away.

This program began on Oct. 16, 1092, when a certain Bu Tahir Arrani killed Nizam al-Mulk, the vizier or prime minister of Malik Shah, the Great Sultan of the Seljuk empire.

Hasan was a leader of a sect called the Nizaris within the larger, but still dissident Shiite sect -- underdogs inside Islam. He had seized by surprise Alamut, an almost impregnable fortress in the remote valleys of northern Iran.

The word "assassin" is derived from a nickname for the killers appointed by Hasan and his successors. It is derived from the word "hashish," but the Assassins (or Hashishiyun) did not use this drug on their missions; apparently it was just Syrian slang for "kooks."

One key to their technique was the use of the dagger and no other weapon.

The Assassin would get very close to the victim, with far greater chance of success than anyone shooting an arrow from a distance, or throwing a spear or putting a poison in a dish.

The cost of the Assassin's proximity was that he was most unlikely to escape; he was virtually committing suicide.

Hasan's Nizaris belonged to the class of religious groups called "antinomian": that is, they sought to achieve transcendence by violating ordinary moral and religious law.

According to Bernard Lewis, in his recently re-issued The Assassins: A Radical Sect Within Islam, "The killing by the Assassin had a ritual, almost a sacramental quality."

Like today's suicide bombers, the Assassin believed heavenly bliss was just around the corner.

Though the West has remembered the Assassins for having killed a few Christian Crusaders, the vast majority of their targets were fellow Muslims and all were leading leading political figures, not ordinary civilians.

Eventually, the sect of Hasan-i Sabah turned into the entirely peaceable Ismaili community of today, whose hereditary spiritual leader is the Aga Khan.

The tradition of European terrorism began differently. Alexei Bogolyubov, a political prisoner belonging to the Narodnik ("Populist") movement, had failed to take off his cap in the presence of General Fyodor Trepov, the Governor of St. Petersburg. Trepov illegally ordered him to be flogged.

On Jan. 24, 1878, a young woman called Vera Zasulich heard of this and found some excuse to walk into Trepov's office, where she shot him -- ineptly, which was lucky for him and her. A far cry from the medieval Assassins, so far, but like them she took no steps to avoid arrest.

At Zasulich's trial in 1878, the defence brought abundant evidence of brutality to political prisoners. Middle-class opinion swung in the Narodniks' favour, and the jury -- a new institution in Russia introduced by the Tsar, Alexander II -- acquitted her.

This inspired a terrifying wave of less mild attacks on high officials of the Russian government, and the word "terrorist" was coined. A peaceful pro-peasant movement of moralistic socialists had mutated into the terrorist Narodnaya Volya, the People's Will.

The man and woman in the street were not targeted, but there was collateral damage, as in February, 1880, when a bomb explosion in the Winter Palace aimed at Alexander II -- the great emancipator of the serfs -- killed 10 ordinary soldiers and wounded 56 other people.

Narodnaya Volya announced its "deep distress" and continued on its course. In the end, the Tsar-Liberator was among their numerous victims.

In Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), there is a secondary character, a "dingy little man" with "a supremely self-confident bearing" -- no wonder, because this would-be suicide bomber walks around London heavily packed with explosives under his coat, and a detonator to blow up himself and others.

The main character, though, is Mr. Verloc, a pornography dealer and anarchist, who gets orders to do something sensational. Since the middle classes believe in science, the chosen target is the Greenwich Observatory, home of the prime meridian.

To place the bomb, Verloc sends his developmentally challenged brother-in-law, Stevie, who trips on a tree-root in Greenwich Park and is "blown to shreds" -- an involuntary suicide bombing, we may say.

Verloc is in fact an agent provocateur, apparently in the pay of the Tsarist Russian government.

The Secret Agent was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock as Sabotage, where the pornography dealer has become a movie-theatre operator.

To return from fiction, the Russian terrorists of history were demoralized by the discovery of a double agent called Azeff -- an affair memorably re-created in a novel by Rebecca West, The Birds Fall Down.

But the greatest weakness of Narodnik terrorism was that it relied on dramatic individual gestures by people who were usually captured and punished.

The Marxists were scornful of this strategy.

Instead they invoked class struggle and the supposedly irresistible force of history -- with some help from the Leninist model of a highly disciplined political party.

And the Bolsheviks proved capable of seizing power and winning an ensuing civil war, despite much greater popular support for the heirs of the Narodniks, the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party -- and affection for the Tsar.

In the early 20th century, terrorism seemed to be dead, superseded by scientific Marxism-Leninism. Yet Lenin himself never recovered after he was shot by an SR assassin.

Fashions in revolutionary violence will doubtless continue to change.