Frank Church holds a CIA poison dart gun at a committee hearing with Vice Chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975. Photo by Henry Griffin (Source: U.S. Capitol Archives.)

The CIA’s role in assassination is one of those topics handled gingerly by the press or Congress from time to time and then hastily put aside, with the habitual claim that the CIA may have dreamed of it, thought about it and maybe even dabbled in it, but had never actually gone successfully all the way. But in fact, the Agency has gone all the way many times.

There’s no dispute that the CIA has used assassination as a weapon lower down the political and social pecking order, as no one knew better than William Colby. He had, by his own admission, supervised the Phoenix Program and other so-called “counter-terror” operations in Vietnam. Phoenix was aimed at “neutralizing” NLF political leaders and organizers in rural South Vietnam. In congressional testimony, Colby boasted that 20,587 NLF activists had been killed between 1967 and 1971 alone.

The South Vietnamese published a much higher estimate, declaring that nearly 41,000 had been killed. Barton Osborn, an intelligence officer in the Phoenix Program, spelled out in chilling terms the bureaucratic attitude of many of the agents toward their murderous assignments. “Quite often it was a matter of expediency just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the paperwork.”

Those killed outright in Phoenix operations may have been more fortunate than the 29,000 suspected NLF members arrested and........

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