#Assassination
23 entries tagged Assassination.
People (14)
- Che Guevara Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary who witnessed the 1954 CIA-backed coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, became a key military commander of the Cuban Revolution, served as Minister of Industries in Cuba, and was captured and executed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967 with CIA assistance - with agency officer Felix Rodriguez present at his death.
- Giorgio Ambrosoli Giorgio Ambrosoli was the Italian lawyer appointed as official liquidator for Michele Sindona's bankrupt Italian banking empire whose methodical documentation of Sindona's fraud was completed just weeks before he was shot dead outside his Milan apartment on July 11, 1979, on the orders of Sindona.
- James Earl Ray James Earl Ray was the career criminal who pled guilty to the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, recanted three days later claiming he was a patsy for a conspiracy organized by a mysterious figure called 'Raul,' and died in prison in 1998 with the conspiracy question still legally unresolved.
- Jim Jones Founder and leader of the People's Temple, a politically connected preacher who moved his followers to Guyana where over 900 died in the 1978 Jonestown massacre. Multiple CIA agents were present at the compound and investigators alleged connections to behavioral modification programs.
- Kerry Thornley Marine Corps veteran who served with Lee Harvey Oswald, wrote The Idle Warriors about him before the assassination, and later came to believe both he and Oswald were mind-controlled participants in the JFK conspiracy.
- Larry Devlin Larry Devlin was the CIA Station Chief in Leopoldville from 1960 to 1967 who received assassination orders against Patrice Lumumba including poison delivered by Sidney Gottlieb, claims he refused to execute the order, and became the primary CIA sponsor of Mobutu Sese Seko's rise to power.
- Marcus Foster First African-American superintendent of Oakland's public schools, assassinated by the Symbionese Liberation Army on November 6, 1973, with cyanide-tipped hollow-point bullets in an attack that bore the hallmarks of an intelligence operation.
- Martin Luther King Jr Martin Luther King Jr. was the preeminent leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham Campaign, and the 1963 March on Washington, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, was subjected to an extraordinary FBI surveillance and harassment campaign under COINTELPRO, and was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
- Patrice Lumumba Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the independent Congo (June 1960), deposed and delivered to Katangan forces by a CIA-backed conspiracy involving Joseph Mobutu within months of independence, and killed on January 17, 1961 - a case the Church Committee found involved CIA assassination planning, making him the emblematic victim of Cold War CIA intervention in African decolonization.
- Rafael Trujillo Rafael Trujillo was the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination on May 30, 1961, who received CIA support through much of his rule until his sponsorship of assassination plots against Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt led the CIA to supply weapons to the opposition conspirators who killed him - making him a Church Committee case study in CIA involvement in foreign leader assassination.
- Richard Dwyer CIA agent present at Jonestown during the 1978 massacre who was named by Jim Jones in the final death tape, shouting 'Get Dwyer out of here' as the mass killings unfolded.
- Sidney Gottlieb Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's Technical Services Division chief who created and directed Project MKULTRA, ran Operation Midnight Climax and the Ewen Cameron subprojects, carried biological assassination materials to the Congo targeting Patrice Lumumba, and ordered destruction of nearly all MKULTRA records before congressional investigation.
- William Harvey William Harvey was the CIA's chief of Berlin Base from 1952 to 1959 who engineered Operation Gold (the Berlin Tunnel), then headed Staff D and ZR/RIFLE (the CIA's assassination planning unit), ran the agency-mafia anti-Castro plots with Johnny Roselli, and was exiled to Rome station by Robert Kennedy for insubordination during Operation Mongoose.
- William J. Bryan Jr. Hypnotist who claimed CIA affiliations and allegedly bragged about hypnotizing Sirhan Sirhan prior to the Robert Kennedy assassination, as well as Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo.
Organizations (3)
- Health Alteration Committee Internal CIA committee that reviewed and authorized proposals for incapacitating or killing foreign targets, including approval of a 1960 operation to disable an Iraqi colonel using a biological agent delivered by monogrammed handkerchief.
- People's Temple The 1978 mass deaths of 918 people at the People's Temple agricultural commune in Guyana, investigated as a possible MKULTRA experiment due to the discovery of drugs used in known CIA operations and the presence of CIA agent Richard Dwyer.
- Symbionese Liberation Army Radical left-wing group active in California in 1973-1974 whose leader Donald DeFreeze was recruited at Vacaville prison by CIA operative Colston Westbrook, and whose campaign of violence (the Marcus Foster assassination and the Patty Hearst kidnapping) had the effect of discrediting left-wing movements.
Programs (4)
- MKNAOMI Joint CIA-Army program under which the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick produced biological and chemical weapons for covert CIA operations, including the toxins Sidney Gottlieb delivered to kill Patrice Lumumba.
- Operation Condor Operation Condor was a CIA-facilitated transnational program of political repression, intelligence sharing, and assassination coordinated among six South American military dictatorships from November 1975, tracking and killing an estimated 60,000 people including opponents who had fled across borders.
- Phoenix Program The Phoenix Program was the CIA-organized counterinsurgency targeting program in Vietnam (1968-1972) that used intelligence-driven identification and systematic neutralization - through capture, defection, or killing - of Viet Cong political and military infrastructure, resulting in the reported neutralization of 81,740 people including approximately 26,369 killed, under the direction of William Colby and later Ted Shackley.
- ZR RIFLE ZR/RIFLE was the CIA's covert executive action (assassination) planning program, established around 1960 under William Harvey, designed to develop a general capability to kill foreign leaders, applied primarily against Fidel Castro through the organized crime network involving Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, and exposed by the Church Committee in 1975 as a program concealed from the Warren Commission.
Events (1)
- 2025 Kyiv SBU Assassination The July 10, 2025 killing of SBU Colonel Ivan Voronych in Kyiv was claimed by The Base's Ukrainian cell White Phoenix and separately attributed by Ukrainian authorities to FSB-directed Russian operatives, leaving unresolved whether the two attributions describe a single coordinated operation or competing claims.
Places (1)
- Dallas, Texas Dallas, Texas is the site of the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the city's connections to Jack Ruby, Carlos Marcello's Mafia network, and CIA-connected figures make it central to the vault's JFK assassination investigation materials.