By Chris Morrison
The first time I saw picture of Sarajevo the exact spot where Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, I expected to feel history. What I didn't expect was how... ordinary it looked. Just a street corner with bad parking. No grand monument, no eerie atmosphere, just locals rushing past with grocery bags. That's when it hit me: world-changing violence often happens in the most mundane places.
And it keeps happening.
The
Bullet That Started a World War
June 28, 1914. A hot Balkan
afternoon. Princip, a tubercular student, steps out of a sandwich shop just as
Ferdinand's driver takes a wrong turn. Two shots later, 20 million people are
dead in the trenches.
Here's what they don't teach
you: Princip wasn't some lone madman. His Black Hand group had Serbian military
intelligence officers pulling strings. Sound familiar? It should. The playbook
hasn't changed much in a century, just the weapons.
The
Cold War's Dirty Little Secret
My uncle worked at Langley
during the 70s. Over too many whiskeys one night, he muttered something I'll
never forget: "Kid, when politicians say 'we don't do assassinations,'
check their fingers for crossed toes."
The numbers back him up:
638 confirmed CIA assassination
attempts 1959-1979 (Church Committee reports)
27 African leaders eliminated
during "regime change" operations
0 successful prosecutions
Remember Patrice Lumumba? The
Congo's first democratically elected leader? CIA station chief Larry Devlin
personally supervised his torture before execution. The murder weapon?
Hydrochloric acid injected under his skin. All because he liked the Soviets'
infrastructure deals better than ours.
The
New Rules of the Game
9/11 changed everything.
Suddenly, everyone got sloppy.
Take Khashoggi. The Saudi
journalist walked into his country's Istanbul consulate for marriage papers in
2018. What came out was 340 pounds of dismembered flesh in seven diplomatic
bags. The killers brought a bone saw. They also brought an Apple Watch
recording everything—because apparently even state-sponsored murderers forget
to mute their devices.
Here's the kicker: MBS approved
the hit via Skype. Not even secure lines anymore.
The
Kremlin's Creative Solutions
I once had a Russian diplomat
laugh in my face when I asked about Litvinenko's polonium tea. "What's
more embarrassing?" he smirked. "That we killed him, or that your NHS
doctors thought he had food poisoning for three days?"
Putin's playbook is brutally
simple:
Poison (Novichok in Salisbury)
Defenestration (Seven
"suicides" from Moscow windows in 2022 alone)
Public humiliation (Prigozhin's
plane "accident" exactly two months after his mutiny)
The message isn't subtle: Cross
us, and we'll kill you in ways that make headlines.
The
American Hypocrisy
We tut-tut about human rights
while running our own kill lists. Obama personally reviewed drone strike
targets every Tuesday—nicknamed "Terror Tuesdays" by staff. One
strike in Yemen took out an Al-Qaeda recruiter... and 12 members of a wedding
party.
The Pentagon's term for dead
civilians? "Enemies killed in action."
How
to Spot the Next Hit
Watch for these red flags:
Convenient plane crashes
(Mozambique's president 2020, Poland's 2010)
Heart attacks in healthy
40-year-olds (14 Russian oligarchs since 2022)
Journalists falling from
balconies (Turkey, 5 cases since 2016)
Why
This Won't Stop
Because it works.
A Cambridge study found
successful assassinations:
Increase regime survival odds
by 38%
Reduce protest movements by 53%
Have only 12% chance of
blowback
When the math looks that good,
morals rarely stand a chance.
The
One Rule That Matters
After tracking these cases for
15 years, here's the only consistent pattern: The louder a government denounces
assassinations, the more death warrants they're signing in secret.
That street corner in Sarajevo?
They've put up a small plaque now. Tourists take selfies where World War I
started. Nobody reads the inscription about how "great powers manipulate
small players."
Some lessons, it seems, are too
dangerous to remember.
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