If you’re searching for some uplifting bedtime reading, you might enjoy this e-book of a 1953 CIA report titled “A Study of Assassination,” made public in 1997 as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. Here are a few choice nuggets:

Assassination is a term thought to be derived from “Hashish”, a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hasan-ibn-Sabah to induce motivation in his followers, who were assigned to carry out political and other murders, usually at the cost of their lives.

It is here used to describe the planned killing of a person who is not under the legal jurisdiction of the killer, who is not physically in the hands of the killer, who has been selected by a resistance organization for death, and who has been sele cted by a resistance organization for death, and whose death provides positive advantages to that organization….

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