Dan Snow's History Hit - A History of Assassinations

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

Kenneth Baker is a British politician and a former Conservative MP who served in the cabinets of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as Environment Secretary, Education Secretary, and Home Secretary. He joined me on the pod to examine the history of assassinations. From Julius Caesar to John F. Kennedy, and even the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound, Kenneth has used them to build up a clearer picture of assassination as a political tool. Is this an effective weapon which has changed the course of history forever, or is an assassination, in the words of Macbeth, "a poisoned chalice"? Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got a lord, got a peer of the realm on the old pod this week. Very, very exciting. Lord Baker of Dorking. Kenneth Baker, formerly a politician in the UK, chairman of the Conservative Party here, a former Environment Secretary, Education Secretary and Home Secretary. All pretty interesting positions during the current crisis, so it's great to talk to him at this time. He's now in the House of Lords, Lord Baker of Dorking. You get to choose your title when you're ennobled as a life peer in the UK. Join the House of Lords. Lord Baker of Dorking. What would I choose? What would I choose if I was to be ennobled? A day that seems fairly remote, it must be said. You know, you've got to think about these things. You've got to think. It's never too early. It's

like your Desert Island Discs songs. You've got to get it right when the time comes, when the big finger points at you out of the sky. Anyway, I talked to Kenneth Baker about assassinations. He's written a new book. He started writing history books since he left politics, and he's written a couple of books, and this one's about assassinations. He's got immediate personal experience of them. He's lost friends to assassinations. And he's convinced that actually assassinations don't work. They don't achieve the political ends hoped for by the assassins. Which I thought was an interesting point. If you want to watch lots of history documentaries, please get a History Hit TV. It works like Netflix, just for history fans. It's just lots of audio and video about history. Hundreds of documentaries. We've got ever more subscribers,

so please go and check that out. We've got new documentaries coming up soon on the rise of Hitler and on naval history as well. So if you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you'll get a month for free and then your second month for just one pound, euro or dollar. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Kenneth Baker. Thank you so much for coming on the show it's a great honour to have you on Well I'm very glad to be talking to you because you know you've done so much for history you've made history interesting and popular and getting young people to follow it as well

that's marvellous because I did history at Oxford a long time ago but I'm an amateur historian you're a real pro Well no not at all I wish you of course, have lived through a fair bit of history, which I might ask you about as well. But your most recent book is Assassinations. And what gave you a particular interest in how and why we assassinate people? I've known eight people who've been assassinated, and two of them were close personal friends.

Ian Gow, who was Margaret Thatcher's PPS, who was blown up by the RA, and Tony Berry, who died in the Brighton bombing. Tony Berry and I were bridge partners, so we got to know each other very well. Apart from that, I knew another six. One was Airene Neve, of course. Another was Dick Sharples, who was the governor of Bermuda. I knew we were both ministers in Ted Heath's government for a time. And then I knew two Sri Lankan politicians who were contemporaries of mine in Oxford, Lilith Afalat-Mudeli, who was the chairman of the union and went on to be the senior minister in the Sri Lankan government.

And he spoke English beautifully, the Georgian English, you know. He must have learned from old grammars. And very witty. I knew him, he was quite a close friend. And then there was Lakshman Kadikabar, another Sri Lankan. Both were assassinated. Lalith, I'm not quite sure who he was assassinating. He was a senior minister.

I met him once or twice in Sri Lanka. And he was a potential presidential candidate. He might have been killed by a Tamil who hated him, or more possibly the prime president, Prima Doza, who was assassinated himself a week later. Lakshman Kedavgar was a Tamil and he was killed by a Tamil. And then I also knew Roberta Wakeham, who died in the Brighton bombing,

and also Lewis McWhirter, who founded the Guinness Book of Records. And I knew him quite well. He was active Conservative. And when I stood to be the candidate for Maribyrn, he was one of the other three in the final contest. Totally made a very good speech. He was a nice man.

He was shot when he opened his door to IRS terrorists. And that was a group that led to the Barkham Street siege. So I knew all these people. And I also met people, not that I had many dealings with them, like Lord Louis Mountbatten and Mrs. Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, because when Mrs. Gandhi came to London, she always had dinner with Margaret Thatcher. And I went along to those dinners and met them both. And I suppose someone who's been in public life will, in the course of time, meet various people who have been assassinated.

But I set out to say, have assassinations ever changed the history of the world? The Israelis said they hadn't. Was he right or not? And so that's what my book explores. I looked at over a hundred significant people across the world who've been assassinated. And I must say, I've only found one that actually changed history of the world. And that was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on the 28th of June in 1914. He did not intend to thrust the whole of Europe into war. All he wanted was a Bosnian nationalist to join up with Serbia. They thought it would be a nice little thing in the Balkans

to settle by themselves. But that was the one that changed history. Others, you feel, might have changed history, and I explored it very carefully. Kennedy, for example. People said that if he hadn't been assassinated, he would have got America out of Vietnam more than LBJ. But I don't agree with that. I think the speech that Kennedy was about to make in Dallas actually said they were going to support

our friends in the Far East. And he also put in 20,000 Americans into Vietnam. And in 1963, he was assassinated. And he was totally preoccupied with being reelected in 1964. And he was not going to be seen as the man who let communists win in North Vietnam and South Vietnam. And he would have been fully committed, in my view. That's contested by some people. But Max Hast Hastings in his great history of the Vietnam War does support that view as well. Who's your first person? Julius Caesar, the most famous. Now, actually, it's very interesting. Right at the beginning, I start with Macbeth, because right in the first act of Macbeth, when Macbeth gets back to his castle, he finds that the King of Scotland, Duncan, is his guest that night. And in a single speech, he uses the word assassination for the

first time in English literature and says, could I assassinate him? And he reflects upon that. And he said, if you could just contain assassination to that one event and tidy it all up and it doesn't have repercussions, well, you might get away with it. But violence breeds violence. And he comes at the end of his speech to say it was a poison chalice, the first time that phrase is used, actually, in the English language. And I frankly found they were all the great assassinations were poison chalices. What's the difference between an assassination and a murder? They're both very similar, of course. And they become very similar in what's happened today. Traditionally, one's always thought of an assassination as a single person killing an evil, wicked man, like Charlotte

Corday stabbing Marat in his bath, for example. She went from Brittany because she was fed up with the executions of her Giron friends, or the madman Bray who shot Martin Luther King. But today, assassinations are conducted by government states. Targeted killings. Both Israel and Russia have used targeted killings on a massive scale. Israel, because it is fighting for survival, and therefore will kill its opponents. When Sharon was the Prime Minister, he wanted to kill Yasser Arafat. But actually, he was checked by America and said no. And when it had turned up earlier, Golda Meir had turned it down. But they do assassinate people. They assassinated the leader of the Fatah party when he was living in Tunis.

And that's a long way from Palestine, Abu Jihad. And only this year, at the beginning in January, they assassinated a Malaysian in Malaysia, who was a rocket advisor to the Israeli government. And so the stretch is very long. And it's been a very good book's been written on it called Rise and Kill. It's a quotation from the Talmud, by a very professional journalist in Israel who spent years writing the history and he quote 2,000 people who have been assassinated by the state of Israel. But Israel is not alone in that. Russia, over the years, has used assassination. The Russian Tsar was assassinated in 1882 Alexander II by a revolutionary group and that was certainly a poison chalice for them

because he was the most progressive Tsar that Russia had he abolished serfdom and he was about to introduce a form of voting at a local level and when he was assassinated by a group called I think it was Freedom Action led by a woman, strangely enough, his successor abolished all the performance together

and they went back to being oppressive czars. And that might have prevented the Bolshevik Revolution, but I think Nicholas II was so weak that was inevitable. But also Russia, Stalin engaged in massive assassinations. Kirov, a possible successor, he had shot. And then all the old Bolsheviks, the Novyov and Bukharin were all shot. They were all tried legally, which was a form of assassination, quite frankly.

And Trotsky was actually assassinated. He sent a killer out to actually kill Trotsky in Mexico with an ice pick driven into his head. They had an attempt to kill him a week earlier by firing into his villa, but Trotsky and his wife hid under the bed and escaped that. But Stalin would not let Trotsky go. He thought Trotsky was undermining his whole position because Trotsky wanted permanent revolution. Stalin did not want permanent revolution. He wanted permanent rule. And there are some wonderful quotations I have in the book. Stalin said, where there is no person, there is no problem.

And he made sure there were no persons or problems when he ran Russia in a very perfect way. And it goes on today. Putin is exactly the same. Putin, his most effective opponent was Nemetsov, who had been a deputy prime minister under Yeltsin. And he had him shot with his girlfriend on a bridge crossing the river just by the Kremlin. And there's no doubt he'd had that done because he was the most effective.

And look what else he has done. Russia was behind the plot to kill Leventko, there's absolutely no doubt about that at all, with plutonium poisoning in his tea in London and that was being completely revealed and the actual people have been identified. The actual murders have been identified and one has now made a member of the Duma

so he can never be charged with anything. These were Putin's emissaries. There's no question at all. And look at Skripal in Salisbury. He decided to take vengeance upon him. And when Skripal had been accused of treachery and sentenced to 10 years, he made it very clear that a traitor to Russia can never really be satisfactorily dealt with until they're dead. You've said that nearly all the assassinations that you've studied have led to blowback on the assassins. The trouble is, I'm thinking that Stalin ended up dying an old man in power and Putin's grip on Russia seems pretty effective. So do you think assassinations have

worked for those two gentlemen? It certainly worked for Stalin, no question about it. But he tried to assassinate Tito on several occasions because Stalin hated Tito, who created Yugoslavia. And eventually Tito wrote him a letter saying, if you send any more people to shoot me, I'll send some over back to shoot you. And strangely enough, a Russian spy, an assassin, had organised the assassination of Tito. And this spy has persuaded himself to be the Costa Rican delegate to Yugoslavia. And he changed his name to a South American name. And he spoke Spanish, of course. And he spent a bit of time in Costa Rica, and he came back determined to shoot Tito. And there's a wonderful picture in the book

of him having a chat with Tito over a coffee table when they were both smoking cigarettes. This is the only picture I've got of when an assassin is actually pictured with the victim. It's a most extraordinary picture, both smiling at each other. Tito had no idea that the assassin sent his proposal to Stalin and it reached him on the evening on which Stalin died. It might have been the last thing that Stalin read.

But he had a seizure that night and that seizure probably saved Tito's life. Now when you say Putin is successful he's got away with it but I wouldn't describe him as a successful leader of Russia. He's tanked the Russian economy and he's known to be an international liar. He's not respected anywhere. They know that he is a tyrant.

He's predicted the death of liberalism but you'll see the death of his regime before that. There's no doubt about that at all. And he's very protective of his regime before that. There's no doubt about that at all. And he's very protective of his regime. I have a chapter in the book just on investigative journalists. They are very often the victims of assassination. If you take about 10 years from 1993, 12 years in Russia,

350 people in the media have been murdered. In the media, I mean television, journalists, writers, publicists, printers, anybody who's involved with free expression. And he continues to do it. As I say, he murdered Nemetsov. He certainly gave all the poison for the killing of the man on Waterloo Bridge who was stabbed by an umbrella. poisoned for the killing of the man on Waterloo Bridge who was stabbed by an umbrella. Romania, I think. But more recently, only this year, there was a young journalist called Maxim Borodin, who was beginning to try and assess how many Russians were being killed in the Ukraine. Whereas the general attitude, the general policy of Putin is there are no Russians in Ukraine at all.

We're not doing that at all. We're helping the government, but not sending soldiers in. And when this became known, he lived in a fifth-floor flat. And he told his friend one day, he said, yesterday I found some people in camouflage uniform on our sort of stairway, very amazed indeed. And then someone said, my balcony yesterday. The day after that, he fell from his death from that balcony. That is one method of assassination. If you fly four or five stories, you're dead. And he did it. And this is known, but he's not the only one doing it. If you take Slovakia, there was a young

journalist called Kuciek, who was assassinated last year with his girlfriend by the Prime Minister, Robert Fico, because he was beginning to write stories of how corrupt Slovakia had become and how the mafia had taken over and how the Prime Minister's wife herself was involved in corruption and channelling European money into their own bank accounts.

And this is very hot stuff indeed. And they were both shot. Fico immediately announced a huge reward for it. But the editor of the paper said, no, he was shot and they can't shoot us all. And a great campaign started in Slovakia to condemn the prime minister, who eventually had to resign. Well, he was defeated, actually, strangely enough, by a middle-aged woman lawyer who stood for human rights. This is the only example where this has happened, I may say. There's a campaign, again, to examine that case internationally. He undoubtedly did it. did it. There was another case in Malta, quite a famous case, when the investigative journalist was beginning to investigate the Prime Minister of Malta and his wife for corruption, because

Malta's turned into the soft underbelly of the mafia in Europe, and he was shot with his girlfriend. That turned out well, because there was an election where a model had won and the Prime Minister is facing trial. From your period as a minister and knowing all these people that were assassinated, you don't feel that any of those assassinations achieved the ends that their assassins had hoped? The two bodies that have engaged in massive assassination are religious terrorists and political terrorists. And the IRA engaged in massive assassination are religious terrorists and political terrorists. And the IRA engaged in war, basically, or assassination on a massive scale. There's no question about that.

They murdered Lord Louis Mountbatten when he was on his family boat with his family just over the border in Southern Ireland. And that achieved nothing. He had finished his period of power at all. It was really a revenge attack. And the leader of the Sinn Féin said, we only doled out to him what he doled out to many other people. But that was ineffective.

It was vicious, nasty and absolutely unforgivable. And the assassins had been arrested, but they've been subsequently released. And if you look at the other assassinations that the IRA engaged in, and it wasn't only the IRA, the Protestants responded by assassinating Catholics as well. The purpose of the IRA was to have a united Ireland. They haven't got a united Ireland.

The Good Friday Agreement did not give them a united Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement gave them an elective authority in Northern Ireland, which is probably the last thing they wanted, quite frankly. And so it did not achieve anything. But they believed they were achieving it. They believed they were fighting for the historic rights of Ireland to be reunited. That has not happened. Religious terrorism, again, has not achieved its objective. If you look at the launch of ISIS by the caliph who preached from the mosque, creating the independent state of ISIS, Daesh,

it had a tremendous burst at the beginning because lots of fanatics joined in and they had very clever guerrilla activities of moving very quickly and very swiftly into unprotected villages in northern Syria and virtually massacring people. And if they were Christians, they actually crucified them. It looked for a time they were going to be very successful in that they dominated about a third of northern Syria and part of northern Iraq. And it looked as if a real movement was going to take over.

But three leaders got together in America, and David Cameron and the President of France, and they decided that ISIS must be defeated. And they used forces collectively to defeat ISIS, both on the ground and in the air. And so this was a great terrorist movement which has been checked. I think there are still pockets of it around in northern Syria, but the great attempt to create an independent caliphate

has not, in fact, survived, although masses of people from all over Europe, including Britons, went over to help them. although masses of people from all over Europe, including Britons, went over to help them. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. When you were a minister,

the tools available nowadays, when Obama was fighting ISIS, incredibly targeted drone strikes, the ability to assassinate people effectively on the battlefield didn't really exist until recently. Has that changed your view of the utility of assassination? Has it worked, for example, going after the hierarchy of al-Qaeda and IS around the world in this very targeted way? Well, that's a very interesting question. I think that in the time when I was an active politician as Home Secretary, the main weapon against terrorists were the security services, MI5 and MI6.

And they did identify many attacks that they managed to thwart. Some attacks nonetheless occurred, the pub bombings, for example, and the bombings of the soldiers in Hyde Park. But the main weapon must be the security forces of any country. And that is why we've increased the expenditure, and this is a non-party issue entirely, very substantially in Britain over the last few years. For example, when the first Gulf War broke out in 1990, I was Home Secretary. The main thrust of MI5 at that time was to penetrate Irish terrorism, both in Ireland and in the UK. And we were very experienced at that and were very effective at it. We had far fewer people employed in MI5 that spoke Arabic and were engaged in terrorist identification in the Arab world.

It was not seen as a major threat. That is entirely different now. We have an substantial number of people who speak Arabic and the other languages of the Middle East. And that must still be our main weapon against terrorism, against assassination. At the end of the day, I could not find any of the assassinations that took place that really affected significantly the course of history. Two dramatic failures of assassination, I think, did change world history. The most famous was the failure to assassinate Adolf Hitler,

not in 1944, because Germany was then destined to lose, come what may, and if he'd been assassinated, it meant that the war would have probably closed a bit more quickly and probably Russia would not have marched into Germany. But when he escaped assassination, it was on September 28th in 1939, on the first day of war with France. He always went to the Munich beer cellar, way back in the 1920s when Nazism started. And for him it was a great celebration of meeting all the early, absolutely dead loyal Nazis who were with him from the beginning.

And he always went and arrived at 8 o'clock and left at 9.30, very promptly. And he always made a speech, a rabidizing speech, from the platform in the hall, standing in front of a wooden pillar. And then a rather strange assassin, not from any political purpose at all, not supported by any political movement, decided to kill Hitler

because if there was going to be another war, he thought German soldiers would be treated very badly and come out of it very badly. And so therefore he was trying to kill Hitler to stop him actually waging war in Europe, not stopping Nazism, not and all the rest of it. And what this chap did is he was a carpenter. He went and visited the Wieseler several times and sat beside the pillar, had a beer or two, and then chiselled out a little cavity in the pillar at the bottom. And then he bought explosives and practiced with them in his parents' garden and he built a bomb. And on the day before Hitler's famous visit, he placed the bomb in the pillar.

And then he tried to scarper off to Switzerland. Hitler arrived. He arrived late. He made a speech. The bomb was due to go off at 9.30, just before 9.30, when Hitler was about to leave. But he left early at seven minutes past nine, because on that day France had invaded the SZR lands and he had to get back to Berlin. If he'd stayed on those last few minutes, from 9.07 to 9.30, he would have been killed.

Eight people were killed. And if he'd been killed then, that would have changed the history of the world. You don't know how it would have changed it. Who would have taken over him? Goring? Maybe the generals, who rather hated Hitler, actually, might have exerted the power of the army. The other one was the failure of the IRA in not killing Margaret Thatcher at the Brighton bombing during the conference which I'd attended.

I was quite lucky because I had to go back to London to one o'clock in the morning when the bomb went off, because I was then the local government minister and I had a debate with Ken Livingstone on the abolition of the GLC early in London. minister and I had a debate with Ken Livingstone on the abolition of the GLC early in London. So I and my wife had to leave the Brighton Hotel at about 1.30 in the morning. And strange enough, the last person we met as we were going down the steps, coming up the steps, was Tony Berry, my friend, who'd been exercising his little dog. And Tony Berry was a really tall, handsome man. He had the smallest dog I think I've ever seen. It was a chihuahua. And I remember it. And we talked about it. And we said it had been a successful conference. Three hours later, he was dead. And you'll remember the event, of course, and the dramatic event. But Margaret survived. Now, if she'd been killed

in that event, the next leader of the Conservative Party would have been either Michael Heseltine or Douglas Howe. It would not have been Cecil Parkinson, because he queered his pitch with the love affair with his secretary. Norman Tebbit was very severely injured, and Nigel Lawson had only been the Chancellor for about six or seven months. His future lay ahead of him. Now, if they had become the leaders of the Conservative Party back in 1984, we would have been a pro-European party. There's no question about that. Both were extreme supporters of Europe.

So that might have changed the history of the world. So those two failed assassinations might just have changed the history of the world. They tried to assassinate Queen Victoria a few times. That might have changed one or two things as well. Eight times. Usually shot when she was travelling. Leaders are very, very vulnerable when they're travelling anywhere.

But there were several attempts. It started very early on with a madman that charged his revolvers. Another one didn't fire proper bullets. They were pretty hopeless. One got very close to her once on were pretty hopeless. One got very close to her once on a station. They never got very close to her. You've seen one of your friends, a man who was killed just a few hours later by an assassin. As a politician, how hard is it to overcome those personal feelings of animosity and dire for revenge? I mean, can you break bread now with

someone you knew was in the IRA or Sinn Féin because of the wider public good? Well, one does know exactly who laid the bomb in the Brighton Hotel and one knows exactly the Yardish terrorist who killed my old friend Ian Gow. And I think they know the one on Eirin Eve. He was killed when his car was leaving the car park, going up a slope, and the fact that there was a slope set off the bomb and killed him.

Actually, in the house that afternoon, I heard an explosion, and I went out and looked through the window and I saw what was happening. It was very tragic indeed. It was very difficult to give those people who killed my friend Ian Gow, because it was a nasty, vicious attempt. He was a politician, believing strongly in the union of Ulster with Britain. He made his views very clearly known. And I can't really forgive that act at all, quite frankly.

Nearly all of those people who committed IRA terrorists were eventually found and sentenced, but released as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. And I find it difficult to do. Some of the other victims of assassins, the wives, sometimes forgive and try to forgive, but it's very difficult. And it was so pointless, it achieved absolutely nothing. A good man, a good, honest, straightforward man

with a very happy family, with a wonderful family, with his boys always playing cricket with him, just expunged, disappeared, written off. Very nasty. I suppose the last question is, as someone that's held one of the great offices of state, when you look at the current crisis, do you wish you were still amongst it

or are you quite glad it's not up to you to decide how on earth we get out of this? The present crisis is totally unique and is going to have a massive effect upon us in every possible way. This is a game changer in my view. It's not a minor event that somehow can be dealt well when you've got a vaccine that works and all the rest of it. A whole way new of communication, you talking with me today for example, is known. Is the job of a politician in these situations to try and work out what the public will put up with and marry that to what the experts are telling you. In my time it came up when I was Environment Secretary

and Chernobyl blew up the Russian reactor and I had conflicting scientific advice as to whether people should drink water or milk and it was completely conflicting. There was one group of scientists who said it was quite safe and you haven't got to worry about it. Others saying there might be some small risk. And so as a politician, I had to decide. And I decided to say that it was quite safe to drink both. Because if I'd said the other thing, it would have taught total chaos in the country.

If you tell people not to drink water right across the country, and originally only the highlands were really affected by the fallout from Chernobyl, the Welsh hills and places like that and a bit of Scotland. And so I had to make a decision then, a very difficult decision. Now, I think decisions like that will be being made also by the present members of the Cabinet, and some have already been made,

where they've favoured the scientific advice on lockdown for example and social isolation. It is a big dilemma for the politician. Well thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what the book's called. Called On Assassinations. Very good. So thank you very much indeed and good luck with the book even in these strange times. Thanks so much. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review.

It really helps, and basically boosts up the chart, which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.