England’s Most Intense Foreign Assassination Campaign

England has had many enemies that required the intelligence services to intercept them abroad through direct action, namely sabotage, kidnapping, and assassination. A famous case is the “Singeing the King of Spain’s Beard”, the destruction of the Spanish fleet at anchor in 1587 by Sir Francis Drake’s privateers, buying England a precious year to prepare for the Catholic Crusade aboard the Armada. Dealing with the Fenians in the nineteenth century and their Irish Republican Army successors in the twentieth century required the full spectrum of English intelligence capabilities. Since 2001, “rendition” and assassination have been features of Western resistance to Islamic militancy. The Spanish operation was a one-off, however, and the other cases involved assassination being employed as part of a suite of policies. At none of these points was assassination arguably the central feature of England’s foreign policy.