A whirlwind of conjecture continues to swirl around the circumstances of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during a July 13 campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show Grounds near Butler, Pennsylvania.

Official reports indicate that twenty year old Thomas Matthew Crooks, killed by a Secret Service sniper immediately after firing the shots, was the sole gunman involved in the failed assassination attempt, and that he apparently acted alone.

Yet the precise details of the case remain prohibitively hazy and are likely to remain so, even as law enforcement, professional journalists, and citizen investigators probe the scant body of information presently available on the planning, motivations, and potential associations of the perpetrator.

A host of troubling irregularities around the conduct of law enforcement and Secret Service agents prior to the shooting have naturally generated a large amount of plausible but still tenuous conspiracy theories in which shadowy deep state actors prominently feature.

The ostensible involvement of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination offers the most obvious precedent for the framing of emergent theories on the recent attempt on Trump’s life. Even so, the historical involvement of the American intelligence community in political assassinations, particularly of American citizens and most especially of high profile American politicians, is unsurprisingly shrouded in a high degree of secrecy. The very nature of political assassinations by intelligence agencies by definition necessitates as many degrees of separation as possible between state actors and the perpetrators of said killings, such that we cannot and should not expect to find a clear body of evidence, much less a paper trail, linking high level conspirators with the actual assassination.

Yet we are not entirely without documentation of assassination protocols originating from the official records of intelligence agencies. A 1953 CIA document titled “A Study of Assassination” helps illuminate the long history of the involvement of the intelligence agency in political killings.

Authored in the broader context of the CIA’s covert operations in Guatemala between 1952 and 1954 (under the codenames PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS), which culminated in a coup against Guatemalan president Juan Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, “A Study of Assassination” details protocols for the assassination of political targets by intelligence operatives and their associates.

While the document does not explicitly reference assassinations carried out against targets in the US, the protocols detailed therein could apply equally to the elimination of foreign and domestic targets alike. Let’s delve into the details of the document:

“A Study of Assassination” opens with an etymology of assassination, tracing the linguistic origins of the word to the hashshashin, agents of medieval Islamic military leader Hasan-Dan-Sabah who were reputed to use intoxicants to enhance their ability to kill surreptitiously:

“Assassination is a term thought to be derived from ‘hashish,’ a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hasan-Dan-Sabah to induce motivation in his followers, who were assigned to carry out political and other murders, usually at the cost of their lives.” (p1)

The next section of the document introduces crucial distinctions between types of assassination, classifying modes of political killings along three axes.

The first distinction is between “simple,” “chase,” and “guarded” assassination:

“[A]ssassinations in which the subject is unaware [of his danger] will be termed "simple"; those where the subject is aware but unguarded will be termed "chase"; those where the victim is guarded will be termed "guarded." (p2)

The second distinction is made between “lost” and “safe” assassination:

If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called "lost." If the assassin is to escape, the adjective will be "safe." It should be noted that no compromises should exist here. The assassin must not fall alive into enemy hands. (p2)

Finally, the document distinguishes between “secret,” “open,” and “terroristic” assassination:

A further type division is caused by the need to conceal the fact that the subject was actually the victim of assassination, rather than an accident or natural causes. If such concealment is desirable the operation will be called "secret" ;; if concealment is immaterial, the act will be called "open"; while if the assassination requires publicity to be effective it will be termed "terroristic."

If we grant, for argument’s sake, that the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump was not the work of a lone wolf but was executed in service of a broader conspiracy by malicious state actors, the circumstances surrounding the failed assassination compel us to classify the attempt as “guarded,” “lost,” and “terroristic.”

Considering recent events, perhaps the most pertinent part of the document is the fate of the assassin described for “lost” assassinations. Several questions present themselves:

How is such an assassin to be recruited? What is the nature of the communications between the assassin and high level conspirators, and of the relationship between the high level conspirators behind the killing and the assassin himself? And finally, who are the parties responsible for eliminating the assassin after the deed is done?

The document specifies in no unclear terms that “no assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded” and states that “decision[s] and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons [...] ideally, only one person will be involved.” (p1) It is also recommended that the perpetrator of the assassination

“[...] should have an absolute minimum of contact with the rest of the organization and his instructions should be given orally by one person only [...] It is preferable that the person issuing instructions also conduct any withdrawal or covering action which may be necessary.” (p3)

In “lost” assassinations, moreover, it becomes even more vital that any contact between the assassin and the broader conspiracy is kept to an absolute minimum. This is doubly important due to the ideal profile specified for a perpetrator who is recruited to carry out a “lost” assassination. The document states:

“In lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. Since a fanatic is unstable psychologically, he must be handled with extreme care. He must not know the identities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong.” (p3)

In such a case, the psychological profile of the assassin clearly makes him a liability. But on a deeper level, the “unstable” psychology of the assassin can also be seen as an asset, since an unstable individual can more easily be recruited to carry out political violence at risk of their own life, and the neurotic character of the assassin serves as an effective cover for the broader operation. Consider that media coverage of Thomas Matthew Crooks quickly pegged him as something of an awkward loner and a social outcast who had been bullied throughout his childhood – essentially, a profile matching that of notorious school shooters. In the absence of a clear picture of Crooks’ personal ideologies, confounded by his seemingly contradictory political alignments, the subtle implication is that his motivations were more akin to those of a neurotic than those of a political radical. Whatever profile of Crooks’ political leanings emerges in the days and weeks to come, the initial insinuation that he acted as a mentally unstable “lone wolf” serves well to distract from the question of whether the shooting was part of a broader conspiracy. Furthermore, in light of the well-documented history of the use of psychotropics by intelligence agencies for mind control purposes, we cannot discount the possibility that Crooks’ apparent psychological profile made him a prime target of brainwashing by malicious factions trying to turn him into a sort of Manchurian candidate. If Crooks was in fact recruited to be the perpetrator of a “lost” assassination, it would follow that the party responsible for his subsequent killing could be connected to the party responsible for recruiting him as an assassin initially.

“A Study of Assassination” goes on to explore in detail various methods and strategies for the killing of political targets. Techniques considered range from hand-to-hand combat and edge weapons to improvised bludgeoning devices, drugs and poisons, explosives, automobile accidents, and even orchestrated falls into bodies of water or open elevator shafts. (p5-20)

The preferred method, and that given the most extensive consideration, is the use of different firearms at various ranges. Crucially, the document states that “public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion” (p11) and advises “the subversion of a unit of an official guard at a ceremony.” (p12)

Close scrutiny of the conduct of Secret Service and law enforcement agents charged with protecting Donald Trump strongly suggests that the assassination attempt may in fact have involved such a subversion. By any standard it was a patently disastrous security failure for which no satisfactory explanation has been given.

To summarize the main points of scrutiny: the alleged perpetrator was initially allowed onto the event grounds with a rangefinder and returned to the site with a backpack shortly after disappearing from the grounds; the alleged perpetrator somehow brought a large ladder onto the event site, despite a large security fence, and yet was somehow able to position the ladder against the building without arousing suspicion; multiple civilians in the crowd vocally notified law enforcement of the perpetrator’s position; the Secret Service counter sniper, in spite of having his rifle visibly trained on Crooks, failed to engage with the shooter until after shots were fired; multiple eyewitness interviews describe a potential second shooter positioned on the water tower near the event site; Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle has unconvincingly claimed that the reason the roof from which Crooks shot Trump was not secured was due to the “safety factor” of “put[ting] somebody on a sloped roof” (despite the counter sniper being positioned on a clearly sloped roof).

More details will surely emerge on the assassination attempt, but the information available thus far clearly points toward the likelihood of a broader conspiracy. Because the high level conspirators are likely to remain hidden in the shadows, we will likely remain hard pressed to identify a particular faction of the deep state responsible for the incident. Yet it is hard to deny that the attempt on Trump’s life resembles something straight out of the CIA assassination playbook.