Realistic government assassins?
I am toying with a story about a sort of James Bond/Jason Bourne/etc. type character, but the more I think about the logistics of this guy really existing, the more I'm disturbed by my lack of ability to fact-check. Government agencies like the CIA, FBI, MI5, SIS, etc. all deny that they carry out assassinations, of course. What I really need is some credible information about what real government assassins might be like, if they exist. Some question I'd like to be able to answer include:
1. Are there any full-time assassins, per se, or would the assassinations just carried out by "dirty job" types who deal with anything dangerous where lethal force might be necessary?
2. Who are some people that the government would feel it necessary to assassinate? Other than the obvious (foreign leaders etc.), I'm having trouble figuring out why, say, MI5 would need someone to be killed rather than just dealing with them through the proper legal channels.
There was some cool information in the tags about freelance assassins, but that's a bit different. And Google mostly yields a bunch of tinfoil hat stuff about how the CIA assassinated people after Hurricane Katrina or whatever. I've tried searching "cia assassinations," "government assassinations," etc. but haven't really come up with anything useful.
I know that the "license to kill" is not necessarily a made-up concept, but I really don't want to insult my readers' intelligence by taking things too far into fantasy-land.
Thanks in advance!
1. Are there any full-time assassins, per se, or would the assassinations just carried out by "dirty job" types who deal with anything dangerous where lethal force might be necessary?
2. Who are some people that the government would feel it necessary to assassinate? Other than the obvious (foreign leaders etc.), I'm having trouble figuring out why, say, MI5 would need someone to be killed rather than just dealing with them through the proper legal channels.
There was some cool information in the tags about freelance assassins, but that's a bit different. And Google mostly yields a bunch of tinfoil hat stuff about how the CIA assassinated people after Hurricane Katrina or whatever. I've tried searching "cia assassinations," "government assassinations," etc. but haven't really come up with anything useful.
I know that the "license to kill" is not necessarily a made-up concept, but I really don't want to insult my readers' intelligence by taking things too far into fantasy-land.
Thanks in advance!