Original subtitles

Lone gunmen that shape the future with one pull of the trigger.

Mysterious assassins brainwashed to commit shocking murders.

And legendary killers who have taken their deadly secrets to the grave.

What do historical figures like Julius Caesar, Helena Hunnan, President

Abraham Lincoln have in common?

Well, for one thing, they were all formidable leaders who faced death, not

bloody battlefield, but instead at the hands of an assassin.

Since the dawn of civilization, hitmen of all types have shaped our world by

eliminating political leaders, silencing whistleblowers, and killing the

competition.

But what's the true motivation?

To assassinate someone in cold blood. Is it money?

Ideology? Or how about a simple thirst for vengeance?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

Some individuals have made their mark on history, not because of great

scientific achievements or works of art, but for cold -blooded murder.

People like James Earl Ray, who gunned down civil rights activist Martin Luther

King Jr.

Maturam Ghazi killed the leader of the Indian independence movement, Mohandas

Gandhi, at point -blank range.

Mark David Chapman.

shot legendary musician John Lennon shortly after receiving his autograph.

They're not just killers. They are assassins.

An assassination is distinguished from an ordinary murder when somebody wants

kill a major figure. Usually a political figure could also be a cultural figure.

The reasons that people assassinate High -profile individuals are

many. They can vary all the way from somebody being disturbed to someone

who has a distinct agenda, a purpose to actually change history. And they may

have to do with seeking to attain personal fame or recognition, to make a

statement.

There is no question that an assassination of a major public figure

has tremendous consequences, and they can change a country, and they can

the world.

While history is filled with stories of rulers, leaders, and religious figures

falling at the hand of an assassin, there is a time not so long ago where

deadly practice was so prevalent it is sometimes referred to as the Golden Age

of Assassinations.

The period between 1878, roughly, and 1914 has been termed the Golden

Age of Assassinations.

And that's a golden age driven by a political ideology,

anarchism.

Anarchism was a system of political belief from a revolutionary manifesto.

that basically argued that things like states, government, hierarchies, now

kings, presidents, all symbols of authority, were the fundamental evil of

world.

Anarchists agreed that they would follow a new way of kind of pursuing

revolution. You wouldn't try to influence people to vote.

You would plant a bomb.

You would shoot a politician.

And that would make ordinary people feel that the world was unstable.

And the more unstable they felt the world was, the closer you were to

and change.

A large number of monarchs and politicians were assassinated, largely

anarchists. This starts in 1878 with a failed assassination attempt

on the German Kaiser Wilhelm I.

Then it is the Russian Tsar, Alexander II, in 1881, who is assassinated by

a Russian anarchist.

You then have the French president, all falling victim to anarchist

assassins. Even the United States did not escape this wave of anarchy, and

President McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York, in 1901.

By an anarchist, if you don't agree with someone, you just try

and assassinate them.

Across the globe, anarchists, revolutionaries, and terrorists were

assassination to destabilize governments and overthrow existing political

structures.

Yet, no one could have predicted that the murder of one aristocrat would lead

the death

of millions around the world.

Sorry for Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 28, 1914.

The occupation of this capital city by the Austro -Hungarian Empire has created

heated tension with young Bosnian Serbs.

In anticipation of a formal visit from Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to

throne of Austria -Hungary, a secret military society prepares

to execute a deadly plan.

An organization called the Black Hand, also known as Unification or Death, were

several prominent members of the Serbian army, including the head of the Serbian

military intelligence service.

So on the day, the group of...

Six main would -be assassins positioned themselves around the city of Sarajevo

in strategic places.

The itinerary of the visit had been publicized beforehand, so it was clear

route the cars would take that the royal couple were traveling in, and they

positioned themselves along the route.

And the first would -be assassin threw a grenade at the car.

which bounced off and exploded behind the car that the royal couple were

travelling in.

But the Archduke and his wife were unscathed and drove to the city hall

they took stock and decided what they would do.

One of the assassins, a guy called Gabriele Princip, basically thought,

blew it.

And he went to have coffee in a cafe.

and he was sitting outside the cafe drinking his coffee, and Franz

car stopped in front of him on accident, so he just wandered over with his gun

and shot the Archduke and his wife on the spur of the moment.

The fascination of Franz Ferdinand is one of the strangest fascinations ever,

because it's the one which really brings out how much history is about accident.

If the car had gone somewhere else, maybe 20 million people wouldn't have

killed in the First World War.

In retaliation for Franz Ferdinand's assassination on July 28, 1914, the

-Hungarian Empire declares war on Serbia and marks the beginning of World War I.

The four -year war would be fought on a global scale.

never seen before in human history.

Some 20 million soldiers died and some 21 million civilians perished as well in

this conflict.

I don't think Gavrilo Princip, when he fired those two fateful shots, could

imagined that some 40 million deaths would result from the deaths of these

people. If, in fact, the assassination hadn't taken place.

Would there have been a First World War? Would history have developed along the

same lines? We don't know the answer.

So I think this really shows you how relatively unimportant people who

would never have been known to us could have such devastating consequences.

The Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California, June 5th, 1968.

Robert F. Kennedy announces his victory of the California presidential primary

to a crowd of supporters.

But hope will soon turn to tragedy.

As Kennedy makes his way through the hotel kitchen on his way to a press

conference, he's ambushed by an assassin.

A gunman appeared, later identified as Sirhan Sirhan,

wielding a .22 caliber.

And by all accounts, began firing at Kennedy, and rather wildly

in this case.

You seem to have a mad gunman, a lone nut with unclear motivations,

who had gotten into this situation.

Kennedy was hit, fell to the floor.

He had been shot three times.

Sir Hahn fired all eight shots.

In the chamber of his revolver, there was screaming, there was panic, there

fear. There were bodies on the floor, and one of them was Senator Robert

Kennedy.

24 hours later, Kennedy died from those wounds.

Sirhan Sirhan, a 24 -year -old Palestinian immigrant, was quickly

for the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Yet, remarkably, after his arrest, the gunman claimed to have no memory of his

murderous rampage.

Sirhan was glassy -eyed and essentially unresponsive after he was

arrested. He was completely placid. He didn't seem to have any idea what had

happened, had no idea why he was arrested.

It was definitely strange.

The last thing he can remember...

Earlier that evening, Sir Han was having a cup of coffee with an attractive girl

who was wearing a polka dot dress in another part of the Ambassador Hotel.

After that, it's a blank until he woke up with people jumping on his head and

trying to wrestle the gun from his hand.

A succession of psychiatrists and psychologists, both for... The defense,

and for the prosecution, examined Sahan.

They all accepted that his amnesia was absolutely

genuine. Many of them said at the time of the shooting, Sahan

was acting under post -hypnotic suggestion. In other words, he had been

hypnotized and was shooting as a result.

Saran was convicted of first -degree murder and is currently serving a life

sentence.

But is it really possible to hypnotize someone into becoming an unknowing

assassin?

Well, from 1953 to 1973, there was a shocking top -secret CIA program

that seemed to have explored that very question.

Its code name was MK...

ultra the mk ultra program is a very weird moment in american history

and the aim of mk ultra was to find out how far you can manipulate the

psychology of individuals and get them to do what you want them to do how deep

it went is very uncertain but that there were people in the cia who had this aim

is a matter of historical record

In the early 1950s, the CIA was deeply interested in combating what they

perceived as mind control research by the Chinese and the Russians in

particular. And they embarked on their own program to explore the mind.

But in the course of this research, the U .S. government made efforts to

experiment with so -called brainwashing of individuals.

through a variety of means.

One was hypnosis and the other was the use of psychoactive drugs.

LSD in particular was proven to be highly effective at putting people in a

of mind where they could be post -hypnotically or otherwise suggested to

violent action.

Somebody who, without fully knowing what they're doing or even knowing at all

what they're doing, can go out and kill.

They did experimentation on unwitting individuals who had not provided

It was later agreed that this was unethical, immoral, and illegal.

In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra documents

to be destroyed.

But just four years later, a Freedom of Information Act request led to the

discovery of around...

20 ,000 secret files that managed to survive the purge.

And while the true extent of the CIA's mind control program will never be

is it possible they actually created a brainwashed assassin?

Now, among the MKUltra documents that survive, we have a report, an internal

report, which a woman under hypnotic control

who had previously expressed a morbid fear of firearms, took a gun, held it to

the head of another woman, and pulled the trigger, and then subsequently had

memory of what it was that she had done.

Now, this was all just a test in clinical circumstances, but it was, by

accounts, done, which sounds, just for the sake of argument, eerily like what

Sirhan Sirhan claimed.

that he had no memory of what had been done.

We don't know whether Sirhan was involved with the MKUltra program, but

possibility certainly exists.

We do know that many individuals were put through very extreme

and it does appear to be scientifically possible to utilize various techniques,

including hypnosis and applying psychoactive drugs.

to create somebody who kills without being knowledgeable about doing that.

Imagine the possibilities if only half of this, a third of it, if

10 % of it worked, and most of the records have been wiped. And that itself

should tell you something.

I don't think it was just because there were things that were done illegally.

It was because there was stuff in that that was never supposed to be known.

You're left with haunting possibilities.

It's frightening to think that mind control can activate a person to commit

murder. Yet the sensory specialized training of another kind has created

many believe are the perfect assassins.

It's a group of killers rumored to possess supernatural powers that allow

to stealthily and silently eliminate their targets.

Iga City, Miya Prefecture, Japan.

This town is home to the Igario Museum that houses over 400 artifacts

and deadly weapons.

once used by the most iconic assassins in all of history.

The ninja.

The ninja were master assassins.

Their name translates to hidden ones or the concealed ones.

Traditionally in Japan, they were referred to as shinobi.

They emerged in Japan probably around the 14th or 15th century.

during a period of prolonged civil war between various daimyos or local

regional lords vying for supremacy.

The skill set of ninjas was mainly assassination as well as espionage,

infiltration, subterfuge.

The ninja arts or ninjutsu was seen by the samurai as completely dishonorable.

But the ninja had no qualms about this, and their main focus was achieving their

objective no matter what.

The ninja or shinobi made their mark on history from the 12th to the 17th

century.

Today, the ninja are long gone.

But, remarkably, there's still one shinobi left in Japan.

His name is Jinichi Kawakami.

I come from a family that has passed down what is known as the shinobi

of the Koga region. In the old family tradition, parents,

grandfather, and even grandmother passed down these teachings to their children

and grandchildren.

And I learned it the same way.

Teaching starts around age six.

As muscles and bones develop, we gradually progress to more intense

endurance exercises that require great patience.

Shinobis are often associated with assassins.

A shinobi is someone who does things that are not visible to the public.

It involves technique related to military espionage, strategy, and

attacks.

While ninjas are often thought of as assassins, they functioned primarily as

spies trained in the arts of stealth and deception.

Their mastery of weapons made them the most feared special operatives in feudal

Japan.

Ninjas were famous for disguising themselves as priests, sometimes even as

maidens, as laborers, and as merchants.

blending in with the general population, and then they could strike at the

opportune moment to hit their target.

Their weapons, too, were unsuspicious. The traditional ninja sword is

considerably shorter than the samurai sword, which they could carry with them

very easily, hide them if necessary.

They could take a household item or tools used in agriculture, so they would

attract attention if they were walking down the streets with them.

and then turned it into a deadly weapon.

As for methods, the most common approach was to injure someone using

conventional weapons.

Then, there are techniques such as administering poison through the

They were extremely skilled at using gunpowder.

There are various techniques, such as mixing flammable substances with water,

creating explosions.

and even mixing substances to produce poisonous gases.

Ninjutsu is a military art. For that reason, I have stated that I will no

teach the aspects of ninjutsu.

While the ninja were very real, to this day there's still very little we know

about them because their deadly techniques were passed down.

In secret.

There were different families that supported ninjutsu, and these families

trained in these arts.

But nobody knew or went on inside their training.

These secrets were passed down from father to son, from uncle to nephew, and

inside of secret schools.

And they had to write blood oaths to say they wouldn't pass them on. It was only

later that these documents started to be written.

So, we don't have many documents for the ninja, but what we do know is that once

a ninja had targeted you, there was very little chance of survival.

It was extremely rare to keep records, as they were confidential, and the

techniques themselves could not be disclosed to others.

There was a risk involved, and keeping them secret was essential for survival,

as revealing them to enemies would increase the danger.

Therefore, a culture of secrecy naturally developed.

While the ninja may have hidden their history, training, and techniques, there

may be an even greater secret yet to be revealed.

Because according to Japanese folklore, it is said that the ninjas were imbued

with supernatural powers.

The ninja really, really engaged with the dark arts of magic.

What they would do is build up their spells, get their ingredients, and then

before their mission, create something that would allow them to see in the

They would be wearing talismans, magical hairpins that they would put in their

hair to help them with the arts of invisibility.

They believed they could bring the power of the moon down to enclose them in

black clouds.

And in this way, they believed they could get in and kill their target.

They believed this, and the people around them believed this.

This image of the ninja as being endowed with supernatural skills was...

historically not seemed to be a kind of legend or lore. It was actually believed

by the populace, and as a result, they were terrified of them.

So because of the lack of records surrounding the ninja, it's a great

what extent we even understand the ninjas and the full extent of their

abilities, and to what extent their abilities might have been somehow divine

supernatural.

This massive part that is unknown about them could be a lot more than what we

ever imagined.

The lore of the ninjas and their silent supernatural powers has certainly ruined

them. Their iconic reputation.

But when it comes to the deadliest slayers in history, there is one group

skills were so feared, their name became the origin of the word assassin.

Masyaf Castle, Syria, 1176 A .D.

The feared warrior Sultan Saladin and his mighty armies surround this imposing

mountain fortress as they continue their conquest of the Middle East.

But these forces would be no match to the powerful guardians of this castle,

a mysterious and deadly Muslim sect.

known as the Hashashin, or quite simply, the Assassins.

During the 12th century, Saladin set up a camp to encircle their fortress in

Masyar, which was the base of operations for the Order of the Assassins.

And he set up a siege.

You know, people inside the castle would be starved to death.

One night, he went to bed, as he usually did in his tents in the camp.

and he always took extreme precautions to defend against an eventual

assassination attempt.

He had a system with little bells that would be triggered if someone passed a

certain perimeter, and the tent itself was heavily guarded.

That night, however, he awoke feeling a presence.

When he opened his eyes, he didn't see anyone next to him, but he did see a

dagger. Next to his bed, stabbed through a note.

And in the note, it said, if you do not lift the siege, next

time you will be dead.

As a result, Saladin lifted the siege.

The message that had been sent to him was clear.

If we wanted you dead, you would no longer be breathing.

The Hashashin operated in Syria, Persia, Turkey.

And throughout the Middle East, from the 11th to the 13th century, the word

assassin is literally derived from their name, based on their mission and

menacing presence.

The assassins, their story begins in 1090 when a character called Hassan

goes to a castle, Alamut, which is in the mountains now in modern Iran.

He hides himself away in this castle.

and trains young men to be killers.

His idea is to build a force of young men who can

assassinate political leaders amongst their enemies.

Almost immediately, they have a fantastic success, where two assassins

to kill a character called Nizam al -Mulk, who is the de facto leader of the

Islamic world.

at the time. That sends shockwaves through the Islamic world.

After Hassan Sabah died in 1123, there were a number of leaders who

took over and carried on the tradition.

So they had an enormous impact.

These Athens were bringers of death.

They began trying to expand their influence by seizing more fortresses so

could form a coherent network.

They also started sending out people.

who essentially went on suicide missions to assassinate political enemies,

ranging from local judges to the rulers and leaders of entire cities.

And they're using daggers to hit their targets.

You had no idea where they might come, when they might come. All your life's

work might come to an end with a single blow of a dagger.

That's always a very scary thing, especially when put together with just

fanatical they were.

How did the leaders of the Hashishin inspire such devotion?

Perhaps clues can be found with intriguing claims made by the famed

merchant and explorer Marco Polo, whose journey through the Middle East in the

13th century was chronicled in The Travels of Marco Polo.

Marco Polo mentions the assassins and talks about the

legend of the old man of the mountains, this character Hassan Sabah, and how he

would command his young men to go and kill for political reasons.

Marco Pello mentioned how they would leap off towers at the command of Hassan

Sabah. He would just tell them, you know, jump, and they would jump off the

of a castle and kill themselves.

Marco Polo comes to the Middle East in a world where there's already a lot of

lurid tales circulating about the Avathans and what they represent and who

are. And he claims in his book that the old man in the mountain, he recruits

young men, drugs them with hashish, takes them to a pleasure garden in

accosted with all sorts of beautiful women, given all sorts of luxurious food

and drink.

And then once they sobered up a little, the old man in the mountain would say,

look, what you've experienced was paradise. And if you assassinate the

who I don't like, then you can experience this paradise for eternity.

And so that has played a large role in creating this image of how the assassins

or Hashashin would be in drug -induced cases as they went around killing their

enemies.

Were the Hashishis really transformed into fanatics from drug -fueled

experiences with hashish, a concentrated form of cannabis in some kind of

pleasure garden?

While it was a story told by both their enemies and Europeans alike, no one

knows the whole truth.

But one of the greatest mysteries surrounding the group that helped coin

term assassin is how they managed to survive.

For nearly 200 years.

The assassins were without armies and without wealth, and yet mysteriously

survived for centuries.

The assassins were hunted and hated by rival Islamic factions.

Historians believe the assassins were among the first to wield assassination

a long -term strategy.

It's entirely possible that fear was the assassins' most powerful weapon.

They didn't need an army.

Just a reputation.

While the half machine may be gone, the fact that their name continues to invoke

fear centuries after their demise is a testament to their deadly legacy.

But some ancient assassins were so shadowy that we're still not certain if

actually existed.

Like in the case of a religious cult based in India during the 13th century.

who many claim were responsible for the murder of more than 2 million people.

India, the 1830s.

The British East India Company, an organization that began as a private

corporation, is now the greatest political and military power in all of

Commanding a private army of 250 ,000 soldiers,

They now occupy, control, and govern much of the Indian subcontinent.

But during their colonial conquest, the British are faced with a mysterious

group of killers they call the Thuggy, or simply the Thugs.

The Thugs were a criminal fraternity, or a mafia, who operated in India.

The thugs' way of working was to travel the roads in India, the byways, and when

they came across groups of travellers who had wealth, they would befriend them

and start travelling with them.

They would sometimes spend weeks worming their way into the confidence of

groups.

And then, at a prearranged signal, they would get into position and pounce.

One man would grab the hands of the victim, another might kick the feet

and then finally a long scarf, the rumal they called it, would be thrown around

the neck and they'd strangle the victim.

They were so practiced at it that they could take out whole groups of people

simultaneously.

Once they'd killed everybody, they'd strip them and search their baggage, and

then they would bury the bodies.

sometimes alive.

Before first light, they would be gone.

They were assassins in the way they worked. They used stealth, they used

disguise, they would befriend you, their weapons were concealed, but there was

no political aspect to what they were doing. They were in it for the money.

It's been estimated that the thuggy, who cemented the word thug in the English

language, robbed and strangled millions of victims.

But the British authorities in India believe this shadowy group of assassins

killed their victims for much more than financial gain.

It was believed they were performing ritual sacrifices.

The Thuggies were rumored to be devotees of the Hindu goddess Kali.

who is commonly associated with a time with death and destruction as well.

And they viewed their actions as a way of offering these sacrifices to the

goddess in order to save off a larger scale destruction of humanity.

So Kali would need to be propitiated with these sacrifices, with the

of human lives.

And the Thuggis saw themselves as fulfilling this.

for the goddess.

The image of Kali that is commonly seen is of a woman with wild black hair, four

arms, one of them carrying a severed head, another a bloody knife, wearing a

garland of human skulls and a skirt of human arms.

It's a pretty terrifying image.

Did the thugs really assassinate millions of travelers in order to

bloodthirsty goddess?

Perhaps the answer can be found with the man who was largely responsible for the

eradication of the Fuggy, a British officer with the East India Company

Captain William Sleeman.

Banditry wasn't unusual, but this seemed to be something more than that.

And William Sleeman applied what you might call more modern criminological

methods to try to deal with this.

And the way that Sleeman actually broke up, Tuggy was through pretty much the

same method that the FBI uses to break up the mafia.

You get informers, you catch people, and you give them a lighter sentence to rat

out their comrades.

It works.

There was a tug which was arrested by the name of Baram.

He claimed that he had been a witness to more than 900 stranglings.

and that he personally had strangled thousands of people. The activities only

became visible when you began to collect and collate information.

When Sleeman started to capture the thugs, he became convinced that they

religious cult, sacrificing victims to Kali.

And I think those British in the 19th century took this as a sort of demonic

cult.

The public hysteria in Europe grew to such an extent that it was totally

accepted as truth that the thugs were a cult of religious sacrifices, were

strangling people by the million in India.

The question is, was that true, and to what extent?

I mean, some historians believe that thug gangs didn't exist.

And we'll never know, of course, how many of the men Lehman arrested were

actually stranglers and how many were innocent people.

We will never know for sure.

Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13th, 2024.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is giving a speech to a crowd on

outdoor stage when suddenly...

Multiple gunshots ring out.

On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump, then a candidate for president of the United

States, was speaking in an open field.

As he was speaking, a young man who had climbed onto a roof fired at Trump.

And miraculously, Trump turned his head at the last second and the bullet merely

grazed his ear.

That man then was shot by a Secret Service sharpshooter.

The recent attempt at assassinating Donald Trump, had that succeeded,

and probably the world would be very different places.

While Donald Trump would escape his life and become the 47th president of the

United States, his attempted assassin.

20 -year -old Thomas Matthew Crooks was shot dead.

To this day, his motives remain unknown.

But he's far from the only assassin in American history that still raises

unanswered questions.

What do we really know about the assassination of President John F.

The man officially credited with killing JFK was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?

Well, it depends upon who you ask.

Loner, misfit, communist, Marine, all -American boy.

That's still a matter of ongoing debate.

Of all the assassins I know, James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther

King, he is the most enigmatic.

It's really unclear what was going on with him, why he did it, did he act

It's a secret that's gone to the grave, and I think we'll never know.

Do we know why there were two assassins who tried to kill President Gerald Ford

in 1975?

We spend and have spent huge amounts of time and money exploring how assassins

are able to shoot at and or kill their victims.

We spend relatively little time examining why.

While the true motives of many assassins remain enigmatic, the most unsettling

truth is that they strike without warning.

When will another deadly assassin unleash their vengeance on a person of

and influence, and through unspeakable tragedy, shape the future?

It's difficult to know what would happen today if a high -profile person were

assassinated.

We would hope that an event like this would not have a disastrous effect on

American democracy.

But the idea that the assassination of leaders is a thing of the past, I think,

is clearly wrong.

Stories of assassination, they remain puzzling.

They remain uncertain.

I think people are always going to delve into them more deeply, to really unpack

the nuances.

the hiddenness, the strangeness of these kinds of history -changing events.

They really do matter.

The idea that an assassin can change the course of history is both profound

and deeply chilling. What would our world be like if the bullets aimed at

had missed on that fateful day in Dallas, or if Archduke Ferdinand had

his hitman?

Unfortunately, we'll never know.

But one thing is certain, as long as humans' posture for power and political

gain will simply need their secrets kept quiet, there will come a day when an

assassin makes another deadly mark on history, and their motives and methods

may forever remain unexplained.