Is that true? I thought that he was the public head of a covert operations section, and not that important. They seem to have replaced him pretty quickly, and expanded the department, so it looks as if once again the US has shot itself in the foot. It was an orchestrated move according to John Bolton, and not the preemptive strike that the media reports. In fact it was really the murder of a diplomat attending a planned and well reported meeting in a foreign sovereign state, and many see it as yet another example of US terrorism.