Pierre Martinet is an ex-agent of DGSE, the French external intelligence agency. In 2005 he published the book La DGSE : service action, un agent sort de l'ombre (The DGSE, Action Service, An Agent Comes Out of the Shadow).

In an interview published in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet

Aftonbladet

Aftonbladet is a Swedish tabloid founded by Lars Johan Hierta in 1830 during the modernization of Sweden. It is one of the larger daily newspapers in the Nordic countries. Aftonbladet is owned by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and Norwegian media group Schibsted, and its editorial page...

 on April 30, 2005, Martinet describes how the habits of assassination

Assassination

To carry out an assassination is "to murder by a sudden and/or secret attack, often for political reasons." Alternatively, assassination may be defined as "the act of deliberately killing someone, especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons."An assassination may be...

victims are mapped out by a preparatory team (which he was part of), for example by setting up illegal video surveillance. Other teams carry out the rest of the work. He asserts that "murder operations are no fantasies. They really exist. The final death sentence always comes from the top level. There is only one who can make that decision. The head of state. But that doesn't mean it always ends that way. [...]You don't think of what happened to the targets afterwards, if they have been "treated" or not."http://aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/story/0,2789,638724,00.html