wet job

plural wet jobs

1. euphemisticespionageA covert assassination performed by government operatives.

   Being a shocked witness in Lisbon to the Carnivore's last bloody wet job

   2004, Gayle Lynds, The Coil: A Novel, St. Martin's Press, →ISBN, page 53

   2 more examples

   Like the Navy SEALs (who often work in conjunction with the Delta Force), Delta Force can go anywhere, anytime; they just leave the wet jobs to SEAL Team 6-the navy's version of Delta Force.

   2003, Robert Young Pelton, Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places), Collins, →ISBN, page 112

   But as soon as the janitor saw Tice, he would have known he had the wrong man and should have and should have withdrawn or attempted a live capture to find out where Theosopholis was. Instead, everything about his style announced wet job. He was assigned to liquidate Tice, and maybe only Tice.

   2006, Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster, St. Martin's Press, →ISBN, page 30

2. figurativelyA vicious attack (on someone's reputation, ideals etc.); a hatchet job.

   1 more example

   The following year – the year of lawyering dangerously, at least at the LRB – saw Hitchens’s wet job on Henry Kissinger (22 October 1992). As he does with many of his subjects, he walked straight up to this one and dropped the guillotine, likening the book under review – an authorised biography – to ‘the profile of a serial murderer’.

   2011, Jeremy Harding, “Diary”, in London Review of Books, 33.VII