The Perfect Kill (17 page)

Pakistani photographer Noor Behram had already pretty much decided on his own that politics was driving the strikes rather than anything like mathematical precision. He knew he couldn't trust the wild rumors filtering out of the tribal areas or, for that matter, the official statements out of Washington and Islamabad. So he went up into the tribal areas to see for himself and photograph the results.

Behram started to show up at drone attack sites in 2008, doing his best to get to them before the bodies were dragged out and the sites were cleaned up. Before Behram could start taking pictures, he'd often get on his hands and knees to help dig out the survivors. It wasn't risk-free
work: Often there would be follow-up drone strikes at the same site. The locals admired his courage and welcomed him at the sites.

After three years of gruesome work, Behram claimed to have the proof on film that more civilians were being killed than the United States and Pakistan admitted. His pictures depicting dead children and old people seem to bear him out. (Custom in the tribal area will not let him take pictures of dead and injured women.)

“For every ten to fifteen people killed, maybe they get one militant,” Behram said. “I don't go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people are killed.”

A lot of other stuff bubbling up in the press made one wonder exactly who it is we're killing with the drones. In February 2011, for instance,
The Washington Post
reported that 581 “militants” had been killed the previous year by drones in Pakistan. But only two were on any “most wanted” list. Nine months later the
Post
reported that in the previous three months, sixty people had been killed in fourteen drone attacks. But the White House would put a name to only one victim, who, by the way, no one I knew in the intelligence world had ever heard of.

It's hard to come up with a good explanation why the American public isn't offered the identities of these people. The locals presumably comb through the rubble and charred cars and know precisely who's been killed. Is the reason Washington can't tell us is that it doesn't know? Or does Washington know drones are killing civilians and doesn't want us to know?

What Washington always seems to miss is just how tricky eavesdropping can be. When it's good, it's very good; I'd go so far as to say there's no better firsthand intelligence. It's just a fact that when two people are on a phone call foolishly expecting privacy, they'll say things never meant to be said in the open or to a stranger. It's even better when they're angry and blurt out some hideous truth.

But for the unwary, chatter is a treacherous snare. Often what's plucked out of the ether is two people speculating about something they
know absolutely nothing about, like whether it's going to rain the following week or not. Having myself been caught in a chatter trap, I have a good idea about the pitfalls.

One day something I took as unimpeachable chatter put Hajj Radwan in a certain hotel in Paris on a certain day. We even had a room number for him. We persuaded the French police to do the needful and arrest him. But when French commandos fast-roped down the side of the hotel and crashed through the windows, they interrupted a Spanish family taking an afternoon snack instead of Hajj Radwan. To this day I don't know what went wrong. Did the French betray us? Or was it because we'd misread the intelligence?

One reason Washington fell in love with chatter is that it takes the hard work out of intelligence, letting it turn off its brain and abdicate all human agency and judgment. It's all the worse these days because Washington is politically and financially invested to the hilt in drones, data analytics, and the fantasy there is such a thing as mechanical justice. Never mind that a lot of innocent people are being slaughtered.

According to a lot of accounts I've recently been reading in the newspapers, Washington doesn't seem to care much that al-Qaeda has started to catch on and do things like constantly switch out phones. They've even taken to throwing their cell phone chips into a bag, shaking them up, and then redistributing them so the U.S. has no idea who is who. It's left it with “signature” or “pattern of life” strikes. They're based on nothing more sophisticated than a drone catching three young men in a field doing exercises, their AKs by their sides. If the three repeat it the next day and in the days after—giving the semblance of organized training—they've all but signed their own death warrants. Who cares that the condemned are without face or name.

The Darwin effect also seems to have kicked in. Smart al-Qaeda types now stick to Karachi and Peshawar, urban areas too densely packed to employ a drone missile. Even worse, many have stopped talking on telephones altogether. As one military intelligence officer
responsible for drone targeting told me, in the years since drone strikes began in earnest, the leadership of our main enemy in Afghanistan—the so-called Haqqani network—only “spiked” once on cell phones. They've otherwise turned themselves into phantoms beyond the reach of our technology. Unconnected but alive.

And finally even our best software apparently sucks. In a little-noticed court case, two opposing software companies presented evidence in court that drone target–acquisition software was sending drone missiles off course by as much as thirteen meters (forty-three feet). In a built-up area that's well within the kill radius of a lot of innocent people.

If there's a moral to the story, I suppose it's that the chances of automating assassination are about equal with the Plenty of Fish website finding us the perfect soul mate. But what do I know.

The more I heard about things such as data visualization and self-learning algorithms, the more it sounded like a bad science-fiction version of the Spanish Inquisition. I needed someone smart to show me where I was wrong.

I managed to run down the noted physicist Tsutomu Shimomura, who's an expert in the mathematics of link analysis—the same algorithms and data visualization reportedly use to draw up kill lists. Among other credentials, Tsutomu studied under Richard Feynman at Caltech. After university, he went to work at Los Alamos. By the way, brains apparently run in the family: Tsutomu's father won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Tsutomu earned a measure of fame when he helped track down the notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick had eluded the FBI for years by, among other things, cloning cell phones. But by comparing relevant metadata, Tsutomu was able to pinpoint Mitnick to his North Carolina
apartment, where the FBI arrested him. Mitnick did five years in jail. The movie
Track Down
is based on the story.

I meet Tsutomu at a Berkeley organic restaurant where there's rhubarb juice on the menu but no Coke or Pepsi. It's unseasonably chilly, but Tsutomu is in shorts, hiking boots, and a T-shirt with an astral constellation print. He orders cauliflower soup.

I get right to it: Does data analytics work? Or are drones killing the wrong people?

Tsutomu's answer is as short as my question: “Correlation isn't guilt.”

For the next twenty minutes, he gives me a riff on “high-yield data” and “extensible” databases. I understand maybe a third of it. What I do get, though, is that traffic analysis tells you only where to look for suspicious activity, but it never determines guilt or innocence.

“To establish guilt,” Tsutomu says, “you need to dig a lot deeper, collect old-fashioned evidence admissible in a court of law.”

To make his point, he tells me that while he was able to pinpoint the location of Mitnick's phone, the FBI ended up raiding the wrong apartment. Fortunately, their mistake was limited to pounding on the wrong door rather than sending a Hellfire missile through the wrong window.

—

T
he jury may still be out on drones, but shooting into the dark has never been anything other than an iffy proposition. Sooner rather than later you'll kill the wrong person and end up making more enemies than you eliminate. When you think about it, with the charges against drone victims irrefutable (at least from Washington's point of view), with body counts unverifiable, and with the definition of victory and defeat left to Washington politicians and bureaucrats who lie for a living, how could drone assassinations not have gone horribly wrong?

Drones are another reminder that scuttling an idiotic idea dressed up as a techno silver bullet is damn near impossible. Falling in dumb
love with quants, algos, and their glittering promises, Washington was seduced by a quick, easy release from reality: war at a bargain, assassination without a downside. Extend the logic out far enough, and Washington will start to believe it can rule the world from a single thumb drive and a fleet of solar-powered drones armed with Hellfire missiles. It will have perfected murder, but it can't remember why.

While all along it remains that to win at any game that counts you have to have real skin in it, see things with your own flesh-and-blood eyes. Murder isn't some Shakespearean play where violence occurs offstage. Which means relearning quaint skills such as reading a map, getting your boots dirty, and summoning the guts to stick a dagger into the heart of an enemy. Like it or not, bare-knuckle reality will always trump an algorithm.

Since the act's objective isn't to catch up with an enemy, tweak divine justice, or divert attention from a political mess at home, there's no need to trumpet body counts, tally up scores, or, for that matter, do any crowing at all. A good kill will speak for itself.

Equatorial Guinea has a reputation for swift and cruel justice. In 1975, the palace guard executed eighty coup plotters in the national sports stadium as a band played a shaky rendition of “Those Were the Days.” Opponents of the currently sitting president accuse him of eating his enemies to “gain power.”

It's not the normal trappings of state executions, but it's more evidence the state has an enduring interest in blending judicial murder with ceremony and show. Ancient Rome had its crucifixions, the Middle Ages its drawing and quarterings, and the emir of Bukhara his poisonous insect pits. The leader of North Korea reportedly threw his uncle to starving dogs.

I know it's a reductivist way of looking at things, but I'd say what's behind this is a belief that a vivid, excruciating death serves as a warning to any would-be miscreants. Or, who knows, maybe it has something to do with a revenge gene. The ceremonies of execution aren't something we in the West have exactly abandoned: Texas posts on the Internet the last testimony of the condemned.

Another thing the state sees in its interest is bringing to bear disproportional and irremediable force against any challenge to its authority and dignity. Cross one of its bright, shining lines, and a state will go out of its way to destroy you. You'll spend the rest of your life either sleeping on a cold concrete slab or receive a fatal jolt of electricity. American prisons—the guard towers, razor wire, and slit windows—are architectural statements to the notion that the state won't countenance slights to its authority or its dignity.

The assassin, on the other hand, doesn't have the leisure or resources to bother with ceremony or show. Political murder isn't political theater. Nor is it a moment of public vengeance or symbolic jackbooted intimidation. The assassin's not out to settle a grudge, right a historical wrong, or give someone a long-overdue public comeuppance. He banishes from his mind the notion of revenge, recognizing that it amounts to only an attempt to restore lost dignity. While the state is able to perform justice with the showmanship of a Super Bowl halftime show, the assassin has no choice but to cut to the chase. Efficiency and the preservation of force are always foremost in his mind.

The capable assassin is no Maori warrior making faces and stomping his feet on the ground to intimidate his enemies. He's not in it for the garlands, laurels, and gold medals. Nor does he care about the symbolism of it. What's the point in assassinating the queen of England, a person with no power? Or blowing up Shea Stadium?

The assassin also understands that if he's consumed by abstract obsessions such as the Clash of Civilizations, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, race purification, or any other fuzzy dogma, he's well down the path to
defeat. He never forgets that ancient piece of Persian wisdom: You don't slap the king, you kill him.

Like many other true believers, Muslim jihadists are a set of people incapable of understanding the fine points of political murder. They've deluded themselves into believing that random butchery will somehow miraculously lead to the restoration of the caliphate. In 1997, Egyptian Islamic militants murdered sixty-two people near Luxor, mostly European tourists. It was a horrifying, headline-grabbing massacre, but it got them absolutely nothing. In fact, it only encouraged the Egyptian junta to step up its extermination of them.

At the turn of the twentieth century, another set of assassins, anarchists, also showed they didn't understand the instrumentalities of political violence. Not one of their spectacular assassinations got them anything other than a world determined to crush them. It was more murder without purpose, and in the end, the anarchists didn't leave as much as a welt on history.

No, the capable assassin understands that he must mete out death with a pair of fine tongs. It's always the man over the office and handmade violence over showy, elaborate productions. He's a literalist, a meticulous watchmaker tasked with repairing a delicate mechanism. No one's asked him to reinvent the watch or time. He knows the universe is too big and too complex for anyone to change it.

The assassin wants nothing to do with the monsters of history and their death cults—Hitler, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, the Engineer. Or its saints. While the assassin obeys a higher law, he doesn't mistake himself for a prophet. No sermons, no glossy brochures, no Madison Avenue propaganda. He wants assassination to come off as the most austere of acts—narrow, precise, and effective. “Disinterested” isn't the exact word for it, but it comes close.

The assassin wants murder to be seen as a purely instrumental act—well thought-out, well executed, and with a closed end. In applying proportional force—a dagger over a surface-to-air missile, a quart of lethal
antifreeze over a sniper's rifle—the assassin shows he's cautious of life. He's taken pains with the venue, ensuring that it results in the fewest collateral casualties. Hajj Radwan could have murdered Hariri that morning with a car bomb at parliament, but the random slaughter would have detracted from the act.

A couple of years ago an al-Qaeda suicide bomber attempted to kill a Saudi prince by stuffing plastique up his own butt and detonating it in the prince's proximity. The prince survived, but the point here is that al-Qaeda didn't care that it was an ignoble death for all. Its sole objective was to kill the prince rather than to create a made-for-TV event. The prince survived, but the Saudis nonetheless got the message that al-Qaeda had refined its tactics from producing mass casualties to something closer to a bullet with a man's name on it.

The assassin can never, of course, exhibit joy in the act. Nor can murder ever be an act of self-expression or validation. In 1971, immediately after murdering the Jordanian prime minister in Cairo, the assassin got on his knees and started to lick the man's blood off the floor. Instead of attempting to run away, he wanted to savor a moment of passion. He apparently didn't understand that ice-cold violence makes a much deeper impression on an enemy.

But it all comes back to the fact that the assassin wants nothing to do with anything that stinks of utopia or the apocalyptic, with all of its pointless symbolic murder. Or, for that matter, nothing to do with anything that stinks of belief in general. You don't murder Jesus Christ in the hopes of killing Christianity: His crucifixion had precisely the opposite effect. Joseph Stalin made the same mistake when he had an assassin drive an ice ax into Leon Trotsky's head: Trotskyism lived on just fine without its progenitor. And while Stalin was busy planning Trotsky's murder, Adolf Hitler was busy making preparations to invade Russia.

Of course, personal ambition should never drive the act. A genuine assassin isn't out to move up the ranks or make a packet in order to buy
a villa on Spain's Costa del Crime. Nor is he out for a bigger cubicle or a better parking space. No, he's closer to a Cincinnatus figure. Having spared his country war, he's perfectly happy to retire to his farm to live out his life in anonymity.

The Venezuelan Communist turned Middle Eastern assassin Carlos the Jackal reduced his odds of survival to nothing by cultivating a celebrity and playboy persona. And indeed, two CIA people cruising around Khartoum recognized him at a stoplight, followed him home, and tipped off the French. Now rotting in a French jail, his celebrity is of no value.

When ego is allowed to consume the act, the audience becomes confused about the act's intent. Was it meant to improve the lot of man or the lot of the assassin? If Carlos thought he had a good reason for murdering the people he did, I for one don't remember what it was.

I often wonder why the Lebanese can't get along better. The way they're squeezed together between mountain and sea, you'd think they'd be forced to. Instead, it's been more of a case of the waves holding the shit (political nastiness) close to shore and everyone being forced to learn the finer points of political murder.

The way it usually works is that a tribe will cross a well-demarcated line and, in response, the wronged tribe will feel obliged to respond, often by lopping off the head of the offending tribe. But at the same time, the two tribes know better than to let their quarrel descend into a Hobbesian all-against-all fight. Okay, it didn't work so well in 1975 when the Lebanese civil war broke out and 120,000 people were killed. But this was the exception rather than the rule.

My hypothesis is that the Lebanese are able to contain violence because they don't thump their chests after the act. Take the September 14,
1982, assassination of the president-elect: No one ever claimed it. But then again, why would they? Its purpose was to eliminate a powerful, irreplaceable man rather than unnecessarily infuriate the president-elect's sect, the Maronite Christians.

I'd imagine the same consideration came into play with Hajj Radwan's 1989 assassination of the Lebanese president. (I'll get deeper into this one later.) Why pit his side, Hezbollah, against the state and the president's sect, the Maronite Christians? By leaving authorship vague, there was no general call to arms and no retaliatory killings. People might suspect Hezbollah, but without facts, they didn't feel compelled to act.

As I'll also get into in detail later, Hajj Radwan went to great lengths to disassociate himself from Hariri's murder because he saw no point in unnecessarily humiliating Hariri's sect, the Sunnis. He understood that people need a clean motivation to go to war.

—

B
eirut, Damascus, Amman, November 2009: The year after Hajj Radwan's assassination, I'm on my way to Damascus from Beirut in a shared taxi when Press TV in Tehran calls me on my cell to ask if I'd do a TV interview on the crisis du jour. I now can't remember what it was, but it probably had something to do with the fighting in Iraq. They ask to do the interview at the Iranian embassy.

I know it's not the best of ideas, considering the Syrians aren't exactly comfortable with an ex–CIA operative dropping in on them for an unexplained visit and popping off on TV about a conflict on their border. I agree though, if only to see where Hajj Radwan supposedly spent his final days.

An hour later, I'm out front of the new Four Seasons hotel, waiting for the Press TV van. The portico is jammed with elegantly dressed guests waiting for their chauffeur-driven cars. I think how this isn't the old Damascus I knew; it's more like its fin-de-siècle iteration. As I stand there, I wonder if Hajj Radwan had ever actually done a pickup here
after he started posing as an Iranian embassy driver. Live your cover, as they say. Could he have not noticed how the Four Seasons was emblematic of the new moneyed Damascus, a world closer to Hariri's than the slum Hajj Radwan had grown up in?

I sit up front with the driver, a young bearded Iranian who speaks formal Arabic. He politely laughs at my Persian. He doesn't ask who I am or why his station would want to interview me. I think about asking him what Hajj Radwan was like, but of course I don't. Instead, we talk about the traffic and the weather.

The way the Iranian embassy sits off the main Mezzeh highway, with a sad walk of dusty trees out front and its neo-Stalinist architecture, it reminds me of an insurance company converted into a secret-police headquarters. The floodlights don't improve things.

A guard waves the van through. I follow the driver up a flight of stairs to a second-floor studio. He puts me at an empty desk to wait for Tehran to call. I wonder if Hajj Radwan once sat here, and then I think about the other threads of history connected to this place.

One building over is the main Iranian embassy, which in the eighties was the cockpit for Khomeini's revolution in Lebanon. It was here that Lebanese Shiite clerics and political figures first met after the 1982 Israeli invasion and then returned home to form Hezbollah. To this day, it's the main conduit for money and arms going to Hezbollah.

In 1984, there was an attempt on the Iranian ambassador in the same building. His would-be assassins sent him an explosives-strapped book. He survived but lost a hand. The Iraqis were no doubt behind it, apparently believing they could change their fortunes vis-à-vis Iran by murdering this man. The problem was that the ambassador was only a cog in Khomeini's revolution. And not to mention that the revolution was just picking up steam and wasn't even close to being frayed. I wonder if at that point in history even Khomeini's assassination would have changed things. Belief is a hard thing to kill.

But it's not as if the Iranians had mastered political murder. In April 1980 a group connected to Iran attempted to assassinate Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. It's commonly believed that this event led Saddam to invade Iran. Causality is a tricky thing, but it's arguable this missed hit led to three disastrous wars—the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), the Gulf War (1990–1991), and the Iraq War (2003–2011). I doubt it's what the Iranians had planned. For the assassin, the law of unintended consequences is the sword of Damocles eternally hanging over his head.

But getting back to the attempt on the Iranian ambassador: It's now clear the Iraqis had gone after the wrong man. They incorrectly believed he was responsible for its problems in Lebanon, including the destruction of its embassy there in 1981. In fact, the best intelligence points at Hajj Radwan. Did the Iraqis not know who Hajj Radwan was or was it that they couldn't get to him? I don't know.

What I do know is that in the early years Hajj Radwan stayed away from the Iranian embassy in Damascus as if it carried the bubonic plague. He insisted that when Iranians came from Tehran they meet in Lebanon. He assured them it was the safest for all.