The Perfect Kill (2 page)

Assassination is an act of war and must be approached as such.

Assassination is a quick release from intolerable fate, an act of sunny optimism that one man's end will alter the flow of events in society's favor.

Assassination is a state of mind, a checkmate. Your opponent may still have pieces on the board, but with his king gone, he's lost the game.

Assassination is an efficient and merciful act. Rather than killing everyone in the room, the assassin shoots the one person he needs to.

Assassination is the highest form of triage, its ultimate ratio being to save society rather than destroy it.

Assassination is a conservative force, the paring down of war to its absolute minimum. One murder in excess is mere murder.

Assassination is a fantastically leveraged act, a David and Goliath contest where cunning and surprise overcome brute
force.

The victim must be a dire threat to your existence, in effect giving you license to murder him. The act can never be about revenge, personal grievance, ownership, or status.

B
eirut, September 1986: Of the five of us who decided to assassinate Hajj Radwan that morning, I'm the sole survivor. The ambassador died of leukemia a few years ago. My boss died in his sleep. His deputy blew his brains out in the parking lot of a northern Virginia hospital. Chuck, my friend, died on Pan Am 103, which was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988. (The operative who would take over my cases also went down on Pan Am 103.)

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying Hajj Radwan was the author of their deaths. It's just that when it comes to longevity he didn't fare too
badly. As a point of fact, Hajj Radwan's passage through political murder lasted a very long and bloody quarter century, a lot longer than even his friends had predicted.

The idea of assassinating Hajj Radwan came up casually, almost as a conversation filler. The ambassador had called us up to his office in the embassy to talk about something I now can't remember. I also can't remember how it was we came around to talking about Hajj Radwan.

The Department of Justice had issued a sealed arrest warrant on him for the 1985 hijacking of an American airliner to Beirut and the murder of a passenger, a Navy diver. But there was nothing in the small print about how it wanted the warrant executed. And of course, there was nothing about taking a shortcut like murder.

The conversation started out as one of those what-ifs. What if we did manage to run Hajj Radwan to ground? What if we did find someone to do something about it?

Chuck shot me a conspiratorial smile. There was no doubt in his mind what he'd do. An Army Ranger detailed to the CIA, he badly wanted in on the action, never leaving the office without his assault rifle and a satchel of hand grenades.

My boss, a Vietnam vet and former rodeo rider, didn't waste any time throwing cold water on the party, thinly noting that we didn't even know where to start looking for Hajj Radwan, let alone have a way to grab him.

The deputy, who looked at Lebanon as a madhouse best treated with black humor, said something about knocking on Hajj Radwan's door with a 155mm artillery round traveling at five hundred miles per hour.

The ambassador didn't let him finish. “Gentlemen,” he said, looking over the top of his reading glasses, “I have a call to make.”

But as we started to file silently out the door, the ambassador called after us: “Find the man, and then we'll decide how much force will be needed.”

My boss: “Sir, you know he'll never be taken alive.”

“Keep me posted,” the ambassador said as he picked up the phone.

Out in the hall, Chuck stopped me while the others walked ahead. “I didn't hear a no.”

I knew he was talking about assassinating Hajj Radwan. It's something we'd been batting around for the last couple of months, with roughly the seriousness of adolescent boys threatening to join the French Foreign Legion. But Chuck was right. The ambassador had left the barn door wide open. Okay, it wasn't exactly a
Murder in the Cathedral
moment—Henry II shouting at his knights, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”—but it was enough to look into the possibilities.

Chuck was a huge man, about six-foot-four, and had the manners of a surly bear. Like me, he took Hajj Radwan deadly serious. For the last couple of months, he'd been telling me how he was convinced that Hajj Radwan knew who he was and intended to kill him. After Chuck died on Pan Am 103, a couple of security people went to his apartment to clean it out. They found wires leading from the door to the overhead air-conditioning vents in the vestibule. The wires were attached to Claymore mines tilted toward the front door. Hajj Radwan's little surprise? Fortunately, Chuck had disarmed them before he left Beirut.

I turned away to keep walking, but Chuck stopped me again. “I'm in if you are.”

I laughed.
Fat chance we'd ever succeed,
I thought.
But what the hell?
I shook Chuck's hand to cement the deal.

As whimsical as it sounds, it was pretty much from that point forward I started to look at Hajj Radwan through the prism of assassination. I knew even then it was a stunted way of looking at anyone. But wasn't it the way Hajj Radwan looked at us?

—

C
huck had every reason in the world to be paranoid about Hajj Radwan. Like I said, the assassin had truly mastered that eternal intimate dance between politics and murder, never missing or wasting a
bullet. Hajj Radwan was the real-life Jackal (as in the Frederick Forsyth novel
The Day of the Jackal
). And it was the rare person who was beyond his reach. What I'm trying to say is that if one day Hajj Radwan decided to kill Chuck a crate of Claymores couldn't have stopped him.

It took a while, but all too soon we came to recognize Hajj Radwan as a tactician on par with history's best. By turning the common automobile, a ton of explosives, and a suicide bomber into a guided missile, he'd beaten the Israelis on the field of battle and did it virtually cost-free. He'd driven the West out of Lebanon the same way. The fact that he'd been able to inflict the largest single-day loss of life on the Marines since World War II forced us to adjust the way we fight war.

And, in a troubling twist, Hajj Radwan, like Caesar in Gaul, had taught himself to narrowly channel violence to more efficiently obtain well-defined and valid military objectives. Combining the meticulous application of surprise, speed, and precision, he threw his enemies into disarray and retreat. When offered the occasion, he preferred to limit violence to a single man. He intuitively grasped that the unexpected apparition of precise and efficient violence touches a raw nerve in man. It's some primeval fear that trumps all other violence.

When Hajj Radwan hijacked the TWA airliner to Beirut in 1985—the same hijacking that earned him a sealed arrest warrant—he murdered only one passenger, the Navy diver. He ignored the other Americans on the plane. In an earlier hijacking to Tehran, in 1984, he murdered two American diplomats rather than the other Americans on the plane. Was it a message that his war was against the American government rather than the American people? I expect so, but the point is that these two hijackings, added to the attacks on the Marines and two of our embassies in Beirut, came with such disciplined and focused violence that it left Washington in a state of dumb dread: Who was this fucking barbarian so meticulous in the application of violence?

When, twenty years later, he came to the aid of his fellow Shiites in
the 2003 Iraq war, it was evident Hajj Radwan was only getting better. One of his people was caught with a laptop oscilloscope capable of reading jammer frequencies. (Jammers counter radio-detonated roadside bombs.) It demonstrated he could beat us at our own game, steal our technological fire. But it wasn't as if he'd let his tactics go.

At a little before six on the evening of January 20, 2007, up to a dozen sport-utility vehicles came racing up to the joint American-Iraqi provincial headquarters in Karbala. They contained about a dozen men, all dressed in American combat fatigues and armed with American weapons. They had American badges around their necks. At least one of them spoke English. One had blond hair.

As soon as they pulled up in front, they jumped out and began their assault on the compound. Their intelligence impeccable, they knew exactly where to find the two top American officers. They also knew where to put up a blocking force to keep anyone from coming to the officers' rescue. One American soldier was killed in the attack, and another four, including the two officers, were captured and taken out into the desert and executed. But was murdering five men symbolic of something or just a coincidence?

Nine days before Karbala, American forces had arrested five Iranian intelligence officers in the northern Iraqi town of Irbil. No one officially drew the connection between the Karbala murders and their arrests, but my hunch is that the attackers murdered five American soldiers in response to the five Iranians taken in Irbil. A gruesome warning from Iran not to touch its people. (The Iranians were released in 2009.)

When I heard that one of Hajj Radwan's lieutenants had been involved, I remembered another time when Hajj Radwan matched numbers. In the eighties, there was a small college on the Muslim side of Beirut that was anxious about the safety of its foreign staff, its American professors in particular. The Americans weren't let off campus without an armed escort. Things went fine until one morning a
contingent of police officers showed up announcing they needed to brief the Americans on a new security threat. As soon as the Americans were assembled, the faux policemen spirited them off for a long and unpleasant captivity.

The stolen uniforms, faultless intelligence, and lightning speed were Hajj Radwan's hallmark, as was the application of proportional violence. The kidnappers had taken the four American professors because a Christian militia allied with the United States had kidnapped (and murdered) four of Hajj Radwan's allies, three Iranian diplomats and a fellow Lebanese Shiite. Five for five at Karbala, four for four in Beirut.

I realize that when your life amounts to waiting around for a very talented and successful assassin to come cut your throat, you tend to assign him godlike powers. Did Chuck and I overestimate Hajj Radwan? Maybe. But again, it does help explain why Chuck and I came to the decision we did.

Finding Hajj Radwan wasn't our only problem. For a start, the full and weighty canon of American law didn't exactly stand foursquare behind us. In fact, assassination had been declared outright illegal in 1981 by President Reagan when he issued Executive Order 12333 banning the act.

No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

But at this point in my career I knew the world well enough to know the trick is never to call anything touchy by its real name, and definitely not to use the word “assassination.” Take, for example, the SEALs' order
to “arrest” bin Laden at his Abbottabad compound. No one with any common sense expected the man to walk out on his own two feet. Or take drone attacks. Not too long ago, I was privately asked if, in my media appearances, I'd kindly stop referring to drone assassinations. It would be more judicious to call them “counterterrorism actions against high-value targets.” Anyhow, what I'm getting at is that our first order of business was to assassinate the English language. I.e., if Chuck and I did miraculously find a way to drop Hajj Radwan into the void, we'd have to make it look like an arrest gone wrong.

The other thing I had to come to terms with was that I'd be pretty much singing this baby a cappella. While Chuck and a couple of other like-minded conspirators were ready to lend me a hand, I was the one who happened to have a couple of well-placed sources on the Muslim side of Beirut where Hajj Radwan lived. I also had a good line to a couple of professional killers. And it would be me—God help us—interpreting American law for them.

Finally, by happenstance, I knew more about Hajj Radwan than most people did. I can even mark the day I was anointed an expert. I was sitting in my pod at the CIA counterterrorism center browsing the morning traffic when I noticed my boss, Duane Clarridge, hovering behind me. Standing next to him was a neatly groomed, compact man in an expensive suit.

I stood up and Clarridge introduced me to Oliver North, then the White House's front man on terrorism. Never one to waste an opportunity, Clarridge told North (not quite accurately) that I knew everything there was worth knowing about Hajj Radwan. He added that I'd even created a sort of Venn diagram to help explain the man.

At Clarridge's invitation, I went over to a chalkboard and produced a spaghetti chart of Hajj Radwan's ties as I understood them—how he'd started out as a foot soldier fighting for the Palestinians but on the side did a couple of jobs for militant Islamic groups. He only later offered his services to Iran and Hezbollah.

As soon as I started getting into the grass of it, I could see North didn't give a shit. So I decided to throw him a piece of red meat: “We may have traced parts of his family to West Africa.”

“You know where they live?” North asked, now clearly interested.

I nodded.

“So what do we do about it?”

It was at that point I wandered onto unfamiliar and forbidden ground. Clearly, the answer should have been “Sir, I don't know.” Instead, I impulsively and stupidly suggested we grab a couple of them and hold them in some secret dungeon until Hajj Radwan saw the light and stopped killing and kidnapping Americans. Blackmail him.

Before it was even out of my mouth, I recognized the idiocy of it. Hajj Radwan had a soul of blue ice. His own mother eviscerated before his eyes wouldn't have moved him. As we were coming to realize to our mounting anxiety, the only thing the man cared about was raw, uncompromising power.

But North took the bait, confiding in me it's exactly what he'd recommend to President Reagan. As North was about ready to leave, he put a hand on my shoulder, telling me that I was now 1600 Pennsylvania's point man on Hajj Radwan. North added that if I was ever to locate Hajj Radwan he'd find me all the “firepower” I needed to “get” my man.

Trust me, I took North seriously. I'd just heard that he'd authorized Delta Force to randomly hijack an innocent and unsuspecting freighter plying the Mediterranean, hold the crew hostage, and under the guise of noble commerce, sail into the middle of whatever crisis du jour there was. By the time the world had figured out the United States had stooped to piracy, the hostage rescue or whatever mission Delta had been charged with would be done and over. As far as I know, Delta never did commandeer a ship, but what it told me was that North was game for the bold and audacious—just the sort of boss you need when you're out there where the fires burn brightly.