The Perfect Kill (22 page)

“They're sure it was Palestinians. But working for Jordan and Israel. They have some names.”

—

I
keep coming back to my hunch that the soft pleasures of Damascus turned Hajj Radwan's head—the new wife, the French boutiques and patisseries, the fancy cars racing around Damascus. There's no solid evidence for it, but I've heard things, such as Hajj Radwan's son catting around Beirut in a new BMW like all the other spoiled Lebanese princelings. If true, it's a sign that Hajj Radwan succumbed to the temptation of money, letting discipline go. Did it also blind him to the fact that
Syria had slipped its totalitarian, police-state moorings, had become lazy and corrupt, and was no longer able to offer him the protective shield it once did?

When I'd heard the details of how Hajj Radwan had finally been run to ground, how the assassin had slipped through Syria's once-formidable security net, smuggled the explosives through the Jordanian border crossing, rigged Hajj Radwan's car with explosives in central Damascus, and even managed to avoid collateral victims, I better understood that the world had changed since my Beirut days.

But what am I missing? The first reports were that the headrest of Hajj Radwan's Pajero exploded, decapitating him. Later reports had it that a magnetic bomb, a “limpet,” had been attached to the back of his car and detonated by a radio signal. A third version had it that the explosives were concealed in the car's spare tire.

What strikes me odd in all of this is the conflicting detail. In the West, we're accustomed to instantly learning the gory details surrounding a high-profile murder. It's as if we were entitled to them. We quickly found out about Swedish prime minister Olof Palme's assassination, including details about the police investigation. Anytime there's a noteworthy murder in the United States, a slew of gruesome pictures appear in the press. But then again, with the act completed, why not?

But none of this occurred after Hajj Radwan's murder—no photos, no police reports, no eyewitness statements. I'd eventually come across a blurry photo of his car taken from a camera phone, but it told me nothing. Hezbollah dealt with Hajj Radwan's murder by staging his blood-soaked clothing in his mausoleum. But as for the truly pertinent facts, its lips are sealed.

One thought I have: Hezbollah and the Syrians have every reason in the world to fake Hajj Radwan's death. Having been caught red-handed in Hariri's murder, he couldn't have been a particularly convenient personage walking around Damascus. Their letting people believe he'd
been assassinated would make sense if he'd returned to the southern suburbs to wait for things to cool down. But this is just another baseless grassy knoll/black helicopter conspiracy theory.

What's apparent here is that Syria still has the capacity to obfuscate the truth, even the assassination of a prominent man in downtown Damascus. It still believes political murder is forbidden knowledge, never to be shared outside a tight, trusted circle. It's a consensus of silence we in the West can't begin to understand.

Beirut, February 14, 2005, 12.54.00: The images from the CCTV camera mounted on the side of the HSBC bank building are grainy but good enough to see how the Mitsubishi van rides heavy on the shocks, carrying something heavy. The van hangs back, doing about eight or nine miles an hour. It hugs the right side of the road as traffic speeds by at forty miles an hour.

There's nothing erratic about the way the Mitsubishi's driver handles the road. Knowing what's about to come, you can't help but wonder what's going through his mind.

The van moves out of the camera's frame at 12.54.37, continuing along the seafront boulevard.

You can't tell it from the CCTV images, but Beirut woke up this morning to a light, fresh breeze off the Mediterranean. When the weather's nice like this, the Corniche is packed with walkers, well-heeled Beirutis in designer tracksuits and gold-foiled Nikes. They take their exercise seriously, scooting along at a half run, elbows churning. Older men stroll in twos and threes, gossiping, gesturing with fat cigars, mostly expensive Cubans. People sit on their balconies sipping their coffees without a care in the world.

It must feel like spring for Rafic Hariri too, a political spring to be
precise. He's spent the morning at parliament, canvassing for the June elections, and now it's all but certain he'll be elected prime minister again. Sure, Hariri has his problems, not least among them the bruising fights with the Syrians. There have even been threats on his life. But it's something he's had to live with ever since he moved back to Lebanon in 1992. But as he's said often enough, they're the ambient noise every Lebanese politician learns to live with.

Hariri would never dare say it openly, but he's all the more optimistic about his political fortunes these days. He's counting on a certain give in the new Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. A London-trained ophthalmologist, Bashar would flinch before committing violence. He wasn't the man of steel his father was, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000. Nor did Bashar seem to be a man to act on his grudges, the main gear that turns Middle East politics; he would flinch before committing violence. Not that he'd ever say it out loud. Hariri wouldn't be surprised if one day he woke up to the news that some Syrian general had overthrown Bashar. It would be a welcome plot turn that would give him even more room to maneuver politically.

After Hariri is through charming parliament, he walks over to the nearby Café de l'Étoile, his security entourage and aides struggling to keep up. This is Hariri's favorite part of Beirut, the old city, whose restoration he's personally overseen. Hariri handpicked the French architects, pored over their plans, and personally arranged for the loans to finance it all. He even put in his own money.

As he walks around the Étoile, you can see from the TV images how Hariri loves the game, the way he moves from table to table, shaking hands, hugging old friends. The smiles flashed back in return say it all—Hariri the rock star, Mr. Lebanon.

But it's not power alone that propels Hariri. Or money, the billions and billions he made loyally serving the Saudi royal family. It's something much more vital, primeval even—a deep tribal loyalty to Lebanon's Sunni Muslims. As I said, the Arabic word is
asabiyyah
. Tribal
solidarity. No matter how rich or celebrated he became, Hariri never betrayed his roots.

Hariri's status as the leader of Lebanon's Sunnis was undisputed. It may add up to nothing more than dumb blood loyalty and influence peddling, but what the Sunnis saw in Hariri was both their anchor and beacon—a man who would better their lives, put them back on the pedestal they thought they deserved to be on. Without Hariri, they would be a people diminished and weak.

You also have to wonder whether class had something to do with what's about to happen. Every time Hariri drove from the airport to his mansion on the hill, and passed through the southern suburbs where the poor Shiites live, he thanked his lucky stars he'd clawed his way out of poverty. Did he think that the Shiites deserved to live in squalor, to wallow in their sectarian impurities? No, but some of his fellow Sunnis didn't always share the same sentiment.

As he walks around the Étoile that morning, it must seem to him like the future's all coming together nicely. He's succeeded in restoring Lebanon to its rightful position in the Middle East's firmament. And to crown it all, the Sunnis would be at the helm. Would that young punk in Damascus dare to try to stop him?

As Hariri climbs behind the wheel of his Mercedes 600 to drive home for lunch, he says something to the man in the passenger seat next to him, a parliamentary deputy. No one will find out what it was. But they both laugh. Hariri loves his jokes.

The next we see of Hariri is his six-car convoy entering the frame of the CCTV camera on the HSBC wall at 12.56.17. The last car exits the frame at 12.56.25. Later, it's calculated from the camera that the convoy was doing just under forty.

A split second later, the camera starts to shake, and a ghostly wave passes across the images. The camera's blown about wildly and hurled off the wall. Dangling by a cable, it watches through a haze of dust the
people pouring out of the building's door, covering their mouths, choking.

Seven minutes later, there's a new optic, one too horrifying to show the public. A man on a motor scooter with a high-definition video camera arrives at the scene. The images he records are horrific. Hariri is burning by the side of the car, bystanders trying to put him out. His friend, the parliamentary deputy, is on fire, clawing to get out the door.

—

L
et's be clear, Hariri had made his mistakes. The worst of them was to misjudge the Syrians and Hezbollah. He didn't understand how they looked at him as a threat. Whether witting or unwitting, he was a bullhorn of resurgent Sunni Islam. Nor did Hariri truly grasp that democracy and the rule of law are a sham in Lebanon, how the state's monopoly on the means of violence was never truly restored, and how Hezbollah called every important shot related to national security . . . and how, in extremis, it wouldn't hesitate to eliminate anyone who got in its way.

In Hajj Radwan's eyes, Hariri was a political poseur. He might be a fabulously rich, well-connected oligarch, but his pretensions to power didn't match reality. He had some armed people under him, but nothing like Hezbollah's military. Couple that with the perception that Hariri intended to turn back history to a mythical Sunni past, and the only possible resolution to the conflict was a bloody one.

Hariri apparently also missed how jumpy the Shiite offshoot regime in Damascus was. In neighboring Iraq, the Sunni revolt was in full flower against the Shiites. Could it be long before it slopped over the border into Syria? In Syria's world, you cut the head off a baby snake before it becomes a full-grown serpent.

These are easy conclusions to come by, but it's unarguable that Hariri
somehow overplayed his hand. He wasn't a complete innocent in his own murder.

From a technical standpoint, Hajj Radwan nearly carried off the perfect kill. He put his best people on the job, figured out a way to cover all three of Hariri's possible routes home that day, and made sure the van intersected his car and exploded at exactly the right moment. He brought to bear everything he'd learned over the last twenty-five years.

Hajj Radwan also went to great lengths to hide his hand. The team covering Hariri that day purchased prepaid cell phones under false names. Since everyone in Lebanon and his dog has a cell phone, and because the Lebanese are a garrulous people who make hundreds of thousands of calls every hour, he must have calculated that tying together these phones would be impossible.

A taped confession of a faux suicide bomber was a nice piece of misdirection. On the face of it, the young bearded man declaiming in Salafi gibberish about why he needed to murder Hariri (and himself) was convincing. Throwing it over the wall of the Salafi-loving TV channel Al Jazeera was another nice touch. On the face of it, it was entirely plausible that a fanatic would sacrifice his life to eliminate a pawn of the Saudi royal family. (Not to mention that the tape served as a sort of bill of indictment, reminding the Lebanese that Hariri was a corrupted Saudi stooge.)

And finally, there was the Yemeni-Saudi nose I wrote about. It jibed nicely with the Saudi Salafi angle. It made no difference that no one could say who the nose belonged to, the point being that outsiders murdered Hariri. Whoever thought that one up on Hajj Radwan's team was a true genius.

But like so much else with political murder, appearances often don't hold up.

—

H
ajj Radwan may have invented modern political murder, but he was no Moses. He'd often enough lose a step, as he did with the attempt on the emir of Kuwait. Or maybe it's just that technology finally caught up with him. Either way, his Hariri assassination went off the tracks in a big way.

Let me start with whether Hariri deserved it or not, Law #1. I can see why Hariri's dumping money into Sunni causes, maybe militant ones, along with his making noises about disarming Hezbollah, caused Hajj Radwan (and his sponsors) heartburn. But did it really add up to a death sentence?

Taking Saudi money didn't make Hariri a foreign invader. He never invited in foreign troops, and he wasn't actively trying to destroy Hajj Radwan or Hezbollah. In short, while it must have been tempting to label Hariri a traitor, it's not completely convincing to frame his murder as an act of self-defense à la Laos, kill or perish. Maybe Hariri could have later turned into a genuine threat, but he wasn't one the day he was murdered.

I suspect Hajj Radwan was horrified as he watched the Lebanese pour out into the streets to protest Hariri's assassination and demand Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon. And when the Syrians did, he must have pinched himself to make sure it wasn't a nightmare. Syria was his rear base and logistics lifeline. Would Damascus cut off his supply lines?

Things must have looked all the more ominous when the Lebanese police grew a backbone and started to seriously investigate Hariri's murder and, even worse, when they brought to bear the latest tools of modern police work, including data analytics. With the telephone companies readily turning over their records to the police, Hajj Radwan must have felt the net start to draw around him.

It all quickly unraveled. An algorithm tied together the eight falsely purchased prepaid cell phones. According to GPS tracking, all eight cell phones, in one way or another, were along Hariri's route from his house
to parliament that morning. For the police, it was proof the phones had been used to coordinate his assassination.

But the real nugget came the morning of Hariri's assassination when a call from one of the prepaid cells to a residential landline was discovered. The recipient of the call, a young lady, told the police her boyfriend had called her the morning of Hariri's murder. It became even more interesting when she said he worked for Hezbollah. She didn't know anything about his calling from a prepaid cell, but the police concluded that he must have violated his team's protocol by calling outside what the police dubbed “the first circle of hell”—the eight prepaid cell phones. Allowing the police to put a name to one of Hariri's watchers that morning was never supposed to happen.