The Perfect Kill (27 page)

Having started out his professional life with the Palestinians, it made sense that Hajj Radwan would now turn to them to catch up on technology. Incidentally, we were pretty certain it was the Palestinians who'd
first put him on the path of combining shaped charges and sophisticated electronics to accurately clock and destroy an automobile traveling at high speed. So why not airplanes?

It all fit in nicely with Hajj Radwan's evolving tactics, how he kept striving to more narrowly channel violence, how he'd gone from destroying buildings to destroying cars. While buildings are fixed in space, cars come with enough predictability (traveling along fixed roads) that they too are extremely vulnerable. Sitting ducks pretty much.

Always trying to extend his range, Hajj Radwan also started to experiment with “belly charges.” He tested them against the Israelis in southern Lebanon, proving that with enough explosives buried under a road, no vehicle, including a heavy tank, is safe. By the way, they're another one of the Secret Service's darkest nightmares.

Another thing that worried me about Hajj Radwan was that he was intent on projecting power across the globe, applying tactics and technology he'd learned in Lebanon. Like a shark, he felt he had to keep moving to stay alive. Clearly, his plan was to be able to hit us from all sides, a redundancy of a sort.

Hajj Radwan kept in play overlapping cells. For instance, when he was tasked with assassinating Saudi diplomats but things were too hot in France, he switched the job to a cell in Bangkok. When in 1992 he was tasked with hitting the Israelis and things were too hot in London, he switched to a cell in Buenos Aires.

But there were certain countries that worried us more than others, particularly West Germany. Overlapping police jurisdictions there, a weak national police, and a large immigrant community offered Hajj Radwan another happy hunting ground. Although he wasn't involved, we saw proof of it in 1992 when a Hezbollah-connected group murdered an Iranian Kurdish dissident in a Berlin café. Or when the Iranians decided to hit in Paris, they used Hajj Radwan's networks in West Germany as a transit route.

But it wasn't until the Pan Am investigation that we found out just
how extensive Hajj Radwan's German networks were. They seemed to be everywhere, from Hamburg to Frankfurt, from Berlin to Strasbourg in France. Burrowed deep into local Lebanese communities, they were indistinguishable from law-abiding Lebanese. They operated with the same discipline as his Lebanese organization: no business over the phone, no contact with Hezbollah party offices or mosques, no gunplay, no beards, no attending pep rallies, no meetings in mosques or Islamic centers. They could strike without warning.

In the early part of the Pan Am investigation (before it was switched to Libya), a cell answering to Hajj Radwan was discovered in Dortmund. Its head was connected to a hijacking in Africa. What particularly intrigued the German police was that a young Lebanese passenger on Pan Am 103 had stayed with the cell's Dortmund chief and then later at another Hajj Radwan–connected apartment in Frankfurt. Did the Lebanese passenger have something to do with Pan Am 103, or was it just another coincidence like the ambassador being booked on the plane?

With all the unexplored German connections, with the calls into the Beirut embassy, with Chuck being on the airplane, with Hajj Radwan's pointed interest in bringing down civilian airliners, there'll always exist in my mind the suspicion that Hajj Radwan had something to do with Pan Am 103. Maybe it was as simple as the Libyans going to him for technical assistance. I know the FBI will dismiss this as pointless speculation, but they'll have to do a lot better to convince me a lone Libyan was behind this atrocity.

—

I
was searching the Mediterranean for our two Black Hawks when I caught sight of Chuck coming down the hill toward me with his bearish gait and his wrecking-ball head. He'd forgotten his assault rifle; something was up.

“You gotta hear this,” he said, walking up to me with his Mona Lisa shit-eating grin. “I just saw my buddy.”

I didn't like the sound of anything that had to do with his shady Christian businessman.

“He can get me Buckley's radio.”

When Hajj Radwan's people kidnapped Bill Buckley, they also carried off his briefcase and Motorola radio.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Haven't you ever heard of the why-am-I-so-lucky principle?”

“If he says he can get it, he can.”

Chuck and I at the same time caught sight of the two Black Hawks approaching the shore. They reminded me of malevolent wasps as they flew low and fast over the water. The guards on top of the shell of the old annex fed ammunition belts into their machine guns.

I'd already made up my mind that Chuck's shady Christian businessman was an inveterate swindler who couldn't be trusted with anything. So what exactly is his angle now? I wondered.

Chuck smiled to let me know he wasn't done: “He gave me the serial number.”

Chuck handed me a piece of paper with a string of numbers on it.

I didn't need Chuck to tell me they matched the serial number on Buckley's Motorola, but I asked anyhow.

“You got it,” he said.

We were both startled when the two Black Hawks popped out from a ravine and sidled over to the helicopter pad, throwing up dust and small stones. The noise was deafening. They swayed in their own backwash like a fat man trying to mambo, then settled down on the pad. They kept their engines revved in case they had to take off on short notice.

I bent half over and ran over to the loadmaster. I shouted into his helmet: “Scratch me off. Baer. I don't feel well. Baer's the name.” I didn't wait for his answer.

I ran back and grabbed my bag and Chuck. He didn't say anything as I walked him behind a squat building to get away from the noise.

“You know what's happening? The fucker's setting us up.”

I now was sure of it. First Ali's offer of the KGB Stechkin, then Buckley's radio—two bright, shiny baubles for the two CIA dupes.

“Go see him to say we want the radio,” I said. “We'll pay one hundred thousand for it. Ten down now.”

No one was going to authorize me to buy back Buckley's radio, and I wasn't going to ask. But I did have ten thousand dollars in the safe, enough to make Hajj Radwan believe we'd taken his bait. I'd figure out later what to do with it.

My palpable fear now was that Hajj Radwan was coming at us from two different directions, Ali and Chuck's businessman. But why should I be surprised? Hajj Radwan had in his possession a large killing machine on both sides of the Green Line. He could target us from anywhere he liked and whenever he liked. He'd built both depth and redundancy into his machine.

I may be guilty of ascribing superhuman abilities to the fucker. But it's a fact that he did things in pairs or multiples. When he hit the French, it wasn't a one-off—first the military attaché, then the intelligence officer, then the gendarmes. He did the same to the Israelis, the first attack in Tyre, in November 1982, and then again there the following year. On October 23, 1983, he hit both the French and the Marines. With Hariri, he closed down the investigation thanks to nearly a dozen quick and dirty assassinations.

Which brings me back to the Israelis and the Red Prince. After the Red Prince's assassination in 1979, the Israelis set about assassinating one senior Palestinian official after the other. Atef was only one among them. They may even have murdered Arafat in 2004. Although a postmortem wasn't conducted right after his death, Swiss forensic scientists did conduct one in 2012. They found traces of polonium-210 in his clothing and personal items, opening up the possibility he'd been assassinated. Arafat's list of enemies was long, but at the top was Israel.

Whether the Israelis murdered Arafat or not, it remains that over the last fifty years Israel carved out the heart of the core Palestinian
resistance thanks to one considered assassination after another. Like Hajj Radwan, they knew that a one-off wouldn't take them to where they wanted to go. It's always a spate rather than a drop.

What I'm saying is that it was completely plausible, if not predictable, that Hajj Radwan would line the two of us by running Ali and Chuck's shady businessman into us. What better way to find out what we were up to?

As we walked back to the office, I stopped Chuck so he wouldn't misunderstand what I had to say. “If we don't start moving a lot faster, he's going to get us first.” Chuck didn't say anything, leading me to wonder if he believed me.

Paris, May 14, 1610: It's hard to imagine, but there was a time when Paris's traffic was worse than it is today. Medieval Paris still stood then, its winding alleys cramped, store displays spilling out into the street, and people jostling one another to get by. Your own two feet got you across town faster than a horse, and certainly faster than a carriage.

That morning King Henri IV decided he needed to see his finance minister, the Duc de Sully. But the duke was sick in bed, which meant the king had to drive across Paris to see him. The king took an entourage of only three in a carriage drawn by six very large horses. His route passed through some of the worst parts of town, including Les Halles, where itinerant workers, prostitutes, smugglers, thieves, and cutthroats roamed its narrow streets looking for opportunity and trouble.

On Rue de la Ferronnerie something ahead brought the king's carriage to a stop. A footman jumped down and ran to see what the holdup was. At that moment a tall man with red hair jumped onto the side of the carriage, filling the window. He reached through it with a knife and
stabbed the king twice, severing his aorta and puncturing his lung. King Henri was rushed back to the Louvre, where he died.

The assassin, a Catholic fanatic, apparently acted alone. Not surprising, the king's murder didn't improve French Catholicism's fortunes. But what his assassin did get right was to trap Henri in his carriage. A vehicle may be a wonderful convenience, but for the victim it's too often a coffin on wheels.

When things become precarious and chaotic for your enemy, there will be unforeseen opportunities.

Kawkaba, Lebanon, February 28, 1999: Was there a hint of what was about to happen? An ominous piece of chatter? An unexplained broken-down car on the side of the road? As with Carrero Blanco's assassination, there was nothing that anyone has ever come forward and admitted to. It was just another shitty day in the little slice of Lebanese hell Israel still held on to, the so-called security strip.

The strip traces its origin to Israel's 1978 invasion of Lebanon. It entered Lebanon to stop cross-border Palestinian attacks, but instead of pulling back, Israel ended up creating a semipermanent buffer zone in southern Lebanon. The assumption was that the north of Israel would be vulnerable to attacks without it.

The strip may have looked good on paper, but it soon turned into a death trap of its own. Sparsely populated and broken up with bald, jagged limestone hills, southern Lebanon normally shouldn't have been particularly good guerrilla country. But the Muslim guerrillas who
started to infest it in the eighties proved to be inventive and resilient. They stayed off cell phones and radios, never carried weapons in the open, and operated out of caves.

What the Israelis had going for them was technology—new sophisticated ground sensors,
Star Wars
–like fortresses, and drones. The guerrillas couldn't move in groups without being immediately detected and destroyed. But the lynchpin in Israel's strategy was to turn the strip into a “killing box”—shooting at anything that moved. The guerrillas would be pretty much left out in the open after everyone with any sense was driven out. Or at least that was the theory.

On the morning of February 28, 1999, the Israeli commander of the strip, General Erez Gerstein, and a reporter from Israel Radio climbed into an armored Mercedes for a quick trip into the strip. The stated purpose was to attend the funeral of a local Lebanese militia commander who'd died fighting for Israel, but Gerstein's ulterior motive was to show the reporter that a drive up into the strip was as safe as a drive around Tel Aviv on the Sabbath—i.e., to prove that all the money and blood Israel had put into the strip was worth it. The journalist could put it on the radio when he got back.

Although Gerstein's Mercedes was armored and souped up, on the outside it was old and beat-up—indistinguishable from the old beat-up Mercedes the Lebanese drive. It bore Lebanese plates and tinted windows, making it impossible to tell that the occupants were Israeli military. The trip wasn't advertised. Couple that with the fact that Gerstein and the reporter would be in and out of Lebanon in less than two hours, and no one, no matter how good, would have the time to put together an ambush. A proper assassination, as Gerstein well knew, depends on good preparation. But so does avoiding one.

Chiseled and fit, and with a well-deserved reputation for bravery and toughness, Gerstein was a soldier's soldier. One story has it that when he commanded the elite Golani Brigade he'd demonstrate the mushroomlike kill zone of a hand grenade by lying down next to one and pulling
the pin. He would jump up out of the smoke and dust, untouched and with an I-told-you-so grin.

Gerstein had campaigned (and been wounded) in Lebanon for more years than he cared to remember, and he knew the country as well as his own. When he was offered command of the strip, he had no illusions about what he was up against. The equally tough problem, though, was to convince his fellow generals that holding on to the strip was worth it. He'd have to do the same with a skeptical Israeli public and press. Thus the decision to take a journalist to the funeral.

As soon as Gerstein and the journalist's convoy crossed the border into Lebanon, it hit speeds of up to eighty miles an hour. Anyone standing by the road saw only a screaming blur of metal heading for who knows where. Even if a guerrilla partisan alerted the command up the line, what could they do about it?

The funeral went fine. The handshaking and hugs over, Gerstein and the reporter jumped back in his Mercedes for the return ride home. Just as on the trip up, the road was clear of traffic, letting the four Mercedes move at breakneck speed.

As Gerstein's convoy breasted an incline in the road, a terrific blinding explosion spewed rock and dirt in all directions. But the main force of it hit Gerstein's Mercedes dead center, lifting it off the road and down into a ravine. At the bottom, it burst into a ball of flames, instantly killing Gerstein, the journalist, and two soldiers. The rest of the convoy made it through.

The reaction in Israel to the news of Gerstein's assassination was instantaneous. One anonymous Israeli soldier wrote to a newspaper: “Reality has thrown us a slap in the face.”

It was the same pretty much across Israel: Don't waste another drop of Israeli blood trying to hold even a square inch of that cursed country. The politicians also got the message. Ehud Barak, at the time the head of the opposition Labor Party and himself a former general, announced that if elected he would pull the Israeli army out of Lebanon.

Three months later, Barak was elected prime minister, and a little more than a year later ordered Israel's troops out of the strip, abandoning it to the Islamic guerrillas. It was the bitter end of a twenty-two-year struggle to tame Lebanon.

As for Israeli intelligence, it settled down to figuring out how Hajj Radwan—could it have been anyone else?—had pulled it off. The shaped charge had his signature all over it. As did the clear-cut motives: Gerstein's murder tipped the scales, breaking the gossamer thread holding together the frayed Israeli consensus to stay in Lebanon. But without Hezbollah offering any details other than claiming the assassination, Hajj Radwan's precise role is stuck in the realm of speculation.

One Thanksgiving, Mother showed up in Washington, insisting on seeing our provincial aristocracy in its natural habitat. The Four Seasons wasn't yet built, so I offered her the staid downtown Madison for lunch. Only a couple of blocks from the White House, it was opened by John F. Kennedy in 1963. My wife, nine months pregnant with our first child, tagged along. It was 1984.

We arrived early; only one other table was occupied. Knowing that our fellow diners would immediately spot us as interlopers, I asked the maître d' to put us at an out-of-the-way table in the back. What's the point in unnecessarily ruffling feathers? And indeed, it wasn't long before Nixon's former counsel John Ehrlichman showed up with two other people. (For his part in Watergate, Ehrlichman went to prison for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury.)

The maître d' sat Ehrlichman and his guests at a table in the center of the dining room, the best perch to see and be seen. Do people never learn?

Throughout lunch, Mother impaled Ehrlichman with a stare. I had a premonition she wasn't going to let the moment pass, and when the bill had been paid, I mumbled something about needing to go to the bathroom. I scurried across the dining room at a good clip, catching out of the corner of my eye Ben Bradlee, the legendary executive editor of
The Washington Post
. More than anyone he was the man who brought down Nixon, along with Ehrlichman.

Against all my innate cowardly instincts, I stopped just outside the entry to watch as Mother made a beeline for Ehrlichman's table, my waddling wife in tow. Sensing trouble, Ehrlichman looked up at her and then at my pregnant wife. Did this improbable pair disarm him even for a moment?

Mother fumbled for something in her purse, finally fishing out her checkbook. She thrust it toward Ehrlichman, along with a pen.

“Sir,” she said in a voice that carried across the Madison's dining room and sounded like a crystal bell dripping with ironic sarcasm. “You are a great American hero. What a great service you've done for our country! My grandbaby would be so proud to have your autograph.” She patted my wife's belly.

Not knowing what else to do, Ehrlichman signed the back of her checkbook. His guests were searching the ground for a hole to crawl into. Bradlee put his napkin up to his mouth to hide his giggling.

A successful assassination depends on terrain and surprise. But its chances are improved when the victim feels safe and at ease. It's a basic truth that when people are absorbed with their comforts and habits they're inattentive and predictable, unintentionally offering inroads into their lives. What Mother had going for her was the Madison's
ritually observed etiquette: Don't bother the other guests. I imagine the last thing Ehrlichman was expecting was another diner pouncing on him.

Mother's other advantage was that with Ehrlichman's indictment he was a winged bird. If she'd gone after Bradlee about some dumb
Washington Post
article, she would have been a lot less successful. The point is that when a target is on the run, making one stupid mistake after another, he's easier to take down. Gaddafi running out of a culvert into the hands of a mob comes to mind.

It's common sense that when the enemy's weak, disoriented, his consensus frayed, and he's indecisive about fighting or fleeing, there stands a much better chance that political murder will work. Wehrmacht officers turned on Hitler after it was clear that he'd lost the war. Saddam's clan turned on him after he'd lost the war. The Russian aristocracy gave up on royalty after the murder of Czar Nicholas II in 1918.

Only months after the 1982 Israeli invasion, Hajj Radwan set about methodically unstitching the Israeli consensus for staying in Lebanon, launching one devastating attack after the next. His way of measuring progress was to draw on a Hezbollah unit responsible for monitoring the Israeli press. It was devoted to looking for rents in the Israeli body politic. I don't know whether Hajj Radwan had predicted Israel would pull out of Lebanon after Gerstein, but I suspect he had a good idea it would. Israeli tolerance for wars in Lebanon isn't without limits.

—

N
either Chuck nor I was so deluded as to believe we were in Hajj Radwan's league. While he moved from success to success, we were still futzing around with radioactive dross like Ali and the Christian businessman. But it didn't stop us from blindly soldiering on. Or, as they say, when you roll into hell, keep going; there is no reverse.

It wasn't all stubborn bravado, though. I'd recently recruited a young man who could get within spitting distance of Hajj Radwan. For obvious reasons, I can't name or describe him other than to say he was my
first real breakthrough. While he couldn't tell me in advance where Hajj Radwan would be, I was confident I could come up with a use for him.

As for Ali, nothing came of my red herring that I'd put in Hajj Radwan's path. Did it fool him, put him on the wrong scent? I don't know. My best guess, though, is that I was only burning up more CIA money . . . while all along Hajj Radwan was tightening the noose around our necks.

A new obstacle Chuck and I ran into was a new chief, an ex-Marine. He reminded me of a squat volcano that from time to time would erupt for no good reason at all. Worse, he was a smart son of a bitch, meaning it was only a matter of time before he caught on to our chasing after a ghost.

Then, as these things so often go, opportunity landed on our laps with a loud thud. It was about four a.m. when what sounded like a lunatic throwing himself at the glass doors of my balcony woke me up. I was about to jump out of bed to see, but then there was a series of bright flashes in my window followed by a dozen booms. Doing exactly what they tell you not to do, I got up on my knees to look out the window. The hill below me was on fire. It looked like we'd just been hit by a barrage from a Stalin organ—a 132mm Katyusha multiple rocket launcher. They're not accurate, but they do get one's attention.

I thought about the “Welcome to Beirut” kit I'd found in my apartment when I first moved in. Among other helpful hints for coping with their fair city, it recommended crawling to the center of your apartment during a shelling. I thought about doing it, but it was now dead quiet. With the shelling apparently over, I went back to bed.

As I found out later, the people at the other end of the Stalin organ belonged to a Shiite militia that had just made the mistake of going to war with Hezbollah. In some contorted, make-your-hair-hurt Oriental machination, they thought that if they could start a war with the Christians they'd somehow divert Hezbollah's attention. It was as if the United States had decided to bomb Mexico to keep the Japanese from attacking Pearl Harbor. And indeed, it made not the slightest difference; the fighting only picked up and spread.

To make a long story short, Hajj Radwan was sucked into it, taking over a unit fighting south of Beirut. But much more important for our plans, Hezbollah enlisted him to secretly procure emergency supplies of weapons and ammunition from an old contact, a Christian warlord. (Although it was all very hush-hush, the Christians were more than happy to help the Muslims kill one another.)

As we started to pick up details about these transfers from chatter, it occurred to me that Hajj Radwan had just been offered up to me on a silver platter. Who would have ever thought a Christian warlord would be his soft underbelly? I felt like the Israelis must have when they found out about the Red Prince's visit to his mother or the IRA when they found out about Thatcher's Brighton speech.

For a while, I considered approaching the Christian warlord to ask him to do the job, but then I thought better of it. A wise man knows better than to come between a beast and his red meat, namely all the money the Christian warlord stood to make from Hajj Radwan. No, I'd have to do the hard work myself.

It took about a month, but I finally caught one of Hajj Radwan's people in a walkie-talkie discussion of a specific arms transfer that would be staged from a particular house on the Muslim side of the Green Line. I knew the house.