The Perfect Kill (5 page)

But it wasn't as if I entertained any illusion that holing up in the Christian enclave kept me a hundred percent safe. Directly down the hill from me was the bombed-out American embassy annex, now a forlorn carcass. With its siding completely stripped off, it looked like an abandoned parking structure. I often thought of it as an architectural statement that Hajj Radwan could come get us any damn time he pleased. It's pretty much what he was doing to the French.

About the time I arrived in Beirut, Hajj Radwan was in the middle of a bloody campaign against France, hijacking French airliners and setting off bombs in Paris. Along with it, he'd taken to picking off French officials in Beirut, one after the other. In the course of a year, he assassinated one military attaché, one intelligence operative, and three gendarmes. The gendarmes were killed less than a mile from my apartment. Who knows exactly how he managed it, but Hajj Radwan clearly had free run of the Christian enclave. He reminded me of a shark that keeps to the depths and only breaks surface to strike; he knew our world, but we didn't know his.

What certainly helped, as I'll keep pointing out, is that Hajj Radwan didn't care about the personal trappings of power and money. He never felt he needed to ape the ways of Lebanon's warlords, racing around town in their Range Rovers and firing Kalashnikovs out the window into the air. He didn't keep bowing and scraping aides around him. And there was no tossing gold coins from his purse or beating his chest to remind people of who he was. For instance, although it was a spectacular, history-altering attack, he never did claim responsibility for the Marine barracks bombing. In fact, his name can only be attached to it by the flimsiest of hearsay.

Hajj Radwan lived a monk's life, or at least he did in the early days. He preferred a shared taxi to his own car and lived in small, cramped
apartments without air-conditioning or central heating. By shunning Beirut's flashy restaurants and nightclubs, places where people go to be seen, and all the other status symbols of Beirut's villains and plutocrats, he freed himself up for the business at hand—murdering his enemies.

Hajj Radwan wouldn't even allow his name to appear on Hezbollah's internal organizational charts. On the rare occasion he needed to visit an official Hezbollah facility, he arranged in advance for an escort to walk him past the guards. No questions asked or answers proffered. It was as if he were just a guy who'd wandered in off the street.

Hajj Radwan didn't carry a gun. He knew that wannabes strap on a Glock to let people know they're not to be fucked with. Guns may be an indispensable credential for the insecure, but they're one more marker to avoid.

The same standard held for the rest of Hajj Radwan's people. They lived life as nonentities, often in apparent poverty, below remark or notice. When they needed to, they adopted the protective coloration of the law-abiding bourgeoisie. From examining telephone records, it was determined the on-the-ground coordinator of Hariri's murder—Hajj Radwan's brother-in-law—had posed as a nouveau riche Armenian jeweler living in a Christian neighborhood. Although there wasn't a drop of Christian blood in him, the gold cross around his neck and a self-taught Christian accent were enough to fool even the wary. He threw more dust in people's eyes by owning a large pleasure yacht, keeping the company of beautiful women, and spending his nights at the Casino du Liban. (On the basis of the telephone analysis, he coordinated Hariri's assassination from the casino.)

To reduce his footprint to nothing, Hajj Radwan cut off contact with even his family. It meant no Sunday barbecues, no weddings, no funerals, ever. He never set foot in his home village because he had to anticipate that the Israelis would have placed a mole there whose sole task was to alert them to his visits.

It wasn't for a lack of trying that the CIA couldn't get a fix on Hajj
Radwan. Over the years, it canvassed every tough, greedy profession in its hunt for Hajj Radwan, from heroin peddling to arms dealing. But no matter what amount of money was put on the table, the CIA always came up empty-handed—not even the thinnest lead, let alone one that would allow it to grab him.

For the longest time, rumor had it that Hajj Radwan had undergone plastic surgery in order to assume an entirely fresh identity. But after his death, when pictures of him were put up around Beirut, it was obvious this wasn't true. It was rather a case of Hajj Radwan's having truly mastered the art of invisibility.

What it all comes back to is that he knew our world, but there was no way for us to know his.

Hajj Radwan didn't grow up in a Palestinian refugee camp, but his Beirut slum might as well have been one. It was a world of crushing poverty—sewers running out onto dirt streets, piles of burning trash, the din of despair and lost lives. Electricity and water were sporadic, often out for days at a time. I never saw Hajj Radwan's house, but I didn't need to, to know it was a cold freeze in the winter, a bagel oven in the summer.

Insular and forced in on itself, Hajj Radwan's slum was as deep and black a hole as Ayn al-Hilweh. Any outsider who made the mistake of wandering in would be immediately confronted and interrogated. As for an American like me, he'd be ipso facto taken as a spy, arrested, and hauled off to a Hezbollah prison.

It was easier for me to see Hajj Radwan by seeing what he wasn't.
Escaping poverty was all but impossible for poor Shiites. When the war got bad, there wasn't the money to pick up and flee to London or Paris as the rich Christians did. Lebanese colonies in Africa were an escape for some. But in a place like Kano, Nigeria, life was no less precarious than it was in Lebanon. The better alternative was to stay put and defend the little you did possess, even at the risk of violent death.

In Hajj Radwan's world there was no time for our preciosity and abstract political fancies, things like the Clash of Civilizations, Progress, and Universal Justice. People didn't have the time to read
The New York Review of Books
or talk about the Academy Awards, write blogs about their inner turmoil, or take off a year to find themselves.

Call it a natural advantage or a disease, but for poor Shiites in Hajj Radwan's slum, reality let them know exactly what they were worth. Without crutches such as trust funds for the wealthy or social safety nets for the poor, profligacy wasn't an option. With few chances coming along in life, you knew you absolutely had to take the ones that did. While we in the West go to sleep thinking about what we've lost, Lebanon's poor Shiites stay awake dreaming about what's to be gained.

Straight-up politics wasn't a salvation either. The Shiites knew from hard experience that elections are rigged or bought, justice is a luxury for the rich, and the rule of law is a deceit perpetuated to keep down the weak. The few Shiites lucky enough to make it to the top immediately forgot their roots and started to sing the elite's tune and devote themselves to their comforts and entertainment.

What the Shiites had left was the extended family, clan, and tribe. As in Homeric Greece, all satisfaction came from blood ties—livelihood, work, duty, social ties, and even relations with God. In Arabic, there's a word for it—
asabiyyah
. Tribal solidarity. A sort of esprit de corps, I guess you could call it. The Sicilians have something like it,
sangu du me sangu
. Blood of my blood.

With tribal solidarity comes the notion that there can be only one
undisputed chief, the tribe's shepherd. Invested in him is every important decision related to the tribe's welfare and security, especially decisions related to war and peace. His decisions are personal and binding; he's prosecutor, jury, and judge. Something like homicide isn't a crime in the public sense, but rather a personal matter for the chief to decide—name the transgression and then decide the appropriate penalty.

It's a world where power is never ambiguous, words are meaningless, and the act alone counts. There are no second-place finishes, no also-rans, no consolation prizes, no satisfaction from straddling the top of the bell curve. The only thing that matters is authentic, unadulterated power—holding on to what you have and usurping more given the opportunity. Those who can't adapt to the world as it is are doomed to misery and early death.

Guesses will always be guesses, but I believe it's in this context that we need to view Hajj Radwan's attempt on Ambassador Phil Habib. It goes some of the way in answering the question why Hajj Radwan didn't murder the first American he came across in Beirut. There were hundreds of them wandering around, all blissfully unaware of Hajj Radwan's existence, let alone knowing that he might have an interest in killing them. If he'd taken this route, he would have racked up a much higher body count.

There was the obvious symbolism of destroying a building belonging to the American government, but I suspect it's more complex than that. In his attempt on Habib, Hajj Radwan almost surely hoped that by making it personal—decapitate the invading enemy—his act would be a stronger incentive for the Americans to decamp and go home. Killing a second secretary from the American embassy or a spook like me lacked the act's full import. In Hajj Radwan's world, you kill the owner, not his dog.

Theory aside, what's for certain is that Hajj Radwan didn't learn
about the instrumentalities of murder at the polo club. He arose out of a world whose insides are blackened by murder and poverty, where beautiful theories are burned to a crisp, and easy-to-come-by morality is slain by brute fact. It's a world where people survive solely thanks to their reptilian instincts, and by sticking to the essential . . . and definitely not by throwing money at a problem.

The day Chuck and I decided to murder Hajj Radwan, we knew we had to find a way to inhabit his world. Unfortunately, this meant entertaining something like empathy for his point of view, including his politics. When you caricature and vilify people, it makes them hard to see, and even harder to get a clean shot at.

Long ago I realized that holing up in some cloistered office, watching CNN, reading regurgitated analysis, and attending vapid meetings in Washington were not going to put me in Hajj Radwan's world. No, getting a feel for a strange tribe is really hard work. You have to eat their food, pray in their mosques, and consort with their women.
Shum al-hawah,
as the Lebanese say. Breathe the air. You need to get to a point where nothing an enemy can say or do will ever come as a surprise to you.

I never flattered myself that I could go completely native, crawl into the skin of a tribe like Hajj Radwan's, and arrive at the undiluted truth. Lawrence of Arabia got a lot deeper into the Arab mind than I ever would, but he never did truly come to understand the Arabs. I consoled myself with the thought that it wasn't a deal breaker. I'm no anthropologist, and like I said, all I really needed to do was understand Hajj Radwan well enough to figure out his next destination and get there before he did.

One thing it meant was I had to erase every prejudice I had, such as when America murders abroad, it's benevolent, but when the locals do it, it's terror. I had to treat Hajj Radwan as a rational human capable of accurately calculating his own interests and then finding the most efficient means of furthering them.

Hajj Radwan didn't murder Americans because he hated their culture or their freedoms. He didn't have the time or inclination to murder for “values.” He didn't give a damn about American women wearing skimpy bikinis to the beach. (Lebanese women wear a lot skimpier ones, and he never said a word about it.) He didn't kill Israelis because he hated Jews, but because they were an occupying power.

Hajj Radwan possessed a neat, clean hatred, which translated into driving the odious foreign invader from his land. It was a straight-line calculation, which, like I said, very much accorded with the Lao assassins' point of view. Again, he made an attempt on Ambassador Habib because he believed it was the shortest and most expeditious means to persuade the Americans to leave. He kidnapped the CIA chief because he thought it would shut down the CIA in Lebanon, or at least force it back behind high walls and, in the bargain, blind it. (By the way, it worked.)

Power alone mattered to Hajj Radwan, usurping and preserving it. It's why he never picked fights over personal slights, historical wrongs, or whims. When the Israelis murdered his brother, he didn't retaliate. By both necessity and design, he tailored assassination to obtain well-defined and tangible objectives—seize a strategic position, assassinate a particularly effective captain to demoralize the enemy's troops, hit at an enemy's most vulnerable point to disrupt its ranks.

Who knows whether Hajj Radwan read Machiavelli, but it's clear that he shared the belief that power is the ability to hurt others. And the more discerning you are about it, the more power you win. Hajj Radwan didn't assassinate the Swedish ambassador because Sweden possesses
no power anyone would want to usurp. But more to the point, Sweden wasn't foolish enough to invade Lebanon.

The point of it all is, if Chuck and I had any chance of pulling this off, we'd have to infiltrate the enemy's camp—that is, mentally.

It's an efficient act—cheap, fast, scalable. Only take on baggage as needed. Throw money at it and you're guaranteed to screw it up.

I'd guess I'm not the only sad bastard on earth who has suffered through a baleful Christmas en famille. In my family, at least, there was always some poor soul who seemed to catch a couple of well-grouped shots (metaphorically speaking). And by the way, it didn't always occur around the family hearth.

I'll never forget one Christmas when Mother took down a big-name Broadway producer. We were spending Christmas in Klosters, Switzerland, at the staid old Chesa Grischuna. I was ten. As was Mother's wont, she introduced herself around and soon became friendly with the Broadway producer and his wife. Right away Mother had her suspicions about the man, how at night he'd disappear after dinner on mysterious errands.

With her unerring smell for philanderers, she finagled it out of the assistant manager that the husband paid him fifty francs to leave a
window open at night so he could sneak in after the hotel's front door was locked. Mother outbid the producer with a crisp new hundred-franc note, persuading the assistant manager to lock the window instead of leaving it open. The next day the producer and his wife abruptly checked out.

I won't even get into whether he deserved it or not; I suspect the couple were already having their problems. But the point is, a fifty-franc prime was enough to do the trick. (In those days it wasn't much more than ten dollars.)

What I'm trying to get at is that life is a lot more fragile than we care to admit. Let me go back to real murder. An ice pick through the medulla oblongata is a hundred percent fatal, for instance. Or jabbing the femoral artery with a penknife. And if you don't want to get caught, an injection of the nucleoside adenosine into the nictitating membrane on the inside of the eye will do it. If you use a tiny .50-gauge needle, no coroner will ever spot it.

For the assassin, what it means is that it's not the taking of life that's difficult, but rather doing it with a well-defined purpose, namely, preserve force and avoid war.
Le mot juste
over a slap across the face, a dagger over a nuke. Always the efficiency of it.

Paris, July 13, 1793: The following story is familiar enough, but it's not without its lessons.

By 1793, the French Revolution's shine had definitely started to dim. The guillotine was no longer a novelty, and the rosy promise of
liberté
,
egalité
, and
fraternité
was seen for the charade it was. On top of everything else, Paris was oppressively hot that summer. Rain clouds squatted just west of the city, lightning spidered the sky, and thunder echoed through the streets like kettledrums. But it stubbornly refused to rain. Another unfulfilled promise.

On the morning of July 13, a beautiful young woman in white made her way through the brooding and ornate Palais Royal. Or maybe she was in blue, as some painters have portrayed her. Or maybe even in pea green. For that matter, who knows whether she was really beautiful or not. Doesn't political murder always assume a dramatic and exotic patina after the act?

What's for certain is that the young woman's name was Charlotte Corday. Of Norman gentry, she was a descendant of Corneille, one of France's greatest dramatists. Benefiting (or suffering) from a classical education, she would say afterward that her decision had been influenced by antiquity, namely Caesar's assassins who'd attempted to save the Republic. In one bloody act, she'd do the same for France.

At some point, Corday stopped to buy a black bonnet decorated with a green ribbon and a knife with a five-inch blade. The purchase of the knife would soon be explained, but why the bonnet?

From the Palais Royal she walked to the Cordeliers district, a part of Paris known for its radical politics. She was in search of the house of Jean-Paul Marat, a fierce, unyielding revolutionary. A doctor turned journalist, he wielded a pen dipped in acid. He believed that any Frenchman who harbored doubts about the revolution deserved to have his head separated from his neck.

Marat himself was something of an assassin. Before the revolution, he'd once applied to become a member of the Academy of Sciences, but being a doctor of middling ability who entertained bizarre theories about “animal magnetism,” he was rejected. Antoine Lavoisier, one of the fathers of chemistry, was a member of the academy at the time, and, in what turned out to be a fatal mistake, he ridiculed Marat's theories—in public. Although Lavoisier was guillotined under the pretext of corruption, it was Marat's old grudge that sealed his fate.

As a Jacobin deputy, Marat should have been at the National Convention rather than at home. But he suffered from an acute case of psoriasis, a disfiguring and painful disease that forced him to spend days in a
medicinal bath. Wrapping a vinegar-soaked cloth around his head also helped. But there was nothing to do about the heat, which made his psoriasis nearly intolerable.

Corday's original plan had been to assassinate Marat at the National Convention, resigning herself to certain arrest and the guillotine. But isn't sacrifice implicit in the deal? She only changed her plans after she found out that Marat was ill at home. So it was there she'd do the deed.

Marat's fiancée's sister turned Corday away at the door, telling her that he was too ill to see anyone. Corday went back to her lodgings and wrote a letter addressed to Marat, falsely claiming she had in her possession a list of names of dangerous counterrevolutionaries. When Marat didn't answer, she wrote a second letter, claiming she was being persecuted and needed his help.

It then occurred to Corday that she needed to write her final testament to the French people, explaining her motivations for murdering Marat. She pinned it to her dress, along with her baptism certificate, and retraced her steps to Marat's house.

Corday was again turned away at the door, but thanks to a distraction caused by a delivery, she slipped through the door and made her way to Marat's quarters. He was in his bath, a board across it covered with letters and papers.

Corday said something about the list of counterrevolutionaries. Looking at her with curiosity, Marat said something about how they'd soon enough lose their heads. Without warning, Corday produced her five-inch knife and plunged it into his neck, just above the collarbone. It severed a main artery and collapsed a lung. Marat quickly bled to death.

As portrayed in one nineteenth-century painting, the beautiful Corday stands behind Marat, staring away, the bloody knife about to drop from her hand. His lifeless body twisted over the edge of his bathtub. A beautiful murderess is a subject compelling enough. But wasn't Marat's murder also a cautionary tale to the powerful and arrogant that an innocent young woman, armed with only a common kitchen knife, is
capable of striking at the heart of power? Corday might not have killed the French Revolution, but she did put it on notice.

Beirut, November 1986: It took me less than a week after I arrived in Beirut to decide my most valuable possession was a telephone that all on its own tirelessly dialed a number until someone picked up at the other end. With Beirut's telephone exchanges shot-up and barely limping along, it was the only practical way to make a call.

I kept the telephone in the middle of my desk as a reminder that my first chore every morning was to get ahold of at least one person. Normally, it was to set up a meeting with a source. I'd punch in the number, turn the speaker on, and go about my business, keeping one ear cocked for the sound of someone at the other end. It took me sometimes four or five hours to ring through to a telephone only a mile away. Reaching a number at the far end of Lebanon could take a week or more.

I knew it wasn't the best idea to call my sources from a telephone line connected to any American . . . if for no other reason than the United States was effectively party to the Lebanese Civil War. But for what it's worth, there wasn't in those days a functioning Lebanese government to eavesdrop on my calls. Even if by chance it did, the government was on our side. Or, as I'll get to, sort of.

But now that we'd made the decision to assassinate Hajj Radwan, it was time to cut out the lax bullshit. I had to anticipate that Hajj Radwan would start to hear echoes of my plans and then quickly move to tap my magic phone. It would have been as simple as recruiting a mole in the local telephone exchange, have him hang a wire on my line, run the wire to a tape recorder, and voilà, my Rolodex would be in Hajj Radwan's hot little hands. From there—if I was right about how smart this guy was—it wouldn't be long before everything unraveled. So, rather than call my
sources from my trusty phone, I'd now have to adopt the practice of showing up at their front doors. Or signal them by moving a geranium pot in my window. Either way, the phone had to go.

By now the skeptical reader might start to wonder just how deep my paranoia ran in those days. But there's this in my defense: A year after the 1984 kidnapping of Beirut's CIA chief, Bill Buckley, we still had no idea who'd taken him or where he was being held. Then one day a friendly Arab government stepped forward to tell us in total confidence that it was someone called Hajj Radwan who'd grabbed him. We pleaded for details, but a name was all they'd give us.

At first, there was some doubt whether Hajj Radwan really existed. We'd never heard the name before, in any shape or form. So we ran it by the Lebanese police, who to our surprise said that, indeed, they did have a record for such a person—a passport application with a black-and-white photo attached. The police faxed us a copy of both. The photo was grainy, but staring out of it was a fierce, slender young man with a neatly trimmed beard.

The police agreed to let us photograph the original picture if we'd send someone down. But when one of our people showed up with a camera, the police red-facedly explained that in the interim both the application and the photo had disappeared. There was no point in rubbing their noses in it, but the only conclusion we could come up with was that Hajj Radwan had a mole inside the police, who was placed well enough to find out about our interest in him and who had enough chutzpah to steal his application and picture. It's sort of as if bin Laden were to have had an assistant FBI director on the books doing his blocking for him.

My paranoia about Hajj Radwan wasn't diminished by the fact that in a storeroom next to my office sat a suitcase full of Bill Buckley's clothes. They were kept there for when he was released. While no one put any real stock in that anymore, the suitcase was a daily reminder that Hajj Radwan could get to any one of us. (It would later be established that Buckley died of pneumonia in 1985 while still under Hajj Radwan's control.)

It was of constant interest to me how Hajj Radwan had been able to identify Buckley. As best I could piece together, he had someone at the airport able to observe the comings and goings at the VIP area, especially when Buckley accompanied his Lebanese counterparts to the airport to send them off to the United States. As I was told by my own source at the airport, Buckley might as well have tattooed his forehead:
Hey, guys, I'm a very important American spy with important friends
.

We also learned that Hajj Radwan could get into all immigration entry and exit records and flight reservations. Couple that with all of the other moles he riddled the Lebanese government with, and Buckley must have looked to him like a big fat fish in a very small fishbowl.

It didn't help that Buckley always wore a starched shirt, pressed suit, and tie. This was in crisp contrast to most foreigners in Beirut who favored the scruffy look—jeans, denim shirts, scuffed shoes. Buckley's living in a tony neighborhood in a grand apartment with a splendid view of the Mediterranean was another telltale marker. On top of it, Buckley kept to an unvarying schedule, leaving and coming home at exactly the same time. Even his most unobservant neighbors wondered who this disciplined man might be.

How exactly Hajj Radwan added it up to correctly pinpoint Buckley as the CIA chief, I don't know. It could have been thanks to tapping his phone. But it didn't matter because I'd firmly made up my mind to reverse Buckley's modus operandi by 180 degrees, to find a way out of the comfortable, habitual world most foreigners in Beirut so easily slip into. Part of it would be dumping my automated telephone. More strategically, I'd have to take a dive down the status ladder, turn myself into a complete nonentity, someone no one wanted to waste a good bullet on.

Although a proper assassination shouldn't come with a big price tag, and I was no Charlotte Corday, it definitely helped that money wasn't a problem. When I telexed Langley that I needed to buy a dozen old apartments in the bad parts of town to mix up where I slept nights, the money was immediately authorized. (If an expense was tied to a “security
upgrade,” Langley bitched but felt compelled to approve it.) It helped that in those days you could buy a bottom-end apartment in Beirut for under ten thousand dollars.

I asked a good contact to put the apartments in his name. With a reputation as a swordsman, he came up with the pretext that he needed them to “entertain friends.” I directed him to neighborhoods along the Green Line, all more or less vacated since the start of the civil war. They were as disregarded and invisible as Hajj Radwan's slum.

It wasn't long before my trusted cat's paw came up with a half-dozen places no self-respecting Lebanese would set foot in—bullet-pocked, windows shot out, front doors blown off their hinges by rockets. None had running water or electricity. The dirt-poor refugees reduced to taking shelter in them minded their own business and pointedly ignored the odd foreigner (me) who'd show up from time to time.