The Perfect Kill (8 page)

The longer it went without my stumbling across a single piece of “actionable intelligence,” the more I understood how hard it was to hit a fast-moving and unpredictable target. While chatter put me in the picture, it didn't put me in the game. No, I'd need a body with a pulse and a brain to tell me where Hajj Radwan would be on a certain day at a certain time, just as Herrhausen's assassin knew with near certainty when he'd be coming down the street. I knew I'd need to recruit a source close to him.

Kigali, Rwanda, April 6, 1994: The assassin has to be able to play in every key and on every scale, and smoothly adapt to changing circumstance and opportunity, just as he must build in layers of redundancy into every moving part. While a blinkered, one-trick assassin might get lucky, it's the assassin prepared for every eventuality who's most likely to succeed.

The story has it that the night the president of Rwanda was assassinated, his wife was in their solarium, searching the sky for her husband's jet, a Falcon 50. It was due in from Dar es Salaam at any moment. Riding on the plane with her husband was the president of Burundi, seven other passengers, and three French crew.

She, like a lot of other people, had heard there'd been an important breakthrough at Dar—a power-sharing agreement that would reconcile Rwanda's two largest tribes, the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis. She wasn't happy about it. While her husband was a moderate Hutu, she thought the despised Tutsis deserved nothing.

For neutral observers, an agreement between the Hutus and Tutsis would be a badly needed correction to Rwanda's unfortunate colonial
past. During their nearly half-century rule, the Belgians took Machiavelli at his most cynical, favoring the minority Tutsis in a deliberate, invidious strategy of divide and rule—all so they could loot the country undisturbed. The losers, the Hutus, were left to simmer in fury and patiently plan their revenge. And, unlike their Hutu president who preferred the olive branch over the gun, few were in the mood for compromise.

At about twenty-five after eight, the Falcon 50's lights could be seen circling the Kigali airport. Because a Falcon's engines emit a distinctive whine, everyone knew it was the president's plane. And anyhow, Kigali isn't a busy airport, making a small passenger jet a rarity.

As the jet came in for a landing, a silver knifepoint raced up into the sky, heading right for the Falcon 50. As these things so often go, time seemed to slow down. Maybe they'd pass each other, people thought. Maybe it's a test or something. But the Falcon 50's and the missile's paths continued toward their fatal intersection.

Some witnesses said that the plane's lights went out first, the engines fell silent, and then a giant orange ball of flame filled the sky. But could it have really happened in that sequence? Others remember only an explosion and then silence. What everyone agrees on is that there was a second streak of light and a second explosion—a second missile.

Half the city watched as the fiery wreckage fell from the sky without a sound, ironically coming to earth in the presidential garden at the feet of the president's wife. Did she flinch or smile?

UN forces were blocked from entering the part of the airport where the two missiles apparently had been fired from. They could only assume Rwandan soldiers had fired them, and the Rwandans didn't want the UN poking around to confirm it.

When the Hutus started to systemically massacre the Tutsis, it was apparent the president's assassination had served as a prearranged signal for genocide. With anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million killed, it was the last great genocide of the twentieth century.

What did the wife know in advance? There are people convinced she
was in on her husband's assassination. Why else would she have been in the solarium that night other than to witness with her own eyes her husband's end?

What is certain is that her husband's assassins knew what they were doing. They blended redundancy (two missiles), technical sophistication (the missiles' heat-seeking guidance system), and predictability (hitting the Falcon 50 on its approach path).

Always appear to be rock steady, rational, bound by your word. It will terrify your enemy as much as the act itself. And when the shooting stops and it's time to talk, he'll welcome you as a trustworthy interlocutor.

Beirut, March 8, 1985: At a little after nine in the morning, a Lebanese general called his American contact in Beirut. There was an urgent piece of business they needed to discuss, he said. And it couldn't be done over the phone.

Since the name of the American isn't important, I'll loan him one, Charlie. His organizational affiliation isn't important either. As for the Lebanese general, I'll leave him as the General.

Charlie looked at the stack of unanswered cables on his desk and thought about how shitty the traffic would be this time of the morning. There wasn't a single working stoplight between his office and the
General's, which sat in the foothills overlooking Beirut. It would take him at least an hour to get there.

“How about later this afternoon?” Charlie asked.

“No,” the General said.

“The traffic's—”

“No. Get up here. Now.”

The General had never pressed Charlie like this, making him wonder what could've gone wrong. It was all the odder considering that the Lebanese army was officered mainly by Christians and was in those days fawningly beholden to the United States. They looked at us as the only thing preventing the Muslims from swarming over the walls and cutting their throats.

Charlie caught the first traffic on the coast road, then a bottleneck at Chevrolet Circle. It took him a good fifteen minutes to get through it, and another ten to get up the hill to the General's office. The General's aide was waiting for him and ran over and opened Charlie's door: “Hurry! Run!”

They took the stairs two at a time. The General was out on the terrace, looking through a pair of binoculars, Beirut spread out below him like a cadaver on a slab. A compact man with close-cropped hair, the General's French-tailored suit fit him impeccably.

Just as Charlie joined the General on his balcony, a flash of light shot out from a cluster of dun tenements in the southern suburbs, instantly followed by the crack of an explosion. A fountain of ash smoke rose from next to a mosque. Laundry that had been hanging from balconies floated languidly to the ground.

The General and Charlie watched silently as the smoke fanned out across the southern suburbs. Charlie estimated the charge at several thousand pounds—a blast radius of an entire city block.

Charlie waited for the General to say something, but he was absorbed, looking through his binoculars. The phone in the office rang. The General handed Charlie the binoculars and went inside to answer it.

The General came back out on the balcony smiling: “At least fifty.”

“Fifty what?”

“Fifty of them for the two hundred forty-one Marines they killed.”

With a sinking feeling, it occurred to Charlie that he'd just witnessed a revenge attack for the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that had occurred a year and a half before. Although the General didn't say it, the only reasonable explanation was that the Lebanese army had been behind the bombing he'd just witnessed. But what had been the target?

While no one had been arrested for the attack on the Marines, the assumption was that Shiite militants in the pay of Iran had done it. The Marines would be claimed by the same fictitious group that claimed the April 1983 American embassy bombing, the Islamic Jihad Organization. As we'd come to learn, Hajj Radwan headed the IJO. Fine, but what Charlie couldn't understand was what the IJO had to do with the people who'd just been murdered. Had their office been bombed or something?

It wasn't until he got back to his office that Charlie found out that the target of the car bomb he'd just witnessed was Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, Lebanon's only ayatollah. He survived only thanks to well-wishers delaying him outside a mosque where he'd just delivered a sermon. The final toll was never officially established, but it was put at about eighty, many of them women and children. (This is the same bombing that Hezbollah would accuse me twenty-six years later of orchestrating.)

As best Charlie could determine, the Lebanese army had decided to murder Fadlallah for no other reason than every Friday he would stand in his pulpit and rail against Israel, the United States, and the Lebanese Christians. A blowtorch of hate, he was Lebanon's face of militant Islam.

The problem was there was no good evidence Fadlallah had anything to do with the attack on the Marines nor, for that matter, with any other attack on the United States. As we would determine, he was only the militants' unwitting mouthpiece. Even more tellingly, the Iranians themselves at one point considered assassinating Fadlallah because he was an ideological rival to Iran's Supreme Leader, its ayatollah in chief.

And it only gets messier: At the time of the attack, Hajj Radwan was in charge of Fadlallah's security. Where he was when the bomb went off, we don't know. But what we knew for certain was that it was Hajj Radwan who led the investigation and the arrest and execution of some dozen suspects.

If the Fadlallah attempt had been purely a Lebanese affair, it would have been an obscure footnote in Lebanon's history. But almost immediately word went around that the CIA was ultimately behind it. Rumor was taken as fact when Bob Woodward came out with his book
Veil
. In it he recounts how President Reagan's CIA director, Bill Casey, confessed on his deathbed that he, Casey, had personally ordered Fadlallah's assassination.

The CIA was left scratching its head. It knew it hadn't authorized Fadlallah's assassination. Was it possible that Casey had really told Woodward this? On the other hand, it didn't make much difference: The CIA was now indelibly painted with the same brush as the Lebanese army—clumsy thugs who didn't give a crap who they killed and maimed. Just as damaging, the Lebanese decided if Casey couldn't keep a secret, no one in the CIA could. It was something I had to learn to live with in Beirut.

Beirut, December 1986: The Colonel pulled out a piece of paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it, and smoothed it out on the coffee table between us. I got up and moved a table lamp closer for better light. It was a military map of downtown Beirut. Someone had drawn in the Green Line with a thick blue grease pencil.

The Colonel cut a distinguished figure—slim, graying at the temples, a granite jaw, starched fatigues. The only thing missing was a regimental mustache. He was a Sunni from the north. His unit, an infantry brigade, was now on rotation on the Green Line.

“Look at this,” he said.

He followed the Green Line with a finger until he came to where it jutted into the Christian lines like a fist punching through a curtain. “I intend to straighten it out right here. What do you think?”

It took me a moment before I figured out that he wanted my go-ahead to launch an attack to “straighten out” the Green Line. I can't remember which Muslim militia was on the other side, but I do remember wondering what kind of hell it would unleash.

I looked over at the Colonel to make sure he was serious. I'd only been introduced to him a couple of months before, not enough time to take his pulse. Maybe this was his idea of a joke. He hadn't touched his drink and was sober as far as I could tell.

“Aren't you asking the wrong person?” I said.

“I can't go to my command because they would only say no.”

The Colonel said he would pass off the attack as a firefight that had gotten out of control. No one would know any better. If I could get a green light, he'd make the attack early the next morning.

I was now thirty-four and should have been smart enough to tell the Colonel fuck no. Instead, I offered to meet back up at midnight with an answer. I didn't say it, but what I really wanted to do was let the deputy chief (the chief was out of the country) know that the Colonel was about to breathe life back into the civil war. We should probably give Langley a heads-up.

The deputy chief would have the right perspective on this, I thought. Like me, guns and violence didn't sit well with him. When he first arrived in Beirut and was given a standard-issue 9mm Browning, he started playing around with it and accidentally pulled the trigger and
put a hole in the ceiling. A major from Delta Force detailed to us cut a heart out of purple paper and pinned it over the hole. (The deputy's Purple Heart was still there the day I left Beirut.)

I gave the Colonel ten minutes to clear the building and then left. My first stop was Chuck's. In Beirut in those days, it was always better to move around in pairs. Chuck rolled his eyes when I told him I needed to ask the deputy permission to start World War III.

The question now became how to find the deputy. He was in the middle of a messy divorce and spent his nights catting around Beirut with young Lebanese girls. He'd lately fallen for a genuine beauty, which in turn led to his turning off his Motorola radio. A girl with a lot of spirit, we called her Frittata. He would later marry her.

Frittata didn't like the deputy's regular haunts, which meant we had the entire Christian enclave to cover. It may have been tiny in terms of square miles, but it was thick with restaurants and nightclubs.

We started out with the French restaurants along the Dog River. They were mostly empty, and it didn't take long to figure out the deputy and Frittata weren't there. Nor were they at the usual places in Kaslik or the half-dozen seaside restaurants they frequented. It was time to recalibrate our sights.

The first strip club we stopped at was like a dank cave, a couple of lurid mauve bulbs hanging from wires behind the bar. In the back near the toilets there was a glass disco floor, colored strobe lights flashing underneath in time with ABBA's “Dancing Queen.” A slender Filipina in a bikini was dancing by herself, a languid beat behind the music.

I spotted our administrative officer at the end of the bar. A short, heavyset man, he was in his usual mechanic's jumpsuit. He'd served a handful of tours in Vietnam where he'd acquired a taste for Asian girls. Lizard-still, he stared at the Filipina.

I sauntered over to him while Chuck stayed in the door, his hand under his vest, gripping his SIG Sauer semiautomatic pistol. I whispered in the administrative officer's ear that I needed to find the deputy.

Not taking his eyes off the Filipina, he said: “Do you see him? Go fuck off.”

I was about to ask him if he'd help us look for the deputy—drinks on me—but Chuck in the meantime had decided he didn't like the looks of a pair sitting in a dark corner. I grabbed Chuck by the elbow and pulled him outside before the SIG Sauer came out.

A half-dozen girlie bars later, I decided I was too tired to care whether the Green Line was jagged or straight. Anyhow, I had to get back for my meeting with the Colonel.

The Colonel listened impassively as I suggested that it was his decision alone whether to straighten out the Green Line or not, but I added that, personally, I didn't think it was a good idea. Who cared whether the Green Line was straight or jagged? He threw down his scotch, then told me he needed to get back to his troops.

As I let him out the door, it occurred to me that, now he'd let me into his circle of violence, I'd let him into mine.

The apartment where I normally met the Colonel was in an upscale building about three miles up the coast from Jounieh. Designed in a quarter circle, every apartment faced the sea. It came with an elegant tiled pool and a small harbor for residents to dock their boats. As I figured out, most of the neighbors used the apartments as fuck pads. Fine, but what I couldn't figure out was why they called them “chalets.”

By our meeting the following week, the Colonel still hadn't straightened out the Green Line, and he never would. I thought about asking why the change of heart, but instead I poured him a tall whiskey. I picked out a fresh cigar from the humidor, clipped off the end, and handed it to him along with a box of long matches.

As he lit his cigar, I slipped a plain envelope across the coffee table,
noting that there was an extra thousand dollars in it. I didn't say why, and he didn't ask. I lighted my own cigar. Aren't these things meant to give you time to formulate your thoughts?

“Do you want some real work?” I finally asked.

The question wasn't without its archaeology. For some time now, the Colonel had been telling me he intended to retire to Atlanta but that he first wanted to do an important service for the United States. It was up to us to decide what that service would be.

I pulled out of my backpack an eight-by-eleven manila envelope and pulled from it Hajj Radwan's picture—a copy of the same grainy passport picture the police had faxed to us. Enlarged, it made Hajj Radwan look even angrier and more menacing than the original fax. I turned it around so that the Colonel could take a good look.

He held it up in his hand to study it, then looked over at me: “I don't know him.”

I would soon regret it, but I decided that full disclosure was in order. I told him how Hajj Radwan had kidnapped Buckley and very well might have been behind the attack on the Marines and the two embassy bombings. I even told him the story of how he'd arranged to snatch the original application from the jaws of the police. As I went on, the Colonel never took his eyes off Hajj Radwan's picture.

I wrote out Hajj Radwan's name in Arabic on a three-by-five card and pushed it over the table to him. He picked it up and looked at it.

I filled up our glasses. “I need your help finding him.”

“I don't know where to start.”

“But you probably have soldiers who do, maybe even some from his neighborhood.”