The Perfect Kill (23 page)

It didn't take long for data analytics to connect the young man to Hajj Radwan and the rest of the Ayn al-Dilbah Gang. When Hajj Radwan realized what was happening, he no doubt recognized it as the smoking gun he'd tried so hard never to leave behind. And that's exactly what that one two-minute call was.

Was Hajj Radwan surprised by the ensuing international investigation? He shouldn't have been. The West looked at Hariri as the Good Arab, a reasonable, cultivated man you could do business with. Moreover, he'd showered a lot of money on the powerful, from French presidents to Washington's favorite charities. Which added up to his murder being an unforgivable snub to the West, making a UN investigation all but inevitable.

A guess is always a guess, but mine is that Hajj Radwan was dumbfounded by how fast things turned to shit. Who would ever have thought an Arab dictatorship such as Syria would be forced to do anything under pressure from the street, not to mention be destabilized by it? Not everyone will agree, but some mark Hariri's assassination as the beginning of the Arab Spring. If true, Hariri's murder led to the wider conflict he had tried so hard to avoid. It's a 180-degree opposite of what the act was designed to do.

With Hariri's murder starting to look a lot like a rogue drone missile
circling around and ready to blow half way up his ass, Hajj Radwan had no choice but to clean up.

Beirut, October 19, 2012: Two years after Hariri's assassination, my eldest daughter, Justine, moved to Beirut to study for a master's degree and improve her Arabic. The day after Hezbollah took its shot at me on TV for helping the tribunal, I call her to suggest it might be a good time to give Lebanon a break. She laughs, asking me how could I possibly contribute to the Hariri investigation. After all, I hadn't lived in Lebanon in years. When I tell her that in order to live you have to walk backward, she doesn't get it. I tell her about my three-by-five cards, how Hariri's murder was rooted in the eighties when I was assigned to Beirut. She doesn't say anything, but then assures me she'll be fine.

A little more than a year later, Justine is at home in her apartment in Ashrafiyah when a terrible explosion nearby shakes the foundation of her building. She doesn't need anyone to tell her it was a car bomb. Her only question is who the target was.

The man assassinated was the police general in charge of the Hariri investigation. Seven other people were killed in the explosion. A Sunni and a Hariri loyalist, the general was the driving force behind the investigation, never letting up on the Hezbollah angle. He gave the tribunal every piece of intelligence he could put his hands on.

Although Hajj Radwan was nearly five years into the grave, his signature was all over the general's assassination—a car passing through a narrow defile. The general had returned to Beirut only the day before, an indication that his assassins' intelligence must have been very good. As for the motivation, everyone assumed it was to put the final nail in the Hariri investigation. And with no witness daring to travel to The Hague to give evidence before the court, it looks like it worked.

The first unmistakable sign Hariri's assassins were serious about shutting down the investigation came in the guise of another car bomb. It went off on January 25, 2008, killing the police officers involved in identifying the eight prepaid cell phones. Other murders followed in quick succession—the boy who sold the prepaid cell phones to Hajj Radwan's people died in a highly suspicious car accident; the team member who'd made the phone call to his girlfriend that morning reportedly was found on the side of a hill, dismembered; a Syrian general close to Hajj Radwan was found in his office shot six times. In all, there were a dozen or more murders related to the investigation. It was as if Al Capone had assassinated J. Edgar Hoover and then worked his way down the FBI's hierarchy, only stopping when the FBI raised a white flag.

Hajj Radwan's people also got into Lebanon's official databases and erased every immigration record, police file, intelligence file, phone record, and birth and death certificate that possibly could be used against Hajj Radwan. It reminded me of when Hajj Radwan had his passport records stolen.

In the end, the Lebanese got the message: “Competing” against Hajj Radwan was tantamount to a death sentence. He and his apparatus had turned on its head Stalin's dictum about the state being an instrument owned by the ruling class to break the resistance to that class. In their version, they broke the state's resistance.

Hajj Radwan died a hero to his cause. The way his face stares down from placards along the airport road, you'd think he'd been beatified. But in that same spirit, no one's about to point out the fact that he'd dug his own grave.

I can understand the “campaign desk” on display in his mausoleum and his special pencil box, but come on: a cell phone? Even Nasrallah
knew better than to carry one. An aide carried his, always at a distance well out of a drone missile's kill radius.

The easiest explanation is that when you're a player in the imperial center (Damascus) you don't have a choice. You can never know when you might get a call from the palace and be asked to pop up for a cup of tea and a chat with the president. The old Hajj Radwan, who once disappeared for months at a time, ignoring his paymasters, had finally been sucked into the machine.

The picture of Hajj Radwan that Hezbollah put up around Lebanon also surprised me. He's in a starched uniform, his beard stylishly trimmed, and he's wearing expensive designer glasses. He was no longer the humble tailor putting around on an old motor scooter. The only thing he's missing in the pictures is a rack of medals.

For me, it's more evidence that Hajj Radwan had been co-opted into the establishment, both in Damascus and Tehran. With all their petty ambitions, pretensions, and unfounded certitudes, those two capitals were the equivalent of Louis XVI's Versailles—an allure for the elite but poison for what the French call an
homme de terrain
, an operator. The pressure on Hajj Radwan to become a company man on company business must have been irresistible.

The other thing that spun out of Hajj Radwan's control were the crosscurrents of history. Well, actually, the Arab Spring turned out to be more like a lethal wind shear. He, like so many others, miscalculated the street, how easily the Sunnis were tipped into revolt, and how they were about to turn his ideas about political violence on their head. But it wasn't the first time he'd been caught crosswise of history. I'd seen it with my own eyes in Beirut, and in fact, it was that occasion that would give me my first and only clean shot I got at the bastard.

You're the enemy within, which means there's never a moment they're not trying to hunt you down to exterminate you. Hit before it's too late.

Beirut, November 22, 1989: The Lebanese had had it with their civil war. Well into its fourteenth year, the war had killed nearly 120,000 people and there was absolutely nothing to show for it. Only the most bloody-minded didn't want the Lebanese government back, warts and all. And indeed, the violence did seem to be ebbing, but not even the sunniest optimist thought the calm would hold.

When the time arrived for parliament to elect a new president, the delegates met at a remote military base, helicopters buzzing overhead and tanks prowling the perimeter. But the day passed as quiet as the grave. A lot of people thought it was thanks to Syria and the United
States compromising on a single candidate. Some even predicted he'd be the man to finally stand Lebanon back up on its own two feet.

In the name of caution, the newly elected president rarely left his palace. When he did, his motorcade routes were cleared of parked cars to prevent an assassin from turning one of them into a bomb. This offered the added advantage of allowing his motorcade to move at high speed. To prevent an inside job, his personal security people were all related by blood, cousins and second cousins. But what no one could do anything about was the official functions that the president felt obligated to preside at. It offered any would-be assassin a fixed place and time.

By Lebanese Independence Day—just seventeen days after the election—the president was a bit more at ease. The evening before, the Syrian intelligence chief had told him Syria wouldn't tolerate an attempt on his life. Anyone who posed a potential threat had been rounded up, he said. Considering that Syria occupied about a third of Lebanon, the Syrian intelligence chief's assurances carried a lot of weight in the president's mind. Who'd want a Syrian armored division bent on retribution coming down on his head? As the Syrian was about to leave, he proposed that one of his men accompany the president's convoy, both to the ceremony and then back to the palace.

It rained the night before, offering up a crystalline morning and a rich, benevolent sky. The snow-dusted mountains and the silver-flecked turquoise sea were a spectacular amphitheater for it all. When the band started to play the national anthem, the president had to hold back a tear. Afterward, he stopped to talk to old friends. Aides had to hurry him along, ushering him into a black Mercedes. He sat in the backseat.

The lead police car pulled away with a screech of tires and sirens wailing. The convoy moved through the cleared streets at a brisk fifty miles an hour, spreading out across two blocks. People tried to get a glimpse of their new president, but with the convoy's speed and nearly
identical cars with smoked windows, it was impossible to tell whose car was whose.

Just as the president's convoy started up a hill into Beirut's commercial center, there was a flash and a terrible trembling of the earth. It felt like a 747 had crashed somewhere nearby. At first, the only thing certain was that the convoy had been right in the middle of whatever it was.

As the smoke drifted off, it now was clear there had been an explosion. Several cars in the convoy were on fire. What was left of the president's security detail jumped out to check on the president, only to find his Mercedes gone. Vanished. They thought at first that the driver had taken advantage of the confusion to get away. But then someone noticed what was left of the Mercedes. It had been ripped in half, the pieces blown hundreds of feet away. The rear right door had taken the brunt of the explosion, exactly where the president had been sitting. A tank's armor wouldn't have saved him.

It turned out that an abandoned candy shop along the route had been packed with explosives, about a ton. But in order to concentrate the force into something like the size of a dinner plate, the assassins had molded the explosives into a conical hollow, a so-called shaped charge. Its force was such that it passed through one interior wall and then an exterior wall. But other than that, the investigators had nothing to go on. The firing device had been obliterated in the explosion. There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, no claims. Motive and intent were also a mystery.

The only thing clear was that it took talent to hit a car moving at fifty miles an hour, not to mention driving the explosion's force through two walls. The assassins clearly had had some sort of advanced military training. That and a lot of practice. But the real mystery stood: Who were these people capable of carrying off the assassination of a head of state in seventeen days?

—

A
lthough no one dared put it to paper, a few investigators thought they recognized the work of Hajj Radwan. By 1989 he'd mastered the art of shaped charges, thanks to experimenting with them on the Israeli army. He could hit any moving vehicle no matter the speed. He'd also picked up the technique of “enhancing” a charge by mixing heat-generating aluminum powder in with the explosives.

Years later, a high-ranking Lebanese intelligence officer would tell me he'd come across some chatter that put Hajj Radwan in the middle of the president's assassination. When I asked him why it had never come out in an official report, there was no mistaking the incredulity in his voice: “Don't you understand what these people are capable of?”

I tried to persuade him to give me more, but he wouldn't budge. In fact, he cautioned me not to write anything about Hajj Radwan—it could get me killed. When I asked him whether it might be worth calling the president's widow to get her opinion, he said he'd advise her not to talk to me.

I tried a couple of other people but had no luck. Most didn't even know who Hajj Radwan was, and they were content to blame Syria for the president's murder. Being a distant and clumsy enemy, Syria was a ready-made scapegoat. Who knows, there's always the possibility it was the Syrians who commissioned Hajj Radwan to do the job. Just as I suspect they'd done with Hariri.

It left me to speculate why Hajj Radwan—or whoever it was—would want to murder the president of Lebanon in the middle of a touch-and-go war with Israel. You'd think he'd have more important things to attend to than assassinating a man of little political significance. Why not finish off the Israelis first and then put Lebanon's house in order?

What I'm pretty sure was at play is the principle that assassination is an instrument that serves the powerful whose power goes unrecognized rather than the merely powerless. If I'm right about Hajj Radwan's part
in it, he murdered the Lebanese president to put the Lebanese statists on notice that they could forget about their fantasies of getting their state back. He and Hezbollah were in charge now, and no one was going to revive Lebanon with some silly parliamentary vote, especially a vote by parliamentarians who possess no power. The new president could go on all he liked about restoring the state's sovereign authority and standing Lebanon up out of the ashes, but the truth was that Lebanese sovereignty was a fiction.

Indeed, Hezbollah was pretty much the de facto Lebanese state. By the president's assassination in 1989, it had subverted much of the army, large parts of the security services, and the police. It effectively ran Beirut's only airport and its main seaport. In other words, Hezbollah was in a position to destroy any fool who wouldn't recognize reality for what it was.

Consider Hajj Radwan's point of view: With the new president proclaiming that he was determined to revive the state, could Hajj Radwan afford to sit on his hands while he tried? Wouldn't the first thing on the president's agenda be to exterminate Hajj Radwan and his coven of assassins? Hajj Radwan then saw no choice other than to put the state in its place.

There are a lot of parallels with the Hariri assassination. With his personal fortune and unreserved backing in Washington, Paris, and Riyadh, Hariri had started to labor under the delusion that he was the state. How long would it be before he deluded himself into trying to disarm Hezbollah? I imagine Hezbollah decided it couldn't wait around to find out. (See Law #21—Get to It Quickly.)

Assassinating people with hollow pretensions to power isn't peculiar to Lebanon. Whether Benazir Bhutto was murdered by the Taliban, the Pakistani government, or a group we've never heard of, her loud and empty claims to power condemned her. She was tragically deceived into believing power in Pakistan is won at the ballot box.

Even in countries where the rule of law is given passing respect, the state at times will find it in its interest to murder upstarts who don't seem to understand the way things really work. What's sometimes called the “deep state”—secret units in the intelligence services or hired assassins—is called in to give the slow-to-comprehend a not so friendly reminder.

Between 1988 and 1998, Iranian intelligence operatives assassinated more than eighty dissident intellectuals. What the victims shared in common was a delusion that the mullahs' power was on the wane and a political space was about to open up. Dubbed the “Chain Murders,” the assassins seemed to know what they were doing, never missing or murdering the wrong person. In many cases, they attempted to conceal that a murder had been committed at all. Some deaths occurred by injections of potassium chloride to induce a heart attack, others by fake car crashes.

A lot of people suspected that Iranian intelligence was behind the murders, and as the bodies started to pile up, even the regime recognized it looked silly trying to deny it. Its default defense was to point the finger at “rogue elements” of Iranian intelligence, conveniently naming an operative who himself may have been assassinated. Whether or not the assassination orders went all the way to the top or not, I doubt we'll ever find out. But the point is that the assassins got what they were after: drowning the budding Iranian Spring in blood.

Just as Vladimir Putin was coming to power in 1999, a wave of assassinations hit Russia's shores with a ferocity that surprised even the most cynical. No one seemed to be immune—big-name journalists, senior army officers, billionaire oligarchs, and even humble bookkeepers. One victim of assassination may have been Putin's old boss, the
ex-mayor of Saint Petersburg. According to a couple of reputable Russian journalists—a dying breed, to be sure—he was murdered by a poisoned lightbulb. The way it worked was the assassins coated the bulb of the ex-mayor's bedside table with a toxic substance that atomizes with heat. A little late-night reading, and that was it for him.

Then, of course, there was the 2006 celebrated assassination of ex–Russian intelligence officer turned Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko. A minute but deadly dose of the isotope polonium-210 killed him. It's almost certain that the assassins had expected the poisoning would go undetected. But when British police officials did discover traces of it, they concluded with near certainty that it was the Russian state that had assassinated Litvinenko.

(One of the small ironies in the Litvinenko assassination is that he may very well have signed his own execution order by openly accusing Putin of murdering a prominent journalist, who herself may have been assassinated because she'd accused Putin of assassinating a Russian general serving in Chechnya. I suppose if there's a lesson to be had, it's that it doesn't pay to call an assassin by his name.)

But it's not that regime assassinations are without risk. Again, it's all in the timing. Too early and you get a reputation for unnecessary brutality, too late and you're in trouble. The KGB must have often regretted not early on assassinating Lech Walesa, the Polish labor leader credited with opening the first crack in the Soviet bloc.

While there's no way of getting the timing exactly right, Machiavelli advises a prince to undertake extrajudicial executions (read: assassinations) at regular intervals.

“For one should not wish ten years at most to pass from one to another of such executions; for when this time is past men begin to vary in their customs and to transgress the laws.”

Or as the old Chinese proverb goes, “If you want to scare the monkeys, kill the chicken.”

Montreal, January 20, 2004: A young Canadian man I knew called me one morning to ask if I'd come up to Montreal. He wanted to introduce me to a man he was thinking about doing some business with. I'll call my friend Marc.

Marc had just opened a nightclub in downtown Montreal. Although only in his late twenties, he was determined to make serious money. I was more than happy to help him if I could, but I was tied up with a new book and asked if I could put the trip off for a couple months.

“Are you sure?” Marc asked. “It's very important to me.”

He told me how his would-be business partner had read my memoir and genuinely wanted to meet me. If only I could fly up for dinner, or even lunch.

I didn't know what to say. There wasn't a shred of practical business advice in any of my books. I left it with a vague promise that I'd do my best to make some time for a trip.

Two days later, Marc's father, an old friend, called me. He was a man who spoke deliberately and with a gravelly voice you had to take seriously. “You really must meet my son's friend,” he said. “He's a good family man. The two of you have a lot in common.”

I wondered what was going on with the two of them pressing me like this, and I decided I'd better go up to Montreal sooner rather than later. But before I could make reservations, Marc called the next morning: “Now it's urgent. My friend's been arrested.”