The Perfect Kill (26 page)

At my next meeting with Ali, I showed him a picture of a bearded man sitting behind the wheel of a car. He's grinning at the camera, a front tooth missing. I told Ali we'd recently discovered he'd played a role in bombing the Marine barracks in October 1983. (It was a lie cut from whole cloth, but there was no way for Ali to know that.)

Ali studied the picture, put it back on the coffee table between us. He said he didn't know the man but would find him for me. I now pulled out a picture of an apartment building. There was an address written on the back.

“Would you be able to have someone watch it?” I asked.

“The building?”

“The man in the picture visits here. Yes.”

For the next half hour we haggled over money, what it would cost for
Ali's people to watch the apartment around the clock and, eventually, the man himself.

When we finished, I said who could know whether one day we might decide to grab him. Ali reached over and shook my hand: “Brother, it would be an honor to bring this man to justice.”

Did I think I could beat Hajj Radwan with bullshit like this? No. But I counted on it buying me time.

Power is the ability to hurt something over and over again. One-offs get you nothing or less than nothing.

Beirut, January 1988: Many a morning I woke up trying to gauge the weight of the courtiers, eunuchs, and imbeciles who occupy Washington like an alien army. But I would quickly remind myself it was a wasted thought: Their deliberations were as opaque to me as a Pashtun
loya jirga
.

By my first cup of coffee I'd generously decide that Washington's bureaucrats weren't so much imbeciles as they were people who genuinely believe they were born to walk within the lines drawn for them. But did they never stop to think it might have been imbeciles who drew the lines in the first place?

The point here is that I made Langley nervous. Whenever I'd propose something dicey, the only thing I'd hear back was the scampering of cold feet. No one wanted to risk his career for uncertain gain on a dim,
distant battlefield, especially with me in the middle of it. It meant that I spent more time than I needed to trying to figure out how to get around Langley's human weather vanes.

I'd also learned from hard experience that it was impossible to get Langley interested in what made Lebanon tick. For a while, I sent in long, thoughtful pieces about how the various Shiite personalities, families, and clans fit in, but I couldn't even get a yawn out of Langley. And forget making them understand how Hajj Radwan's
Machtpolitik
worked, all the ins and outs that explained the man. They couldn't have cared less that Hajj Radwan had first been recruited into Fatah by a Christian Palestinian who had converted to Islam and that Hajj Radwan was consequently infected by a convert's uncompromising beliefs. When I tried to fill in the details about his involvement in the first embassy bombing in April 1983, Langley wrote back that it was ancient history and that I needed to give it a break.

Were they distracted by off-sites and campfires on the Pecos River? No doubt. But what really was at the center of it was that Langley was unfamiliar with the ways of political violence. My bosses didn't even want to consider the possibility that it might come with a set of rules and logic. They were more than happy to wallow in the prejudice that the barbarians kill one another and us for no good reason.

One man I answered to had recently come back from an important Arab posting. As the story went, when things started to heat up in the middle of his tour, he ordered a .12-gauge shotgun. Shotguns are of no use when you want to kill at a distance, but they do okay when you are trying to hold back the mob from overrunning the premises.

When the gun arrived, he was as excited as a five-year-old on Christmas morning. He found a box of shells, loaded the shotgun, and pumped a shell into the chamber. BANG! Having no idea it was a police riot gun that chambers and fires a round in the same action, he stared at the gun in disbelief. Too shaken to realize what he was doing, he chambered a
second round. BANG! Terrified, he threw the gun across the office, where it came to a stop under a cabinet. It would stay there for months, no one willing to pick up the thing.

The story only gets better: When his deputy came back to the office and saw the hole in the wall over his desk, he decided that the chief, whom he'd never gotten along with, had sent him a not so subtle warning. He forthwith resigned from the CIA to marry a fabulously wealthy heiress.

Act two: When the station's administrative officer finally summoned the nerve to retrieve the gun from under the chief's cabinet, he took it back to his office and couldn't resist working the action to determine what the problem was. BANG! The casualty of the third and last accidental discharge was the office refrigerator.

Act three: A bomb tech from Langley finally gave the shotgun a decent burial in the desert.

I may not have got this sequence exactly right—isn't that always the case when it comes to office lore?—but the point remains that, contrary to popular opinion, the CIA isn't a pack of cold-blooded assassins. Like me, they're mostly feckless liberal arts majors who learn on the fly. I suppose it's one good reason Americans are always reading about their fumbling spooks in the newspapers.

What made it worse was when Ronald Reagan decided it would be a good idea to outsource national security. The CIA was cheerfully sucked into that great deceit, contracting out all sorts of its core functions. We felt it in the field. While the bosses at Langley were schmoozing the Northrops and Boeings of the world, our raison d'être was reduced to not rocking the boat. And God forbid if anyone took the mission seriously. But it got even worse when Langley started to meddle in operations to further someone's political or financial interests back home.

At one point, the DEA handed off to the CIA one of its confidential informants, a small-time Lebanese drug dealer. The only thing to recommend the man was eleven outstanding arrest warrants—all garden-
variety murders. His last was for blowing his sister's head off with a shotgun. She'd apparently dated the wrong guy. Or maybe it was his sister-in-law. Does it matter? The point is that he wasn't exactly the most trustworthy proxy.

But it didn't stop my boss at Langley, the one with the accidental discharge under his belt, from employing him to kidnap the hijacker of a Jordanian airliner. Indeed, the sister-murdering drug dealer did arrange for bikini-clad FBI agents to arrest the hijacker on a pleasure boat sitting off Cyprus. The hijacker was brought back to the United States for trial and received a life sentence. Justice served, Americans could now go back to a good night's sleep.

But at no point did anyone ask what message this little stunt sent to Hajj Radwan. Could he not have asked himself why we would bother with someone who wasn't a true threat to the United States? After all, the hijacker hadn't hijacked an American airliner or even killed an American. Yes, the arrest may have gone down smoothly, not a shot fired and no one breaking a fingernail, but in the end, what good did it do? Hajj Radwan would have wisely ignored the man and moved on to more worthwhile prey.

It didn't help that the rest of our foreign policy only strengthened Hajj Radwan's disregard for us, from the invasion of tiny Grenada to the Iran-Contra swindle. It all played right into his prejudice that Washington plays to the stands and special interests. For someone with a ruthless construct on life, we looked soft at the core—an open invitation to hit us all the harder.

Let me go back to Iran-Contra in order to remind you that it was Hajj Radwan who was holding the hostages Reagan wanted back—he was at the pointed end of the deal. So when Oliver North showed one of Hajj Radwan's Iranian sponsors—the so-called Second Channel—around the White House, Radwan must have wondered whether we'd completely lost our minds. It was sort of as if the president had shown the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot around Disneyland, hoping to soften him up. It
wasn't only Langley that didn't understand that there are such things as hidden levers of power. After I left the CIA, I wrote a book in which I tried to make sense of Iran's two-decade detour through political violence. In one chapter I recount a short visit to Iran to make a documentary film on suicide bombers. Among the people we interviewed was the family of the Hezbollah secretary-general assassinated in 1992. (It was the assassination that provoked Hajj Radwan to attack two Jewish/Israeli targets in Buenos Aires.)

I was intrigued by the fact that the daughter of the assassinated Hezbollah secretary-general had married into the family of Iran's first modern suicide bomber, a boy of thirteen who sacrificed himself in order to destroy an Iraqi tank. To me, the marriage seemed like a bizarre iteration of the Order of Assassins, the twelfth-century Persian group that invented political murder. But it turned out my obsessive fascination with political murder wasn't shared by all. One eminent critic of my book reacted with disbelief, horror, and shock when I wrote that our documentary crew couldn't find a decent restaurant in Tehran. If we couldn't sniff out Tehran's hip nouvelle cuisine, how could we possibly understand the real Iran?

She might have a point. There's a good argument to be made that political murder is only a footnote to Persian history. The Order of Assassins didn't change much of anything, either for the better or for the worse. And I have no doubt that people will argue with me over whether Hajj Radwan's assassinations changed history in any lasting and significant way. Was I making the mistake of confusing the obscure with the important? Maybe.

I need to add that it's not as if the American government embraced my point of view. In Beirut, I'd always start my day off reading State Department telexes dealing with Lebanon. They'd drone on about what the Lebanese president was doing or what some parliamentary deputy was saying. Even back then Hariri was taken by Washington as an authoritative source on Lebanon. But in none of it did the name Hajj
Radwan appear or, for that matter, the notion that there might be a ghost calling the shots.

The same goes for Pan Am 103. I recently started e-mailing one of the FBI's lead investigators in that attack. I raised my suspicions about the chatter, how it implicated Iran. He wrote me back that he hadn't looked at the chatter related to Pan Am but that “they [the National Security Agency] opened their files to one of our agents who pored through everything they [allegedly] had.” But he hadn't read the intelligence himself! In other words, he and I were singing off two completely different sheets of music.

It had been easy enough to persuade Chuck to help me look around for new sources, and it wasn't long before he fished up a shady Christian businessman who claimed he could get to anyone in Lebanon. I'd heard that one before, but I decided to give Chuck's new source the benefit of the doubt.

About a month after meeting the Christian, Chuck came into the office waving a crisp new hundred-dollar bill in my face: “A supernote, Bobby boy. My guy [the shady Christian] just bought it for me.”

A “supernote” is a counterfeit U.S. hundred-dollar bill designed to withstand serious scrutiny. Like a real hundred, it's printed on cotton rag paper. The plates used to print them are engraved with a geometric lathe, a very rare piece of equipment. Supernotes are of such high quality that the counterfeiters include in them tiny mistakes so as not to be deceived into taking back their own product.

I asked Chuck how much his source wanted for it.

“One-twenty.”

I looked at Chuck, waiting for the punch line. He saw where I was going. “Fuck, I don't know. That's what he paid for it.”

Was Chuck's source's plan to entice us into the counterfeiting business? If so, the economics obviously didn't make sense.

All things being equal, I'd have encouraged Chuck to drop the guy. But we were drawing a complete blank trying to find someone to get inside Hajj Radwan's world. I recognize that keeping Chuck's businessman on the books amounts to trolling in a bus station, but even a rotten piece of bait can catch a fish, right?

Which brings me back to Jennifer Matthews and the Jordanian doctor who murdered her. It took me a while, but I finally came to the conclusion that the main reason political murder is so difficult for us is that we don't have at our disposal a ready, committed pool of proxies. The Communist Third International had all the true believers it could use, as does al-Qaeda today. But what do we have to draw a committed following? While everyone in the world is ready to immigrate to the United States or take a free trip to Disneyland, it doesn't mean they're prepared to murder for us. It's a problem I was reminded of every day, and when on the rare occasion some true believer did manage to find his way to me, he inevitably turned out to be as crazy as a tree full of owls.

Not long after Ali dished up that suspicious story about the TWA hijacking, I ran into a former Christian warlord who couldn't care less about money but wanted to kill Muslims. He in turn introduced me to two Christian military officers who'd on their own taken to ambushing Syrian army patrols. They in turn introduced me to a master car-bomb maker who'd once simultaneously set off eleven car bombs. A Shiite from the southern suburbs, he had a virtual laissez-passer to enter Hajj Radwan's neighborhood.

When I showed the bomber the picture of a place I thought Hajj Radwan frequented, he immediately offered to flatten it with a pair of gargantuan car bombs the moment Hajj Radwan showed up. The man's bomb-making skill had a certain appeal to me, as did the redundancy of the charge, but I demurred. My intent wasn't to cause mass casualties, à la the attempt on the Lebanese ayatollah in 1985. And, on top of it,
how could two car bombs ever be construed back at the Department of Justice as an arrest gone wrong?

No, I'd have to keep looking for the real thing, someone who could put himself within the blast range of Hajj Radwan and not take a city block with him.

One Saturday morning, three of us were waiting at the helicopter landing pad to catch a ride over to Cyprus on a pair of Black Hawks. I definitely needed to get away. A moldy sky had been holding over the city, neither rain nor sun. With the state of my hunt for Hajj Radwan at a frustrating standstill, a couple of days with the family in Cyprus could only do me good.

There also seemed to be a lot of unsettling stuff happening on the other side of the Green Line. While I was dancing around with Ali, and Chuck with the Christian businessman, we'd found out that Hajj Radwan had started to solicit the services of various Palestinian groups, buying up both their technology and experts. He was after it all too, from infrared triggering devices to command detonators. But what concerned us most was Hajj Radwan's interest in bombs designed to bring down airliners.

Over the last decade, the Palestinians had perfected suitcase bombs to the point they could be smuggled through any airport security regime in the world, even the most up-to-date. It was all the more ominous when Hajj Radwan brought under one roof bomb makers from two different groups. Combining their skills, they were capable of building the perfect airplane bomb.