The Perfect Kill (30 page)

This may all sound like too much grainy detail and a lot of pointless barbarian bloodletting—and it is for those who've made up their mind that political murder is an anachronism—but the point here is that these murders were well planned and undertaken with a well-defined purpose in mind: Preserve force and head off war. They were a stand-in for an all-out Shiite-Sunni civil war.

Which brings me back to the central question of whether Hajj Radwan's assassination in 2008 truly counted. Did it make us safer? The answer quickly dissolves into a lot of hypotheticals that will never be answered. But my take is that the melee of assassins Hajj Radwan bequeathed to Lebanon is still out there, very much active. Hajj Radwan's
brother-in-law fit nicely into his shoes. He knows how to make the perfect shaped charge and hit a car on the move. In short, the Islamic Jihad Organization, or whatever they're calling the organization Hajj Radwan founded, is like some sort of bacteria resistant to antibiotics: As soon as a survival mechanism is found, it's shared with everyone. He was an architect of political murder rather than a one-man show.

The fact is that we all were too slow out of the blocks. The Israelis should have killed Hajj Radwan before he destroyed the military intelligence headquarters in Tyre in November 1982. The United States should have killed him before he blew up our embassy in April 1983. Hariri should have recognized him for the threat he was and made the necessary accommodation.

Two years before Chuck and I started planning, Hajj Radwan had already done the bulk of damage he would do—the Marines, the two embassies, the hostages. Three years after our fumbled Hail Mary, Hajj Radwan released the hostages, thanks to diplomacy rather than force. He would make more attacks on the United States, including the one in Karbala, but they were petering out of their own accord. By 2008, Hajj Radwan was more or less retired.

In Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
, the protagonist is stranded alone on an island, forced to learn how to survive. But life suddenly becomes a lot more complicated when Friday shows up. The two of them had to figure out how to create what amounts to a society. But think of the other equally plausible alternative: Crusoe and Friday fall out and have no choice but to compete with each other for survival—hunt each other down to destruction. Wouldn't their instincts have to develop a lot faster?

Like so many of my generation, I had my lethal instincts bred out of
me from birth. Dr. Spock didn't condition us to put two bullets between someone's eyes. Trying to regenerate those instincts when I was in Beirut was doomed from the start. Purposeful murder, like sports or business, is something you have to do every day to get good at it.

In the Iraq War, during a botched raid on an enemy house, a Navy SEAL was seriously wounded in an ambush. It led the SEALs to switch from “dynamic entries” to “combat entries.” What that involved was speeding up a raid, greatly reducing everyone's reaction time . . . and shooting anything that moves. There were a lot fewer SEAL casualties and more on the other side. But the drawback was that the raids were based on the same chatter and algorithms that cause drone missiles to miss. There wasn't a way to know whether they were killing the right enemy or not, let alone whether they were nipping a problem in the bud.

My guess is that what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will tell us is that even though our weaponry is of the highest lethality, our soldiers and spies are uncommonly courageous, and there's a whole generation of young Americans prepared to sacrifice themselves for their country, all of this doesn't add up to their comprehending the complexities of political murder.

Somewhere along the line we've deceived ourselves into believing that money wins war, that we have the great luxury of time, and that the show of force is enough to make our enemies submit. In stubbornly refusing to see our enemies for who and what they are, we've missed the fact that you can't kill what you can't see.

Getting at the facts of an assassination is like taking matryoshka dolls apart—a lot of little lies within big lies. While I may have spent what amounts to thirty years writing this book and sent it to a lot of people for a reality check, from Hezbollah experts to ATF bomb techs, there are still large parts of the story I'm not sure I got right. There's always some new fact or story that comes along to surprise me. I apologize for errors of fact and interpretation I may have made. For instance, my working hypothesis is that Nasrallah knew about Hariri, but I don't know it for a fact. Even the facts I should have down I'm not quite sure about.

The day after Hezbollah TV aired its lie about my involvement in the attempt on Lebanon's only ayatollah, I called an old friend to ask him why he thought William Casey, the ex–CIA director, had made up the story about American involvement, as Bob Woodward recounted in his book
Veil
.

“Because it's true,” he said.

I had no idea what he was talking about and told him so.

“I was there. I trained them . . . or at least I think I did. Here's the story.”

In August 1984 a dozen bomb techs stood at the edge of an airfield and watched a twin-engine King Air set down on the base's single runway. They knew Bill Casey was on the plane, but they had no idea why he had decided to pay the base a visit. It wasn't the kind of place you casually drop in on.

The base is located on a remote inland waterway in a remote part of America. Protected by high fences, watchtowers, and thickets of old-growth trees, it's impossible for someone outside the fence to see the
bomb ranges, trailers, and Quonset huts. But when the wind's right, you can hear the explosions.

Foreigners flown in for training have no idea where they are. To make sure of this, the windows of the plane are covered by thick black-out curtains. And once on base, no one is allowed out. No one is even allowed to make phone calls out.

One reason for the secrecy is that residing within the base's confines is more expertise in bombs than anywhere else. It's where the American government sends IEDs collected from around the world to be pulled apart and studied. After they're analyzed, they're rebuilt for testing.

When the King Air door opened, the base chief and two bomb techs were surprised to see a young woman in the door and a woman in her early sixties standing behind her. The two walked down the plane's stairs looking as if Jules Verne had just transported them to the center of the earth. A moment later, Casey shuffled into the plane's door—wearing a Burning Tree Country Club golfer's cap, T-shirt, and smudged painter's pants. Casey joined the two women at the bottom of the stairs and introduced them to the base chief and the two techs. The techs barely understood Casey through his notorious mumble that the two women were his wife and daughter.

The base chief offered to take everyone to breakfast, and Casey agreed, sort of.

“Yeah, they're hungry,” he said, nodding toward his wife and daughter. “But I want to talk to this major you have here before I do anything.”

Casey had given the commander of the Lebanese bomb techs an unintended field promotion. He was actually an army captain. He and his team had been at the base for the past several weeks, learning how to dismantle car bombs and other IEDs.

The chief and a bomb tech led Casey to an old Ford Bronco, its windows covered with wire mesh to protect against blast debris. They drove for about five minutes down a gravel road with pine trees on either side.
When the Lebanese captain saw the Bronco, he came out. When he recognized Casey, he stiffened and put on his green Lebanese Army beret. Casey shook his hand and got right to it.

“This guy Fadlallah's a goddamned problem.”

The bomb tech was standing near enough to Casey to clearly hear what he said. He was sure he hadn't misunderstood, Casey's mumble having disappeared. Casey apparently wanted to be absolutely certain that the Lebanese captain knew he was talking about Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah.

“Isn't there something we can do about him?” Casey asked, more to himself than to the captain.

That afternoon the bomb techs training the Lebanese were given an addendum to the curriculum: a three-day segment on building “radio detonators”—devices that send out encoded radio signals to detonate bombs.

Nothing was put in writing, per Casey's orders. And it was only eight months later that the bomb techs wondered if this didn't have something to do with the Fadlallah attempt. Could it have been anything else?

—

H
ajj Radwan obviously should have been the one to write this book. But since he didn't even keep a journal (as far as I know), it's left to someone like me to comb through the carnage he'd created to try to make sense of what he was up to.

The way I see it, Hajj Radwan had spent nearly three decades trying to bring a system to political murder. He went out of his way to avoid the obvious traps, such as blowing up trains and school buses. I would argue that it paid off by his own terms. By channeling violence, he obtained more than most assassins. When he managed to apply all of the rules, his success rate approached one hundred percent. If Hajj Radwan were around to give us a thumbnail sketch, here's what I think he would have said:

One: Assassination has to be pretty much a local affair, a settling of scores among people who really know one another. As with the Lao and Mafia assassinations, it works best when the assassin knows his victim by sight. He has no doubt about why the victim is a problem, what the stakes are, and how exactly his murder will improve things.

Hajj Radwan's assassinations worked best in Lebanon—if for no other reason than that it's a small country where there are only a couple of degrees of separation between people. And part of it goes back to the fact that Lebanese politics is a continually negotiated compromise—it's possible for one well-calculated murder to change one side's fortunes. In other words, Hajj Radwan could put a price on Lebanese blood.

The same considerations hold for Israeli assassinations. The Jews and the Arabs live in a confined space. Before Mossad puts a Palestinian on a “kill list,” it will find out everything there is to know about him, from the elements of his crime to his underwear size. Mossad makes its mistakes, but it would never consider a shot in the dark—such as dropping a drone on an enemy you don't know by name or sight.

Two: Assassination is not that much different from the ancient rite of sacrifice, where a scapegoat is offered up to an enemy to resolve a conflict. It's what von Stauffenberg counted on when he made his attempt on Hitler, propitiate the Allies by murdering him and in the bargain save Germany. In Iraq, my implicit bargain with the generals was that if they got rid of Saddam, the Sunnis would remain the dominant force. Hajj Radwan's implicit offer to the Sunnis was that with Hariri out of the picture there'd be no war between the Shiites and Sunnis.

Three: When Machiavelli advises the prince to periodically cull out the bad apples, he's in effect classified assassination as a legitimate tool of governance. An in extremis, ad hoc form of justice. It's how Hajj Radwan justified assassinating the Lebanese president in 1989. Sacrifice the one to save the herd.

The one common element in all of this is that the assassin
must
have a deep, factual, bulletproof knowledge of the enemy, whether he lives
across the street or halfway around the world. It's the only way to anticipate a threat and deal with it in a timely and efficient manner. When the Saudis offered up bin Laden to the Clinton administration, Washington wisely declined to take him. It was Saudi Arabia alone who understood the threat he represented and, accordingly, should have done its own dirty work.

Without even a superficial understanding of the murky stew of clans and tribes that govern the ragged edges of the world, the United States isn't capable of efficient political murder. If we can't tell a Baluchi from a Pashtun, how can we decide who deserves it and who doesn't? This is one reason why the murders of Saddam, bin Laden, and Gaddafi produced nothing other than more bloodshed. As Wall Street would put it, the United States mispriced violence.

It's not that I don't understand the attraction of drones, how they give the White House a bump in the polls and Americans the illusion that they're being kept safe, but the point is that the United States has confused ideas with people. Assassinating bin Ladin never stood a chance of driving a stake into violent jihad, just as Rome did not kill Christianity when it killed Christ. In other words, there's no point in killing the Clausewitzes of the world but, rather, the general who's mastered his tactics and is about ready to rout you on the battlefield.

And finally, there is this: If the central problem of humanity is justice, it can never be far from the assassin's mind that the act must always be about cutting out the malignant cell to save the body. Anything short of or beyond it, and he'll only make things worse.

March 15, 44 BC
—Julius Caesar in Rome

May 14, 1610
—Henri IV of France in Paris

July 13, 1793
—Jean-Paul Marat in Paris

June 28, 1914
—Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

August 21, 1940
—Leon Trotsky in Coyoacán, Mexico City

July 20, 1944
—Attempt on Adolf Hitler by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg at the Wolf's Lair, East Prussia

August 22, 1962
—Attempt on French president Charles de Gaulle outside Paris

November 2, 1963
—Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon

November 22, 1963
—John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas

June 6, 1968
—Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, California

November 28, 1971
—Jordanian prime minister Wasfi al-Tal in Cairo

December 20, 1973
—Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco in Madrid

August 23, 1974
—Detective Inspector Peter Flanagan in Omagh, Northern Ireland

April 4, 1979
—Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto, executed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan

August 27, 1979
—Lord Mountbatten in County Sligo, Ireland

May 5, 1981
—Three Bonanno crime family members in a Brooklyn nightclub. Vito Rizzuto was believed to be one of the gunmen.

October 6, 1981
—Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat in Cairo

September 14, 1982
—Lebanese president-elect Bachir Gemayel in Beirut

October 12, 1984
—Attempt on Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, England

June 14, 1985
—Hijacking of TWA 847

February 16, 1992
—Hezbollah secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi in Nabatiyah Governorate, Lebanon

April 17, 1993
—Turkish president Turgut Özal in Ankara (possible assassination)

September 25, 1997
—Attempt on Hammas official Khaled Mashal in Amman

November 23, 2006
—Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, former Russian secret service officer, in London

December 27, 2007
—Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi, Pakistan

February 12, 2008
—Hajj Radwan (Imad Mughniyah) in Damascus