Authors: Robert B. Baer
Another way down the ladder was to buy a fleet of old Mercedes. They were chewed away with rust and dented, and their windows either stuck up (a sweltering ride in the summer) or stuck down (a wet ride in the winter). People looked right through them. And through me too, as if I were a homeless person. But in a country where a car is an unfailing class marker, it was well worth the discomfort.
It took about six months for me to establish a parallel existence in a world where the soft conveniences and amusements of civilization don't exist. I could disappear into it when I needed, cross over the tracks to the small, poor part of town. I knew I was nowhere near Hajj Radwan's standards, but at least I'd improve my odds over Buckley's.
I'll keep saying it, but the truth is you can't kill what you can't see.
Assassination is a fine and subtle craft. Or to steal from Flaubert, the aesthetics of it are the highest form of justice. And in that sense it's an
educative act: The assassin shows himself to be unsparing and hard in his clarity. He demonstrates how he's meticulously and correctly calculated the true value of the person he's about to murder, what his murder will accomplish, and what it will cost. He doesn't miss or unnecessarily take innocent lives. It's a leverage of force like no other.
Archimedes of Syracuse said that if he had a place to stand and a lever he could move the world. The assassin makes a similar claim: Give him a place to stand and a dagger and he'll move the world. Few have succeeded, but the ones who have, or came close, offer us a lesson.
On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, shooting two bullets into him from a semiautomatic pistol. Rabin bled to death on the operating table. Rabin's murder mattered because of who Rabin wasâa highly decorated and brilliant military officer, a hero in a nation of heroes. Moreover, he had a long record of not playing politics with Israel's security. During the first Palestinian uprising (1987â1993), Rabinâhe was then defense ministerâordered Israeli troops to go in and “break the bones” of the Palestinians. It was credentials like those that put him in a position to persuade a reluctant Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. Amir's calculation was that with Rabin gone there'd be no peace. So far, he's been right.
On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg tried something similar when he made an attempt on Adolf Hitler with a bomb in a briefcase. Weighing about 2.2 pounds, the components were stolen from the Wehrmacht. In other words, they were free. His motivations were equally barebones: Kill Hitler and save Germany from certain destruction. One life's a small price to pay for one's country.
Amir turned, and Stauffenberg came close to turning, history on a dime for pennies. Their approach to violence was strictly instrumentalâone act with one defined, absolutely clear objective. Expending great resources wasn't necessary, and neither was creating widespread symbolic destruction. Neither assassin derived any pleasure from the shedding of blood. And neither entertained grandiose visions: no bullshit
about the Clash of Civilizations or Utopia. And like the Laotian assassins, they intended to preserve the body.
The most iconic assassinations in history have been spare, economical actsâJulius Caesar cut down by daggers, the archbishop of Canterbury by broadswords, Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a semiautomatic pistol. A psychotic, Lee Harvey Oswald murdered Kennedy with a $19.95 mail-order rifle. If nothing else, he demonstrated that changing history is within anyone's reach.
It's by one swift, precise, and violent act that the assassin demonstrates to the powerful that in spite of all of their money and phalanxes of security they're still vulnerable. They've picked the wrong side of history or the wrong enemy. What good did the terrible force of the French Revolution do for Marat? What good did the Gestapo do against Count von Stauffenberg? Only luck (a blocking concrete pillar) gave Hitler a year's reprieve.
In choosing the uncomplicated and inexpensive over the elaborate and expensive, the assassin reduces a struggle to two people.
Manu forti
, he imposes the ultimate submission on a victim, leaving no room for misunderstanding the stakes or the finality of the contest. It's akin to a dual at eight feet or a medieval knight unhorsing another. There can be only one winner.
Set against our conceits about Progress and World Peace, I recognize this will strike a lot of people as ridiculously primeval. Hasn't assassination gone way beyond its shelf life? No doubt about it. But the truth remains that murder conducted face-to-face still terrifies people a lot more than killing at great distances or with giant bombs. Which means assassination isn't going away.
â
T
he early Zionist organization Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, taught itself to efficiently streamline assassination. At its largest, the group numbered only in the hundreds. It didn't keep offices or
infrastructure. Some members were known to carry cots on their backs so they could sleep in a different house each night. Lehi's preferred weapons were knives, pistols, and crude bombs.
I interviewed a veteran Lehi bomb technician who did his best to make the case that Lehi was quite careful about the employment of violence: “We never tried to kill innocent people, not civilians, not children.”
As evidence, he told me the story of when Lehi attempted to kill a British army major with a book bomb posted through the mail, but ended up accidentally killing his brother, the group immediately dropped the post office as a delivery system. Stamps might be cheap, but the savings was overridden by inaccuracy.
Lehi understood the tactical advantages of not wasting precious resources by taking and holding ground or planting a flag, or, for that matter, even owning a flag. It strictly “compartmented” everything: no employee newsletters, no staff meetings, no conferences. But of course, why would the right hand ever let the left hand know what it's doing if both hands share the same objectiveâto persuade Britain to abandon Palestine by murdering its officials?
Lehi knew better than to try to turn itself into something it wasn't, namely a conventional armed force. Armies are cumbersome and slow; they're expensive to feed and arm; they're easy for an enemy to corner and destroy. Not to mention that it's much easier to vet an assassin than a division of green recruits to determine who'll run at the sound of gunfire and who won't.
Lehi bookended its bloody run with two notorious assassinations. In 1944, two Lehi operatives gunned down Lord Moyne, British Minister in the Middle East, in front of his Cairo residence. In 1948, Lehi operatives shot out the tires of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte's car and then shot him dead as he sat in the backseat.
As Lehi intended, the British were forced to pull back into fortresses not unlike ours in Beirut. Which turned Britain, like it did us, into an
isolated and detested occupying power. Although Britain had reason enough to abandon its Palestine mandate, assassination certainly played a role in the decision.
In the beginning, moderate Zionists condemned the members of Lehi as dangerous fanatics. But after independence, Israel soon came to embrace Lehi's assassins as heroic patriots. By 1949, Israel had granted Lehi a general amnesty. By 1980, it instituted a military decoration called the Lehi Ribbon. By 1983, Yitzhak Shamir, a Lehi leader who had green-lighted Folke Bernadotte's assassination, was elected prime minister. The assassin in history has often ascended to power thanks to ruthlessly murdering his enemies. But this is the first instance that comes to my mind where a democracy elected an assassin as a head of state.
After independence, Israel adopted the Lehi model as an instrument of statecraft. Late on April 9, 1973, a half-dozen speedboats riding low in the water with Israeli commandos put ashore just south of Beirut. They were met by Mossad agents in rented cars and driven to an upscale neighborhood of Beirut called Verdun. The commandos split up and entered two nearby apartment buildings. In minutes they assassinated three Palestinian leaders believed to have been in on the Munich massacre. Their work done, the commandos left on their rubber boats, returning safe and sound to their mother ship.
The Verdun assassinations left Palestinians in shock and numb with fear. Who were these supermen who could sneak into an Arab capital and with impunity murder well-protected people? It was all the more jarring because the commandos' leader and a future prime minister, Ehud Barak, had dressed as a woman. There are few things more unsettling than a cross-dressing assassin.
Not too many years after Verdun, I ran into the Lebanese businessman who'd unwittingly rented the cars to the Mossad operatives. He was still bitter they'd burned his cars on the beach, particularly because Mossad had canceled their American Express cards before he could
collect on the insurance. But for him, it was Barak's dressing as a woman that was the icing on the cake. He was convinced the Israelis' intent was to rub the Lebanese's noses in their cleverness.
On one level, the Israelis demonstrated that they could exact their pound of flesh far short of war. On another, the Verdun assassinations rattled the Palestinians to their core. Where was any one of them safe?
Who knows for sure, but offhand I'd say the skill and efficiency of the Verdun assassinations intimidated the Palestinians more than a warship sitting off the coast. I can't say exactly why, but precise, efficient murder seems to carry some sort of terror multiplier effect.
What Lehi and the other successful assassins of history tell us is that the act is never improved by making things overcomplicated. The fewer the moving parts, the less likely it'll fail and the more likely it'll produce terror in the enemy. It's probably one reason we're riveted by Marat's meeting his end in his bathtub. The only thing more disturbing would have been if he'd been squatting over his chamber pot.
As I'll soon get to, Israeli assassinations eventually became large institutionalized affairs and the Lehi touch was lost.
The Bekaa Valley, November 1983: For a year the USS
New Jersey
pounded Lebanon with artillery rounds the size of Volkswagens. The boom of its guns is something a generation of Lebanese will never forget. But with the enemy burrowed deep into the fabric of the country, the front lines in those days were extremely fluid and the way the Reagan administration looked at it was what else could be done with a monkey house like Lebanon except try to flatten it.
One innocent day I was at a quiet lunch in the Bekaa when something that sounded like a freight train hurtling off a bridge passed over the top
of us. The impact was miles away, but the glasses on the table trembled, and a serving cart started to roll across the floor. In less than a minute, the restaurant was back to normal, everyone picking up their conversations where they'd left off. I didn't get the impression anyone was much impressed by the
New Jersey
.
The Lebanese often complained to me that the
New Jersey
was firing blanks. Or if it wasn't, its gunners were very bad shots. Nothing I could say would convince them that the
New Jersey
was firing real ordnance. On the other hand, I couldn't explain why the
New Jersey
never seemed to hit anything. I didn't know who he was that early in the game, but later I've often wondered what Hajj Radwan had thought about the
New Jersey
and all of our flailing around in his country.
The restaurant where I'd had a ringside seat to the
New Jersey
's show of force sat right off the main BeirutâDamascus road. It was a route Hajj Radwan took three or four times a week to see his people in the Bekaa. For all I know, he'd passed by as I ate lunch. And if he had, could he too have decided that big guns don't win wars?
If Hajj Radwan wasn't the most powerful man in Lebanon, he more than anyone understood the fine instrumentalities of violence. His clinical, meticulous, pared-down approach to assassination demonstrated that over and over. Again, it helped that he didn't care about the conceits and excesses of powerâreality always trumped pretense.
Hajj Radwan didn't maintain offices, training camps, or anything that came with ground anyone could tie his name to. The size of his organization varied strictly according to need and never grew larger than the low hundreds. Like any capable guerrilla group, they never put themselves under the same roof. Instead, they met in twos and threes, alternating between one another's apartments, street corners, or dark stairwells.
Hajj Radwan detested the modern corporate circus, wanting nothing to do with anything that smacked of administrative drag. He didn't permit personnel rosters, telephone books, PowerPoint and Excel
spreadsheets, press flacks, or event planners. And definitely no conferences, staff meetings, and corporate pep talks. If someone didn't like the way he ran things, he could quit and go work for IBM.
Hajj Radwan treated the Internet as if it were the bubonic plague. It might be newfangled, convenient, and entertaining, the delight of the lazy and shiftless, but he understood it for what it wasâa central bus station easy for the cops to watch. The worst sort of flytrap. Even talking in chat rooms was strictly verboten for his people.
Inside Hezbollah, few people even knew Hajj Radwan's name or, for that matter, that there existed an ultrasecret cell. And those who did never mentioned it outside their tight, closed circle. And anyone foolish enough to ask around about Hajj Radwan was immediately pegged as a spy. It's a consensus of silence that is difficult for us in the West to understand, but for the assassin, it's a sine qua non for survival.
It greatly helped that Hajj Radwan was never tempted to brand himself or his organization. No catchy names, no commissioning of hip, edgy logos, no tagging on walls. Some attacks he claimed in the name of the “Islamic Jihad Organization.” But that was nothing more than a name to serve the act, a confected mystery meant to let his enemies tremble at it in dumb dread.