The Perfect Kill

by Robert B. Baer

Finally, you need to know that there was no getting around my CIA censors, which in practical terms meant that I’ve unfortunately been uable to write about the true set-piece plot against Hajj Radwan. It left me with writing about a couple of sideshows. It’s for this same reason I’ve had to alter the names of sources, change personal details, and adjust time frames. And for reasons too obscure to bother with here, I can’t get into all the details of my CIA career. What I can say is that I was assigned to Beirut from 1986 to 1988, and then spent three years in Paris—the main years of the Hajj Radwan story. I understand that leaving out the key event is akin to Homer writing the Odyssey but omitting the scene where Odysseus returns to Ithaca. But there’s nothing to be done about it. In the end, though, does any of this really matter? It’s a rulebook rather than history I’m trying to write.

  I don’t intend to give away the ending here, but what I will do is state the obvious: The utility of political murder can only be judged in context and time. Assassination may have worked for the Laotians at a certain point in their history, but that doesn’t mean it’s a universal instrument of justice. Like pornography, you know a good kill when you see it.

  —

  One night after dark I walked up Hamra Street. It was dry when I started, but the air was heavy and fresh: A storm was on the way. When it did start to rain, I ducked into the first shelter I came across, a below-street-level movie theater. Blade Runner was showing. Since the movie had just come out in theaters in the United States, I expected a crappy pirated copy. But it was the real thing.

  Afterward, it was sheeting rain outside. Just like in the movie, broken lights sparked, coils of steam coming off them. It wasn’t keeping people inside, though. People leaning into each other under umbrellas ran along the sidewalks. I watched as a couple disappeared down into an underground nightclub. A French armored personnel carrier passed by, a tricolor at the top of its whip antenna and a soldier in a poncho and beret in the hatch. From under a store marquee, three giggling, sleek Lebanese girls in tight jeans and leather jackets waved at him. He waved back. It was at that moment I decided to ask for a transfer here, to join whatever party this was at the edge of the apocalypse.

  The next morning I made a courtesy call on my contact in the embassy. The view from his office made me feel like I was standing on the bow of a ship cutting through an emerald sea. He pointed at a chair for me to sit down.

  “I’ve only got five minutes,” he said. “So, what’s up?”

  He was a slight, nervous man, someone I couldn’t imagine ever at rest. His tie was loose at the neck, his shirtsleeves rolled up, a pencil behind his ear. I’d met his wife earlier, a charming young woman who also worked in the embassy. I got the impression neither of them was happy about being here.

  The phone rang. His French was curt and halting. He said something about pushing back lunch. His secretary stuck her head into the office, walked over to his desk, and left a piece of paper. He picked it up, glanced at it, and dropped it into his out-box with a sigh. When he looked back up at me, it was with an expression that made me wonder if he’d forgotten who I was.

  I got to it before he was interrupted again: “Do you think they could use another Arabic speaker here?”

  I was about to add that I’d be more than happy to break my next assignment for Beirut, but the phone rang again. He listened for a moment before pointing at the door to let me know he’d need to continue the call in private. I never did get an answer to my question.

  For dinner that night I stopped by a bakery and bought a sort of pizza topped with olive oil and thyme. The Lebanese call it manaeesh. When I made it back to Beirut four years later, it pretty much became my staple. Chuck and I would take turns buying a stack of them in the morning, warm out of the oven and wrapped up in waxed paper. When it came Chuck’s turn, he’d come in and drop them on whatever file I was reading, usually Hajj Radwan’s. If the file hadn’t later been burned during a particularly bad round of fighting, I’m sure it would still smell of thyme. If there’s a smell for the world’s most accomplished murderer, in my mind it’s thyme.

  Thyme manaeesh is usually meant for breakfast, but right now, as I stood in the window of my room watching the sea, I couldn’t imagine a better dinner. I opened the window to get a better look at the St-Georges’ black hulk, imagining what it must have been like for the last guests leaving in their bulletproof limousines. Did they know it was the end of the Lebanon they’d fallen so hard for?

  The traffic along the Corniche was thinning out now, the honking dying away to the occasional beep of a taxi looking for the last fare of the night. I noticed in front of the faux-antiquities store a parked car, two men standing by it smoking cigarettes. The tremulous streetlight played over their clean-shaven faces. Were they waiting for someone?

  One of them looked up at my window, saw me, and said something to the other one. They flicked their cigarettes in the middle of the road, got into their car, and drove away. There’s no way to know whether or not they had any connection to what was to follow less than four months later. It’s unlikely, but it doesn’t keep me from associating the two events in my mind.

  —

  On April 18, 1983, at about a quarter to one, a young man sat behind the wheel of a late-model GMC pickup parked along the Corniche in almost the same spot where the two men had been standing smoking. The truck’s engine was running. According to witnesses, the pickup was sagging on its springs, something heavy under the tarp-covered bed. No one would remember the driver other than he was young, like the tens of thousands of men who’d flocked to Beirut to help with the backbreaking job of rebuilding it after nearly ten years of civil war.

  Other witnesses said they saw an old green Mercedes race up the Corniche, weaving through traffic and honking. There were three men in it. When it came abreast of the GMC, the driver of the Mercedes stuck his head out the window and motioned to the GMC’s driver to get going. The GMC’s driver put the pickup in gear and slowly started down the Corniche in the opposite direction the Mercedes had come from.

  With lunchtime traffic, it took the GMC about fifteen minutes to reach the American embassy. When the pickup finally came parallel with the embassy’s covered portico, it abruptly dove through a gap in the oncoming traffic and headed up the embassy’s semicircular driveway. When it came to a short flight of stairs leading to the front entrance, it exploded. The embassy’s center collapsed like a failed wedding cake. Among the dead was my embassy contact, as well as sixty-three others. My contact’s charming wife wasn’t in the embassy and survived.

  MAKE IT SHARP, DISCRETE, AND FINAL

  The April 1983 Beirut embassy bombing brought to an end the long love affair between Lebanon and the United States. But the main reason I retell this story is that it’s likely the bomber’s intent was to assassinate President Reagan’s envoy to the Middle East, Ambassador Philip Habib. The evidence for it is circumstantial but, taken in context, convincing.

  Within days of the bombing, a local embassy guard confessed under interrogation that the three men in the green Mercedes had stopped by the embassy shortly beforehand to talk to him. They had wanted to know one thing: whether Ambassador Habib was in the building. The guard told them he was, and without another word, the Mercedes roared off, heading up the Corniche—in the direction of the idling GMC.

  The guard said he immediately regretted not having told the three that he hadn’t actually seen Habib; he’d just heard someone say something about Habib’s having returned to the embassy. (Habib, in fact, was in a meeting across town, and as a consequence, survived the attempt on him.)

  It’s no surprise at all that there were Lebanese who wanted Habib dead. He was Reagan’s point man in the attempt to broker a peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel. With the deal set only in diplomatic aspic, it’s likely they calculated that with Habib gone Reagan would pull out of the negotiations and the treaty talks would collapse. There, of course, was the symbolism of destroying an American embassy, but if th
e guard was telling the truth—from my reading of the transcripts, I believe he was—the April 1983 embassy bombing was a clear case of a bullet with a man’s name on it.

  I’ll go farther out on a speculative limb and say it’s almost certain Habib’s would-be assassins framed the act in their minds as one of survival. The way they looked at it, a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon would lead to a strong central government and ultimately to their destruction. So, à la Laos, it was a case of kill or perish.

  Hajj Radwan’s name would eventually be attached to the embassy bombing. But he would only have been twenty-one at the time. Was it possible for a man so young to carry out a complicated attack like this? Based on circumstantial evidence, I believe so. And if I’m right, it meant that at an early age Hajj Radwan recognized the tactical advantages of narrowly channeling violence to obtain a precise objective. It certainly wouldn’t be the first or the last time he’d take or try to take a scalp to end an argument.

  A little more than twenty-two years after my first visit to Beirut, a suicide bomber would drive by the Palm Beach on his way to assassinate Hariri. His van would blow up in front of the St-Georges, destroying what was left of it. The St-Georges and the Palm Beach, of course, would only be mute witnesses to history, collateral in what otherwise was a fairly precise attack.

  I’ll get more into it later, but Hariri was murdered because the assassins, one, believed he was a threat to their survival, and two, believed he couldn’t be replaced. Like the Lao assassins, they believed they had no choice in the matter. To be sure, not everyone will share this view, but the point is that it’s what Hariri’s assassins believed.

  NOTE TO ASSASSINS: The assassin can’t afford to entertain abstract notions such as determinism and cowardly fatalism. Nor does he think people are of equal value. Accordingly, he believes it’s possible to adjust history (in his favor) by the destruction of one man.

  LAW

  #3

  PLACATE THE EDIFICE UNTIL IT’S TIME TO BLOW IT UP

  Owe and own nothing to push back against. Never wear your beliefs on your sleeve. In assuming an impermeable façade of ignorance, poverty, and banality, you blind the enemy to your true strength and intentions.

  KILL ’EM ALL

  Beirut, October 1986: The apartment they assigned me came with cheap, scuffed-up, imitation Ethan Allen furniture. Passed on from one tenant to the next, it was the kind of crap people back home put out on the sidewalk in the dead of night. But what more than made up for the furniture was the view—the glorious, shimmering, opalescent Mediterranean at my feet. It was better than the Palm Beach’s.

  I’d never tire of sitting on my balcony with my first cup of coffee in the morning, wondering if there was a scrubbier patch of earth more courted, inveigled, meddled with, and invaded than Lebanon. The Persians, Alexander the Great, the Ottomans, and just about everyone else with imperial ambitions had felt obliged to trample across it on the way to someplace else. The Israelis invaded with a predictable rhythm, sometimes it seemed only for practice. But what intrigued me was how the Lebanese all of a sudden had learned to say enough is enough and actually got good at driving off invaders.

  Just north of me was an ancient Phoenician port called Jounieh. With its red sandstone Ottoman-era buildings, limestone quays, hip boutiques, French restaurants, and nightclubs, it was one of those cosmopolitan entrepôts where the Orient happily consorts with the Occident. But the truth is, Jounieh—which is almost all Christian—fully and cheerfully tilted West.

  The nightclubs were always packed, thrumming into the early morning with the latest Western music. Outside, you’d always find rows of new BMWs, Range Rovers, and Mercedes, their owners snorting coke in the backseat. It wouldn’t be until first light that the clubbers would pour out into the street in search of an espresso and a shot of brandy. They’d be out again for lunch, the kind that lasts into the late afternoon. I couldn’t figure out when these people slept.

  I couldn’t see it from my balcony, but one peninsula over from Jounieh was a posh yacht club, where the criminally rich and gorgeous girls in bikinis lounged on the decks of world-class yachts. Supposedly the club never closed, no matter how bad the civil war got. When the wind was right, you could hear the fighting in downtown Beirut. But people didn’t pay attention, or they just turned up the music.

  There was nothing you couldn’t buy in the Christian enclave, from new Porsches to the latest Patek Philippe watches, from fresh truffles to long-stem roses. It didn’t matter that the high-end stuff had been hijacked at sea. My Lebanese friends would shrug their shoulders: In war, you make do the best you can.

  It’s a gross and unfair generalization, but Lebanon’s Christians didn’t have the slightest doubt about what they wanted from life: a comfortable apartment with comfortable furniture, a nice car, regular trips to Paris or London, an education for their children to brighten their future prospects. But what they absolutely had to have was a fat nest egg for when things got really bad and they needed to run for it. And the higher-end the bolt-hole the better, luxurious places such as Geneva and Beverly Hills. But in fact, it didn’t matter where, just as long as the chances of meeting a violent death were removed.

  Like the wealthy anywhere, the Lebanese Christians were reluctant warriors. They relished power as much as the next Lebanese, but it was always more about position and money than some abstract higher good. When the civil war forced them to take up arms, they had no idea what to do with them. They’d resort to indiscriminately firing artillery barrages into Muslim Beirut, setting off car bombs in densely populated neighborhoods, or unremittingly machine-gunning a suspected enemy position. The object was to kill anything that moved.

  The Christians’ unexamined premise was that overwhelming force—a deluge of firepower, bigger and better guns, fancy technology, and lots of money—was what would keep the barbarians at bay. It wasn’t all that different from Americans using their expensive fancy weapons to rack up body counts in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Another thing about the Christians is that they didn’t care to consider that on the other side of the Green Line there were people who devoted their waking lives to efficient murder. While the Christians were happy to pelt their enemies with everything they owned, these people preferred murder with a more personal touch—a bullet with a man’s name on it rather than a 155mm artillery round.

  It’s tempting to blame the Christians for willful blindness. But it’s also true that those same people living on the other side of the Green Line were particularly good at making themselves invisible. They saw no point in the Christians’ show and pomp, it never being far from their minds that you can’t kill what you can’t see.

  AS DEEP AS HELL IS HOT AND DARK

  Sidon, Lebanon, 2008: A couple of months after Hajj Radwan is assassinated, I’m in the Middle East filming a documentary on car bombs for a British television station. One of our not-to-miss stops is a miserable Palestinian refugee camp called Ayn al-Hilweh—“the sweet-water spring.” It sits in the hills just east of Sidon.

  Since the Lebanese state’s writ has never reached into Ayn al-Hilweh, the camp’s inhabitants have been at liberty to arm themselves to the teeth and turn their camp into an impregnable fortress. By the mid-eighties Ayn al-Hilweh had won itself a well-deserved reputation as the main rear base for the “Islamic resistance”—the Hezbollah guerrilla force that would drive Israel out of Lebanon in 2000. Although the Israelis would have dearly loved to, they didn’t dare send in a commando team on any mission. They would have been cut down in minutes. Nor could they bomb it from the air without killing hundreds of people and provoking an international outrage.

  Getting Lebanese permission to enter Ayn al-Hilweh takes some doing. Not too long before our visit, a Lebanese military intelligence officer in mufti snuck into the camp to check on something, but he was quickly recognized and shot dead. The Lebanese soldier at the checkpoint to the camp’s entry makes a point of telling us we could very
well meet the same fate. We brush it off, though, convinced we’ll be fine sailing under the banner of a free press.

  As arranged, two fierce-looking Palestinian gunmen meet us just inside the camp’s confines. Both have Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. One man is about five-foot-two, the other six-foot-something. Mutt and Jeff.

  We follow the two in silence as they disappear down a crooked, cramped, foul-smelling alley. Rickety overhanging additions, tangles of wire, and laundry turn day into night. The roar of generators beats the air, producing a layer of smoke as thick as Shanghai smog. An open ditch along one side serves as a sewer. Eyes follow us from darkened doorways.

  As we head down an even narrower alley, I try to strike up a conversation with our escorts. Mutt pretends not to hear me, and Jeff only grunts. It isn’t long before I lose all sense of direction. I now completely get why the Israelis and the Lebanese avoid this place as if it were a viper pit.

  We emerge from the dark into a trapezium of jagged sunlight, the camp’s version of a main street. We turn left and walk about ten feet until we come to what amounts to a covered grease pit. “Here’s your garage,” Mutt says.

  Warped fiberboard screwed and nailed together by large flattened tin cans stands in for a roof. Carelessly stacked cinder blocks serve as walls. If tools come with the place, they aren’t on display.

  A skinny teenager emerges from somewhere only to be disappointed that we aren’t here to get our car fixed. His disappointment turns to bewilderment when we tell him we want to film his “garage.” (We’ve already decided it would be impolitic to tell him his establishment is our standin for the kind of place we imagine car bombs are made.)

  Our visit to Ayn al-Hilweh would amount to more terrorism-gawking if it were not for our making a courtesy call on the camp commander on our way out. I don’t say anything to the crew, but I know from chatter that the commander was close to Hajj Radwan.

  As we are milling outside his office, one of his aides sidles up to me for a chat. I now can’t remember how Hajj Radwan’s assassination comes up, but it does.