“He was here a couple months before,” the aide says. He points to a pile of broken masonry and trash not ten feet from us: “He was standing right by there.”
“He was here in Ayn al-Hilweh?” I say, thinking, So much for my theory that Hajj Radwan fled to Syria after murdering Hariri.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
I couldn’t help myself. “But why?”
“How should I know?” the aide says as he walks away to join another conversation.
For a split second I consider running after him to remind him that the fucker’s dead and buried. So what’s the big deal about telling me what he was doing here? But I know it’s pointless. Whatever unnatural aura that follows Hajj Radwan’s memory around would trump whatever pleading I can bring to the table.
—
As we head out of the camp, following Mutt and Jeff, I can’t help but consider the very real possibility that it was here, in a makeshift garage not unlike the one we’ve just filmed, that Hajj Radwan prepared the truck bombs destined for the two U.S. embassies and the Marine barracks. It runs counter to the press’s reporting that those bombs were assembled in the Bekaa Valley and driven down to Beirut. But as I know, those reports are as flimsy as my speculation that the bombs might have been made here.
As hard as I try not to let it, my favorite idée fixe, Pan Am 103, pops into my head. What we know for certain is that in July 1988 a meeting of Hajj Radwan’s associates took place in a Palestinian camp very much like Ayn al-Hilweh, this one just south of Beirut. The meeting had been convened to plan the blowing up of five civilian airliners in mid-flight.
The venue was a shabby, nondescript travel agency—cheap plastic furniture, dirty terrazzo floor, crowded, stifling hot. It wasn’t in the report, but I imagine the plotters stood in a corner whispering to one another, their voices masked by the general din. But who knows, maybe the owners were in on the plot. It was only thanks to dumb luck we even found out about the meeting.
It wasn’t as if that camp wasn’t on our radar. We knew Hajj Radwan borrowed it as an ad hoc sanctuary, just like he did with Ayn al-Hilweh. He’d arrive without fanfare, do his business, and then take off without a word. Once, a couple of days after we had picked up chatter that Hajj Radwan had been there for a meeting, Chuck and I drove up into the hills above it to take a look.
The camp’s narrow streets were packed, people going about their innocent quotidian business. Granted, we were at a good distance, but it all looked benign enough to me. Even after Pan Am 103 went down, and I’d read about the meeting at the travel agency, it was hard to think of this camp as somewhere someone would plan mass murder.
“You give me the plates of the fucker’s car and enough time to set up,” Chuck said, “and by God, I’ll reach out and touch him.”
Chuck went back to our car and grabbed a foreshortened Kalashnikov equipped with a laser sight. He picked out at random a parked car, put the rifle to his shoulder, and held it steady, looking in his scope. He lowered so he could read the ballistic performance tables taped to the stock. He put it back to his shoulder, locking on to the car again. “Yep. A no-misser.”
I started to get nervous. Two weeks before, Chuck and one of our techs were close to here when they were arrested by one of the local Christian militias. They were held until someone up the chain of command passed down the order to let them go. Now I was afraid of a repeat. Since Langley was already nervous about what we were up to, we couldn’t afford to give them an excuse to pull us out.
“We’re out of here,” I finally said. Chuck lowered his rifle and took it back to the car.
—
Even to this day, I wonder if at that very moment Chuck’s murderers weren’t down there in that camp designing his murder—I don’t know—perfecting the bomb that would blow a hole in the skin of Pan Am 103. The assembling and testing of it would have been too risky in places like Malta, Frankfurt, London, or wherever the Pan Am device was checked in.
I’d come to look at Palestinian refugee camps as underground rivers. You vaguely know they’re there, but you don’t know much else. Without the landmarks we’re accustomed to—fixed addresses, fixed telephone lines, and censuses—it’s impossible for us to get our bearings. Which, in turn, means it’s impossible to conduct a proper police investigation, or for that matter an assassination.
Hezbollah sprouted out of the same soil as the Palestinian camps—Beirut’s anonymous and insular slums. Although it was secretly formed in August 1982, it didn’t go public until 1985. And even after that, Hezbollah’s military command was unknown. Shuttling between tenements in the southern suburbs and poor villages in the south, the key military commanders aren’t known to even Hezbollah’s rank and file. It’s as if General Motors were managed by a mail clerk somewhere in the basement, but no one knows his name or how to find him.
THE OTHER SIDE OF MANHOOD’S TRACKS
Beirut, October 1986: From my balcony, I could see a good slice of Muslim Beirut. It was like looking down into the Ninth Circle of Hell. Not only did Hajj Radwan operate somewhere over there; so did a lot of other political psychopaths, from the Japanese Red Army to the German Red Army Faction. They were all people who’d have dearly loved to get their hands on a CIA operative. If I ever made the mistake of crossing over, even for a short visit, my life wouldn’t have been worth an hour’s purchase.
The upshot of it was that the CIA lived by the ironclad diktat of never crossing over. No more hanging out at the Palm Beach for me or going to movies in Hamra. The American ambassador occasionally did go over, but it was always for an unannounced visit, and for only a couple of hours. And he was escorted by what amounted to a reinforced company. (The American embassy possessed what amounted to the fourth-largest militia in Lebanon.)
But it wasn’t as if I entertained any illusion that holing up in the Christian enclave kept me a hundred percent safe. Directly down the hill from me was the bombed-out American embassy annex, now a forlorn carcass. With its siding completely stripped off, it looked like an abandoned parking structure. I often thought of it as an architectural statement that Hajj Radwan could come get us any damn time he pleased. It’s pretty much what he was doing to the French.
About the time I arrived in Beirut, Hajj Radwan was in the middle of a bloody campaign against France, hijacking French airliners and setting off bombs in Paris. Along with it, he’d taken to picking off French officials in Beirut, one after the other. In the course of a year, he assassinated one military attaché, one intelligence operative, and three gendarmes. The gendarmes were killed less than a mile from my apartment. Who knows exactly how he managed it, but Hajj Radwan clearly had free run of the Christian enclave. He reminded me of a shark that keeps to the depths and only breaks surface to strike; he knew our world, but we didn’t know his.
What certainly helped, as I’ll keep pointing out, is that Hajj Radwan didn’t care about the personal trappings of power and money. He never felt he needed to ape the ways of Lebanon’s warlords, racing around town in their Range Rovers and firing Kalashnikovs out the window into the air. He didn’t keep bowing and scraping aides around him. And there was no tossing gold coins from his purse or beating his chest to remind people of who he was. For instance, although it was a spectacular, history-altering attack, he never did claim responsibility for the Marine barracks bombing. In fact, his name can only be attached to it by the flimsiest of hearsay.
Hajj Radwan lived a monk’s life, or at least he did in the early days. He preferred a shared taxi to his own car and lived in small, cramped apartments without air-conditioning or central heating. By shunning Beirut’s flashy restaurants and nightclubs, places where people go to be seen, and all the other status symbols of Beirut’s villains and plutocrats, he freed himself up for the business at hand—murdering his enemies.
Hajj Radwan wouldn’t even allow his name to appear on Hezbollah’s internal organizational charts. On the rare occasion he needed to visit an official Hezbollah facility
, he arranged in advance for an escort to walk him past the guards. No questions asked or answers proffered. It was as if he were just a guy who’d wandered in off the street.
Hajj Radwan didn’t carry a gun. He knew that wannabes strap on a Glock to let people know they’re not to be fucked with. Guns may be an indispensable credential for the insecure, but they’re one more marker to avoid.
The same standard held for the rest of Hajj Radwan’s people. They lived life as nonentities, often in apparent poverty, below remark or notice. When they needed to, they adopted the protective coloration of the law-abiding bourgeoisie. From examining telephone records, it was determined the on-the-ground coordinator of Hariri’s murder—Hajj Radwan’s brother-in-law—had posed as a nouveau riche Armenian jeweler living in a Christian neighborhood. Although there wasn’t a drop of Christian blood in him, the gold cross around his neck and a self-taught Christian accent were enough to fool even the wary. He threw more dust in people’s eyes by owning a large pleasure yacht, keeping the company of beautiful women, and spending his nights at the Casino du Liban. (On the basis of the telephone analysis, he coordinated Hariri’s assassination from the casino.)
To reduce his footprint to nothing, Hajj Radwan cut off contact with even his family. It meant no Sunday barbecues, no weddings, no funerals, ever. He never set foot in his home village because he had to anticipate that the Israelis would have placed a mole there whose sole task was to alert them to his visits.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying that the CIA couldn’t get a fix on Hajj Radwan. Over the years, it canvassed every tough, greedy profession in its hunt for Hajj Radwan, from heroin peddling to arms dealing. But no matter what amount of money was put on the table, the CIA always came up empty-handed—not even the thinnest lead, let alone one that would allow it to grab him.
For the longest time, rumor had it that Hajj Radwan had undergone plastic surgery in order to assume an entirely fresh identity. But after his death, when pictures of him were put up around Beirut, it was obvious this wasn’t true. It was rather a case of Hajj Radwan’s having truly mastered the art of invisibility.
What it all comes back to is that he knew our world, but there was no way for us to know his.
Calculate like a hungry man.
—SUN TZU
Hajj Radwan didn’t grow up in a Palestinian refugee camp, but his Beirut slum might as well have been one. It was a world of crushing poverty—sewers running out onto dirt streets, piles of burning trash, the din of despair and lost lives. Electricity and water were sporadic, often out for days at a time. I never saw Hajj Radwan’s house, but I didn’t need to, to know it was a cold freeze in the winter, a bagel oven in the summer.
Insular and forced in on itself, Hajj Radwan’s slum was as deep and black a hole as Ayn al-Hilweh. Any outsider who made the mistake of wandering in would be immediately confronted and interrogated. As for an American like me, he’d be ipso facto taken as a spy, arrested, and hauled off to a Hezbollah prison.
It was easier for me to see Hajj Radwan by seeing what he wasn’t. Escaping poverty was all but impossible for poor Shiites. When the war got bad, there wasn’t the money to pick up and flee to London or Paris as the rich Christians did. Lebanese colonies in Africa were an escape for some. But in a place like Kano, Nigeria, life was no less precarious than it was in Lebanon. The better alternative was to stay put and defend the little you did possess, even at the risk of violent death.
In Hajj Radwan’s world there was no time for our preciosity and abstract political fancies, things like the Clash of Civilizations, Progress, and Universal Justice. People didn’t have the time to read The New York Review of Books or talk about the Academy Awards, write blogs about their inner turmoil, or take off a year to find themselves.
Call it a natural advantage or a disease, but for poor Shiites in Hajj Radwan’s slum, reality let them know exactly what they were worth. Without crutches such as trust funds for the wealthy or social safety nets for the poor, profligacy wasn’t an option. With few chances coming along in life, you knew you absolutely had to take the ones that did. While we in the West go to sleep thinking about what we’ve lost, Lebanon’s poor Shiites stay awake dreaming about what’s to be gained.
Straight-up politics wasn’t a salvation either. The Shiites knew from hard experience that elections are rigged or bought, justice is a luxury for the rich, and the rule of law is a deceit perpetuated to keep down the weak. The few Shiites lucky enough to make it to the top immediately forgot their roots and started to sing the elite’s tune and devote themselves to their comforts and entertainment.
What the Shiites had left was the extended family, clan, and tribe. As in Homeric Greece, all satisfaction came from blood ties—livelihood, work, duty, social ties, and even relations with God. In Arabic, there’s a word for it—asabiyyah. Tribal solidarity. A sort of esprit de corps, I guess you could call it. The Sicilians have something like it, sangu du me sangu. Blood of my blood.
With tribal solidarity comes the notion that there can be only one undisputed chief, the tribe’s shepherd. Invested in him is every important decision related to the tribe’s welfare and security, especially decisions related to war and peace. His decisions are personal and binding; he’s prosecutor, jury, and judge. Something like homicide isn’t a crime in the public sense, but rather a personal matter for the chief to decide—name the transgression and then decide the appropriate penalty.
It’s a world where power is never ambiguous, words are meaningless, and the act alone counts. There are no second-place finishes, no also-rans, no consolation prizes, no satisfaction from straddling the top of the bell curve. The only thing that matters is authentic, unadulterated power—holding on to what you have and usurping more given the opportunity. Those who can’t adapt to the world as it is are doomed to misery and early death.
Guesses will always be guesses, but I believe it’s in this context that we need to view Hajj Radwan’s attempt on Ambassador Phil Habib. It goes some of the way in answering the question why Hajj Radwan didn’t murder the first American he came across in Beirut. There were hundreds of them wandering around, all blissfully unaware of Hajj Radwan’s existence, let alone knowing that he might have an interest in killing them. If he’d taken this route, he would have racked up a much higher body count.
There was the obvious symbolism of destroying a building belonging to the American government, but I suspect it’s more complex than that. In his attempt on Habib, Hajj Radwan almost surely hoped that by making it personal—decapitate the invading enemy—his act would be a stronger incentive for the Americans to decamp and go home. Killing a second secretary from the American embassy or a spook like me lacked the act’s full import. In Hajj Radwan’s world, you kill the owner, not his dog.
Theory aside, what’s for certain is that Hajj Radwan didn’t learn about the instrumentalities of murder at the polo club. He arose out of a world whose insides are blackened by murder and poverty, where beautiful theories are burned to a crisp, and easy-to-come-by morality is slain by brute fact. It’s a world where people survive solely thanks to their reptilian instincts, and by sticking to the essential … and definitely not by throwing money at a problem.
A NOTE ON COLD EMPATHY
The day Chuck and I decided to murder Hajj Radwan, we knew we had to find a way to inhabit his world. Unfortunately, this meant entertaining something like empathy for his point of view, including his politics. When you caricature and vilify people, it makes them hard to see, and even harder to get a clean shot at.
Long ago I realized that holing up in some cloistered office, watching CNN, reading regurgitated analysis, and attending vapid meetings in Washington were not going to put me in Hajj Radwan’s world. No, getting a feel for a strange tribe is really hard work. You have to eat their food, pray in their mosques, and consort with their women. Shum al-hawah, as the Lebanese say. Breathe the air. You need to get to a point where nothing an enemy can say or do will ever come as a s
urprise to you.
I never flattered myself that I could go completely native, crawl into the skin of a tribe like Hajj Radwan’s, and arrive at the undiluted truth. Lawrence of Arabia got a lot deeper into the Arab mind than I ever would, but he never did truly come to understand the Arabs. I consoled myself with the thought that it wasn’t a deal breaker. I’m no anthropologist, and like I said, all I really needed to do was understand Hajj Radwan well enough to figure out his next destination and get there before he did.
One thing it meant was I had to erase every prejudice I had, such as when America murders abroad, it’s benevolent, but when the locals do it, it’s terror. I had to treat Hajj Radwan as a rational human capable of accurately calculating his own interests and then finding the most efficient means of furthering them.
Hajj Radwan didn’t murder Americans because he hated their culture or their freedoms. He didn’t have the time or inclination to murder for “values.” He didn’t give a damn about American women wearing skimpy bikinis to the beach. (Lebanese women wear a lot skimpier ones, and he never said a word about it.) He didn’t kill Israelis because he hated Jews, but because they were an occupying power.
Hajj Radwan possessed a neat, clean hatred, which translated into driving the odious foreign invader from his land. It was a straight-line calculation, which, like I said, very much accorded with the Lao assassins’ point of view. Again, he made an attempt on Ambassador Habib because he believed it was the shortest and most expeditious means to persuade the Americans to leave. He kidnapped the CIA chief because he thought it would shut down the CIA in Lebanon, or at least force it back behind high walls and, in the bargain, blind it. (By the way, it worked.)
Power alone mattered to Hajj Radwan, usurping and preserving it. It’s why he never picked fights over personal slights, historical wrongs, or whims. When the Israelis murdered his brother, he didn’t retaliate. By both necessity and design, he tailored assassination to obtain well-defined and tangible objectives—seize a strategic position, assassinate a particularly effective captain to demoralize the enemy’s troops, hit at an enemy’s most vulnerable point to disrupt its ranks.
The Perfect Kill Page 5