Who knows whether Hajj Radwan read Machiavelli, but it’s clear that he shared the belief that power is the ability to hurt others. And the more discerning you are about it, the more power you win. Hajj Radwan didn’t assassinate the Swedish ambassador because Sweden possesses no power anyone would want to usurp. But more to the point, Sweden wasn’t foolish enough to invade Lebanon.
The point of it all is, if Chuck and I had any chance of pulling this off, we’d have to infiltrate the enemy’s camp—that is, mentally.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: The assassin is an iconoclast cruelly devoted to the truth.
LAW
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EVERY ACT A BULLET OR A SHIELD
It’s an efficient act—cheap, fast, scalable. Only take on baggage as needed. Throw money at it and you’re guaranteed to screw it up.
AS FAST AND EASY AS INFIDELITY
I’d guess I’m not the only sad bastard on earth who has suffered through a baleful Christmas en famille. In my family, at least, there was always some poor soul who seemed to catch a couple of well-grouped shots (metaphorically speaking). And by the way, it didn’t always occur around the family hearth.
I’ll never forget one Christmas when Mother took down a big-name Broadway producer. We were spending Christmas in Klosters, Switzerland, at the staid old Chesa Grischuna. I was ten. As was Mother’s wont, she introduced herself around and soon became friendly with the Broadway producer and his wife. Right away Mother had her suspicions about the man, how at night he’d disappear after dinner on mysterious errands.
With her unerring smell for philanderers, she finagled it out of the assistant manager that the husband paid him fifty francs to leave a window open at night so he could sneak in after the hotel’s front door was locked. Mother outbid the producer with a crisp new hundred-franc note, persuading the assistant manager to lock the window instead of leaving it open. The next day the producer and his wife abruptly checked out.
I won’t even get into whether he deserved it or not; I suspect the couple were already having their problems. But the point is, a fifty-franc prime was enough to do the trick. (In those days it wasn’t much more than ten dollars.)
What I’m trying to get at is that life is a lot more fragile than we care to admit. Let me go back to real murder. An ice pick through the medulla oblongata is a hundred percent fatal, for instance. Or jabbing the femoral artery with a penknife. And if you don’t want to get caught, an injection of the nucleoside adenosine into the nictitating membrane on the inside of the eye will do it. If you use a tiny .50-gauge needle, no coroner will ever spot it.
For the assassin, what it means is that it’s not the taking of life that’s difficult, but rather doing it with a well-defined purpose, namely, preserve force and avoid war. Le mot juste over a slap across the face, a dagger over a nuke. Always the efficiency of it.
DON’T EXPECT TO LIVE UNTIL MORNING
Paris, July 13, 1793: The following story is familiar enough, but it’s not without its lessons.
By 1793, the French Revolution’s shine had definitely started to dim. The guillotine was no longer a novelty, and the rosy promise of liberté, egalité, and fraternité was seen for the charade it was. On top of everything else, Paris was oppressively hot that summer. Rain clouds squatted just west of the city, lightning spidered the sky, and thunder echoed through the streets like kettledrums. But it stubbornly refused to rain. Another unfulfilled promise.
On the morning of July 13, a beautiful young woman in white made her way through the brooding and ornate Palais Royal. Or maybe she was in blue, as some painters have portrayed her. Or maybe even in pea green. For that matter, who knows whether she was really beautiful or not. Doesn’t political murder always assume a dramatic and exotic patina after the act?
What’s for certain is that the young woman’s name was Charlotte Corday. Of Norman gentry, she was a descendant of Corneille, one of France’s greatest dramatists. Benefiting (or suffering) from a classical education, she would say afterward that her decision had been influenced by antiquity, namely Caesar’s assassins who’d attempted to save the Republic. In one bloody act, she’d do the same for France.
At some point, Corday stopped to buy a black bonnet decorated with a green ribbon and a knife with a five-inch blade. The purchase of the knife would soon be explained, but why the bonnet?
From the Palais Royal she walked to the Cordeliers district, a part of Paris known for its radical politics. She was in search of the house of Jean-Paul Marat, a fierce, unyielding revolutionary. A doctor turned journalist, he wielded a pen dipped in acid. He believed that any Frenchman who harbored doubts about the revolution deserved to have his head separated from his neck.
Marat himself was something of an assassin. Before the revolution, he’d once applied to become a member of the Academy of Sciences, but being a doctor of middling ability who entertained bizarre theories about “animal magnetism,” he was rejected. Antoine Lavoisier, one of the fathers of chemistry, was a member of the academy at the time, and, in what turned out to be a fatal mistake, he ridiculed Marat’s theories—in public. Although Lavoisier was guillotined under the pretext of corruption, it was Marat’s old grudge that sealed his fate.
As a Jacobin deputy, Marat should have been at the National Convention rather than at home. But he suffered from an acute case of psoriasis, a disfiguring and painful disease that forced him to spend days in a medicinal bath. Wrapping a vinegar-soaked cloth around his head also helped. But there was nothing to do about the heat, which made his psoriasis nearly intolerable.
Corday’s original plan had been to assassinate Marat at the National Convention, resigning herself to certain arrest and the guillotine. But isn’t sacrifice implicit in the deal? She only changed her plans after she found out that Marat was ill at home. So it was there she’d do the deed.
Marat’s fiancée’s sister turned Corday away at the door, telling her that he was too ill to see anyone. Corday went back to her lodgings and wrote a letter addressed to Marat, falsely claiming she had in her possession a list of names of dangerous counterrevolutionaries. When Marat didn’t answer, she wrote a second letter, claiming she was being persecuted and needed his help.
It then occurred to Corday that she needed to write her final testament to the French people, explaining her motivations for murdering Marat. She pinned it to her dress, along with her baptism certificate, and retraced her steps to Marat’s house.
Corday was again turned away at the door, but thanks to a distraction caused by a delivery, she slipped through the door and made her way to Marat’s quarters. He was in his bath, a board across it covered with letters and papers.
Corday said something about the list of counterrevolutionaries. Looking at her with curiosity, Marat said something about how they’d soon enough lose their heads. Without warning, Corday produced her five-inch knife and plunged it into his neck, just above the collarbone. It severed a main artery and collapsed a lung. Marat quickly bled to death.
As portrayed in one nineteenth-century painting, the beautiful Corday stands behind Marat, staring away, the bloody knife about to drop from her hand. His lifeless body twisted over the edge of his bathtub. A beautiful murderess is a subject compelling enough. But wasn’t Marat’s murder also a cautionary tale to the powerful and arrogant that an innocent young woman, armed with only a common kitchen knife, is capable of striking at the heart of power? Corday might not have killed the French Revolution, but she did put it on notice.
THE ECONOMICS OF POLITICAL MURDER
Beirut, November 1986: It took me less than a week after I arrived in Beirut to decide my most valuable possession was a telephone that all on its own tirelessly dialed a number until someone picked up at the other end. With Beirut’s telephone exchanges shot-up and barely limping along, it was the only practical way to make a call.
I kept the telephone in the middle of my desk as a reminder that my first chore every morning was to get ahold of at least one person. Normally
, it was to set up a meeting with a source. I’d punch in the number, turn the speaker on, and go about my business, keeping one ear cocked for the sound of someone at the other end. It took me sometimes four or five hours to ring through to a telephone only a mile away. Reaching a number at the far end of Lebanon could take a week or more.
I knew it wasn’t the best idea to call my sources from a telephone line connected to any American … if for no other reason than the United States was effectively party to the Lebanese Civil War. But for what it’s worth, there wasn’t in those days a functioning Lebanese government to eavesdrop on my calls. Even if by chance it did, the government was on our side. Or, as I’ll get to, sort of.
But now that we’d made the decision to assassinate Hajj Radwan, it was time to cut out the lax bullshit. I had to anticipate that Hajj Radwan would start to hear echoes of my plans and then quickly move to tap my magic phone. It would have been as simple as recruiting a mole in the local telephone exchange, have him hang a wire on my line, run the wire to a tape recorder, and voilà, my Rolodex would be in Hajj Radwan’s hot little hands. From there—if I was right about how smart this guy was—it wouldn’t be long before everything unraveled. So, rather than call my sources from my trusty phone, I’d now have to adopt the practice of showing up at their front doors. Or signal them by moving a geranium pot in my window. Either way, the phone had to go.
By now the skeptical reader might start to wonder just how deep my paranoia ran in those days. But there’s this in my defense: A year after the 1984 kidnapping of Beirut’s CIA chief, Bill Buckley, we still had no idea who’d taken him or where he was being held. Then one day a friendly Arab government stepped forward to tell us in total confidence that it was someone called Hajj Radwan who’d grabbed him. We pleaded for details, but a name was all they’d give us.
At first, there was some doubt whether Hajj Radwan really existed. We’d never heard the name before, in any shape or form. So we ran it by the Lebanese police, who to our surprise said that, indeed, they did have a record for such a person—a passport application with a black-and-white photo attached. The police faxed us a copy of both. The photo was grainy, but staring out of it was a fierce, slender young man with a neatly trimmed beard.
The police agreed to let us photograph the original picture if we’d send someone down. But when one of our people showed up with a camera, the police red-facedly explained that in the interim both the application and the photo had disappeared. There was no point in rubbing their noses in it, but the only conclusion we could come up with was that Hajj Radwan had a mole inside the police, who was placed well enough to find out about our interest in him and who had enough chutzpah to steal his application and picture. It’s sort of as if bin Laden were to have had an assistant FBI director on the books doing his blocking for him.
My paranoia about Hajj Radwan wasn’t diminished by the fact that in a storeroom next to my office sat a suitcase full of Bill Buckley’s clothes. They were kept there for when he was released. While no one put any real stock in that anymore, the suitcase was a daily reminder that Hajj Radwan could get to any one of us. (It would later be established that Buckley died of pneumonia in 1985 while still under Hajj Radwan’s control.)
It was of constant interest to me how Hajj Radwan had been able to identify Buckley. As best I could piece together, he had someone at the airport able to observe the comings and goings at the VIP area, especially when Buckley accompanied his Lebanese counterparts to the airport to send them off to the United States. As I was told by my own source at the airport, Buckley might as well have tattooed his forehead: Hey, guys, I’m a very important American spy with important friends.
We also learned that Hajj Radwan could get into all immigration entry and exit records and flight reservations. Couple that with all of the other moles he riddled the Lebanese government with, and Buckley must have looked to him like a big fat fish in a very small fishbowl.
It didn’t help that Buckley always wore a starched shirt, pressed suit, and tie. This was in crisp contrast to most foreigners in Beirut who favored the scruffy look—jeans, denim shirts, scuffed shoes. Buckley’s living in a tony neighborhood in a grand apartment with a splendid view of the Mediterranean was another telltale marker. On top of it, Buckley kept to an unvarying schedule, leaving and coming home at exactly the same time. Even his most unobservant neighbors wondered who this disciplined man might be.
How exactly Hajj Radwan added it up to correctly pinpoint Buckley as the CIA chief, I don’t know. It could have been thanks to tapping his phone. But it didn’t matter because I’d firmly made up my mind to reverse Buckley’s modus operandi by 180 degrees, to find a way out of the comfortable, habitual world most foreigners in Beirut so easily slip into. Part of it would be dumping my automated telephone. More strategically, I’d have to take a dive down the status ladder, turn myself into a complete nonentity, someone no one wanted to waste a good bullet on.
Although a proper assassination shouldn’t come with a big price tag, and I was no Charlotte Corday, it definitely helped that money wasn’t a problem. When I telexed Langley that I needed to buy a dozen old apartments in the bad parts of town to mix up where I slept nights, the money was immediately authorized. (If an expense was tied to a “security upgrade,” Langley bitched but felt compelled to approve it.) It helped that in those days you could buy a bottom-end apartment in Beirut for under ten thousand dollars.
I asked a good contact to put the apartments in his name. With a reputation as a swordsman, he came up with the pretext that he needed them to “entertain friends.” I directed him to neighborhoods along the Green Line, all more or less vacated since the start of the civil war. They were as disregarded and invisible as Hajj Radwan’s slum.
It wasn’t long before my trusted cat’s paw came up with a half-dozen places no self-respecting Lebanese would set foot in—bullet-pocked, windows shot out, front doors blown off their hinges by rockets. None had running water or electricity. The dirt-poor refugees reduced to taking shelter in them minded their own business and pointedly ignored the odd foreigner (me) who’d show up from time to time.
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.
FEAR MAKES US SEE CLEARLY
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 was—a highly decorated and brilliant military officer, a hero in a nation of heroes. Moreo
ver, he had a long record of not playing politics with Israel’s security. During the first Palestinian uprising (1987–1993), Rabin—he was then defense minister—ordered 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 instrumental—one 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 acts—Julius 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.
The Perfect Kill Page 6