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.
—
The 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 objective—to 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 ASSASSIN ALWAYS EXCEPTIONAL, THE VICTIM ALWAYS IRREPLACEABLE
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 Beirut–Damascus 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 power—reality 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 was—a 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.
Hajj Radwan intuitively understood that the capable assassin doesn’t measure his worth by the size of his budget, how many people are under him, or the number of fancy gadgets he possesses. And he definitely doesn’t play the numbers game. Toting up body counts is a mark of failure and impotence, like a waterfront whore counting her tricks at the end of a night. In political murder, no one gives a shit how hard you try or how many times you do something, but rather how well you do it.
Other professional murderers bring the same sort of asceticism to the act. The Mexican drug cartels behead their victims with axes and kitchen knives, deliberately leaving the remains by the side of the road to make people understand just how ruthless they are … and to send the implicit message they’ll happily do it again.
I would like to have been a fly on the wall when Hajj Radwan watched news reports coming out of Iraq about our attempts to assassinate Saddam in the early days of the war. How our cruise missiles smashed up a lot of stuff and killed a lot of people, but never came close to Saddam. I also wonder what he said about our emptying the Treasury for the “Global War on Terror,” the six trillion dollars we spent on it, or whatever the final tally is. Could it not have seemed a grotesque amount of money to assassinate one man, Osama bin Laden?
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: Like the economies of love and betrayal, assassination must be finely calculated.
LAW
#5
ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP FOR EVERYTHING
Count on the most important pieces of a plan failing at exactly the wrong moment. Double up on everything—two sets of eyes, two squeezes of the trigger, double-prime charges, two traitors in the enemy’s camp.
NOTHING EVER WORKS THE FIRST TIME
I’ll never forget when they walked us through a mock ambush at CIA boot camp. It was a muggy September night, the cicadas shrieking as if they were the ones about to be murdered. One of our instructors shepherded us, as if we were lambs, into a half-buried bunker. Its six-inch-slit Plexiglas window looked down on a concrete bridge spanning a shallow gully. He told us to put in our earplugs.
At first, there was only the pulsing blackness of night. Then came the sound of a chain dragging over concrete. I couldn’t tell what was going on until a car came into view crossing the bridge in our direction. Its lights were off. Another one followed close behind. There were four cars in all, a single chain pulling them roughly across the bridge. It reminded me of an automated car wash.
As soon as the first car reached our side of the bridge, there was a piercing light, followed by a boom and a ball of flame that climbed into the sky and vanished. Flipped over on its back, the car looked like a smoking, dead roach. From the far side of the bridge came a second explosion, slamming the last car into the one in front of it. The two cars in between were now hemmed in.
From somewhere on the riverbank behind us, someone slammed a rocket-propelled grenade into car number two. A second rocket hit it, shoving the car back a couple of feet. A heavy machine gun pounded bullets and tracers into number two. A second machine gun followed suit. Number two shuddered and started to burn, revealing the landscape for the first time. It was one way to see Virginia’s Tidewater.
The next morning they took us back to inspect the damage. The rubber dummy in the backseat of car number two was a melted blob. “I don’t think this fellow had much of a chance, do you?” the instructor said, wheeling around to see if anyone dared challenge him.
He didn’t use the word, but I knew he was talking about redundancy—the two initial explosions, the two rocket-propelled grenades, the two heavy machine guns. If one failed, the second one would step in to take over. It’s basic tactics familiar to any soldier.
THE ASSASSIN WHO DANCES WITH A HUNDRED LEGS
The need to compensate for human shortcomings, frailty, and run-of-the-mill stupidity won’t come as news to anyone. It’s as basic as two eyes, two ears, and two kidneys. But a fail-safe redundancy is absolutely indispensable for the assassin, if for no other reason than he’s unlikely to get a second chance.
Police SWAT teams build redundancy into their “entries”—two “flash-bang” grenades thrown in each room; two snipers; two shooters, one entering a room “high,” the other “low”; two bullets into a perp. The Navy SEAL credited with killing bin Laden reportedly went by the book, shooting him twice. “Double tapping” the bad guy has entered Hollywood’s pop vocabulary.
Redundancy has even been built into assault rifles. The Israelis have on the market a two-barrel, one-trigger assault rifle called the Gilboa Snake. According to the advertising, “The features of the Gilboa Snake enables operators to accurately deliver two rounds into a target without the delay of cycling and the felt recoil which make ‘double taps’ difficult to group.”
Redundancy also fits in with general strategy. On August 23, 2013, two car bombs went off in a crowded neighborhood in Tripoli, Lebanon. On December 29, 2013, Chechen Islamic rebels blew up the main train station in Volgograd, and then a trolley bus the next day. And there was Hajj Radwan’s twin attacks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, one against the Marines and the other against French paratroopers. The number two—or, even better, multiple attacks—advertises that you enjoy the advantage of military reserves.
The siblings of redundancy are speed, surprise, terrain, and faultless intelligence. The less redundancy built into an assassination, the more the other elements must compensate for it. The ultimate redundancy, although the least efficient manifestation of violence, is massive firepower.
Surprise, of course, is also critical. No wink and a nod beforehand, no foreplay, no threats. The dummy in car number two wasn’t offered the slightest hint of what was waiting for him at the bridge. The attack occurring at night added to the element of surprise.
As for speed, the attack on the convoy, from beginning to end, could
n’t have lasted more than two minutes. It unspooled much too quickly for the human mind to react in a coherent fashion. There wasn’t even enough time to choose between fight or flight.
The terrain was also ideal. Once number two started across the bridge—a narrow defile without escape—his fate was sealed. It was like catching someone coming down an escalator, trapped on either side, and people blocking escape in front and back. It’s as easy as shooting a rubber duck in a bathtub.
Precise intelligence is the icing on the cake. The composition of number two’s convoy, his route, and his schedule were all known to his assassins. The only thing better would have been if the assassins had been informed in advance where the convoy would stop to let number two get out to take a piss.
Nothing I saw of assassination in the years since my training changed my view of it. Follow the elementary rules, build in redundancy and superb intelligence, and a mark doesn’t stand a chance.
—
I was caught up in my first real assassination in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, an Israeli one. It came with the three classic elements of political murder—surprise, speed, precision. The one thing I wasn’t so sure about was the intelligence, my sole contribution to it.
It all started when a Lebanese cop I knew knocked on my door to tell me he’d discovered a notorious Palestinian militant living next to him. When I asked him if he was sure he had the right Palestinian, he shrugged his shoulders: “It’s got to be him.” He was able to pick out the man’s apartment building from an aerial photograph.
Without a way to confirm or disprove the cop’s story, I sent a message around the region to see if anyone had anything to add. My answer came back very early the next morning in the guise of a violent pounding on my door. The cop shouted through the door that the apartment building he’d flagged to me had just been hit and completely destroyed by two F-16s belonging to you know who. (Two for the redundancy of it.)
I quickly decamped, anxious that the next person pounding on my door would be a Palestinian assassin bent on vengeance. As we drove away into the night, I was all but certain the F-16s were dispatched based on good intelligence; mine only tipped the scale. If I was on to him, they had to be, right?
The Perfect Kill Page 7