The Perfect Kill

by Robert B. Baer

  The other thing I thought about is that in a time of war it’s an organic and slippery progression from spare, dagger-in-the-heart assassination to falling into the lazy man’s trap of bringing to bear massive overwhelming force. For instance, two F-16s with big bombs. Like I said, it’s the time-honored default when the other elements of assassination aren’t possible.

  At the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, the American Air Force did its best to assassinate Saddam, launching six separate cruise missile attacks on sites where he was supposed to be hiding. (In Pentagonese, it’s called “destroying command nodes” rather than assassination.) None, though, came even close. It was like hunting a rabbit running at full tilt with a .50-caliber machine gun: It tears up a lot of earth, but leaves the rabbit to make it back to its hole and have a good laugh about it. But when does blindly spraying bullets in all directions ever lead to a sought-after outcome?

  A group of Libyan Salafis I used to meet in Khartoum once tried to assassinate Gaddafi. The best ruse they could come up with was to commandeer a trash truck as their Trojan horse. A half dozen of them hid in the back, while the driver went through the routine of a pickup at Gaddafi’s main palace in Tripoli. Although not quite sure where they were on the compound, the assassins jumped out, guns blazing. Gaddafi was nowhere in the vicinity, leaving the palace guards to cut them down at their leisure. When I delicately asked my Salafi friend what they were thinking, he replied, “Allah told us to do it.”

  No surprise it was the Germans who brought Teutonic precision and fastidiousness to political murder. In 1979 the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, made an attempt on Alexander Haig, NATO’s commander at the time. The venue was a bridge, the weapon fifty pounds of explosives buried in the pavement. While the RAF understood the principle of hitting the mark while passing through a narrow defile, they mistimed the detonation and only wounded two of Haig’s bodyguards. Everyone expected the RAF to get better, and that they did.

  Deutsche Bank knew that its chairman, Alfred Herrhausen, like other captains of German industry, was a potential target for assassination and accordingly spared no money to protect him. It furnished him with a heavily armored car and an escort of bodyguards. But what Deutsche Bank couldn’t anticipate was a military-style assault masked by the innocent and banal.

  As Herrhausen’s Mercedes pulled away from his house in Bad Homburg the morning of November 30, 1989, no one noticed the bicycle by the side of the road. Nor, of course, did anyone notice the infrared beam crossing the road at tire level. It was a typical morning, nothing out of place, nothing suspicious, another routine trip to work.

  Herrhausen’s Mercedes broke the infrared beam closing the bomb’s electrical circuit, which in turn set off the ten-kilogram explosive charge hidden in the bicycle’s saddlebag. Although the charge was relatively small, it was perfectly lethal thanks to the fact that the concave shape of the explosives projected a two-kilogram copper metal dish at something like three kilometers per second. The extreme heat caused the dish to melt into an elongated ball, a “carrot.” The carrot passed through Herrhausen’s door, severed his legs, and exited the Mercedes on the other side. Herrhausen bled to death.

  Experts call the device that killed Herrhausen a “platter” charge. In the Iraq War such devices would become known as EFPs—explosively formed penetrators. With an explosive-to-dish ratio of 4:1, they’re capable of cutting through the thickest of armor. They’re the equivalent of a sniper’s rifle, which for the Secret Service makes them one of its darkest nightmares. With properly formed explosives, a correctly shaped dish, and an infrared firing device, no president is safe.

  So far so good, but how did the RAF learn about platter charges? They’re not something you read about in The Anarchist Cookbook.

  —

  The CIA first introduced platter charges in the Middle East during the first Afghan war (1979–1989). By packing a small, locally manufactured stove with explosives, the mujahideen could drive the curved bottom through any Soviet armor plating. From Afghanistan, the technology passed through Iran to various parts of the Middle East, including Lebanon. Hezbollah picked up the technology and perfected it.

  Some reports have it that the East German secret police, the Stasi, trained the RAF in platter charges. But there were other equally plausible reports that pointed to certain Palestinian explosives experts based in Lebanon. While I’m not certain how it would have worked, it intrigued me that the Palestinian group in question was at the time allied with Hajj Radwan. Did Hajj Radwan have anything to do with training the RAF? It’s another one of those things easy to believe but impossible to prove.

  The Lebanese first figured out how to defend against a Herrhausen-style attack by adopting a sort of reverse redundancy. Militia commanders would move around in convoys of identical cars, sometimes up to twenty. Smoked windows and no license plates made it impossible for any platter-charge-wielding assassin to determine which car the militia commander was riding in.

  Short of being able to afford a twenty-car convoy, the next best way to avoid a military-style assassination is to build unpredictability and randomness into one’s existence. In this regard, Herrhausen made every mistake in the book: He left home for work at the same time every morning, he lived at an easily located address, and his neighborhood was lightly trafficked, which offered the RAF a clear field of fire. (It’s another reason not to live in the suburbs.)

  —

  Hajj Radwan understood that it’s our little habits and routines that offer the assassin his best chance. He didn’t do things like commute to work, visit his mother, or attend annual trade shows. If he had a regular barber or doctor, he didn’t advertise it. He was nowhere to be seen on his birthday. But above all, he never strutted around like a peacock.

  Various sources agree that in the early days Hajj Radwan led the most disciplined of ghostly existences, avoiding all repetitive practices. He never left by the same door he entered, never slept under the same roof two nights in a row, and never identified himself with a particular car or telephone number.

  Hajj Radwan brought the same strict regime to everything else he did. There was no detail too small for him not to personally attend to, from making sure the charges were dual primed to making sure everyone got to an appointment on time. He knew a bad battery or someone falling asleep at the switch could change the course of history. He knew he was only as strong as his weakest link, and the weakest link was only as strong as its weakest link.

  For the first year in Beirut, I’d come in early every morning to check the overnight chatter, looking for that little weak link. I filled my boxes with three-by-five cards. I got to know Hajj Radwan’s voice so I could pick it out of a noisy room. I knew his wolf pack almost as well as he did. But it was soon apparent that the chatter alone wasn’t doing it. For a start, it wasn’t in real time. While the chatter was grabbed out of the air in Lebanon, it first bounced its way back to Washington and only after a twenty-four-hour turnaround did it come back to Beirut. I’d find out Hajj Radwan had been at a certain place at a certain time. But so what? It was too late to get there before him. It was the same with satellite photography, which we got long after the fact. Even if we caught sight of Hajj Radwan’s car at Ayn al-Hilweh, it only told me he’d come and gone, not where he was going next.

  The longer it went without my stumbling across a single piece of “actionable intelligence,” the more I understood how hard it was to hit a fast-moving and unpredictable target. While chatter put me in the picture, it didn’t put me in the game. No, I’d need a body with a pulse and a brain to tell me where Hajj Radwan would be on a certain day at a certain time, just as Herrhausen’s assassin knew with near certainty when he’d be coming down the street. I knew I’d need to recruit a source close to him.

  ASSASSINATION BY THE NUMBER

  Kigali, Rwanda, April 6, 1994: The assassin has to be able to play in every key and on every scale, and smoothly adapt to changing circumstance an
d opportunity, just as he must build in layers of redundancy into every moving part. While a blinkered, one-trick assassin might get lucky, it’s the assassin prepared for every eventuality who’s most likely to succeed.

  The story has it that the night the president of Rwanda was assassinated, his wife was in their solarium, searching the sky for her husband’s jet, a Falcon 50. It was due in from Dar es Salaam at any moment. Riding on the plane with her husband was the president of Burundi, seven other passengers, and three French crew.

  She, like a lot of other people, had heard there’d been an important breakthrough at Dar—a power-sharing agreement that would reconcile Rwanda’s two largest tribes, the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis. She wasn’t happy about it. While her husband was a moderate Hutu, she thought the despised Tutsis deserved nothing.

  For neutral observers, an agreement between the Hutus and Tutsis would be a badly needed correction to Rwanda’s unfortunate colonial past. During their nearly half-century rule, the Belgians took Machiavelli at his most cynical, favoring the minority Tutsis in a deliberate, invidious strategy of divide and rule—all so they could loot the country undisturbed. The losers, the Hutus, were left to simmer in fury and patiently plan their revenge. And, unlike their Hutu president who preferred the olive branch over the gun, few were in the mood for compromise.

  At about twenty-five after eight, the Falcon 50’s lights could be seen circling the Kigali airport. Because a Falcon’s engines emit a distinctive whine, everyone knew it was the president’s plane. And anyhow, Kigali isn’t a busy airport, making a small passenger jet a rarity.

  As the jet came in for a landing, a silver knifepoint raced up into the sky, heading right for the Falcon 50. As these things so often go, time seemed to slow down. Maybe they’d pass each other, people thought. Maybe it’s a test or something. But the Falcon 50’s and the missile’s paths continued toward their fatal intersection.

  Some witnesses said that the plane’s lights went out first, the engines fell silent, and then a giant orange ball of flame filled the sky. But could it have really happened in that sequence? Others remember only an explosion and then silence. What everyone agrees on is that there was a second streak of light and a second explosion—a second missile.

  Half the city watched as the fiery wreckage fell from the sky without a sound, ironically coming to earth in the presidential garden at the feet of the president’s wife. Did she flinch or smile?

  UN forces were blocked from entering the part of the airport where the two missiles apparently had been fired from. They could only assume Rwandan soldiers had fired them, and the Rwandans didn’t want the UN poking around to confirm it.

  When the Hutus started to systemically massacre the Tutsis, it was apparent the president’s assassination had served as a prearranged signal for genocide. With anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million killed, it was the last great genocide of the twentieth century.

  What did the wife know in advance? There are people convinced she was in on her husband’s assassination. Why else would she have been in the solarium that night other than to witness with her own eyes her husband’s end?

  What is certain is that her husband’s assassins knew what they were doing. They blended redundancy (two missiles), technical sophistication (the missiles’ heat-seeking guidance system), and predictability (hitting the Falcon 50 on its approach path).

  NOTE TO ASSASSINS: As in love and war, assassination shouldn’t be reduced to one dimension. It’s a way of thinking broadly.

  LAW

  #6

  TEND YOUR REPUTATION LIKE A RARE ORCHID

  Always appear to be rock steady, rational, bound by your word. It will terrify your enemy as much as the act itself. And when the shooting stops and it’s time to talk, he’ll welcome you as a trustworthy interlocutor.

  NEVER TAKE SIDES IN A DOGFIGHT

  Beirut, March 8, 1985: At a little after nine in the morning, a Lebanese general called his American contact in Beirut. There was an urgent piece of business they needed to discuss, he said. And it couldn’t be done over the phone.

  Since the name of the American isn’t important, I’ll loan him one, Charlie. His organizational affiliation isn’t important either. As for the Lebanese general, I’ll leave him as the General.

  Charlie looked at the stack of unanswered cables on his desk and thought about how shitty the traffic would be this time of the morning. There wasn’t a single working stoplight between his office and the General’s, which sat in the foothills overlooking Beirut. It would take him at least an hour to get there.

  “How about later this afternoon?” Charlie asked.

  “No,” the General said.

  “The traffic’s—”

  “No. Get up here. Now.”

  The General had never pressed Charlie like this, making him wonder what could’ve gone wrong. It was all the odder considering that the Lebanese army was officered mainly by Christians and was in those days fawningly beholden to the United States. They looked at us as the only thing preventing the Muslims from swarming over the walls and cutting their throats.

  Charlie caught the first traffic on the coast road, then a bottleneck at Chevrolet Circle. It took him a good fifteen minutes to get through it, and another ten to get up the hill to the General’s office. The General’s aide was waiting for him and ran over and opened Charlie’s door: “Hurry! Run!”

  They took the stairs two at a time. The General was out on the terrace, looking through a pair of binoculars, Beirut spread out below him like a cadaver on a slab. A compact man with close-cropped hair, the General’s French-tailored suit fit him impeccably.

  Just as Charlie joined the General on his balcony, a flash of light shot out from a cluster of dun tenements in the southern suburbs, instantly followed by the crack of an explosion. A fountain of ash smoke rose from next to a mosque. Laundry that had been hanging from balconies floated languidly to the ground.

  The General and Charlie watched silently as the smoke fanned out across the southern suburbs. Charlie estimated the charge at several thousand pounds—a blast radius of an entire city block.

  Charlie waited for the General to say something, but he was absorbed, looking through his binoculars. The phone in the office rang. The General handed Charlie the binoculars and went inside to answer it.

  The General came back out on the balcony smiling: “At least fifty.”

  “Fifty what?”

  “Fifty of them for the two hundred forty-one Marines they killed.”

  With a sinking feeling, it occurred to Charlie that he’d just witnessed a revenge attack for the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that had occurred a year and a half before. Although the General didn’t say it, the only reasonable explanation was that the Lebanese army had been behind the bombing he’d just witnessed. But what had been the target?

  While no one had been arrested for the attack on the Marines, the assumption was that Shiite militants in the pay of Iran had done it. The Marines would be claimed by the same fictitious group that claimed the April 1983 American embassy bombing, the Islamic Jihad Organization. As we’d come to learn, Hajj Radwan headed the IJO. Fine, but what Charlie couldn’t understand was what the IJO had to do with the people who’d just been murdered. Had their office been bombed or something?

  It wasn’t until he got back to his office that Charlie found out that the target of the car bomb he’d just witnessed was Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, Lebanon’s only ayatollah. He survived only thanks to well-wishers delaying him outside a mosque where he’d just delivered a sermon. The final toll was never officially established, but it was put at about eighty, many of them women and children. (This is the same bombing that Hezbollah would accuse me twenty-six years later of orchestrating.)

  As best Charlie could determine, the Lebanese army had decided to murder Fadlallah for no other reason than every Friday he would stand in his pulpit and rail against Israel, the United States, and the Lebanese Christians. A bl
owtorch of hate, he was Lebanon’s face of militant Islam.

  The problem was there was no good evidence Fadlallah had anything to do with the attack on the Marines nor, for that matter, with any other attack on the United States. As we would determine, he was only the militants’ unwitting mouthpiece. Even more tellingly, the Iranians themselves at one point considered assassinating Fadlallah because he was an ideological rival to Iran’s Supreme Leader, its ayatollah in chief.

  And it only gets messier: At the time of the attack, Hajj Radwan was in charge of Fadlallah’s security. Where he was when the bomb went off, we don’t know. But what we knew for certain was that it was Hajj Radwan who led the investigation and the arrest and execution of some dozen suspects.

  If the Fadlallah attempt had been purely a Lebanese affair, it would have been an obscure footnote in Lebanon’s history. But almost immediately word went around that the CIA was ultimately behind it. Rumor was taken as fact when Bob Woodward came out with his book Veil. In it he recounts how President Reagan’s CIA director, Bill Casey, confessed on his deathbed that he, Casey, had personally ordered Fadlallah’s assassination.

  The CIA was left scratching its head. It knew it hadn’t authorized Fadlallah’s assassination. Was it possible that Casey had really told Woodward this? On the other hand, it didn’t make much difference: The CIA was now indelibly painted with the same brush as the Lebanese army—clumsy thugs who didn’t give a crap who they killed and maimed. Just as damaging, the Lebanese decided if Casey couldn’t keep a secret, no one in the CIA could. It was something I had to learn to live with in Beirut.

  A CLEAN ACT GIVES YOU MORAL FORCE

  Beirut, December 1986: The Colonel pulled out a piece of paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it, and smoothed it out on the coffee table between us. I got up and moved a table lamp closer for better light. It was a military map of downtown Beirut. Someone had drawn in the Green Line with a thick blue grease pencil.