The Perfect Kill

by Robert B. Baer

  The Colonel cut a distinguished figure—slim, graying at the temples, a granite jaw, starched fatigues. The only thing missing was a regimental mustache. He was a Sunni from the north. His unit, an infantry brigade, was now on rotation on the Green Line.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  He followed the Green Line with a finger until he came to where it jutted into the Christian lines like a fist punching through a curtain. “I intend to straighten it out right here. What do you think?”

  It took me a moment before I figured out that he wanted my go-ahead to launch an attack to “straighten out” the Green Line. I can’t remember which Muslim militia was on the other side, but I do remember wondering what kind of hell it would unleash.

  I looked over at the Colonel to make sure he was serious. I’d only been introduced to him a couple of months before, not enough time to take his pulse. Maybe this was his idea of a joke. He hadn’t touched his drink and was sober as far as I could tell.

  “Aren’t you asking the wrong person?” I said.

  “I can’t go to my command because they would only say no.”

  The Colonel said he would pass off the attack as a firefight that had gotten out of control. No one would know any better. If I could get a green light, he’d make the attack early the next morning.

  I was now thirty-four and should have been smart enough to tell the Colonel fuck no. Instead, I offered to meet back up at midnight with an answer. I didn’t say it, but what I really wanted to do was let the deputy chief (the chief was out of the country) know that the Colonel was about to breathe life back into the civil war. We should probably give Langley a heads-up.

  The deputy chief would have the right perspective on this, I thought. Like me, guns and violence didn’t sit well with him. When he first arrived in Beirut and was given a standard-issue 9mm Browning, he started playing around with it and accidentally pulled the trigger and put a hole in the ceiling. A major from Delta Force detailed to us cut a heart out of purple paper and pinned it over the hole. (The deputy’s Purple Heart was still there the day I left Beirut.)

  I gave the Colonel ten minutes to clear the building and then left. My first stop was Chuck’s. In Beirut in those days, it was always better to move around in pairs. Chuck rolled his eyes when I told him I needed to ask the deputy permission to start World War III.

  The question now became how to find the deputy. He was in the middle of a messy divorce and spent his nights catting around Beirut with young Lebanese girls. He’d lately fallen for a genuine beauty, which in turn led to his turning off his Motorola radio. A girl with a lot of spirit, we called her Frittata. He would later marry her.

  Frittata didn’t like the deputy’s regular haunts, which meant we had the entire Christian enclave to cover. It may have been tiny in terms of square miles, but it was thick with restaurants and nightclubs.

  We started out with the French restaurants along the Dog River. They were mostly empty, and it didn’t take long to figure out the deputy and Frittata weren’t there. Nor were they at the usual places in Kaslik or the half-dozen seaside restaurants they frequented. It was time to recalibrate our sights.

  The first strip club we stopped at was like a dank cave, a couple of lurid mauve bulbs hanging from wires behind the bar. In the back near the toilets there was a glass disco floor, colored strobe lights flashing underneath in time with ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” A slender Filipina in a bikini was dancing by herself, a languid beat behind the music.

  I spotted our administrative officer at the end of the bar. A short, heavyset man, he was in his usual mechanic’s jumpsuit. He’d served a handful of tours in Vietnam where he’d acquired a taste for Asian girls. Lizard-still, he stared at the Filipina.

  I sauntered over to him while Chuck stayed in the door, his hand under his vest, gripping his SIG Sauer semiautomatic pistol. I whispered in the administrative officer’s ear that I needed to find the deputy.

  Not taking his eyes off the Filipina, he said: “Do you see him? Go fuck off.”

  I was about to ask him if he’d help us look for the deputy—drinks on me—but Chuck in the meantime had decided he didn’t like the looks of a pair sitting in a dark corner. I grabbed Chuck by the elbow and pulled him outside before the SIG Sauer came out.

  A half-dozen girlie bars later, I decided I was too tired to care whether the Green Line was jagged or straight. Anyhow, I had to get back for my meeting with the Colonel.

  The Colonel listened impassively as I suggested that it was his decision alone whether to straighten out the Green Line or not, but I added that, personally, I didn’t think it was a good idea. Who cared whether the Green Line was straight or jagged? He threw down his scotch, then told me he needed to get back to his troops.

  As I let him out the door, it occurred to me that, now he’d let me into his circle of violence, I’d let him into mine.

  THINK TWICE BEFORE SUMMONING THE DEVIL

  The apartment where I normally met the Colonel was in an upscale building about three miles up the coast from Jounieh. Designed in a quarter circle, every apartment faced the sea. It came with an elegant tiled pool and a small harbor for residents to dock their boats. As I figured out, most of the neighbors used the apartments as fuck pads. Fine, but what I couldn’t figure out was why they called them “chalets.”

  By our meeting the following week, the Colonel still hadn’t straightened out the Green Line, and he never would. I thought about asking why the change of heart, but instead I poured him a tall whiskey. I picked out a fresh cigar from the humidor, clipped off the end, and handed it to him along with a box of long matches.

  As he lit his cigar, I slipped a plain envelope across the coffee table, noting that there was an extra thousand dollars in it. I didn’t say why, and he didn’t ask. I lighted my own cigar. Aren’t these things meant to give you time to formulate your thoughts?

  “Do you want some real work?” I finally asked.

  The question wasn’t without its archaeology. For some time now, the Colonel had been telling me he intended to retire to Atlanta but that he first wanted to do an important service for the United States. It was up to us to decide what that service would be.

  I pulled out of my backpack an eight-by-eleven manila envelope and pulled from it Hajj Radwan’s picture—a copy of the same grainy passport picture the police had faxed to us. Enlarged, it made Hajj Radwan look even angrier and more menacing than the original fax. I turned it around so that the Colonel could take a good look.

  He held it up in his hand to study it, then looked over at me: “I don’t know him.”

  I would soon regret it, but I decided that full disclosure was in order. I told him how Hajj Radwan had kidnapped Buckley and very well might have been behind the attack on the Marines and the two embassy bombings. I even told him the story of how he’d arranged to snatch the original application from the jaws of the police. As I went on, the Colonel never took his eyes off Hajj Radwan’s picture.

  I wrote out Hajj Radwan’s name in Arabic on a three-by-five card and pushed it over the table to him. He picked it up and looked at it.

  I filled up our glasses. “I need your help finding him.”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “But you probably have soldiers who do, maybe even some from his neighborhood.”

  I already knew the Colonel had half a dozen Shiite soldiers from the southern suburbs in his brigade.

  The Colonel whistled and turned his head to look out toward the sea.

  I sensed I was losing momentum, but now wasn’t the time to give up. “Couldn’t they be persuaded to look into it, give us something? I don’t know, an address?”

  He looked at me unwaveringly for a full five seconds before he asked, “Is your intention to kill this man?”

  I hesitated a fatal split second before answering. “Right now, let’s just find him.”

  He pushed the three-by-five card back across the table toward me.

  I didn
’t pick it up: “Keep it.”

  “I will remember the name.”

  I took the card and put it in the envelope. “So what do you think?” I said.

  “Let me think. Maybe.”

  In Lebanon, you never hear “no.” “Maybe” is the polite, perfectly serviceable standin for it. But in as much as I could read the Colonel’s body language, his “maybe” was more like a “fuck no.”

  I thought how here’s a military man who’s been on the front lines of war for the last ten years, produced the deaths of an untold number of people, and now refuses to help hunt down a man who wouldn’t hesitate to murder both of us. Did I scare him with the story about Hajj Radwan stealing his papers from the police?

  After the Colonel left, I took my drink out onto the balcony. A young girl in a bikini was swimming laps in the pool. The underwater lights were on. She looked too poised and classy to be someone’s mistress. But who knows; there’s so little I understand about this country.

  SOMETIMES RAKING THROUGH THE ASHES ONLY GETS YOU MORE ASHES

  Beirut, October 2009: On a trip to Beirut for the Hariri Tribunal, I call the Colonel to catch up on old times. He’s now retired, but instead of immigrating to the United States, he’s in business here. We meet in the restaurant on the rooftop terrace of a fancy boutique hotel in Ashrafiyah, not far from where the Lebanese president-elect was assassinated in September 1982.

  The Colonel has exchanged his starched fatigues for an expensive Italian suit and a hand-sewn silk tie. He’s as slim as ever, his upright bearing still intact. He’s apparently done well, a man no longer in need of the CIA’s money or, for that matter, me.

  We laugh about old times, how posh and intolerably chic Beirut’s become, how the Lebanese have shed bloodlust for money. But isn’t that the way these things usually go?

  When we get around to political gossip, I drop it in—as naturally as I can—that it’s something the way Hajj Radwan was caught red-handed in the murder of Hariri. The Colonel pretends not to hear and looks around for the waiter. “Sorry, I have an appointment. Maybe we can have dinner one night.” He catches a waiter’s eye and makes as if he’s scribbling on his hand.

  I know there’s no point in drilling a dry well, but I’ve come a long way and don’t intend to let him go without something: “So, no opinion about Hariri?”

  “I believe your question should be why Israel decided to kill Hariri.” When I look at him in disbelief, he says: “You know as well as I do that the Israelis will never leave us in peace.”

  The cockeyed conspiracy theory that Israel killed Hariri started even before the smoke cleared that Valentine’s Day. The truly inventive souls swore they’d seen the Israeli F-16 that had bombed Hariri’s convoy. And now with news of the tribunal’s indictments, the latest twist is that Israel somehow manipulated Lebanese telephone records in order to frame Hezbollah. Could the Colonel possibly believe this crap?

  But never one to abandon a lost, dead, and buried cause, I ask, “So how then did the Israelis get to Hajj Radwan and murder him?”

  “May I invite you to come up to my village?”

  And there it is, I think: a genuine offer of hospitality to avoid the truth.

  As I watch the Colonel disappear into the elevator, I think how you should never underestimate the upside of ostentatious savagery. Even from the other side of the grave, Hajj Radwan still terrifies the crap out of the Lebanese.

  DON’T NEGLECT THE LOCAL MUSEUMS

  Now that I’ve been publicly linked to Hajj Radwan’s murder, I’ll never get a chance to visit his mausoleum in Nabatiyah. This leaves me to picture it as something like the Gothic reliquaries my mother used to drag me through when I was a kid in Europe—hushed, dark, eerie. A peephole into a very alien world.

  But I didn’t need to see Hajj Radwan’s tomb to know that he lived in a world where moral ambivalence doesn’t exist. There’s no kicking the can down the road, no twiddling your thumbs waiting for bad karma to catch up with your enemies. It’s a world of brutal calculations, where every important decision comes with a built-in on/off switch. Murder is like breathing—no blessing or license needed. It may all sound tribal, primeval, and repugnant to us, but it’s the way many parts of the world work.

  People who live close to the bone don’t have a choice other than to preserve their reputations. Call it honor, a culture of shame, or whatever you like. The point is, you don’t go around making empty threats, you don’t miss, you don’t kill the wrong person, and you don’t wander into quagmires you don’t know how to get out of. And God forbid, if you ever do, you never acknowledge the mistake.

  The brutal economy of life means you can’t afford to become tethered to a failing enterprise. There’s no tolerance for thoughtlessly flipping the on/off switch up and down, no changing horses midstream, no waiting around for a better opportunity to come along.

  So it is, the assassin, with each and every act, demonstrates he’s capable of bringing a quick, discrete, cathartic end to an enemy. Doing it expeditiously and right the first time gives him moral force; there are no points for a good try. You don’t threaten to get bin Laden “dead or alive” and then wait a decade to do it.

  It’s with his reputation in mind that Hajj Radwan never advertised an assassination in advance. While he, of course, didn’t want to lose the element of surprise, he also didn’t want to make a promise he very well might not be able to keep. There is little doubt that this is what was at play with the first American embassy bombing in April 1983. By never acknowledging it was an attempt on Ambassador Habib, he let people believe it was a straightforward attack on the American embassy. And indeed, it’s the way it’s going to go down in history.

  Like the Colonel, Hajj Radwan could only have shaken his head in disbelief at the failed attempt on Fadlallah. He couldn’t have missed the sheer ineptness of it: an ally out of control, the wrong target, bad execution. Could it only have served as an encouragement to him to press on all the harder against the United States and its impotent Lebanese allies, the Maronite Christians?

  No doubt he took away the same lesson from the two Iraq wars where the United States tried and failed to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Its shiny and expensive technology counted for nothing. Again, the same went for bin Laden. How could the United States lose the tallest Arab in the world and then flail around in Afghanistan for no purpose at all? It clearly had failed to heed that old piece of Persian wisdom: When you decide to kill the king, kill the king.

  SUCCESS IS THE KEY TO LEVERAGE

  And by the way, never underestimate good old garden-variety ruthlessness. Sadly, it’s what keeps a lot of us in line and society running smoothly.

  I’ll always remember the time the local florist assassinated one of my uncles (by marriage). She was good, bringing to bear impeccable intelligence, lightning speed, and total surprise. It came out of nowhere too, and in its fashion proved lethal.

  To all appearances, my uncle was a happily married man. His wife was a class act, his children polite and dutiful. He often went on about the sanctity of marriage, how through thick and thin a man must stick with his wife, how monogamy is of a piece with the underlying order of the universe. My uncle worked hard. On his time off, he paraded his family around town. His wife turned their Santa Monica house into a gem of propriety and order.

  One Valentine’s Day, my uncle was jammed up between appointments but had just enough time to drop by the florist around the corner from his office. He asked for her twenty-four freshest red roses—twelve to be sent to his wife at home and twelve to another address.

  The florist asked my uncle whether he wanted cards to go along with the bouquets. He thought about it for a second before he picked out two cards and jotted down quick notes on each. He licked the envelopes closed, making double sure there wasn’t a mix-up with the addresses.

  As soon as my uncle was out the door, the suspicious florist opened the envelopes to take a look. Confirming one bouquet was for my uncle’s mistress
, she switched the cards and sent the bouquets on their way.

  By the end of Valentine’s Day, my uncle’s life came crashing to earth: His wife divorced him, and his mistress left him. (The wife got the Santa Monica house.) As for the florist, anyone with a secret steered well clear of her.

  From time to time I wonder about her and all the other people with moral on/off switches. How is it that as soon as she decided my uncle deserved it she didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger?

  I used to think the ability to make instantaneous decisions was encoded in our DNA. You’re either fast on the trigger or you’re not. But a Navy SEAL told me that, in fact, it’s possible to condition your brain to speed up your reactions. It has something to do with adjusting the amygdala. At the sound of gunfire, you either run or fire back, not stand there with your hands in your pockets.

  Or maybe it’s just plain common sense. After the botched Fadlallah attempt, how could the Colonel take the CIA seriously? Its putative henchmen didn’t even know how to use a weapon thousands of Lebanese had mastered, the car bomb. Was this the best the CIA could do?

  If I’d sat the Colonel down and told him the Lebanese army did it all on its own, I’m sure he wouldn’t have believed me. Wasn’t the Lebanese army an American proxy, at our beck and call? Surely, the General would first have come to Charlie to ask permission to kill the man. If we couldn’t arrange that, we shouldn’t be in the game.

  And it wasn’t as if I had a good argument on my side: The United States has a long, miserable record of mismanaging foreign proxies. Take Vietnam. By 1963 the Kennedy administration had had it with Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s inept and stubborn president. But rather than do the job itself, it started a whisper campaign that we’d all be better off with Diem out of the game. And indeed, it wouldn’t be long before the generals overthrew and murdered him. But as it turned out, Diem’s successor was worse, proving the dictum you can’t put political murder on remote control. You’re either all in or not at all.