Standing next to the boss was a beefy man with a buzz cut. Right away I pegged him as a DEA agent.
“Bob, our colleague from the DEA has a few questions for you,” my boss said. “But first look at these.”
He pushed across the desk a stack of glossy black-and-white photographs. One was of me shaking Mario’s hand in front of the restaurant we’d just come out of. There were more of me, arriving at the restaurant and later walking to the Métro. The quality of the photos was good. I could tell they’d been shot from a tricked-out surveillance van.
I had to laugh at the fop I looked in my thin-soled Italian loafers and double-breasted washed-silk suit. It was an outfit that had set back my mother at least one thousand dollars when she was here.
“Do you know who this man is?” the DEA agent asked.
I gave him Mario’s name.
In return, the DEA agent gave me a quick summary of Mario’s DEA file, which ranged from his involvement in a Corsican settling of accounts that ended up in a wild shoot-out in a nightclub off the Champs-Élysées to a massive swindle against the French government. Mario would be in jail for life if he wasn’t so slippery, he said. By the time the DEA agent finished, Mario sounded like the true lynchpin behind the French Connection. Shit, I thought, Mario is a real player.
After the DEA agent left, the boss asked me about Mario. When I told him he was a walk-in, he asked what I intended to do with him. I said I wasn’t sure yet, neglecting, of course, to tell him about Algeria and Atef. There was no way I was going to include this man in my plans to get Hajj Radwan.
As I was about to leave, he stopped me by saying I’d be well served to be a little more wary of walkins. Yeah, ain’t that so, I thought. He was the naïf who cabled back to headquarters about the diviner.
“As a matter of fact,” he said. “Don’t see Mario again, even to say good-bye.”
“Of course.”
The following week, I met Mario at a café close to where we’d had lunch. There was no van in sight, but I went in the back entrance anyhow. And when we finished, I left the same way.
It wasn’t as if I thought I could beat the DEA at this game. They had to be all over Mario, including his phone. I momentarily thought about bringing the DEA agent into my scheme, lying to him that Hajj Radwan was in the middle of a drug deal. He would have done half the legwork for me. But I decided against it because political murder’s already hard enough without bringing the narcos in as co-conspirators.
I met Mario a couple more times before he offered to take me “right to the top.” His “boss,” he said, had a “proposal” for me. I didn’t know who he was talking about or what the proposal might be, but assuming it had something to do with Algeria, I agreed.
The office I followed Mario into was furnished in elegantly distressed Louis XV and a couple of ultramodern marble statues. Recessed lighting set it off nicely.
We waited in the anteroom, the secretary studiously ignoring us. It was fifteen minutes before a man who could have been Mario’s cousin walked up to us. His suit made Mother’s look like she’d bought it off a sales rack at T.J.Maxx. He stuck his hand out as if he were about to stick a knife in my gut: “Jean-Charles Marchiani.”
Although I’d never laid eyes on the man, I knew exactly who he was. In fact, most politically sentient Frenchmen did. Formerly a French intelligence officer, he now was the sidekick of Jacques Chirac’s ex–interior minister. He was a Corsican from Bastia.
The details have never been completely aired in public, but it was Marchiani who negotiated a French arms-for-hostage deal with Iran. Boiled down to its essence, the deal stipulated that in return for Iran’s promise to stop killing and kidnapping Frenchmen, France would open its arms bazaar to Iran.
What few people wanted to consider was that on the other side of the deal was ultimately Hajj Radwan: He was the one killing the Frenchmen and holding French hostages. In fact, as part of Marchiani’s deal, a huge onetime payment was directed to Hajj Radwan in return for releasing the French hostages. Who says political murder doesn’t pay.
When Washington heard the terms, it gasped. It was a deal even more flagrantly dirty than Iran-Contra. (No one was so insensitive as to point out that with Iran-Contra we’d also indirectly rewarded Hajj Radwan.) But the deal worked as advertised, and Marchiani would climb the ladder, eventually winning a seat in the European Parliament. Though one day he would end up in jail for corruption.
Back to the story: Marchiani wasn’t interested in wasting any time pussyfooting around: “So whaz it you wanna see me about?”
I turned around to have Mario explain that I’d thought it was Marchiani who wanted to see me. But he was gone.
The only thing to be done at this point was throw caution to the wind: “We have a problem with a certain man in Lebanon. His name is—”
“I know exactly who you’re talking about.”
Of course he did; he’d personally sold France’s soul to Hajj Radwan.
“The United States has a sealed arrest warrant for him and needs help executing it.”
Marchiani made his hand into the shape of an imaginary pistol, then pointed its imaginary barrel at the temple of an imaginary man: “Cinq-cents mille balles.” Five hundred thousand francs. (At the time that was something like $90,000.) He then curled his forefinger to make as if he were pulling the trigger of his imaginary pistol.
Assassinating Hajj Radwan for under a $100,000 seemed like a bargain to me. However, since it was more likely that Marchiani would offer me up to Hajj Radwan rather than the other way around, I was reduced to doing a riff on Hajj Radwan—what a cold-blooded murderer he was, etc. Marchiani sensed I was going nowhere with it and shooed me out of his office.
Outside on the sidewalk I looked around for Mario to wring his neck for setting me up with Marchiani like this. But then considered that, thanks to his little stunt, I now had some leverage over him, i.e., I was in a position to ask him to find me a real Corsican assassin for a job in Algiers. But of course, only if I could first persuade Atef to come on board.
THE SOUND OF A KNIFE THROUGH THE TEMPLE
Atef never did make it back to Paris before I was transferred out. It was Claude who told me what happened on the night of June 8, 1992.
Atef had called Claude that morning to say he’d be coming to Paris to see French intelligence. They agreed to have dinner that night. They’d pick up Atef at his hotel, the Méridien Montparnasse, and from there the three would drive to a nearby Chinese restaurant Atef liked.
The Méridien is an atrocity, a soulless high-rise gouged with a soulless lobby meant to give you the feel of airiness. Instead, it puts you in mind of an abandoned warehouse.
Claude called Atef in his room from the front-desk phone. A couple of minutes later, Atef came out of an elevator in the wake of a clutch of tourists. As Atef made his way across the lobby, Claude caught sight of a man sitting on a divan and pointedly staring at Atef. When the man noticed Claude looking at him, he turned away, pretending something fascinating on the other side of the lobby had caught his attention.
Claude pointed the man out to Atef, who by now was staring at the wall as if he were searching for a hole to disappear into. Claude told Atef to wait while he went to look for a pay phone. He found a French intelligence contact at home and told him about the man, saying he looked like a tail. The contact said he was pretty sure it wasn’t French intelligence. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it that late in the evening. He advised Claude and Atef to go ahead with their dinner plans, but right after, Atef should go back to his room and stay put for the night. They’d sort it out in the morning.
Over dinner, Atef and Claude talked about the suspicious man on the divan, but they agreed to treat it as a coincidence and nothing more. It wasn’t until after eleven they headed back to the Méridien.
When Claude pulled up in front of the main entrance, the lobby was full of Japanese tourists who’d just been dropped off by a tour bus. Claude got ou
t of the car to say goodnight to Atef.
As Claude shook hands with Atef, out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of two men walking down the sidewalk in their direction. Dressed in short black leather jackets and with their heads shaved, they looked like skinheads. One had an athletic bag in his hand. They were walking fast as if they were late for something.
Now on guard, Claude noticed the two skinheads exchange a look. Without warning, they lunged at Atef. One embraced Atef from behind, while the other raised the gym bag and positioned it to the nape of Atef’s neck. Inside was a 9mm pistol. There were two quick muffled cracks. The man holding Atef let him slump to the ground.
Claude looked around for help. It was only then that he noticed the two trucks blocking either end of the street. A precaution in the event the police happened on the scene? Claude watched as the skinhead assassins disappeared down into an underground garage. There had to be an exit on another street, he thought. They would be long gone before the police showed up.
Like most everyone, Claude assumed Atef’s assassins were Mossad agents who’d just taken revenge for Munich. He was no doubt right. But I still wonder if part of it didn’t have something to do with Hajj Radwan. If I knew about Atef’s association with him, so did Mossad. Either way, Claude is lucky the assassins were professionals, otherwise they’d have murdered him too.
THE ON-RAMP TO THE APOCALYPSE AND OTHER LETHAL CERTITUDES
If there’s one lesson to be learned from Atef’s assassination, it’s this: Don’t unnecessarily waste bullets. There was no point in Atef’s assassins killing Claude, and they didn’t. Why irritate the French for no purpose at all?
While writing this book, I happened to be on the phone with a Homeland Security official, explaining how I was struggling to come to terms with how some people narrowly channel violence and others kill indiscriminately. He cut me off, saying he knew exactly where I wanted to go with this. He had noticed the same phenomenon with South American narcotics violence.
Colombia’s Medellín cartel, for instance, normally sends an assassin into a restaurant with a silenced pistol to murder the intended victim and with orders not to kill anyone else. On the other hand, the typical Cali cartel assassin will spray an assault rifle around a restaurant, killing as many people as he can. It’s almost as if he doesn’t care whether he hits the intended victim or not.
“The reason for it is pretty clear,” the official said. “The Cali cartels are a lot weaker than Medellín’s, which leads them to believe they need to instill dumb fear in everyone. It’s their way of establishing ‘respect’ for their power.”
When you think about it, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are replete with insecure people who inflict as much violence as they can to “instill respect.” It’s the only way they know how to shore up their power. Anarchists, nihilists, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, and the Taliban are cases in point. But it doesn’t stop there.
In the final months of World War II, the British and American air forces unleashed one of the largest and most controversial bombardments of Nazi Germany. Over three years, they destroyed Dresden, a baroque gem of a city. The problem was that Dresden possessed no clearly discernable military or strategic significance. Did the Allies hope that in euthanizing Dresden they would somehow euthanize Germany? If so, it didn’t work.
Let me go back to the Engineer and all the dumb blood he spilled. Like the Cali cartel, he believed that when Israel was forced to understand the terrible random violence he was prepared to rain down on it, it would see no choice other than to alter course—in the Palestinians’ favor. But what occurred, in fact, was that Israel opened up the stops, grimly determined to destroy the Engineer and everyone like him. The Engineer didn’t liberate a square inch of Palestine.
“Fairness” is not a word normally associated with political murder, but when the Palestinians heard about the Engineer’s assassination, I would imagine they grudgingly recognized that from the Israelis’ point of view the man deserved it. And they could only have been impressed that the Engineer was the only one killed in the room. No F-16s, no tank fire, no collateral murder.
And let’s throw al-Qaeda into the mix. Al-Qaeda’s objective on 9/11 was to kill the largest number of people possible. It made no difference who they killed, in uniform or not. And just like the attackers of Dresden and the Engineer, al-Qaeda failed to alter the course of events in their favor. The United States, in fact, was moved to come after it with a meat cleaver. But considering the kind of people al-Qaeda attracted, that wasn’t much of a surprise.
When bin Laden set up in Peshawar in the eighties, he attracted one of the most bizarre and feckless potpourris of true believers to ever gather in modern times. While they professed they’d come to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan, anyone could see they weren’t battle worthy. They were too coddled and soft to survive an Afghan winter, let alone a firefight with the Red Army.
Bin Laden’s acolytes kept to their expensive Peshawar villas, endlessly smoking water pipes and arguing over the meaning of jihad. The closest they came to hardship was flying back home to plead with their families for more money so they could return to the “front.” They only understood violence and war in the fuzziest of abstracts.
The presumed 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, was of the same stripe. Born in Kuwait to a relatively well-off Pakistani family, he came to Peshawar to find something to do with his life. Not exactly a man of colossal genius or courage, he stayed in the rear, raised money, and fantasized about war.
KSM first appeared on America’s radar when he was caught sending money to his nephew Ramzi Yousef. At some point, the two of them hatched a plan to knock down a high-rise full of people as an act of pure annihilation, somehow believing it would persuade the United States to stop supporting Israel. They couldn’t understand that it was like dropping a cat in ice water hoping to improve its disposition.
In 1993, Ramzi Yousef would go on to blow up a van in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. He managed to kill six people, but the bomb wasn’t large enough to bring down the building. He was run to ground in Pakistan and extradited to the United States to stand trial.
The absolute vacuousness of Yousef’s mind came out in court. “You [America] were the first one who killed innocent people, and you are the first one who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb which killed tens of thousands of women and children in Japan and when you killed over a hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, in Tokyo with fire bombings.”
Never taking his oar out of those shallow waters, Yousef said that in bringing jihad to the United States he was “bringing the fight to the Jews.” There are a lot of Jews working in the World Trade Center, he said, and killing them would force America to change its policy.
Both uncle and nephew demonstrated a complete callousness toward life, an unfocused and undiluted hate that destroyed but did nothing else. They practice-bombed a Manila movie theater, injuring seven. They left a bomb under an airliner seat, which killed a Japanese passenger. At one point, they considered blowing up eleven airliners over the Pacific.
Political naiveté like this is most often born out of a mix of ignorance and inexperience. It’s particularly lethal when it involves a civilization in peril. Take, for example, the Khmer Rouge, the Palestinian militants, Peru’s Shining Path. All three believe they are skirting extinction and have no choice but to lash out at their enemies. They are fixated on the vague possibilities of violence rather than its finer calculations.
Another way to look at mindless violence is to compare it with the mindless destruction of architecture. An insecure people will destroy an enemy’s architectural heritage and other cultural symbols as a means to deny its existence and thereby shore up its own. This is exactly what al-Qaeda tried to do when it destroyed the Sufi tombs in Timbuktu. Or when the Saudi Wahhabis systemically razed ancient Mecca to efface Islam’s
pagan past.
In comparison, Mossad meticulously planned and carried out Atef’s murder, employing the least amount of violence necessary. Not to mention accomplishing it with a cold, irremediable efficiency: There’s no way to survive two 9mm bullets into the medulla oblongata (the nape of the neck).
Hajj Radwan also brought to bear accurate, proportionate, and discriminate violence. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, he attacked only Israeli army targets, not civilians. He attacked the Marines rather than just any American. And he definitely didn’t bother with symbolic targets, such as synagogues or churches.
Hajj Radwan would resort to slaughter only when it was in direct response to slaughter perpetrated by the other side. It was only after France supplied Iraq with the munitions used to bomb Iranian cities that he set off bombs in Paris and indiscriminately killed civilians. In his eyes, a justified and proportionate application of violence.
Applying the word “fairness” to Hajj Radwan isn’t going to fly. But what he did have was an uncommon ability to distinguish between man and function. Given the opportunity, he always went after the man rather than the title. He murdered Hariri not because he was a former prime minister but because of who Hariri was—a rising threat. It’s just as Caesar’s assassins didn’t pick him because he was just any Roman general, but because of who he was and what he wanted.
Unlike the Engineer and KSM, Hajj Radwan, like an insurance company, knew how to accurately model risk. He recognized that societies have only a fixed tolerance for absorbing violence. While you never want to apply too little of it, applying too much of it is even worse. While Hajj Radwan could get away with killing Frenchmen, he knew when to stop in order to leave room for a deal with the likes of Marchiani. It’s always about the deal to be had, not the quantity of blood spilled. It’s something the Engineer and bin Laden couldn’t figure out and consequently they got nothing for their efforts.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: It’s a fine line between instrumental and random violence. But like it or not, it’s pretty much up to the victim to decide when the line’s been crossed. So never ignore an enemy’s sensibilities. And never forget there’s no such thing as a silver lining to a massacre.
The Perfect Kill Page 13