The Perfect Kill

by Robert B. Baer

  LAW

  #10

  NEVER CEDE TACTICAL CONTROL

  The eye behind the scope decides whether to pull the trigger or not. Committees, bureaucracy, and collective decision making are guaranteed to spoil the broth.

  If I could find a way to get him out of there, even putting out a contract on him, if the CIA still did that sort of thing, assuming it ever did, I would be for it.

  —RICHARD M. NIXON ON SADDAM HUSSEIN

  Salah-al-Din, Iraq, March 4, 1995: When the CIA sent me to northern Iraq, my orders were chiseled in stone: Keep a low profile, don’t get killed, come home, file report. I also need to state for the record that no one said a word about assassinating Saddam Hussein. Or, for that matter, starting World War III. But as these things so often go, fortune had its own plans.

  In my defense, we’re talking about Iraq 1995. The place was a howling madhouse. In the north the Kurds were slaughtering one another in droves, if only for the stubborn joy of it. Saddam’s rump state was one vast gulag, his prisons booked to capacity, people starving in the streets. With Saddam unable to meet the payroll, his beloved army was starting to crumble. He ordered deserters rounded up and their ears amputated. Saddam himself showed every sign of cracking, from time to time threatening to reinvade Kuwait or even rocket Israel.

  Seeing opportunity in chaos, Congress showered money on the CIA in the hope it could turn the Iraqi exiles on its payroll into a military force capable of unseating Saddam. But what Congress couldn’t understand was that those same exiles, to a man, were a pack of swindlers, thieves, and freebooters. No amount of money was going to pry them out of their posh CIA-paid-for apartments in London’s Mayfair and Paris’s Sixteenth Arrondissement.

  At the same time, there were those of us who often wondered if Congress’s enthusiasm for getting rid of Saddam wasn’t only for show. It wouldn’t, for instance, do anything to repeal Executive Order 12333, President Reagan’s 1981 ban on assassination. It meant the CIA was left with the sugar-plum-fairy dream that some Iraqi general on a white horse would ride over the hill and overthrow Saddam in a military coup d’état. Or, equally fanciful, his valet would grow a pair of balls big enough to put a bullet between the boss’s eyes.

  When the CIA sent me to Kurdish northern Iraq in 1994 to babysit two Congressional aides—it was my on-the-ground debut for things Iraq—it took me a nanosecond to decide we needed someone up here permanently. The way I looked at it, it was the only way we’d ever embolden a general on a white horse. I promptly volunteered to become the CIA’s Man in Kurdistan.

  There’s something I should note here. Having served in Paris for three years, I wanted to go back to Beirut to get back in the fray. But after my misadventures there, Langley wouldn’t consider it. Which made Iraq the next best thing. And, in the interests of full disclosure, my pitiful thinking went no deeper than that Iraq and Lebanon had to share the same operating manual since they were both part of the Levant. Knowing Lebanon the way I thought I did, how hard could it be to figure out Iraq?

  Another thing I learned in Paris played into my decision. After Atef was assassinated, I’d foolishly clung to the hope there might be something to be done with the Algiers angle. I’d asked Claude to fish around, and it wasn’t a week before he came back with an intriguing tidbit that one of Hajj Radwan’s old mentors, a retired Algerian intelligence officer, still kept in touch with him. When Hajj Radwan traveled to Algiers to see Atef, he’d always drop by to see the mentor. Claude gave me the mentor’s Algiers home phone number … and from there it was a matter of waiting for what the French call an aubaine—a godsend.

  It came a month later in the guise of a bearded, fire-breathing Algerian Salafi. He told the guard at the front gate he wanted to tell the CIA something in the strictest confidence. My enthusiasm for walkins undampened, I volunteered to go over and meet him.

  The Algerian looked crazy, and he was. There was something very combustible burning inside him. Every time he wanted to make a point he’d grab my hand in an attempt to crush it, his eyes blazing red. He kept yelling about some proto-Nazi group in Lyon having bulldozed his mosque. “Allah will not let this stand!” he screamed. I kept looking over my shoulder at the guard, afraid he would pull out his sidearm and shoot both of us.

  I took the Algerian out front to the park to the very bench Mario and I once had borrowed. He said he wanted only one thing from the CIA: help in overthrowing the military junta in Algeria. There was no chance of that, but I strung him along until I could figure out whether he might have people in Algeria capable of running down Hajj Radwan’s mentor. It was all a long shot, but at that point, it’s all I had.

  The Algerian Salafi and I met once a week, and the more time I spent with him, the more convinced I became that he was truly insane. Worse, he’d taken a liking to me. But why was I surprised? The mentally disturbed come to me like birds to a lighthouse. Eventually he told a French magazine he intended to murder the Algerian ambassador to Paris. The same day, the police ran him in, which, in turn, led him to call me for help. The cad that I was, I didn’t take his call.

  The Algerian wasn’t the only dead-end lead to Hajj Radwan that floated to the surface during my Paris days. A walk-in claiming to be in touch with Hajj Radwan showed up at our embassy in an Eastern European country I’m not allowed to name. Anyhow, thanks to its efficient intelligence service, which seemed to have every phone and hotel room in town bugged, it quickly became apparent that the man was a swindler. Or, as they’re called in the business, a fabricator.

  I’d burned through a lot of CIA money in my lonely hunt for Hajj Radwan, and the only thing I had to show for it was the epiphany that there was nothing to be had in Europe. The exiles who take up refuge there live off stale reputations and imagined importance. They’re all desperate to latch on to a sugar daddy like the CIA. But when has it ever been any different?

  After the revolution in 1917, the British fell into the same trap, believing White Russian exiles could do something about the Bolsheviks, namely assassinate Lenin; the British got absolutely nothing for their efforts. The CIA tried to do something about Mao and the Chinese Communists using the Taiwanese, but fared no better than the British did in Russia. Machiavelli got it right when he said exiles are a worthless bunch.

  NEVER TAKE IN STRAY CATS

  When five of us pulled up in front of the dun two-story cinder-block house in the one-mule shithole of an Iraqi village called Salah-al-Din, my first question was: What’s going to keep Saddam from assassinating us?

  The house we were meant to live in for the next six months sat on a bald, windswept saddle. Its living room fronted a bleak hardscrabble field. To paraphrase someone I can’t remember, there wasn’t a tree to hang Judas from. Which meant any would-be sniper had a clean shot through our front window. And it wasn’t as if Saddam’s assassins had far to come: On a clear day, you could see the Iraqi front lines from our roof. Hajj Radwan would rather have opened his wrist than set up camp here.

  In fact, there wasn’t any protective coloring to be had. We were the only foreigners within a thousand parasangs, or whatever measurement the Kurds go by. And the way we were outfitted in a rainbow of Gortex parkas, hiking books, and Kalashnikov assault rifles we might as well have had “CIA” emblazoned across our fronts. For a moment, I stupidly thought about our dressing up like the Kurdish peshmerga in their exotic turbans and sashes. But we’d have given off the malodorous scent of imposters and been shot on sight.

  It wasn’t as if we could trust our hosts, the Kurds. Not only were they slaughtering one another, their ranks were riddled with regime spies. Trust me, it occurred to me more than once that if Saddam recruited a Kurd to kill us, it would be me, the chief, at the top of his list. It left me with the dumb hope that Saddam would decide I wasn’t worth the candle.

  My days were spent shuttling between the Kurds, urging my old Toyota Land Cruiser to go faster than it knew how. A moving target’s harder to hit, right? Nights, we stayed hom
e watching satellite TV, everyone drifting off to bed at about nine. I couldn’t imagine why I ever thought Iraq would put me back inside the Arab mind.

  Life in the north would have passed by in a mix of dull anxiety and unrelieved boredom had not an Iraqi general crossed over from Saddam-held Iraq bearing a “message” for “the CIA spies.” I was alarmed that news of our arrival had spread so far and wide, but I agreed to meet him.

  With the general’s bushy mustache, squat neck, and black pools for eyes, he could have passed as Saddam’s doppelganger. With his throaty Arabic, he even sounded like him. Not exactly thrilled to be sharing the company of a CIA agent, the general kept craning his neck as if he were trying to crawl out of a noose.

  After a lot of hemming and hawing, and half a dozen cups of coffee, the general finally got it out that five senior military officers had sent him north to offer us a plan to get rid of Saddam. What they had in mind was a classic coup d’état, very much like the one we’d been dreaming about for so long. They would commandeer a battalion of tanks, seize the strategic points around Baghdad, and invite Saddam to step down. The whole thing would be over in a couple of hours, and with any luck, no one would die. All they wanted from the United States was a sign of support, like an F-16 flyover at a certain time.

  Their plan sounded reasonable enough to me. On the other hand, the general hadn’t offered me the details. He wanted Langley’s initial reaction first. As soon as the general was out the door, I wrote up the meeting in a succinct telex for Langley. The way I looked at it, wiser heads back there would prevail. They’d either green-light it or take a pass. How hard could that be?

  Foreknowledge cannot be had from ghosts and spirits.

  —SUN TZU

  When I didn’t get a response to the general’s plans after a week, I started to get nervous. And when one week turned into two and three, I started to wonder what in the hell was going on. Didn’t the dolts back home understand by now what a mistake it was to leave me in a vacuum to figure out things for myself? By week four, I decided all on my own that the problem had to be that Langley preferred something cleaner and more expeditious.

  I sat the general down and told him he had to come up with something, well, more “streamlined.” Capturing Baghdad sounded too messy. A week later the general relayed to me a message from his rogue officers: They were now prepared to suborn twelve tanks and drive on to Tikrit, where they’d pulverize Saddam in his palace. Since the palace sat by itself on an outcropping of rock, it would be a fairly clean job.

  I was encouraged that the putschists weren’t talking about an assassin’s high-powered rifle or poisoning Saddam’s espresso. Though I should concede that a tank’s main gun is a fairly precise weapon, which might even leave some to characterize it as a weapon of assassination. Not my problem, though; I wrote up the new plan and sent it back to give Langley a chance to weigh in on whether or not the “Tikrit plan” sounded like a violation of 12333. Wasn’t it exactly for something like this that Langley kept all of those smart lawyers on the payroll?

  In the meantime, the general duly sent a message to the rogue officers, letting them know we’d probably be going with the twelve tanks on Tikrit option.

  —

  It also finally dawned on me that it truly was time to start tightening things up. What would Hajj Radwan do in my shoes? Okay, he would never have allowed himself to be put in my shoes, but beyond that, I knew it was high time I deprive Saddam of a sitting target. I exchanged our Toyotas for a fleet of old dented-up cars. I broke us up into two teams and made sure we changed houses every night. Some nights we slept in caves. But I still felt like whitey at the oasis, the restless natives out there in the black night waiting for their chance to pounce and cut our throats.

  I also decided we’d better seriously arm ourselves. One of my guys, an ex–Army captain, went down to the local arms merchant and bought a Russian Dragunov sniper rifle. He couldn’t wait to test it. But when he came home, he had a bloody circle around his right eye. With Dragunovs, as he figured out too late, the scope isn’t meant to rest against your face when you fire it.

  Just when I thought I was getting a grip on things, a woman showed up at the local Kurdish intelligence office, claiming she needed to tell the Americans something. Before anyone could get over to see her, she blew herself up, leaving fragments of her skull embedded in the concrete ceiling. Was she a counterassassin sent to interrupt our plans? There was no way to know. I took it, though, as an evil omen that the deck wasn’t cutting in our favor, and then was certain of it when the notorious Iraqi exile and convicted swindler Ahmed Chalabi charged onto the stage. Frankly, Chalabi was the last thing I needed.

  A University of Chicago and MIT grad, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan for bank embezzlement. Resurrected by the CIA after the Gulf War, he now owed his political existence to Washington. It was our F-16s that kept Saddam from grabbing and lynching him; it was the United States he ran to when things got ugly. By rights, Chalabi should have been America’s obedient proxy who slavishly followed my orders. Instead, he treated me as if I were the mad uncle in the attic. He would pretend to listen to me, but as soon as I was out the door, he’d revert to his old conniving self.

  I could have tolerated Chalabi had he known anything about his own country. But he hadn’t lived in Iraq since 1958, which meant he didn’t have a clue about how the fine gears of Saddam’s regime turned. Like every other exile I’d ever run into, Chalabi was all smoke and mirrors. To make matters even worse, he had a political following in Washington, mainly neocons.

  Getting wind of the twelve tanks on Tikrit plan, Chalabi decided his face card in the game would be to forge a letter making it appear as if the National Security Council had enlisted him in the plot against Saddam. The forged letter helpfully laid out the specifics: An “NSC assassin” by the name of “Robert Pope” was on his way to northern Iraq to carry out the deed. And—surprise, surprise—he couldn’t accomplish it without Chalabi’s help.

  As we’d later determine, Chalabi had forged the letter for the benefit of two Iranian spies who’d crossed over the border to pay him a visit. Leaving the letter out faceup on his desk, he arranged to be called out of his office, giving the two Iranians the chance to read it. After having read the letter (upside down), the Iranians raced back to Tehran to report that the NSC was about to put a limit to Saddam’s days. As far as anyone was able to determine—Chalabi denies the whole thing—Chalabi’s ploy was to make himself appear in Tehran’s eyes as an indispensable player.

  As we also found out later, the Iranians were never fooled. But what did happen was that the Iranian military went on full alert, moving armored units to its border with Iraq. Saddam followed suit, putting his army on full alert. (It was the first time he’d done so since the Gulf War.) Joining the party, Turkey put its army on full alert and closed the border crossing into Iraq. I knew it was only a matter of time before Washington finally stirred itself awake.

  As my little house of cards started to come down, it occurred to me that Hajj Radwan would have blindfolded Chalabi, marched him out into the main square, and executed him without ado or ceremony—for everyone to take note and pay heed. But of course, unlike me, Hajj Radwan didn’t have a flock of know-nothing neocon chicken hawks sitting on his shoulder. Nor, for that matter, did he have to answer to a moribund institution like the CIA.

  Not that I’m without guilt in any of this. Even at the time, I knew I should have sat down the rogue officers for a face-to-face meeting. Since they couldn’t cross the front lines into the Kurdish north, I should have insisted we meet in Amman, Jordan.

  I should have also made the generals take some concrete action that would demonstrate that they, in fact, were prepared to harm Saddam—mortar his Baghdad palace or something. It’s just elementary gang wisdom that you don’t trust anyone until he’s made the enemy bleed. Blood in, blood out, as they say.

  What it all comes back to is you can’t make something like assassina
tion work by remote control. Not from a comfy office on the Potomac, not from a café in Europe, and not even from the mountains of Kurdistan. It’s just another sine qua non that you see the guts of it with your own two eyes, get out on the field and sweat it out with your guys.

  But none of this changes the fact that if I couldn’t get an answer out of Washington about the Tikrit plan, even a simple yes or no, there was no way I was ever going to get them to let me go to Amman to meet the generals. So I was left to wait in grim anticipation for this little baby to run off the tracks.

  At four in the morning on March 1, there was a knock at my door. I opened it to find my radioman. He said: “Want to read a message from the White House?”

  In my long, checkered CIA career, I’d never seen a piece of correspondence sent directly from the White House to a CIA station, let alone to a pissant unit like mine. I found a flashlight and sat down at the end of my bed to read it.

  It was a curt message to all of the plotters, including Chalabi. It said something about how the action “you have planned” had been “compromised,” and “proceeding” would be at “your peril.”

  To be sure, the White House’s prose was nuanced and businesslike, but by the time I got to the end of it, I didn’t need to decipher Linear B to get the drift: Knock the fucking assassination thing off.

  It wouldn’t be until I got back to Washington that I found out that Chalabi’s fabrication—the tale of the faux “NSC assassin” aka “Robert Pope”—had reached the White House’s ears and set its hair on fire. The White House knew for a fact that it hadn’t dispatched this Pope to Iraq to assassinate Saddam. Who else could it be other than the CIA?

  It also didn’t help that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had called Clinton’s national security adviser in the middle of the night, demanding to know what in the hell was going on in Iraq. From where he sat, it looked as if the three largest armies in the Middle East were on an apocalyptic collision course. And by the way, if there really was a plan afoot to assassinate Saddam, shouldn’t he know about it?