Let me go back to Hariri to put this in perspective. Hajj Radwan employed the equivalent of 2,500 kilos of TNT, enough to dig a six-foot-deep hole in the road. The investigators came to the chilling hypothesis that Hajj Radwan had arranged it so the van would intercept Hariri’s armored Mercedes precisely as it passed between the St-Georges and the Phoenicia, the two tallest buildings on the Corniche. If Hariri somehow had survived the explosion, the reverberating blast effect would have microwaved him.
Finally, if it weren’t already daunting enough a task, the van detonated in front of Hariri’s Mercedes rather than behind it. The occupants of the car directly in front of Hariri’s—only four feet ahead of Hariri’s car—survived, thanks to the car’s lifting up and allowing the undercarriage to take the brunt of the explosion.
In other words, there was no way to misinterpret the message: Hariri had to pay with his life for the wrongs he’d committed or was about to (whatever those were). The attack wasn’t a shot over the bow, something that could have been safely ignored. Missing would have completely altered the message’s content.
I suspect that one reason Hajj Radwan knew what he was doing was that he’d missed before and paid the penalty. In 1985 he made an attempt on the emir of Kuwait with a car bomb. Not only did the emir survive, but Hajj Radwan’s brother-in-law, who had been arrested for the 1983 bombings of the French and American embassies there, was dropped even deeper down into the godforsaken Kuwaiti oubliette he was already in.
For seven years, Hajj Radwan did everything in his power to spring his brother-in-law from his Kuwaiti jail, kidnapping and murdering any Kuwaiti he could put his hands on. But nothing would move the Kuwaitis, and with each try, Hajj Radwan looked weaker and more impotent. In the emir of Kuwait’s eyes, Hajj Radwan was not the stuff of nightmares.
I myself have a vague idea what it feels like to escape a near miss. It occurred in Central Asia not long after the breakup of the Soviet Union. I’d rented a small house to work out of, but apparently I’d chosen the wrong part of town. The first warning that I wasn’t welcome came in the guise of a breakin. I then put up bars over the windows and posted an armed guard out front. That same night, I was across town when I heard a boom from the direction of my house. When I got back home, my guard was out front talking to the police, who were examining a hole in my front yard. The guard explained that he’d been in the living room when someone threw a grenade at the front window, clearly meaning for it to explode inside. It was only thanks to its bouncing off a bar that it didn’t make it in. I never did find out whether the grenade was meant for the guard or me. But the point is that I chose not to take it personally—an assassination attempt. I took the precaution of moving out of the house, but otherwise kept doing what I was doing.
As is not the case in horseshoes, there are no points for coming close in assassination. It’s something the IRA apparently didn’t grasp.
NOTHING LIKE A PH.D. TO SCREW THE POOCH
Anyone who knew Magee wasn’t surprised he tried to decapitate the British government. Anything to get the English to leave. The question was whether he was the right man for the job.
In Magee’s favor, the tile work was good. Stuffing explosives into the bathroom wall of room 629 could only have been tedious work. The tiles needed to be put back just right and properly finished to conceal the fresh grout. It’s no doubt why it took Magee and his nameless accomplice three days to do the job.
But anyone who’s worked with explosives or tried to put together a complicated assassination like Thatcher’s understands it was a matter of sheer luck that Magee came as close to murdering the woman as he did. The main problem was that he hadn’t used enough explosives. In fact, the charge was so undersized that only one of the occupants of room 629 died and the other was only slightly injured. (Magee disputes the estimates of twenty to thirty pounds of explosives. There was five times that amount, he claims.)
The truth is that Magee ran up against the laws of physics—there’s only so much space in the wall of a hotel bathroom. The alternative would have been to fill the basement with explosives or run “strip charges” along the supporting beams and main load-bearing walls of the Grand. But neither, of course, was feasible; someone would have noticed. Nor apparently was it possible to pinpoint Thatcher’s room in advance to better position the explosives. While Hariri never stood a chance, Margaret Thatcher stood a very good one. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Going light on explosives was a grave miscalculation, but other ones were just plain foolhardy. Take the name Magee used to check into the Grand, Roy Walsh. Walsh was a notorious IRA operative serving life for murder. All it would have taken was an alert desk clerk to recognize the name and bring it to the police’s attention. Or if the police had done a thorough check of the guests who’d stayed at the Grand in the weeks before the conference, they very well might have stumbled onto the plot.
Magee also failed to take into account the possibility that the Conservatives would change hotels at the last minute. Or that Thatcher would come down from London for only the day of her speech rather than stay the night at the Grand. Magee should have taken the elementary precaution of including a mechanism to interrupt the timer. If the Conservatives had moved locations, inadvertently drawing the IRA into murdering only innocent guests, it would have been an even worse political catastrophe.
The crowning mistake came when Magee returned to England for the new round of bombings, freely and cheerfully flying back into the cage. He apparently hadn’t grasped another elementary rule: An assassin never revisits the scene of the crime. And by the way, couldn’t the IRA find a bomber without a criminal record, someone without fingerprints on file?
—
Like most IRA volunteers, Patrick Magee was born into economic and political blight—unemployment, prejudice, ignored grievances. He was two when his family moved from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Norwich, England. Life was a little easier there, but not much. Norwich is where Magee acquired the accent that let him check into the Grand unremarked.
In 1969, Magee moved back to Belfast, not long after the Troubles started in Northern Ireland. He joined the IRA at eighteen and soon came to the attention of the police, earning a reputation as a bomber with a brain. He reportedly exercised it by doing the Times crossword puzzle.
Magee bounced in and out of the Castlereagh interrogation center like a yo-yo. The police tried every trick they knew to recruit him as an informer. A policeman who’d conducted one of Magee’s interrogations had this to say about him: “He was a hard man, and we knew what he was like. We would have loved to have had him on our side.” But Magee was cagey, neither agreeing nor saying no. He was smart enough back then never to leave evidence behind that the police could use to put him away.
It’s unclear why Magee would make a clumsy mistake such as leaving a fingerprint on the registration card or failing to use enough explosives. But it didn’t dent Magee’s cocksure defiance as he was led from the court and addressed onlookers in Gaelic: “Tiocfaidh ár lá.” Our day will come.
There’s an old saying that the only Catholics in Northern Ireland who get a good education get it in prison. It’s true of Magee at least, who inside would earn a Ph.D. in literature by correspondence. (He also picked up a wife by correspondence, a novelist.)
It wasn’t long after his release—thanks to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement—that he publicly tried to justify the attempt on Thatcher. So far, so familiar, but he could never stick to a single story or, for that matter, articulate why precisely the IRA needed to murder Thatcher. In one interview Magee said that “they” (presumably the IRA) wanted to murder Thatcher because “they” were frustrated with the war in Northern Ireland. “The obvious recourse was to take the war to England,” he said.
As for targeting Thatcher instead of someone else, Magee said: “She was the leader of the British government, and she came into office determined to pursue a hard military line … You go up the chain of command and the b
uck stopped with her.”
In another interview Magee said he’d accomplished what he’d intended to, namely push Britain into peace: “After Brighton, anything was possible, and the British for the first time began to look very differently at us.”
In a third interview Magee pulled back, saying he was lucky to have missed Thatcher. “In fact, if half of the British government had been killed, it might have been impossible for a generation of the British establishment to come to terms with us.”
It’s all pure intellectual slop, of course. Just as the assassin knows the size of the charge it takes to do a job, he also knows exactly why he’s picked his target. An assassin can never entertain second thoughts, never beg for understanding, and never let the faintest shadow of doubt cross his brow, either before or after the act. In an assassin’s world, there is no tolerance for contrition or, for that matter, press interviews and Ph.D.’s.
Yes, the Brighton attack was spectacular, the kind of pyrotechnical display that got the IRA marquee billing. Arguably, it was the closest the IRA would ever come to making inroads into the consciousness of the wider British politic, which tended to look at the IRA as savages best kept in kraals. But in the end what did it really get out of it?
It comes down to this single truth: Either Margaret Thatcher deserved it or she didn’t. And if she truly did, then the last thing the IRA should ever have let happen is the Iron Lady walking out of the smoke and debris of the Grand Hotel.
Almost as bad, the IRA senselessly frittered away what mystique it still possessed when it allowed Magee to put on display his small personal ambitions and frailties. Magee’s sad public avowal will forever be a constant reminder that the IRA had tried and failed to murder Thatcher. Like an old fat man stripping down to nothing, the IRA turned itself into a thing of low contempt, the gang that can’t shoot straight.
EVERY FAILURE AN OPPORTUNITY
As I said, Hajj Radwan made mistakes, as he did with the attempt on the emir of Kuwait. But what he did to mitigate them was to never confess to them. What’s the point in acknowledging failure? It’s not like it’ll make things right with a would-be victim. In fact, it’s better to do just the opposite, mislead people into believing you hit exactly what you were aiming at. Your objective is to leave the world in stupid dread rather than give it a ray of hope that you’re not as formidable as first thought.
Let me go back to Hajj Radwan’s car bombing of the American embassy annex in Beirut on September 20, 1984. (It occurred the day after Patrick Magee checked out of the Grand.) The best working hypothesis until now is that it was an attempt on the American and British ambassadors. If the British ambassador’s security detail hadn’t shot and killed the van’s driver, thereby preventing him from making it into the garage, both ambassadors probably would have died. In short, Hajj Radwan missed. But try to prove it.
Hajj Radwan knew exactly what he was doing in arranging to leave absolutely no evidence at the site of the attack. The van was stolen, the explosives were untraceable, the suicide bomber unidentifiable, and all fingerprints burned off in the explosion. Like any good assassination, it came out of a clear blue sky and disappeared back into one.
Although the Islamic Jihad Organization—the same fictitious organization commonly associated with Hajj Radwan—would claim it, it never said what the target was other than the annex. It left a handful of people like me, with only fragmentary intelligence and contextualization, to hypothesize that it had been a failed attempt on the ambassadors. One opinion among many.
Somewhat in support of my argument, Hajj Radwan sharply altered his tactics after the attack on the annex, moving away from trying to murder a target by bringing down a building on top of him to murdering him in a moving car. To that end, he improved his odds by adopting sophisticated firing devices and shaped charges. As one day he would demonstrate, no one traveling in a car is safe.
Anyway, people remember the attack on the annex as a resounding success to this day—the van slipped through a tight cordon of security, the driver faithfully sacrificed himself, and the bomb went off as it was supposed to. As Hajj Radwan could have told us, seeming to get what you want is as important as getting what you want.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: An assassination is meant to preclude mean reversion. If it won’t, go back to the drawing board.
LAW
#16
IF YOU CAN’T CONTROL THE KILL, CONTROL THE AFTERMATH
A good, thorough cleanup is what really scares the shit out of people.
IN ORDER TO FULLY UNDERSTAND ANOTHER BEING, YOU HAVE TO WATCH IT DIE
Damascus, November 2009: Syria’s a country in a hurry to slow down the future. It doesn’t even bother to pretend it likes foreigners. And when it does grudgingly allow them inside its borders, it keeps them at arm’s length. I’m not sure why I need another lesson in a truth so obvious, but apparently I do when I’m sent there by The Hague for the Hariri investigation. It’s a year and a half before the Arab Spring.
I arrange through a friend to have a Syrian visa faxed to Syria’s only border crossing with Jordan, where I’ll cross by taxi. Having had my run-ins with Syrian officialdom, as I get ready to board the plane, I call my friend to make sure he’s indeed faxed the visa. He tells me not to worry: A valid Syrian visa will be at the crossing.
As the Syrian border post looms into view, my taxi driver slows way down as if he’s caught a bad case of cold feet and is about to turn around. Like all Jordanian taxi drivers who ply the road to Damascus, he is scared shitless by the Syrians. He fumbles with my passport with his free hand: “You’re sure you don’t have a visa?” I reassure him, no problemo.
He parks in front of the main building. We walk inside together. At the counter, there’s a woman pleading with a surly border guard in a field-gray uniform who is sporting a twenty-four-hour stubble, his tie loose at the neck. He’s a man who doesn’t look happy to be at work.
He shuffles through a stack of papers in front of him and shakes his head. The woman keeps repeating she’s sure a visa was faxed: It has to be somewhere there in his papers. He says something I can’t hear, and she goes and sits down on a banquette against the wall. My heart reaches out to her.
When it comes my turn to belly up to the counter, I buoyantly tell the guard that, unlike the lady, I really do have a faxed visa waiting for me. The man’s mood doesn’t brighten an iota. But it doesn’t stop me from grinning like an idiot, as if I’d driven all this way just to have a friendly chat with the bastard.
He grabs my passport without a word, sits down, and swivels his chair to face his computer screen. He punches in my name and passport number. After peering at the screen for about ten seconds, he swivels back and looks at me as if he’s about to faint with excitement: “You came here as a journalist!”
Sadly, true. It was right before the Iraq War in 2003, for ABC News. I consider pointing out that it was six years ago, that I’m no longer a journalist, and that I never once filed a report on Syria. But I can tell it’s a set of facts he won’t give a fuck about.
Ever since my short stint as a journalist in Syria, it’s as if a scarlet A were tattooed on my forehead. Some Syrian friends tried to have the journalist notation expunged from Syrian immigration computers. But neither cajoling nor bribes worked. Not that it truly surprised me. Police states such as Syria have a wondrous knack for discovering efficiency when it comes to keeping track of shifty foreigners.
As soon as I start to explain I’m no longer a journalist, he cuts me off with biblical finality: “You need a journalist’s visa. Go back to Amman and apply for one.”
I, of course, can’t tell him the truth about being a consultant to the tribunal on my way to Damascus to snoop for evidence of Syrian complicity in the murder of Hariri. He would have trussed me up like a Christmas ham and delivered me to the mukhabarat—Syria’s fingernail-pulling spooks.
“My very good friend in Damascus sent me a visa here,” I wearily try a last time. “I’m sure of it.”
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He pats his stack of papers: “It’s not here. No visa.” He turns to a man standing just to my right, no doubt to tell him to bugger off too. Another burnt offering before a stone idol.
The guard stands up, walks across the office, and disappears through a door. The pirate posing as my taxi driver is now grinning like a drunken jackass, no doubt adding up in his head how much he’ll overcharge me for the ride back to Amman.
I go sit down with the other doomed petitioners on the banquette, thinking about the time Mother beat the Syrian bureaucracy at its own game. It was when she first came to Syria on a month’s visa but, fascinated with the country, wanted to stay longer. Try as hard as I could, I couldn’t find anyone to help extend her visa.
So Mother took a taxi down to the Ministry of Interior, a place more feared than Count Dracula’s castle, only to be informed a visa extension wouldn’t be possible. Undeterred, she was back the next day, this time with a bagful of thick books. She took a seat and started to read. By closing time, the Syrians were in a panic. Who was this tenacious old lady? When she showed up the next morning with her books, it was clear this was a battle the great nation of Syria was destined to lose. She got her extension.
It’s another twenty minutes before our tormentor is back. Everyone crowds the counter to renew their pleadings. When I finally nudge my way in, he looks at me as if he’s seen me for the first time. But before I can even open my mouth, he says: “I told you there’s no fax for you.”
For a moment, I consider he might be after a bribe. But before I can make up my mind, a bright, malign bulb goes on in my head.
The Perfect Kill Page 22