Before leaving on my trip, a friend suggested that I should take the occasion of my visit to Damascus to look up the mukhabarat chief, the same one who would pull my fingernails out if he were to find out I worked for the tribunal. He’d surely agree to have tea with me, the friend said. I had my doubts. The man was the Syrian president’s most trusted henchman and had a reputation for brutality that made Syrians tremble at the mere mention of his name. Although there was no solid evidence for it, he was a suspect in Hariri’s murder. But more to the point, why would he want to waste his time with an ex–CIA operative? But to make my friend feel better, I entered his name and phone number in my iPhone.
I lean far over the counter to get the border guard’s attention. He looks up at me, now genuinely irritated.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Give me back my passport. I’ll tell my friend in Damascus there’s been a small error.”
Detecting the faintest shadow of concern passing across his face, I press my advantage: “He works for the government. I’m sure he’ll understand why you won’t let me in your country.”
I can tell he doesn’t want to, but he can’t resist: “Who?”
“You mean who do I have a meeting with?”
He searches my face, trying to decide the nature of the swindle afoot.
“Do you really want to know?” I ask. I may be wrong, but I sense the starch coming out of him.
I pull out my iPhone, hit Contacts, and find the mukhabarat chief’s name. I turn it around for him to see.
“He’s probably at lunch,” I say. “We can call him at home.”
A high, rattled laugh comes out from somewhere deep in the poor man’s throat. He looks over his shoulder for salvation. Seeing none, he shoves back his chair and bolts across the office. He disappears into the same office he went into before.
It isn’t a minute later when an older man with a lot of stars on his shoulder peeks out from behind the door. The guard whispers in his ear, pointing his chin toward me.
For the next ten minutes, I sit in the border chief’s office, drinking sickly-sweet tea and eating soggy biscuits. No one says a word to me; people coming in and out avert their eyes. I feel like a leper with his bell clanging wildly.
After ten minutes, my passport is back with a meticulously centered and blotted visa. The border chief orders his adjutant to walk me through the rest of the formalities. I can see he wants to shake my hand; then he thinks better of it.
I wonder if anyone’s ever passed through Syrian customs with such alacrity and deference. Or with a border guard carrying his suitcase. As we pull away for Damascus, my driver looks at me in the rearview mirror as if I were some kind of sorcerer.
I won’t really understand it until the Arab Spring shows up in Syria, but what I just got was an aperçu into Syria’s final days—the decline and fall of a police state once renowned for its brutal efficiency. It also helps me understand how Hajj Radwan’s assassins managed to smuggle their explosives through this border crossing. For all I know, they did it by taxi … and no doubt without having to resort to an adolescent sleight of hand like mine.
—
As soon as I pass through the front door of Damascus’s Four Seasons hotel, life gets a lot better very fast, the air-conditioning sucking the grit out of the air and offering back a gentle, cool breeze. The place is a celestial oasis.
Unlike my visa, my reservation is waiting for me, a suite overlooking the old city. Although I have only my small carry-on, the concierge insists a bellhop carry it up to the room. The elevator is a rocket, too fast to bother with music.
I kick off my shoes, settle back on the sofa, and flip on the giant flat-panel TV to CNN. I think about how there was a time when CNN was banned in Syria, like every other American news organization. Is Syrian censorship’s ugly yoke finally about to come off?
I’m starting to doze off when there’s a knock at the door. I think it’s the maid to turn down the bed. I shout at the door no thank you. Instead of an answer, there’s another knock, now more insistent. I start to panic: They’ve discovered my ruse at the border.
The more I think about it, the deeper my panic sets in. Maybe they’ve found out I’m here for The Hague. Since I’m not on a UN or diplomatic passport, I can see them cooking up some charge, throwing me in jail, and holding me for years. Or worse.
I open the door to find the assistant manager who just checked me in. “Your room’s not quite ready,” he says, craning his neck to get a look over my shoulder. Behind him stands the bellhop.
I look back at my room to see what the problem is. Nothing I can see—the bed’s made, there’s a stack of fresh towels in the bathroom, and a bowl of fresh fruit on the credenza. But of course there’s nothing wrong with it! Someone’s simply made the grave error of putting me in a room that isn’t bugged.
I follow the assistant manager and the bellhop to the elevator, up four flights, and down the hall to my new room. It’s identical to the one I just vacated—fruit, clean sheets, and all. The only difference is it has a better view of Damascus’s old city.
—
That evening, a Syrian friend I’ll call Dennis collects me to see a mutual friend, the same businessman who a couple of years before had told me he’d seen Hajj Radwan floating around the Syrian presidency waiting for a meeting. I hope now he’ll throw me a scrap about Hariri.
It’s not completely unreasonable. As Hariri’s aides related the story, the businessman had showed up in Beirut a day before Hariri’s assassination to warn him there was a plot against him. But like the other warnings, Hariri ignored it. I intend to ask the businessman point-blank what induced him to warn Hariri.
As we get out of the car in front of the businessman’s office, Dennis catches my attention and draws an imaginary circle around his ear with his forefinger—a signal that the businessman’s office is bugged. So much for bringing up Hariri or Hajj Radwan. Although both men are now cold in their graves, even gossiping about them is forbidden. I’ll have to find a way to see the businessman later.
Although I’ve only been in town for a couple of hours now, blind paranoia has me around the throat like an enraged boa. The only appetite I have for this doomed investigation is to find a place not bugged and ask Dennis about Hariri and Hajj Radwan.
Over dinner at an outdoor restaurant, Dennis politely listens to my questions but keeps coming back to the argument it was Syria that paid in spades for Hariri’s assassination. Getting kicked out of Lebanon has been a catastrophic defeat for it. The Syrian troops there were the only thing keeping a lid on the place. Why then would the Syrians—or, for that matter, Hezbollah—want to assassinate Hariri?
I think about pointing out that the worst way to assign blame for a political murder is to frame it in terms of cui bono—who benefits? By that measure, Lyndon Johnson murdered JFK. Or how about British intelligence arranging a phony attempt on Thatcher to justify cracking down on the IRA? But I don’t say it, and by the end of dinner, I’ve gotten nothing out of Dennis.
I know this all sounds like a lot of belaboring of very thin leads, but in a murky affair such as Hariri’s, where not a single witness has stepped forward to offer real evidence, thin is better than nothing. And I have nothing to lose. So I ask Dennis to drive me past the place where Hajj Radwan met his end.
The street we turn down could be any upscale suburb in any modern Arab city. There’s a small grocery store still open, a man shopping. A couple is hurrying along, likely on their way home. Otherwise the sidewalks are rolled up for the night.
Dennis pulls over at the intersection and points in the direction of a hospital mid-block. It’s in front of that hospital where he was killed, he says. I ask him if he saw the car.
Dennis says he was on his way home that evening when he was surprised to see the street taped off by police. But he couldn’t get close enough to see what the problem was. He never saw Hajj Radwan’s car.
A new Toyota Lexus is parked where Dennis pointed. Because the
streetlights are dim, I can’t see much else. There’s nothing to mark the place. Then again, what am I expecting, the Syrians to put up a statue to Hajj Radwan? Unlike the Lebanese, they can’t claim him as their own.
I wish Dennis would pull up closer so I can get a better look, but he wheels the car around to take me back to the Four Seasons.
“Who did it?” I ask.
“They’re sure it was Palestinians. But working for Jordan and Israel. They have some names.”
—
I keep coming back to my hunch that the soft pleasures of Damascus turned Hajj Radwan’s head—the new wife, the French boutiques and patisseries, the fancy cars racing around Damascus. There’s no solid evidence for it, but I’ve heard things, such as Hajj Radwan’s son catting around Beirut in a new BMW like all the other spoiled Lebanese princelings. If true, it’s a sign that Hajj Radwan succumbed to the temptation of money, letting discipline go. Did it also blind him to the fact that Syria had slipped its totalitarian, police-state moorings, had become lazy and corrupt, and was no longer able to offer him the protective shield it once did?
When I’d heard the details of how Hajj Radwan had finally been run to ground, how the assassin had slipped through Syria’s once-formidable security net, smuggled the explosives through the Jordanian border crossing, rigged Hajj Radwan’s car with explosives in central Damascus, and even managed to avoid collateral victims, I better understood that the world had changed since my Beirut days.
But what am I missing? The first reports were that the headrest of Hajj Radwan’s Pajero exploded, decapitating him. Later reports had it that a magnetic bomb, a “limpet,” had been attached to the back of his car and detonated by a radio signal. A third version had it that the explosives were concealed in the car’s spare tire.
What strikes me odd in all of this is the conflicting detail. In the West, we’re accustomed to instantly learning the gory details surrounding a high-profile murder. It’s as if we were entitled to them. We quickly found out about Swedish prime minister Olof Palme’s assassination, including details about the police investigation. Anytime there’s a noteworthy murder in the United States, a slew of gruesome pictures appear in the press. But then again, with the act completed, why not?
But none of this occurred after Hajj Radwan’s murder—no photos, no police reports, no eyewitness statements. I’d eventually come across a blurry photo of his car taken from a camera phone, but it told me nothing. Hezbollah dealt with Hajj Radwan’s murder by staging his blood-soaked clothing in his mausoleum. But as for the truly pertinent facts, its lips are sealed.
One thought I have: Hezbollah and the Syrians have every reason in the world to fake Hajj Radwan’s death. Having been caught red-handed in Hariri’s murder, he couldn’t have been a particularly convenient personage walking around Damascus. Their letting people believe he’d been assassinated would make sense if he’d returned to the southern suburbs to wait for things to cool down. But this is just another baseless grassy knoll/black helicopter conspiracy theory.
What’s apparent here is that Syria still has the capacity to obfuscate the truth, even the assassination of a prominent man in downtown Damascus. It still believes political murder is forbidden knowledge, never to be shared outside a tight, trusted circle. It’s a consensus of silence we in the West can’t begin to understand.
THE ROYAL ROAD TO DISCOVERY
Beirut, February 14, 2005, 12.54.00: The images from the CCTV camera mounted on the side of the HSBC bank building are grainy but good enough to see how the Mitsubishi van rides heavy on the shocks, carrying something heavy. The van hangs back, doing about eight or nine miles an hour. It hugs the right side of the road as traffic speeds by at forty miles an hour.
There’s nothing erratic about the way the Mitsubishi’s driver handles the road. Knowing what’s about to come, you can’t help but wonder what’s going through his mind.
The van moves out of the camera’s frame at 12.54.37, continuing along the seafront boulevard.
You can’t tell it from the CCTV images, but Beirut woke up this morning to a light, fresh breeze off the Mediterranean. When the weather’s nice like this, the Corniche is packed with walkers, well-heeled Beirutis in designer tracksuits and gold-foiled Nikes. They take their exercise seriously, scooting along at a half run, elbows churning. Older men stroll in twos and threes, gossiping, gesturing with fat cigars, mostly expensive Cubans. People sit on their balconies sipping their coffees without a care in the world.
It must feel like spring for Rafic Hariri too, a political spring to be precise. He’s spent the morning at parliament, canvassing for the June elections, and now it’s all but certain he’ll be elected prime minister again. Sure, Hariri has his problems, not least among them the bruising fights with the Syrians. There have even been threats on his life. But it’s something he’s had to live with ever since he moved back to Lebanon in 1992. But as he’s said often enough, they’re the ambient noise every Lebanese politician learns to live with.
Hariri would never dare say it openly, but he’s all the more optimistic about his political fortunes these days. He’s counting on a certain give in the new Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. A London-trained ophthalmologist, Bashar would flinch before committing violence. He wasn’t the man of steel his father was, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000. Nor did Bashar seem to be a man to act on his grudges, the main gear that turns Middle East politics; he would flinch before committing violence. Not that he’d ever say it out loud. Hariri wouldn’t be surprised if one day he woke up to the news that some Syrian general had overthrown Bashar. It would be a welcome plot turn that would give him even more room to maneuver politically.
After Hariri is through charming parliament, he walks over to the nearby Café de l’Étoile, his security entourage and aides struggling to keep up. This is Hariri’s favorite part of Beirut, the old city, whose restoration he’s personally overseen. Hariri handpicked the French architects, pored over their plans, and personally arranged for the loans to finance it all. He even put in his own money.
As he walks around the Étoile, you can see from the TV images how Hariri loves the game, the way he moves from table to table, shaking hands, hugging old friends. The smiles flashed back in return say it all—Hariri the rock star, Mr. Lebanon.
But it’s not power alone that propels Hariri. Or money, the billions and billions he made loyally serving the Saudi royal family. It’s something much more vital, primeval even—a deep tribal loyalty to Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims. As I said, the Arabic word is asabiyyah. Tribal solidarity. No matter how rich or celebrated he became, Hariri never betrayed his roots.
Hariri’s status as the leader of Lebanon’s Sunnis was undisputed. It may add up to nothing more than dumb blood loyalty and influence peddling, but what the Sunnis saw in Hariri was both their anchor and beacon—a man who would better their lives, put them back on the pedestal they thought they deserved to be on. Without Hariri, they would be a people diminished and weak.
You also have to wonder whether class had something to do with what’s about to happen. Every time Hariri drove from the airport to his mansion on the hill, and passed through the southern suburbs where the poor Shiites live, he thanked his lucky stars he’d clawed his way out of poverty. Did he think that the Shiites deserved to live in squalor, to wallow in their sectarian impurities? No, but some of his fellow Sunnis didn’t always share the same sentiment.
As he walks around the Étoile that morning, it must seem to him like the future’s all coming together nicely. He’s succeeded in restoring Lebanon to its rightful position in the Middle East’s firmament. And to crown it all, the Sunnis would be at the helm. Would that young punk in Damascus dare to try to stop him?
As Hariri climbs behind the wheel of his Mercedes 600 to drive home for lunch, he says something to the man in the passenger seat next to him, a parliamentary deputy. No one will find out what it was. But they both laugh. Hariri loves his jokes.
The next we s
ee of Hariri is his six-car convoy entering the frame of the CCTV camera on the HSBC wall at 12.56.17. The last car exits the frame at 12.56.25. Later, it’s calculated from the camera that the convoy was doing just under forty.
A split second later, the camera starts to shake, and a ghostly wave passes across the images. The camera’s blown about wildly and hurled off the wall. Dangling by a cable, it watches through a haze of dust the people pouring out of the building’s door, covering their mouths, choking.
Seven minutes later, there’s a new optic, one too horrifying to show the public. A man on a motor scooter with a high-definition video camera arrives at the scene. The images he records are horrific. Hariri is burning by the side of the car, bystanders trying to put him out. His friend, the parliamentary deputy, is on fire, clawing to get out the door.
—
Let’s be clear, Hariri had made his mistakes. The worst of them was to misjudge the Syrians and Hezbollah. He didn’t understand how they looked at him as a threat. Whether witting or unwitting, he was a bullhorn of resurgent Sunni Islam. Nor did Hariri truly grasp that democracy and the rule of law are a sham in Lebanon, how the state’s monopoly on the means of violence was never truly restored, and how Hezbollah called every important shot related to national security … and how, in extremis, it wouldn’t hesitate to eliminate anyone who got in its way.
In Hajj Radwan’s eyes, Hariri was a political poseur. He might be a fabulously rich, well-connected oligarch, but his pretensions to power didn’t match reality. He had some armed people under him, but nothing like Hezbollah’s military. Couple that with the perception that Hariri intended to turn back history to a mythical Sunni past, and the only possible resolution to the conflict was a bloody one.
Hariri apparently also missed how jumpy the Shiite offshoot regime in Damascus was. In neighboring Iraq, the Sunni revolt was in full flower against the Shiites. Could it be long before it slopped over the border into Syria? In Syria’s world, you cut the head off a baby snake before it becomes a full-grown serpent.
The Perfect Kill Page 23