These are easy conclusions to come by, but it’s unarguable that Hariri somehow overplayed his hand. He wasn’t a complete innocent in his own murder.
IS ASSASSINATION A LOST ART?
From a technical standpoint, Hajj Radwan nearly carried off the perfect kill. He put his best people on the job, figured out a way to cover all three of Hariri’s possible routes home that day, and made sure the van intersected his car and exploded at exactly the right moment. He brought to bear everything he’d learned over the last twenty-five years.
Hajj Radwan also went to great lengths to hide his hand. The team covering Hariri that day purchased prepaid cell phones under false names. Since everyone in Lebanon and his dog has a cell phone, and because the Lebanese are a garrulous people who make hundreds of thousands of calls every hour, he must have calculated that tying together these phones would be impossible.
A taped confession of a faux suicide bomber was a nice piece of misdirection. On the face of it, the young bearded man declaiming in Salafi gibberish about why he needed to murder Hariri (and himself) was convincing. Throwing it over the wall of the Salafi-loving TV channel Al Jazeera was another nice touch. On the face of it, it was entirely plausible that a fanatic would sacrifice his life to eliminate a pawn of the Saudi royal family. (Not to mention that the tape served as a sort of bill of indictment, reminding the Lebanese that Hariri was a corrupted Saudi stooge.)
And finally, there was the Yemeni-Saudi nose I wrote about. It jibed nicely with the Saudi Salafi angle. It made no difference that no one could say who the nose belonged to, the point being that outsiders murdered Hariri. Whoever thought that one up on Hajj Radwan’s team was a true genius.
But like so much else with political murder, appearances often don’t hold up.
—
Hajj Radwan may have invented modern political murder, but he was no Moses. He’d often enough lose a step, as he did with the attempt on the emir of Kuwait. Or maybe it’s just that technology finally caught up with him. Either way, his Hariri assassination went off the tracks in a big way.
Let me start with whether Hariri deserved it or not, Law #1. I can see why Hariri’s dumping money into Sunni causes, maybe militant ones, along with his making noises about disarming Hezbollah, caused Hajj Radwan (and his sponsors) heartburn. But did it really add up to a death sentence?
Taking Saudi money didn’t make Hariri a foreign invader. He never invited in foreign troops, and he wasn’t actively trying to destroy Hajj Radwan or Hezbollah. In short, while it must have been tempting to label Hariri a traitor, it’s not completely convincing to frame his murder as an act of self-defense à la Laos, kill or perish. Maybe Hariri could have later turned into a genuine threat, but he wasn’t one the day he was murdered.
I suspect Hajj Radwan was horrified as he watched the Lebanese pour out into the streets to protest Hariri’s assassination and demand Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon. And when the Syrians did, he must have pinched himself to make sure it wasn’t a nightmare. Syria was his rear base and logistics lifeline. Would Damascus cut off his supply lines?
Things must have looked all the more ominous when the Lebanese police grew a backbone and started to seriously investigate Hariri’s murder and, even worse, when they brought to bear the latest tools of modern police work, including data analytics. With the telephone companies readily turning over their records to the police, Hajj Radwan must have felt the net start to draw around him.
It all quickly unraveled. An algorithm tied together the eight falsely purchased prepaid cell phones. According to GPS tracking, all eight cell phones, in one way or another, were along Hariri’s route from his house to parliament that morning. For the police, it was proof the phones had been used to coordinate his assassination.
But the real nugget came the morning of Hariri’s assassination when a call from one of the prepaid cells to a residential landline was discovered. The recipient of the call, a young lady, told the police her boyfriend had called her the morning of Hariri’s murder. It became even more interesting when she said he worked for Hezbollah. She didn’t know anything about his calling from a prepaid cell, but the police concluded that he must have violated his team’s protocol by calling outside what the police dubbed “the first circle of hell”—the eight prepaid cell phones. Allowing the police to put a name to one of Hariri’s watchers that morning was never supposed to happen.
It didn’t take long for data analytics to connect the young man to Hajj Radwan and the rest of the Ayn al-Dilbah Gang. When Hajj Radwan realized what was happening, he no doubt recognized it as the smoking gun he’d tried so hard never to leave behind. And that’s exactly what that one two-minute call was.
Was Hajj Radwan surprised by the ensuing international investigation? He shouldn’t have been. The West looked at Hariri as the Good Arab, a reasonable, cultivated man you could do business with. Moreover, he’d showered a lot of money on the powerful, from French presidents to Washington’s favorite charities. Which added up to his murder being an unforgivable snub to the West, making a UN investigation all but inevitable.
A guess is always a guess, but mine is that Hajj Radwan was dumbfounded by how fast things turned to shit. Who would ever have thought an Arab dictatorship such as Syria would be forced to do anything under pressure from the street, not to mention be destabilized by it? Not everyone will agree, but some mark Hariri’s assassination as the beginning of the Arab Spring. If true, Hariri’s murder led to the wider conflict he had tried so hard to avoid. It’s a 180-degree opposite of what the act was designed to do.
With Hariri’s murder starting to look a lot like a rogue drone missile circling around and ready to blow half way up his ass, Hajj Radwan had no choice but to clean up.
MAY YOUR WORDS TASTE YOUR BLOOD
Beirut, October 19, 2012: Two years after Hariri’s assassination, my eldest daughter, Justine, moved to Beirut to study for a master’s degree and improve her Arabic. The day after Hezbollah took its shot at me on TV for helping the tribunal, I call her to suggest it might be a good time to give Lebanon a break. She laughs, asking me how could I possibly contribute to the Hariri investigation. After all, I hadn’t lived in Lebanon in years. When I tell her that in order to live you have to walk backward, she doesn’t get it. I tell her about my three-by-five cards, how Hariri’s murder was rooted in the eighties when I was assigned to Beirut. She doesn’t say anything, but then assures me she’ll be fine.
A little more than a year later, Justine is at home in her apartment in Ashrafiyah when a terrible explosion nearby shakes the foundation of her building. She doesn’t need anyone to tell her it was a car bomb. Her only question is who the target was.
The man assassinated was the police general in charge of the Hariri investigation. Seven other people were killed in the explosion. A Sunni and a Hariri loyalist, the general was the driving force behind the investigation, never letting up on the Hezbollah angle. He gave the tribunal every piece of intelligence he could put his hands on.
Although Hajj Radwan was nearly five years into the grave, his signature was all over the general’s assassination—a car passing through a narrow defile. The general had returned to Beirut only the day before, an indication that his assassins’ intelligence must have been very good. As for the motivation, everyone assumed it was to put the final nail in the Hariri investigation. And with no witness daring to travel to The Hague to give evidence before the court, it looks like it worked.
The first unmistakable sign Hariri’s assassins were serious about shutting down the investigation came in the guise of another car bomb. It went off on January 25, 2008, killing the police officers involved in identifying the eight prepaid cell phones. Other murders followed in quick succession—the boy who sold the prepaid cell phones to Hajj Radwan’s people died in a highly suspicious car accident; the team member who’d made the phone call to his girlfriend that morning reportedly was found on the side of a hill, dismembered; a Syrian general close to Hajj Rad
wan was found in his office shot six times. In all, there were a dozen or more murders related to the investigation. It was as if Al Capone had assassinated J. Edgar Hoover and then worked his way down the FBI’s hierarchy, only stopping when the FBI raised a white flag.
Hajj Radwan’s people also got into Lebanon’s official databases and erased every immigration record, police file, intelligence file, phone record, and birth and death certificate that possibly could be used against Hajj Radwan. It reminded me of when Hajj Radwan had his passport records stolen.
In the end, the Lebanese got the message: “Competing” against Hajj Radwan was tantamount to a death sentence. He and his apparatus had turned on its head Stalin’s dictum about the state being an instrument owned by the ruling class to break the resistance to that class. In their version, they broke the state’s resistance.
MORE ABOUT PETARDS BLOWING UP IN YOUR OWN FACE
Hajj Radwan died a hero to his cause. The way his face stares down from placards along the airport road, you’d think he’d been beatified. But in that same spirit, no one’s about to point out the fact that he’d dug his own grave.
I can understand the “campaign desk” on display in his mausoleum and his special pencil box, but come on: a cell phone? Even Nasrallah knew better than to carry one. An aide carried his, always at a distance well out of a drone missile’s kill radius.
The easiest explanation is that when you’re a player in the imperial center (Damascus) you don’t have a choice. You can never know when you might get a call from the palace and be asked to pop up for a cup of tea and a chat with the president. The old Hajj Radwan, who once disappeared for months at a time, ignoring his paymasters, had finally been sucked into the machine.
The picture of Hajj Radwan that Hezbollah put up around Lebanon also surprised me. He’s in a starched uniform, his beard stylishly trimmed, and he’s wearing expensive designer glasses. He was no longer the humble tailor putting around on an old motor scooter. The only thing he’s missing in the pictures is a rack of medals.
For me, it’s more evidence that Hajj Radwan had been co-opted into the establishment, both in Damascus and Tehran. With all their petty ambitions, pretensions, and unfounded certitudes, those two capitals were the equivalent of Louis XVI’s Versailles—an allure for the elite but poison for what the French call an homme de terrain, an operator. The pressure on Hajj Radwan to become a company man on company business must have been irresistible.
The other thing that spun out of Hajj Radwan’s control were the crosscurrents of history. Well, actually, the Arab Spring turned out to be more like a lethal wind shear. He, like so many others, miscalculated the street, how easily the Sunnis were tipped into revolt, and how they were about to turn his ideas about political violence on their head. But it wasn’t the first time he’d been caught crosswise of history. I’d seen it with my own eyes in Beirut, and in fact, it was that occasion that would give me my first and only clean shot I got at the bastard.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: It’s all in the timing.
LAW
#17
HE WHO LAUGHS LAST SHOOTS FIRST
You’re the enemy within, which means there’s never a moment they’re not trying to hunt you down to exterminate you. Hit before it’s too late.
ALWAYS FLATTER THE GUY WITH A GUN IN HIS HAND, RIGHT UP UNTIL IT’S TIME TO ACT
Beirut, November 22, 1989: The Lebanese had had it with their civil war. Well into its fourteenth year, the war had killed nearly 120,000 people and there was absolutely nothing to show for it. Only the most bloody-minded didn’t want the Lebanese government back, warts and all. And indeed, the violence did seem to be ebbing, but not even the sunniest optimist thought the calm would hold.
When the time arrived for parliament to elect a new president, the delegates met at a remote military base, helicopters buzzing overhead and tanks prowling the perimeter. But the day passed as quiet as the grave. A lot of people thought it was thanks to Syria and the United States compromising on a single candidate. Some even predicted he’d be the man to finally stand Lebanon back up on its own two feet.
In the name of caution, the newly elected president rarely left his palace. When he did, his motorcade routes were cleared of parked cars to prevent an assassin from turning one of them into a bomb. This offered the added advantage of allowing his motorcade to move at high speed. To prevent an inside job, his personal security people were all related by blood, cousins and second cousins. But what no one could do anything about was the official functions that the president felt obligated to preside at. It offered any would-be assassin a fixed place and time.
By Lebanese Independence Day—just seventeen days after the election—the president was a bit more at ease. The evening before, the Syrian intelligence chief had told him Syria wouldn’t tolerate an attempt on his life. Anyone who posed a potential threat had been rounded up, he said. Considering that Syria occupied about a third of Lebanon, the Syrian intelligence chief’s assurances carried a lot of weight in the president’s mind. Who’d want a Syrian armored division bent on retribution coming down on his head? As the Syrian was about to leave, he proposed that one of his men accompany the president’s convoy, both to the ceremony and then back to the palace.
It rained the night before, offering up a crystalline morning and a rich, benevolent sky. The snow-dusted mountains and the silver-flecked turquoise sea were a spectacular amphitheater for it all. When the band started to play the national anthem, the president had to hold back a tear. Afterward, he stopped to talk to old friends. Aides had to hurry him along, ushering him into a black Mercedes. He sat in the backseat.
The lead police car pulled away with a screech of tires and sirens wailing. The convoy moved through the cleared streets at a brisk fifty miles an hour, spreading out across two blocks. People tried to get a glimpse of their new president, but with the convoy’s speed and nearly identical cars with smoked windows, it was impossible to tell whose car was whose.
Just as the president’s convoy started up a hill into Beirut’s commercial center, there was a flash and a terrible trembling of the earth. It felt like a 747 had crashed somewhere nearby. At first, the only thing certain was that the convoy had been right in the middle of whatever it was.
As the smoke drifted off, it now was clear there had been an explosion. Several cars in the convoy were on fire. What was left of the president’s security detail jumped out to check on the president, only to find his Mercedes gone. Vanished. They thought at first that the driver had taken advantage of the confusion to get away. But then someone noticed what was left of the Mercedes. It had been ripped in half, the pieces blown hundreds of feet away. The rear right door had taken the brunt of the explosion, exactly where the president had been sitting. A tank’s armor wouldn’t have saved him.
It turned out that an abandoned candy shop along the route had been packed with explosives, about a ton. But in order to concentrate the force into something like the size of a dinner plate, the assassins had molded the explosives into a conical hollow, a so-called shaped charge. Its force was such that it passed through one interior wall and then an exterior wall. But other than that, the investigators had nothing to go on. The firing device had been obliterated in the explosion. There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, no claims. Motive and intent were also a mystery.
The only thing clear was that it took talent to hit a car moving at fifty miles an hour, not to mention driving the explosion’s force through two walls. The assassins clearly had had some sort of advanced military training. That and a lot of practice. But the real mystery stood: Who were these people capable of carrying off the assassination of a head of state in seventeen days?
—
Although no one dared put it to paper, a few investigators thought they recognized the work of Hajj Radwan. By 1989 he’d mastered the art of shaped charges, thanks to experimenting with them on the Israeli army. He could hit any moving vehicle no matter the speed. He’d also picked up the tec
hnique of “enhancing” a charge by mixing heat-generating aluminum powder in with the explosives.
Years later, a high-ranking Lebanese intelligence officer would tell me he’d come across some chatter that put Hajj Radwan in the middle of the president’s assassination. When I asked him why it had never come out in an official report, there was no mistaking the incredulity in his voice: “Don’t you understand what these people are capable of?”
I tried to persuade him to give me more, but he wouldn’t budge. In fact, he cautioned me not to write anything about Hajj Radwan—it could get me killed. When I asked him whether it might be worth calling the president’s widow to get her opinion, he said he’d advise her not to talk to me.
I tried a couple of other people but had no luck. Most didn’t even know who Hajj Radwan was, and they were content to blame Syria for the president’s murder. Being a distant and clumsy enemy, Syria was a ready-made scapegoat. Who knows, there’s always the possibility it was the Syrians who commissioned Hajj Radwan to do the job. Just as I suspect they’d done with Hariri.
It left me to speculate why Hajj Radwan—or whoever it was—would want to murder the president of Lebanon in the middle of a touch-and-go war with Israel. You’d think he’d have more important things to attend to than assassinating a man of little political significance. Why not finish off the Israelis first and then put Lebanon’s house in order?
What I’m pretty sure was at play is the principle that assassination is an instrument that serves the powerful whose power goes unrecognized rather than the merely powerless. If I’m right about Hajj Radwan’s part in it, he murdered the Lebanese president to put the Lebanese statists on notice that they could forget about their fantasies of getting their state back. He and Hezbollah were in charge now, and no one was going to revive Lebanon with some silly parliamentary vote, especially a vote by parliamentarians who possess no power. The new president could go on all he liked about restoring the state’s sovereign authority and standing Lebanon up out of the ashes, but the truth was that Lebanese sovereignty was a fiction.
The Perfect Kill Page 24