The Perfect Kill

by Robert B. Baer

  In the meantime, the assassins did their best to go about life as inconspicuously as possible. But it wasn’t all that easy in Madrid, a city that ran on the rhythm of a dull estuary. Young men without jobs, who spent their days and nights sitting in parks and cafés, weren’t exactly invisible. On top of it, there was no way to hide their Basque accents.

  Since none of the assassins had lived in Madrid long enough to become completely familiar with the city, everything was hard, from finding an apartment to renting a car. They didn’t have a good network of friends and contacts to rely on. Nor did they have a safe way to communicate other than with face-to-face meetings. The one thing they did have going for them was Spanish lassitude—and the fortune that Spain’s secret police weren’t particularly efficient.

  The Basque assassins twice accidentally fired off rounds in their apartments. It was sheer luck that neighbors didn’t call the police. And in what can only be described as a rash act, they stole a machine gun from a sleeping sentry at Spain’s military headquarters. What did ETA have to do to get noticed? Apparently nothing, and with each day, ETA’s confidence in its ability to assassinate Carrero Blanco grew. In spite of the mistakes, its members still retained the element of surprise.

  —

  On the morning of December 20, Carrero Blanco emerged from his apartment building at five after nine. His bodyguard and driver were waiting by his new Dodge 3700 GT, as was the rest of his security detail.

  No one has ever come forward to say they’d noticed anything out of place that morning. To be sure, no one noticed a chalk mark on Calle de Claudio Coello, a street behind Francisco de Borja. The unsteady vertical line on the wall looked like a child’s thoughtless scrawl. But in the high-end-murder business it’s called a “timing line”—a mark to help clock the speed of a moving car.

  Another thing no one noticed that morning was the ETA assassins who’d been posing as sculptors. Two months before, they’d rented a basement studio on Calle de Claudio Coello. This time of the morning they’d normally be making a racket, chipping away at their blocks of marble and carrying out heavy bags of something. Marble chips, the neighbors assumed. No one, of course, had a clue they’d been tunneling under the street. But not a peep out of them now.

  No, to all appearances it was a typical morning, the usual people on their way to work, the same early shoppers. The only thing unusual was that the U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had been in Madrid on a visit and had stopped by the American embassy, which was only a couple blocks from San Francisco de Borja.

  Carrero Blanco stepped out of the church at about half past nine, the driver holding open the Dodge’s rear door for him. Carrero Blanco took his usual seat. His bodyguards looked up and down the street, searching for anything out of place. The two chase cars of his security detail were double-parked behind Carrero Blanco’s Dodge, idling. Everyone started off at once.

  The convoy took its usual route south on Calle de Serrano, a one-way street, and then a left on Calle de Juan Bravo, another one-way street. It made an immediate left on Calle de Claudio Coello. It would have been a straight shot down Calle de Claudio Coello. But mid-block there was a double-parked car. No one was in it. But so what? This was Madrid, and Blanco’s driver thought nothing about it. He slowed down to maneuver around it.

  Carrero Blanco’s Dodge had barely passed the double-parked car when the street heaved and exploded in flying debris and concrete. Where the Dodge had been, there now was only an enormous crater, quickly filling with water and sewage.

  Carrero Blanco’s dazed detail had no idea what had happened to him or his Dodge. It was as if he’d been plucked from the earth by an unworldly force. They wouldn’t know where he was until people came running out of San Francisco de Borja to tell them that the car had landed on a second-floor terrace on the other side of the five-story church. Carrero Blanco immediately survived the blast, but he died afterward in the hospital. His driver and bodyguard also died.

  Franco would be dead less than two years later. But Spain went after ETA and Carrero Blanco’s assassins the best it could. In 1978 one of them was himself assassinated in France by a car bomb. A few others were hauled in, or drifted off to other occupations. One became a successful filmmaker. ETA never got its own country. Whether or not Carrero Blanco’s assassination hastened the end of Spanish fascism is a matter of interpretation.

  ALWAYS APPEAR TO BE DULL AND UNIMPORTANT, DISTRACTED BY THE FLEETING BUSINESS OF LIFE

  Beirut, July 11, 1987: The Victorians would have called it Eastern licentiousness, but the way I looked at it at the time was that the Lebanese are a people who know how to throw a rollicking birthday party. It was my thirty-fifth birthday, and one I’ll never forget.

  A new friend of mine, whom I’ll call Colette, put it together. She was a smart, sweet girl and, as the Italians say, un bel pezzo di figa. She picked an outdoor restaurant just downhill from a mountain village called Faraya.

  Right away, I liked the feng shui of the place, how the restaurant was carved into the limestone hillside, its terrace thrown open to a spectacular set of seashell-pink Roman ruins and, beyond the ruins, the inevitable Mediterranean framed by a spotless blue-lacquered sky.

  I thought it would be only four of us, but more people kept showing up, about a dozen in the end. The more the merrier, I thought. These days I was doing my best to pass myself off as a foreign roué come to Lebanon to party. Which was only partially true.

  The more pressing truth was that I was now as paranoid as Chuck. I could feel Hajj Radwan’s hot breath hard on the back of my neck. There was nothing specific other than the slow accumulation of evidence that he had free run of the Christian enclave. The French assassinations and a lot of recent really good chatter were proof enough for me.

  But it wouldn’t be until the Hariri investigation that I fully understood just how right I was. As I wrote before, Hajj Radwan’s brother-in-law—the on-the-ground coordinator for Hariri’s assassination—had set himself up on the Christian side of Beirut posing as an Armenian jeweler. If he could embed himself in the Christian enclave so easily, it must have been all the easier for Hajj Radwan’s less prominent operatives. Hell, for all I knew, my downstairs neighbors worked for him.

  It all meant that a Carrero Blanco–like assassination would have been a cup of tea for Hajj Radwan. Which left me the choice of either hiding in our fortress, counting the days until it was time to leave Beirut, or going out among the Lebanese and pretending to be something I wasn’t. If I could have, I would have posed as a priest or something, but it never would have worked. So, I was left with the womanizing act.

  The party started with about fifty plates of Lebanese mezze—hummus, tabbouleh, fresh vegetables—and an enormous bottle of homemade arak. It’s the Lebanese version of Greek ouzo. It disappeared faster than I thought possible.

  I wished the hard drinking hadn’t started so early; these people were interesting. Mostly Greek Orthodox, they were in their twenties and hip. Their politics were open-minded and ecumenical; of all the Lebanese Christians, they were the closest to the Muslims. It also wasn’t far from my mind that one of the assassins of the Maronite president-elect in September 1982 was Greek Orthodox. It was a long shot, but I was hoping one of my fellow partyers might know a way into Hajj Radwan’s world.

  All too soon things started to get watery, the conversation descending into giggling and professions of eternal love between America and Lebanon. Mercifully, someone stood up on a chair to recite a poem—in Greek. At the end of it, even though I understood nothing, I downed my arak with the best of them. The next bard jumped up on the table and stomped his foot in cadence with his delivery. We emptied our glasses again, only this time smashing them on the floor. All of the dishes on the table soon met the same fate; the owner stood in the door, smiling at us.

  I suspected lunch was over when my fellow revelers got up, staggered to their cars, and came back with their assault rifles. Each couplet now was punctuated by the
rat-tat-tat of firing into the air. I watched as the tracer rounds arced over the Roman ruins toward the sea. We were on borrowed light by the time we finally left.

  —

  That night I couldn’t sleep, thinking how I’d been caught up in the lunacy of this country, falling for its charms like so many other expat saps. Or maybe harder than most did. I was always after that anonymous moment when some fact or tidbit of information would clear up some burning question or explain the byways of political violence that govern these people.

  Not long after my birthday party, I took over a source who had some good inroads into Fatah. He soon got into trouble though, obligating me to put him up in one of my apartments to wait for things to cool down. One night over a whiskey, he asked me if he could trust me. It’s a question I always have a pat answer for: Yes, absolutely.

  After a lot of hemming and hawing, he said that Fatah had been behind the 1982 assassination of the Lebanese president-elect. There’s too much detail to get into here, but the upshot was that it had been Yasser Arafat who’d personally given the orders. Arafat decided the president-elect was a dire threat to the Palestinians and that he had no choice other than to murder him. But it didn’t mean that Arafat could afford to claim it or, for that matter, even use his own people. It’s the reason he enlisted a breakaway faction of the predominantly Greek Orthodox Syrian Social Nationalist Party to do the job. If my source hadn’t been able to provide chapter and verse, I would have dismissed his story out of hand.

  The story became even more interesting when the source told me one of Hajj Radwan’s gunmen might have been connected to the president’s assassination. When I asked him whether Hajj Radwan was in on it, he said he didn’t think so. When I asked him if there was a way to check, he shot back that he wouldn’t ask.

  The deeper I waded into Lebanon’s swamp, the murkier it seemed to get. There were layers upon layers of hidden relations I couldn’t make sense of, entire worlds closed to me. At times it seemed as if there were a caste of assassins who hired out their services. Hajj Radwan first murdered for the Palestinians and later for the Iranians and the Syrians. The fact that it wasn’t always about politics added to the complexity. Hajj Radwan spent seven years trying to free his brother-in-law from his Kuwaiti prison. But there was no way for me to tie it all up in a pink bow. I did have my little consolations, though. If ETA could bumble around Madrid and not tip its hand, so could I.

  Death is not an artist.

  —JULES RENARD

  There was one girl from my birthday party who’d caught my attention. She had a voice that could drive the birds from the sky, but a sixth sense told me she was a good connector. I called her to ask her out for drinks.

  We met in a noisy bar near the Green Line, a place called the Beirut Cellar. I’d heard that you’d have to dodge the snipers if you left the place too late. By the time I started to frequent the club, there was always the racket of gunfire from the Green Line, but a sniper never took a shot at me, either arriving or leaving.

  The night’s crowd was noisy. The girl led me by the hand and sat me down next to a smallish, half-bald man in a suit and tie. “My good friend,” she said, introducing me. “He’s a journalist.” After a little chitchat, she wandered off to say hello to a friend.

  The journalist was from Tyre, but he had come up to Beirut to attend university and then stayed on to work in journalism. When the civil war started, he moved over to the Christian enclave. It worked because his wife was Christian.

  But it was the mention of Tyre that interested me. Hajj Radwan traced his origins to a village close by. I was doubtful, but I wondered if the journalist might have run across him. I resisted asking, though; a curiosity in Hajj Radwan isn’t the best calling card.

  I got up and went to the bar for two beers. “How about taking me to Tyre to show me the sights?” I asked as I sat back down.

  He took his beer, searching my face to see if I was serious or not. When he decided I was, he said: “We—I mean you—would be taken right away. It’s not safe.”

  I knew that, of course. A couple of months before, Hajj Radwan had kidnapped an American colonel working for the UN in southern Lebanon. He would later execute him.

  But my motto is to always lead with innocence: “Oh, come on, who would notice us?”

  He gave me a harassed smile: “Surely, sir, you have a family to think about.”

  “Don’t you know someone in Tyre who’d be willing to show me around?”

  He thought for a moment. “Listen, I have a colleague who covers Tyre. When he’s next here, I’ll introduce you.”

  BEWARE OF THE UNINVITED

  From downstairs came the shriek of a door opening on rusted hinges. I wondered when the last time the apartment’s heavy iron front doors were both opened at the same time. Probably at the start of the civil war when the building’s inhabitants were desperately fleeing the fighting, piling their crap on the tops of their cars and heading up into the mountains.

  From the stairwell came grunting, men hoisting something very heavy up the stairs: “Put him down … Let’s take a breather … No, wait till the landing.”

  It was Ali and his men. I pictured them in the gloomy dark of the stairwell, throwing their backs into hoisting Ali and his wheelchair up the stairs, sweating, terrified they’d drop him.

  I’d met Ali through the journalist from the Beirut Cellar. His colleague from Tyre had refused to meet me, and as a consolation, he had introduced me to Ali. Up until a sniper’s bullet paralyzed Ali, he had been a militia commander in the southern suburbs. Out of the action and broke, he was happy to take the CIA’s money in exchange for his “explaining Lebanon” to me.

  I’d now been meeting Ali for two months, but I had never got around to asking him how he managed to cross the Green Line without a problem. I guessed it had something to do with his being wheelchair bound. Or maybe he had some Christian connection who helped. Lebanon is all about the right connections.

  An unsteady light leaked under the door, a flashlight, then a knock. When I opened the door, Ali rolled himself into the apartment. In the dark, I could make out three men in the hall. I consoled them with a smile and closed the door. I went into the kitchen to make coffee on a Bunsen burner.

  As soon as I sat down, Ali yelled at the door for someone to bring in the package. A man let himself in, carrying something neatly wrapped in cloth. Ali took it and handed it to me. It was heavy. I unwrapped it to find a submachine gun with the dimensions of a large pistol. There were also two long magazines held together by a rubber band.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ali said. “A PM-63.”

  A PM-63 is a Polish-made submachine gun favored by tank crews and Middle Eastern thugs, mainly thanks to its handy size. A rare weapon, it was a thing of real value in Beirut.

  Ali said he’d personally taken this one and a dozen others from Arafat’s security detail when Arafat was run out of Beirut in 1982.

  I wasn’t a gun collector, and I had no idea what I was going to do with it. But the point is that Ali had given it to me as a token of trust. I got up and gave him a hug.

  I didn’t have a gun to give Ali. But what I did have for him was my version of a token of trust—a thick plastic-wrapped stack of “sterile” hundred-dollar bills. (Out of delicacy, I’d put it in a plain white envelope.) I handed it to Ali, who, without saying a word, put it in an inner pocket.

  About five blocks away, toward the Green Line, there was the burr of a large machine gun. Ali and I stopped to listen. When we didn’t hear an answer to it, we both relaxed.

  What interested me was Ali’s past: The Shiite militia he’d once headed was based in the southern suburbs next to the airport. He knew all the fighters there, from the lowliest gunsels to the commanders. He knew their origins, who lived where, who controlled which street. It seemed there wasn’t a name he couldn’t run down for me. A lot of it I was able to confirm from chatter.

  An ironic man with a good sense of humor, Ali
understood just how pointless the fighting had all been and that one day the Lebanese would have to go back to living like normal people. Like the colonel who’d wanted no part of my plans to assassinate Hajj Radwan, Ali wanted to immigrate to the United States and open a convenience store in Detroit.

  It took me half a dozen meetings before I felt confident enough to test him on the subject of Hajj Radwan. I eased into it by asking questions about Hajj Radwan’s neighborhood, Ayn al-Dilbah. Ali said he knew it well, pretty much house by house. Not wanting to raise his suspicions right at the start, I left it there.

  At the following meeting, I brought up the TWA 847 hijacking—the one that earned Hajj Radwan a sealed arrest warrant for the murder of a Navy diver. I said almost in passing that there was a theory that some of the hijackers were from Ayn al-Dilbah. Again, I intentionally didn’t mention Hajj Radwan’s name.

  Without missing a beat, Ali said he knew exactly who the hijackers were. He offered me three names. I’d heard them before, but only in the press.

  Now I started to worry. I knew for a fact that the three had nothing to do with TWA 847. Chatter had put them in the Bekaa at the time. Was Ali fishing for a bonus? Or was it something more sinister?

  Ali then compounded the error by saying he’d seen the three with his own eyes exiting and entering the plane. He’d grown up with them, he said, and there was no doubt about it; they were like his brothers. I told him we’d talk more about it at the next meeting.

  I stood in the window, watching Ali’s men hoist him into the back of his old van, still stumped if Ali was lying about TWA 847 to get a bonus or to cover for someone.

  —

  At the next meeting, Ali rolled into my apartment with a big smile plastered across his face: “You know what a Stechkin is?”

  I did: It’s a small Russian fully automatic pistol.