“Well, I think I got you one, and it’s a very special one. At one time it belonged to a KGB officer.”
Ali didn’t need to tell me he was referring to the 1985 kidnapping of three Russian diplomats and a KGB officer. The KGB officer was wounded in the attack and died. His Stechkin was taken from him. As I wrote before, we knew that Hajj Radwan had organized the attack, taking a $200,000 ransom.
Paranoia is a wonderful astringent, not to mention a wonderful way to tune up your senses. Right now they were screaming at me that the missing KGB pistol was a big, juicy piece of bait—and at the other end of the line was Hajj Radwan. Offering me the pistol was sort of like telling a concert violinist that you’ve just found an old violin in your attic, made by some Italian named Stradi-somebody. My only question was what was next.
At the next meeting, Ali showed up with the serial number for the Stechkin. When I unfolded the torn-off piece of paper and read the numbers, my heart turned to water. They were correct.
“The man who has it is ready to meet,” Ali said.
As I listened to Ali offer the outlines of the deal, I could only wonder what Act III would be. A burlap bag over my head and a quick ride across the Green Line? Or maybe, more efficient, two bullets in the back of the head.
My mind started racing, trying to figure out how to retake lost ground. What I knew was that for a start I had to make Ali believe I’d taken the bait. I shook Ali’s hand: “Fine work.” I folded up the paper with the serial number and put it in my jeans pocket. I said I needed to check on something before we could proceed.
After Ali was out the door, I went to the window to check the street. Other than Ali’s van, there wasn’t a car in sight. But so what? It’s not like kidnappers would be so stupid as to park out front.
I cursed myself for the idiotic daisy chain I’d started down—the birthday party, casual friends, the journalist. It’s a spy’s version of dumpster diving, all so goddamned haphazard and lazy. Not even Carrero Blanco’s assassins would have set a trap for themselves like this.
IT’S HARD CLEANING UP OLD WHORES
These days it’s almost impossible to shed your past, especially if it’s in any way shady—an old DUI arrest, bad credit, flunking out of junior college. It’s like carrying around a dead fish in your pocket. Margaret Thatcher’s would-be assassin, Patrick Magee, was caught thanks to the police having his fingerprints on file. It’s one reason, I suppose, that assassination is a young man’s game.
Call them naïfs, lily-whites, cleanskins, or anything you like, but the point is that people without a blemish on their record are your ideal recruits. As pure as a pink chrysanthemum, they can slip into most anywhere without coming to anyone’s attention. People such as retiring librarians, octogenarian spinsters, and friars work okay, but it’s the young and seemingly innocent you really want.
Hajj Radwan understood the principle as well as anyone. The young man he chose to fire the opening shot in the war on Israel wasn’t even a mote of dust on Israel’s radar. Only seventeen years old, and with no radical ties, he could have been raised by wolves on the steppe as far as the Israelis were concerned.
Years later, I’d meet his family, who lived in a small village above Tyre. Who knows for sure, but they convinced me that they had no idea what the boy was about to do. But of course, why would he tell them? It’s all about the need to know.
As best as could be determined, it was shortly after the 1982 Israeli invasion that Hajj Radwan approached the boy to enlist him as a suicide bomber. Had someone else spotted the boy beforehand, gauged his readiness for martyrdom? Or was he a longtime acquaintance of Hajj Radwan’s? We don’t know. But the upshot was that the boy agreed to sacrifice his life in order to end the foreign occupation of his country.
In the days after their invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis genuinely believed that the Lebanese were grateful they’d given the Palestinians a good dusting. In fact, they were so confident of it that Israeli tour groups started to organize visits to south Lebanon. El Al, the Israeli state airline, opened an office in Sidon. Scantily clad Israeli tourists even took to sunbathing on Lebanese beaches.
Early on November 11, 1982—less than six months after the invasion—Hajj Radwan’s young recruit drove his old, explosive-packed Peugeot through the front door of the seven-story building. The truck detonated, bringing down the building. It killed seventy-five Israeli soldiers and some two dozen Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners.
For the first time, the Israelis got a glimpse into the Lebanese hell they’d thoughtlessly wandered into. Hajj Radwan clearly had done a good job of casing the place. He’d gotten the timing of the attack exactly right, coinciding with the return of the night patrols and before the morning patrols left. Heavy rain that morning had driven more soldiers inside. Had he planned it around the weather? Unlikely, but who knows?
I don’t know when Israel discovered that Hajj Radwan was behind the attack or even whether, in fact, he was. What is certain is that the attackers were in an entirely different class from Carrero Blanco’s. Not only did no one from his side shoot a gun into a ceiling, they also didn’t offer a long and detailed admission to explain themselves. The act was meant to speak for itself.
And just as Hajj Radwan wanted, there were more questions than answers. For instance, how had he managed to enlist his lily-white suicide bomber, and even more remarkable, how could he be so sure that the boy would take his own life? As it turned out, Hajj Radwan had on the bench scores of lily-whites just like him, but not one of them was on an Israeli suspect list. For that matter, the Israelis didn’t even know who Hajj Radwan was until very late in the game.
Although Ali didn’t work out, the reason for my sifting through my new Greek Orthodox friends was to find a lily-white of my own, someone who could naturally insinuate himself into Hajj Radwan’s circle. But as I was reminded again and again, the membrane between Christian and Muslim Beirut went pretty much one way.
SILENT PRAYERS FOR A DEAF GOD
I’ve always been good at is turning failure into opportunity. I counted on it now with Ali as I tried to find a way to string him along with some bullshit story, buy myself some time. Hajj Radwan was good, but it didn’t mean that he was immune to red herrings.
Systemic misdirection used to be a standard practice for CIA officers in Moscow. As soon as one of them arrived in town, he’d make as much smoke as possible. He’d strike up a conversation with an unsuspecting passenger on the subway, slipping him his calling card. His KGB tail would have no choice but to haul the poor bastard in and sweat him. Or he’d walk into a police station to file a complaint about someone parking too close to his car, the idea being to force his KGB tail to ask the cops why he’d paid them a visit. Swarming the KGB with false leads such as these tied them up in knots and wore out its surveillance teams.
At my next meeting with Ali, I showed him a picture of a bearded man sitting behind the wheel of a car. He’s grinning at the camera, a front tooth missing. I told Ali we’d recently discovered he’d played a role in bombing the Marine barracks in October 1983. (It was a lie cut from whole cloth, but there was no way for Ali to know that.)
Ali studied the picture, put it back on the coffee table between us. He said he didn’t know the man but would find him for me. I now pulled out a picture of an apartment building. There was an address written on the back.
“Would you be able to have someone watch it?” I asked.
“The building?”
“The man in the picture visits here. Yes.”
For the next half hour we haggled over money, what it would cost for Ali’s people to watch the apartment around the clock and, eventually, the man himself.
When we finished, I said who could know whether one day we might decide to grab him. Ali reached over and shook my hand: “Brother, it would be an honor to bring this man to justice.”
Did I think I could beat Hajj Radwan with bullshit like this? No. But I counted on it buying me time.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: Always be ready with a clever lie or two to confuse the curious.
LAW
#19
ALWAYS HAVE AN ENCORE IN YOUR POCKET
Power is the ability to hurt something over and over again. One-offs get you nothing or less than nothing.
WHEN THE ASSASSIN SPEAKS, LET NO DOG BARK
Beirut, January 1988: Many a morning I woke up trying to gauge the weight of the courtiers, eunuchs, and imbeciles who occupy Washington like an alien army. But I would quickly remind myself it was a wasted thought: Their deliberations were as opaque to me as a Pashtun loya jirga.
By my first cup of coffee I’d generously decide that Washington’s bureaucrats weren’t so much imbeciles as they were people who genuinely believe they were born to walk within the lines drawn for them. But did they never stop to think it might have been imbeciles who drew the lines in the first place?
The point here is that I made Langley nervous. Whenever I’d propose something dicey, the only thing I’d hear back was the scampering of cold feet. No one wanted to risk his career for uncertain gain on a dim, distant battlefield, especially with me in the middle of it. It meant that I spent more time than I needed to trying to figure out how to get around Langley’s human weather vanes.
I’d also learned from hard experience that it was impossible to get Langley interested in what made Lebanon tick. For a while, I sent in long, thoughtful pieces about how the various Shiite personalities, families, and clans fit in, but I couldn’t even get a yawn out of Langley. And forget making them understand how Hajj Radwan’s Machtpolitik worked, all the ins and outs that explained the man. They couldn’t have cared less that Hajj Radwan had first been recruited into Fatah by a Christian Palestinian who had converted to Islam and that Hajj Radwan was consequently infected by a convert’s uncompromising beliefs. When I tried to fill in the details about his involvement in the first embassy bombing in April 1983, Langley wrote back that it was ancient history and that I needed to give it a break.
Were they distracted by off-sites and campfires on the Pecos River? No doubt. But what really was at the center of it was that Langley was unfamiliar with the ways of political violence. My bosses didn’t even want to consider the possibility that it might come with a set of rules and logic. They were more than happy to wallow in the prejudice that the barbarians kill one another and us for no good reason.
One man I answered to had recently come back from an important Arab posting. As the story went, when things started to heat up in the middle of his tour, he ordered a .12-gauge shotgun. Shotguns are of no use when you want to kill at a distance, but they do okay when you are trying to hold back the mob from overrunning the premises.
When the gun arrived, he was as excited as a five-year-old on Christmas morning. He found a box of shells, loaded the shotgun, and pumped a shell into the chamber. BANG! Having no idea it was a police riot gun that chambers and fires a round in the same action, he stared at the gun in disbelief. Too shaken to realize what he was doing, he chambered a second round. BANG! Terrified, he threw the gun across the office, where it came to a stop under a cabinet. It would stay there for months, no one willing to pick up the thing.
The story only gets better: When his deputy came back to the office and saw the hole in the wall over his desk, he decided that the chief, whom he’d never gotten along with, had sent him a not so subtle warning. He forthwith resigned from the CIA to marry a fabulously wealthy heiress.
Act two: When the station’s administrative officer finally summoned the nerve to retrieve the gun from under the chief’s cabinet, he took it back to his office and couldn’t resist working the action to determine what the problem was. BANG! The casualty of the third and last accidental discharge was the office refrigerator.
Act three: A bomb tech from Langley finally gave the shotgun a decent burial in the desert.
I may not have got this sequence exactly right—isn’t that always the case when it comes to office lore?—but the point remains that, contrary to popular opinion, the CIA isn’t a pack of cold-blooded assassins. Like me, they’re mostly feckless liberal arts majors who learn on the fly. I suppose it’s one good reason Americans are always reading about their fumbling spooks in the newspapers.
What made it worse was when Ronald Reagan decided it would be a good idea to outsource national security. The CIA was cheerfully sucked into that great deceit, contracting out all sorts of its core functions. We felt it in the field. While the bosses at Langley were schmoozing the Northrops and Boeings of the world, our raison d’être was reduced to not rocking the boat. And God forbid if anyone took the mission seriously. But it got even worse when Langley started to meddle in operations to further someone’s political or financial interests back home.
At one point, the DEA handed off to the CIA one of its confidential informants, a small-time Lebanese drug dealer. The only thing to recommend the man was eleven outstanding arrest warrants—all garden-variety murders. His last was for blowing his sister’s head off with a shotgun. She’d apparently dated the wrong guy. Or maybe it was his sister-in-law. Does it matter? The point is that he wasn’t exactly the most trustworthy proxy.
But it didn’t stop my boss at Langley, the one with the accidental discharge under his belt, from employing him to kidnap the hijacker of a Jordanian airliner. Indeed, the sister-murdering drug dealer did arrange for bikini-clad FBI agents to arrest the hijacker on a pleasure boat sitting off Cyprus. The hijacker was brought back to the United States for trial and received a life sentence. Justice served, Americans could now go back to a good night’s sleep.
But at no point did anyone ask what message this little stunt sent to Hajj Radwan. Could he not have asked himself why we would bother with someone who wasn’t a true threat to the United States? After all, the hijacker hadn’t hijacked an American airliner or even killed an American. Yes, the arrest may have gone down smoothly, not a shot fired and no one breaking a fingernail, but in the end, what good did it do? Hajj Radwan would have wisely ignored the man and moved on to more worthwhile prey.
It didn’t help that the rest of our foreign policy only strengthened Hajj Radwan’s disregard for us, from the invasion of tiny Grenada to the Iran-Contra swindle. It all played right into his prejudice that Washington plays to the stands and special interests. For someone with a ruthless construct on life, we looked soft at the core—an open invitation to hit us all the harder.
Let me go back to Iran-Contra in order to remind you that it was Hajj Radwan who was holding the hostages Reagan wanted back—he was at the pointed end of the deal. So when Oliver North showed one of Hajj Radwan’s Iranian sponsors—the so-called Second Channel—around the White House, Radwan must have wondered whether we’d completely lost our minds. It was sort of as if the president had shown the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot around Disneyland, hoping to soften him up. It wasn’t only Langley that didn’t understand that there are such things as hidden levers of power. After I left the CIA, I wrote a book in which I tried to make sense of Iran’s two-decade detour through political violence. In one chapter I recount a short visit to Iran to make a documentary film on suicide bombers. Among the people we interviewed was the family of the Hezbollah secretary-general assassinated in 1992. (It was the assassination that provoked Hajj Radwan to attack two Jewish/Israeli targets in Buenos Aires.)
I was intrigued by the fact that the daughter of the assassinated Hezbollah secretary-general had married into the family of Iran’s first modern suicide bomber, a boy of thirteen who sacrificed himself in order to destroy an Iraqi tank. To me, the marriage seemed like a bizarre iteration of the Order of Assassins, the twelfth-century Persian group that invented political murder. But it turned out my obsessive fascination with political murder wasn’t shared by all. One eminent critic of my book reacted with disbelief, horror, and shock when I wrote that our documentary crew couldn’t find a decent restaurant in Tehran. If we couldn’t sniff out Tehran’s hip nouvelle cuisine, how could we poss
ibly understand the real Iran?
She might have a point. There’s a good argument to be made that political murder is only a footnote to Persian history. The Order of Assassins didn’t change much of anything, either for the better or for the worse. And I have no doubt that people will argue with me over whether Hajj Radwan’s assassinations changed history in any lasting and significant way. Was I making the mistake of confusing the obscure with the important? Maybe.
I need to add that it’s not as if the American government embraced my point of view. In Beirut, I’d always start my day off reading State Department telexes dealing with Lebanon. They’d drone on about what the Lebanese president was doing or what some parliamentary deputy was saying. Even back then Hariri was taken by Washington as an authoritative source on Lebanon. But in none of it did the name Hajj Radwan appear or, for that matter, the notion that there might be a ghost calling the shots.
The same goes for Pan Am 103. I recently started e-mailing one of the FBI’s lead investigators in that attack. I raised my suspicions about the chatter, how it implicated Iran. He wrote me back that he hadn’t looked at the chatter related to Pan Am but that “they [the National Security Agency] opened their files to one of our agents who pored through everything they [allegedly] had.” But he hadn’t read the intelligence himself! In other words, he and I were singing off two completely different sheets of music.
MORE STRAY CATS
It had been easy enough to persuade Chuck to help me look around for new sources, and it wasn’t long before he fished up a shady Christian businessman who claimed he could get to anyone in Lebanon. I’d heard that one before, but I decided to give Chuck’s new source the benefit of the doubt.
About a month after meeting the Christian, Chuck came into the office waving a crisp new hundred-dollar bill in my face: “A supernote, Bobby boy. My guy [the shady Christian] just bought it for me.”
A “supernote” is a counterfeit U.S. hundred-dollar bill designed to withstand serious scrutiny. Like a real hundred, it’s printed on cotton rag paper. The plates used to print them are engraved with a geometric lathe, a very rare piece of equipment. Supernotes are of such high quality that the counterfeiters include in them tiny mistakes so as not to be deceived into taking back their own product.
The Perfect Kill Page 27