The Perfect Kill

by Robert B. Baer

  I asked Chuck how much his source wanted for it.

  “One-twenty.”

  I looked at Chuck, waiting for the punch line. He saw where I was going. “Fuck, I don’t know. That’s what he paid for it.”

  Was Chuck’s source’s plan to entice us into the counterfeiting business? If so, the economics obviously didn’t make sense.

  All things being equal, I’d have encouraged Chuck to drop the guy. But we were drawing a complete blank trying to find someone to get inside Hajj Radwan’s world. I recognize that keeping Chuck’s businessman on the books amounts to trolling in a bus station, but even a rotten piece of bait can catch a fish, right?

  Which brings me back to Jennifer Matthews and the Jordanian doctor who murdered her. It took me a while, but I finally came to the conclusion that the main reason political murder is so difficult for us is that we don’t have at our disposal a ready, committed pool of proxies. The Communist Third International had all the true believers it could use, as does al-Qaeda today. But what do we have to draw a committed following? While everyone in the world is ready to immigrate to the United States or take a free trip to Disneyland, it doesn’t mean they’re prepared to murder for us. It’s a problem I was reminded of every day, and when on the rare occasion some true believer did manage to find his way to me, he inevitably turned out to be as crazy as a tree full of owls.

  Not long after Ali dished up that suspicious story about the TWA hijacking, I ran into a former Christian warlord who couldn’t care less about money but wanted to kill Muslims. He in turn introduced me to two Christian military officers who’d on their own taken to ambushing Syrian army patrols. They in turn introduced me to a master car-bomb maker who’d once simultaneously set off eleven car bombs. A Shiite from the southern suburbs, he had a virtual laissez-passer to enter Hajj Radwan’s neighborhood.

  When I showed the bomber the picture of a place I thought Hajj Radwan frequented, he immediately offered to flatten it with a pair of gargantuan car bombs the moment Hajj Radwan showed up. The man’s bomb-making skill had a certain appeal to me, as did the redundancy of the charge, but I demurred. My intent wasn’t to cause mass casualties, à la the attempt on the Lebanese ayatollah in 1985. And, on top of it, how could two car bombs ever be construed back at the Department of Justice as an arrest gone wrong?

  No, I’d have to keep looking for the real thing, someone who could put himself within the blast range of Hajj Radwan and not take a city block with him.

  READING BIRD ENTRAILS

  One Saturday morning, three of us were waiting at the helicopter landing pad to catch a ride over to Cyprus on a pair of Black Hawks. I definitely needed to get away. A moldy sky had been holding over the city, neither rain nor sun. With the state of my hunt for Hajj Radwan at a frustrating standstill, a couple of days with the family in Cyprus could only do me good.

  There also seemed to be a lot of unsettling stuff happening on the other side of the Green Line. While I was dancing around with Ali, and Chuck with the Christian businessman, we’d found out that Hajj Radwan had started to solicit the services of various Palestinian groups, buying up both their technology and experts. He was after it all too, from infrared triggering devices to command detonators. But what concerned us most was Hajj Radwan’s interest in bombs designed to bring down airliners.

  Over the last decade, the Palestinians had perfected suitcase bombs to the point they could be smuggled through any airport security regime in the world, even the most up-to-date. It was all the more ominous when Hajj Radwan brought under one roof bomb makers from two different groups. Combining their skills, they were capable of building the perfect airplane bomb.

  Having started out his professional life with the Palestinians, it made sense that Hajj Radwan would now turn to them to catch up on technology. Incidentally, we were pretty certain it was the Palestinians who’d first put him on the path of combining shaped charges and sophisticated electronics to accurately clock and destroy an automobile traveling at high speed. So why not airplanes?

  It all fit in nicely with Hajj Radwan’s evolving tactics, how he kept striving to more narrowly channel violence, how he’d gone from destroying buildings to destroying cars. While buildings are fixed in space, cars come with enough predictability (traveling along fixed roads) that they too are extremely vulnerable. Sitting ducks pretty much.

  Always trying to extend his range, Hajj Radwan also started to experiment with “belly charges.” He tested them against the Israelis in southern Lebanon, proving that with enough explosives buried under a road, no vehicle, including a heavy tank, is safe. By the way, they’re another one of the Secret Service’s darkest nightmares.

  Another thing that worried me about Hajj Radwan was that he was intent on projecting power across the globe, applying tactics and technology he’d learned in Lebanon. Like a shark, he felt he had to keep moving to stay alive. Clearly, his plan was to be able to hit us from all sides, a redundancy of a sort.

  Hajj Radwan kept in play overlapping cells. For instance, when he was tasked with assassinating Saudi diplomats but things were too hot in France, he switched the job to a cell in Bangkok. When in 1992 he was tasked with hitting the Israelis and things were too hot in London, he switched to a cell in Buenos Aires.

  But there were certain countries that worried us more than others, particularly West Germany. Overlapping police jurisdictions there, a weak national police, and a large immigrant community offered Hajj Radwan another happy hunting ground. Although he wasn’t involved, we saw proof of it in 1992 when a Hezbollah-connected group murdered an Iranian Kurdish dissident in a Berlin café. Or when the Iranians decided to hit in Paris, they used Hajj Radwan’s networks in West Germany as a transit route.

  But it wasn’t until the Pan Am investigation that we found out just how extensive Hajj Radwan’s German networks were. They seemed to be everywhere, from Hamburg to Frankfurt, from Berlin to Strasbourg in France. Burrowed deep into local Lebanese communities, they were indistinguishable from law-abiding Lebanese. They operated with the same discipline as his Lebanese organization: no business over the phone, no contact with Hezbollah party offices or mosques, no gunplay, no beards, no attending pep rallies, no meetings in mosques or Islamic centers. They could strike without warning.

  In the early part of the Pan Am investigation (before it was switched to Libya), a cell answering to Hajj Radwan was discovered in Dortmund. Its head was connected to a hijacking in Africa. What particularly intrigued the German police was that a young Lebanese passenger on Pan Am 103 had stayed with the cell’s Dortmund chief and then later at another Hajj Radwan–connected apartment in Frankfurt. Did the Lebanese passenger have something to do with Pan Am 103, or was it just another coincidence like the ambassador being booked on the plane?

  With all the unexplored German connections, with the calls into the Beirut embassy, with Chuck being on the airplane, with Hajj Radwan’s pointed interest in bringing down civilian airliners, there’ll always exist in my mind the suspicion that Hajj Radwan had something to do with Pan Am 103. Maybe it was as simple as the Libyans going to him for technical assistance. I know the FBI will dismiss this as pointless speculation, but they’ll have to do a lot better to convince me a lone Libyan was behind this atrocity.

  —

  I was searching the Mediterranean for our two Black Hawks when I caught sight of Chuck coming down the hill toward me with his bearish gait and his wrecking-ball head. He’d forgotten his assault rifle; something was up.

  “You gotta hear this,” he said, walking up to me with his Mona Lisa shit-eating grin. “I just saw my buddy.”

  I didn’t like the sound of anything that had to do with his shady Christian businessman.

  “He can get me Buckley’s radio.”

  When Hajj Radwan’s people kidnapped Bill Buckley, they also carried off his briefcase and Motorola radio.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Haven’t you ever heard of the why-am-I-so-lucky principle?”

&nbs
p; “If he says he can get it, he can.”

  Chuck and I at the same time caught sight of the two Black Hawks approaching the shore. They reminded me of malevolent wasps as they flew low and fast over the water. The guards on top of the shell of the old annex fed ammunition belts into their machine guns.

  I’d already made up my mind that Chuck’s shady Christian businessman was an inveterate swindler who couldn’t be trusted with anything. So what exactly is his angle now? I wondered.

  Chuck smiled to let me know he wasn’t done: “He gave me the serial number.”

  Chuck handed me a piece of paper with a string of numbers on it.

  I didn’t need Chuck to tell me they matched the serial number on Buckley’s Motorola, but I asked anyhow.

  “You got it,” he said.

  We were both startled when the two Black Hawks popped out from a ravine and sidled over to the helicopter pad, throwing up dust and small stones. The noise was deafening. They swayed in their own backwash like a fat man trying to mambo, then settled down on the pad. They kept their engines revved in case they had to take off on short notice.

  I bent half over and ran over to the loadmaster. I shouted into his helmet: “Scratch me off. Baer. I don’t feel well. Baer’s the name.” I didn’t wait for his answer.

  I ran back and grabbed my bag and Chuck. He didn’t say anything as I walked him behind a squat building to get away from the noise.

  “You know what’s happening? The fucker’s setting us up.”

  I now was sure of it. First Ali’s offer of the KGB Stechkin, then Buckley’s radio—two bright, shiny baubles for the two CIA dupes.

  “Go see him to say we want the radio,” I said. “We’ll pay one hundred thousand for it. Ten down now.”

  No one was going to authorize me to buy back Buckley’s radio, and I wasn’t going to ask. But I did have ten thousand dollars in the safe, enough to make Hajj Radwan believe we’d taken his bait. I’d figure out later what to do with it.

  My palpable fear now was that Hajj Radwan was coming at us from two different directions, Ali and Chuck’s businessman. But why should I be surprised? Hajj Radwan had in his possession a large killing machine on both sides of the Green Line. He could target us from anywhere he liked and whenever he liked. He’d built both depth and redundancy into his machine.

  I may be guilty of ascribing superhuman abilities to the fucker. But it’s a fact that he did things in pairs or multiples. When he hit the French, it wasn’t a one-off—first the military attaché, then the intelligence officer, then the gendarmes. He did the same to the Israelis, the first attack in Tyre, in November 1982, and then again there the following year. On October 23, 1983, he hit both the French and the Marines. With Hariri, he closed down the investigation thanks to nearly a dozen quick and dirty assassinations.

  Which brings me back to the Israelis and the Red Prince. After the Red Prince’s assassination in 1979, the Israelis set about assassinating one senior Palestinian official after the other. Atef was only one among them. They may even have murdered Arafat in 2004. Although a postmortem wasn’t conducted right after his death, Swiss forensic scientists did conduct one in 2012. They found traces of polonium-210 in his clothing and personal items, opening up the possibility he’d been assassinated. Arafat’s list of enemies was long, but at the top was Israel.

  Whether the Israelis murdered Arafat or not, it remains that over the last fifty years Israel carved out the heart of the core Palestinian resistance thanks to one considered assassination after another. Like Hajj Radwan, they knew that a one-off wouldn’t take them to where they wanted to go. It’s always a spate rather than a drop.

  What I’m saying is that it was completely plausible, if not predictable, that Hajj Radwan would line the two of us by running Ali and Chuck’s shady businessman into us. What better way to find out what we were up to?

  As we walked back to the office, I stopped Chuck so he wouldn’t misunderstand what I had to say. “If we don’t start moving a lot faster, he’s going to get us first.” Chuck didn’t say anything, leading me to wonder if he believed me.

  NEVER EXPECT TO BRING DOWN THE EDIFICE IN ONE GO

  Paris, May 14, 1610: It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when Paris’s traffic was worse than it is today. Medieval Paris still stood then, its winding alleys cramped, store displays spilling out into the street, and people jostling one another to get by. Your own two feet got you across town faster than a horse, and certainly faster than a carriage.

  That morning King Henri IV decided he needed to see his finance minister, the Duc de Sully. But the duke was sick in bed, which meant the king had to drive across Paris to see him. The king took an entourage of only three in a carriage drawn by six very large horses. His route passed through some of the worst parts of town, including Les Halles, where itinerant workers, prostitutes, smugglers, thieves, and cutthroats roamed its narrow streets looking for opportunity and trouble.

  On Rue de la Ferronnerie something ahead brought the king’s carriage to a stop. A footman jumped down and ran to see what the holdup was. At that moment a tall man with red hair jumped onto the side of the carriage, filling the window. He reached through it with a knife and stabbed the king twice, severing his aorta and puncturing his lung. King Henri was rushed back to the Louvre, where he died.

  The assassin, a Catholic fanatic, apparently acted alone. Not surprising, the king’s murder didn’t improve French Catholicism’s fortunes. But what his assassin did get right was to trap Henri in his carriage. A vehicle may be a wonderful convenience, but for the victim it’s too often a coffin on wheels.

  NOTE TO ASSASSINS: Treat failure as an opportunity, every exit as an entry, and every success as an invitation to the next.

  LAW

  #20

  NOTHING WOUNDED MOVES UPHILL

  When things become precarious and chaotic for your enemy, there will be unforeseen opportunities.

  EVERYBODY WHO’S MARKED FOR DEATH MUST DIE

  Kawkaba, Lebanon, February 28, 1999: Was there a hint of what was about to happen? An ominous piece of chatter? An unexplained broken-down car on the side of the road? As with Carrero Blanco’s assassination, there was nothing that anyone has ever come forward and admitted to. It was just another shitty day in the little slice of Lebanese hell Israel still held on to, the so-called security strip.

  The strip traces its origin to Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon. It entered Lebanon to stop cross-border Palestinian attacks, but instead of pulling back, Israel ended up creating a semipermanent buffer zone in southern Lebanon. The assumption was that the north of Israel would be vulnerable to attacks without it.

  The strip may have looked good on paper, but it soon turned into a death trap of its own. Sparsely populated and broken up with bald, jagged limestone hills, southern Lebanon normally shouldn’t have been particularly good guerrilla country. But the Muslim guerrillas who started to infest it in the eighties proved to be inventive and resilient. They stayed off cell phones and radios, never carried weapons in the open, and operated out of caves.

  What the Israelis had going for them was technology—new sophisticated ground sensors, Star Wars–like fortresses, and drones. The guerrillas couldn’t move in groups without being immediately detected and destroyed. But the lynchpin in Israel’s strategy was to turn the strip into a “killing box”—shooting at anything that moved. The guerrillas would be pretty much left out in the open after everyone with any sense was driven out. Or at least that was the theory.

  On the morning of February 28, 1999, the Israeli commander of the strip, General Erez Gerstein, and a reporter from Israel Radio climbed into an armored Mercedes for a quick trip into the strip. The stated purpose was to attend the funeral of a local Lebanese militia commander who’d died fighting for Israel, but Gerstein’s ulterior motive was to show the reporter that a drive up into the strip was as safe as a drive around Tel Aviv on the Sabbath—i.e., to prove that all the money and blood Israel had put
into the strip was worth it. The journalist could put it on the radio when he got back.

  Although Gerstein’s Mercedes was armored and souped up, on the outside it was old and beat-up—indistinguishable from the old beat-up Mercedes the Lebanese drive. It bore Lebanese plates and tinted windows, making it impossible to tell that the occupants were Israeli military. The trip wasn’t advertised. Couple that with the fact that Gerstein and the reporter would be in and out of Lebanon in less than two hours, and no one, no matter how good, would have the time to put together an ambush. A proper assassination, as Gerstein well knew, depends on good preparation. But so does avoiding one.

  Chiseled and fit, and with a well-deserved reputation for bravery and toughness, Gerstein was a soldier’s soldier. One story has it that when he commanded the elite Golani Brigade he’d demonstrate the mushroomlike kill zone of a hand grenade by lying down next to one and pulling the pin. He would jump up out of the smoke and dust, untouched and with an I-told-you-so grin.

  Gerstein had campaigned (and been wounded) in Lebanon for more years than he cared to remember, and he knew the country as well as his own. When he was offered command of the strip, he had no illusions about what he was up against. The equally tough problem, though, was to convince his fellow generals that holding on to the strip was worth it. He’d have to do the same with a skeptical Israeli public and press. Thus the decision to take a journalist to the funeral.

  As soon as Gerstein and the journalist’s convoy crossed the border into Lebanon, it hit speeds of up to eighty miles an hour. Anyone standing by the road saw only a screaming blur of metal heading for who knows where. Even if a guerrilla partisan alerted the command up the line, what could they do about it?