The Perfect Kill

by Robert B. Baer

  The funeral went fine. The handshaking and hugs over, Gerstein and the reporter jumped back in his Mercedes for the return ride home. Just as on the trip up, the road was clear of traffic, letting the four Mercedes move at breakneck speed.

  As Gerstein’s convoy breasted an incline in the road, a terrific blinding explosion spewed rock and dirt in all directions. But the main force of it hit Gerstein’s Mercedes dead center, lifting it off the road and down into a ravine. At the bottom, it burst into a ball of flames, instantly killing Gerstein, the journalist, and two soldiers. The rest of the convoy made it through.

  The reaction in Israel to the news of Gerstein’s assassination was instantaneous. One anonymous Israeli soldier wrote to a newspaper: “Reality has thrown us a slap in the face.”

  It was the same pretty much across Israel: Don’t waste another drop of Israeli blood trying to hold even a square inch of that cursed country. The politicians also got the message. Ehud Barak, at the time the head of the opposition Labor Party and himself a former general, announced that if elected he would pull the Israeli army out of Lebanon.

  Three months later, Barak was elected prime minister, and a little more than a year later ordered Israel’s troops out of the strip, abandoning it to the Islamic guerrillas. It was the bitter end of a twenty-two-year struggle to tame Lebanon.

  As for Israeli intelligence, it settled down to figuring out how Hajj Radwan—could it have been anyone else?—had pulled it off. The shaped charge had his signature all over it. As did the clear-cut motives: Gerstein’s murder tipped the scales, breaking the gossamer thread holding together the frayed Israeli consensus to stay in Lebanon. But without Hezbollah offering any details other than claiming the assassination, Hajj Radwan’s precise role is stuck in the realm of speculation.

  HIT A SITTING DUCK WHILE IT’S STILL SITTING, AND EVEN BETTER WHEN IT’S SITTING AND WINGED

  One Thanksgiving, Mother showed up in Washington, insisting on seeing our provincial aristocracy in its natural habitat. The Four Seasons wasn’t yet built, so I offered her the staid downtown Madison for lunch. Only a couple of blocks from the White House, it was opened by John F. Kennedy in 1963. My wife, nine months pregnant with our first child, tagged along. It was 1984.

  We arrived early; only one other table was occupied. Knowing that our fellow diners would immediately spot us as interlopers, I asked the maître d’ to put us at an out-of-the-way table in the back. What’s the point in unnecessarily ruffling feathers? And indeed, it wasn’t long before Nixon’s former counsel John Ehrlichman showed up with two other people. (For his part in Watergate, Ehrlichman went to prison for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury.)

  The maître d’ sat Ehrlichman and his guests at a table in the center of the dining room, the best perch to see and be seen. Do people never learn?

  Throughout lunch, Mother impaled Ehrlichman with a stare. I had a premonition she wasn’t going to let the moment pass, and when the bill had been paid, I mumbled something about needing to go to the bathroom. I scurried across the dining room at a good clip, catching out of the corner of my eye Ben Bradlee, the legendary executive editor of The Washington Post. More than anyone he was the man who brought down Nixon, along with Ehrlichman.

  Against all my innate cowardly instincts, I stopped just outside the entry to watch as Mother made a beeline for Ehrlichman’s table, my waddling wife in tow. Sensing trouble, Ehrlichman looked up at her and then at my pregnant wife. Did this improbable pair disarm him even for a moment?

  Mother fumbled for something in her purse, finally fishing out her checkbook. She thrust it toward Ehrlichman, along with a pen.

  “Sir,” she said in a voice that carried across the Madison’s dining room and sounded like a crystal bell dripping with ironic sarcasm. “You are a great American hero. What a great service you’ve done for our country! My grandbaby would be so proud to have your autograph.” She patted my wife’s belly.

  Not knowing what else to do, Ehrlichman signed the back of her checkbook. His guests were searching the ground for a hole to crawl into. Bradlee put his napkin up to his mouth to hide his giggling.

  OF PEELING THE VENEER OFF THE LIE AND OTHER UNYIELDING DEEDS

  A successful assassination depends on terrain and surprise. But its chances are improved when the victim feels safe and at ease. It’s a basic truth that when people are absorbed with their comforts and habits they’re inattentive and predictable, unintentionally offering inroads into their lives. What Mother had going for her was the Madison’s ritually observed etiquette: Don’t bother the other guests. I imagine the last thing Ehrlichman was expecting was another diner pouncing on him.

  Mother’s other advantage was that with Ehrlichman’s indictment he was a winged bird. If she’d gone after Bradlee about some dumb Washington Post article, she would have been a lot less successful. The point is that when a target is on the run, making one stupid mistake after another, he’s easier to take down. Gaddafi running out of a culvert into the hands of a mob comes to mind.

  It’s common sense that when the enemy’s weak, disoriented, his consensus frayed, and he’s indecisive about fighting or fleeing, there stands a much better chance that political murder will work. Wehrmacht officers turned on Hitler after it was clear that he’d lost the war. Saddam’s clan turned on him after he’d lost the war. The Russian aristocracy gave up on royalty after the murder of Czar Nicholas II in 1918.

  Only months after the 1982 Israeli invasion, Hajj Radwan set about methodically unstitching the Israeli consensus for staying in Lebanon, launching one devastating attack after the next. His way of measuring progress was to draw on a Hezbollah unit responsible for monitoring the Israeli press. It was devoted to looking for rents in the Israeli body politic. I don’t know whether Hajj Radwan had predicted Israel would pull out of Lebanon after Gerstein, but I suspect he had a good idea it would. Israeli tolerance for wars in Lebanon isn’t without limits.

  —

  Neither Chuck nor I was so deluded as to believe we were in Hajj Radwan’s league. While he moved from success to success, we were still futzing around with radioactive dross like Ali and the Christian businessman. But it didn’t stop us from blindly soldiering on. Or, as they say, when you roll into hell, keep going; there is no reverse.

  It wasn’t all stubborn bravado, though. I’d recently recruited a young man who could get within spitting distance of Hajj Radwan. For obvious reasons, I can’t name or describe him other than to say he was my first real breakthrough. While he couldn’t tell me in advance where Hajj Radwan would be, I was confident I could come up with a use for him.

  As for Ali, nothing came of my red herring that I’d put in Hajj Radwan’s path. Did it fool him, put him on the wrong scent? I don’t know. My best guess, though, is that I was only burning up more CIA money … while all along Hajj Radwan was tightening the noose around our necks.

  A new obstacle Chuck and I ran into was a new chief, an ex-Marine. He reminded me of a squat volcano that from time to time would erupt for no good reason at all. Worse, he was a smart son of a bitch, meaning it was only a matter of time before he caught on to our chasing after a ghost.

  Then, as these things so often go, opportunity landed on our laps with a loud thud. It was about four a.m. when what sounded like a lunatic throwing himself at the glass doors of my balcony woke me up. I was about to jump out of bed to see, but then there was a series of bright flashes in my window followed by a dozen booms. Doing exactly what they tell you not to do, I got up on my knees to look out the window. The hill below me was on fire. It looked like we’d just been hit by a barrage from a Stalin organ—a 132mm Katyusha multiple rocket launcher. They’re not accurate, but they do get one’s attention.

  I thought about the “Welcome to Beirut” kit I’d found in my apartment when I first moved in. Among other helpful hints for coping with their fair city, it recommended crawling to the center of your apartment during a shelling. I thought about doing it, but it was no
w dead quiet. With the shelling apparently over, I went back to bed.

  As I found out later, the people at the other end of the Stalin organ belonged to a Shiite militia that had just made the mistake of going to war with Hezbollah. In some contorted, make-your-hair-hurt Oriental machination, they thought that if they could start a war with the Christians they’d somehow divert Hezbollah’s attention. It was as if the United States had decided to bomb Mexico to keep the Japanese from attacking Pearl Harbor. And indeed, it made not the slightest difference; the fighting only picked up and spread.

  To make a long story short, Hajj Radwan was sucked into it, taking over a unit fighting south of Beirut. But much more important for our plans, Hezbollah enlisted him to secretly procure emergency supplies of weapons and ammunition from an old contact, a Christian warlord. (Although it was all very hush-hush, the Christians were more than happy to help the Muslims kill one another.)

  As we started to pick up details about these transfers from chatter, it occurred to me that Hajj Radwan had just been offered up to me on a silver platter. Who would have ever thought a Christian warlord would be his soft underbelly? I felt like the Israelis must have when they found out about the Red Prince’s visit to his mother or the IRA when they found out about Thatcher’s Brighton speech.

  For a while, I considered approaching the Christian warlord to ask him to do the job, but then I thought better of it. A wise man knows better than to come between a beast and his red meat, namely all the money the Christian warlord stood to make from Hajj Radwan. No, I’d have to do the hard work myself.

  It took about a month, but I finally caught one of Hajj Radwan’s people in a walkie-talkie discussion of a specific arms transfer that would be staged from a particular house on the Muslim side of the Green Line. I knew the house.

  So here’s what I needed to do: Nail down the specific time of a transfer, persuade my new source to rig the building with explosives and, most important, make sure Hajj Radwan was there in the house for the transfer. If I could pinpoint the room he’d be in, a small shaped charge through the wall would do the job. As for finding explosives and a house opposite Hajj Radwan’s transfer house, it was a lead-pipe cinch.

  —

  Here I need to remind the reader that I’ve been obliged to fudge some of the names and details of this story, as well as fall back on secondary narratives—and omit the central plot against Hajj Radwan. But, again, let’s not forget this is a personal journey through political violence rather than history. What’s absolutely true, though, is that Chuck took an instant dislike to the house I picked to stage Hajj Radwan’s murder. Except for a couple of skeletal dead trees out front, there was an unobstructed field of fire from the other side of the Green Line—nothing to stop a sniper from sending a bullet through our house’s front windows. When I told him we didn’t have time to find a better place, he shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose we could sandbag the shit out of it.”

  Frankly, I was worried about Chuck these days. He was itching to get something going. But the Lebanese were driving him crazy. They have this annoying habit of racing up behind a car and flashing their lights to let the other driver know he had better speed up or get out of the way. I’m not sure what he hoped to accomplish, but Chuck asked our tech to help him bore a small hole in his trunk from where he could shoot out the front lights of the bastards flashing him. (He planned to use a pellet gun.) The tech—an easygoing Texan with the radio call sign Garfield—talked Chuck out of it.

  The rest of the house was equally unappealing—a decade of ruin and filth. There was a coppery smell of urine in the back bedrooms. The mattresses were gone from their frames, and trash was piled everywhere. There were bookshelves on one wall but no books, only a couple of faded magazines covered in an inch of dust and plaster.

  There was a good view of the southern suburbs from the roof, including the house where Hajj Radwan staged the transfers. There was no sign of life now, but since the transfers went on at night, I wasn’t surprised.

  Directly behind the house loomed the Ministry of Defense. My hope was that this would dissuade the local Christian warlord—Hajj Radwan’s arms dealer—from deciding to police us up. It also helped that with most of the houses reduced to piles of rubble there weren’t many neighbors. In fact, no one in their right mind hung on here.

  There was a knock at the door—two gray old ladies leopard-spotted with age and all in black. By the looks of them, I guessed they were the owners, who, I imagined, wanted to see the idiot foreigners their nephew had swindled into renting their place.

  We all sat down as if we were at pink tea at the Dorchester. Courtesies over, they asked if we would agree to pay the entire year’s rent in advance. Since it was only twenty dollars a month, I said fine. I pulled out of my wallet two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. I got Chuck to give me two twenties.

  The one with the densest liver spots coughed in her sleeve and then asked where we might be from. I said we were Hungarian engineers. I kept my fingers crossed she wouldn’t now ask for a lease after all. The only Hungarian word I knew was “Magyar.”

  The two women looked at each and spoke rapidly in Arabic. I caught one saying it was a good sign Hungarians were moving in. Was it a harbinger that the civil war was finally coming to a close?

  FROM FLASH TO BANG

  In Beirut in those days, putting your hands on things such as explosives, detonators, and radio-controlled firing devices was as easy as buying a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. And I mean everything from tanks to heavy artillery. It was only a question of money and knowing the right person.

  It took one of my arms dealers less than twenty-four hours to find me two out-of-the-box American-made LAWs. A LAW is a single-use disposable rocket and rocket launcher. We made the transfer in the parking lot of a posh restaurant, no one paying us the least attention. It was fifty dollars a LAW.

  Another arms dealer was a young American Armenian who knew his way around more exotic instruments of murder. I’d first gotten in touch with him to see if he could build a replica of a Samsonite airplane bomb. He was supposedly very good at it. My objective was to show Langley how easily and expertly these things could be constructed.

  The Armenian’s workshop was deep in an Armenian neighborhood called Bourj Hammoud. As it was in Hajj Radwan’s neighborhood, the unbidden didn’t dare set foot in it. According to one story, a local Christian militia sent a team in to arrest someone, but before making it ten feet in, they were all mowed down in a blaze of gunfire. I’ll call my Armenian arms dealer Joe.

  The day my replica airplane bomb was ready for pickup, Joe met me on the road that skirts Bourj Hammoud. We drove about a hundred feet down a street so narrow that I was sure the side mirrors would snap off. We pulled up in front of what looked like a junk shop.

  It was pitch-black inside. Something with a pair of menacing red eyes was curled up in a blanket on a sofa. It reminded me of an alert reticulated python.

  I sat down at a workbench. Joe went in the back and brought out a new, ash-gray Samsonite suitcase.

  “Open it,” he said. “You can’t even smell the glue.”

  Joe turned on a Coleman camping lantern and hung it over the suitcase.

  The work looked good to me. There was no sign the interior lining had been replaced by mock plasticized and rolled penthrite explosives—PETN. I picked it up; the weight felt right too.

  Joe: “Let ’em X-ray it. They won’t see a damn thing. Fuck, Samsonite couldn’t tell the difference.”

  From upstairs came the crying of a child, which gave me an opening for a new piece of business. I pulled out a picture of a baby’s bassinet: “Could you work with one of these, turn it into a bomb?”

  “Of course.”

  “With PETN? I need it to cut through a wall. A shaped charge.”

  Joe smiled: “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

  “And hook it up to an infrared trigger, at about a mile distance?”

  “You got it.”
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br />   Joe fished around in a drawer until he found a double-sided circuit board with filaments of wire and diodes attached to it. “It’s a light-sensitive trigger switch,” he said, handing it to me to look at.

  “More faithful than Old Faithful. When 8,192 counts have been received, the generator is turned off, the light-sensor circuit is enabled, then the relay driver is enabled. Got it?”

  I vaguely knew that he was talking about a wiring scheme that would make this thing foolproof, but other than that, I just had to trust him.

  “You see what’s cool about this is that the device has no memory effect.” He looked at me and no doubt saw I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  “Let me try again. Any exposure to light during the safe/arm delay time will have no effect. It’s only the illumination right after the safe/arm delay that triggers this baby.”

  He was starting to warm up to the subject. “You’ll love this feature. A red-light-emitting diode monitors the state of the output. If the output is energized, the LED glows.”

  I asked him where he’d gone to school. “Brigham Young,” he said.

  By the time I walked out of Joe’s cabinet of wonders, I’d put in an order for a device that closed the detonating circuit after 8,192 counts, an infrared relay, and a PETN-rigged bassinet (multiprimed).

  —

  As I started to accumulate my arsenal, the problem was to make sure it worked. Fortunately, we had our very talented tech Garfield, the good old boy from Texas who had talked Chuck out of shooting out the lights of cars pissing him off.

  Garfield could turn anything into a bomb, even a jar of Maxim instant coffee. (Maxim is a wonderful oxidizer.) He also could make old crappy Soviet weaponry work. Once, in order to check out a batch of Soviet surface-to-air missiles, he fooled the missiles by hanging a lighted cigar from a string and swinging it back and forth. The missiles’ “gimlet” followed the cigar like a hound dog on a wild pig’s scent. Garfield also was a genius with video. A couple of months before, he’d rigged up a camera on a warehouse associated with Hajj Radwan, allowing us to record the comings and goings.