The Perfect Kill
Page 32
And finally, there is this: If the central problem of humanity is justice, it can never be far from the assassin’s mind that the act must always be about cutting out the malignant cell to save the body. Anything short of or beyond it, and he’ll only make things worse.
CHRONOLOGY
March 15, 44 BC—Julius Caesar in Rome
May 14, 1610—Henri IV of France in Paris
July 13, 1793—Jean-Paul Marat in Paris
June 28, 1914—Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
August 21, 1940—Leon Trotsky in Coyoacán, Mexico City
July 20, 1944—Attempt on Adolf Hitler by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg at the Wolf’s Lair, East Prussia
August 22, 1962—Attempt on French president Charles de Gaulle outside Paris
November 2, 1963—Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon
November 22, 1963—John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas
June 6, 1968—Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, California
November 28, 1971—Jordanian prime minister Wasfi al-Tal in Cairo
December 20, 1973—Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco in Madrid
August 23, 1974—Detective Inspector Peter Flanagan in Omagh, Northern Ireland
April 4, 1979—Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto, executed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan
August 27, 1979—Lord Mountbatten in County Sligo, Ireland
May 5, 1981—Three Bonanno crime family members in a Brooklyn nightclub. Vito Rizzuto was believed to be one of the gunmen.
October 6, 1981—Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat in Cairo
September 14, 1982—Lebanese president-elect Bachir Gemayel in Beirut
October 12, 1984—Attempt on Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, England
June 14, 1985—Hijacking of TWA 847
February 16, 1992—Hezbollah secretary-general Abbas al-Musawi in Nabatiyah Governorate, Lebanon
April 17, 1993—Turkish president Turgut Özal in Ankara (possible assassination)
September 25, 1997—Attempt on Hammas official Khaled Mashal in Amman
November 23, 2006—Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, former Russian secret service officer, in London
December 27, 2007—Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi, Pakistan
February 12, 2008—Hajj Radwan (Imad Mughniyah) in Damascus
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Let me start with the reader. I thank him for his indulgence in allowing me to alter the names of people whose identities are either unimportant or need to be protected. The Engineer’s name was Yahya Ayyash, but I saw absolutely no purpose in cluttering up the text with foreign names. The same goes for my protagonist, Hajj Radwan. His real name is Imad Fayez Mughniyah. The same applies when I play around with some of the narrative. Again, it’s in the name of protecting “sources and methods,” as well as telling a more coherent story. The book was vetted by the CIA not for opinion or storytelling but to ensure it exposes no secrets.
The list of references I drew on is long. But there are a couple of sources I cannot fail to thank. First of all, the Lebanese police. Without their superb work I would have no idea Hajj Radwan was behind Hariri’s murder. And while the tribunal conducted a thorough and fair investigation, I did not draw on evidence collected for the trial. Nicholas Blanford’s Killing Mr. Lebanon is a wonderful source on Hariri’s assassination, as his Warriors of God is on Hezbollah. Joby Warrick’s The Triple Agent is the main source for my retelling the Khost tragedy. Michael Newton’s Age of Assassins is the best book out there on modern assassination. A lot of his thinking bled into mine; I apologize for not citing him appropriately.
Special thanks go to my editor at Blue Rider, David Rosenthal, and my agent, Luke Janklow. If they hadn’t encouraged me that there was something here—whatever this odd blend of memoir and political science is—this book would never have been written.
An index for this book can be found at
Penguin.com/ThePerfectKillIndex.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert B. Baer is one of the most accomplished agents in CIA history and a winner of the Career Intelligence Medal. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including See No Evil—the basis for the acclaimed film Syriana, which earned George Clooney an Oscar for his portrayal of Baer. He is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Middle East and frequently appears on all major news outlets. Baer writes regularly for Time.com and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He is the current national security affairs analyst for CNN.