The Perfect Kill (10 page)

Hajj Radwan also very early on learned he could dispense with the social conveniences and arrangements most of us take for granted. He
strangled in himself any inclination to believe anyone could ever truly like you. It's a comforting delusion, and nothing more. For Hajj Radwan, the only true bond is the threat of pain.

As rigorous as his selection system was, Hajj Radwan understood that Laws #7 and #8 (Vet Your Proxies in Blood) come as a pair—you test, you recruit, you test. A candidate's advertised qualifications might look fabulous on paper, but only in the crucible of war will you know for sure. Let someone spend weeks under Israeli bombardment and not end up cracking, and you just might have the man you need.

As far as I know, Hajj Radwan's system never failed him. There is no record of malingerers, traitors, or defectors from his ranks. In other words, Hajj Radwan would never have gone near a flake like Alice, let alone taken her on as part of his organization.

Marrakesh, January 22, 1983: It's not generally well-known, but Hassan II, the late king of Morocco, was one of the most proficient and prolific assassins of modern times. His customary practice was to drop his victims out of a helicopter over the Atlantic and let the sharks conveniently dispose of the remains. But when the occasion called for it, the king knew how to improvise.

As the official version went, on the evening of the twenty-second, King Hassan's security chief, Ahmed Dlimi, was driving outside Marrakesh when his car was broadsided by a truck traveling at high speed. Dlimi died instantly, and the truck's driver immediately was detained for reckless driving and manslaughter. The police quickly closed the case as a simple accident. But it was the naive Moroccan who didn't suspect the king had had his security chief murdered.

But Dlimi's murder nonetheless came as a surprise to many Moroccans. A faithful subject and an efficient intelligence chief, Dlimi had
kept Morocco in good order for more than a decade. He'd assassinated his predecessor on the orders of King Hassan and strangled many a coup attempt in the cradle. It was Dlimi who'd overseen the notorious murder of a Moroccan dissident in Paris in 1965. Dlimi wasn't the king's personal assassin, but he came close. In other words, King Hassan had to have had a very good reason for murdering him.

The suspicion was that the king had caught Dlimi plotting against him in some sort of palace intrigue, maybe planning some sort of putsch. But because of the political delicacy of the matter, the king, rather than jail Dlimi, felt he needed to foreshorten the course of justice. Again, it was only a theory.

If there was one thing that Hassan had learned over the years, it was to keep his own counsel, especially when it came to foreigners. One rare exception was his good friend General Vernon Walters, the former CIA deputy director and ambassador to Germany. The king never forgot that Walters had given him a ride on a tank when the king was a child during World War II, and their friendship remained uninterrupted ever since.

A few years after Dlimi's death, on a visit to Rabat, Walters asked the king about him. The king chuckled: “My friend, if you only knew what I have had to endure. I shall tell you.”

The king said that he had started to hear stories that Dlimi's drinking had gotten out of hand. On occasion, he himself could smell liquor on Dlimi's breath. The king knew he couldn't have a drunk as his security chief, but on the other hand, he wasn't sure exactly what to do about it. Simply firing Dlimi would set off a flight of unsettling rumors about coups and so on. Even the intimation of disloyalty in the royal inner circle doesn't serve the interest of an absolute monarch.

One night at a little after two in the morning, Dlimi called Hassan and excitedly told him that he'd caught the king's wife sleeping with a captain of the palace guard. Dlimi was obviously drunk, his words slurred and incoherent. The king didn't know what to think and told Dlimi they'd talk in the morning.

The next day the king discreetly looked into Dlimi's charge and found out there was no truth to it. The king started to think about the best way to ease out Dlimi. But before he could come to a decision, he heard from a good source that Dlimi had told a Saudi envoy about the queen's infidelity. Hassan didn't need anyone to tell him that his rivals, the Saudi royals, were now tittering about King Hassan's unfaithful wife. Thus, with his honor at stake, he had no choice.

Hassan, of course, knew he could get away with it. He controlled the entire food chain, from the police to the press. He had plenty of people he could trust to do the job right, just as Dlimi once could have.

Assassination is the most sophisticated and delicate form of warfare, only to be entrusted to the battle-hardened and those who've already made your enemy bleed.

Omagh, County Tyrone, August 23, 1974: In the IRA's eyes, Detective Inspector Peter Flanagan was a traitor. Not only was he a Catholic who'd gone to work for the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the Protestant-controlled police in Northern Ireland), he'd also made the inexpiable sin of going into the Special Branch. The Special Branch had a well-earned reputation for helping Britain's Special Air Service finger IRA operatives for assassination. In other words, Flanagan had written his own death sentence.

The IRA selected Sean O'Callaghan to assassinate Flanagan for no better reason than that O'Callaghan was on active IRA service, a so-called volunteer. Although he had never assassinated anyone before, O'Callaghan's mettle had been tested in a mortar attack on a British army base that resulted in the death of a female soldier. The IRA told
O'Callaghan that Flanagan deserved it because he'd participated in brutal interrogations of IRA operatives.

A man of habit, Flanagan would eat lunch every day at the same Omagh pub, a place called Broderick's. He always parked his VW Beetle in the same spot on Georges Street and sat on the same stool at the end of the bar. He read the
Irish Independent
as he ate.

O'Callaghan knew enough about an operative's work to know he needed to reconnoiter Broderick's in advance, map the place out in his mind. He also needed to see Flanagan with his own eyes. When the gunplay starts, there's no time for dithering or making the mistake of shooting the wrong person.

Flanagan was at the far end of the bar on the day O'Callaghan cased Broderick's, right where he was supposed to be. O'Callaghan ordered a half pint of Guinness at the opposite end. Having finished his beer and seen what he needed to, O'Callaghan left.

When it came to putting a team together, the IRA produced Paul Norney, a sixteen-year-old boy from Belfast. It didn't care that Norney was on the run, suspected of the murder of a British soldier. The other accomplice detailed to O'Callaghan was a young girl who he knew only by the name he loaned her, Lulu. The IRA told him she could drive, and that's all that mattered.

O'Callaghan had his doubts, though. He'd heard of another operation where a young girl was recruited to drive for a job, but in fact she couldn't shift gears. O'Callaghan made Lulu show him she could drive. She did fine.

The guns were hand-delivered a couple of days before they were set to go: two new snub-nosed Magnum .357s.

The night before, O'Callaghan, Norney, and Lulu spent the night at an IRA safe house in Carrickmore. Everyone stayed up until early in the morning. At one point, things got tense when Lulu started to tease Norney about his age. Norney didn't take it well, and O'Callaghan had to pull her out in the hall to tell her to knock it off. “It was a prestige
operation and we wanted it to go well,” O'Callaghan would later write in his memoir.

In the morning, all three went to a garage, where O'Callaghan walked up to the owner and identified himself as an IRA volunteer. O'Callaghan said he needed to borrow a car. Intimidated to the bone by the IRA, the garage owner didn't ask why. As they left, O'Callaghan told him to hold off reporting the theft to the police.

As they set off for Omagh, another car went on ahead to check for patrols and flying roadblocks. O'Callaghan had told the driver of the other car to signal by tapping his brakes if he saw anything O'Callaghan needed to worry about.

As they got closer to Omagh, the lookout car raced ahead and then came back flashing its lights: It's a go.

Lulu parked in the no-parking zone next to Broderick's. O'Callaghan and Norney got out to check to see if Flanagan's Beetle was there.

Norney looked in first to make sure Flanagan was in his spot at the end of the bar. He told O'Callaghan he was.

O'Callaghan: “You sure?”

Norney was.

O'Callaghan: “Okay, let's go.”

O'Callaghan went in and spotted Flanagan sitting at the end of the bar, reading the
Irish Independent
.

As soon as Flanagan saw O'Callaghan and Norney coming toward him, he understood what was about to happen. “No . . . please . . . no!” Flanagan said.

O'Callaghan started jerking the trigger of his revolver. Flanagan stood up and staggered back in a futile attempt to save himself. He stumbled and fell through the bathroom door. O'Callaghan continued shooting bullets into him.

Flanagan was still, face-forward on the bathroom floor. O'Callaghan instinctively knew Flanagan was dead.

As O'Callaghan reloaded his gun to calm himself, he only now
noticed everyone in the pub staring at him. The owner stood frozen, an empty glass in his hand and a towel in the other. A woman said something he didn't catch. O'Callaghan turned to her: “Just sit down, shut up, and nothing will happen to you.”

O'Callaghan and Norney came out of the bar and crossed the road to the getaway car. Norney climbed in first. But before O'Callaghan could get in his door, Lulu pulled away, dragging O'Callaghan down the street. He shouted at her to get it together. She stopped, and he got in. He turned to Norney and told him to reload his gun.

Lulu was far down the road before O'Callaghan realized she was heading down a one-way street. He told her to turn around. He didn't care that they'd have to drive back past Broderick's.

“Is he dead?” Lulu asked.

O'Callaghan: “Yes, he's dead all right.”

Norney giggled: “Dead? 'Course he's fucking dead.”

After they abandoned the stolen car by the side of the road, an IRA team collected them with a van and drove to a cottage in the country.

It was only then that O'Callaghan took stock of the truth that he'd just murdered a man in cold blood. He wrote in his memoir that it was something he'd spend the rest of his life thinking about.

After three hours, all three were moved again, this time to a house near Carrickmore. When they arrived at the back of the house, a middle-aged priest came out to meet them. It was a man O'Callaghan knew, someone who'd loaned his house to the IRA before.

The priest knew that they'd just murdered Flanagan. As they entered the house, he blessed all three with holy water. The priest told O'Callaghan over dinner: “Flanagan was an abominable man who sold his soul to the devil.” As they were about to move yet another time, the priest again blessed them.

Lulu went back to Belfast, and O'Callaghan never saw her again. Norney and a couple of other IRA operatives were later arrested in
Manchester after firing shots into a restaurant that had just given them bad service.

In 1988, a depressed O'Callaghan turned himself in to the police. He received a sentence of 539 years, including time for Flanagan's murder. He was released from prison in 1996 by royal prerogative.

—

S
ean O'Callaghan is a gaunt man, caved in as if life's eaten him away from the inside. One moment he's leaning against the kitchen counter, immobile, a cup of coffee steady in his hand. The next he's pacing back and forth like a caged animal, as if he's in a hurry to say what he has to and get away.

O'Callaghan, in fact, has been confessing for years. In his memoir, he spares himself and the IRA nothing. It reads like something you'd tell to a priest in the privacy of a confessional rather than a mea culpa for an unsympathetic and uncomprehending world.

O'Callaghan joined the IRA in 1969 when he was sixteen. A bomb he was making exploded in his parents' house. He was sent to jail for it. After his release, he did one odd job after another for the IRA. But mostly he mixed up chemicals for car bombs.

O'Callaghan resigned from the IRA in 1976 and moved to London where he married and opened a cleaning business. When the IRA tried to reenlist him, he decided to turn informer for Irish intelligence. He would say later it was the 1979 assassination of the queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten that had finally turned him.

The exact nature of O'Callaghan's service to Irish intelligence is unclear. One version has it that O'Callaghan tipped the authorities off to a shipment of seven tons of Kalashnikovs sent to the IRA by the Irish-American crime boss Whitey Bulger. In 1984, O'Callaghan supposedly helped foil an assassination attempt on Prince Charles and Princess Diana during a Duran Duran and Dire Straits concert.

Down on his luck, O'Callaghan tried to retool himself as a security consultant. But business was never good, and his fortunes continued to slide. In 2006, a year after I'd interviewed him, two young men he'd met at a gay bar in West London tied him to a chair with electrical wire while they robbed the apartment he was temporarily staying at.

The occasion for my meeting O'Callaghan was to interview him for a documentary on car bombs. Camera on, O'Callaghan described how he could mix enough material for a car bomb in one day—about five hundred kilos of nitrobenzene fertilizer. It was the same chemical composition responsible for turning Northern Ireland's cities into smoking ghost towns.

O'Callaghan insists that the bombs he made were designed to destroy empty buildings rather than people.

When I asked him whether he'd personally set off a car bomb, he answered: “I did, yeah, um, well in the country, quite a few of them.”

When I asked if they killed anyone, he said: “No, no, there was nobody killed or injured in any of the car bombs I was involved in.” But he quickly added he would have been very happy to kill a cop or a British soldier.

O'Callaghan's ambivalence about violence reminds me of the Italian Red Brigades, another set of Catholics who turned to violence in order to right a political wrong. Although dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, they never could bring themselves to entirely abandon the Catholic faith. The two founders of the Red Brigades, Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol, married in a church. And like the European bourgeoisie, they took August off.

It seems to me both O'Callaghan and the Red Brigades lacked the will and stamina to see things through to the end, to do what had to be done. They certainly never showed they were prepared to meet the end Hajj Radwan met in Damascus. They were weakened by some indefinable ambivalence about violence, all but ensuring they would fail at it. Hajj
Radwan's suicide bombers' deaths were an absolute given, but they never lost their way, stalled, or turned around.

There are other little things that tell the same story. For instance, IRA “volunteers” see no problem living in British government–subsidized housing or taking unemployment checks. It's something Hajj Radwan never would have considered, no matter how short on money he got. For him, any dependency on any enemy for anything is a sign of weakness and vulnerability. How do you convincingly conduct a rebellion when you're on the dole? Or, for that matter, how do you put yourself beyond compromise? Not only does it send the wrong message to an enemy, it also offers him innumerable portals of entry.

Did the IRA's ambiguity about violence—and in particular the belief that blowing up buildings wins wars—fatally undermine its cause? I suspect so. Destroying other people's stuff rarely turns the tide of battle. It's the same with symbolic violence. O'Callaghan was right when he said the IRA had made an unforgivable error in murdering Lord Mountbatten, a man without power. It won them nothing, but it cost them a lot.

There was a time when I still believed in the possibility of repairing relationships. What it meant for me in Beirut was that every couple of weeks I'd catch a ride on a Black Hawk helicopter over to Cyprus to see my wife and children. Langley had kindly allowed them to set up in Larnaca to be near me but out of the line of fire. They thought it would keep the embers of marriage alive.

Like any plan infallible on paper, this one fell apart at first contact. A Libyan assassin with American blood on his hands moved next door to my wife's apartment, giving Langley a case of the vapors. My wife and children were bundled off to Brussels on the first flight out. My visits
became less frequent, and the marriage suffered accordingly. (It was okay, I reassured myself. Life could damn well take a break while I was on the hunt for the world's greatest assassin.)

One Christmas, Mother decided she would fix things. With no advance warning, she gathered her grandchildren around her: “My dears, I've made a decision.”

She turned first to my eldest, Justine. She knew Grandma well enough to know something was up. She'd recently overheard me calling Mother a spiteful old cow, but she didn't understand the language of adulthood well enough to not take me seriously.

“Come sit by me,” Mother said, patting a place on the sofa next to her for Justine to sit. “I have something to ask you.”

Justine did as she was told, not saying a word.

“Tell me who Philip of Macedon was,” Grandmother said.

Justine, only eleven, had no idea.

“He's Philip the Second, Alexander the Great's father.” Mother lit a cigarette, tilted back her head, and blew a thick cloud of smoke at the ceiling.

“He had a broken tibia,” she resumed. “And surely you know he was assassinated.”

“Who?” Justine asked.

“Philip. And what do you think about the theory that Alexander himself was assassinated?”

When Justine didn't say anything, Mother guffawed: “Your parents are so pitifully ignorant. Do they teach you nothing? That does it—this summer I'm coming back to take you to Pella so you can see for yourself Philip's leg.”

I'd grown up with Mother's Alexander the Great stories and how she'd embraced the Great Men school of history, a world of honor where men did their duty, no questions asked, no dithering. But this was all new to Justine, and she had no idea why she was going to be dragged off to Macedonia.