The Perfect Kill (18 page)

Hajj Radwan fully grasped that unyielding independence is what both kept him alive and allowed him to maneuver with the total freedom he needed. At one point, he even went out and made his own money. In 1985 he kidnapped four Russian diplomats in Beirut, killing one who happened to be a KGB officer. At their release, Hajj Radwan arranged to collect a $200,000 ransom. There was nothing the Iranians could do about it.

Over the years, we watched with curiosity as Tehran tirelessly tried to drag Hajj Radwan under its umbrella. It appointed him an official in the Amin al-Haras—the intelligence wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. But as I said, titles meant nothing to Hajj Radwan, who not only declined to don an Iranian uniform but also refused to
participate in the ceremonies and mindless discipline that go hand in hand with an organized military. When relations between Iran and Hajj Radwan became strained, Hajj Radwan would disappear for months on end, ignoring Tehran's frantic appeals for a meeting.

Hajj Radwan despised the infighting in Tehran—the petty fights over status and money, the turf wars, the bureaucratic prevarications. When responsibility for being the liaison to him shifted from the Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Ministry of Intelligence, he stormed away, refusing to meet any Iranian official. He knew that petty bureaucratic rivalries can only undermine the mission.

Hajj Radwan would for years meet only Iranian officials he personally trusted. It was essential for him that his Iranian interlocutors understand Lebanon and its politics, as well as his views of the fine instrumentalities of political violence. Operating under an Iranian ignorant of Lebanon could only lead to disaster, drawing him into some ill-advised attack. Hajj Radwan had one confederate in Tehran he completely trusted, a man he called on every time there was a problem he needed sorted out. It provoked considerable jealousy in the Iranian leadership, especially as Hajj Radwan moved from one spectacular success to the next. Everyone wanted a piece of him to burnish his resistance credentials.

But at some point a shift occurred. This was at a time when Iran was losing its appetite for revolution. Among other things, it decided that the Western hostages Hajj Radwan had started taking in 1982 were more of a liability than an asset. Although he wasn't happy about it, Tehran overrode Hajj Radwan's objections and ordered their release. Hajj Radwan was being slowly sucked into Iran's ambit.

We also learned that in return for releasing the hostages Tehran gave Hajj Radwan a large one-time payment. But it was unclear whether he wanted the money for his organization or was lining his pockets. I wouldn't go so far as to say Hajj Radwan turned into a spoken-for,
paid-up Iranian agent, but it was certainly starting to look like it. Was it about money or power? I don't know.

Hajj Radwan's brother-in-law was arrested by Kuwait in 1983 after blowing up the American and French embassies there, and he spent the next seven years in a Kuwaiti jail. When Iraq invaded and the prisons were emptied, he escaped and made his way back to Lebanon. As the brother-in-law told friends, he couldn't believe the change in Hajj Radwan's organization, how it had gone from a highly mobile, shadowy band of assassins to something closer to a bureaucracy, with all the attendant drag and bullshit. He was equally shocked by how so many of the operatives had settled for comfortable lives.

Somewhere along the line, the Syrians also seemed to get a piece of Hajj Radwan. When I heard from a businessman close to the Syrian president that Hajj Radwan regularly visited the presidential palace, I had a hard time believing him. But the businessman assured me that on a couple of occasions he'd seen Hajj Radwan cooling his heels, waiting to see the president. There was no reason the businessman would lie to me, but it wasn't the Hajj Radwan I knew.

Was the hot, blue flame of power too much for Hajj Radwan to resist? If so, it drew him away from the tight, spare tribal mind-set he'd grown up with in the southern suburbs, that impenetrable prophylactic that had kept him alive all of these years. Working at the Iranian embassy as a driver was okay as a cover, but as Hajj Radwan would find out too late, it wasn't foolproof.

He'd also apparently remarried, a girl from a good family. They settled down in a comfortable apartment in a quiet Damascus suburb. He received visitors at home and kept regular hours. Some sources have it that his professional life was limited to training Palestinian groups. He would go meet them in their offices.

When I look back at it now—Syria's and Iran's success in roping in Hajj Radwan, his settling down in Damascus, the apartment, the new
wife—it's clear Hajj Radwan had let his standards slip. I'm not saying that Beirut would have forever remained the sanctuary it was in my days there, but it was definitely safer than Damascus.

By the way, the Press TV interview goes fine, the anchor impeccably polite and thoughtful.

From Damascus I drop down to Amman by taxi. My intention is to see a retired Jordanian operative who'd once worked against Hezbollah. I catch him a couple of times on the phone, but he always has some excuse for not being able to meet me. By call number five I get the hint.

What I'm starting to figure out is that people want absolutely nothing to do with the tribunal. When I first started to work for it, I called a couple of my ex-colleagues who'd tracked Hezbollah over the years, but they only laughed at the proposition of helping. As for giving evidence at the trial, I didn't dare ask. (After Hezbollah ran its TV piece on me, I better understood the sentiment.)

With time on my hands, I call the widow of the Jordanian intelligence officer killed at Khost, a Jordanian prince by the name of Sharif Ali bin Zeid. I know she wants to ask me about her husband's death, as she's convinced she hasn't gotten the full story. I'm not sure why she thinks an ex–CIA agent will have a more authoritative version for her, but I agree to have coffee with her. We meet in the lobby of my hotel.

She starts by telling me how that morning, December 30, Sharif Ali texted her from Afghanistan that he'd been unable to get out of his mind that the only safe place in the world he could imagine was the small terrace of their house. He could picture it in its every detail, he wrote.
The two of them sitting there, their two dogs at their feet, the sun sinking into the Dead Sea.

She stops and worries her coffee with her spoon. “Do you think he had a premonition?”

In tight jeans and a cable-knit sweater, Sharif Ali's widow is pretty. Her English is nearly flawless, every word carefully articulated. Every once and a while she says something to remind me she's a Christian. It makes me wonder what she meant by premonition.

She tells me how Sharif Ali and she met when they were nineteen. It was an improbable match, he a prince and a descendant of the Prophet, and she the daughter of a Christian university professor. The king forbade their marrying, but Sharif Ali spent the next five years petitioning him to reconsider.

She says her husband was half American in the way he looked at the world. He'd fallen in love with the United States while studying at Boston College and later interning for Senator John Kerry. When they first started to date, he'd take her out on his motorboat in the Gulf of Aqaba, anchor it, and talk about his bright vision for Jordan, how with an open mind it could become the Hong Kong of the Middle East. Her husband, she says, was one of those rare people able to bridge the chasm between East and West.

In Joby Warrick's book about Khost,
The Triple Agent
, there's a picture of Sharif Ali posing on the running board of a Land Rover in the middle of a river in spate. A plump man, he's smiling, obviously thrilled to be on an adventure. I now try to picture Sharif Ali put down among the Pashtuns of Khost, a people as alien to him as they were to Jennifer Matthews. I can very well imagine him having a premonition that it was about to go bad.

The king finally relented to their marriage, but only under the condition that she convert to Islam. She agreed, and the two quickly married—six months before Sharif Ali went to Khost.

Starting to tear up, she changes the subject, saying she's about to lose
her house. According to Jordanian law, she's obligated to give half of it to her husband's family. Without the money to buy them out, she now needs to look for a new place.

“It's the one place in the world he felt safe,” she says again. “How can I let a stranger live there?”

She says that since she can't keep their house she wants to write a book about Sharif Ali, a love story. It would give purpose to his death. Could I look for an agent when I get back to the United States?

I look out the window at the blast walls, drop barriers, and armored personnel carriers surrounding the hotel. There are metal detectors at the entrance and a policeman with a machine gun. The hotel was turned into a fortress after suicide bombers struck Amman's hotels in 2005. I wonder if Sharif Ali confronted Jennifer Matthews about her decision not to run the doctor through a metal detector.

Sharif Ali's widow gets up to leave and then sits back down to ask one last question. “When you spend a life devoted to one thing like this, and it's taken away, there has to be a purpose. Right?”

It's a question I don't have a ready answer for; I'm not sure Zawahiri's assassination would have mattered. I keep coming back to the thought that al-Qaeda is only an idea—a notion that jihad must be pursued through violence. Even according to Zawahiri, any true believer can pick up a weapon and fight the unbelievers, with or without guidance. How do you kill a belief by killing one man? You don't. It's just as Saddam never stood a chance of killing Khomeini's revolution by assassinating his ambassador to Damascus. I keep it to myself, though. When is the truth ever a comfort in death? Instead, I mumble something about Zawahiri's being a mass murderer and, yes, his assassination would have mattered.

After Sharif Ali's widow leaves, I think how the Jordanians, or at least the rich ones, are so much like us—open, gentle, self-reflective. Although the Jordanians played their part in the attempt on Zawahiri and
later on Hajj Radwan, they aren't a people who live off their murderous instincts.

—

T
hat same night I drop by the apartment of a Jordanian prince. He's Sharif Ali's cousin. As soon as I bring up Khost, he becomes angry: “It was an unforgivable blunder.”

He gets up to get his pipe and then sits back down with a sigh. Referring to the Palestinian doctor, he says, “You never throw a fish like that back into the pond. They turn on you in an instant. My cousin was a naïf.”

The prince then redirects his anger to Jordan's intelligence chief, the man who sent Sharif Ali to Khost: “The man's a dull clerk. He rose far above his station. Worse, he's corrupt.”

It turns out that around the time of Khost the Jordanian intelligence chief was deep into a crooked scheme to market stolen Iraqi oil. Apparently, he was too distracted about making money to think about the sort of danger he'd put Sharif Ali in. In February 2012, the chief would be indicted in Jordan for money laundering, embezzlement, and abuse of power. An added irony to the affair is that his partner in the oil scheme was an ex–CIA officer who'd once headed the hunt for bin Laden and Zawahiri.

But the prince's anger turns to puzzlement when he gets around to drone assassinations.

“In all seriousness, what's to be gotten? You don't seem to understand that you're only cutting away the fat for them.”

For the next fifteen minutes he goes on a riff about how the demonstration of force isn't the same as the careful application of force. One's an ugly burlesque, the other a ballet. It's even worse when it's allowed to turn into a public spectacle. As British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell put it, “Don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

It's never far from the assassin's mind that murder is a proscribed art, whatever the justification or motive. It's reason enough not to crow about it, to prance around, or even to acknowledge it with a wink and nod. In fact, the assassin should do his absolute best to bake into the act all the misdirection, lies, and water-muddying he can. Why gratuitously piss people off?

King Hassan II of Morocco went for the same polite-fiction approach when he decided to assassinate his security chief in January 1983. And today, more than three decades later, the official record is that Dlimi died in an auto accident. While most Moroccans suspect otherwise, without the ability to nail Hassan's lie, memories are so faded that it doesn't matter.

The Lao assassins never attempted to disguise their murders as something they weren't. But not one of them has ever stepped forward to claim authorship. Why put it in people's minds that you're an assassin? Assassination isn't a narcissistic act to be included on your résumé or what amounts to a medal to be pulled out on special occasions. Its sole purpose is to destroy a cancerous cell.

On the wrong side of the equation, the CIA's reported attempt on al-Qaeda's number two, Zawahiri, came off as something closer to political blustering than as a true reckoning of power. With all the embarrassing leaks, with the stupid cover-up, with a tell-all book, it left the curious like me to comb through facts that should never have seen the light of day—if for no other reason than that they make us look like a paper tiger.

Washington doesn't even make a good-faith effort to hide its hand in political murder, all but publicly embracing the two-thousand-plus people it's assassinated since 9/11. Some drone pilots have even gone public, airing their regrets and the mistakes. And so, with all the public hoo-ha
and flailing around, drone assassinations aren't all that different from Equatorial Guinea's execution of the coup plotters in its national sports stadium. More show than efficient political murder.