The Perfect Kill (19 page)

I realize that both al-Qaeda and the Pakistanis know all about our drone assassinations. In fact, according to
The New York Times,
it was Pakistan that insisted on selecting the victim of the first CIA drone strike in the Pashtun tribal belt. But it was never part of the bargain for us to trumpet it around. I'd imagine the Pakistanis can only groan every morning they wake up to read another
Washington Post
exposé about a CIA assassination in their country.

George Bernard Shaw once famously said that if you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you might as well teach it to dance. True enough, but I'm certain he never had assassination in mind. It's just one of those rare transgressions you never want to boast about.

With the Khost revelations, with Brennan's lie that drones have never caused the death of innocent victims, with all the hand-wringing and moralizing, could we not come off as rank amateurs in the business of political murder? We mostly do fine as human beings, but we're lousy assassins.

Keep your enemy in a state of ignorance and confusion. When you conceal even the most insignificant and benign details of your existence, your enemy will misjudge your abilities and strengths, and make commensurate mistakes. Just as a good conjurer never lets on how he's performed a trick, there's no point in your leaving behind a smoking gun.

Geneva, October 11, 1987: The chances are we'll never find out what really happened that night in room 317 of Geneva's elegant lakeside Beau-Rivage hotel. Its sole occupant was found dead in the bathtub, and
whoever his visitors were from the night before haven't and aren't about to come forward. The mute facts of the case aren't particularly helpful either.

When the manager called the Geneva police about the dead guest in room 317, the hotel assumed it had a suicide on its hands. It's also what the cops thought when they first saw the handsome man floating in the bathtub. His name was Uwe Barschel; he was a German politician. He was forty-three years old.

The Geneva medical examiner's report is factual and dry. It notes Barschel was discovered at around one-thirty in the afternoon. The bathtub was full, but Barschel's head was above the waterline. He was fully clothed, his tie loose at the neck. The autopsy showed no water in Barschel's stomach or lungs: He hadn't drowned. The barbiturate lorazepam was found in his stomach, which supported the hypothesis of suicide. He'd also drunk a half bottle of wine.

What gave the police pause were the bruises and cuts on Barschel's corpse, signs of some sort of struggle. But it was impossible to determine whether they were connected to his death or not. The police also found it curious that the wine bottle couldn't be found. To add to the uncertainty of it, it couldn't be determined whether the quantity of lorazepam found in Barschel's stomach was sufficient to produce death.

Barschel's distraught wife immediately rejected the suicide hypothesis, convinced that her husband had been murdered. She told the story of how her husband had received a disturbing, mysterious call the month before he went to Geneva. “For the first time in my life, I am afraid,” he told her afterward. He refused to explain to her who his caller was, or anything else for that matter. In spite of misgivings, Barschel met his mystery caller the day before he was found in the bathtub of room 317.

But what could the Geneva police do with thin, circumstantial evidence such as this? And not to mention that politics and suspicion of
foul play are the perfect recipe for generating baseless conspiracy theories, especially in the minds of distraught spouses. And then, as these things so often go, things went from murky to murkier.

The former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky claimed it was Mossad that had assassinated Barschel. The motive? Barschel had surfaced as an obstacle to a secret arms deal between Iran and Israel. According to Ostrovsky's version, Israeli operatives lured Barschel into a meeting with a promise to help with some political problem. The Israeli operatives jumped Barschel as soon as the door closed behind him then killed him by forcing barbiturates and poison down his throat.

Israel denied murdering Barschel. But so what? skeptics asked. They argued Israel would have no interest in admitting to the murder of a German politician. Killing some Arab in Europe was one thing, but murdering a prominent European was something else. Good enough, but the truth remains there's no convincing proof Barschel was assassinated, let alone that Israel did it.

At this point, anyone serious threw up his hands and stopped paying attention, in particular serious journalists. When the facts become contradictory and confusing, people mindful of their reputations run from a difficult story. It's what happened with Iran and Pan Am 103. The way the press looks at it, everyone gets cut in a knife fight.

But it didn't deter the public prosecution department of Lübeck, Germany, which in June 2011 announced it would reopen the Barschel case. It promised that new scientific tools would clear things up. It's unclear why the Swiss, who have primary jurisdiction, weren't mentioned in the press report.

One ironic twist to the Barschel case is that the only other time the Beau-Rivage crossed paths with history had been the 1898 assassination of the empress of Austria. She was stabbed on the quay in front of the hotel and brought inside to die. Bystanders ran down her anarchist assassin and arrested him. Good old-fashioned vigilante justice.

The Swiss police took their time modernizing, but when they finally did, they did it with a vengeance. Incidentally, it was the Swiss who kindly introduced me to the brave new digital glue pot we all exist in today.

It happened on one glorious autumn drive to Zermatt. Unbeknownst to me, a police camera on the side of the road “flashed” me—caught me speeding. For a normal law-abiding person, it should have been a pretty much straight-up monetary atonement. When an overpriced ticket with a picture of your license plate and a notation of the excess speed arrives in the mail, you send back a check in the return mail. But genius that I am, I decided I could beat the Swiss criminal justice system. My thinking was that since the guilty car was a rental and not registered in Switzerland, they wouldn't bother about the ticket.

Two years later on a trip to Geneva, I arrived after midnight and went to bed, counting on sleeping in late. But at about five-thirty the next morning, the squawk of a walkie-talkie outside my door woke me up. There was a sharp knock. I opened it to find two starched and armed Swiss policemen. After they verified I was the person who'd checked into the room, they told me to get dressed and follow them to the police station to pay an outstanding speeding ticket.

As I was all but frog-marched through the lobby, I considered asking my escort whether their time wouldn't be better spent catching Barschel's assassins, but I was awake enough to know it wouldn't improve
my situation. I paid the ticket and walked out of the police station vowing never again to commit a crime in Switzerland.

Very early on, the Swiss got the hang of the digital glue pot. For instance, in the early nineties they instituted a practice that when a visitor calls ahead to a Swiss airport to reserve a rental car the rental company will run an intrusive credit check on its new client. What it meant for spooks, criminals, and other scofflaws is no more alias passports or alias credit cards; a quick scroll down the page would instantly expose any villainy. Couple this with the advent of smartphones, the Internet, biometric chips embedded in passports, iris scans, and all the rest of the enemy-of-the-state snooping, and anyone with murder on his mind had better think twice about doing it in Switzerland.

As the story goes, one morning one of Hajj Radwan's gunmen needed to see him about an urgent piece of business. But without a phone number or an address, he wasn't sure where to start. He went around Beirut checking with Hajj Radwan's wolf pack. But no one knew where to find him. The man even dropped by the apartment of Hajj Radwan's wife. But she too didn't know; she hadn't seen him in six months.

Two months later, the man was talking to a friend in front of the Fransabank in the southern suburbs when they noticed a man on a wobbly motor scooter heading their way. Belching oily black smoke and stuttering like an old lawn mower, the scooter sounded as if it were about to cut out. Its rider was thickset, of middling height, and poorly dressed—soiled white shirt, cheap synthetic pants, scuffed shoes. Wrapped around his face was a kaffiyeh, a cotton scarf. On the rear rack was a burlap sack bound in twine holding some sort of cloth. He was a poor tailor maybe.

The scooter pulled up next to them, and the rider turned off the
engine. They couldn't see the man's face because of the kaffiyeh. Caked in dust, he looked like he'd been traveling for a long distance on unpaved back roads. The rider said something they couldn't catch. He unwrapped the kaffiyeh from his face: It was the boss, Hajj Radwan. They all had a good laugh at Hajj Radwan's ability to conjure himself out of nowhere.

Who knows whether the story's apocryphal or not. But the point is that Hajj Radwan was the human variety of a
Gonepteryx rhamni
, a butterfly whose color and pattern is indistinguishable from the foliage around it. Operating out of the southern suburbs, and indifferent to the trappings of power, money, and celebrity, he knew how to disappear into the fabric of poverty and despair. And to be sure, he went out of his way never to subject himself to protofascist digital microscopes like Switzerland's.

If indeed Barschel was assassinated, I imagine his assassins pulled off their own
Gonepteryx
act. For a start, they left nothing behind for the police to work with—no weapon, no telephone or charge-card records, no CCTV images. In order to get past the Beau-Rivage's front desk, I imagine they dressed Swiss bourgeois chic—pricey tweed jackets, polished Bally shoes, Pringle cashmere sweaters. If they had gone with the scruffy look, they wouldn't have gotten as far as the elevator before the concierge stopped them. After the act, they would have immediately headed out of Geneva. I don't know this, of course, but it's just as Barschel's assassins would want it.

But as any able assassin will tell you, disappearing into dull obscurity isn't as easy as it would seem.

Anyone in a dark profession who can't avail himself of a place like Ayn al-Hilweh had better learn the basics of garden-variety deception. In
fact, every single moment of his life is best framed with an eye to concealing the most basic truths about his existence.

He will never want to volunteer anything anyone will remember him by. What's the point in advertising you have a demented mother-in-law or that you were second coxswain on the varsity rowing team? Or that you're a billionaire? Or that you're married to a former Miss America? Money and beauty are things that stick in people's minds.

The assassin always runs in the opposite direction from the limelight, away from places where people go to see and be seen—three-star Michelin restaurants, art openings, high-end dog shows. They're flytraps that come with attentive staffs, CCTV camera coverage, and private security people who watch everyone like a hawk. In other words, don't commit a murder in the Van Cleef & Arpels on Fifth Avenue.

If there's a choice between doing business at a Motel 6 in Hoboken, New Jersey, or the Plaza, take the Motel 6. Or if you really want to drop out of sight, take a Greyhound bus (pay for the ticket in cash) to an Indian reservation in northern Arizona and meet there. Good luck to the cops trying to reconstruct that trip.

The same sort of invisibility holds for couture. It's always Sears menswear over Brioni, Payless ShoeSource over John Lobb. And never wear anything memorable or that catches the eye—no nose rings, no T-shirts with trite messages, no fancy watches with altimeters. Always wear clunky and scratched eyeglasses; it's what people will remember rather than your eyes.

The assassin would as soon wear a ballerina's pink tutu as sport tattoos, mirrored Oakley wraparound sunglasses, and rippled muscles. Looking the part of a coiled and cold-blooded killer is something people will remember. And by the same token, the assassin studiously avoids giving off attitude—no impatient assurance or giving the impression he has the drop on anyone.

What he's after is a completely self-erasing manner. For instance, he
will employ a disarming tic of cocking his head to one side and pointing an ear at his interlocutor, pretending he's riveted by every word coming out of the stupid bastard's mouth. Always lead with insecurity and deference; Mr. Magoo over Donald Trump.

While the assassin might selflessly pledge himself to action, he understands there's no point in flaunting his principles. He embraces the profoundly ordinary and ignorant, appearing to be a slave to every shallow convention, devoid of everything that makes a person stand out—the worship of money, overweening ambition, intellectual prescience. There's not a book in his house.

The assassin works hard at turning himself into a fire hose of public opinion and pedestrian convictions, giving off the hum of an empty mind. He clings to unsupported and wrong opinions as if his reputation depends on it. He unironically flies the flag on Independence Day and pastes a
GO PACKERS!
sticker on his bumper.

If the assassin's forced to talk politics, he recites unimportant, unrevealing, and reassuring facts. But in the end, he pleads that he can't make heads or tails out of politics. He doesn't sign petitions, write to his congressman, or keep a blog. If he posts pictures on Instagram, it's of his dog or Mount Rushmore . . . with nothing else in the frame. He's more than happy to let everyone know he thinks Nixon got a raw deal.

The assassin will want to make himself appear as jealous as a hunchback. While he'll shit all over the elite's pretensions—screening rooms, surfing in Bali, flying off to Europe on a private jet—and scoff at people with real intellectual lives, he'll never stop telling people he knows all about automobiles, from their prices to their performances.

Always working at dimming his shine, the assassin must never be caught coming up with a bright or original idea. He'll fight instead over the size of his cubicle or a better parking space. He embraces the stink of mediocrity and frivolity as if it's his cherished birthright.

By turning himself into a walking and talking purloined letter, by
hiding in the open, the assassin will deceive people into believing that he's the least important person in the world, i.e., incapable of pulling off a perfect kill.

Dubai, January 19, 2010: The closed-circuit images instantly captivated the world's imagination, especially the one of the girl in the floppy hat and big sunglasses. Although the picture is pixelated and grainy, you can tell she's pretty. There's something about her—I don't know—a joie de vivre, a reassuring insouciance; maybe she'd be a fun date. As she checks in, she looks up at the camera above the reception desk and smiles:
Don't bother about me, guys, I'm just a happy-go-lucky tourist on holiday
.