The Perfect Kill (20 page)

There are more clips of her arriving at Dubai's airport, walking through passport control. And then back at the airport for her flight out. There are shots of her passing through a hotel lobby, wearing the same angelic smile. If she's performing for the cameras, I don't see it. What's obvious though is that there's never a clear shot of her face—always the glasses and the hat.

The Dubai police would never have thought twice about the girl had they not found a dead Palestinian in a hotel they'd caught her in on a CCTV camera feed. At first, it appeared as if he'd died of natural causes. He was tucked into bed, his clothes neatly draped over a chair, his room locked from the inside. But when it was found that he was traveling on a phony passport, that he was an arms dealer, and that he was on an Israeli hit list, there were too many coincidences for the Dubai police's liking. They opened a murder investigation.

The police were particularly intrigued by spots of blood found on the
Palestinian's pillow. There also were unexplained bruises on his face, nose, and neck. The headboard in his room was damaged. When the autopsy showed signs of an injection on his right hip, the possibility of murder was raised. It was confirmed when a drug that causes paralysis was discovered in his system.

The police's hypothesis was that the assassin or assassins forced their way into the man's room, subdued him long enough to administer a shot, and then neatly tidied up the room to make it appear the Palestinian had died in his sleep. Did the assassins climb out the window after locking the room from the inside? It was one question never answered.

By running an algorithm through Dubai airport's entry-and-departure records in the days in and around the Palestinian's murder, and by sifting through all potentially related cell phone calls and CCTV feeds, the police assembled what they believed was a convincing and coherent picture of the team that assassinated the Palestinian.

It appeared that most team members had arrived in Dubai early in the morning of January 18, 2010, and then left the next day—immediately after the assassination. There'd been two dozen of them, maybe more. With the exception of one, the assassins traveled to Dubai on forged passports. No one's explained why one assassin, Michael Bodenheimer, traveled on a legitimate German passport.

The team paid for its hotel rooms either in cash or with prepaid credit cards, which were issued by a company named Payoneer. The team used prepaid cell phones that employed a “virtual call center” in Vienna. Based on records, some of the assassins had made preparatory trips to Dubai, no doubt to case locations.

From the CCTV images, it's clear the team always kept on their disguises, ducking into bathrooms to change wigs and dark glasses. Several put on baseball caps to break up their faces. Some even took pains to sit around the lobby with tennis rackets. It was a case of living your cover. It was all a nice performance considering the effort, but not good enough to fool Dubai's supercomputers and algorithms.

When the Dubai police made public the CCTV images and other details of the investigation, most people concluded the assassins had to have been Israelis. Israel had both opportunity and motivation to murder the Palestinian. But there was one question there's no good answer for: Aren't the Israelis better than this?

An Israeli journalist close to Mossad wrote for
GQ
that the Dubai job had been carried out by an ultrasecret Mossad assassination unit known as Caesarea. It's responsible for what the KGB used to call “active measures”—assassinations, break-ins, and sabotage.

All of Caesarea's operatives work under aliases and have no government connections, either by phone or e-mail. It's housed separately from Mossad, outside Tel Aviv. Its operatives are forbidden from discussing their work outside the Caesarea facility. In the espionage business, they're called “lily whites.” But apparently the white of a lily isn't an easy color to match.

My first reaction to the Dubai job was that Mossad had gotten sloppy. What else could explain leaving a digital bread-crumb trail such as this? It definitely wasn't the same Mossad who'd murdered Atef and (maybe) Barschel. A couple of my former colleagues wondered if it wasn't a matter of Mossad's not caring whether it got caught or not. My question, though, is: Why did the team go to such pains to clean up the room and use a sophisticated drug unless their intention was to make the police believe he'd died of natural causes?

My hunch is that Mossad miscalculated Dubai's technical sophistication, failing to take into account its CCTV cameras, cell phone records, and advanced software. Maybe it was thanks to a stubborn bias that the
Gulf Arabs are Bedouin savages incapable of conducting a modern police investigation. If true, it meant that Mossad overlooked the blindingly obvious, like Dubai's ultramodern airport whose security and infrastructure is better than most in the West.

And let's not forget money. Anyone with deep pockets can purchase an Orwellian state apparatus to efficiently monitor every hotel, airport, and train station in the country. I once spent a day inspecting the London police unit responsible for the thousands of CCTV cameras monitoring that city. I walked away convinced London isn't the place you'd want to commit a high-level political murder. But neither is Dubai.

Not to mention that Dubai wasn't the first time Mossad botched an assassination. There was the failed attempt on the Red Prince in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1973. But equally sloppy was the Mossad attempt on a Hamas leader in Amman in September 1997. Two Mossad assassins were arrested, the victim survived, and a diplomatic blowup between Israel and Jordan nearly wrecked their relations. It seems that somewhere between Atef and Dubai, Mossad lost its way. Polite fictions are no longer in its bag of tricks.

I've often wondered if it doesn't have something to do with the Israelis' having gotten too comfortable with “targeted killings” in the West Bank and Gaza. Very much like the SAS in Northern Ireland, Israeli commandos enjoy a distinct home-turf advantage. With all Palestinian electronic communications and databases being monitored and a vast web of paid and vetted informants in place, the Palestinians live in a virtual high-security prison. Targeted killings are like spearing fish in a barrel.

Not long before Dubai, I happen to be visiting a West Bank refugee camp for a documentary and am able to walk the route taken by Israeli commandos on their way to assassinating a Palestinian militant. It winds its way through a maze of cramped alleys and open sewers, reminding me a lot of Ayn al-Hilweh. The Israeli team entered the camp in the middle of the night, I during the day.

The pathway between the makeshift houses narrows to the point I'm able to raise my arms and touch either side. There's no logic to the camp's layout, which means I keep getting lost and ending up in dead ends. Kids start to show up, and I soon have a pack of them following me, laughing at the stupid, lost foreigner. It's a mystery to me how Israeli commandos are capable of navigating a place such as this in the black of night, other than thanks to lots of practice.

The house where the assassination occurred looks like all the other houses around it—one story, cinder block, barred and shuttered windows, pebble-dash front door. A Palestinian tells me that after the Israelis crashed through the door it took them only seconds to find the false wall behind which the Palestinian was hiding. They shot him through the wall, only digging him out afterward to identify him. The commandos obviously had an informant close to the man.

I'm not saying Mossad would have covered its trail if it had tapped into Dubai's telephone system or something. And yes, the floppy hats and big dark glasses were a nice touch, but it remains that Mossad in the Gulf was a fish out of water. There just wasn't a way to hide two dozen Westerners up to something fishy. And not to mention that Mossad failed to build in misdirection, doing something such as—I don't know—leaving false clues pointing at the CIA.

It's to the assassin's advantage never to forget that people prefer their myths and beautiful lies to facts. Only twenty-four percent of Americans accept the 1964 Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The rest believe JFK was murdered by, well, take your
pick—the CIA, the mob, or the Trilateral Commission. Never mind that there's not an iota of evidence to support any one of those conspiracy theories. It's this sort of childlike credence that the assassin wants to leverage.

At every stage of the planning and execution, the assassin needs to build in misdirection. For instance, if a sniper rifle is to be used, he should steal it from, let's say, the mob, or anyone else who might plausibly engage in assassination. If a getaway car is needed, steal it from the FBI. The same goes for cell phones and computers.

There was misdirection built into the Hariri assassination at every step, which I'll get into later. But in the meantime, suffice it to say that a man's nose found at the bomb site still has investigators guessing. According to isotopic analysts, its onetime owner grew up along the Saudi–Yemeni border, which supported the initial suspicion that al-Qaeda was behind Hariri's murder. Did the assassins plant the nose to throw off the investigation? It's too conspiratorial to give it much thought.

It's just a fact that people get hung up on small, insignificant details and inconsistencies. With their abiding distrust of government, the facts surrounding an assassination are easily deflected, and then they quietly recede into infinite possibilities. On the other hand, when you leave a smoking gun as Mossad did in Dubai, you gratuitously cede that advantage.

A couple of years ago, a Miami-Dade homicide detective called me up to ask if the South Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger had been a CIA informant. I'm pretty sure he knew better, but some half-wit up the line no doubt needed to be reassured. (Bulger, in fact, had nothing to do with the CIA, which leaves me to wonder whether he hadn't been going around telling people he murdered on behalf of the CIA. He wouldn't have been the first criminal to do so.)

It all comes down to the fact that there's absolutely no reason to confess or in any way acknowledge the act. One day an enemy very well could turn into a friend. So why let a long-buried corpse with your knife
in its back cast a shadow over a beautiful new friendship, especially when a little preventive fact-obscuring and fact-burying greatly improve amnesia? Iran might have been behind Pan Am 103, but now, with a diplomatic thaw in the air, it serves everyone's interest that Iran never owned up to it.

It's better not to try rather than to try and miss. A failed attempt gives the victim an aura of invincibility, augmenting his power while diminishing yours. Like any business, reputation is everything.

B
righton, England, September 14, 1984: The Grand's front-desk receptionist, Trudy Groves, would afterward tell the police that she didn't remember much about the man who checked in that morning. The name he wrote down on the registration card, Roy Walsh, meant nothing to her either. Nor did his address: Braxfield Road, London.

Groves gave Walsh a key for room 629 because, as she said, “it was a nice room facing the sea.” Walsh paid her in cash: ₤180 for three nights. She wished him a good stay and watched him head up to his room.

On September 15, Walsh and another man ate lunch in the dining room. They charged the meal to Walsh's room. As well as anyone could
tell, the two spent the rest of the day in Walsh's room, a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hanging on the door.

A waiter later would tell the police that Walsh seemed a pleasant enough man who liked to order his meals in the room. He remembered that on September 17, Walsh called room service for a pot of tea and turkey sandwiches. But when the floor waiter knocked on the door, a taller man answered the door, not Walsh. The waiter could hear someone in the bathroom. Later that evening, the two called down for a bottle of vodka and three Cokes. The waiter wondered if they weren't celebrating something.

No one remembers Walsh and his companion checking out on September 19. But there's no reason anyone would. He was just another tourist. In any case, the Grand's staff had other things to think about. In less than a month, the Conservative Party would hold its annual conference in the hotel, and the place would be mobbed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher herself would spend the night.

—

O
ctober 12: At exactly 2:54 a.m. a deafening roar convulsed the Grand. A center section of the old Victorian building rose in a fountain of black smoke and debris, held in the air for an instant, and then spilled out into the street. It was as if hell had taken a bite out of the hotel and spit it out. The only light came from small fires burning everywhere.

As the firemen arrived, it looked like guests had hung out their clothes to dry on the telephone lines and street lamps. It took them a moment to realize that it was curtains and bedding blown outward from the explosion.

One of the firemen who ran into the hotel met Thatcher calmly making her way down a blackened corridor, seemingly indifferent to the smoke and screams.

“Good morning,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

—

F
our guests died in the explosion, including a member of parliament. A woman later would die from her injuries. Thirty-eight others were injured. The press reported Thatcher survived only because she had stayed up into the early morning writing her speech for that day. Rather than in her bed, asleep, she was at a desk in the sitting room of her suite. But that was the press's version, which would turn out not to be exactly accurate.

Investigators estimated that it had been twenty to thirty pounds of gelignite explosives that had dislodged a large chimney and pulled down a center section of the hotel. On the basis of a pattern of shattered bathroom tile, it was quickly determined that room 629's bathroom had been packed with explosives.

The investigators discovered fragments of a video-recorder timer. The timer was set to go off in exactly twenty-four days, six hours, and thirty-five minutes—2:54 a.m., an hour when Thatcher, her cabinet, and the rest of the Grand's guests should have been in their rooms asleep.

From there it was a matter of investigators running down the names of guests who'd stayed in room 629 in the preceding weeks. There'd been couples from the United States, London, Hertfordshire, and a businessman from Mumbai. They could all be accounted for but one: Roy Walsh.

After Walsh's registration card was found, chemical and laser analysis picked up a fingerprint and a right palm print. Matching them to arrest records, it turned out that Roy Walsh was, in fact, Patrick Magee, a longtime operative of the Irish Republican Army.

Magee was arrested in 1985 in Glasgow, Scotland, while he was preparing a new bombing campaign. He was convicted a year later for the Grand's bombing, including the murder of five people and the attempted murder of Great Britain's prime minister and her cabinet. “Attempted” tells you all you need to know.

—

I
t took me a while, but I think I finally figured out one of the elementary rules that Hajj Radwan played by. It has to do with game theory, what I call the winning combination of the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's a lesson the IRA and Magee apparently missed.

The Prisoner's Dilemma basically goes like this: The police arrest you and your partner in a crime. Questioning you in separate cells, their objective is to send you both to jail for as long as possible. If you both refuse to cooperate, you each do one year in jail. But if your partner rats you out, he gets off, and you get ten years. If, on the other hand, you beat him to it, he gets the ten years. If you rat each other out, you each get five years. The choice then is you either “compete” against your partner in crime or “cooperate” with him.

The best course of action, of course, is to cooperate, neither of you confessing to the crime. You each do your year in jail, and that's it. But what keeps the game from descending into a free-for-all, the two of you falling for the police's game and turning on each other? Mathematicians played around with the possibilities for a long time and came up with the strategy that as soon as one of you starts to confess the other administers a sharp reminder that the winning combination is to cooperate. Letting things slide and hoping for the best is the worst strategy, the only winner being the police.

But it doesn't mean that this is some tit-for-tat game of revenge. It's the police you want to beat rather than each other, i.e., the objective is to minimize your partner's pain as well as your own. It's a tricky strategy, but done right it avoids a mutually destructive escalation of violence.

Two years before Hajj Radwan's assassination I drove up into the Bekaa Valley to take a look at a burned-out and shrapnel-shredded black Mercedes. It had once belonged to the secretary-general of Hezbollah, the one before Nasrallah. He was riding in the car when it was struck by
an Israeli guided missile. His wife, their five-year-old son, and four others were also killed. The attack occurred on February 16, 1992.

The Mercedes was still on the trailer it was hauled up to the Bekaa on and was now parked next to the town mosque. As I walked around it, a Shiite imam watched me, curious about a foreigner who'd come to see evidence of the man's martyrdom.

You could see where the Israeli missile came through the rear window and exploded in the backseat where he and his family had been sitting. I'd heard somewhere that the strike had been so precise that the driver survived. But right away I could see it wasn't possible: The Israelis had made certain no one walked out of that car alive.

I wondered why Hezbollah left the car out in the open like this. Why not put it in a museum? Did it have something to do with making death seem banal, reminding Muslims that it's a common destiny to die for the faith? Either way, the burned-out Mercedes is one more shrine to Hezbollah's bizarre death cult.

Israel's decision to assassinate Nasrallah's predecessor made sense. As a leader of the Islamic Resistance in the south, he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israeli soldiers. With his departure, Israel's battlefield fortunes would improve. Cut off the head of the snake and the snake dies, right? But in fact, things went from bad to worse for the Israelis. Nasrallah proved to be a more intelligent and cunning enemy.

Israel also apparently didn't understand the inner workings of Hezbollah. While the public face of it consists of a dozen or so turbaned Shiite clerics, its true leaders are its invisible military commanders—people such as Hajj Radwan. As contacts would tell me, when a Hezbollah military commander enters a room, the turbans all stand and bow to him. No one observing this little rite has any doubt about the way Hezbollah's hierarchy of power works. In other words, in assassinating Hezbollah's secretary-general, Israel violated Law #2—Make It Count.

Israel, of course, had expected Hezbollah would retaliate for the
assassination of the secretary-general and his family—it was a bright red line it couldn't ignore. But was Israel prepared for the way it came?

On March 17, 1992, one day and one month after the assassination, a suicide bomber blew up himself and his car in front of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing twenty-nine and wounding more than two hundred. Two years later, in 1994, a second car bomb went off in the same city, this time destroying the Jewish community center and killing eighty-five. The evidence is fairly good that Hajj Radwan was involved in both attacks.

What the Argentine attacks show us is that Hajj Radwan was prepared to employ disproportionate force when provoked. In murdering the Hezbollah secretary-general and his family, Israel had violated the implicit rules: It had stopped “cooperating.” Which makes the Argentina attacks an invitation to Israel to go back to “cooperating.” Did Israel get the message? Apparently, as so far it's made no attempt on Nasrallah.

Something similar occurred when Hajj Radwan decided he needed to shut off the Hariri investigation. He struck fast, hard, and with precision—nearly a dozen assassinations and attempts. They were all against people who'd stopped “cooperating,” in the sense that they were pushing for the investigation. As soon as the Lebanese shunned the investigation, the assassinations stopped.

The consensus inside the intelligence community, while not in the FBI, is that Iran (with or without Libyan help) destroyed Pan Am 103 as a direct response to the Navy's shooting down of an Iranian passenger Airbus over the Gulf. It was a reminder to the United States that civilian airliners are off-limits. Read: The United States had better go back to “cooperating.” (Never mind that the USS
Vincennes
shot down the Iranian Airbus by accident; perception is what counts in assessing Iran's response.)

What the Argentina attacks and Pan Am 103 have in common is the understanding they couldn't result in misses. That would have been like sending no message at all.

I suspect Hajj Radwan would have sympathized with the IRA's attempt on Thatcher, but for the love of God, he must have asked, how could they get so close and then botch it? Like I just said, when you play the Prisoner's Dilemma, there's no tolerance for missing. Never slap the king, always kill him.

On August 22, 1962, French right-wing army officers made an attempt on President Charles de Gaulle as he drove from the Élysée Palace to Orly Airport. Although a dozen gunmen fired as many as 140 bullets at his convoy, they killed only two bodyguards. De Gaulle and his wife were untouched. It's what led de Gaulle to quip to his wife about his would-be assassins' bad shooting. But more to the point, the failed attempt politically bolstered de Gaulle while fatally demoralizing the rogue officers.

Let me go back to Hariri to put this in perspective. Hajj Radwan employed the equivalent of 2,500 kilos of TNT, enough to dig a six-foot-deep hole in the road. The investigators came to the chilling hypothesis that Hajj Radwan had arranged it so the van would intercept Hariri's armored Mercedes precisely as it passed between the St-Georges and the Phoenicia, the two tallest buildings on the Corniche. If Hariri somehow had survived the explosion, the reverberating blast effect would have microwaved him.

Finally, if it weren't already daunting enough a task, the van detonated in front of Hariri's Mercedes rather than behind it. The occupants
of the car directly in front of Hariri's—only four feet ahead of Hariri's car—survived, thanks to the car's lifting up and allowing the undercarriage to take the brunt of the explosion.

In other words, there was no way to misinterpret the message: Hariri had to pay with his life for the wrongs he'd committed or was about to (whatever those were). The attack wasn't a shot over the bow, something that could have been safely ignored. Missing would have completely altered the message's content.

I suspect that one reason Hajj Radwan knew what he was doing was that he'd missed before and paid the penalty. In 1985 he made an attempt on the emir of Kuwait with a car bomb. Not only did the emir survive, but Hajj Radwan's brother-in-law, who had been arrested for the 1983 bombings of the French and American embassies there, was dropped even deeper down into the godforsaken Kuwaiti oubliette he was already in.

For seven years, Hajj Radwan did everything in his power to spring his brother-in-law from his Kuwaiti jail, kidnapping and murdering any Kuwaiti he could put his hands on. But nothing would move the Kuwaitis, and with each try, Hajj Radwan looked weaker and more impotent. In the emir of Kuwait's eyes, Hajj Radwan was not the stuff of nightmares.

I myself have a vague idea what it feels like to escape a near miss. It occurred in Central Asia not long after the breakup of the Soviet Union. I'd rented a small house to work out of, but apparently I'd chosen the wrong part of town. The first warning that I wasn't welcome came in the guise of a break-in. I then put up bars over the windows and posted an armed guard out front. That same night, I was across town when I heard a boom from the direction of my house. When I got back home, my guard was out front talking to the police, who were examining a hole in my front yard. The guard explained that he'd been in the living room when someone threw a grenade at the front window, clearly meaning for it to explode inside. It was only thanks to its bouncing off a bar that it didn't make it in. I never did find out whether the grenade was meant for
the guard or me. But the point is that I chose not to take it personally—an assassination attempt. I took the precaution of moving out of the house, but otherwise kept doing what I was doing.