The Perfect Kill (21 page)

As is not the case in horseshoes, there are no points for coming close in assassination. It's something the IRA apparently didn't grasp.

Anyone who knew Magee wasn't surprised he tried to decapitate the British government. Anything to get the English to leave. The question was whether he was the right man for the job.

In Magee's favor, the tile work was good. Stuffing explosives into the bathroom wall of room 629 could only have been tedious work. The tiles needed to be put back just right and properly finished to conceal the fresh grout. It's no doubt why it took Magee and his nameless accomplice three days to do the job.

But anyone who's worked with explosives or tried to put together a complicated assassination like Thatcher's understands it was a matter of sheer luck that Magee came as close to murdering the woman as he did. The main problem was that he hadn't used enough explosives. In fact, the charge was so undersized that only one of the occupants of room 629 died and the other was only slightly injured. (Magee disputes the estimates of twenty to thirty pounds of explosives. There was five times that amount, he claims.)

The truth is that Magee ran up against the laws of physics—there's only so much space in the wall of a hotel bathroom. The alternative would have been to fill the basement with explosives or run “strip charges” along the supporting beams and main load-bearing walls of the Grand. But neither, of course, was feasible; someone would have noticed. Nor apparently was it possible to pinpoint Thatcher's room in advance to better position the explosives. While Hariri never stood a
chance, Margaret Thatcher stood a very good one. But that wasn't the end of it.

Going light on explosives was a grave miscalculation, but other ones were just plain foolhardy. Take the name Magee used to check into the Grand, Roy Walsh. Walsh was a notorious IRA operative serving life for murder. All it would have taken was an alert desk clerk to recognize the name and bring it to the police's attention. Or if the police had done a thorough check of the guests who'd stayed at the Grand in the weeks before the conference, they very well might have stumbled onto the plot.

Magee also failed to take into account the possibility that the Conservatives would change hotels at the last minute. Or that Thatcher would come down from London for only the day of her speech rather than stay the night at the Grand. Magee should have taken the elementary precaution of including a mechanism to interrupt the timer. If the Conservatives had moved locations, inadvertently drawing the IRA into murdering only innocent guests, it would have been an even worse political catastrophe.

The crowning mistake came when Magee returned to England for the new round of bombings, freely and cheerfully flying back into the cage. He apparently hadn't grasped another elementary rule: An assassin never revisits the scene of the crime. And by the way, couldn't the IRA find a bomber without a criminal record, someone without fingerprints on file?

—

L
ike most IRA volunteers, Patrick Magee was born into economic and political blight—unemployment, prejudice, ignored grievances. He was two when his family moved from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Norwich, England. Life was a little easier there, but not much. Norwich is where Magee acquired the accent that let him check into the Grand unremarked.

In 1969, Magee moved back to Belfast, not long after the Troubles
started in Northern Ireland. He joined the IRA at eighteen and soon came to the attention of the police, earning a reputation as a bomber with a brain. He reportedly exercised it by doing the
Times
crossword puzzle.

Magee bounced in and out of the Castlereagh interrogation center like a yo-yo. The police tried every trick they knew to recruit him as an informer. A policeman who'd conducted one of Magee's interrogations had this to say about him: “He was a hard man, and we knew what he was like. We would have loved to have had him on our side.” But Magee was cagey, neither agreeing nor saying no. He was smart enough back then never to leave evidence behind that the police could use to put him away.

It's unclear why Magee would make a clumsy mistake such as leaving a fingerprint on the registration card or failing to use enough explosives. But it didn't dent Magee's cocksure defiance as he was led from the court and addressed onlookers in Gaelic:
“Tiocfaidh ár lá.”
Our day will come.

There's an old saying that the only Catholics in Northern Ireland who get a good education get it in prison. It's true of Magee at least, who inside would earn a Ph.D. in literature by correspondence. (He also picked up a wife by correspondence, a novelist.)

It wasn't long after his release—thanks to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement—that he publicly tried to justify the attempt on Thatcher. So far, so familiar, but he could never stick to a single story or, for that matter, articulate why precisely the IRA needed to murder Thatcher. In one interview Magee said that “they” (presumably the IRA) wanted to murder Thatcher because “they” were frustrated with the war in Northern Ireland. “The obvious recourse was to take the war to England,” he said.

As for targeting Thatcher instead of someone else, Magee said: “She was the leader of the British government, and she came into office determined to pursue a hard military line . . . You go up the chain of command and the buck stopped with her.”

In another interview Magee said he'd accomplished what he'd intended to, namely push Britain into peace: “After Brighton, anything was possible, and the British for the first time began to look very differently at us.”

In a third interview Magee pulled back, saying he was lucky to have missed Thatcher. “In fact, if half of the British government had been killed, it might have been impossible for a generation of the British establishment to come to terms with us.”

It's all pure intellectual slop, of course. Just as the assassin knows the size of the charge it takes to do a job, he also knows exactly why he's picked his target. An assassin can never entertain second thoughts, never beg for understanding, and never let the faintest shadow of doubt cross his brow, either before or after the act. In an assassin's world, there is no tolerance for contrition or, for that matter, press interviews and Ph.D.'s.

Yes, the Brighton attack was spectacular, the kind of pyrotechnical display that got the IRA marquee billing. Arguably, it was the closest the IRA would ever come to making inroads into the consciousness of the wider British politic, which tended to look at the IRA as savages best kept in kraals. But in the end what did it really get out of it?

It comes down to this single truth: Either Margaret Thatcher deserved it or she didn't. And if she truly did, then the last thing the IRA should ever have let happen is the Iron Lady walking out of the smoke and debris of the Grand Hotel.

Almost as bad, the IRA senselessly frittered away what mystique it still possessed when it allowed Magee to put on display his small personal ambitions and frailties. Magee's sad public avowal will forever be a constant reminder that the IRA had tried and failed to murder Thatcher. Like an old fat man stripping down to nothing, the IRA turned itself into a thing of low contempt, the gang that can't shoot straight.

As I said, Hajj Radwan made mistakes, as he did with the attempt on the emir of Kuwait. But what he did to mitigate them was to never confess to them. What's the point in acknowledging failure? It's not like it'll make things right with a would-be victim. In fact, it's better to do just the opposite, mislead people into believing you hit exactly what you were aiming at. Your objective is to leave the world in stupid dread rather than give it a ray of hope that you're not as formidable as first thought.

Let me go back to Hajj Radwan's car bombing of the American embassy annex in Beirut on September 20, 1984. (It occurred the day after Patrick Magee checked out of the Grand.) The best working hypothesis until now is that it was an attempt on the American and British ambassadors. If the British ambassador's security detail hadn't shot and killed the van's driver, thereby preventing him from making it into the garage, both ambassadors probably would have died. In short, Hajj Radwan missed. But try to prove it.

Hajj Radwan knew exactly what he was doing in arranging to leave absolutely no evidence at the site of the attack. The van was stolen, the explosives were untraceable, the suicide bomber unidentifiable, and all fingerprints burned off in the explosion. Like any good assassination, it came out of a clear blue sky and disappeared back into one.

Although the Islamic Jihad Organization—the same fictitious organization commonly associated with Hajj Radwan—would claim it, it never said what the target was other than the annex. It left a handful of people like me, with only fragmentary intelligence and contextualization, to hypothesize that it had been a failed attempt on the ambassadors. One opinion among many.

Somewhat in support of my argument, Hajj Radwan sharply altered his tactics after the attack on the annex, moving away from trying to murder a target by bringing down a building on top of him to
murdering him in a moving car. To that end, he improved his odds by adopting sophisticated firing devices and shaped charges. As one day he would demonstrate, no one traveling in a car is safe.

Anyway, people remember the attack on the annex as a resounding success to this day—the van slipped through a tight cordon of security, the driver faithfully sacrificed himself, and the bomb went off as it was supposed to. As Hajj Radwan could have told us, seeming to get what you want is as important as getting what you want.

A good, thorough cleanup is what really scares the shit out of people.

Damascus, November 2009: Syria's a country in a hurry to slow down the future. It doesn't even bother to pretend it likes foreigners. And when it does grudgingly allow them inside its borders, it keeps them at arm's length. I'm not sure why I need another lesson in a truth so obvious, but apparently I do when I'm sent there by The Hague for the Hariri investigation. It's a year and a half before the Arab Spring.

I arrange through a friend to have a Syrian visa faxed to Syria's only border crossing with Jordan, where I'll cross by taxi. Having had my run-ins with Syrian officialdom, as I get ready to board the plane, I call my friend to make sure he's indeed faxed the visa. He tells me not to worry: A valid Syrian visa will be at the crossing.

As the Syrian border post looms into view, my taxi driver slows way
down as if he's caught a bad case of cold feet and is about to turn around. Like all Jordanian taxi drivers who ply the road to Damascus, he is scared shitless by the Syrians. He fumbles with my passport with his free hand: “You're sure you don't have a visa?” I reassure him, no problemo.

He parks in front of the main building. We walk inside together. At the counter, there's a woman pleading with a surly border guard in a field-gray uniform who is sporting a twenty-four-hour stubble, his tie loose at the neck. He's a man who doesn't look happy to be at work.

He shuffles through a stack of papers in front of him and shakes his head. The woman keeps repeating she's sure a visa was faxed: It has to be somewhere there in his papers. He says something I can't hear, and she goes and sits down on a banquette against the wall. My heart reaches out to her.

When it comes my turn to belly up to the counter, I buoyantly tell the guard that, unlike the lady, I really do have a faxed visa waiting for me. The man's mood doesn't brighten an iota. But it doesn't stop me from grinning like an idiot, as if I'd driven all this way just to have a friendly chat with the bastard.

He grabs my passport without a word, sits down, and swivels his chair to face his computer screen. He punches in my name and passport number. After peering at the screen for about ten seconds, he swivels back and looks at me as if he's about to faint with excitement: “You came here as a journalist!”

Sadly, true. It was right before the Iraq War in 2003, for ABC News. I consider pointing out that it was six years ago, that I'm no longer a journalist, and that I never once filed a report on Syria. But I can tell it's a set of facts he won't give a fuck about.

Ever since my short stint as a journalist in Syria, it's as if a scarlet
A
were tattooed on my forehead. Some Syrian friends tried to have the journalist notation expunged from Syrian immigration computers. But neither cajoling nor bribes worked. Not that it truly surprised me. Police
states such as Syria have a wondrous knack for discovering efficiency when it comes to keeping track of shifty foreigners.

As soon as I start to explain I'm no longer a journalist, he cuts me off with biblical finality: “You need a journalist's visa. Go back to Amman and apply for one.”

I, of course, can't tell him the truth about being a consultant to the tribunal on my way to Damascus to snoop for evidence of Syrian complicity in the murder of Hariri. He would have trussed me up like a Christmas ham and delivered me to the
mukhabarat
—Syria's fingernail-pulling spooks.

“My very good friend in Damascus sent me a visa here,” I wearily try a last time. “I'm sure of it.”

He pats his stack of papers: “It's not here. No visa.” He turns to a man standing just to my right, no doubt to tell him to bugger off too. Another burnt offering before a stone idol.

The guard stands up, walks across the office, and disappears through a door. The pirate posing as my taxi driver is now grinning like a drunken jackass, no doubt adding up in his head how much he'll overcharge me for the ride back to Amman.

I go sit down with the other doomed petitioners on the banquette, thinking about the time Mother beat the Syrian bureaucracy at its own game. It was when she first came to Syria on a month's visa but, fascinated with the country, wanted to stay longer. Try as hard as I could, I couldn't find anyone to help extend her visa.

So Mother took a taxi down to the Ministry of Interior, a place more feared than Count Dracula's castle, only to be informed a visa extension wouldn't be possible. Undeterred, she was back the next day, this time with a bagful of thick books. She took a seat and started to read. By closing time, the Syrians were in a panic. Who was this tenacious old lady? When she showed up the next morning with her books, it was clear this was a battle the great nation of Syria was destined to lose. She got her extension.

It's another twenty minutes before our tormentor is back. Everyone crowds the counter to renew their pleadings. When I finally nudge my way in, he looks at me as if he's seen me for the first time. But before I can even open my mouth, he says: “I told you there's no fax for you.”

For a moment, I consider he might be after a bribe. But before I can make up my mind, a bright, malign bulb goes on in my head.

Before leaving on my trip, a friend suggested that I should take the occasion of my visit to Damascus to look up the
mukhabarat
chief, the same one who would pull my fingernails out if he were to find out I worked for the tribunal. He'd surely agree to have tea with me, the friend said. I had my doubts. The man was the Syrian president's most trusted henchman and had a reputation for brutality that made Syrians tremble at the mere mention of his name. Although there was no solid evidence for it, he was a suspect in Hariri's murder. But more to the point, why would he want to waste his time with an ex–CIA operative? But to make my friend feel better, I entered his name and phone number in my iPhone.

I lean far over the counter to get the border guard's attention. He looks up at me, now genuinely irritated.

“It's fine,” I say. “Give me back my passport. I'll tell my friend in Damascus there's been a small error.”

Detecting the faintest shadow of concern passing across his face, I press my advantage: “He works for the government. I'm sure he'll understand why you won't let me in your country.”

I can tell he doesn't want to, but he can't resist: “Who?”

“You mean who do I have a meeting with?”

He searches my face, trying to decide the nature of the swindle afoot.

“Do you really want to know?” I ask. I may be wrong, but I sense the starch coming out of him.

I pull out my iPhone, hit Contacts, and find the
mukhabarat
chief's name. I turn it around for him to see.

“He's probably at lunch,” I say. “We can call him at home.”

A high, rattled laugh comes out from somewhere deep in the poor
man's throat. He looks over his shoulder for salvation. Seeing none, he shoves back his chair and bolts across the office. He disappears into the same office he went into before.

It isn't a minute later when an older man with a lot of stars on his shoulder peeks out from behind the door. The guard whispers in his ear, pointing his chin toward me.

For the next ten minutes, I sit in the border chief's office, drinking sickly-sweet tea and eating soggy biscuits. No one says a word to me; people coming in and out avert their eyes. I feel like a leper with his bell clanging wildly.

After ten minutes, my passport is back with a meticulously centered and blotted visa. The border chief orders his adjutant to walk me through the rest of the formalities. I can see he wants to shake my hand; then he thinks better of it.

I wonder if anyone's ever passed through Syrian customs with such alacrity and deference. Or with a border guard carrying his suitcase. As we pull away for Damascus, my driver looks at me in the rearview mirror as if I were some kind of sorcerer.

I won't really understand it until the Arab Spring shows up in Syria, but what I just got was an aperçu into Syria's final days—the decline and fall of a police state once renowned for its brutal efficiency. It also helps me understand how Hajj Radwan's assassins managed to smuggle their explosives through this border crossing. For all I know, they did it by taxi . . . and no doubt without having to resort to an adolescent sleight of hand like mine.

—

A
s soon as I pass through the front door of Damascus's Four Seasons hotel, life gets a lot better very fast, the air-conditioning sucking the grit out of the air and offering back a gentle, cool breeze. The place is a celestial oasis.

Unlike my visa, my reservation is waiting for me, a suite overlooking
the old city. Although I have only my small carry-on, the concierge insists a bellhop carry it up to the room. The elevator is a rocket, too fast to bother with music.

I kick off my shoes, settle back on the sofa, and flip on the giant flat-panel TV to CNN. I think about how there was a time when CNN was banned in Syria, like every other American news organization. Is Syrian censorship's ugly yoke finally about to come off?

I'm starting to doze off when there's a knock at the door. I think it's the maid to turn down the bed. I shout at the door no thank you. Instead of an answer, there's another knock, now more insistent. I start to panic: They've discovered my ruse at the border.

The more I think about it, the deeper my panic sets in. Maybe they've found out I'm here for The Hague. Since I'm not on a UN or diplomatic passport, I can see them cooking up some charge, throwing me in jail, and holding me for years. Or worse.

I open the door to find the assistant manager who just checked me in. “Your room's not quite ready,” he says, craning his neck to get a look over my shoulder. Behind him stands the bellhop.

I look back at my room to see what the problem is. Nothing I can see—the bed's made, there's a stack of fresh towels in the bathroom, and a bowl of fresh fruit on the credenza. But of course there's nothing wrong with it! Someone's simply made the grave error of putting me in a room that isn't bugged.

I follow the assistant manager and the bellhop to the elevator, up four flights, and down the hall to my new room. It's identical to the one I just vacated—fruit, clean sheets, and all. The only difference is it has a better view of Damascus's old city.

—

T
hat evening, a Syrian friend I'll call Dennis collects me to see a mutual friend, the same businessman who a couple of years before had told me he'd seen Hajj Radwan floating around the Syrian
presidency waiting for a meeting. I hope now he'll throw me a scrap about Hariri.

It's not completely unreasonable. As Hariri's aides related the story, the businessman had showed up in Beirut a day before Hariri's assassination to warn him there was a plot against him. But like the other warnings, Hariri ignored it. I intend to ask the businessman point-blank what induced him to warn Hariri.

As we get out of the car in front of the businessman's office, Dennis catches my attention and draws an imaginary circle around his ear with his forefinger—a signal that the businessman's office is bugged. So much for bringing up Hariri or Hajj Radwan. Although both men are now cold in their graves, even gossiping about them is forbidden. I'll have to find a way to see the businessman later.

Although I've only been in town for a couple of hours now, blind paranoia has me around the throat like an enraged boa. The only appetite I have for this doomed investigation is to find a place not bugged and ask Dennis about Hariri and Hajj Radwan.

Over dinner at an outdoor restaurant, Dennis politely listens to my questions but keeps coming back to the argument it was Syria that paid in spades for Hariri's assassination. Getting kicked out of Lebanon has been a catastrophic defeat for it. The Syrian troops there were the only thing keeping a lid on the place. Why then would the Syrians—or, for that matter, Hezbollah—want to assassinate Hariri?

I think about pointing out that the worst way to assign blame for a political murder is to frame it in terms of cui bono—who benefits? By that measure, Lyndon Johnson murdered JFK. Or how about British intelligence arranging a phony attempt on Thatcher to justify cracking down on the IRA? But I don't say it, and by the end of dinner, I've gotten nothing out of Dennis.

I know this all sounds like a lot of belaboring of very thin leads, but in a murky affair such as Hariri's, where not a single witness has stepped forward to offer real evidence, thin is better than nothing. And I have
nothing to lose. So I ask Dennis to drive me past the place where Hajj Radwan met his end.

The street we turn down could be any upscale suburb in any modern Arab city. There's a small grocery store still open, a man shopping. A couple is hurrying along, likely on their way home. Otherwise the sidewalks are rolled up for the night.

Dennis pulls over at the intersection and points in the direction of a hospital mid-block. It's in front of that hospital where he was killed, he says. I ask him if he saw the car.

Dennis says he was on his way home that evening when he was surprised to see the street taped off by police. But he couldn't get close enough to see what the problem was. He never saw Hajj Radwan's car.

A new Toyota Lexus is parked where Dennis pointed. Because the streetlights are dim, I can't see much else. There's nothing to mark the place. Then again, what am I expecting, the Syrians to put up a statue to Hajj Radwan? Unlike the Lebanese, they can't claim him as their own.

I wish Dennis would pull up closer so I can get a better look, but he wheels the car around to take me back to the Four Seasons.

“Who did it?” I ask.