The Perfect Kill (25 page)

We met in a noisy bar near the Green Line, a place called the Beirut Cellar. I'd heard that you'd have to dodge the snipers if you left the place
too late. By the time I started to frequent the club, there was always the racket of gunfire from the Green Line, but a sniper never took a shot at me, either arriving or leaving.

The night's crowd was noisy. The girl led me by the hand and sat me down next to a smallish, half-bald man in a suit and tie. “My good friend,” she said, introducing me. “He's a journalist.” After a little chitchat, she wandered off to say hello to a friend.

The journalist was from Tyre, but he had come up to Beirut to attend university and then stayed on to work in journalism. When the civil war started, he moved over to the Christian enclave. It worked because his wife was Christian.

But it was the mention of Tyre that interested me. Hajj Radwan traced his origins to a village close by. I was doubtful, but I wondered if the journalist might have run across him. I resisted asking, though; a curiosity in Hajj Radwan isn't the best calling card.

I got up and went to the bar for two beers. “How about taking me to Tyre to show me the sights?” I asked as I sat back down.

He took his beer, searching my face to see if I was serious or not. When he decided I was, he said: “We—I mean you—would be taken right away. It's not safe.”

I knew that, of course. A couple of months before, Hajj Radwan had kidnapped an American colonel working for the UN in southern Lebanon. He would later execute him.

But my motto is to always lead with innocence: “Oh, come on, who would notice us?”

He gave me a harassed smile: “Surely, sir, you have a family to think about.”

“Don't you know someone in Tyre who'd be willing to show me around?”

He thought for a moment. “Listen, I have a colleague who covers Tyre. When he's next here, I'll introduce you.”

From downstairs came the shriek of a door opening on rusted hinges. I wondered when the last time the apartment's heavy iron front doors were both opened at the same time. Probably at the start of the civil war when the building's inhabitants were desperately fleeing the fighting, piling their crap on the tops of their cars and heading up into the mountains.

From the stairwell came grunting, men hoisting something very heavy up the stairs: “Put him down . . . Let's take a breather . . . No, wait till the landing.”

It was Ali and his men. I pictured them in the gloomy dark of the stairwell, throwing their backs into hoisting Ali and his wheelchair up the stairs, sweating, terrified they'd drop him.

I'd met Ali through the journalist from the Beirut Cellar. His colleague from Tyre had refused to meet me, and as a consolation, he had introduced me to Ali. Up until a sniper's bullet paralyzed Ali, he had been a militia commander in the southern suburbs. Out of the action and broke, he was happy to take the CIA's money in exchange for his “explaining Lebanon” to me.

I'd now been meeting Ali for two months, but I had never got around to asking him how he managed to cross the Green Line without a problem. I guessed it had something to do with his being wheelchair bound. Or maybe he had some Christian connection who helped. Lebanon is all about the right connections.

An unsteady light leaked under the door, a flashlight, then a knock. When I opened the door, Ali rolled himself into the apartment. In the dark, I could make out three men in the hall. I consoled them with a smile and closed the door. I went into the kitchen to make coffee on a Bunsen burner.

As soon as I sat down, Ali yelled at the door for someone to bring in
the package. A man let himself in, carrying something neatly wrapped in cloth. Ali took it and handed it to me. It was heavy. I unwrapped it to find a submachine gun with the dimensions of a large pistol. There were also two long magazines held together by a rubber band.

“Beautiful, isn't it?” Ali said. “A PM-63.”

A PM-63 is a Polish-made submachine gun favored by tank crews and Middle Eastern thugs, mainly thanks to its handy size. A rare weapon, it was a thing of real value in Beirut.

Ali said he'd personally taken this one and a dozen others from Arafat's security detail when Arafat was run out of Beirut in 1982.

I wasn't a gun collector, and I had no idea what I was going to do with it. But the point is that Ali had given it to me as a token of trust. I got up and gave him a hug.

I didn't have a gun to give Ali. But what I did have for him was my version of a token of trust—a thick plastic-wrapped stack of “sterile” hundred-dollar bills. (Out of delicacy, I'd put it in a plain white envelope.) I handed it to Ali, who, without saying a word, put it in an inner pocket.

About five blocks away, toward the Green Line, there was the burr of a large machine gun. Ali and I stopped to listen. When we didn't hear an answer to it, we both relaxed.

What interested me was Ali's past: The Shiite militia he'd once headed was based in the southern suburbs next to the airport. He knew all the fighters there, from the lowliest gunsels to the commanders. He knew their origins, who lived where, who controlled which street. It seemed there wasn't a name he couldn't run down for me. A lot of it I was able to confirm from chatter.

An ironic man with a good sense of humor, Ali understood just how pointless the fighting had all been and that one day the Lebanese would have to go back to living like normal people. Like the colonel who'd wanted no part of my plans to assassinate Hajj Radwan, Ali wanted to immigrate to the United States and open a convenience store in Detroit.

It took me half a dozen meetings before I felt confident enough to test him on the subject of Hajj Radwan. I eased into it by asking questions about Hajj Radwan's neighborhood, Ayn al-Dilbah. Ali said he knew it well, pretty much house by house. Not wanting to raise his suspicions right at the start, I left it there.

At the following meeting, I brought up the TWA 847 hijacking—the one that earned Hajj Radwan a sealed arrest warrant for the murder of a Navy diver. I said almost in passing that there was a theory that some of the hijackers were from Ayn al-Dilbah. Again, I intentionally didn't mention Hajj Radwan's name.

Without missing a beat, Ali said he knew exactly who the hijackers were. He offered me three names. I'd heard them before, but only in the press.

Now I started to worry. I knew for a fact that the three had nothing to do with TWA 847. Chatter had put them in the Bekaa at the time. Was Ali fishing for a bonus? Or was it something more sinister?

Ali then compounded the error by saying he'd seen the three with his own eyes exiting and entering the plane. He'd grown up with them, he said, and there was no doubt about it; they were like his brothers. I told him we'd talk more about it at the next meeting.

I stood in the window, watching Ali's men hoist him into the back of his old van, still stumped if Ali was lying about TWA 847 to get a bonus or to cover for someone.

—

A
t the next meeting, Ali rolled into my apartment with a big smile plastered across his face: “You know what a Stechkin is?”

I did: It's a small Russian fully automatic pistol.

“Well, I think I got you one, and it's a very special one. At one time it belonged to a KGB officer.”

Ali didn't need to tell me he was referring to the 1985 kidnapping of
three Russian diplomats and a KGB officer. The KGB officer was wounded in the attack and died. His Stechkin was taken from him. As I wrote before, we knew that Hajj Radwan had organized the attack, taking a $200,000 ransom.

Paranoia is a wonderful astringent, not to mention a wonderful way to tune up your senses. Right now they were screaming at me that the missing KGB pistol was a big, juicy piece of bait—and at the other end of the line was Hajj Radwan. Offering me the pistol was sort of like telling a concert violinist that you've just found an old violin in your attic, made by some Italian named Stradi-somebody. My only question was what was next.

At the next meeting, Ali showed up with the serial number for the Stechkin. When I unfolded the torn-off piece of paper and read the numbers, my heart turned to water. They were correct.

“The man who has it is ready to meet,” Ali said.

As I listened to Ali offer the outlines of the deal, I could only wonder what Act III would be. A burlap bag over my head and a quick ride across the Green Line? Or maybe, more efficient, two bullets in the back of the head.

My mind started racing, trying to figure out how to retake lost ground. What I knew was that for a start I had to make Ali believe I'd taken the bait. I shook Ali's hand: “Fine work.” I folded up the paper with the serial number and put it in my jeans pocket. I said I needed to check on something before we could proceed.

After Ali was out the door, I went to the window to check the street. Other than Ali's van, there wasn't a car in sight. But so what? It's not like kidnappers would be so stupid as to park out front.

I cursed myself for the idiotic daisy chain I'd started down—the birthday party, casual friends, the journalist. It's a spy's version of dumpster diving, all so goddamned haphazard and lazy. Not even Carrero Blanco's assassins would have set a trap for themselves like this.

These days it's almost impossible to shed your past, especially if it's in any way shady—an old DUI arrest, bad credit, flunking out of junior college. It's like carrying around a dead fish in your pocket. Margaret Thatcher's would-be assassin, Patrick Magee, was caught thanks to the police having his fingerprints on file. It's one reason, I suppose, that assassination is a young man's game.

Call them naïfs, lily-whites, cleanskins, or anything you like, but the point is that people without a blemish on their record are your ideal recruits. As pure as a pink chrysanthemum, they can slip into most anywhere without coming to anyone's attention. People such as retiring librarians, octogenarian spinsters, and friars work okay, but it's the young and seemingly innocent you really want.

Hajj Radwan understood the principle as well as anyone. The young man he chose to fire the opening shot in the war on Israel wasn't even a mote of dust on Israel's radar. Only seventeen years old, and with no radical ties, he could have been raised by wolves on the steppe as far as the Israelis were concerned.

Years later, I'd meet his family, who lived in a small village above Tyre. Who knows for sure, but they convinced me that they had no idea what the boy was about to do. But of course, why would he tell them? It's all about the need to know.

As best as could be determined, it was shortly after the 1982 Israeli invasion that Hajj Radwan approached the boy to enlist him as a suicide bomber. Had someone else spotted the boy beforehand, gauged his readiness for martyrdom? Or was he a longtime acquaintance of Hajj Radwan's? We don't know. But the upshot was that the boy agreed to sacrifice his life in order to end the foreign occupation of his country.

In the days after their invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis genuinely believed that the Lebanese were grateful they'd given the Palestinians a
good dusting. In fact, they were so confident of it that Israeli tour groups started to organize visits to south Lebanon. El Al, the Israeli state airline, opened an office in Sidon. Scantily clad Israeli tourists even took to sunbathing on Lebanese beaches.

Early on November 11, 1982—less than six months after the invasion—Hajj Radwan's young recruit drove his old, explosive-packed Peugeot through the front door of the seven-story building. The truck detonated, bringing down the building. It killed seventy-five Israeli soldiers and some two dozen Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners.

For the first time, the Israelis got a glimpse into the Lebanese hell they'd thoughtlessly wandered into. Hajj Radwan clearly had done a good job of casing the place. He'd gotten the timing of the attack exactly right, coinciding with the return of the night patrols and before the morning patrols left. Heavy rain that morning had driven more soldiers inside. Had he planned it around the weather? Unlikely, but who knows?

I don't know when Israel discovered that Hajj Radwan was behind the attack or even whether, in fact, he was. What is certain is that the attackers were in an entirely different class from Carrero Blanco's. Not only did no one from his side shoot a gun into a ceiling, they also didn't offer a long and detailed admission to explain themselves. The act was meant to speak for itself.

And just as Hajj Radwan wanted, there were more questions than answers. For instance, how had he managed to enlist his lily-white suicide bomber, and even more remarkable, how could he be so sure that the boy would take his own life? As it turned out, Hajj Radwan had on the bench scores of lily-whites just like him, but not one of them was on an Israeli suspect list. For that matter, the Israelis didn't even know who Hajj Radwan was until very late in the game.

Although Ali didn't work out, the reason for my sifting through my new Greek Orthodox friends was to find a lily-white of my own, someone who could naturally insinuate himself into Hajj Radwan's circle. But
as I was reminded again and again, the membrane between Christian and Muslim Beirut went pretty much one way.

I've always been good at is turning failure into opportunity. I counted on it now with Ali as I tried to find a way to string him along with some bullshit story, buy myself some time. Hajj Radwan was good, but it didn't mean that he was immune to red herrings.

Systemic misdirection used to be a standard practice for CIA officers in Moscow. As soon as one of them arrived in town, he'd make as much smoke as possible. He'd strike up a conversation with an unsuspecting passenger on the subway, slipping him his calling card. His KGB tail would have no choice but to haul the poor bastard in and sweat him. Or he'd walk into a police station to file a complaint about someone parking too close to his car, the idea being to force his KGB tail to ask the cops why he'd paid them a visit. Swarming the KGB with false leads such as these tied them up in knots and wore out its surveillance teams.