The Perfect Kill (3 page)

From that day forward, I started to scour every official file and public record I could think of for little gems related to Hajj Radwan. I spent weeks in the Library of Congress, reading archived Lebanese newspapers, thick references on Lebanese families, and every book there was on the Lebanese civil war. I enlisted the National Security Agency to do a run through its “chatter”—intercepted telephone and walkie-talkie conversations—connected to Hajj Radwan. I studied high-resolution satellite images of his Beirut neighborhood and village.

A year of this, and I'd produced a not-bad family tree for the man, tracing his ties by blood and marriage. I also came up with a fairly comprehensive list of his friends and schoolmates and, of course, the gunmen who worked for him. We dubbed them the “Ayn al-Dilbah Gang” because most traced their origins to a Beirut slum of the same name.

As nice as all the trivia was, I was convinced it would be the chatter that would put me in the game. The Lebanese may be a dear and generous people, but their political currency is rumor and conspiracy mongering rather than hard fact. A conversation grabbed out of the air would be my best chance of fixing Hajj Radwan. And with the right combination of lady luck and a little Kentucky windage, I'd get a nice, clean shot.

—

A
fter our meeting with the ambassador, I went back to my office, which was as dark and rank as the bottom of an elevator shaft. I didn't need to flip the switch up and down to know it was thanks to a city-wide electricity cut. I would have pulled back the curtains, but I knew on the other side was a foot-thick steel blast wall and a hermetic outer cocoon of antimortar screens and razor wire blocking out the rest of the natural light. If I wanted to see, I could go find a flashlight.

As I sat there in the dark alone with my thoughts, there was no avoiding the cold truth that I was forced to exist in this shithole of a
modern-day Crusader's castle thanks to Hajj Radwan. Since he'd blown up two of our embassies and the Marine barracks, we could only assume he'd try again.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the chances of finding and murdering Hajj Radwan were about even with those of the Bolshoi Ballet's calling me out of the blue for a tryout. I just couldn't see my way around the fact that while I was obliged to cower in an iron-and-concrete womb, Hajj Radwan was out there somewhere as invisible as a wish and with all the time and opportunity in the world to experiment with his endless ingenuity for murder. And indeed, even to this day, I wonder just how many of us Hajj Radwan did manage to kill.

It was almost as if Hajj Radwan had been there at the meeting that morning in the ambassador's office, a ghost standing in the corner, his arms crossed, coldly taking our measure for death as we joked about ramming a hot 155mm artillery round up his ass. I know it's not the officially sanctioned view, nor do I have anything like irrefutable proof to offer the reader in support of it. The Department of Justice would dismiss it as worthless hearsay.

Here's what I believe to be fact: The American ambassador to Lebanon was booked on Pan Am for its December 21, 1988, flight from London's Heathrow to New York's JFK, but the reservation was canceled that same morning. It's a small detail generally overlooked, thanks to the fact that the embassy administrative officer had made the reservation in a name not the ambassador's. Not even Pan Am management knew it would be carrying the ambassador on its Flight 103 that fateful night.

It's also generally not well-known that the State Department was in the middle of an investigation into whether Hajj Radwan was running a mole in our Beirut embassy, a local-hire Lebanese guard. By the time Pan Am 103 exploded, the investigators had narrowed it down that the mole was very likely in the ambassador's security detail. From that perch he would have been aware of the ambassador's every movement, including plans to travel overseas.

None of this went beyond a working hypothesis, but several investigators wondered whether Pan Am hadn't been an attempt on the ambassador . . . with Hajj Radwan at the center of it. It was all the eerier because one of the investigators looking into the mole also went down on Pan Am 103.

When I first heard this theory, I dismissed it as conspiratorial hogwash. A Libyan intelligence official was indicted, tried, and found guilty of the bombing. One of the lead FBI Pan Am investigators told me—categorically, I might add—that I was flat-out wrong about the Hajj Radwan angle, as well as the Iranian role. Case closed.

I never thought about it again until it came out in the Hariri investigation more than twenty years later that Hajj Radwan's people had been making multiple calls to the embassy, most likely to a local Lebanese employee. To the same mole? Maybe. Or just as likely, with retirements and all, a replacement. Anyhow, you get the point that I still have my suspicions that Pan Am 103 was bigger than one Libyan intelligence officer.

There is, of course, no way for me to prove that the calls from Hajj Radwan's people to the embassy had any connection to Pan Am 103. I also can't tell you for certain whether the downing of Pan Am 103 had anything to do with an attempt on the American ambassador to Lebanon. Easy to believe, impossible to prove.

I only dredge up this old history to show the kind of grip Hajj Radwan had on us in Beirut—and why we thought he deserved it. I also should add this wasn't some random epiphany. In a fashion, I'd crossed paths with Hajj Radwan years before.

Power is the usurpation of power, and assassination its ultimate usurpation. The act is designed to alter the calculus of power in your favor. If it won't, don't do it.

Sam Thong, Laos, early 1970s: It was with a profession in mind that Joseph Westermeyer decided to go to medical school. But his other love was anthropology, that abiding curiosity about how different people go about their lives. While still studying medicine at the University of Minnesota, Westermeyer carved out the time to start taking anthropology courses. He would go on to get a master's in it. It then didn't take much for one of his professors to convince him he needed to do some original fieldwork. Having cut his teeth on the Cheyenne Indians, his teacher advised Westermeyer to pick a people as different from average Americans as he could find.

Mrs. Westermeyer wasn't exactly thrilled to move to hot, dirty Vientiane, Laos. On top of it, the country was in the grip of civil war. Large parts of it were off-limits to foreigners, especially to Americans, whose country had taken sides. But it didn't keep Dr. Westermeyer from
helping out at a remote up-country clinic, in a place called Sam Thong—Three Jars. His wife and small son stayed in Vientiane.

Westermeyer's work at the clinic involved tending to casualties of the war, both soldiers and civilians. But during the monsoon season, when the fighting abated, he had occasion to travel to even more isolated parts of Laos. It wasn't long before he started to come across odd cases of political murder. They were particularly intriguing because they didn't fit the character of the Laotians, some of the least violent people in the world.

Although there was nothing like an official account, Westermeyer was able to piece together that in each case the local community had come to a consensus that the man or woman to be murdered represented a grave threat to its existence. Whether the crimes were imagined or real, it was believed that if they didn't act, the community would suffer terrible harm or even extinction.

Westermeyer told me that in one case the victim was selected because he had started burning grain stocks, which resulted in shortages and price spikes. The way the local community saw it, they could either murder him or starve.

Since none of the victims was elected, there was no voting them out of office. And since the central government's writ didn't reach these remote communities, there was no appeal to higher authority. Attempts at mediation failed. In other words, assassination was the first and only recourse to justice.

After the act, none of the Laotian assassins was arrested or punished, and all returned to their normal lives. There were no revenge murders or reprisals. No blood money was ever paid. In fact, the assassins were quietly celebrated as heroes.

Westermeyer came across no evidence the assassins suffered from psychopathic illness or murderous ambition for political office. Nor was there evidence of spontaneous rage—no mob violence or lynchings. The
wrong person was never killed, and no assassin missed. “Cool decisiveness” weighed in all cases, Westermeyer wrote in a monograph on the subject.

At the time, Westermeyer couldn't help but compare the Lao assassinations to contemporaneous ones in the United States—John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X. While the American assassins were mostly loners, the Laotian assassins were anything but. All well integrated into their communities, they conducted the murders from an unshakable conviction that the murders served their communities. Again, personal grievance or revenge played no part in any of it.

“After each assassination, there was this big sigh of communal relief,” Westermeyer said. “They were, I guess you might say, family affairs—the face-to-face settlings of scores. But hasn't murder of this sort been around for eons?”

He paused a moment before adding, “But I suppose what the Lao assassinations really come down to is conflict resolution, albeit the extreme form. The sacrifice of one man to save society.”

Kill or perish.

Beirut, December 1982: It's the rare moment when some earth-shattering event comes barreling down on you like a freight train with its brakes burned out . . . and you're too blind and deaf to jump out of the way. I got my opportunity when I decided to make a short personal trip to Lebanon. Like most things in my life, it took me a long time to put it in perspective.

When I cabled the chief in Beirut to ask permission to make a visit, I
detected in its terse reply a sotto voce bitching. Did I really need to take a vacation to Beirut less than six months after the Israeli invasion? In my favor, though, the chief wasn't exactly in a position to say no. For some months now, the Reagan administration had been billing Lebanon as this phoenix miraculously risen from the ashes. It was as safe as a Sunday-afternoon stroll down Fifth Avenue.

As the plane started to circle Beirut on approach, I fell in love with the country at first sight. The snowcapped mountains spilling out into the sea were a thing of great beauty. My enthusiasm wasn't in the least dampened by Beirut's shot-up, rocketed terminal leaking rain by the bucketfuls. I'm not sure what it was that attracted me to the Lebanese. Their effervescence, their polyglot chattering, all the pandemonium they made tempered by a Mediterranean lightheartedness? Okay, even at the time I knew it was the sort of love only an outsider could feel. If I'd been through the shit the Lebanese had, my take would have been a bit more jaundiced.

Here in a nutshell is Lebanon's recent history: Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, thanks to a Palestinian attempt on Israel's ambassador to London on June 3. It was a massive display of force meant to teach the Palestinians a lesson they'd never forget. But three months later, Lebanon's pick for president was assassinated before he could assume office, which caused things to really fall apart. President Reagan sent the Marines in as peacekeepers, but they were soon sucked into a hopeless quagmire that included the October 23, 1983, bombing of the Marine barracks at the airport. Reagan wisely threw in the towel, pulling out the Marines. The tally: One assassination attempt, one assassination, and one suicide bomber forced the United States to abandon its old dream of turning Lebanon back into the Switzerland of the Middle East. But I've gotten ahead of myself. The unraveling wouldn't start until two months after I left Beirut.

I also owe it to you to let you know that as I walked out of the terminal I didn't have the faintest premonition of the coming storm. In fact,
when I caught sight of a jeep with three Marines chatting with a couple of Lebanese kids, the Stars and Stripes snapping in the wind, I fell for the phoenix myth hook, line, and sinker: America, indeed, was about to succeed in Lebanon where so many had failed.

Leave it to me to find the worst taxi driver in Lebanon. On the ten-mile-or-so run into town, the lunatic weaved through traffic like he was at the wheel of a penny-arcade race car, deliberately aiming for the cars in front of him, only peeling off with an inch to spare. Another challenge to his virility seemed to be the craters in the road. He'd laugh evilly every time one of them would catapult me into the ceiling. Never for a moment did he take his hand off the horn of his ancient piece-of-shit Mercedes, which, by the way, had three bullet holes through the front window at head level. The icing on the cake was when he'd yell back at me: “Welcome to Lebanon! I love America! Give me visa!”

I noticed that the airport road ran right through a miserable slum. But like most foreigners, I ignored it, sort of like how people ignore Jamaica as they drive into Manhattan from JFK. Beirut's glitter is what I came to see, not its ugly poor.

As soon as he pulled up in front of the Palm Beach, I grabbed my backpack, dropped a twenty-dollar bill into the front seat, flung open the door, and ran into the hotel before the maniac could stop me. I didn't care that what I'd left him was probably ten times more than the going rate, just as long as I didn't have to argue about the visa.

While the outside of the Palm Beach was scalloped with bullet holes and shrapnel and its shot-out windows were covered with plastic sheeting, the inside was a sea of tranquillity. The manager himself—white linen shirt, a heavy gold watch, cashmere blazer—showed me to my room. He opened the curtain to a luminous topaz sea.

He stood behind me and pointed at an abandoned, fire-scarred Venetian-style pink building a little ways up the Corniche: “The St-Georges.”

If you had to pick one center of French colonial gravity in this city, it
would be the venerable and celebrated St-Georges hotel. British secret agent turned KGB mole turned defector Kim Philby started to drink himself to death here. It was supposedly Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's favorite hotel in Beirut. At the beginning of the civil war, the hotel's last guests famously fled in armored limousines, leaving the hotel to be looted and burned.

“They're going to refurbish it,” the manager said. I thought about telling him it was “restore” it, but I didn't; his English was better than my French and Arabic would ever be.

Right next to the St-Georges sat a row of one-story shops with sun-faded touristy crap in the windows. In one window, though, there was on display what looked like Greek and Roman antiquities. Could they be genuine?

Going out for a walk that night along the Corniche, I didn't see any lights on in the hotel other than my own. Was I the Palm Beach's only guest? There was always a lot of banging and yelling in the kitchen, but I never ran across any other diners. No wonder the manager had so much time for me.

Every morning when I came down, he'd be at breakfast. “Our establishment has everything one could ask for,” he'd say, pulling back my chair. “Bacon and eggs, French toast, Cheerios.” His smile couldn't hide his disappointment when I would stick with a croissant and a coffee.

One night a violent thunderstorm knocked out the electricity. It wasn't ten minutes later that there was a knock on my door. The manager was outside holding a candle cupped in his hand as if he were a monk. He came in and set it on my side table. He asked if I needed anything. When I said no, he said he would be downstairs. I decided he must live in the hotel.

I spent my days walking around Beirut. I'd start off heading due east in the direction of Martyrs' Square and the old gold market. The fighting had reduced this part of town to great mounds of rubble crowned by weeds and saplings. The old Ottoman buildings still standing looked
like sandcastles hit by a wave, some with their top floors completely blasted off. When I'd seen enough of this, I'd usually make my way to the old Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyah, which the fighting had barely touched.

Afternoons, I'd usually end up in Hamra, the old business district. There were a couple of first-class bookstores there where you could find just about anything decent written on the Middle East. I'd buy as many books as I could carry and head back to the Palm Beach. Invariably, I'd stop at the Café de Paris and start leafing through them, sitting among the old men in their elegant suits drinking coffee and reading newspapers.

I'd been living in the Middle East almost a year now, but I was still in the first inning of a furious catch-up game, trying to make sense of the place. The unfamiliar names, the important dates, the sharp, unexplained turns in history were an endless source of confusion. For instance, how was it that Egypt and Syria, two countries that don't share a border, managed to unite as one country for a couple of years? It was nuts.

What I did figure out early on was that I'd better understand the logic of the violence that was so endemic to the Middle East. If the locals have a nuanced sense of it, I'd better have one too.

When I was in the middle of studying Arabic in Washington, D.C., I'll never forget watching on television the 1981 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat. I kept asking myself what kind of people these were, the Egyptian president's own soldiers, approaching the reviewing stand in a half crouch and emptying their Kalashnikov rifles into him. What induced them to take a life in such a disciplined way, not to mention trade their own lives to destroy someone they didn't know? More important, I wanted to know how it was that Sadat's assassination failed to change anything in Egypt. Because the fact is the Egyptian military came out of it all the stronger.

The 1982 assassination of the Lebanese president-elect seemed to me
to be of a different order altogether. It set in motion hidden forces that sharply altered the course of events, becoming a shot to the head of the Lebanese phoenix. Why then did Sadat's assassination fail to move history but the Lebanese president-elect's did?

One obvious answer is that a junta runs Egypt, meaning the generals are pretty much interchangeable and easily replaced. While on the other hand, Lebanon is a continuously negotiated compromise between squabbling tribes. When France gave Lebanon its independence in 1943, the pro-French Maronite Christians were left in charge, controlling both the presidency and the army. But as the demographics shifted against the Maronites in favor of the Muslims, the consensus naturally started to fray. It didn't help that the last census was conducted in 1932, leaving a lot of people to simmer about usurped power. It was made all the worse after a large influx of Palestinian refugees arrived in the seventies and started to arm themselves. Couple that with the fact there are eighteen officially recognized religious sects in Lebanon and the country became the perfect laboratory for me to study political violence.

My way of imposing order on chaos was to write down important facts and dates on three-by-five cards and arrange them in various orders. For instance, I noted down the name of the young man who had loaned out the apartment used to blow up the hall where the Lebanese president-elect was giving a speech. He was a secret member of an obscure Christian political party called the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The party had a long history of violence, but naïf that I was, I couldn't fully grasp its motivations for murdering the president-elect. It was something I promised myself to look into one day, adding new cards to my stacks.