The Perfect Kill (7 page)

Hajj Radwan intuitively understood that the capable assassin doesn't measure his worth by the size of his budget, how many people are under him, or the number of fancy gadgets he possesses. And he definitely doesn't play the numbers game. Toting up body counts is a mark of failure and impotence, like a waterfront whore counting her tricks at the end of a night. In political murder, no one gives a shit how hard you try or how many times you do something, but rather how well you do it.

Other professional murderers bring the same sort of asceticism to the act. The Mexican drug cartels behead their victims with axes and kitchen knives, deliberately leaving the remains by the side of the road to make people understand just how ruthless they are . . . and to send the implicit message they'll happily do it again.

I would like to have been a fly on the wall when Hajj Radwan watched news reports coming out of Iraq about our attempts to assassinate Saddam in the early days of the war. How our cruise missiles smashed up a lot of stuff and killed a lot of people, but never came close to Saddam. I also wonder what he said about our emptying the Treasury for the “Global War on Terror,” the six trillion dollars we spent on it, or whatever the final tally is. Could it not have seemed a grotesque amount of money to assassinate one man, Osama bin Laden?

Count on the most important pieces of a plan failing at exactly the wrong moment. Double up on everything—two sets of eyes, two squeezes of the trigger, double-prime charges, two traitors in the enemy's camp.

I'll never forget when they walked us through a mock ambush at CIA boot camp. It was a muggy September night, the cicadas shrieking as if they were the ones about to be murdered. One of our instructors shepherded us, as if we were lambs, into a half-buried bunker. Its six-inch-slit Plexiglas window looked down on a concrete bridge spanning a shallow gully. He told us to put in our earplugs.

At first, there was only the pulsing blackness of night. Then came the sound of a chain dragging over concrete. I couldn't tell what was going on until a car came into view crossing the bridge in our direction. Its lights were off. Another one followed close behind. There were four cars
in all, a single chain pulling them roughly across the bridge. It reminded me of an automated car wash.

As soon as the first car reached our side of the bridge, there was a piercing light, followed by a boom and a ball of flame that climbed into the sky and vanished. Flipped over on its back, the car looked like a smoking, dead roach. From the far side of the bridge came a second explosion, slamming the last car into the one in front of it. The two cars in between were now hemmed in.

From somewhere on the riverbank behind us, someone slammed a rocket-propelled grenade into car number two. A second rocket hit it, shoving the car back a couple of feet. A heavy machine gun pounded bullets and tracers into number two. A second machine gun followed suit. Number two shuddered and started to burn, revealing the landscape for the first time. It was one way to see Virginia's Tidewater.

The next morning they took us back to inspect the damage. The rubber dummy in the backseat of car number two was a melted blob. “I don't think this fellow had much of a chance, do you?” the instructor said, wheeling around to see if anyone dared challenge him.

He didn't use the word, but I knew he was talking about redundancy—the two initial explosions, the two rocket-propelled grenades, the two heavy machine guns. If one failed, the second one would step in to take over. It's basic tactics familiar to any soldier.

The need to compensate for human shortcomings, frailty, and run-of-the-mill stupidity won't come as news to anyone. It's as basic as two eyes, two ears, and two kidneys. But a fail-safe redundancy is absolutely indispensable for the assassin, if for no other reason than he's unlikely to get a second chance.

Police SWAT teams build redundancy into their “entries”—two “flash-bang” grenades thrown in each room; two snipers; two shooters, one entering a room “high,” the other “low”; two bullets into a perp. The Navy SEAL credited with killing bin Laden reportedly went by the book, shooting him twice. “Double tapping” the bad guy has entered Hollywood's pop vocabulary.

Redundancy has even been built into assault rifles. The Israelis have on the market a two-barrel, one-trigger assault rifle called the Gilboa Snake. According to the advertising, “The features of the Gilboa Snake enables operators to accurately deliver two rounds into a target without the delay of cycling and the felt recoil which make ‘double taps' difficult to group.”

Redundancy also fits in with general strategy. On August 23, 2013, two car bombs went off in a crowded neighborhood in Tripoli, Lebanon. On December 29, 2013, Chechen Islamic rebels blew up the main train station in Volgograd, and then a trolley bus the next day. And there was Hajj Radwan's twin attacks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, one against the Marines and the other against French paratroopers. The number two—or, even better, multiple attacks—advertises that you enjoy the advantage of military reserves.

The siblings of redundancy are speed, surprise, terrain, and faultless intelligence. The less redundancy built into an assassination, the more the other elements must compensate for it. The ultimate redundancy, although the least efficient manifestation of violence, is massive firepower.

Surprise, of course, is also critical. No wink and a nod beforehand, no foreplay, no threats. The dummy in car number two wasn't offered the slightest hint of what was waiting for him at the bridge. The attack occurring at night added to the element of surprise.

As for speed, the attack on the convoy, from beginning to end, couldn't have lasted more than two minutes. It unspooled much too
quickly for the human mind to react in a coherent fashion. There wasn't even enough time to choose between fight or flight.

The terrain was also ideal. Once number two started across the bridge—a narrow defile without escape—his fate was sealed. It was like catching someone coming down an escalator, trapped on either side, and people blocking escape in front and back. It's as easy as shooting a rubber duck in a bathtub.

Precise intelligence is the icing on the cake. The composition of number two's convoy, his route, and his schedule were all known to his assassins. The only thing better would have been if the assassins had been informed in advance where the convoy would stop to let number two get out to take a piss.

Nothing I saw of assassination in the years since my training changed my view of it. Follow the elementary rules, build in redundancy and superb intelligence, and a mark doesn't stand a chance.

—

I
was caught up in my first real assassination in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, an Israeli one. It came with the three classic elements of political murder—surprise, speed, precision. The one thing I wasn't so sure about was the intelligence, my sole contribution to it.

It all started when a Lebanese cop I knew knocked on my door to tell me he'd discovered a notorious Palestinian militant living next to him. When I asked him if he was sure he had the right Palestinian, he shrugged his shoulders: “It's got to be him.” He was able to pick out the man's apartment building from an aerial photograph.

Without a way to confirm or disprove the cop's story, I sent a message around the region to see if anyone had anything to add. My answer came back very early the next morning in the guise of a violent pounding on my door. The cop shouted through the door that the apartment building he'd flagged to me had just been hit and
completely destroyed by two F-16s belonging to you know who. (Two for the redundancy of it.)

I quickly decamped, anxious that the next person pounding on my door would be a Palestinian assassin bent on vengeance. As we drove away into the night, I was all but certain the F-16s were dispatched based on good intelligence; mine only tipped the scale. If I was on to him, they had to be, right?

The other thing I thought about is that in a time of war it's an organic and slippery progression from spare, dagger-in-the-heart assassination to falling into the lazy man's trap of bringing to bear massive overwhelming force. For instance, two F-16s with big bombs. Like I said, it's the time-honored default when the other elements of assassination aren't possible.

At the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, the American Air Force did its best to assassinate Saddam, launching six separate cruise missile attacks on sites where he was supposed to be hiding. (In Pentagonese, it's called “destroying command nodes” rather than assassination.) None, though, came even close. It was like hunting a rabbit running at full tilt with a .50-caliber machine gun: It tears up a lot of earth, but leaves the rabbit to make it back to its hole and have a good laugh about it. But when does blindly spraying bullets in all directions ever lead to a sought-after outcome?

A group of Libyan Salafis I used to meet in Khartoum once tried to assassinate Gaddafi. The best ruse they could come up with was to commandeer a trash truck as their Trojan horse. A half dozen of them hid in the back, while the driver went through the routine of a pickup at Gaddafi's main palace in Tripoli. Although not quite sure where they were on the compound, the assassins jumped out, guns blazing. Gaddafi was nowhere in the vicinity, leaving the palace guards to cut them down at their leisure. When I delicately asked my Salafi friend what they were thinking, he replied, “Allah told us to do it.”

No surprise it was the Germans who brought Teutonic precision and
fastidiousness to political murder. In 1979 the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, made an attempt on Alexander Haig, NATO's commander at the time. The venue was a bridge, the weapon fifty pounds of explosives buried in the pavement. While the RAF understood the principle of hitting the mark while passing through a narrow defile, they mistimed the detonation and only wounded two of Haig's bodyguards. Everyone expected the RAF to get better, and that they did.

Deutsche Bank knew that its chairman, Alfred Herrhausen, like other captains of German industry, was a potential target for assassination and accordingly spared no money to protect him. It furnished him with a heavily armored car and an escort of bodyguards. But what Deutsche Bank couldn't anticipate was a military-style assault masked by the innocent and banal.

As Herrhausen's Mercedes pulled away from his house in Bad Homburg the morning of November 30, 1989, no one noticed the bicycle by the side of the road. Nor, of course, did anyone notice the infrared beam crossing the road at tire level. It was a typical morning, nothing out of place, nothing suspicious, another routine trip to work.

Herrhausen's Mercedes broke the infrared beam closing the bomb's electrical circuit, which in turn set off the ten-kilogram explosive charge hidden in the bicycle's saddlebag. Although the charge was relatively small, it was perfectly lethal thanks to the fact that the concave shape of the explosives projected a two-kilogram copper metal dish at something like three kilometers per second. The extreme heat caused the dish to melt into an elongated ball, a “carrot.” The carrot passed through Herrhausen's door, severed his legs, and exited the Mercedes on the other side. Herrhausen bled to death.

Experts call the device that killed Herrhausen a “platter” charge. In the Iraq War such devices would become known as EFPs—explosively formed penetrators. With an explosive-to-dish ratio of 4:1, they're capable of cutting through the thickest of armor. They're the equivalent of a
sniper's rifle, which for the Secret Service makes them one of its darkest nightmares. With properly formed explosives, a correctly shaped dish, and an infrared firing device, no president is safe.

So far so good, but how did the RAF learn about platter charges? They're not something you read about in
The Anarchist Cookbook
.

—

T
he CIA first introduced platter charges in the Middle East during the first Afghan war (1979–1989). By packing a small, locally manufactured stove with explosives, the mujahideen could drive the curved bottom through any Soviet armor plating. From Afghanistan, the technology passed through Iran to various parts of the Middle East, including Lebanon. Hezbollah picked up the technology and perfected it.

Some reports have it that the East German secret police, the Stasi, trained the RAF in platter charges. But there were other equally plausible reports that pointed to certain Palestinian explosives experts based in Lebanon. While I'm not certain how it would have worked, it intrigued me that the Palestinian group in question was at the time allied with Hajj Radwan. Did Hajj Radwan have anything to do with training the RAF? It's another one of those things easy to believe but impossible to prove.

The Lebanese first figured out how to defend against a Herrhausen-style attack by adopting a sort of reverse redundancy. Militia commanders would move around in convoys of identical cars, sometimes up to twenty. Smoked windows and no license plates made it impossible for any platter-charge-wielding assassin to determine which car the militia commander was riding in.

Short of being able to afford a twenty-car convoy, the next best way to avoid a military-style assassination is to build unpredictability and randomness into one's existence. In this regard, Herrhausen made every mistake in the book: He left home for work at the same time every morning, he lived at an easily located address, and his neighborhood
was lightly trafficked, which offered the RAF a clear field of fire. (It's another reason not to live in the suburbs.)

—

H
ajj Radwan understood that it's our little habits and routines that offer the assassin his best chance. He didn't do things like commute to work, visit his mother, or attend annual trade shows. If he had a regular barber or doctor, he didn't advertise it. He was nowhere to be seen on his birthday. But above all, he never strutted around like a peacock.

Various sources agree that in the early days Hajj Radwan led the most disciplined of ghostly existences, avoiding all repetitive practices. He never left by the same door he entered, never slept under the same roof two nights in a row, and never identified himself with a particular car or telephone number.

Hajj Radwan brought the same strict regime to everything else he did. There was no detail too small for him not to personally attend to, from making sure the charges were dual primed to making sure everyone got to an appointment on time. He knew a bad battery or someone falling asleep at the switch could change the course of history. He knew he was only as strong as his weakest link, and the weakest link was only as strong as its weakest link.

For the first year in Beirut, I'd come in early every morning to check the overnight chatter, looking for that little weak link. I filled my boxes with three-by-five cards. I got to know Hajj Radwan's voice so I could pick it out of a noisy room. I knew his wolf pack almost as well as he did. But it was soon apparent that the chatter alone wasn't doing it. For a start, it wasn't in real time. While the chatter was grabbed out of the air in Lebanon, it first bounced its way back to Washington and only after a twenty-four-hour turnaround did it come back to Beirut. I'd find out Hajj Radwan had been at a certain place at a certain time. But so what? It was too late to get there before him. It was the same with satellite photography, which we got long after the fact. Even if we caught sight of Hajj
Radwan's car at Ayn al-Hilweh, it only told me he'd come and gone, not where he was going next.