The Perfect Kill (11 page)

I had no great hope that a quick trip to Macedonia to look at Philip's skeleton would turn Justine into a classics scholar or make her mindful of her duties. But she did come home with another lesson of sorts.

While transiting the Frankfurt airport, Mother decided she needed to stock up on cigarettes. The duty-free queue snaked around the store, putting everyone in a foul mood. That is except for the cashiers, who, unperturbed, worked at their usual plodding pace. When my mother finally got to the front, she graced the cashier with one of her indulgent and endearing smiles, then patiently explained that the magnetic strip on her Visa card wasn't working properly—the cashier would have to manually enter the card's number.

Things went downhill from there when the cashier pretended she didn't hear Mother and pointlessly continued to swipe her Visa card. Mother asked if she spoke English. The cashier looked up for an instant. “My English is very good.” She went back to swiping the card.

Mother puffed herself up like a blowfish for the one and only main assault: “You
fucking
Nazis. You never learned anything!”

The duty-free shop fell dead quiet, no one even thinking about a counterattack.

—

S
hakespeare's
Hamlet
bounced around in my head from the first time I read it. It makes a wonderful argument for doing nothing—I don't know—take your trust fund and go off someplace quiet and tend to your comforts and hobbies. Or in my case, bide my time until I could collect my pension. And while I'm at it, who granted me the divine-like power of determining life and death? It's something I tried not to think about in Beirut.

There's few of us who don't suffer the qualms of taking another's life. Assassinating Hitler is one thing, but when it comes to political murder in general, there just isn't a manual for it. Our DNA just isn't designed to coolly parse through the pluses and minuses of it. Only psychopaths are
truly capable of cold-bloodedly pulling the trigger on a stranger. Nor, for that matter, are we even inclined to talk about it. Try raising the merits of assassination at the next office Christmas party.

O'Callaghan wrote in his memoir that later, after Flanagan's assassination, he heard Flanagan hadn't, in fact, been involved in the torture of IRA prisoners. It made him wonder whether working for the Special Branch, an organization that helped Britain assassinate members of the IRA, was enough to justify his murder. By that standard, anyone working for any institution associated with the British government would be a potential target.

In my hunt for Hajj Radwan, I had to take my lessons where I found them. It would have helped had my conscience been a completely empty vessel. Assassination isn't something you work yourself up to in installments. There is no
Assassination for Dummies
.

Anyhow, as the attentive reader has probably caught on by now, Mother was in her own right something of an assassin. When it came to fight-or-flight, she never dithered. Intuitively, she grasped the tactics and, in particular, how, with an uncompromising coup de main, it's possible to seize the field of battle, letting your enemy know flight is his only option.

When my attempt on Saddam was about to blow up in the press, I called her to give her the quick and dirty. She got through the decision to murder Saddam fine, but when it came to the circus I'd let it turn into, she snorted. Was that the best the CIA could do? And when she heard about the FBI investigation, her only question was whether that other set of fools didn't have something better to do with their time.

Mother was born with an on/off switch, while most of us have to build one from scratch, then keep it from rusting.

There are few things more fatal to your cause than an incompetent assassin. If he fails spectacularly, you fail spectacularly. Which means a hard vetting of an assassin is absolutely critical.

As I've said, Hajj Radwan got all of his best people off the front in the south. The crucible of war is the most reliable guide to who's got the right stuff and who doesn't. And then, of course, there's the Darwin effect—the truly incompetent are self-selected out. It's a harsh regime, but it's the only one that works.

Not that this will come as news to anyone who needs solid people on a team, but the Navy SEALs will run a new recruit through a grueling basic-training course not so much to count the number of push-ups or sit-ups he can do but to see at what point he will crack. But it wouldn't be until they got to Afghanistan or Iraq and saw combat before the real vetting was complete. New York investment bankers will test an intern by sending him out to buy lunch, the idea being that if he can't keep a dozen sandwich orders straight in his head, he'll never be able to juggle millions of dollars of complicated trades. But the real vetting comes when he's sent off to play with real money.

What it all comes down to is examining a person's flaws and weaknesses rather than his advertised strengths. In battle, or when the world otherwise starts to go to shit, straight A's and paper credentials count for nothing. A Harvard MBA won't tell you whether someone's going to run at the sound of gunfire. Nor will it tell you who's inclined to betray you and who won't.

It might be different the day we're able to bar code people—I don't know—pull up on our iPhones their genome sequencing, grades, rap sheets, credit history, SAT scores, applications for unemployment, and every relevant e-mail and text, both sent and received. Or even better yet, when they make an app to image someone's neural networks in
order to tell us exactly what he's thinking. In the meantime, the only thing we can count on is that the person in front of us isn't the person we see. Which means there's no getting around compelling a new recruit to leap through burning hoops at a full-tilt run to see how he fares. The only truth, as Hajj Radwan would have told us, is pain.

To be sure, it's not a matter of only a one-time early vetting. For instance, there's nothing more corrosive than the twin evils of money and narcissism. The kind of person who reads
Wine Spectator
, treats his instincts as adventures, looks for the perfect four-hour-a-week job, and, failing that, marries into money is too distracted to be a good assassin. Whatever serious vetting he got early on no longer counts.

It's something Hajj Radwan couldn't have missed. He had a front seat to the Red Prince's loud and fiery end, saw how he'd gone soft and lax and paid the price. Like so many other Palestinian exiles, the Red Prince treated Beirut like a bordello and spa rather than a military base. Unable to resist fast cars, fast women, and grand apartments on the Corniche, the Red Prince was tied up attending to his comforts instead of the mechanics of murder and survival. Coddled and inattentive, he offered himself up to the Israelis on a silver platter. What a dumbshit, Hajj Radwan must have thought: You never, ever let your guard down in this business.

Again, it goes back to the fact that the assassin is only as strong as his weakest point. When it fails, so does the whole enterprise. It's a lesson the IRA had a hard time learning.

Exercise violence with vigilant precision and care. Grievances are incarnated in a man rather than in a tribe, nation, or civilization. Blindly and stupidly lashing out is the quickest way to forfeit power.

I'd learned the hard way in Beirut that Hajj Radwan's front door was bolted, sandbagged, and trapped. And if somehow I did miraculously blast my way through it, the place for sure would be empty. No, I'd have to up my game to beat the bastard, find a better iteration of Alice. She or he would also be from Hajj Radwan's old days, only still active. And of course, more worthy of confidence than Alice—grounded, steady on the trigger, ready to sacrifice himself. Okay, it's a résumé befitting the second apparition of the messiah. But I didn't see an alternative.

Not long before Hajj Radwan was assassinated, I was in Gaza making a documentary for British television about suicide bombers. One thread we followed was the 1996 Israeli assassination of a young Palestinian
engineer turned Hamas master bomb maker. In sheer number of kills, the man ranked up there with Hajj Radwan. Inside Hamas, he was known simply as “the Engineer.”

As a teenager the Engineer had taught himself to repair electrical appliances, which proved useful for making car bombs and suicide vests. His technical abilities, combined with a wanton cruelty, put him at the top of Israel's kill list.

A fixer in Gaza arranged for our crew to film the apartment where the Engineer had met his end. With the neighborhood's cheap, exposed cinder-block construction, potholed streets, and vegetable pushcarts, we could have been anywhere in Gaza. There was no address on the apartment building or, for that matter, any other good way to distinguish it from the neighboring buildings.

A young man and an elderly woman showed us into a small bedroom at the back of their second-floor apartment. It was spare, clean, the walls newly whitewashed. The bed was neatly made. I walked over to the window to see what the Engineer's last view of life would have been. It looked down on a pile of broken masonry and trash. Prisons have better views.

I suspected only a handful of people knew the Engineer had been holing up here, and visitors must have been extremely rare. Cut off from family and friends as he was, I wondered whether he came to regret the path he'd taken. Or did it only deepen his hate?

I examined the bed more closely. The mattress obviously had been replaced, and someone now slept here. I sat on the bed exactly where he'd sat the last moments of his life, my back also against the wall. There was no sign of spalling from the explosion on the wall; someone had done a good job patching up.

The young man told me what happened that day.

Not having a cell phone of his own, the Engineer would from time to time borrow the phones of visitors. When an uncle of the apartment's owner came to visit, he agreed to let the Engineer borrow his phone so
the Engineer could talk to his father. The phone soon rang. The uncle listened for a moment and turned to the Engineer. “It's your father,” he said. “He wants to say hi.”

Not getting up from the bed, the Engineer reached for the phone and held it to his ear. “Abi?” My father?

Did the Engineer notice that the uncle's cell phone was a bit heavy? Or did he even stop to think the Israelis were eavesdropping on his father's telephone?

Before the Engineer could say another word, the telephone exploded, taking off a quarter of his head. He died instantly.

No one else in the room was injured. The uncle, to whom the Israelis had given the phone, fled Gaza for Israel before he could be arrested.

The point of this story is that I needed someone like the uncle, someone able to put himself in the same room with Hajj Radwan.

Paris, June 8, 1992: The man at the center of this story is still in the game, so I'll do him the service of loaning him an alias, Claude. It wouldn't be the one he'd pick, but it's better than reminding people he'd gotten caught up in a notorious assassination in central Paris.

It was a colleague who'd first introduced us one wet October afternoon at what's called in espionage a “turn-over” meeting, the occasion when the old handler passes off an informer to the new handler.

Turn-overs can be dicey. The new handler's never sure the informer will take to him, while the informer's never sure whether the new handler will keep him on the books. Money's the most common problem, but so is “production.” Like most plodding bureaucracies, Langley suffers from the what-new-have-you-told-me-today syndrome. If a new handler starts to hit that note too soon, it's not unknown for the informer to storm out of a meeting and never come back.

Not that Claude ever considered himself an informer, at least in the sense that the CIA wanted him to be—i.e., its exclusive property. Claude, in fact, didn't take a salary, but he was more than happy to play the role of a high-end connector useful to a lot of people but beholden to none. How he made his money wasn't our business.

The appointment was set for three at a café on Avenue Friedland, two blocks down from the Étoile. My colleague and I took a table in the glassed-in front part of the café. We didn't care who saw us, including French intelligence. We assumed that sooner or later they'd find out about our association with Claude, if they didn't know already. So why make it look sinister by meeting in a dark alley or something?

The rain started again, black umbrellas unfurling on cue. My colleague pointed out a round, shortish man coming our way. His umbrella was up too. He was in an expensive mouse-gray cashmere coat, a silk scarf at the neck, and a Borsalino sitting squarely on the top of his head. He had a dead cigar in his free hand. He grinned broadly when he caught sight of us.

As he pushed through the door, Claude caught the waiter's eye and ordered a
serré
. A triple espresso. We stood up to shake his hand. He sat down, offering us cigars from a leather case—Cubans, Romeo y Julietas. In those days everyone in Paris seemed to smoke, including enjoying cigars in cramped cafés. If you didn't like it, you could take your coffee and sit outside in the rain. Neither of us took a cigar.

I don't remember what we talked about; it was more than twenty years ago. But I do remember liking Claude right away. Like me, he was a man curious about the world. He cast his net as far as it would go, always on a plane to go meet some exotic character.

After I got to know Claude, I wondered if there was a bottom to the well of people he knew. He'd met Hajj Radwan in the early eighties in Beirut, and later ran into him in Tehran from time to time. A couple of times I tried to persuade Claude to help me against Hajj Radwan, but he
categorically refused. Didn't I understand that this was a bright red line in our relationship?

I'd normally meet Claude at least once a week, either over drinks or dinner. Or sometimes at his apartment. Yeah, I know, for amateur espionage aficionados, this isn't a practice a smart operative would follow with a real informer. But like I said, the French probably knew about us. If we had something we didn't want them to eavesdrop on, we'd go outside on the street to talk.

One day Claude mentioned in passing that he would be shepherding around town an official from the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was a rising star in the PLO, and Arafat supposedly considered him like a son. There was even talk of his one day taking over PLO security. His name was Atef Bseiso.

Atef may have been a man worth knowing, but he came with some serious baggage. The Israelis privately accused him of helping plan the kidnapping and murder of eleven athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. I never got a good look at the Munich evidence, which left me basically agnostic on Atef's role. Not to mention that the Israelis aren't exactly infallible when it comes to the Palestinians: They infamously assassinated a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, mistaking him for the Red Prince.

Either way, my real interest in Atef was his connections to Hajj Radwan. For a couple of years now, we'd been picking up pretty good chatter that Atef's man in Lebanon met Hajj Radwan fairly regularly. The venue was the same Palestinian refugee camp I'd visit years later as a journalist, Ayn al-Hilweh.

When I asked Claude about the relationship between Atef and Hajj Radwan, he said that Atef would only tell him they'd meet from time to time in Algeria. But nothing more. Did Claude know more than he was saying? I could only guess.

Atef was the real thing, the latchkey to Hajj Radwan's back door. I
didn't tell Claude what I had in mind and only asked him to set up a dinner with Atef.

In the taxi there, I asked Claude about Munich. “He was a kid,” Claude said. “He had no idea what was going on. It's bullshit.”

By the time we arrived at the restaurant that Claude had picked in the Bois de Boulogne, Atef was already sitting at the table. A bear of a man with beetling brows and a strong handshake, he had the manners of a diplomat rather than a spook. His English was good. School-learned, I guessed.

It was a long, cheery dinner with lots of wine. It was 1991; the first intifadah was winding down, and the PLO was waging a charm offensive on all fronts; we talked politics, batting around this one question: If the PLO was to really put down the ax, would Israel forget the past?

My impression was that Atef was one Palestinian ready for peace. But that didn't necessarily mean he was ready to sacrifice Hajj Radwan to further the endeavor. In any case, it was too sensitive a question to ask at the first meeting and definitely not in front of Claude.

As we waited outside for our taxis, Atef promised to come back to Paris the following month to continue our meetings. But as Claude would relay to me, Atef got busy and had to postpone. But I didn't care: He was worth the wait.

—

W
hat I still had to do was figure out whether Atef had any inclination to play Trojan horse to Hajj Radwan's Troy. Did he have a price like so many Palestinians? Or would it be a case of making some political trade for his betraying Hajj Radwan?

This is another gross and unfair generalization, but we looked at the Palestinians as a biddable people. Beaten down, desperate, and poor, they're quick to betray their own, even family. That someone sold out the Engineer didn't come as a surprise to anyone. Just as it didn't come
as a surprise that we were able to buy our way into filming the room the Engineer was assassinated in. It only cost a couple hundred dollars. By comparison, no amount of money would have persuaded Hajj Radwan's people to show us the spot where he'd been assassinated in Damascus. His staged martyrdom museum was all we'd get.

But it wasn't as if Hajj Radwan didn't understand the Palestinians, and all their shortcomings and weaknesses and the lethal trap they represented. He'd grown up with them, fought alongside them, and knew how with the right incentive they'd turn on him in an instant; they were his soft underbelly.

My problem now was determining Atef's price. I'd need a lot more time with him to figure that out. In the meantime, though, I'd need to put the other pieces together.

In Paris, I made a habit of meeting every raving lunatic, criminal imposter, and common fraud who happened to knock on the CIA's front door. They all had some fantastic story to tell, which almost always came with a demand for money. But since ninety-nine percent of the stories I heard were unadulterated bullshit, the tale-tellers never got a penny out of me. But I do have to admit some stories were truly entertaining.

One day in December 1990, a diviner showed up with his divining rod. His proposal was straightforward: If we supplied him with maps of Baghdad, he and his rod would point us to the bunker where Saddam was hiding. Considering that President George H. W. Bush badly wanted to assassinate Saddam rather than occupy Iraq, my genius boss thought we should look into it. It was the no-stone-unturned philosophy. But common sense prevailed back at Langley, and we were instructed to take a pass.

It's not to say that all “walk-ins” were total dead ends. Two months after my meeting with Atef, I got a call from the front gate guard to tell me a “Mr. Walker” wanted to see me.

Standing at the front desk was a rainspout-thin man waiting for me. He looked more Italian than French. In fact, as he would tell me, he was Corsican.

We sat on a bench out front, the din of traffic from the Place de la Concorde forcing us to lean into each other to be heard. I noticed his shoes were scuffed and worn down. How long would it be before he hit me up for money?

To make a long story short, the man, whom I'll call Mario, said he wanted to help the United States against terrorism. His ace in the hole was his large extended “family.” They lived in a lot of interesting parts of the world and knew a lot of interesting people. “People who could greatly help us,” he said. Mario didn't put a name to it, but I knew he was talking about the Corsican mob.

I knew nothing about Corsican mobsters other than their tentacles were into all sorts of very dark places in France. I was intrigued enough to invite him to lunch the next day. I picked a chic restaurant in the Fifth Arrondissement, a place expensive enough to keep away the low-end tourists and cops.

We talked politics, with me quickly getting around to Algeria, where Atef supposedly met Hajj Radwan.

“We've got people there,” Mario chimed in. “Right where they should be.”

I was comfortable with Mario, his French almost as accented as mine. As we parted in front of the restaurant, I gave him my telephone number and told him to call as soon as he was ready to introduce me to the Algerian side of the “family.”

The next day at noon, my phone rang. But rather than Mario, it was my boss: “If you wouldn't mind, please come up.”