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.
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
—RUDYARD KIPLING
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.
As I wrote this book after all of these years, my five broken-down boxes of three-by-fives were indispensable in reconstructing Hajj Radwan’s story. The grainy detail I jotted down on them you won’t find on Google or anywhere else on the Internet. Okay, I understand they at best amount to a partial truth, and are certainly not material that scholars could ever put any stock in. But without them, I’d have to depend on that notorious liar, my memory.
The other thing worth noting is that when I first visited Lebanon in 1982, I knew violence only from a distance—I knew the Vietnam War from protests and watching Walter Cronkite on TV. And to be sure, I never had to face the decision the Lao assassins had to, that binary choice whether to kill or not. And when the CIA did have the occasion to issue me a gun, the only advice offered me was to avoid gunfights at all costs, and of course to never even think of provoking one. In other words, I didn’t have a clue under what conditions murder could be a moral or legitimizing force. Things like self-defense and tyrannicide were too abstract for me to do anything with.
Which brings me to this: To paraphrase Stendhal, the “I” in this book isn’t so much about ego as it is a shortcut to telling a story. I’ve written about my hunt for Hajj Radwan in other books, as I have my Iraq story. While I would have preferred to avoid the self-plagiarizing, I can’t because my understanding of political violence depends on those events. And anyhow, the way I look at it, I needed to sit through Act III—Hajj Radwan’s assassination—before I could complete my journey through political murder. This will sound pathologically callous, but it’s a fact that you have to watch something die before you can truly understand it.
Finally, you need to know that there was no getting around my CIA censors, which in practical terms meant that I’ve unfortunately been uable to write about the true set-piece plot against Hajj Radwan. It left me with writing about a couple of sideshows. It’s for this same reason I’ve had to alter the names of sources, change personal details, and adjust time frames. And for reasons too obscure to bother with here, I can’t get into all the details of my CIA career. What I can say is that I was assigned to Beirut from 1986 to 1988, and then spent three years in Paris—the main years of the Hajj Radwan story. I understand that leaving out the key event is akin to Homer writing the Odyssey but omitting the scene where Odysseus returns to Ithaca. But there’s nothing to be done about it. In the end, though, does any of this really matter? It’s a rulebook rather than history I’m trying to write.
I don’t intend to give away the ending here, but what I will do is state the obvious: The utility of political murder can only be judged in context and time. Assassination may have worked for the Laotians at a certain point in their history, but that doesn’t mean it’s a universal instrument of justice. Like pornography, you know a good kill when you see it.
—
One night after dark I walked up Hamra Street. It was dry when I started, but the air was heavy and fresh: A storm was on the way. When it did start to rain, I ducked into the first shelter I came across, a below-street-level movie theater. Blade Runner was showing. Since the movie had just come out in theaters in the United States, I expected a crappy pirated copy. But it was the real thing.
Afterward, it was sheeting rain outside. Just like in the movie, broken lights sparked, coils of steam coming off them. It wasn’t keeping people inside, though. People leaning into each other under umbrellas ran along the sidewalks. I watched as a couple disappeared down into an underground nightclub. A French armored personnel carrier passed by, a tricolor at the top of its whip antenna and a soldier in a poncho and beret in the hatch. From under a store marquee, three giggling, sleek Lebanese girls in tight jeans and leather jackets waved at him. He waved back. It was at that moment I decided to ask for a transfer here, to join whatever party this was at the edge of the apocalypse.
The next morning I made a courtesy call on my contact in the embassy. The view from his office made me feel like I was standing on the bow of a ship cutting through an emerald sea. He pointed at a chair for me to sit down.
“I’ve only got five minutes,” he said. “So, what’s up?”
He was a slight, nervous man, someone I couldn’t imagine ever at rest. His tie was loose at the neck, his shirtsleeves rolled up, a pencil behind his ear. I’d met his wife earlier, a charming young woman who also worked in the embassy. I got the impression neither of them was happy about being here.
The phone rang. His French was curt and halting. He said something about pushing back lunch. His secretary stuck her head into the office, walked over to his desk, and left a piece of paper. He picked it up, glanced at it, and dropped it into his out-box with a sigh. When he looked back up at me, it was with an expression that made me wonder if he’d forgotten who I was.
I got to it before he was interrupted again: “Do you think they could use another Arabic speaker here?”
I was about to add that I’d be more than happy to break my next assignment for Beirut, but the phone rang again. He listened for a moment before pointing at the door to let me know he’d need to continue the call in private. I never did get an answer to my question.
For dinner that night I stopped by a bakery and bought a sort of pizza topped with olive oil and thyme. The Lebanese call it manaeesh. When I made it back to Beirut four years later, it pretty much became my staple. Chuck and I would take turns buying a stack of them in the morning, warm out of the oven and wrapped up in waxed paper. When it came Chuck’s turn, he’d come in and drop them on whatever file I was reading, usually Hajj Radwan’s. If the file hadn’t later been burned during a particularly bad round of fighting, I’m sure it would still smell of thyme. If there’s a smell for the world’s most accomplished murderer, in my mind it’s thyme.
Thyme manaeesh is usually meant for breakfast, but right now, as I stood in the window of my room watching the sea, I couldn’t imagine a better dinner. I opened the window to get a better look at the St-Georges’ black hulk, imagining what it must have been like for the last guests leaving in their bulletproof limousines. Did they know it was the end of the Lebanon they’d fallen so hard for?
The traffic along the Corniche was thinning out now, the honking dying away to the occasional beep of a taxi looking for the last fare of the night. I noticed in front of the faux-antiquities store a parked car, two men standing by it smoking cigarettes. The tremulous streetlight played over their clean-shaven faces. Were they waiting for someone?
One of them looked up at my window, saw me, and said something to the other one. They flicked their cigarettes in the middle of the road, got into their car, and drove away. There’s no way to know whether or not they had any connection to what was to follow less than four months later. It’s unlikely, but it doesn’t keep me from associating the two events in my mind.
—
On April 18, 1983, at about a quarter to one, a young man sat behind the wheel of a late-model GMC pickup parked along the Corniche in almost the same spot where the two men had been standing smoking. The truck’s engine was running. According to witnesses, the pickup was sagging on its springs, something heavy under the tarp-covered bed. No one would remember the driver other than he was young, like the tens of thousands of men who’d flocked to Beirut to help with the backbreaking job of rebuilding it after nearly ten years of civil war.
Other witnesses said they saw an old green Mercedes race up the Corniche, weaving through traffic and honking. There were three men in it. When it came abreast of the GMC, the driver of the Mercedes stuck his head out the window and motioned to the GMC’s driver to get going. The GMC’s driver put the pickup in gear and slowly started down the Corniche in the opposite direction the Mercedes had come from.
With lunchtime traffic, it took the GMC about fifteen minutes to reach the American embassy. When the pickup finally came parallel with the embassy’s covered portico, it abruptly dove through a gap in the oncoming traffic and headed up the embassy’s semicircular driveway. When it came to a short flight of stairs leading to the front entrance, it exploded. The embassy’s center collapsed like a failed wedding cake. Among the dead was my embassy contact, as well as sixty-three others. My contact’s charming wife wasn’t in the embassy and survived.
The April 1983 Beirut embassy bombing brought to an end the long love affair between Lebanon and the United States. But the main reason I retell this story is that it’s likely the bomber’s intent was to assassinate President Reagan’s envoy to the Middle East, Ambassador Philip Habib. The evidence for it is circumstantial but, taken in context, convincing.
Within days of the bombing, a local embassy guard confessed under interrogation that the three men in the green Mercedes had stopped by the embassy shortly beforehand to talk to him. They had wanted to know one thing: whether Ambassador Habib was in the building. The guard told them he was, and without another word, the Mercedes roared off, heading up the Corniche—in the direction of the idling GMC.
The guard said he immediately regretted not having told the three that he hadn’t actually seen Habib; he’d just heard someone say something about Habib’s having returned to the embassy. (Habib, in fact, was in a meeting across town, and as a consequence, survived the attempt on him.)
It’s no surprise at all that there were Lebanese who wanted Habib dead. He was Reagan’s point man in the attempt to broker a peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel. With the deal set only in diplomatic aspic, it’s likely they calculated that with Habib gone Reagan would pull out of the negotiations and the treaty talks would collapse. There, of course, was the symbolism of destroying an American embassy, but if the guard was telling the truth—from my reading of the transcripts, I believe he was—the April 1983 embassy bombing was a clear case of a bullet with a man’s name on it.
I’ll go farther out on a speculative limb and say it’s almost certain Habib’s would-be assassins framed the act in their minds as one of survival. The way they looked at it, a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon would lead to a strong central government and ultimately to their destruction. So, à la Laos, it was a case of kill or perish.
Hajj Radwan’s name would eventually be attached to the embassy bombing. But he would only have been twenty-one at the time. Was it possible for a man so young to carry out a complicated attack like this? Based on circumstantial evidence, I believe so. And if I’m right, it meant that at an early age Hajj Radwan recognized the tactical advantages of narrowly channeling violence to obtain a precise objective. It certainly wouldn’t be the first or the last time he’d take or try to take a scalp to end an argument.
A little more than twenty-two years after my first visit to Beirut, a suicide bomber would drive by the Palm Beach on his way to assassinate Hariri. His van would blow up in front of the St-Georges, destroying what was left of it. The St-Georges and the Palm Beach, of course, would only be mute witnesses to history, collateral in what otherwise was a fairly precise attack.
I’ll get more into it later, but Hariri was murdered because the assassins, one, believed he was a threat to their survival, and two, believed he couldn’t be replaced. Like the Lao assassins, they believed they had no choice in the matter. To be sure, not everyone will share this view, but the point is that it’s what Hariri’s assassins believed.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: The assassin can’t afford to entertain abstract notions such as determinism and cowardly fatalism. Nor does he think people are of equal value. Accordingly, he believes it’s possible to adjust history (in his favor) by the destruction of one man.