Just as there are animals that let other animals do their killing for them—vultures and hyenas—employ a trusted proxy when one’s available. If the plot’s uncovered, you’ll have someone to sacrifice.
Paris, December 1988: Mother was an industrial smoker. Whenever she’d visit me on an overseas posting, she’d always get off the plane with a carry-on full of Marlboros, a dozen cartons or so. How she made it through customs all those years, I’m not sure. It probably had something to do with her being built like a squat castle and possessing a bright, open face. She looked nothing like a smuggler.
As soon as I’d install her in her hotel, she’d insist on an elaborate lunch, bottles of both white and red wine. She usually wouldn’t touch her food, though, instead she’d sip her wines, smoke one cigarette after another, and listen to how exactly I intended to entertain her during her visit. Although, by anyone’s standards, her idea of “entertainment” was more like a forced march.
Mother didn’t tour so much as she carpet-bombed. She insisted on missing nothing, on and off the beaten track. We had traipsed through some of the world’s most accommodating and posh capitals and a few of its more exotic sumps—Dushanbe, Tajikistan, for example—but Mother’s visits to Paris were always a nightmare.
The trouble was, she knew the place too well. She had dragged me there as a child so she and her bohemian friends could spend their days in faux-serious discussions in Left Bank cafés. Nights, it was usually a seedy transvestite bar they’d taken a liking to. In May 1968, she hauled me back again so I could see firsthand what a revolution looked like. She’d countenance nothing less than authentic Paris, but my portfolio was the Middle East, not France. The handful of French authentiques I knew weren’t interested in entertaining mothers. I knew a few down-at-the-heel bistros, but that was it. No, I’d have to come up with a serious expedient. And then I got this blade of an icy thought: Why not borrow Mother to help recruit la femme Nikita!
This part takes a bit of background. A few months earlier, as I was about to transfer from Beirut to Paris, I made the rounds of my Lebanese friends to cadge names of people I could call on to jump-start my tour. A journalist who liked a good prank thought about it for a moment before he asked, “Do you want to meet an interesting French girl? She eats only what’s alive.”
He’d first heard of her—I’ll call her Alice—by reputation. It was in the early days of the Lebanese civil war when she showed up in Beirut to fight for the Palestinians, for Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, to be precise. She must have been something like eighteen at the time and, from the descriptions he heard, a real thoroughbred—beautiful and precociously well educated.
Eventually, the journalist saw a TV clip of her running out into the street, firing her Kalashnikov in the direction of a Christian position, a bandolier of ammunition draped over one shoulder. After she’d empty her Kalashnikov, she, like her young Palestinian comrades, would duck back behind a building to reload. “Her eyes were creased, smiling,” he said. “You just knew she loved it.”
For a time, Alice dated the Red Prince, the notorious Fatah security chief who ruled Beirut with a bloody, iron fist. He had a reputation for killing anyone who appeared to be even a remote threat to the Palestinians. After the Israelis found out the Red Prince had been one of the masterminds behind the Munich Olympics massacre, they assassinated him with a car bomb—en route (ironically, given my current intentions) to his mother’s birthday party.
I wrote down Alice’s name, reminding my journalist friend to see if he could find a Paris telephone number for her.
Not long after I arrived in Paris, I ran a trace on Alice. Langley fired back what’s called a “screamer.” Alice wasn’t just a pretty girl with a colorful past, she was an in-the-flesh Angel of Death, almost certainly connected to a half dozen assassinations. One of her boyfriends came out of her apartment and put the key in the ignition only to have the car explode, killing him instantly. At some point, she joined the armed French leftist group Action Directe and then somehow ended up connected with the German Red Army Faction, the assassins of Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen. Her new friends, as they prided themselves, were the kind of people who spend their days plotting murder rather than standing out on the front lawn talking about the weather. There also was the little question about whether she had set up the Red Prince for assassination.
The more I read about this female hyena, the straighter my hair stood on end. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t in jail. By the time I got to the end of the cable, I decided the last thing I needed on a new tour was to hang out with this girl. But with Mother on the way, I had a change of heart. And who could tell whether she might get me back into the game in Beirut.
Alice’s radical past would still be a fresh memory in Beirut. I’d have to actually meet her to find out if she was in a position to dig up a lead on Hajj Radwan. Or, who knows, she might be prepared to serve him up on a platter à la (maybe) the Red Prince. Or, what the hell, pull the trigger herself if she could get close enough. And as long as I’d gotten this far, what better way to approach her than hiding in the wake of Battleship Mom?
When I asked a French police contact to help me find Alice, she looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. It took her a couple of days before she came back with a phone number for Alice, a Left Bank bookstore.
I had no trouble getting Alice on the phone, but when I did, my French, a language I’d never quite mastered, failed me. Mercifully, she switched to English: “Please, what is it that you want?”
I mumbled something about having a common friend in Lebanon. The icy silence that came back down the line suggested I wasn’t retaking ground. So I blurted it out: “My mother’s in town. Would you like to join us for dinner?”
I knew I sounded like a total idiot, maybe insane. I waited for Alice to slam down the phone. Instead, she asked, “Where?” I let her pick.
And that’s how I ended up on a date with an authentic Femme Nikita, with my mother as chaperone and (although she didn’t know it) a beard in the bargain.
—
Mother and I got to the restaurant first. She immediately decided she didn’t like the place, if for no other reason than that it was full of tourists happily consulting their guidebooks and chatting about Paris’s splendors. She took pointed offense at a table of older Germans in pastel and earth tones. (They looked pleasant enough to me.)
Mother put on her tortoiseshell reading glasses and picked up the wine list. After a moment, she looked up: “And who is this woman we’re having dinner with?”
Before I could answer, I spotted a middle-aged woman stalled in the front door, obviously looking for someone she didn’t know. Even in the dimness, I could see Alice’s days as a siren were long past: She was syphilitic thin and hard as flint. I half stood up and waved. Alice came over to our table.
She coldly shook my mother’s hand, looking her up and down with what I took to be a sneer. Alice sat down and half turned in her seat to look for a waiter. Not seeing one, she sighed. My mother asked if she could pour Alice a glass of wine. Alice looked at her with a painted smile: “I don’t drink.”
I looked over and caught Mother sniffing the way she does when she suspects something is off. She started to rummage through her purse, but rather than her claws, she pulled out her silver etui and her cheap Bic lighter. She lit a Marlboro and for what seemed an eternity inspected the lighted end.
Through dinner, the conversation was painfully ordinary—the weather, Paris prices, the hideous traffic. I tried to get in a couple of questions about Beirut, probing for something I could pry open with Mom safely back across the Atlantic, but Alice ignored my every foray. For a second, I wondered if my cop friend hadn’t put me on to the wrong Alice. I had to remind myself that my friend had assured me the police knew exactly who she was.
Her chicken fricassee done, Alice abruptly stood up and announced she couldn’t stay for dessert. She had a rendezvous, she said. She left us to pay the bill.
If I’d had a traditional romance in mind, that one dinner was more than enough to cool any ardor. And not to mention that I, no doubt, was too clunky for Alice’s tastes. But what I couldn’t get out of my mind was the outside chance that Alice had run across Hajj Radwan during her Beirut days. The Red Prince—her ex-boyfriend—had initially recruited Hajj Radwan into Fatah and had served as his mentor during his rookie years. Had the Red Prince introduced Hajj Radwan to Alice? Had Hajj Radwan fought side by side with Alice? Unlikely, but I’d never know until I could sit Alice down again and ask her.
A couple of weeks after my mother left, I called Alice. She sounded friendlier this time and even suggested we get together. She said she was at a conference the following day in the late afternoon. Maybe we could meet for coffee afterward?
“On second thought,” she said, “why don’t you come along and sit through it with me?”
I had to wonder what sort of conference a French assassin would attend, but I immediately agreed. She gave me the address of a hotel in Montparnasse I’d never heard of. Little did I know that three blocks away, less than a year later, a wonderful lead to Hajj Radwan would go up in smoke, literally.
When I left work to meet Alice, it was raining, traffic at a standstill. By the time the taxi finally made it across the Seine, I was already twenty minutes late. In frustration, I jumped out and half ran down the Boulevard Montparnasse.
When I got to the address, I found a modern, boxy hotel, the kind of place Parisians have fought valiantly to keep out of their city. But if banality truly is the essence of a good smoke screen, the place couldn’t be beat. Who would think of looking for la femme Nikita in France’s version of a Motel 6? The concierge directed me to the conference room on the mezzanine level.
The door was closed. I could hear a man’s voice inside hectoring a hushed room about something. I was about to let myself in when I noticed next to the door an easel with a placard on it. There were three small letters at the bottom right, EST.
Vaguely familiar, I leaned over to read the fine print: Erhard Seminars Training.
The little I knew about est was that it was some New Age, California-based cult where you aren’t allowed to piss for hours so you can have the pleasure of being verbally assaulted for every real and imagined character flaw inflicted on you at birth. Enlightenment through bladder distress. Okay, I had enough flaws for est to incarcerate me for life. But now wasn’t the time I needed to be reminded of it.
I let go of the knob, turned around, and slinked away like a bilge rat abandoning a sinking ship. I never called Alice again.
How could I have been so stupid to think Alice would ever be able to help me hunt down and murder Hajj Radwan? I should have seen right away she was a flake who couldn’t be trusted with a sensitive mission. If I’d sent her to Beirut to help me find Hajj Radwan, she would only have kept looking for herself. I’d have done better recruiting Mom to do it. At least she and I had had a womb in common.
When I was a young man, an old family friend once put his hand around my shoulder and offered me a little piece of wisdom. “Finding the right girl is like testing a used car. The first thing you need to do is take her out on a hard drive to see what parts fall off.” He was half serious.
Before deciding whether he would make it with a girl or not, he’d take her on a long brutal road trip to Baja California . . . usually in a small sports car. They’d camp along the way, whatever the weather. If she survived the scorpions that crawl around Mexican beaches, there was a chance they might have a good run.
“Most didn’t,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “You find out pretty quick who the batshit crazy ones are.”
Hezbollah has a more conventional way of selecting new recruits. They’d line them up on a very hot day, warning them to remain rock-still. Just as the first of them would start to succumb to the heat and wobble, a drill instructor would fire a Kalashnikov down the line—at eye level. In the tape I saw, one of the new recruits is hit in the ear, falls to the ground, writhing in pain and holding the bloody stump where his ear used to be. For his efforts, he was selected out because he didn’t have the fortitude to fight in a war.
Hajj Radwan had more of an artisan’s touch to hiring his people. Corporate America would call it an “internal referral”—someone already working for a company who will vouch for an applicant. The idea is an insider is not about to recommend a dud and risk losing his job. Or in Hajj Radwan’s regime of discipline, his life.
Hajj Radwan only took in people who were an open book to him. Many of them he knew from birth, had grown up with, and/or was bound to by marriage or blood. The point is he needed to be able to examine a person’s entire life cycle before he could ever trust him—how he coped with extended families, how he did in pre-K, who he dated, how he related to Islam.
As the Lebanese police discovered from analyzing telephone data, all of Hariri’s assassins were in one way or another attached to a small town in southern Lebanon called Nabatiyah. Hajj Radwan’s brother-in-law was from there, as were a lot of the street men who tracked Hariri the morning of his murder. (Hajj Radwan’s own village is close to Nabatiyah.)
But none of this is to say Hajj Radwan engaged in nepotism. He wasn’t a godfather who reflexively took family into the business. He knew relatives, as well as anyone, can get you killed. As for friends, Hajj Radwan looked at them as a frivolity and a self-indulgence, never as ready-made recruits.
Hajj Radwan also very early on learned he could dispense with the social conveniences and arrangements most of us take for granted. He strangled in himself any inclination to believe anyone could ever truly like you. It’s a comforting delusion, and nothing more. For Hajj Radwan, the only true bond is the threat of pain.
As rigorous as his selection system was, Hajj Radwan understood that Laws #7 and #8 (Vet Your Proxies in Blood) come as a pair—you test, you recruit, you test. A candidate’s advertised qualifications might look fabulous on paper, but only in the crucible of war will you know for sure. Let someone spend weeks under Israeli bombardment and not end up cracking, and you just might have the man you need.
As far as I know, Hajj Radwan’s system never failed him. There is no record of malingerers, traitors, or defectors from his ranks. In other words, Hajj Radwan would never have gone near a flake like Alice, let alone taken her on as part of his organization.
Marrakesh, January 22, 1983: It’s not generally well-known, but Hassan II, the late king of Morocco, was one of the most proficient and prolific assassins of modern times. His customary practice was to drop his victims out of a helicopter over the Atlantic and let the sharks conveniently dispose of the remains. But when the occasion called for it, the king knew how to improvise.
As the official version went, on the evening of the twenty-second, King Hassan’s security chief, Ahmed Dlimi, was driving outside Marrakesh when his car was broadsided by a truck traveling at high speed. Dlimi died instantly, and the truck’s driver immediately was detained for reckless driving and manslaughter. The police quickly closed the case as a simple accident. But it was the naive Moroccan who didn’t suspect the king had had his security chief murdered.
But Dlimi’s murder nonetheless came as a surprise to many Moroccans. A faithful subject and an efficient intelligence chief, Dlimi had kept Morocco in good order for more than a decade. He’d assassinated his predecessor on the orders of King Hassan and strangled many a coup attempt in the cradle. It was Dlimi who’d overseen the notorious murder of a Moroccan dissident in Paris in 1965. Dlimi wasn’t the king’s personal assassin, but he came close. In other words, King Hassan had to have had a very good reason for murdering him.
The suspicion was that the king had caught Dlimi plotting against him in some sort of palace intrigue, maybe planning some sort of putsch. But because of the political delicacy of the matter, the king, rather than jail Dlimi, felt he needed to foreshorten the course of justice. Again, it was only a theory.
If there was one thing that Hassan had learned over the years, it was to keep his own counsel, especially when it came to foreigners. One rare exception was his good friend General Vernon Walters, the former CIA deputy director and ambassador to Germany. The king never forgot that Walters had given him a ride on a tank when the king was a child during World War II, and their friendship remained uninterrupted ever since.
A few years after Dlimi’s death, on a visit to Rabat, Walters asked the king about him. The king chuckled: “My friend, if you only knew what I have had to endure. I shall tell you.”
The king said that he had started to hear stories that Dlimi’s drinking had gotten out of hand. On occasion, he himself could smell liquor on Dlimi’s breath. The king knew he couldn’t have a drunk as his security chief, but on the other hand, he wasn’t sure exactly what to do about it. Simply firing Dlimi would set off a flight of unsettling rumors about coups and so on. Even the intimation of disloyalty in the royal inner circle doesn’t serve the interest of an absolute monarch.
One night at a little after two in the morning, Dlimi called Hassan and excitedly told him that he’d caught the king’s wife sleeping with a captain of the palace guard. Dlimi was obviously drunk, his words slurred and incoherent. The king didn’t know what to think and told Dlimi they’d talk in the morning.
The next day the king discreetly looked into Dlimi’s charge and found out there was no truth to it. The king started to think about the best way to ease out Dlimi. But before he could come to a decision, he heard from a good source that Dlimi had told a Saudi envoy about the queen’s infidelity. Hassan didn’t need anyone to tell him that his rivals, the Saudi royals, were now tittering about King Hassan’s unfaithful wife. Thus, with his honor at stake, he had no choice.
Hassan, of course, knew he could get away with it. He controlled the entire food chain, from the police to the press. He had plenty of people he could trust to do the job right, just as Dlimi once could have.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: When it comes to looking for a proxy, don’t forget that a dead lion is always better than a living dog.