Assassination is the most sophisticated and delicate form of warfare, only to be entrusted to the battle-hardened and those who’ve already made your enemy bleed.
Omagh, County Tyrone, August 23, 1974: In the IRA’s eyes, Detective Inspector Peter Flanagan was a traitor. Not only was he a Catholic who’d gone to work for the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the Protestant-controlled police in Northern Ireland), he’d also made the inexpiable sin of going into the Special Branch. The Special Branch had a well-earned reputation for helping Britain’s Special Air Service finger IRA operatives for assassination. In other words, Flanagan had written his own death sentence.
The IRA selected Sean O’Callaghan to assassinate Flanagan for no better reason than that O’Callaghan was on active IRA service, a so-called volunteer. Although he had never assassinated anyone before, O’Callaghan’s mettle had been tested in a mortar attack on a British army base that resulted in the death of a female soldier. The IRA told O’Callaghan that Flanagan deserved it because he’d participated in brutal interrogations of IRA operatives.
A man of habit, Flanagan would eat lunch every day at the same Omagh pub, a place called Broderick’s. He always parked his VW Beetle in the same spot on Georges Street and sat on the same stool at the end of the bar. He read the Irish Independent as he ate.
O’Callaghan knew enough about an operative’s work to know he needed to reconnoiter Broderick’s in advance, map the place out in his mind. He also needed to see Flanagan with his own eyes. When the gunplay starts, there’s no time for dithering or making the mistake of shooting the wrong person.
Flanagan was at the far end of the bar on the day O’Callaghan cased Broderick’s, right where he was supposed to be. O’Callaghan ordered a half pint of Guinness at the opposite end. Having finished his beer and seen what he needed to, O’Callaghan left.
When it came to putting a team together, the IRA produced Paul Norney, a sixteen-year-old boy from Belfast. It didn’t care that Norney was on the run, suspected of the murder of a British soldier. The other accomplice detailed to O’Callaghan was a young girl who he knew only by the name he loaned her, Lulu. The IRA told him she could drive, and that’s all that mattered.
O’Callaghan had his doubts, though. He’d heard of another operation where a young girl was recruited to drive for a job, but in fact she couldn’t shift gears. O’Callaghan made Lulu show him she could drive. She did fine.
The guns were hand-delivered a couple of days before they were set to go: two new snub-nosed Magnum .357s.
The night before, O’Callaghan, Norney, and Lulu spent the night at an IRA safe house in Carrickmore. Everyone stayed up until early in the morning. At one point, things got tense when Lulu started to tease Norney about his age. Norney didn’t take it well, and O’Callaghan had to pull her out in the hall to tell her to knock it off. “It was a prestige operation and we wanted it to go well,” O’Callaghan would later write in his memoir.
In the morning, all three went to a garage, where O’Callaghan walked up to the owner and identified himself as an IRA volunteer. O’Callaghan said he needed to borrow a car. Intimidated to the bone by the IRA, the garage owner didn’t ask why. As they left, O’Callaghan told him to hold off reporting the theft to the police.
As they set off for Omagh, another car went on ahead to check for patrols and flying roadblocks. O’Callaghan had told the driver of the other car to signal by tapping his brakes if he saw anything O’Callaghan needed to worry about.
As they got closer to Omagh, the lookout car raced ahead and then came back flashing its lights: It’s a go.
Lulu parked in the no-parking zone next to Broderick’s. O’Callaghan and Norney got out to check to see if Flanagan’s Beetle was there.
Norney looked in first to make sure Flanagan was in his spot at the end of the bar. He told O’Callaghan he was.
O’Callaghan: “You sure?”
Norney was.
O’Callaghan: “Okay, let’s go.”
O’Callaghan went in and spotted Flanagan sitting at the end of the bar, reading the Irish Independent.
As soon as Flanagan saw O’Callaghan and Norney coming toward him, he understood what was about to happen. “No . . . please . . . no!” Flanagan said.
O’Callaghan started jerking the trigger of his revolver. Flanagan stood up and staggered back in a futile attempt to save himself. He stumbled and fell through the bathroom door. O’Callaghan continued shooting bullets into him.
Flanagan was still, face-forward on the bathroom floor. O’Callaghan instinctively knew Flanagan was dead.
As O’Callaghan reloaded his gun to calm himself, he only now noticed everyone in the pub staring at him. The owner stood frozen, an empty glass in his hand and a towel in the other. A woman said something he didn’t catch. O’Callaghan turned to her: “Just sit down, shut up, and nothing will happen to you.”
O’Callaghan and Norney came out of the bar and crossed the road to the getaway car. Norney climbed in first. But before O’Callaghan could get in his door, Lulu pulled away, dragging O’Callaghan down the street. He shouted at her to get it together. She stopped, and he got in. He turned to Norney and told him to reload his gun.
Lulu was far down the road before O’Callaghan realized she was heading down a one-way street. He told her to turn around. He didn’t care that they’d have to drive back past Broderick’s.
“Is he dead?” Lulu asked.
O’Callaghan: “Yes, he’s dead all right.”
Norney giggled: “Dead? ’Course he’s fucking dead.”
After they abandoned the stolen car by the side of the road, an IRA team collected them with a van and drove to a cottage in the country.
It was only then that O’Callaghan took stock of the truth that he’d just murdered a man in cold blood. He wrote in his memoir that it was something he’d spend the rest of his life thinking about.
After three hours, all three were moved again, this time to a house near Carrickmore. When they arrived at the back of the house, a middle-aged priest came out to meet them. It was a man O’Callaghan knew, someone who’d loaned his house to the IRA before.
The priest knew that they’d just murdered Flanagan. As they entered the house, he blessed all three with holy water. The priest told O’Callaghan over dinner: “Flanagan was an abominable man who sold his soul to the devil.” As they were about to move yet another time, the priest again blessed them.
Lulu went back to Belfast, and O’Callaghan never saw her again. Norney and a couple of other IRA operatives were later arrested in Manchester after firing shots into a restaurant that had just given them bad service.
In 1988, a depressed O’Callaghan turned himself in to the police. He received a sentence of 539 years, including time for Flanagan’s murder. He was released from prison in 1996 by royal prerogative.
—
Sean O’Callaghan is a gaunt man, caved in as if life’s eaten him away from the inside. One moment he’s leaning against the kitchen counter, immobile, a cup of coffee steady in his hand. The next he’s pacing back and forth like a caged animal, as if he’s in a hurry to say what he has to and get away.
O’Callaghan, in fact, has been confessing for years. In his memoir, he spares himself and the IRA nothing. It reads like something you’d tell to a priest in the privacy of a confessional rather than a mea culpa for an unsympathetic and uncomprehending world.
O’Callaghan joined the IRA in 1969 when he was sixteen. A bomb he was making exploded in his parents’ house. He was sent to jail for it. After his release, he did one odd job after another for the IRA. But mostly he mixed up chemicals for car bombs.
O’Callaghan resigned from the IRA in 1976 and moved to London where he married and opened a cleaning business. When the IRA tried to reenlist him, he decided to turn informer for Irish intelligence. He would say later it was the 1979 assassination of the queen’s cousin Lord Mountbatten that had finally turned him.
The exact nature of O’Callaghan’s service to Irish intelligence is unclear. One version has it that O’Callaghan tipped the authorities off to a shipment of seven tons of Kalashnikovs sent to the IRA by the Irish-American crime boss Whitey Bulger. In 1984, O’Callaghan supposedly helped foil an assassination attempt on Prince Charles and Princess Diana during a Duran Duran and Dire Straits concert.
Down on his luck, O’Callaghan tried to retool himself as a security consultant. But business was never good, and his fortunes continued to slide. In 2006, a year after I’d interviewed him, two young men he’d met at a gay bar in West London tied him to a chair with electrical wire while they robbed the apartment he was temporarily staying at.
The occasion for my meeting O’Callaghan was to interview him for a documentary on car bombs. Camera on, O’Callaghan described how he could mix enough material for a car bomb in one day—about five hundred kilos of nitrobenzene fertilizer. It was the same chemical composition responsible for turning Northern Ireland’s cities into smoking ghost towns.
O’Callaghan insists that the bombs he made were designed to destroy empty buildings rather than people.
When I asked him whether he’d personally set off a car bomb, he answered: “I did, yeah, um, well in the country, quite a few of them.”
When I asked if they killed anyone, he said: “No, no, there was nobody killed or injured in any of the car bombs I was involved in.” But he quickly added he would have been very happy to kill a cop or a British soldier.
O’Callaghan’s ambivalence about violence reminds me of the Italian Red Brigades, another set of Catholics who turned to violence in order to right a political wrong. Although dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, they never could bring themselves to entirely abandon the Catholic faith. The two founders of the Red Brigades, Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol, married in a church. And like the European bourgeoisie, they took August off.
It seems to me both O’Callaghan and the Red Brigades lacked the will and stamina to see things through to the end, to do what had to be done. They certainly never showed they were prepared to meet the end Hajj Radwan met in Damascus. They were weakened by some indefinable ambivalence about violence, all but ensuring they would fail at it. Hajj Radwan’s suicide bombers’ deaths were an absolute given, but they never lost their way, stalled, or turned around.
There are other little things that tell the same story. For instance, IRA “volunteers” see no problem living in British government–subsidized housing or taking unemployment checks. It’s something Hajj Radwan never would have considered, no matter how short on money he got. For him, any dependency on any enemy for anything is a sign of weakness and vulnerability. How do you convincingly conduct a rebellion when you’re on the dole? Or, for that matter, how do you put yourself beyond compromise? Not only does it send the wrong message to an enemy, it also offers him innumerable portals of entry.
Did the IRA’s ambiguity about violence—and in particular the belief that blowing up buildings wins wars—fatally undermine its cause? I suspect so. Destroying other people’s stuff rarely turns the tide of battle. It’s the same with symbolic violence. O’Callaghan was right when he said the IRA had made an unforgivable error in murdering Lord Mountbatten, a man without power. It won them nothing, but it cost them a lot.
There was a time when I still believed in the possibility of repairing relationships. What it meant for me in Beirut was that every couple of weeks I’d catch a ride on a Black Hawk helicopter over to Cyprus to see my wife and children. Langley had kindly allowed them to set up in Larnaca to be near me but out of the line of fire. They thought it would keep the embers of marriage alive.
Like any plan infallible on paper, this one fell apart at first contact. A Libyan assassin with American blood on his hands moved next door to my wife’s apartment, giving Langley a case of the vapors. My wife and children were bundled off to Brussels on the first flight out. My visits became less frequent, and the marriage suffered accordingly. (It was okay, I reassured myself. Life could damn well take a break while I was on the hunt for the world’s greatest assassin.)
One Christmas, Mother decided she would fix things. With no advance warning, she gathered her grandchildren around her: “My dears, I’ve made a decision.”
She turned first to my eldest, Justine. She knew Grandma well enough to know something was up. She’d recently overheard me calling Mother a spiteful old cow, but she didn’t understand the language of adulthood well enough to not take me seriously.
“Come sit by me,” Mother said, patting a place on the sofa next to her for Justine to sit. “I have something to ask you.”
Justine did as she was told, not saying a word.
“Tell me who Philip of Macedon was,” Grandmother said.
Justine, only eleven, had no idea.
“He’s Philip the Second, Alexander the Great’s father.” Mother lit a cigarette, tilted back her head, and blew a thick cloud of smoke at the ceiling.
“He had a broken tibia,” she resumed. “And surely you know he was assassinated.”
“Who?” Justine asked.
“Philip. And what do you think about the theory that Alexander himself was assassinated?”
When Justine didn’t say anything, Mother guffawed: “Your parents are so pitifully ignorant. Do they teach you nothing? That does it—this summer I’m coming back to take you to Pella so you can see for yourself Philip’s leg.”
I’d grown up with Mother’s Alexander the Great stories and how she’d embraced the Great Men school of history, a world of honor where men did their duty, no questions asked, no dithering. But this was all new to Justine, and she had no idea why she was going to be dragged off to Macedonia.
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.
—
Shakespeare’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.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: If assassination is a telegraph sent to an enemy to let him know the game has changed, you’d better be sure your telegraph operator knows how to work the key.