Since the act’s objective isn’t to catch up with an enemy, tweak divine justice, or divert attention from a political mess at home, there’s no need to trumpet body counts, tally up scores, or, for that matter, do any crowing at all. A good kill will speak for itself.
Equatorial Guinea has a reputation for swift and cruel justice. In 1975, the palace guard executed eighty coup plotters in the national sports stadium as a band played a shaky rendition of “Those Were the Days.” Opponents of the currently sitting president accuse him of eating his enemies to “gain power.”
It’s not the normal trappings of state executions, but it’s more evidence the state has an enduring interest in blending judicial murder with ceremony and show. Ancient Rome had its crucifixions, the Middle Ages its drawing and quarterings, and the emir of Bukhara his poisonous insect pits. The leader of North Korea reportedly threw his uncle to starving dogs.
I know it’s a reductivist way of looking at things, but I’d say what’s behind this is a belief that a vivid, excruciating death serves as a warning to any would-be miscreants. Or, who knows, maybe it has something to do with a revenge gene. The ceremonies of execution aren’t something we in the West have exactly abandoned: Texas posts on the Internet the last testimony of the condemned.
Another thing the state sees in its interest is bringing to bear disproportional and irremediable force against any challenge to its authority and dignity. Cross one of its bright, shining lines, and a state will go out of its way to destroy you. You’ll spend the rest of your life either sleeping on a cold concrete slab or receive a fatal jolt of electricity. American prisons—the guard towers, razor wire, and slit windows—are architectural statements to the notion that the state won’t countenance slights to its authority or its dignity.
The assassin, on the other hand, doesn’t have the leisure or resources to bother with ceremony or show. Political murder isn’t political theater. Nor is it a moment of public vengeance or symbolic jackbooted intimidation. The assassin’s not out to settle a grudge, right a historical wrong, or give someone a long-overdue public comeuppance. He banishes from his mind the notion of revenge, recognizing that it amounts to only an attempt to restore lost dignity. While the state is able to perform justice with the showmanship of a Super Bowl halftime show, the assassin has no choice but to cut to the chase. Efficiency and the preservation of force are always foremost in his mind.
The capable assassin is no Maori warrior making faces and stomping his feet on the ground to intimidate his enemies. He’s not in it for the garlands, laurels, and gold medals. Nor does he care about the symbolism of it. What’s the point in assassinating the queen of England, a person with no power? Or blowing up Shea Stadium?
The assassin also understands that if he’s consumed by abstract obsessions such as the Clash of Civilizations, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, race purification, or any other fuzzy dogma, he’s well down the path to defeat. He never forgets that ancient piece of Persian wisdom: You don’t slap the king, you kill him.
Like many other true believers, Muslim jihadists are a set of people incapable of understanding the fine points of political murder. They’ve deluded themselves into believing that random butchery will somehow miraculously lead to the restoration of the caliphate. In 1997, Egyptian Islamic militants murdered sixty-two people near Luxor, mostly European tourists. It was a horrifying, headline-grabbing massacre, but it got them absolutely nothing. In fact, it only encouraged the Egyptian junta to step up its extermination of them.
At the turn of the twentieth century, another set of assassins, anarchists, also showed they didn’t understand the instrumentalities of political violence. Not one of their spectacular assassinations got them anything other than a world determined to crush them. It was more murder without purpose, and in the end, the anarchists didn’t leave as much as a welt on history.
No, the capable assassin understands that he must mete out death with a pair of fine tongs. It’s always the man over the office and handmade violence over showy, elaborate productions. He’s a literalist, a meticulous watchmaker tasked with repairing a delicate mechanism. No one’s asked him to reinvent the watch or time. He knows the universe is too big and too complex for anyone to change it.
The assassin wants nothing to do with the monsters of history and their death cults—Hitler, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, the Engineer. Or its saints. While the assassin obeys a higher law, he doesn’t mistake himself for a prophet. No sermons, no glossy brochures, no Madison Avenue propaganda. He wants assassination to come off as the most austere of acts—narrow, precise, and effective. “Disinterested” isn’t the exact word for it, but it comes close.
The assassin wants murder to be seen as a purely instrumental act—well thought-out, well executed, and with a closed end. In applying proportional force—a dagger over a surface-to-air missile, a quart of lethal antifreeze over a sniper’s rifle—the assassin shows he’s cautious of life. He’s taken pains with the venue, ensuring that it results in the fewest collateral casualties. Hajj Radwan could have murdered Hariri that morning with a car bomb at parliament, but the random slaughter would have detracted from the act.
A couple of years ago an al-Qaeda suicide bomber attempted to kill a Saudi prince by stuffing plastique up his own butt and detonating it in the prince’s proximity. The prince survived, but the point here is that al-Qaeda didn’t care that it was an ignoble death for all. Its sole objective was to kill the prince rather than to create a made-for-TV event. The prince survived, but the Saudis nonetheless got the message that al-Qaeda had refined its tactics from producing mass casualties to something closer to a bullet with a man’s name on it.
The assassin can never, of course, exhibit joy in the act. Nor can murder ever be an act of self-expression or validation. In 1971, immediately after murdering the Jordanian prime minister in Cairo, the assassin got on his knees and started to lick the man’s blood off the floor. Instead of attempting to run away, he wanted to savor a moment of passion. He apparently didn’t understand that ice-cold violence makes a much deeper impression on an enemy.
But it all comes back to the fact that the assassin wants nothing to do with anything that stinks of utopia or the apocalyptic, with all of its pointless symbolic murder. Or, for that matter, nothing to do with anything that stinks of belief in general. You don’t murder Jesus Christ in the hopes of killing Christianity: His crucifixion had precisely the opposite effect. Joseph Stalin made the same mistake when he had an assassin drive an ice ax into Leon Trotsky’s head: Trotskyism lived on just fine without its progenitor. And while Stalin was busy planning Trotsky’s murder, Adolf Hitler was busy making preparations to invade Russia.
Of course, personal ambition should never drive the act. A genuine assassin isn’t out to move up the ranks or make a packet in order to buy a villa on Spain’s Costa del Crime. Nor is he out for a bigger cubicle or a better parking space. No, he’s closer to a Cincinnatus figure. Having spared his country war, he’s perfectly happy to retire to his farm to live out his life in anonymity.
The Venezuelan Communist turned Middle Eastern assassin Carlos the Jackal reduced his odds of survival to nothing by cultivating a celebrity and playboy persona. And indeed, two CIA people cruising around Khartoum recognized him at a stoplight, followed him home, and tipped off the French. Now rotting in a French jail, his celebrity is of no value.
When ego is allowed to consume the act, the audience becomes confused about the act’s intent. Was it meant to improve the lot of man or the lot of the assassin? If Carlos thought he had a good reason for murdering the people he did, I for one don’t remember what it was.
I often wonder why the Lebanese can’t get along better. The way they’re squeezed together between mountain and sea, you’d think they’d be forced to. Instead, it’s been more of a case of the waves holding the shit (political nastiness) close to shore and everyone being forced to learn the finer points of political murder.
The way it usually works is that a tribe will cross a well-demarcated line and, in response, the wronged tribe will feel obliged to respond, often by lopping off the head of the offending tribe. But at the same time, the two tribes know better than to let their quarrel descend into a Hobbesian all-against-all fight. Okay, it didn’t work so well in 1975 when the Lebanese civil war broke out and 120,000 people were killed. But this was the exception rather than the rule.
My hypothesis is that the Lebanese are able to contain violence because they don’t thump their chests after the act. Take the September 14, 1982, assassination of the president-elect: No one ever claimed it. But then again, why would they? Its purpose was to eliminate a powerful, irreplaceable man rather than unnecessarily infuriate the president-elect’s sect, the Maronite Christians.
I’d imagine the same consideration came into play with Hajj Radwan’s 1989 assassination of the Lebanese president. (I’ll get deeper into this one later.) Why pit his side, Hezbollah, against the state and the president’s sect, the Maronite Christians? By leaving authorship vague, there was no general call to arms and no retaliatory killings. People might suspect Hezbollah, but without facts, they didn’t feel compelled to act.
As I’ll also get into in detail later, Hajj Radwan went to great lengths to disassociate himself from Hariri’s murder because he saw no point in unnecessarily humiliating Hariri’s sect, the Sunnis. He understood that people need a clean motivation to go to war.
—
Beirut, Damascus, Amman, November 2009: The year after Hajj Radwan’s assassination, I’m on my way to Damascus from Beirut in a shared taxi when Press TV in Tehran calls me on my cell to ask if I’d do a TV interview on the crisis du jour. I now can’t remember what it was, but it probably had something to do with the fighting in Iraq. They ask to do the interview at the Iranian embassy.
I know it’s not the best of ideas, considering the Syrians aren’t exactly comfortable with an ex–CIA operative dropping in on them for an unexplained visit and popping off on TV about a conflict on their border. I agree though, if only to see where Hajj Radwan supposedly spent his final days.
An hour later, I’m out front of the new Four Seasons hotel, waiting for the Press TV van. The portico is jammed with elegantly dressed guests waiting for their chauffeur-driven cars. I think how this isn’t the old Damascus I knew; it’s more like its fin-de-siècle iteration. As I stand there, I wonder if Hajj Radwan had ever actually done a pickup here after he started posing as an Iranian embassy driver. Live your cover, as they say. Could he have not noticed how the Four Seasons was emblematic of the new moneyed Damascus, a world closer to Hariri’s than the slum Hajj Radwan had grown up in?
I sit up front with the driver, a young bearded Iranian who speaks formal Arabic. He politely laughs at my Persian. He doesn’t ask who I am or why his station would want to interview me. I think about asking him what Hajj Radwan was like, but of course I don’t. Instead, we talk about the traffic and the weather.
The way the Iranian embassy sits off the main Mezzeh highway, with a sad walk of dusty trees out front and its neo-Stalinist architecture, it reminds me of an insurance company converted into a secret-police headquarters. The floodlights don’t improve things.
A guard waves the van through. I follow the driver up a flight of stairs to a second-floor studio. He puts me at an empty desk to wait for Tehran to call. I wonder if Hajj Radwan once sat here, and then I think about the other threads of history connected to this place.
One building over is the main Iranian embassy, which in the eighties was the cockpit for Khomeini’s revolution in Lebanon. It was here that Lebanese Shiite clerics and political figures first met after the 1982 Israeli invasion and then returned home to form Hezbollah. To this day, it’s the main conduit for money and arms going to Hezbollah.
In 1984, there was an attempt on the Iranian ambassador in the same building. His would-be assassins sent him an explosives-strapped book. He survived but lost a hand. The Iraqis were no doubt behind it, apparently believing they could change their fortunes vis-à-vis Iran by murdering this man. The problem was that the ambassador was only a cog in Khomeini’s revolution. And not to mention that the revolution was just picking up steam and wasn’t even close to being frayed. I wonder if at that point in history even Khomeini’s assassination would have changed things. Belief is a hard thing to kill.
But it’s not as if the Iranians had mastered political murder. In April 1980 a group connected to Iran attempted to assassinate Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. It’s commonly believed that this event led Saddam to invade Iran. Causality is a tricky thing, but it’s arguable this missed hit led to three disastrous wars—the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), the Gulf War (1990–1991), and the Iraq War (2003–2011). I doubt it’s what the Iranians had planned. For the assassin, the law of unintended consequences is the sword of Damocles eternally hanging over his head.
But getting back to the attempt on the Iranian ambassador: It’s now clear the Iraqis had gone after the wrong man. They incorrectly believed he was responsible for its problems in Lebanon, including the destruction of its embassy there in 1981. In fact, the best intelligence points at Hajj Radwan. Did the Iraqis not know who Hajj Radwan was or was it that they couldn’t get to him? I don’t know.
What I do know is that in the early years Hajj Radwan stayed away from the Iranian embassy in Damascus as if it carried the bubonic plague. He insisted that when Iranians came from Tehran they meet in Lebanon. He assured them it was the safest for all.
Hajj Radwan fully grasped that unyielding independence is what both kept him alive and allowed him to maneuver with the total freedom he needed. At one point, he even went out and made his own money. In 1985 he kidnapped four Russian diplomats in Beirut, killing one who happened to be a KGB officer. At their release, Hajj Radwan arranged to collect a $200,000 ransom. There was nothing the Iranians could do about it.
Over the years, we watched with curiosity as Tehran tirelessly tried to drag Hajj Radwan under its umbrella. It appointed him an official in the Amin al-Haras—the intelligence wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. But as I said, titles meant nothing to Hajj Radwan, who not only declined to don an Iranian uniform but also refused to participate in the ceremonies and mindless discipline that go hand in hand with an organized military. When relations between Iran and Hajj Radwan became strained, Hajj Radwan would disappear for months on end, ignoring Tehran’s frantic appeals for a meeting.
Hajj Radwan despised the infighting in Tehran—the petty fights over status and money, the turf wars, the bureaucratic prevarications. When responsibility for being the liaison to him shifted from the Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Ministry of Intelligence, he stormed away, refusing to meet any Iranian official. He knew that petty bureaucratic rivalries can only undermine the mission.
Hajj Radwan would for years meet only Iranian officials he personally trusted. It was essential for him that his Iranian interlocutors understand Lebanon and its politics, as well as his views of the fine instrumentalities of political violence. Operating under an Iranian ignorant of Lebanon could only lead to disaster, drawing him into some ill-advised attack. Hajj Radwan had one confederate in Tehran he completely trusted, a man he called on every time there was a problem he needed sorted out. It provoked considerable jealousy in the Iranian leadership, especially as Hajj Radwan moved from one spectacular success to the next. Everyone wanted a piece of him to burnish his resistance credentials.
But at some point a shift occurred. This was at a time when Iran was losing its appetite for revolution. Among other things, it decided that the Western hostages Hajj Radwan had started taking in 1982 were more of a liability than an asset. Although he wasn’t happy about it, Tehran overrode Hajj Radwan’s objections and ordered their release. Hajj Radwan was being slowly sucked into Iran’s ambit.
We also learned that in return for releasing the hostages Tehran gave Hajj Radwan a large one-time payment. But it was unclear whether he wanted the money for his organization or was lining his pockets. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Hajj Radwan turned into a spoken-for, paid-up Iranian agent, but it was certainly starting to look like it. Was it about money or power? I don’t know.
Hajj Radwan’s brother-in-law was arrested by Kuwait in 1983 after blowing up the American and French embassies there, and he spent the next seven years in a Kuwaiti jail. When Iraq invaded and the prisons were emptied, he escaped and made his way back to Lebanon. As the brother-in-law told friends, he couldn’t believe the change in Hajj Radwan’s organization, how it had gone from a highly mobile, shadowy band of assassins to something closer to a bureaucracy, with all the attendant drag and bullshit. He was equally shocked by how so many of the operatives had settled for comfortable lives.
Somewhere along the line, the Syrians also seemed to get a piece of Hajj Radwan. When I heard from a businessman close to the Syrian president that Hajj Radwan regularly visited the presidential palace, I had a hard time believing him. But the businessman assured me that on a couple of occasions he’d seen Hajj Radwan cooling his heels, waiting to see the president. There was no reason the businessman would lie to me, but it wasn’t the Hajj Radwan I knew.
Was the hot, blue flame of power too much for Hajj Radwan to resist? If so, it drew him away from the tight, spare tribal mind-set he’d grown up with in the southern suburbs, that impenetrable prophylactic that had kept him alive all of these years. Working at the Iranian embassy as a driver was okay as a cover, but as Hajj Radwan would find out too late, it wasn’t foolproof.
He’d also apparently remarried, a girl from a good family. They settled down in a comfortable apartment in a quiet Damascus suburb. He received visitors at home and kept regular hours. Some sources have it that his professional life was limited to training Palestinian groups. He would go meet them in their offices.
When I look back at it now—Syria’s and Iran’s success in roping in Hajj Radwan, his settling down in Damascus, the apartment, the new wife—it’s clear Hajj Radwan had let his standards slip. I’m not saying that Beirut would have forever remained the sanctuary it was in my days there, but it was definitely safer than Damascus.
By the way, the Press TV interview goes fine, the anchor impeccably polite and thoughtful.
Assassins, like politicians and journalists, are not attracted to losers.
—HUNTER S. THOMPSON
From Damascus I drop down to Amman by taxi. My intention is to see a retired Jordanian operative who’d once worked against Hezbollah. I catch him a couple of times on the phone, but he always has some excuse for not being able to meet me. By call number five I get the hint.
What I’m starting to figure out is that people want absolutely nothing to do with the tribunal. When I first started to work for it, I called a couple of my ex-colleagues who’d tracked Hezbollah over the years, but they only laughed at the proposition of helping. As for giving evidence at the trial, I didn’t dare ask. (After Hezbollah ran its TV piece on me, I better understood the sentiment.)
With time on my hands, I call the widow of the Jordanian intelligence officer killed at Khost, a Jordanian prince by the name of Sharif Ali bin Zeid. I know she wants to ask me about her husband’s death, as she’s convinced she hasn’t gotten the full story. I’m not sure why she thinks an ex–CIA agent will have a more authoritative version for her, but I agree to have coffee with her. We meet in the lobby of my hotel.
She starts by telling me how that morning, December 30, Sharif Ali texted her from Afghanistan that he’d been unable to get out of his mind that the only safe place in the world he could imagine was the small terrace of their house. He could picture it in its every detail, he wrote. The two of them sitting there, their two dogs at their feet, the sun sinking into the Dead Sea.
She stops and worries her coffee with her spoon. “Do you think he had a premonition?”
In tight jeans and a cable-knit sweater, Sharif Ali’s widow is pretty. Her English is nearly flawless, every word carefully articulated. Every once and a while she says something to remind me she’s a Christian. It makes me wonder what she meant by premonition.
She tells me how Sharif Ali and she met when they were nineteen. It was an improbable match, he a prince and a descendant of the Prophet, and she the daughter of a Christian university professor. The king forbade their marrying, but Sharif Ali spent the next five years petitioning him to reconsider.
She says her husband was half American in the way he looked at the world. He’d fallen in love with the United States while studying at Boston College and later interning for Senator John Kerry. When they first started to date, he’d take her out on his motorboat in the Gulf of Aqaba, anchor it, and talk about his bright vision for Jordan, how with an open mind it could become the Hong Kong of the Middle East. Her husband, she says, was one of those rare people able to bridge the chasm between East and West.
In Joby Warrick’s book about Khost, The Triple Agent, there’s a picture of Sharif Ali posing on the running board of a Land Rover in the middle of a river in spate. A plump man, he’s smiling, obviously thrilled to be on an adventure. I now try to picture Sharif Ali put down among the Pashtuns of Khost, a people as alien to him as they were to Jennifer Matthews. I can very well imagine him having a premonition that it was about to go bad.
The king finally relented to their marriage, but only under the condition that she convert to Islam. She agreed, and the two quickly married—six months before Sharif Ali went to Khost.
Starting to tear up, she changes the subject, saying she’s about to lose her house. According to Jordanian law, she’s obligated to give half of it to her husband’s family. Without the money to buy them out, she now needs to look for a new place.
“It’s the one place in the world he felt safe,” she says again. “How can I let a stranger live there?”
She says that since she can’t keep their house she wants to write a book about Sharif Ali, a love story. It would give purpose to his death. Could I look for an agent when I get back to the United States?
I look out the window at the blast walls, drop barriers, and armored personnel carriers surrounding the hotel. There are metal detectors at the entrance and a policeman with a machine gun. The hotel was turned into a fortress after suicide bombers struck Amman’s hotels in 2005. I wonder if Sharif Ali confronted Jennifer Matthews about her decision not to run the doctor through a metal detector.
Sharif Ali’s widow gets up to leave and then sits back down to ask one last question. “When you spend a life devoted to one thing like this, and it’s taken away, there has to be a purpose. Right?”
It’s a question I don’t have a ready answer for; I’m not sure Zawahiri’s assassination would have mattered. I keep coming back to the thought that al-Qaeda is only an idea—a notion that jihad must be pursued through violence. Even according to Zawahiri, any true believer can pick up a weapon and fight the unbelievers, with or without guidance. How do you kill a belief by killing one man? You don’t. It’s just as Saddam never stood a chance of killing Khomeini’s revolution by assassinating his ambassador to Damascus. I keep it to myself, though. When is the truth ever a comfort in death? Instead, I mumble something about Zawahiri’s being a mass murderer and, yes, his assassination would have mattered.
After Sharif Ali’s widow leaves, I think how the Jordanians, or at least the rich ones, are so much like us—open, gentle, self-reflective. Although the Jordanians played their part in the attempt on Zawahiri and later on Hajj Radwan, they aren’t a people who live off their murderous instincts.
—
That same night I drop by the apartment of a Jordanian prince. He’s Sharif Ali’s cousin. As soon as I bring up Khost, he becomes angry: “It was an unforgivable blunder.”
He gets up to get his pipe and then sits back down with a sigh. Referring to the Palestinian doctor, he says, “You never throw a fish like that back into the pond. They turn on you in an instant. My cousin was a naïf.”
The prince then redirects his anger to Jordan’s intelligence chief, the man who sent Sharif Ali to Khost: “The man’s a dull clerk. He rose far above his station. Worse, he’s corrupt.”
It turns out that around the time of Khost the Jordanian intelligence chief was deep into a crooked scheme to market stolen Iraqi oil. Apparently, he was too distracted about making money to think about the sort of danger he’d put Sharif Ali in. In February 2012, the chief would be indicted in Jordan for money laundering, embezzlement, and abuse of power. An added irony to the affair is that his partner in the oil scheme was an ex–CIA officer who’d once headed the hunt for bin Laden and Zawahiri.
But the prince’s anger turns to puzzlement when he gets around to drone assassinations.
“In all seriousness, what’s to be gotten? You don’t seem to understand that you’re only cutting away the fat for them.”
For the next fifteen minutes he goes on a riff about how the demonstration of force isn’t the same as the careful application of force. One’s an ugly burlesque, the other a ballet. It’s even worse when it’s allowed to turn into a public spectacle. As British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell put it, “Don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
It’s never far from the assassin’s mind that murder is a proscribed art, whatever the justification or motive. It’s reason enough not to crow about it, to prance around, or even to acknowledge it with a wink and nod. In fact, the assassin should do his absolute best to bake into the act all the misdirection, lies, and water-muddying he can. Why gratuitously piss people off?
King Hassan II of Morocco went for the same polite-fiction approach when he decided to assassinate his security chief in January 1983. And today, more than three decades later, the official record is that Dlimi died in an auto accident. While most Moroccans suspect otherwise, without the ability to nail Hassan’s lie, memories are so faded that it doesn’t matter.
The Lao assassins never attempted to disguise their murders as something they weren’t. But not one of them has ever stepped forward to claim authorship. Why put it in people’s minds that you’re an assassin? Assassination isn’t a narcissistic act to be included on your résumé or what amounts to a medal to be pulled out on special occasions. Its sole purpose is to destroy a cancerous cell.
On the wrong side of the equation, the CIA’s reported attempt on al-Qaeda’s number two, Zawahiri, came off as something closer to political blustering than as a true reckoning of power. With all the embarrassing leaks, with the stupid cover-up, with a tell-all book, it left the curious like me to comb through facts that should never have seen the light of day—if for no other reason than that they make us look like a paper tiger.
Washington doesn’t even make a good-faith effort to hide its hand in political murder, all but publicly embracing the two-thousand-plus people it’s assassinated since 9/11. Some drone pilots have even gone public, airing their regrets and the mistakes. And so, with all the public hoo-ha and flailing around, drone assassinations aren’t all that different from Equatorial Guinea’s execution of the coup plotters in its national sports stadium. More show than efficient political murder.
I realize that both al-Qaeda and the Pakistanis know all about our drone assassinations. In fact, according to The New York Times, it was Pakistan that insisted on selecting the victim of the first CIA drone strike in the Pashtun tribal belt. But it was never part of the bargain for us to trumpet it around. I’d imagine the Pakistanis can only groan every morning they wake up to read another Washington Post exposé about a CIA assassination in their country.
George Bernard Shaw once famously said that if you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you might as well teach it to dance. True enough, but I’m certain he never had assassination in mind. It’s just one of those rare transgressions you never want to boast about.
With the Khost revelations, with Brennan’s lie that drones have never caused the death of innocent victims, with all the hand-wringing and moralizing, could we not come off as rank amateurs in the business of political murder? We mostly do fine as human beings, but we’re lousy assassins.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: Always the lie over the truth, no matter how implausible it may sound. Doubt is the truth’s best corrosive. So make it as palatable as possible for everyone.