Keep your enemy in a state of ignorance and confusion. When you conceal even the most insignificant and benign details of your existence, your enemy will misjudge your abilities and strengths, and make commensurate mistakes. Just as a good conjurer never lets on how he’s performed a trick, there’s no point in your leaving behind a smoking gun.
Geneva, October 11, 1987: The chances are we’ll never find out what really happened that night in room 317 of Geneva’s elegant lakeside Beau-Rivage hotel. Its sole occupant was found dead in the bathtub, and whoever his visitors were from the night before haven’t and aren’t about to come forward. The mute facts of the case aren’t particularly helpful either.
When the manager called the Geneva police about the dead guest in room 317, the hotel assumed it had a suicide on its hands. It’s also what the cops thought when they first saw the handsome man floating in the bathtub. His name was Uwe Barschel; he was a German politician. He was forty-three years old.
The Geneva medical examiner’s report is factual and dry. It notes Barschel was discovered at around one-thirty in the afternoon. The bathtub was full, but Barschel’s head was above the waterline. He was fully clothed, his tie loose at the neck. The autopsy showed no water in Barschel’s stomach or lungs: He hadn’t drowned. The barbiturate lorazepam was found in his stomach, which supported the hypothesis of suicide. He’d also drunk a half bottle of wine.
What gave the police pause were the bruises and cuts on Barschel’s corpse, signs of some sort of struggle. But it was impossible to determine whether they were connected to his death or not. The police also found it curious that the wine bottle couldn’t be found. To add to the uncertainty of it, it couldn’t be determined whether the quantity of lorazepam found in Barschel’s stomach was sufficient to produce death.
Barschel’s distraught wife immediately rejected the suicide hypothesis, convinced that her husband had been murdered. She told the story of how her husband had received a disturbing, mysterious call the month before he went to Geneva. “For the first time in my life, I am afraid,” he told her afterward. He refused to explain to her who his caller was, or anything else for that matter. In spite of misgivings, Barschel met his mystery caller the day before he was found in the bathtub of room 317.
But what could the Geneva police do with thin, circumstantial evidence such as this? And not to mention that politics and suspicion of foul play are the perfect recipe for generating baseless conspiracy theories, especially in the minds of distraught spouses. And then, as these things so often go, things went from murky to murkier.
The former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky claimed it was Mossad that had assassinated Barschel. The motive? Barschel had surfaced as an obstacle to a secret arms deal between Iran and Israel. According to Ostrovsky’s version, Israeli operatives lured Barschel into a meeting with a promise to help with some political problem. The Israeli operatives jumped Barschel as soon as the door closed behind him then killed him by forcing barbiturates and poison down his throat.
Israel denied murdering Barschel. But so what? skeptics asked. They argued Israel would have no interest in admitting to the murder of a German politician. Killing some Arab in Europe was one thing, but murdering a prominent European was something else. Good enough, but the truth remains there’s no convincing proof Barschel was assassinated, let alone that Israel did it.
At this point, anyone serious threw up his hands and stopped paying attention, in particular serious journalists. When the facts become contradictory and confusing, people mindful of their reputations run from a difficult story. It’s what happened with Iran and Pan Am 103. The way the press looks at it, everyone gets cut in a knife fight.
But it didn’t deter the public prosecution department of Lübeck, Germany, which in June 2011 announced it would reopen the Barschel case. It promised that new scientific tools would clear things up. It’s unclear why the Swiss, who have primary jurisdiction, weren’t mentioned in the press report.
One ironic twist to the Barschel case is that the only other time the Beau-Rivage crossed paths with history had been the 1898 assassination of the empress of Austria. She was stabbed on the quay in front of the hotel and brought inside to die. Bystanders ran down her anarchist assassin and arrested him. Good old-fashioned vigilante justice.
The Swiss police took their time modernizing, but when they finally did, they did it with a vengeance. Incidentally, it was the Swiss who kindly introduced me to the brave new digital glue pot we all exist in today.
It happened on one glorious autumn drive to Zermatt. Unbeknownst to me, a police camera on the side of the road “flashed” me—caught me speeding. For a normal law-abiding person, it should have been a pretty much straight-up monetary atonement. When an overpriced ticket with a picture of your license plate and a notation of the excess speed arrives in the mail, you send back a check in the return mail. But genius that I am, I decided I could beat the Swiss criminal justice system. My thinking was that since the guilty car was a rental and not registered in Switzerland, they wouldn’t bother about the ticket.
Two years later on a trip to Geneva, I arrived after midnight and went to bed, counting on sleeping in late. But at about five-thirty the next morning, the squawk of a walkie-talkie outside my door woke me up. There was a sharp knock. I opened it to find two starched and armed Swiss policemen. After they verified I was the person who’d checked into the room, they told me to get dressed and follow them to the police station to pay an outstanding speeding ticket.
As I was all but frog-marched through the lobby, I considered asking my escort whether their time wouldn’t be better spent catching Barschel’s assassins, but I was awake enough to know it wouldn’t improve my situation. I paid the ticket and walked out of the police station vowing never again to commit a crime in Switzerland.
Very early on, the Swiss got the hang of the digital glue pot. For instance, in the early nineties they instituted a practice that when a visitor calls ahead to a Swiss airport to reserve a rental car the rental company will run an intrusive credit check on its new client. What it meant for spooks, criminals, and other scofflaws is no more alias passports or alias credit cards; a quick scroll down the page would instantly expose any villainy. Couple this with the advent of smartphones, the Internet, biometric chips embedded in passports, iris scans, and all the rest of the enemy-of-the-state snooping, and anyone with murder on his mind had better think twice about doing it in Switzerland.
As the story goes, one morning one of Hajj Radwan’s gunmen needed to see him about an urgent piece of business. But without a phone number or an address, he wasn’t sure where to start. He went around Beirut checking with Hajj Radwan’s wolf pack. But no one knew where to find him. The man even dropped by the apartment of Hajj Radwan’s wife. But she too didn’t know; she hadn’t seen him in six months.
Two months later, the man was talking to a friend in front of the Fransabank in the southern suburbs when they noticed a man on a wobbly motor scooter heading their way. Belching oily black smoke and stuttering like an old lawn mower, the scooter sounded as if it were about to cut out. Its rider was thickset, of middling height, and poorly dressed—soiled white shirt, cheap synthetic pants, scuffed shoes. Wrapped around his face was a kaffiyeh, a cotton scarf. On the rear rack was a burlap sack bound in twine holding some sort of cloth. He was a poor tailor maybe.
The scooter pulled up next to them, and the rider turned off the engine. They couldn’t see the man’s face because of the kaffiyeh. Caked in dust, he looked like he’d been traveling for a long distance on unpaved back roads. The rider said something they couldn’t catch. He unwrapped the kaffiyeh from his face: It was the boss, Hajj Radwan. They all had a good laugh at Hajj Radwan’s ability to conjure himself out of nowhere.
Who knows whether the story’s apocryphal or not. But the point is that Hajj Radwan was the human variety of a Gonepteryx rhamni, a butterfly whose color and pattern is indistinguishable from the foliage around it. Operating out of the southern suburbs, and indifferent to the trappings of power, money, and celebrity, he knew how to disappear into the fabric of poverty and despair. And to be sure, he went out of his way never to subject himself to protofascist digital microscopes like Switzerland’s.
If indeed Barschel was assassinated, I imagine his assassins pulled off their own Gonepteryx act. For a start, they left nothing behind for the police to work with—no weapon, no telephone or charge-card records, no CCTV images. In order to get past the Beau-Rivage’s front desk, I imagine they dressed Swiss bourgeois chic—pricey tweed jackets, polished Bally shoes, Pringle cashmere sweaters. If they had gone with the scruffy look, they wouldn’t have gotten as far as the elevator before the concierge stopped them. After the act, they would have immediately headed out of Geneva. I don’t know this, of course, but it’s just as Barschel’s assassins would want it.
But as any able assassin will tell you, disappearing into dull obscurity isn’t as easy as it would seem.
Anyone in a dark profession who can’t avail himself of a place like Ayn al-Hilweh had better learn the basics of garden-variety deception. In fact, every single moment of his life is best framed with an eye to concealing the most basic truths about his existence.
He will never want to volunteer anything anyone will remember him by. What’s the point in advertising you have a demented mother-in-law or that you were second coxswain on the varsity rowing team? Or that you’re a billionaire? Or that you’re married to a former Miss America? Money and beauty are things that stick in people’s minds.
The assassin always runs in the opposite direction from the limelight, away from places where people go to see and be seen—three-star Michelin restaurants, art openings, high-end dog shows. They’re flytraps that come with attentive staffs, CCTV camera coverage, and private security people who watch everyone like a hawk. In other words, don’t commit a murder in the Van Cleef & Arpels on Fifth Avenue.
If there’s a choice between doing business at a Motel 6 in Hoboken, New Jersey, or the Plaza, take the Motel 6. Or if you really want to drop out of sight, take a Greyhound bus (pay for the ticket in cash) to an Indian reservation in northern Arizona and meet there. Good luck to the cops trying to reconstruct that trip.
The same sort of invisibility holds for couture. It’s always Sears menswear over Brioni, Payless ShoeSource over John Lobb. And never wear anything memorable or that catches the eye—no nose rings, no T-shirts with trite messages, no fancy watches with altimeters. Always wear clunky and scratched eyeglasses; it’s what people will remember rather than your eyes.
The assassin would as soon wear a ballerina’s pink tutu as sport tattoos, mirrored Oakley wraparound sunglasses, and rippled muscles. Looking the part of a coiled and cold-blooded killer is something people will remember. And by the same token, the assassin studiously avoids giving off attitude—no impatient assurance or giving the impression he has the drop on anyone.
What he’s after is a completely self-erasing manner. For instance, he will employ a disarming tic of cocking his head to one side and pointing an ear at his interlocutor, pretending he’s riveted by every word coming out of the stupid bastard’s mouth. Always lead with insecurity and deference; Mr. Magoo over Donald Trump.
While the assassin might selflessly pledge himself to action, he understands there’s no point in flaunting his principles. He embraces the profoundly ordinary and ignorant, appearing to be a slave to every shallow convention, devoid of everything that makes a person stand out—the worship of money, overweening ambition, intellectual prescience. There’s not a book in his house.
The assassin works hard at turning himself into a fire hose of public opinion and pedestrian convictions, giving off the hum of an empty mind. He clings to unsupported and wrong opinions as if his reputation depends on it. He unironically flies the flag on Independence Day and pastes a GO PACKERS! sticker on his bumper.
If the assassin’s forced to talk politics, he recites unimportant, unrevealing, and reassuring facts. But in the end, he pleads that he can’t make heads or tails out of politics. He doesn’t sign petitions, write to his congressman, or keep a blog. If he posts pictures on Instagram, it’s of his dog or Mount Rushmore . . . with nothing else in the frame. He’s more than happy to let everyone know he thinks Nixon got a raw deal.
The assassin will want to make himself appear as jealous as a hunchback. While he’ll shit all over the elite’s pretensions—screening rooms, surfing in Bali, flying off to Europe on a private jet—and scoff at people with real intellectual lives, he’ll never stop telling people he knows all about automobiles, from their prices to their performances.
Always working at dimming his shine, the assassin must never be caught coming up with a bright or original idea. He’ll fight instead over the size of his cubicle or a better parking space. He embraces the stink of mediocrity and frivolity as if it’s his cherished birthright.
By turning himself into a walking and talking purloined letter, by hiding in the open, the assassin will deceive people into believing that he’s the least important person in the world, i.e., incapable of pulling off a perfect kill.
Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella.
—MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
Dubai, January 19, 2010: The closed-circuit images instantly captivated the world’s imagination, especially the one of the girl in the floppy hat and big sunglasses. Although the picture is pixelated and grainy, you can tell she’s pretty. There’s something about her—I don’t know—a joie de vivre, a reassuring insouciance; maybe she’d be a fun date. As she checks in, she looks up at the camera above the reception desk and smiles: Don’t bother about me, guys, I’m just a happy-go-lucky tourist on holiday.
There are more clips of her arriving at Dubai’s airport, walking through passport control. And then back at the airport for her flight out. There are shots of her passing through a hotel lobby, wearing the same angelic smile. If she’s performing for the cameras, I don’t see it. What’s obvious though is that there’s never a clear shot of her face—always the glasses and the hat.
The Dubai police would never have thought twice about the girl had they not found a dead Palestinian in a hotel they’d caught her in on a CCTV camera feed. At first, it appeared as if he’d died of natural causes. He was tucked into bed, his clothes neatly draped over a chair, his room locked from the inside. But when it was found that he was traveling on a phony passport, that he was an arms dealer, and that he was on an Israeli hit list, there were too many coincidences for the Dubai police’s liking. They opened a murder investigation.
The police were particularly intrigued by spots of blood found on the Palestinian’s pillow. There also were unexplained bruises on his face, nose, and neck. The headboard in his room was damaged. When the autopsy showed signs of an injection on his right hip, the possibility of murder was raised. It was confirmed when a drug that causes paralysis was discovered in his system.
The police’s hypothesis was that the assassin or assassins forced their way into the man’s room, subdued him long enough to administer a shot, and then neatly tidied up the room to make it appear the Palestinian had died in his sleep. Did the assassins climb out the window after locking the room from the inside? It was one question never answered.
By running an algorithm through Dubai airport’s entry-and-departure records in the days in and around the Palestinian’s murder, and by sifting through all potentially related cell phone calls and CCTV feeds, the police assembled what they believed was a convincing and coherent picture of the team that assassinated the Palestinian.
It appeared that most team members had arrived in Dubai early in the morning of January 18, 2010, and then left the next day—immediately after the assassination. There’d been two dozen of them, maybe more. With the exception of one, the assassins traveled to Dubai on forged passports. No one’s explained why one assassin, Michael Bodenheimer, traveled on a legitimate German passport.
The team paid for its hotel rooms either in cash or with prepaid credit cards, which were issued by a company named Payoneer. The team used prepaid cell phones that employed a “virtual call center” in Vienna. Based on records, some of the assassins had made preparatory trips to Dubai, no doubt to case locations.
From the CCTV images, it’s clear the team always kept on their disguises, ducking into bathrooms to change wigs and dark glasses. Several put on baseball caps to break up their faces. Some even took pains to sit around the lobby with tennis rackets. It was a case of living your cover. It was all a nice performance considering the effort, but not good enough to fool Dubai’s supercomputers and algorithms.
When the Dubai police made public the CCTV images and other details of the investigation, most people concluded the assassins had to have been Israelis. Israel had both opportunity and motivation to murder the Palestinian. But there was one question there’s no good answer for: Aren’t the Israelis better than this?
An Israeli journalist close to Mossad wrote for GQ that the Dubai job had been carried out by an ultrasecret Mossad assassination unit known as Caesarea. It’s responsible for what the KGB used to call “active measures”—assassinations, break-ins, and sabotage.
All of Caesarea’s operatives work under aliases and have no government connections, either by phone or e-mail. It’s housed separately from Mossad, outside Tel Aviv. Its operatives are forbidden from discussing their work outside the Caesarea facility. In the espionage business, they’re called “lily whites.” But apparently the white of a lily isn’t an easy color to match.
We all die with reasons.
—A DUBAI POLICE OFFICER TO ME
My first reaction to the Dubai job was that Mossad had gotten sloppy. What else could explain leaving a digital bread-crumb trail such as this? It definitely wasn’t the same Mossad who’d murdered Atef and (maybe) Barschel. A couple of my former colleagues wondered if it wasn’t a matter of Mossad’s not caring whether it got caught or not. My question, though, is: Why did the team go to such pains to clean up the room and use a sophisticated drug unless their intention was to make the police believe he’d died of natural causes?
My hunch is that Mossad miscalculated Dubai’s technical sophistication, failing to take into account its CCTV cameras, cell phone records, and advanced software. Maybe it was thanks to a stubborn bias that the Gulf Arabs are Bedouin savages incapable of conducting a modern police investigation. If true, it meant that Mossad overlooked the blindingly obvious, like Dubai’s ultramodern airport whose security and infrastructure is better than most in the West.
And let’s not forget money. Anyone with deep pockets can purchase an Orwellian state apparatus to efficiently monitor every hotel, airport, and train station in the country. I once spent a day inspecting the London police unit responsible for the thousands of CCTV cameras monitoring that city. I walked away convinced London isn’t the place you’d want to commit a high-level political murder. But neither is Dubai.
Not to mention that Dubai wasn’t the first time Mossad botched an assassination. There was the failed attempt on the Red Prince in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1973. But equally sloppy was the Mossad attempt on a Hamas leader in Amman in September 1997. Two Mossad assassins were arrested, the victim survived, and a diplomatic blowup between Israel and Jordan nearly wrecked their relations. It seems that somewhere between Atef and Dubai, Mossad lost its way. Polite fictions are no longer in its bag of tricks.
I’ve often wondered if it doesn’t have something to do with the Israelis’ having gotten too comfortable with “targeted killings” in the West Bank and Gaza. Very much like the SAS in Northern Ireland, Israeli commandos enjoy a distinct home-turf advantage. With all Palestinian electronic communications and databases being monitored and a vast web of paid and vetted informants in place, the Palestinians live in a virtual high-security prison. Targeted killings are like spearing fish in a barrel.
Not long before Dubai, I happen to be visiting a West Bank refugee camp for a documentary and am able to walk the route taken by Israeli commandos on their way to assassinating a Palestinian militant. It winds its way through a maze of cramped alleys and open sewers, reminding me a lot of Ayn al-Hilweh. The Israeli team entered the camp in the middle of the night, I during the day.
The pathway between the makeshift houses narrows to the point I’m able to raise my arms and touch either side. There’s no logic to the camp’s layout, which means I keep getting lost and ending up in dead ends. Kids start to show up, and I soon have a pack of them following me, laughing at the stupid, lost foreigner. It’s a mystery to me how Israeli commandos are capable of navigating a place such as this in the black of night, other than thanks to lots of practice.
The house where the assassination occurred looks like all the other houses around it—one story, cinder block, barred and shuttered windows, pebble-dash front door. A Palestinian tells me that after the Israelis crashed through the door it took them only seconds to find the false wall behind which the Palestinian was hiding. They shot him through the wall, only digging him out afterward to identify him. The commandos obviously had an informant close to the man.
I’m not saying Mossad would have covered its trail if it had tapped into Dubai’s telephone system or something. And yes, the floppy hats and big dark glasses were a nice touch, but it remains that Mossad in the Gulf was a fish out of water. There just wasn’t a way to hide two dozen Westerners up to something fishy. And not to mention that Mossad failed to build in misdirection, doing something such as—I don’t know—leaving false clues pointing at the CIA.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
It’s to the assassin’s advantage never to forget that people prefer their myths and beautiful lies to facts. Only twenty-four percent of Americans accept the 1964 Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The rest believe JFK was murdered by, well, take your pick—the CIA, the mob, or the Trilateral Commission. Never mind that there’s not an iota of evidence to support any one of those conspiracy theories. It’s this sort of childlike credence that the assassin wants to leverage.
At every stage of the planning and execution, the assassin needs to build in misdirection. For instance, if a sniper rifle is to be used, he should steal it from, let’s say, the mob, or anyone else who might plausibly engage in assassination. If a getaway car is needed, steal it from the FBI. The same goes for cell phones and computers.
There was misdirection built into the Hariri assassination at every step, which I’ll get into later. But in the meantime, suffice it to say that a man’s nose found at the bomb site still has investigators guessing. According to isotopic analysts, its onetime owner grew up along the Saudi–Yemeni border, which supported the initial suspicion that al-Qaeda was behind Hariri’s murder. Did the assassins plant the nose to throw off the investigation? It’s too conspiratorial to give it much thought.
It’s just a fact that people get hung up on small, insignificant details and inconsistencies. With their abiding distrust of government, the facts surrounding an assassination are easily deflected, and then they quietly recede into infinite possibilities. On the other hand, when you leave a smoking gun as Mossad did in Dubai, you gratuitously cede that advantage.
A couple of years ago, a Miami-Dade homicide detective called me up to ask if the South Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger had been a CIA informant. I’m pretty sure he knew better, but some half-wit up the line no doubt needed to be reassured. (Bulger, in fact, had nothing to do with the CIA, which leaves me to wonder whether he hadn’t been going around telling people he murdered on behalf of the CIA. He wouldn’t have been the first criminal to do so.)
It all comes down to the fact that there’s absolutely no reason to confess or in any way acknowledge the act. One day an enemy very well could turn into a friend. So why let a long-buried corpse with your knife in its back cast a shadow over a beautiful new friendship, especially when a little preventive fact-obscuring and fact-burying greatly improve amnesia? Iran might have been behind Pan Am 103, but now, with a diplomatic thaw in the air, it serves everyone’s interest that Iran never owned up to it.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: Ordinary life does not stop for a death, so don’t give anyone a reason to decide otherwise. Find a way to avoid the digital flytraps. Ditch all phones, computers, and credit cards. Always use a public bus or taxi paid for in cash instead of a car. If a phone call is for some reason inevitable, use a burner phone and steal a Wi-Fi signal from outside a Starbucks. One call, one phone. Meetings are best set in advance, for instance, every second Saturday of the month, with an alternate twenty-four hours later. For other communications, use some sort of visual signal—move a flowerpot in the window or leave a chalk mark on the wall. In sum, never gratuitously give anyone a springboard into your life. Like ancient Scythian horsemen, give the bastards no center to counterattack.