It’s better not to try rather than to try and miss. A failed attempt gives the victim an aura of invincibility, augmenting his power while diminishing yours. Like any business, reputation is everything.
God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.
—VOLTAIRE
Brighton, England, September 14, 1984: The Grand’s front-desk receptionist, Trudy Groves, would afterward tell the police that she didn’t remember much about the man who checked in that morning. The name he wrote down on the registration card, Roy Walsh, meant nothing to her either. Nor did his address: Braxfield Road, London.
Groves gave Walsh a key for room 629 because, as she said, “it was a nice room facing the sea.” Walsh paid her in cash: ₤180 for three nights. She wished him a good stay and watched him head up to his room.
On September 15, Walsh and another man ate lunch in the dining room. They charged the meal to Walsh’s room. As well as anyone could tell, the two spent the rest of the day in Walsh’s room, a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the door.
A waiter later would tell the police that Walsh seemed a pleasant enough man who liked to order his meals in the room. He remembered that on September 17, Walsh called room service for a pot of tea and turkey sandwiches. But when the floor waiter knocked on the door, a taller man answered the door, not Walsh. The waiter could hear someone in the bathroom. Later that evening, the two called down for a bottle of vodka and three Cokes. The waiter wondered if they weren’t celebrating something.
No one remembers Walsh and his companion checking out on September 19. But there’s no reason anyone would. He was just another tourist. In any case, the Grand’s staff had other things to think about. In less than a month, the Conservative Party would hold its annual conference in the hotel, and the place would be mobbed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher herself would spend the night.
—
October 12: At exactly 2:54 a.m. a deafening roar convulsed the Grand. A center section of the old Victorian building rose in a fountain of black smoke and debris, held in the air for an instant, and then spilled out into the street. It was as if hell had taken a bite out of the hotel and spit it out. The only light came from small fires burning everywhere.
As the firemen arrived, it looked like guests had hung out their clothes to dry on the telephone lines and street lamps. It took them a moment to realize that it was curtains and bedding blown outward from the explosion.
One of the firemen who ran into the hotel met Thatcher calmly making her way down a blackened corridor, seemingly indifferent to the smoke and screams.
“Good morning,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”
Four guests died in the explosion, including a member of parliament. A woman later would die from her injuries. Thirty-eight others were injured. The press reported Thatcher survived only because she had stayed up into the early morning writing her speech for that day. Rather than in her bed, asleep, she was at a desk in the sitting room of her suite. But that was the press’s version, which would turn out not to be exactly accurate.
Investigators estimated that it had been twenty to thirty pounds of gelignite explosives that had dislodged a large chimney and pulled down a center section of the hotel. On the basis of a pattern of shattered bathroom tile, it was quickly determined that room 629’s bathroom had been packed with explosives.
The investigators discovered fragments of a video-recorder timer. The timer was set to go off in exactly twenty-four days, six hours, and thirty-five minutes—2:54 a.m., an hour when Thatcher, her cabinet, and the rest of the Grand’s guests should have been in their rooms asleep.
From there it was a matter of investigators running down the names of guests who’d stayed in room 629 in the preceding weeks. There’d been couples from the United States, London, Hertfordshire, and a businessman from Mumbai. They could all be accounted for but one: Roy Walsh.
After Walsh’s registration card was found, chemical and laser analysis picked up a fingerprint and a right palm print. Matching them to arrest records, it turned out that Roy Walsh was, in fact, Patrick Magee, a longtime operative of the Irish Republican Army.
Magee was arrested in 1985 in Glasgow, Scotland, while he was preparing a new bombing campaign. He was convicted a year later for the Grand’s bombing, including the murder of five people and the attempted murder of Great Britain’s prime minister and her cabinet. “Attempted” tells you all you need to know.
It took me a while, but I think I finally figured out one of the elementary rules that Hajj Radwan played by. It has to do with game theory, what I call the winning combination of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s a lesson the IRA and Magee apparently missed.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma basically goes like this: The police arrest you and your partner in a crime. Questioning you in separate cells, their objective is to send you both to jail for as long as possible. If you both refuse to cooperate, you each do one year in jail. But if your partner rats you out, he gets off, and you get ten years. If, on the other hand, you beat him to it, he gets the ten years. If you rat each other out, you each get five years. The choice then is you either “compete” against your partner in crime or “cooperate” with him.
The best course of action, of course, is to cooperate, neither of you confessing to the crime. You each do your year in jail, and that’s it. But what keeps the game from descending into a free-for-all, the two of you falling for the police’s game and turning on each other? Mathematicians played around with the possibilities for a long time and came up with the strategy that as soon as one of you starts to confess the other administers a sharp reminder that the winning combination is to cooperate. Letting things slide and hoping for the best is the worst strategy, the only winner being the police.
But it doesn’t mean that this is some tit-for-tat game of revenge. It’s the police you want to beat rather than each other, i.e., the objective is to minimize your partner’s pain as well as your own. It’s a tricky strategy, but done right it avoids a mutually destructive escalation of violence.
Two years before Hajj Radwan’s assassination I drove up into the Bekaa Valley to take a look at a burned-out and shrapnel-shredded black Mercedes. It had once belonged to the secretary-general of Hezbollah, the one before Nasrallah. He was riding in the car when it was struck by an Israeli guided missile. His wife, their five-year-old son, and four others were also killed. The attack occurred on February 16, 1992.
The Mercedes was still on the trailer it was hauled up to the Bekaa on and was now parked next to the town mosque. As I walked around it, a Shiite imam watched me, curious about a foreigner who’d come to see evidence of the man’s martyrdom.
You could see where the Israeli missile came through the rear window and exploded in the backseat where he and his family had been sitting. I’d heard somewhere that the strike had been so precise that the driver survived. But right away I could see it wasn’t possible: The Israelis had made certain no one walked out of that car alive.
I wondered why Hezbollah left the car out in the open like this. Why not put it in a museum? Did it have something to do with making death seem banal, reminding Muslims that it’s a common destiny to die for the faith? Either way, the burned-out Mercedes is one more shrine to Hezbollah’s bizarre death cult.
Israel’s decision to assassinate Nasrallah’s predecessor made sense. As a leader of the Islamic Resistance in the south, he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israeli soldiers. With his departure, Israel’s battlefield fortunes would improve. Cut off the head of the snake and the snake dies, right? But in fact, things went from bad to worse for the Israelis. Nasrallah proved to be a more intelligent and cunning enemy.
Israel also apparently didn’t understand the inner workings of Hezbollah. While the public face of it consists of a dozen or so turbaned Shiite clerics, its true leaders are its invisible military commanders—people such as Hajj Radwan. As contacts would tell me, when a Hezbollah military commander enters a room, the turbans all stand and bow to him. No one observing this little rite has any doubt about the way Hezbollah’s hierarchy of power works. In other words, in assassinating Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Israel violated Law #2—Make It Count.
Israel, of course, had expected Hezbollah would retaliate for the assassination of the secretary-general and his family—it was a bright red line it couldn’t ignore. But was Israel prepared for the way it came?
On March 17, 1992, one day and one month after the assassination, a suicide bomber blew up himself and his car in front of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing twenty-nine and wounding more than two hundred. Two years later, in 1994, a second car bomb went off in the same city, this time destroying the Jewish community center and killing eighty-five. The evidence is fairly good that Hajj Radwan was involved in both attacks.
What the Argentine attacks show us is that Hajj Radwan was prepared to employ disproportionate force when provoked. In murdering the Hezbollah secretary-general and his family, Israel had violated the implicit rules: It had stopped “cooperating.” Which makes the Argentina attacks an invitation to Israel to go back to “cooperating.” Did Israel get the message? Apparently, as so far it’s made no attempt on Nasrallah.
Something similar occurred when Hajj Radwan decided he needed to shut off the Hariri investigation. He struck fast, hard, and with precision—nearly a dozen assassinations and attempts. They were all against people who’d stopped “cooperating,” in the sense that they were pushing for the investigation. As soon as the Lebanese shunned the investigation, the assassinations stopped.
The consensus inside the intelligence community, while not in the FBI, is that Iran (with or without Libyan help) destroyed Pan Am 103 as a direct response to the Navy’s shooting down of an Iranian passenger Airbus over the Gulf. It was a reminder to the United States that civilian airliners are off-limits. Read: The United States had better go back to “cooperating.” (Never mind that the USS Vincennes shot down the Iranian Airbus by accident; perception is what counts in assessing Iran’s response.)
What the Argentina attacks and Pan Am 103 have in common is the understanding they couldn’t result in misses. That would have been like sending no message at all.
Come, my dear, we are going home. They can’t shoot straight.
—CHARLES DE GAULLE TO HIS WIFE AFTER A 1962 ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
I suspect Hajj Radwan would have sympathized with the IRA’s attempt on Thatcher, but for the love of God, he must have asked, how could they get so close and then botch it? Like I just said, when you play the Prisoner’s Dilemma, there’s no tolerance for missing. Never slap the king, always kill him.
On August 22, 1962, French right-wing army officers made an attempt on President Charles de Gaulle as he drove from the Élysée Palace to Orly Airport. Although a dozen gunmen fired as many as 140 bullets at his convoy, they killed only two bodyguards. De Gaulle and his wife were untouched. It’s what led de Gaulle to quip to his wife about his would-be assassins’ bad shooting. But more to the point, the failed attempt politically bolstered de Gaulle while fatally demoralizing the rogue officers.
Let me go back to Hariri to put this in perspective. Hajj Radwan employed the equivalent of 2,500 kilos of TNT, enough to dig a six-foot-deep hole in the road. The investigators came to the chilling hypothesis that Hajj Radwan had arranged it so the van would intercept Hariri’s armored Mercedes precisely as it passed between the St-Georges and the Phoenicia, the two tallest buildings on the Corniche. If Hariri somehow had survived the explosion, the reverberating blast effect would have microwaved him.
Finally, if it weren’t already daunting enough a task, the van detonated in front of Hariri’s Mercedes rather than behind it. The occupants of the car directly in front of Hariri’s—only four feet ahead of Hariri’s car—survived, thanks to the car’s lifting up and allowing the undercarriage to take the brunt of the explosion.
In other words, there was no way to misinterpret the message: Hariri had to pay with his life for the wrongs he’d committed or was about to (whatever those were). The attack wasn’t a shot over the bow, something that could have been safely ignored. Missing would have completely altered the message’s content.
I suspect that one reason Hajj Radwan knew what he was doing was that he’d missed before and paid the penalty. In 1985 he made an attempt on the emir of Kuwait with a car bomb. Not only did the emir survive, but Hajj Radwan’s brother-in-law, who had been arrested for the 1983 bombings of the French and American embassies there, was dropped even deeper down into the godforsaken Kuwaiti oubliette he was already in.
For seven years, Hajj Radwan did everything in his power to spring his brother-in-law from his Kuwaiti jail, kidnapping and murdering any Kuwaiti he could put his hands on. But nothing would move the Kuwaitis, and with each try, Hajj Radwan looked weaker and more impotent. In the emir of Kuwait’s eyes, Hajj Radwan was not the stuff of nightmares.
I myself have a vague idea what it feels like to escape a near miss. It occurred in Central Asia not long after the breakup of the Soviet Union. I’d rented a small house to work out of, but apparently I’d chosen the wrong part of town. The first warning that I wasn’t welcome came in the guise of a break-in. I then put up bars over the windows and posted an armed guard out front. That same night, I was across town when I heard a boom from the direction of my house. When I got back home, my guard was out front talking to the police, who were examining a hole in my front yard. The guard explained that he’d been in the living room when someone threw a grenade at the front window, clearly meaning for it to explode inside. It was only thanks to its bouncing off a bar that it didn’t make it in. I never did find out whether the grenade was meant for the guard or me. But the point is that I chose not to take it personally—an assassination attempt. I took the precaution of moving out of the house, but otherwise kept doing what I was doing.
As is not the case in horseshoes, there are no points for coming close in assassination. It’s something the IRA apparently didn’t grasp.
Anyone who knew Magee wasn’t surprised he tried to decapitate the British government. Anything to get the English to leave. The question was whether he was the right man for the job.
In Magee’s favor, the tile work was good. Stuffing explosives into the bathroom wall of room 629 could only have been tedious work. The tiles needed to be put back just right and properly finished to conceal the fresh grout. It’s no doubt why it took Magee and his nameless accomplice three days to do the job.
But anyone who’s worked with explosives or tried to put together a complicated assassination like Thatcher’s understands it was a matter of sheer luck that Magee came as close to murdering the woman as he did. The main problem was that he hadn’t used enough explosives. In fact, the charge was so undersized that only one of the occupants of room 629 died and the other was only slightly injured. (Magee disputes the estimates of twenty to thirty pounds of explosives. There was five times that amount, he claims.)
The truth is that Magee ran up against the laws of physics—there’s only so much space in the wall of a hotel bathroom. The alternative would have been to fill the basement with explosives or run “strip charges” along the supporting beams and main load-bearing walls of the Grand. But neither, of course, was feasible; someone would have noticed. Nor apparently was it possible to pinpoint Thatcher’s room in advance to better position the explosives. While Hariri never stood a chance, Margaret Thatcher stood a very good one. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Going light on explosives was a grave miscalculation, but other ones were just plain foolhardy. Take the name Magee used to check into the Grand, Roy Walsh. Walsh was a notorious IRA operative serving life for murder. All it would have taken was an alert desk clerk to recognize the name and bring it to the police’s attention. Or if the police had done a thorough check of the guests who’d stayed at the Grand in the weeks before the conference, they very well might have stumbled onto the plot.
Magee also failed to take into account the possibility that the Conservatives would change hotels at the last minute. Or that Thatcher would come down from London for only the day of her speech rather than stay the night at the Grand. Magee should have taken the elementary precaution of including a mechanism to interrupt the timer. If the Conservatives had moved locations, inadvertently drawing the IRA into murdering only innocent guests, it would have been an even worse political catastrophe.
The crowning mistake came when Magee returned to England for the new round of bombings, freely and cheerfully flying back into the cage. He apparently hadn’t grasped another elementary rule: An assassin never revisits the scene of the crime. And by the way, couldn’t the IRA find a bomber without a criminal record, someone without fingerprints on file?
—
Like most IRA volunteers, Patrick Magee was born into economic and political blight—unemployment, prejudice, ignored grievances. He was two when his family moved from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Norwich, England. Life was a little easier there, but not much. Norwich is where Magee acquired the accent that let him check into the Grand unremarked.
In 1969, Magee moved back to Belfast, not long after the Troubles started in Northern Ireland. He joined the IRA at eighteen and soon came to the attention of the police, earning a reputation as a bomber with a brain. He reportedly exercised it by doing the Times crossword puzzle.
Magee bounced in and out of the Castlereagh interrogation center like a yo-yo. The police tried every trick they knew to recruit him as an informer. A policeman who’d conducted one of Magee’s interrogations had this to say about him: “He was a hard man, and we knew what he was like. We would have loved to have had him on our side.” But Magee was cagey, neither agreeing nor saying no. He was smart enough back then never to leave evidence behind that the police could use to put him away.
It’s unclear why Magee would make a clumsy mistake such as leaving a fingerprint on the registration card or failing to use enough explosives. But it didn’t dent Magee’s cocksure defiance as he was led from the court and addressed onlookers in Gaelic: “Tiocfaidh ár lá.” Our day will come.
There’s an old saying that the only Catholics in Northern Ireland who get a good education get it in prison. It’s true of Magee at least, who inside would earn a Ph.D. in literature by correspondence. (He also picked up a wife by correspondence, a novelist.)
It wasn’t long after his release—thanks to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement—that he publicly tried to justify the attempt on Thatcher. So far, so familiar, but he could never stick to a single story or, for that matter, articulate why precisely the IRA needed to murder Thatcher. In one interview Magee said that “they” (presumably the IRA) wanted to murder Thatcher because “they” were frustrated with the war in Northern Ireland. “The obvious recourse was to take the war to England,” he said.
As for targeting Thatcher instead of someone else, Magee said: “She was the leader of the British government, and she came into office determined to pursue a hard military line . . . You go up the chain of command and the buck stopped with her.”
In another interview Magee said he’d accomplished what he’d intended to, namely push Britain into peace: “After Brighton, anything was possible, and the British for the first time began to look very differently at us.”
In a third interview Magee pulled back, saying he was lucky to have missed Thatcher. “In fact, if half of the British government had been killed, it might have been impossible for a generation of the British establishment to come to terms with us.”
It’s all pure intellectual slop, of course. Just as the assassin knows the size of the charge it takes to do a job, he also knows exactly why he’s picked his target. An assassin can never entertain second thoughts, never beg for understanding, and never let the faintest shadow of doubt cross his brow, either before or after the act. In an assassin’s world, there is no tolerance for contrition or, for that matter, press interviews and Ph.D.’s.
Yes, the Brighton attack was spectacular, the kind of pyrotechnical display that got the IRA marquee billing. Arguably, it was the closest the IRA would ever come to making inroads into the consciousness of the wider British politic, which tended to look at the IRA as savages best kept in kraals. But in the end what did it really get out of it?
It comes down to this single truth: Either Margaret Thatcher deserved it or she didn’t. And if she truly did, then the last thing the IRA should ever have let happen is the Iron Lady walking out of the smoke and debris of the Grand Hotel.
Almost as bad, the IRA senselessly frittered away what mystique it still possessed when it allowed Magee to put on display his small personal ambitions and frailties. Magee’s sad public avowal will forever be a constant reminder that the IRA had tried and failed to murder Thatcher. Like an old fat man stripping down to nothing, the IRA turned itself into a thing of low contempt, the gang that can’t shoot straight.
As I said, Hajj Radwan made mistakes, as he did with the attempt on the emir of Kuwait. But what he did to mitigate them was to never confess to them. What’s the point in acknowledging failure? It’s not like it’ll make things right with a would-be victim. In fact, it’s better to do just the opposite, mislead people into believing you hit exactly what you were aiming at. Your objective is to leave the world in stupid dread rather than give it a ray of hope that you’re not as formidable as first thought.
Let me go back to Hajj Radwan’s car bombing of the American embassy annex in Beirut on September 20, 1984. (It occurred the day after Patrick Magee checked out of the Grand.) The best working hypothesis until now is that it was an attempt on the American and British ambassadors. If the British ambassador’s security detail hadn’t shot and killed the van’s driver, thereby preventing him from making it into the garage, both ambassadors probably would have died. In short, Hajj Radwan missed. But try to prove it.
Hajj Radwan knew exactly what he was doing in arranging to leave absolutely no evidence at the site of the attack. The van was stolen, the explosives were untraceable, the suicide bomber unidentifiable, and all fingerprints burned off in the explosion. Like any good assassination, it came out of a clear blue sky and disappeared back into one.
Although the Islamic Jihad Organization—the same fictitious organization commonly associated with Hajj Radwan—would claim it, it never said what the target was other than the annex. It left a handful of people like me, with only fragmentary intelligence and contextualization, to hypothesize that it had been a failed attempt on the ambassadors. One opinion among many.
Somewhat in support of my argument, Hajj Radwan sharply altered his tactics after the attack on the annex, moving away from trying to murder a target by bringing down a building on top of him to murdering him in a moving car. To that end, he improved his odds by adopting sophisticated firing devices and shaped charges. As one day he would demonstrate, no one traveling in a car is safe.
Anyway, people remember the attack on the annex as a resounding success to this day—the van slipped through a tight cordon of security, the driver faithfully sacrificed himself, and the bomb went off as it was supposed to. As Hajj Radwan could have told us, seeming to get what you want is as important as getting what you want.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: An assassination is meant to preclude mean reversion. If it won’t, go back to the drawing board.