Don’t wait until the enemy is too deeply ensconced in power or too inured to violence before acting. He’ll easily shrug off the act and then come after you with a meat cleaver.
The morning started out above suspicion, a few sleek clouds scooting across an opulent sky. There was only the faintest of breezes. It was Sunday, and standing out on my balcony, I could see there was already traffic heading for the beaches. A couple of sailboats were out. More rain was promised, but you could’ve fooled me.
I went out on the balcony to listen to the Green Line. There were a couple of muted booms. Good, I thought, the Shiites are still at one another’s throats. Which meant that Hajj Radwan was even shorter on ammunition and would be back knocking on the Christian’s door, asking for more. But it wouldn’t last forever.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Hezbollah would prevail in the end—if for no other reason than that they had belief on their side and a lot of practice at war. When that day came, my little causeway into Hajj Radwan’s world would shut down. Like all soft underbellies, this one wouldn’t be around forever.
Missing the worst traffic, I got to Byblos early for lunch and wandered around streets unchanged since Phoenician times. After twenty minutes, I went to the restaurant to wait. I sipped a glass of wine as I watched a sailboat tack into port. A young girl was at the helm, mom and dad taking down the sails.
The Christian politician who joined me for lunch wanted to talk only about the upcoming elections and how the army commander intended to steal them by force. The Christian militias wouldn’t stand for it, he said. The fighting would be bad. He offered names, the usual suspects of Christian bigotry. Every once in a while, he’d say that the United States needed to do something to stop it. He kept coming back to our “great betrayal” of the Christians and how we shouldn’t have sent the Marines if we hadn’t intended to finish the job.
When I brought up the Shiite civil war, he looked at me blankly. It could have been occurring on the other side of the world as far as he was concerned. If I’d suggested that there was such a person as Hajj Radwan who one day would be calling the shots in the Christian enclave, he wouldn’t have believed me.
I got away about two, the return beach traffic still light. Before I got to Halat, there was a boom. It had to be close for me to hear it over the radio. Oddly, though, I couldn’t see any smoke. Maybe it was a nearby quarry I didn’t know about. But why would they be working on Sunday?
The road took a tight turn around a finger of rock that jutted out into the sea. Just as I came around it, there was a thundering explosion a few hundred feet in front of me, rock spewing out into the road. I thought that it had to have been a large-caliber artillery round. A bank of gray smoke and dust drifted up the side of the cliff.
There was an old Mercedes on the other side of the road, its nose into the rock, the windows spidered by shrapnel. The driver’s door opened. A man got out. He was holding his head, blood running down his face. He moved quickly and opened the back door. I slowed down, looking for a place to pull over. I watched him as he pulled a small girl from the backseat, cradling her in his arms. Her left leg from right below the hip was shredded, gushing blood.
There was static from my Motorola, then someone keying it. “Maverick, Maverick.”
Maverick was my radio call sign. I picked up the radio and yelled into it. “What!”
“Sorry to disturb you whatever you’re in between.” It was Chuck.
“Fuck off.”
There was nothing I could do for the girl bleeding to death not twenty feet away, but I put down the radio and started to get out of the car.
The radio was insistent now. “Maverick, don’t forget we got a meet at seventeen hundred.”
It was our private code that there was movement at Hajj Radwan’s transfer house—and that we should meet up at ours.
There were people piling out of cars now. A man had the little girl on the ground on a coat. He was tying a tourniquet around her leg. It wasn’t going to work; she would die. I wasn’t going to watch.
I expected that traffic would be backed up along the coast road, but it wasn’t. It was as if there’d been no shelling at all. I wondered about the Lebanese’s capacity to shrug off violence, whether they were just numbed by it or if it was a case of sheer defiance.
I had no idea what the shelling had been about. But what I did know was that Muslim Beirut wasn’t in range; it had to have been from a Christian position. Was this the start of it, the Christian civil war? Fuck these people and their shitty little blood feuds.
Instead of the direct route to our house, I continued along the coast road toward the port. Before I got there, I cut east through Sin el Fil. I stopped and turned the engine off to listen to the Green Line. There was some gunfire, the usual stuff for this time of day.
I stopped at a fork below the Ministry of Defense. It had a good view of the southern suburbs. No sign of fighting. I got out with a pair of binoculars. Our house looked as abandoned and forlorn as ever. I couldn’t see Chuck’s car, and there was no sign of movement at Hajj Radwan’s transfer house. What was Chuck talking about?
I eased down the hill, still listening for any uptick of fighting. I called Chuck on the Motorola, but I was now out of repeater range. It was probably just as well; no doubt the chief had his radio on and was listening to us.
I walked around the house, checking to see if anything was out of place. I looked into the window and saw the Coke can on the coffee table that I’d left there on my last visit.
I opened the old padlock to the front door. It had taken Garfield two weeks to find an old rusted combination lock that still worked. I checked the untamperable plastic-encased counter above the door. Its purpose was to number each opening and closing of the door. It was at thirty-eight. The last time I’d been here, I closed the door at thirty-four. Had Chuck let himself in since we were last here? I’d have to wait until he showed up to ask.
I tried Chuck on the radio again, but there still wasn’t a ping off the repeater. I went into the kitchen and pulled the dead refrigerator from the wall. I pulled off the back panel. The IR receiver was there. But there was no way to tell whether anyone had gotten to it.
A rocket’s scream. The impact was maybe half a mile away, in the middle of the no-man’s-land between the house and the southern suburbs. Where had it come from? I pushed the refrigerator back against the wall. There was a distant pop of a mortar launch and then another.
Death was now diving around the house, at least a half-dozen explosions. I crawled to the back bedroom, the one that smelled like piss. Too bad there was nothing to pull over me. I squatted in the corner. There were several more impacts and then silence. It was time to leave.
Thank God the car started right away. I peeled away and headed up the hill, the car fishtailing with every rock and hole I hit. At an intersection I slowed down to get a look behind me. The Green Line was dead quiet. Had it been some dumb bastard on the other side unburdening himself of old mortar shells?
Then a new mortar round landed somewhere above me. I floored the car. By the time I got to the main road, two more fell in quick succession. They’d fallen so close together that I knew they’d been fired from separate tubes.
I didn’t slow down at the intersection with the main road and only saw the van when it darkened the right side of my car. I don’t remember the crash or anything else that happened in the next few minutes.
I looked up to see a craggy old woman in black looking down at me. I thought for a moment she was one of my landladies come to ask what I’d done to her house. The woman said something I couldn’t hear.
I was curious how the world had gone liquid and blurry, and then noticed the van was implanted in the side of my car, water from its radiator splashed into and across the wreck of my new car. I wondered what had happened to its driver.
I felt around on the passenger floor for my Motorola. It wasn’t there. Someone had reached in and grabbed it, I thought. Why hadn’t they also taken my Kalashnikov and my 9mm Browning, which were still on the floor? There were more people now gathered around the car. Someone opened the door for me and reached in to pull me out. As I started to get out, I felt something under my foot: my Motorola. I picked it up and keyed it. “This is Maverick. Anyone near the MOD? I need a ride.”
Garfield came up: “What’s the problem, Maverick? Forget where you parked your car?”
—
That night Chuck didn’t help clear things up when he told me that he’d seen where the mortars were fired from. It wasn’t from the southern suburbs, but from our side, a Christian position. And it wasn’t far from where he and the tech had been arrested six months before.
I felt as if ice water were coursing through me. Had Hajj Radwan’s arms supplier found out about us and mortared our house as an invitation for us to kindly get the fuck out of his business? Or maybe Hajj Radwan himself was somehow behind it, letting us know he knew all about our plans. For all I knew, my two landladies worked for Hajj Radwan and told him about us. Not a shred of evidence for it, of course. I was worse off than Chuck with his Claymore mines and pellet gun.
I also never did find out who shelled the Byblos road. Maybe it had something to do with the upcoming presidential elections, not that that made any sense either. While I’m at it, I still don’t understand exactly why the Colonel wouldn’t help his natural ally, the United States, go after our common enemy, Hajj Radwan. The truth is that I wasn’t anywhere near understanding this country.
But what I was certain of was that it was time to get out. Our house was compromised. If the Christian warlord hadn’t noticed us before, he did now. I told Chuck he should leave too, but he told me he wasn’t ready to get out of the game. Who knows, maybe he thought my replacement would know what he was doing.
Society attacks early when the individual is helpless.
—B. F. SKINNER
To this day, I have no idea whether Hajj Radwan even knew who I was, let alone plotted my murder. I recently had a chance to ask Garfield about it. “Don’t know, bud,” he said. “What I do know is that a couple of mortars were enough to make you turn tail and run away like a three-legged jackrabbit.”
I also don’t know whether Law #2—Make It Count—applied by the time I got around to planning Hajj Radwan’s murder. Would it have made a difference by 1988? Would it have prevented Pan Am 103 and Chuck’s murder? I doubt it. By then, someone else would have instantly filled Hajj Radwan’s shoes.
What did I really know about Hajj Radwan? He supposedly had bottle green eyes, a color you don’t easily forget. But without a good picture, it wasn’t something I could ever pin down. It was the same thing later when I couldn’t determine whether his new wife was Lebanese or Syrian. Who cares? No one. But the point is that if you can’t tell whether a man has hazel or blue eyes, how can you even begin to get at the harder question about determining the value of his blood?
Like the Pashtun tribal belt, Lebanon is a horrendously byzantine place, and I mean byzantine in the sense that the country is incomprehensible to outsiders. Its hidden mechanisms of power, secret alliances, and opaque interests are forever out of our reach. My three-by-five cards might get me in the door, but they’re not even close to a road map for political murder.
In other words, the chance of our following Law #21—Get to It Quickly—wasn’t in the cards. By the time we figured out who he was, it was three years too late. He’d already driven us out of Lebanon, created a guerrilla force capable of beating any conventional force, and terrified the Lebanese to the point no one in his right mind dared defy him.
If there’s anything I learned over the years about political murder, it’s that you have to know your enemies as well as you know your own country. It’s the only possible way to meet and destroy a rising threat. The French should have done something about Ho Chi Minh when he was a sous chef at the Ritz in Paris. The Saudis should have taken care of Osama bin Laden in the mid-nineties, long before he gave substance to smoke.
When you decide to swim in the deep end of Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, or any other foreign land, you’d better know exactly what’s in the water swimming with you. Both the British Raj and the United States failed in Pakistan’s tribal belt because they didn’t have a clue about the enemy they were fighting.
It’s no consolation, but the American government isn’t alone in being out of touch. On December 3, 2013, a senior member of Hezbollah was shot dead just after midnight near his home in the southern suburbs, not very far from Hajj Radwan’s transfer house on the Green Line. A professional job, he was hit at close range and the assassin or assassins got cleanly away.
The New York Times described the victim as a “major player,” and the BBC called him a Hezbollah “commander.” What neither apparently knew was that he was the right-hand man of Hajj Radwan, approximately number three in the Islamic Jihad Organization. He’d been instrumental in the attacks on the Marines and the two attempts on the American ambassadors. If indeed Hajj Radwan was involved in Pan Am 103, I suspect that this man also played a role.
Two weeks later, a pro-Hariri former finance minister was blown up by a car bomb as he traveled through Beirut. When someone asked me “why him” and “why now,” I could only offer that the man was an active backer of the tribunal. So maybe it was a matter of more cleaning up—Law #16. Or he might have been selected to pay down the debt of the murder of the Hezbollah “major player” from two weeks before.
This may all sound like too much grainy detail and a lot of pointless barbarian bloodletting—and it is for those who’ve made up their mind that political murder is an anachronism—but the point here is that these murders were well planned and undertaken with a well-defined purpose in mind: Preserve force and head off war. They were a stand-in for an all-out Shiite-Sunni civil war.
Which brings me back to the central question of whether Hajj Radwan’s assassination in 2008 truly counted. Did it make us safer? The answer quickly dissolves into a lot of hypotheticals that will never be answered. But my take is that the melee of assassins Hajj Radwan bequeathed to Lebanon is still out there, very much active. Hajj Radwan’s brother-in-law fit nicely into his shoes. He knows how to make the perfect shaped charge and hit a car on the move. In short, the Islamic Jihad Organization, or whatever they’re calling the organization Hajj Radwan founded, is like some sort of bacteria resistant to antibiotics: As soon as a survival mechanism is found, it’s shared with everyone. He was an architect of political murder rather than a one-man show.
The fact is that we all were too slow out of the blocks. The Israelis should have killed Hajj Radwan before he destroyed the military intelligence headquarters in Tyre in November 1982. The United States should have killed him before he blew up our embassy in April 1983. Hariri should have recognized him for the threat he was and made the necessary accommodation.
Two years before Chuck and I started planning, Hajj Radwan had already done the bulk of damage he would do—the Marines, the two embassies, the hostages. Three years after our fumbled Hail Mary, Hajj Radwan released the hostages, thanks to diplomacy rather than force. He would make more attacks on the United States, including the one in Karbala, but they were petering out of their own accord. By 2008, Hajj Radwan was more or less retired.
In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist is stranded alone on an island, forced to learn how to survive. But life suddenly becomes a lot more complicated when Friday shows up. The two of them had to figure out how to create what amounts to a society. But think of the other equally plausible alternative: Crusoe and Friday fall out and have no choice but to compete with each other for survival—hunt each other down to destruction. Wouldn’t their instincts have to develop a lot faster?
Like so many of my generation, I had my lethal instincts bred out of me from birth. Dr. Spock didn’t condition us to put two bullets between someone’s eyes. Trying to regenerate those instincts when I was in Beirut was doomed from the start. Purposeful murder, like sports or business, is something you have to do every day to get good at it.
In the Iraq War, during a botched raid on an enemy house, a Navy SEAL was seriously wounded in an ambush. It led the SEALs to switch from “dynamic entries” to “combat entries.” What that involved was speeding up a raid, greatly reducing everyone’s reaction time . . . and shooting anything that moves. There were a lot fewer SEAL casualties and more on the other side. But the drawback was that the raids were based on the same chatter and algorithms that cause drone missiles to miss. There wasn’t a way to know whether they were killing the right enemy or not, let alone whether they were nipping a problem in the bud.
My guess is that what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will tell us is that even though our weaponry is of the highest lethality, our soldiers and spies are uncommonly courageous, and there’s a whole generation of young Americans prepared to sacrifice themselves for their country, all of this doesn’t add up to their comprehending the complexities of political murder.
Somewhere along the line we’ve deceived ourselves into believing that money wins war, that we have the great luxury of time, and that the show of force is enough to make our enemies submit. In stubbornly refusing to see our enemies for who and what they are, we’ve missed the fact that you can’t kill what you can’t see.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: Assassins and psychopaths don’t procrastinate. They treat violence as purely instrumental, only worth it when accomplished expeditiously.
Getting at the facts of an assassination is like taking matryoshka dolls apart—a lot of little lies within big lies. While I may have spent what amounts to thirty years writing this book and sent it to a lot of people for a reality check, from Hezbollah experts to ATF bomb techs, there are still large parts of the story I’m not sure I got right. There’s always some new fact or story that comes along to surprise me. I apologize for errors of fact and interpretation I may have made. For instance, my working hypothesis is that Nasrallah knew about Hariri, but I don’t know it for a fact. Even the facts I should have down I’m not quite sure about.
The day after Hezbollah TV aired its lie about my involvement in the attempt on Lebanon’s only ayatollah, I called an old friend to ask him why he thought William Casey, the ex–CIA director, had made up the story about American involvement, as Bob Woodward recounted in his book Veil.
“Because it’s true,” he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about and told him so.
“I was there. I trained them . . . or at least I think I did. Here’s the story.”
In August 1984 a dozen bomb techs stood at the edge of an airfield and watched a twin-engine King Air set down on the base’s single runway. They knew Bill Casey was on the plane, but they had no idea why he had decided to pay the base a visit. It wasn’t the kind of place you casually drop in on.
The base is located on a remote inland waterway in a remote part of America. Protected by high fences, watchtowers, and thickets of old-growth trees, it’s impossible for someone outside the fence to see the bomb ranges, trailers, and Quonset huts. But when the wind’s right, you can hear the explosions.
Foreigners flown in for training have no idea where they are. To make sure of this, the windows of the plane are covered by thick black-out curtains. And once on base, no one is allowed out. No one is even allowed to make phone calls out.
One reason for the secrecy is that residing within the base’s confines is more expertise in bombs than anywhere else. It’s where the American government sends IEDs collected from around the world to be pulled apart and studied. After they’re analyzed, they’re rebuilt for testing.
When the King Air door opened, the base chief and two bomb techs were surprised to see a young woman in the door and a woman in her early sixties standing behind her. The two walked down the plane’s stairs looking as if Jules Verne had just transported them to the center of the earth. A moment later, Casey shuffled into the plane’s door—wearing a Burning Tree Country Club golfer’s cap, T-shirt, and smudged painter’s pants. Casey joined the two women at the bottom of the stairs and introduced them to the base chief and the two techs. The techs barely understood Casey through his notorious mumble that the two women were his wife and daughter.
The base chief offered to take everyone to breakfast, and Casey agreed, sort of.
“Yeah, they’re hungry,” he said, nodding toward his wife and daughter. “But I want to talk to this major you have here before I do anything.”
Casey had given the commander of the Lebanese bomb techs an unintended field promotion. He was actually an army captain. He and his team had been at the base for the past several weeks, learning how to dismantle car bombs and other IEDs.
The chief and a bomb tech led Casey to an old Ford Bronco, its windows covered with wire mesh to protect against blast debris. They drove for about five minutes down a gravel road with pine trees on either side. When the Lebanese captain saw the Bronco, he came out. When he recognized Casey, he stiffened and put on his green Lebanese Army beret. Casey shook his hand and got right to it.
“This guy Fadlallah’s a goddamned problem.”
The bomb tech was standing near enough to Casey to clearly hear what he said. He was sure he hadn’t misunderstood, Casey’s mumble having disappeared. Casey apparently wanted to be absolutely certain that the Lebanese captain knew he was talking about Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah.
“Isn’t there something we can do about him?” Casey asked, more to himself than to the captain.
That afternoon the bomb techs training the Lebanese were given an addendum to the curriculum: a three-day segment on building “radio detonators”—devices that send out encoded radio signals to detonate bombs.
Nothing was put in writing, per Casey’s orders. And it was only eight months later that the bomb techs wondered if this didn’t have something to do with the Fadlallah attempt. Could it have been anything else?
—
Hajj Radwan obviously should have been the one to write this book. But since he didn’t even keep a journal (as far as I know), it’s left to someone like me to comb through the carnage he’d created to try to make sense of what he was up to.
The way I see it, Hajj Radwan had spent nearly three decades trying to bring a system to political murder. He went out of his way to avoid the obvious traps, such as blowing up trains and school buses. I would argue that it paid off by his own terms. By channeling violence, he obtained more than most assassins. When he managed to apply all of the rules, his success rate approached one hundred percent. If Hajj Radwan were around to give us a thumbnail sketch, here’s what I think he would have said:
One: Assassination has to be pretty much a local affair, a settling of scores among people who really know one another. As with the Lao and Mafia assassinations, it works best when the assassin knows his victim by sight. He has no doubt about why the victim is a problem, what the stakes are, and how exactly his murder will improve things.
Hajj Radwan’s assassinations worked best in Lebanon—if for no other reason than that it’s a small country where there are only a couple of degrees of separation between people. And part of it goes back to the fact that Lebanese politics is a continually negotiated compromise—it’s possible for one well-calculated murder to change one side’s fortunes. In other words, Hajj Radwan could put a price on Lebanese blood.
The same considerations hold for Israeli assassinations. The Jews and the Arabs live in a confined space. Before Mossad puts a Palestinian on a “kill list,” it will find out everything there is to know about him, from the elements of his crime to his underwear size. Mossad makes its mistakes, but it would never consider a shot in the dark—such as dropping a drone on an enemy you don’t know by name or sight.
Two: Assassination is not that much different from the ancient rite of sacrifice, where a scapegoat is offered up to an enemy to resolve a conflict. It’s what von Stauffenberg counted on when he made his attempt on Hitler, propitiate the Allies by murdering him and in the bargain save Germany. In Iraq, my implicit bargain with the generals was that if they got rid of Saddam, the Sunnis would remain the dominant force. Hajj Radwan’s implicit offer to the Sunnis was that with Hariri out of the picture there’d be no war between the Shiites and Sunnis.
Three: When Machiavelli advises the prince to periodically cull out the bad apples, he’s in effect classified assassination as a legitimate tool of governance. An in extremis, ad hoc form of justice. It’s how Hajj Radwan justified assassinating the Lebanese president in 1989. Sacrifice the one to save the herd.
The one common element in all of this is that the assassin must have a deep, factual, bulletproof knowledge of the enemy, whether he lives across the street or halfway around the world. It’s the only way to anticipate a threat and deal with it in a timely and efficient manner. When the Saudis offered up bin Laden to the Clinton administration, Washington wisely declined to take him. It was Saudi Arabia alone who understood the threat he represented and, accordingly, should have done its own dirty work.
Without even a superficial understanding of the murky stew of clans and tribes that govern the ragged edges of the world, the United States isn’t capable of efficient political murder. If we can’t tell a Baluchi from a Pashtun, how can we decide who deserves it and who doesn’t? This is one reason why the murders of Saddam, bin Laden, and Gaddafi produced nothing other than more bloodshed. As Wall Street would put it, the United States mispriced violence.
It’s not that I don’t understand the attraction of drones, how they give the White House a bump in the polls and Americans the illusion that they’re being kept safe, but the point is that the United States has confused ideas with people. Assassinating bin Ladin never stood a chance of driving a stake into violent jihad, just as Rome did not kill Christianity when it killed Christ. In other words, there’s no point in killing the Clausewitzes of the world but, rather, the general who’s mastered his tactics and is about ready to rout you on the battlefield.
And finally, there is this: If the central problem of humanity is justice, it can never be far from the assassin’s mind that the act must always be about cutting out the malignant cell to save the body. Anything short of or beyond it, and he’ll only make things worse.