The Perfect Kill (13 page)

In 1993, Ramzi Yousef would go on to blow up a van in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. He managed to kill six people, but the bomb wasn't large enough to bring down the building. He was run to ground in Pakistan and extradited to the United States to stand trial.

The absolute vacuousness of Yousef's mind came out in court. “You [America] were the first one who killed innocent people, and you are the first one who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb which killed tens of thousands of women and children in Japan and when you killed over a hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, in Tokyo with fire bombings.”

Never taking his oar out of those shallow waters, Yousef said that in bringing jihad to the United States he was “bringing the fight to the Jews.” There are a lot of Jews working in the World Trade Center, he said, and killing them would force America to change its policy.

Both uncle and nephew demonstrated a complete callousness toward life, an unfocused and undiluted hate that destroyed but did nothing else. They practice-bombed a Manila movie theater, injuring seven.
They left a bomb under an airliner seat, which killed a Japanese passenger. At one point, they considered blowing up eleven airliners over the Pacific.

Political naiveté like this is most often born out of a mix of ignorance and inexperience. It's particularly lethal when it involves a civilization in peril. Take, for example, the Khmer Rouge, the Palestinian militants, Peru's Shining Path. All three believe they are skirting extinction and have no choice but to lash out at their enemies. They are fixated on the vague possibilities of violence rather than its finer calculations.

Another way to look at mindless violence is to compare it with the mindless destruction of architecture. An insecure people will destroy an enemy's architectural heritage and other cultural symbols as a means to deny its existence and thereby shore up its own. This is exactly what al-Qaeda tried to do when it destroyed the Sufi tombs in Timbuktu. Or when the Saudi Wahhabis systemically razed ancient Mecca to efface Islam's pagan past.

In comparison, Mossad meticulously planned and carried out Atef's murder, employing the least amount of violence necessary. Not to mention accomplishing it with a cold, irremediable efficiency: There's no way to survive two 9mm bullets into the medulla oblongata (the nape of the neck).

Hajj Radwan also brought to bear accurate, proportionate, and discriminate violence. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, he attacked only Israeli army targets, not civilians. He attacked the Marines rather than just any American. And he definitely didn't bother with symbolic targets, such as synagogues or churches.

Hajj Radwan would resort to slaughter only when it was in direct response to slaughter perpetrated by the other side. It was only after France supplied Iraq with the munitions used to bomb Iranian cities that he set off bombs in Paris and indiscriminately killed civilians. In his eyes, a justified and proportionate application of violence.

Applying the word “fairness” to Hajj Radwan isn't going to fly. But
what he did have was an uncommon ability to distinguish between man and function. Given the opportunity, he always went after the man rather than the title. He murdered Hariri not because he was a former prime minister but because of who Hariri was—a rising threat. It's just as Caesar's assassins didn't pick him because he was just any Roman general, but because of who he was and what he wanted.

Unlike the Engineer and KSM, Hajj Radwan, like an insurance company, knew how to accurately model risk. He recognized that societies have only a fixed tolerance for absorbing violence. While you never want to apply too little of it, applying too much of it is even worse. While Hajj Radwan could get away with killing Frenchmen, he knew when to stop in order to leave room for a deal with the likes of Marchiani. It's always about the deal to be had, not the quantity of blood spilled. It's something the Engineer and bin Laden couldn't figure out and consequently they got nothing for their efforts.

The eye behind the scope decides whether to pull the trigger or not. Committees, bureaucracy, and collective decision making are guaranteed to spoil the broth.

S
alah-al-Din, Iraq, March 4, 1995: When the CIA sent me to northern Iraq, my orders were chiseled in stone: Keep a low profile, don't get killed, come home, file report. I also need to state for the record that no one said a word about assassinating Saddam Hussein. Or, for that matter, starting World War III. But as these things so often go, fortune had its own plans.

In my defense, we're talking about Iraq 1995. The place was a howling madhouse. In the north the Kurds were slaughtering one another in
droves, if only for the stubborn joy of it. Saddam's rump state was one vast gulag, his prisons booked to capacity, people starving in the streets. With Saddam unable to meet the payroll, his beloved army was starting to crumble. He ordered deserters rounded up and their ears amputated. Saddam himself showed every sign of cracking, from time to time threatening to reinvade Kuwait or even rocket Israel.

Seeing opportunity in chaos, Congress showered money on the CIA in the hope it could turn the Iraqi exiles on its payroll into a military force capable of unseating Saddam. But what Congress couldn't understand was that those same exiles, to a man, were a pack of swindlers, thieves, and freebooters. No amount of money was going to pry them out of their posh CIA-paid-for apartments in London's Mayfair and Paris's Sixteenth Arrondissement.

At the same time, there were those of us who often wondered if Congress's enthusiasm for getting rid of Saddam wasn't only for show. It wouldn't, for instance, do anything to repeal Executive Order 12333, President Reagan's 1981 ban on assassination. It meant the CIA was left with the sugar-plum-fairy dream that some Iraqi general on a white horse would ride over the hill and overthrow Saddam in a military coup d'état. Or, equally fanciful, his valet would grow a pair of balls big enough to put a bullet between the boss's eyes.

When the CIA sent me to Kurdish northern Iraq in 1994 to babysit two Congressional aides—it was my on-the-ground debut for things Iraq—it took me a nanosecond to decide we needed someone up here permanently. The way I looked at it, it was the only way we'd ever embolden a general on a white horse. I promptly volunteered to become the CIA's Man in Kurdistan.

There's something I should note here. Having served in Paris for three years, I wanted to go back to Beirut to get back in the fray. But after my misadventures there, Langley wouldn't consider it. Which made Iraq the next best thing. And, in the interests of full disclosure, my pitiful thinking went no deeper than that Iraq and Lebanon had to share
the same operating manual since they were both part of the Levant. Knowing Lebanon the way I thought I did, how hard could it be to figure out Iraq?

Another thing I learned in Paris played into my decision. After Atef was assassinated, I'd foolishly clung to the hope there might be something to be done with the Algiers angle. I'd asked Claude to fish around, and it wasn't a week before he came back with an intriguing tidbit that one of Hajj Radwan's old mentors, a retired Algerian intelligence officer, still kept in touch with him. When Hajj Radwan traveled to Algiers to see Atef, he'd always drop by to see the mentor. Claude gave me the mentor's Algiers home phone number . . . and from there it was a matter of waiting for what the French call an
aubaine
—a godsend.

It came a month later in the guise of a bearded, fire-breathing Algerian Salafi. He told the guard at the front gate he wanted to tell the CIA something in the strictest confidence. My enthusiasm for walk-ins undampened, I volunteered to go over and meet him.

The Algerian looked crazy, and he was. There was something very combustible burning inside him. Every time he wanted to make a point he'd grab my hand in an attempt to crush it, his eyes blazing red. He kept yelling about some proto-Nazi group in Lyon having bulldozed his mosque. “Allah will not let this stand!” he screamed. I kept looking over my shoulder at the guard, afraid he would pull out his sidearm and shoot both of us.

I took the Algerian out front to the park to the very bench Mario and I once had borrowed. He said he wanted only one thing from the CIA: help in overthrowing the military junta in Algeria. There was no chance of that, but I strung him along until I could figure out whether he might have people in Algeria capable of running down Hajj Radwan's mentor. It was all a long shot, but at that point, it's all I had.

The Algerian Salafi and I met once a week, and the more time I spent with him, the more convinced I became that he was truly insane. Worse, he'd taken a liking to me. But why was I surprised? The mentally
disturbed come to me like birds to a lighthouse. Eventually he told a French magazine he intended to murder the Algerian ambassador to Paris. The same day, the police ran him in, which, in turn, led him to call me for help. The cad that I was, I didn't take his call.

The Algerian wasn't the only dead-end lead to Hajj Radwan that floated to the surface during my Paris days. A walk-in claiming to be in touch with Hajj Radwan showed up at our embassy in an Eastern European country I'm not allowed to name. Anyhow, thanks to its efficient intelligence service, which seemed to have every phone and hotel room in town bugged, it quickly became apparent that the man was a swindler. Or, as they're called in the business, a fabricator.

I'd burned through a lot of CIA money in my lonely hunt for Hajj Radwan, and the only thing I had to show for it was the epiphany that there was nothing to be had in Europe. The exiles who take up refuge there live off stale reputations and imagined importance. They're all desperate to latch on to a sugar daddy like the CIA. But when has it ever been any different?

After the revolution in 1917, the British fell into the same trap, believing White Russian exiles could do something about the Bolsheviks, namely assassinate Lenin; the British got absolutely nothing for their efforts. The CIA tried to do something about Mao and the Chinese Communists using the Taiwanese, but fared no better than the British did in Russia. Machiavelli got it right when he said exiles are a worthless bunch.

When five of us pulled up in front of the dun two-story cinder-block house in the one-mule shithole of an Iraqi village called Salah-al-Din, my first question was: What's going to keep Saddam from assassinating us?

The house we were meant to live in for the next six months sat on a bald, windswept saddle. Its living room fronted a bleak hardscrabble field. To paraphrase someone I can't remember, there wasn't a tree to hang Judas from. Which meant any would-be sniper had a clean shot through our front window. And it wasn't as if Saddam's assassins had far to come: On a clear day, you could see the Iraqi front lines from our roof. Hajj Radwan would rather have opened his wrist than set up camp here.

In fact, there wasn't any protective coloring to be had. We were the only foreigners within a thousand parasangs, or whatever measurement the Kurds go by. And the way we were outfitted in a rainbow of Gortex parkas, hiking books, and Kalashnikov assault rifles we might as well have had “CIA” emblazoned across our fronts. For a moment, I stupidly thought about our dressing up like the Kurdish
peshmerga
in their exotic turbans and sashes. But we'd have given off the malodorous scent of imposters and been shot on sight.

It wasn't as if we could trust our hosts, the Kurds. Not only were they slaughtering one another, their ranks were riddled with regime spies. Trust me, it occurred to me more than once that if Saddam recruited a Kurd to kill us, it would be me, the chief, at the top of his list. It left me with the dumb hope that Saddam would decide I wasn't worth the candle.

My days were spent shuttling between the Kurds, urging my old Toyota Land Cruiser to go faster than it knew how. A moving target's harder to hit, right? Nights, we stayed home watching satellite TV, everyone drifting off to bed at about nine. I couldn't imagine why I ever thought Iraq would put me back inside the Arab mind.

Life in the north would have passed by in a mix of dull anxiety and unrelieved boredom had not an Iraqi general crossed over from Saddam-held Iraq bearing a “message” for “the CIA spies.” I was alarmed that news of our arrival had spread so far and wide, but I agreed to meet him.

With the general's bushy mustache, squat neck, and black pools for
eyes, he could have passed as Saddam's doppelganger. With his throaty Arabic, he even sounded like him. Not exactly thrilled to be sharing the company of a CIA agent, the general kept craning his neck as if he were trying to crawl out of a noose.

After a lot of hemming and hawing, and half a dozen cups of coffee, the general finally got it out that five senior military officers had sent him north to offer us a plan to get rid of Saddam. What they had in mind was a classic coup d'état, very much like the one we'd been dreaming about for so long. They would commandeer a battalion of tanks, seize the strategic points around Baghdad, and invite Saddam to step down. The whole thing would be over in a couple of hours, and with any luck, no one would die. All they wanted from the United States was a sign of support, like an F-16 flyover at a certain time.

Their plan sounded reasonable enough to me. On the other hand, the general hadn't offered me the details. He wanted Langley's initial reaction first. As soon as the general was out the door, I wrote up the meeting in a succinct telex for Langley. The way I looked at it, wiser heads back there would prevail. They'd either green-light it or take a pass. How hard could that be?

When I didn't get a response to the general's plans after a week, I started to get nervous. And when one week turned into two and three, I started to wonder what in the hell was going on. Didn't the dolts back home understand by now what a mistake it was to leave me in a vacuum to figure out things for myself? By week four, I decided all on my own that the problem had to be that Langley preferred something cleaner and more expeditious.

I sat the general down and told him he had to come up with something, well, more “streamlined.” Capturing Baghdad sounded too messy. A week later the general relayed to me a message from his rogue officers: They were now prepared to suborn twelve tanks and drive on to Tikrit, where they'd pulverize Saddam in his palace. Since the palace sat by itself on an outcropping of rock, it would be a fairly clean job.

I was encouraged that the putschists weren't talking about an assassin's high-powered rifle or poisoning Saddam's espresso. Though I should concede that a tank's main gun is a fairly precise weapon, which might even leave some to characterize it as a weapon of assassination. Not my problem, though; I wrote up the new plan and sent it back to give Langley a chance to weigh in on whether or not the “Tikrit plan” sounded like a violation of 12333. Wasn't it exactly for something like this that Langley kept all of those smart lawyers on the payroll?

In the meantime, the general duly sent a message to the rogue officers, letting them know we'd probably be going with the twelve tanks on Tikrit option.

—

I
t also finally dawned on me that it truly was time to start tightening things up. What would Hajj Radwan do in my shoes? Okay, he would never have allowed himself to be put in my shoes, but beyond that, I knew it was high time I deprive Saddam of a sitting target. I exchanged our Toyotas for a fleet of old dented-up cars. I broke us up into two teams and made sure we changed houses every night. Some nights we slept in caves. But I still felt like whitey at the oasis, the restless natives out there in the black night waiting for their chance to pounce and cut our throats.

I also decided we'd better seriously arm ourselves. One of my guys, an ex–Army captain, went down to the local arms merchant and bought a Russian Dragunov sniper rifle. He couldn't wait to test it. But when he came home, he had a bloody circle around his right eye. With
Dragunovs, as he figured out too late, the scope isn't meant to rest against your face when you fire it.

Just when I thought I was getting a grip on things, a woman showed up at the local Kurdish intelligence office, claiming she needed to tell the Americans something. Before anyone could get over to see her, she blew herself up, leaving fragments of her skull embedded in the concrete ceiling. Was she a counterassassin sent to interrupt our plans? There was no way to know. I took it, though, as an evil omen that the deck wasn't cutting in our favor, and then was certain of it when the notorious Iraqi exile and convicted swindler Ahmed Chalabi charged onto the stage. Frankly, Chalabi was the last thing I needed.

A University of Chicago and MIT grad, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan for bank embezzlement. Resurrected by the CIA after the Gulf War, he now owed his political existence to Washington. It was our F-16s that kept Saddam from grabbing and lynching him; it was the United States he ran to when things got ugly. By rights, Chalabi should have been America's obedient proxy who slavishly followed my orders. Instead, he treated me as if I were the mad uncle in the attic. He would pretend to listen to me, but as soon as I was out the door, he'd revert to his old conniving self.

I could have tolerated Chalabi had he known anything about his own country. But he hadn't lived in Iraq since 1958, which meant he didn't have a clue about how the fine gears of Saddam's regime turned. Like every other exile I'd ever run into, Chalabi was all smoke and mirrors. To make matters even worse, he had a political following in Washington, mainly neocons.