The Perfect Kill

August 18, 2014
Former CIA agent Baer (The Company We Keep) reveals the ins and outs of the politically charged notion of assassination, as experienced through his own eventful career. He recounts a decade spent tracking the Lebanese assassin known as Hajj Radwan, and distills his knowledge into 21 pithy laws, each of which gets its own chapter. As he takes the reader from #1 “The Bastard Has to Deserve It” to #21 “Get to It Quickly,” Baer argues both for and against the necessity of assassination, noting his preference for the old-fashioned, more personal approach over modern drone warfare, which he compares to phone sex: “ solve the immediate problem, but they leave you unsure of what you got out of it and hungry for more.” His style is candid and accessible, with a little of the American cowboy in evidence. He seems to have admired Radwan, while simultaneously wanting him dead: “although I never laid eyes on him, we were the most intimate of enemies.” While the material is dry at times, it still makes for a fascinating look at a nebulous and misunderstood topic. Agent: Luke Janklow and Paul Lucas, Janklow & Nesbit.

August 15, 2014
A best-selling author and former CIA operative chronicles his experiences as an assassin while offering chilling insight into the fine art of political murder. When FBI agents told CNN national security affairs analyst Baer (The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, 2008, etc.) he was under investigation for the attempted murder of Saddam Hussein, he was bewildered. The CIA had indeed charged him with terminating Hussein, but now his country was turning against him for trying to do his job. With dry wit and intelligence, the author reviews his long career as a sometime-assassin (who ultimately never killed his targets) and provides running commentary about the do's and don'ts of political murder. He draws on his more than 25 years of experience as a CIA operative as well as the long, bloody history of assassination itself, titling each of the chapters after what he calls the 21 "laws" of killing powerful leaders. At the heart of the labyrinthine story are the author's experiences with a man he calls Hajj Radwan, who had "truly mastered that eternal intimate dance between politics and murder." Feared throughout the Middle East but especially in Lebanon, Radwan-who Baer speculates may have helped mastermind the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland-worked with speed, secrecy, surprise and intimate knowledge of his victims. Perhaps even more importantly, he channeled his brutality on individuals rather than groups to "obtain well-defined and valid military objectives." Baer contrasts Radwan's tactics to the impersonal drone strikes-which often miss their marks, kill the innocent and produce more violence-currently employed by the United States. In the end, it is the skilled assassin, rather than the American technocrat, who doesn't understand "the murky stew of clans and tribes that govern the ragged edges of the world," that stands the better chance of eliminating evil. Fascinating reading from an expert.

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October 15, 2014
The provocative title of this book by longtime CIA agent Baer is a grabber, but anyone thinking it's a how-to on assassination will be disappointed (which is probably a good thing). The text begins by declaring that assassination may be the act of a psychotic, or it may be more like tyrannicide, a necessary removal of a tyrant. Despite titles like Law #1: The Bastard Has to Deserve It, Baer focuses not on assassination in general but on the attempts by the CIA to find and kill Imad Mughniyeh (known as Hajj Radwan), the senior Hezbollah military commander believed to have masterminded various terrorist acts, including the attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983. Baer was in the front lines of trying to take out Radwan and came very close twice (Radwan was killed in a car bombing in 2008). Baer's account is done a disservice by those chapter headings and subheads, which have little or nothing to do with the actual contents, but beyond the slick packaging, this is a fascinating, up-close look at the hunt for Radwan, and it's packed with intriguing contemporary and historical details on the assassinations of tyrants.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)