40 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
ANNALS OFCOVERTACTION
LAST MAN STANDING
The killing of Qassem Suleimani and the calculus of assassination.BYADAM ENTOUSAND E VA N OSNOS
W
hen nation-states engage in
the bloody calculus of kill-
ing, the boundary between
whom they can target and whom they
can’t is porous. On January 3rd, the
United States launched a drone strike
that executed Major General Qassem
Suleimani, the chief of Iran’s élite spe-
cial-forces-and-intelligence unit, the
Quds Force. He was one of Iran’s most
powerful leaders, with control over para-
military operations across the Middle
East, including a campaign of roadside
bombings and other attacks by proxy
forces that had killed at least six hun-
dred Americans during the Iraq War.
Since the Hague Convention of 1907,
killing a foreign government official out-
side wartime has generally been barred
by the Law of Armed Conflict. When
the Trump Administration first an-
nounced the killing of Suleimani, offi-
cials declared that he had posed an “im-
minent” threat to Americans. Then,
under questioning and criticism, the
Administration changed its explanation,
citing Suleimani’s role in an ongoing
“series of attacks.” Eventually, President
Trump abandoned the attempt at justifi-
cation, tweeting that it didn’t “really mat-
ter,” because of Suleimani’s “horrible
past.” The President’s dismissal of the
question of legality betrayed a grim truth:
a state’s decision to kill hinges less on
definitive matters of law than on a set
of highly malleable political, moral, and
visceral considerations. In the case of
Suleimani, Trump’s order was the cul-
mination of a grand strategic gamble to
change the Middle East, and the open-
ing of a potentially harrowing new front
in the use of assassination.
The path to Suleimani’s killing be-
gan, in effect, with another lethal oper-
ation, more than a decade ago—on a
winter night in February, 2008, in an
upscale residential district of Damas-
cus, Syria. The target was Imad Mugh-
niyeh, a bearded, heavyset Lebanese en-
gineer in his mid-forties, who could
have passed for a college professor.
Mughniyeh was the architect of mili-
tary strategy for Hezbollah, the armed
force that dominates Lebanon and is
supplied with weapons and money by
Iran. Mughniyeh had been blamed for
some of the most spectacular terrorist
strikes of the past quarter century, in-
cluding the bombings that killed nearly
two hundred and fifty Americans in
Beirut, in 1983, and a suicide attack at
the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, in
1992, in which twenty-nine people died.
Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer,
said, of Mughniyeh, “We hold him re-
sponsible for doing more damage to the
C.I.A. than anybody ever has—period.”
Mughniyeh was also known for his suc-
cess in evading surveillance. In 1985, the
C.I.A. learned that Mughniyeh was
passing through Paris, but when a French
paramilitary team rappelled down the
wall of his hotel and burst through the
window, they found only a startled Span-
ish family enjoying an afternoon snack.
“He was an artist in keeping himself
below the radar,” Ehud Olmert, the for-
mer Israeli Prime Minister, said recently,
at his office in Tel Aviv.
In 2006, after a brief, fierce war with
Hezbollah, Israel launched a mission
to hunt down Mughniyeh before he
could regroup for more fighting. Ol-
mert, the Prime Minister at the time,
assigned the project to Meir Dagan, the
chief of Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intel-
ligence service. Dagan, a squat sixty-
one-year-old war veteran whose body
carried shrapnel from old wounds, dis-
dained the crude romance that hovered
around his profession. “There is no joy
in taking lives,” he later told a reporter.
“Anyone who enjoys it is a psychopath.”
Dagan had a personal stake in the
Mughniyeh operation. In 1982, he was
serving in southern Lebanon when a
suicide bomber, allegedly recruited by
Mughniyeh, reduced Israel’s military-intelligence post to rubble. Dagan liked
to say, “One day, I will catch Mughni-
yeh, and when I do, God willing, I will
finish him.” (Dagan died in 2016.)
One of the most sensitive questions
was where to carry out the killing if
the opportunity arose. An assassination
on ill-chosen terrain could trigger a po-
litical backlash or another war; an at-
tack inside Lebanon might well force
Hezbollah to retaliate. In 2007, Mos-
sad caught a break. A Mossad agent
hidden among Hezbollah leaders got
access to Mughniyeh’s cell phone,
allowing the organization to track
his movements. Mughniyeh, Mossad
learned, shuttled between two apart-
ments near Damascus. One belonged
to his mistress; he used the other, in the
upscale Kfar Sousa neighborhood, for
sensitive meetings. The Kfar Sousa
apartment would be an opportune site
for assassination—or, as Mossad calls
such operations, “negative treatment.”
While Israeli operatives slipped into
Damascus to prepare for the mission,
Dagan enlisted the help of the C.I.A.
Unlike Israel, the U.S. had an embassy
in Damascus, which housed a C.I.A.
station staffed by undercover officers.
At Dagan’s request, the C.I.A. rented
an apartment with a view of Mughni-
yeh’s meeting place, and Israeli opera-
tives equipped it with small remote-
controlled cameras, which fed live video
back to the Mossad headquarters, in
the Tel Aviv area. Mossad formulated
the plan, which called for hiding a bomb
in a parked car. Its technicians designed
a so-called shaped explosive, which pro-
jects shrapnel in a conical five-metre
“kill zone.” According to a former Is-
raeli official, the C.I.A. smuggled in the
explosive among ordinary shipments to
the Embassy. The C.I.A. in Damascus
gave the explosive to Mossad, whose
agents installed it in the spare-tire holder
of a Mitsubishi Pajero S.U.V.
But, at the last minute, President