From a reader: "I am a regular reader of your blog and enjoy it very much. I came across these
(unexpected) paragraphs yesterday in an article in the N.Y. Times Magazine from
February 3, 2013:
Happy to remain an anonymous tipster (in case you had not seen it and wish to post about it)."
Happy to remain an anonymous tipster (in case you had not seen it and wish to post about it)."
"I had no idea what kind of “substance” until a friend
urged me to look at “La Liste Hariri,” one of de Villiers’s many books set in
and around Lebanon. The book, published in early 2010, concerns the
assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister. I spent years
looking into and writing about Hariri’s death, and I was curious to know what de
Villiers made of it. I found the descriptions of Beirut and Damascus to be
impressively accurate, as were the names of restaurants, the atmosphere of the
neighborhoods and the descriptions of some of the security chiefs that I knew
from my tenure as The Times’ Beirut bureau chief. But the real surprise came
later. “La Liste Hariri” provides detailed information about the elaborate plot,
ordered by Syria and carried out by Hezbollah, to kill Hariri. This plot is one
of the great mysteries of the Middle East, and I found specific information that
no journalists, to my knowledge, knew at the time of the book’s publication,
including a complete list of the members of the assassination team and a
description of the systematic elimination of potential witnesses by Hezbollah
and its Syrian allies. I was even more impressed when I spoke to a former member
of the U.N.-backed international tribunal, based in the Netherlands, that
investigated Hariri’s death. “When ‘La Liste Hariri’ came out, everyone on the
commission was amazed,” the former staff member said. “They were all literally
wondering who on the team could have sold de Villiers this information — because
it was very clear that someone had showed him the commission’s reports or the
original Lebanese intelligence reports.”
When I put the question to de Villiers, a smile of
discreet triumph flashed on his face. It turns out that he has been friends for
years with one of Lebanon’s top intelligence officers, an austere-looking man
who probably knows more about Lebanon’s unsolved murders than anyone else. It
was he who handed de Villiers the list of Hariri’s killers. “He worked hard to
get it, and he wanted people to know,” de Villiers said. “But he couldn’t trust
journalists.” I was one of those he didn’t trust. I have interviewed the same
intelligence chief multiple times on the subject of the Hariri killing, but he
never told me about the list. De Villiers had also spoken with high-ranking
Hezbollah officials, in meetings that he said were brokered by French
intelligence. One assumes these men had not read his fiction." (Let me guess: Johny `Abduh is the "top intelligence" officer, who now works for the Hariri family?)