Disguised contract murders in a 2020 non-fiction book
by Stephen Hewitt | Published
The 2020 book I am a hitman purports to be the story, told in the first person, of an anonymous, ex-military professional murderer, who had so far escaped justice and who wrote on page 3 “I have killed people for money over a period of more than 15 years”... “You're never going to know who I've killed as I always ensured my targets did not appear to have been murdered. They died in accidents, occasionally a suicide, and even more rarely from random acts that appeared to the outside world to just be street crimes.”
Interleaved with his personal life the first-person narrator describes secret murders committed in multiple countries, including Britain where the book is published. According to its first pages it is published by Welbeck “An imprint of Welbeck Non-Fiction Limited”, 20 Mortimer Street, W1T 3JW, with ISBN 9781787396036. On the back cover is printed “NON-FICTION”.
Perhaps the only thing that seems reasonably sure about this book is that it needs to be treated with caution and cannot be taken at face value. Apart from common-sense external reasons, there are internal indications. For example, even in terms of its own story there is no coherent motivation given for publication and it's true agendas and motivations remain hidden. It may be a mixture of information and disinformation or be pure fiction. Perhaps one agenda is the demoralising effect on society of the apparent impunity with which such a work can be published.
This review approaches the book on the basis that it is factual but this approach is not intended to imply that it necessarily is, or that the book necessarily contains anything except fiction and disinformation.
The unreliable narrator
There is a disclaimer in one of the first pages: “That means the contents of this book are based on a 100% true story and events. But to protect the identity and privacy of those who form part of the narrative in this book, all names, dates, descriptions and places have been changed.”
If it were frank fiction, in places you might think it used the device of the unreliable narrator, where the reader is supposed to see through what the narrator is asserting to a reality beyond. But in this book there is no consistency in this.
For example, near the end of the book, the narrator is visited by two men who say they are from MI6: “If they'd known who I really was they'd have kicked the front door down and grabbed or most likely shot us.”
The question is whether the reader is supposed to think that the narrator really believes this. In the subsequent discussion it seems that the MI6 men know exactly who he is and are delivering some kind of death threat. They ask if he knows anything about a hitman called “the ghost” (which in fact is he himself). After he denies all knowledge “the quieter MI6 man” says “I hope he's somewhere safe, because those criminals will kill him if they ever find him.”
The same narrator has already interpreted what seems like a similar threat after one of his first murders:
My second job for H was an Iraqi man allegedly selling arms to rogue players in the Middle East. This guy had once been a middleman between Saddam Hussein and the US government, but he'd supposedly turned bad and had been providing arms from Western suppliers to Saddam's sworn enemies, the Iranians. This was the late 1990s.
(page 93)
After he has murdered this victim in the USA, disguising the death as suicide, he receives a warning:
But afterwards, the instigator warned H that Saddam's agents might come looking for us to get revenge in order to convince their enemies in the Middle East that they hadn't played a role in the death of that arms dealer. That warning came via the CIA, who were really saying that if we disclosed anything about the job to anyone, they'd help Saddam's agents track us down and kill us.
(page 97)
This narrator repeatedly makes assertions or purports to believe things which common sense suggests are absurd. For example:
“I now realised why my last intended victim near Brighton had his daughter on the back of his Harley-Davidson that day. It must have been a safety measure just in case I still tried to kill him.” (page 288)
Near the end of the story he says he has “dozens of neatly stacked mini audio cassettes” (page 292)...“I'd secretly recorded virtually everything I had ever done. Many of the numerous chats with H. Every job including most of the kills themselves. No one knew about those tapes and they had the potential to bring a lot of people down if I ever got caught. I could use them to bargain my way out, whether by fear or coercion, with the good guys or the bad ones.”
“He hadn't fled from Israeli gangsters. He'd fled to north Cyprus in order to continue to operate as a criminal and avoid a Mossad hit squad.” (page 205) And the same narrator has written two pages before that North Cyprus “was virtually lawless and filled with gangsters from all over Europe and Russia.”...“If I'd been my target, North Cyprus would have been the last place on earth I would have lived,”...
The career in murder
He joined the French foreign legion and went to Lebanon in the early 1980s. “We landed in Beirut from a French warship anchored off the coast in the dead of night after boarding a troop vessel in Larnaca, Cyprus, the previous day. I was in an undercover unit specifically trained to seek out and kill as many insurgents as we could find.” (page 58)
His commanding officer, called ‘H’ in the book, was later to recruit him for his career of professional murder and supply him with the work.
“He'd served in Northern Ireland with the British Army and left under a cloud, though none of us knew what he'd actually done. At first, he seemed typical of the type of British army officer I thought I'd managed to avoid by not joining the regular services. He had an unruly mop of blonde hair and a plummy nasal accent that made him sound like a gritty version of Kenneth Williams.”
They were both badly injured by a truck bomb driven into the “nine-storey Drakkar building” which ended their time in the French foreign legion.
In hospital together he learned more about ‘H’:
“He admitted he'd experienced this type of covert action before on the streets of Belfast when he'd been in the British Army. He said he had been kicked out after shooting an IRA man at close range in the head and presuming his own commanding officer would help cover it up for him.” (page 63)
Later back in Britain ‘H’ approached him “H told me that some old ex-army contacts had come to him with a “special job” located in Brazil”. This was to be his first murder and according to the story it involved his own family. (page 74)
“But before he went into the details, he insisted on fully explaining to me how he'd killed people on behalf of the British Army in Belfast and told me more about how he'd been kicked out of the army for shooting an IRA man in the head” ... “We went into more depth about methods for making deaths look like accidents. H told me there were eye drops containing a chemical that could kill within two minutes and that left no trace in the body. We talked about how falling is the most common way for people to die at home. He said his own personal favourite was getting someone to fall off a cliff edge or be knocked down by a car.” (page 75)
“The most important thing is to always remember that whatever method you use, it has to work and it has to be unrecognisable from another job. It would only take one clever detective to start comparing cases from the accidental death files and I'd be in trouble.” (page 106)
“H once admitted to me that many of his tips to me about how to kill had come from mistakes he himself made when he was younger, when he was a hitman for the British armed services. These days they call what he did “black ops”, but back in the 1970s it was the sort of stuff no government wanted to admit took place.” (page 179)
Jump or be shot
One technique of disguised murder is “Russian Suicide, where you take your target to a high place and offer them the choice, to jump or be shot” (page 162). He murders one victim by telling him to jump off a hospital roof. He later hears that his co-conspirator ‘H’ has died after jumping off a hospital roof.
He uses what seems like a closely related technique in another murder: “I gave him a choice: either take the bullet or drive the car off the edge of the road and hope to survive the sheer drop. He agreed to the latter option”. (page 243)
“It never ceases to amaze me how people always choose the jumping option” (page 191). Yet the threat to shoot might be a bluff: of his hospital roof murder he wrote: “I had no intention of using my gun, but he didn't know that”.
Information used for murder
One theme, that is not explicitly mentioned by the author at all, is an apparent stream of intelligence that helps his murders and seems to continue afterwards too. In one case it includes medical records of the victim. He seems, perhaps, to be especially well-informed about what the police are doing.
It's not explicit whether this intelligence always comes via ‘H’, though sometimes it does. There is an implication that sometimes it comes from elsewhere on page 196: “‘H’ called me after he had read the latest story in the papers and accused me of not finding out enough background about the target before I did the job.”
On page 100 he mentions the “research phase” “Looking and listening. Learning and watching”. But it is not evident how the kind of information he reports could come from an outsider watching someone from a distance.
For example in Thailand: “Within days of arriving to do my research work in Bangkok, I witnessed a meeting he had in a city hotel with two middle-aged policemen from his home territory back in the UK.” (page 169). He does not say how he was able to identify these policemen.
After he has murdered a man by shutting him in a walk-in refrigerator in Britain, disguising it as an accident, to his surprise, the police start searching for clues: “It turned out that some smart alec young detective had decided to cover his arse when he learned of the notoriety of the victim.” (page 125)
After he has murdered in Cyprus: “H should have been delighted, but when I rang him the next day to let him know how it had gone he'd just heard from a contact in north Cyprus that the police had got hold of a description of me and were trying to identify who I was.”
“In my research, I discovered that he had at different times been an informant for Mossad, the DEA and British intelligence” (page 235)
Another example is in Spain, where again in a way not explained, he obtains intelligence on his victim, including related police investigations. “I soon established my next victim's mundane routine life, as well as his healthy and not so healthy habits. There were loads of creditors closing in on him. some were high street banks, while others were the type who come and collect their money if you don't pick up the phone.”...“I discovered that the police were studying allegations from one of his former business partners that he was a the centre of a massive money laundering ring.” (page 161)
Links to so-called “intelligence agencies”
“Those three jobs actually turned out to be our only commissions for nearly two years, as 9/11 sparked a shutdown of many major criminal activities.” ... “The security services in the UK and US, whom H had links to, also didn't want any jobs to be carried out during that sensitive period because of everything going on following those terror attacks. They were obviously hyper-sensitive about anyone finding out about their connections to us.” (page 109)
“He joked about how he'd met a contact high up in the UK government recently and discovered I had an unofficial nickname in the spy world: “The Ghost”. I wasn't amused, because I couldn't understand how anyone was even aware of my existence.” (page 198)
“H eventually spoke to another contact whom he described as being “very high up” in the UK government. This man said that Mossad had been shadowing the legal-high scientist for two years because he had helped develop nerve gas for the Israelis and had tried to sell the same formula to the Saudis.”
“H promised to talk to his mate at MI6 and see if he could get Mossad to ease off.” (page 206)
“It wasn't until a few weeks later that H admitted that Mossad had commissioned the kill after H struck a deal with them in return for them not pursuing us over the death of that Israeli scientist.”
At the end of his story, he is visited by two men from MI6, as described above.
There are also other references, including to the USA's CIA as noted above and to the USA's DEA (drug enforcement agency) and Spain's CNI (Centro National de Inteligencia).