Beirut's Great Mystery

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So who killed Rafiq Hariri? Barring a confession from the conspirators, the world may never know the full truth. But interviews with the participants in the drama reveal the immense pressure under which Hariri lived out his final months. His encounter with Assad last August set off a six-month showdown that pit Hariri against one of the most ruthless regimes in the Middle East, which had concluded it could no longer tolerate his defiance. In the end, that defiance may have cost Hariri his life. But it also gave his countrymen—and, perhaps, the region—a chance for a different future.

The August meeting in Damascus was a confrontation between two men with vastly different resumes, styles and visions. Hariri, 60 at the time of his death, was a gregarious, self-made billionaire with friends from Paris to the Persian Gulf. Assad, an ophthalmologist, now 39, had inherited the presidency after the death of his father Hafez in 2000. Hariri had tried to court the younger Assad, but by last summer the two men were on a collision course. First Assad ordered Hariri to support a change to Lebanon's constitution that would extend the tenure of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, 68, a former Lebanese general widely viewed as a Syrian puppet. Assad believed that Hariri was behind U.N. Resolution 1559, a measure sponsored last year by the U.S. and France demanding that Syria withdraw its remaining 14,000 troops from Lebanon. A well-placed Western diplomat says Hariri was the "main mover and shaker, the one who managed to forge the alliance between the U.S. and France that was behind the resolution. And the Syrians knew it." Perhaps counting on Hariri's history of placating Syria, Assad summoned Hariri to Damascus to send a message: Back down—or else.

Hariri returned to Lebanon shaken. A close friend says that when he visited Hariri at his weekend home outside Beirut, the Prime Minister recounted his humiliation. He sobbed on his friend's shoulder when they touched on the topic a few days later. "To them, we are all ants," Hariri told an aide. But after consulting with Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, Hariri decided to back Syria's plan to extend Lahoud's term. On Sept. 3, the Lebanese parliament voted 96-29 to further Lahoud's term by three years.

But then Hariri's enemies went too far. On an October trip to France to meet with French President Jacques Chirac, Hariri received word of an assassination attempt on Marwan Hamade, a member of parliament who had voted against Lahoud. Hariri saw the attempted hit as a warning. Nineteen days later, he quit as Prime Minister, writing Lahoud, "I entrust revered Lebanon and its good people to God Almighty."