Chapter 7
The tobacconist's son was frightened, and so was his father. "For pity's sake, tell them what you know, my son," he begged the boy.
The two-man delegation from the Kuwait Resistance Committee had been perfectly polite when they introduced themselves to the tobacconist, but were quite insistent that they wished his son to be frank and truthful with them.
The shopkeeper, though he knew the visitors had given him pseudonyms instead of their real names, had enough wit to realize he was talking to powerful and influential members of his own people. Worse, it had come as a total surprise to him to learn that his son was involved in active resistance at all.
Worst of all, he had just learned that his offspring was not even with the official Kuwaiti resistance but had been seen tossing a bomb under an Iraqi truck at the behest of some strange bandit of whom he had never heard. It was enough to give any father a heart attack.
The four of them sat in the drawing room of the tobacconist's comfortable house in Keifan while one of the visitors explained that they had nothing against the Bedou but simply wished to contact him so that they could collaborate.
So the boy explained what had happened from the moment his friend had been pulled down behind a pile of rubble at the moment he was about to fire at a speeding Iraqi truck. The men listened in silence, only the questioner occasionally interjecting with another query. It was the one who said nothing, the one in dark glasses, who was Abu Fouad.
The questioner was particularly interested in the house where the group met with the Bedou. The boy gave the address, then added: "I do not think there is much point in going there. He is extremely watchful. One of us went there once to try and talk to him, but the place was locked. We do not think he lives there, but he knew we had been there. He told us never to do that again. If it ever happened, he said, he would break contact, and we would never see him again."
Sitting in his corner, Abu Fouad nodded in approval. Unlike the others, he was a trained soldier, and he thought he recognized the hand of another trained man. "When will you meet him next?" he asked quietly.
There was a possibility that the boy could pass a message, an invitation to a parley. "Nowadays, he contacts one of us. The contacted one brings the rest. It may take some time." The two Kuwaitis left. They had descriptions of two vehicles: a battered pickup apparently in the disguise of a market gardener bringing his fruit into town from the countryside, and a powerful fourwheel-drive for journeys into the desert.
Abu Fouad ran the numbers of both vehicles past a friend in the Ministry of Transportation, but the trace ran out. Both numbers were fictional. The only other lead was through the identity cards that the man would have to carry to pass those ubiquitous Iraqi roadblocks and checkpoints. Through his committee he contacted a civil servant in the Interior Ministry. He was lucky. The man recalled running off a phony identity card for a market gardener from Jahra. It was a favor he had done for the millionaire Ahmed Al-Khalifa six weeks earlier.
Abu Fouad was elated and intrigued. The merchant was an influential and respected figure in the movement. But it had always been thought that he was strictly confined to the financial, noncombatant side of things. What on earth was he doing as the patron of the mysterious and lethal Bedou?
South of the Kuwaiti border, the incoming tide of American weaponry rolled on. As the last week of September slid by, General Norman Schwarzkopf, buried in the rabbit warren of secret chambers two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry on Old Airport Road in Riyadh, finally realized that he had enough strength at last to declare Saudi Arabia safe from Iraqi attack.
In the air, General Charles "Chuck" Horner had built an umbrella of constantly patrolling steel, a fast-moving and amply provisioned armada of air-superiority fighters, ground-attack fighter-bombers, air-to-air refueling tankers, heavy bombers, and tank-busting Thunderbolts, enough to destroy the incoming Iraqis on the ground and in the air.
He had airborne technology that could and did cover by radar every square inch of Iraq, that could sense every movement of heavy metal rolling on the roads, moving through the desert, or trying to take to the air, that could listen to every Iraqi conversation on the airwaves and pinpoint any source of heat.
On the ground, Norman Schwarzkopf knew he now had enough mechanized units, light and heavy armor, artillery, and infantry to receive any Iraqi column, hold it, surround it, and liquidate it. In the last week of September, in conditions of such total secrecy that not even its Allies were told, the United States made its plans to move from defensive role to offensive. The assault on Iraq was planned, even though the United Nations mandate was still limited to securing the safety of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and only that.
But he also had problems. One was that the number of Iraqi troops, guns, and tanks deployed against him was double the number when he had arrived in Riyadh six weeks earlier. Another problem was that he would need double the amount of Coalition forces to liberate Kuwait than that needed to secure Saudi Arabia.
Norman Schwarzkopf was a man who took George Patton's dictum very seriously: One dead American or Brit or Frenchie or any other Coalition soldier or airman was one too many. Before he would go in, he would want two things: twice the amount of force he presently had, and an air assault guaranteed to "degrade" by fifty percent the strength of the Iraqi forces arrayed north of the border.
That meant more time, more equipment, more stores, more guns, more tanks, more troops, more airplanes, more fuel, more food, and a lot more money. Then he told the stunned armchair Napoleons on Capitol Hill that if they wanted a victory, they had better let him have it all.
Actually, it was the more urbane Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who passed the message on, but he softened the language a bit. Politicians love to play the games of soldiers, but they hate to be addressed in the language of soldiers.
So the planning in that last week of September was utterly secret. As it turned out, it was just as well. The United Nations, leaking peace plans at every seam, would wait until November 29 before giving the goahead to the Coalition to use all necessary force to evict Iraq from Kuwait unless she quit by January 15. Had planning started at the end of November, it could never have been completed in time.
Ahmed Al-Khalifa was deeply embarrassed. He knew Abu Fouad, of course, who and what he was. Further, he sympathized with his request. But he had given his word, he explained, and he could not go back on it.
Not even to his fellow-Kuwaiti and fellow-resister did he reveal that the Bedou was in fact a British officer. But he did agree to leave a message for the Bedou in a place he knew the man would find it sooner or later.
The following morning he left a letter, with his personal recommendation urging the Bedou to agree to meet Abu Fouad, under the marble tombstone of Able Seaman Shepton in the Christian cemetery.
There were six soldiers in the group, headed by a sergeant, and when the Bedou came around the corner, they were as surprised as he.
Mike Martin had parked his small truck in the lock-up garage and was making his way across the city on foot toward the villa he had chosen for that night. He was tired, and unusually, his alertness was blunted.
When he saw the Iraqis and knew they had seen him, he cursed himself. In his job, men can die for a moment's lack of alertness.
It was well after curfew, and though he was quite used to moving through the city when it was deserted of law-abiding citizens and only the Iraqi patrols were on the prowl, he made a point of moving through the ill-lit side streets, across the darkened patches of waste ground, and down the black alleys, just as the Iraqis made a point of sticking to the main highways and intersections. That way, they never troubled each other.
But following Hassan Rahmani's return to Baghdad and his vitriolic report on the uselessness of the Popular Army, some changes were taking place. The Green Berets of the Iraqi Special Forces had begun to appear.
Though not classed with the elite Republican Guard, the Green Berets were at least more disciplined than the rabble of conscripts called the Popular Army. It was six of these who stood quietly by their truck at a road junction where normally there would have been no Iraqis.
Martin just had time to lean heavily on the stick he carried with him and adopt the posture of an old man. It was a good posture, for in the Arab culture the old are given respect or at least, compassion.
"Hey, you," shouted the sergeant. "Come over here."
There were four assault rifles trained on the lone figure in the checkered keffiyeh. The old man paused, then hobbled forward.
"What are you doing out at this hour, Bedou?" "Just an old man trying to get to his home before the curfew, sayidi," the man whined.
"It's past the hour of curfew, fool! Two hours past."
The old man shook his head in bewilderment. "I didn't know, sayidi. I have no watch."
In the Middle East watches are not indispensable, just highly prized, a sign of prosperity. Iraqi soldiers arriving in Kuwait soon acquired them--they just took them. But the word Bedouin comes from bidun, meaning "without."
The sergeant grunted. The excuse was possible. "Papers," he said.
The old man used his spare hand to pat his soiled robe. "I seem to have lost them," he pleaded.
"Frisk him," said the sergeant. One of the soldiers moved forward. The hand grenade strapped to the inside of Martin's left thigh felt like one of the watermelons from his truck.
"Don't you touch my balls," said the old Bedou sharply. The soldier stopped. One in the back let out a giggle. The sergeant tried to keep a straight face.
"Well, go on, Zuhair. Frisk him." The young soldier Zuhair hesitated, embarrassed. He knew the joke was on him.
"Only my wife is allowed to touch my balls," said the Bedou. Two of the soldiers let out a guffaw and lowered their rifles. The rest did the same. Zuhair still held back. "Mind you, it doesn't do her any good. I'm long past that sort of thing," said the old man.
It was too much. The patrol roared with laughter. Even the sergeant grinned.
"All right, old man. On your way. And don't stay out again after dark."
The Bedou limped off to the corner of the street, scratching under his clothes. At the corner he turned. The grenade, priming arm sticking clumsily out to one side, skittered across the cobbles and came to rest against the toe-cap of Zuhair. All six stared at it. Then it went off. It was the end of the six soldiers. It was also the end of September.
That night, far away in Tel Aviv, General Kobi Dror of the Mossad sat in his office in the Hadar Dafna building, taking a late-night drink after work with an old friend and colleague, Shlomo Gershon, always known as Sami.
Sami Gershon was head of the Mossad's Combatants or Komemiute Division, the section responsible for running illegal agents, the dangerous cutting edge of espionage. He had been one of the other two present when his chief had lied to Chip Barber.
"You don't think we should have told them?" Gershon asked, because the subject had come up again.
Dror swirled his beer in the bottle and took a swig. "Screw them," he growled. "Let them recruit their own bloody assets."
As a teenage soldier in the spring of 1967, Dror had crouched under his Patton tank in the desert and waited while four Arab states prepared to settle accounts with Israel once and for all. He still recalled how the outside world had confined itself to muttering, "Tut tut."
With the rest of his crew, commanded by a twenty-year-old, he had been one of those under Israel Tal who had punched a hole straight through the Mitla Pass and driven the Egyptian Army back to the Suez Canal.
And he recalled how, when Israel had destroyed four armies and four air forces in six days, the same Western media that had wrung its hands at his country's impending obliteration in May had accused Israel of bully-boy tactics by winning.
From then on, Kobi Dror's philosophy had been made: Screw them all. He was a sabra, born and raised in Israel, and had none of the breadth of vision nor forbearance of people like David Ben-Gurion.
His political loyalty lay with the far-right Likud Party, with Menachem Begin, who had been in the Irgun, and Itzhak Shamir, formerly of the Stern Gang.
Once, sitting at the back of a classroom, listening to one of his staff lecture the new recruits, he had heard the man use the phrase "friendly intelligence agencies." He had risen and taken over the class.
"There is no such thing as a friend of Israel, except maybe a diaspora Jew," he told them. "The world is divided into two: our enemies and neutrals. Our enemies we know how to deal with. As for neutrals, take everything, give nothing. Smile at them, slap them on the back, drink with them, flatter them, thank them for their tipoffs, and tell them nothing."
"Well, Kobi, let's hope they never find out," said Gershon. "How can they? There's only eight of us who know. And we're all in the Office." It must have been the beer. He was overlooking someone.
In the spring of 1988 a British businessman called Stuart Harris was attending an industrial fair in Baghdad. He was sales director of a company in Nottingham that made and sold road-grading equipment. The fair was under the auspices of the Iraqi Ministry of Transport.
Like almost all Westerners, he had been staying at the Rashid Hotel on Yafa Street, which had been built mainly for foreigners and was always under surveillance.
On the third day of the exhibition, Harris had returned to his room to find a plain envelope pushed under his door. It had no name on it, just his room number, and the number was correct.
Inside was a single sheet of paper and another completely plain envelope of the airmail type. The slip of paper said in English and in block capitals: "On your return to London pass this envelope unopened to Norman at the Israeli embassy."
That was all. Stuart Harris had been panic-stricken, terrified. He knew the reputation of Iraq, of its dreaded Secret Police. Whatever was in the plain envelope could get him arrested, tortured, even killed.
To his credit, he kept cool, sat down, and tried to work things out. Why him? for example. There were scores of British businessmen in Baghdad. Why pick Stuart Harris? They could not know he was Jewish, that his father had arrived in England in 1935 from Germany as Samuel Horowitz, could they?
Though he would never find out, there had been a conversation two days earlier in the fairground canteen between two functionaries of the Iraqi Transportation Ministry.
One had told the other of his visit to the Nottingham works the previous autumn; how Harris had been his host on the first and second days, then disappeared for a day, then come back. He--the Iraqi--had asked if Harris was ill. It was a colleague who had laughed and told him Harris had been off for Yom Kippur.
The two Iraqi civil servants thought nothing more of it, but someone at the next booth did. He reported the conversation to his superior. The senior man appeared to take no notice but later became quite thoughtful and ran a check on Mr. Stuart Harris of Nottingham, establishing his room number at the Rashid.
Harris sat and wondered what on earth to do. Even if, he reasoned, the anonymous sender of the letter had discovered he was Jewish, there was one thing they could not have known. No way. By an extraordinary coincidence, Stuart Harris was a sayan.
The Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, founded in 1951 on the order of Ben-Gurion himself, is known outside its own walls as the Mossad, Hebrew for "Institute." Inside its walls it is never, ever called that, but always "the Office."
Among the leading intelligence agencies of the world, it is by far the smallest. In terms of on-the-payroll staff, it is tiny. The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, has about 25,000 employees on its staff, and that excludes all the outstations. At its peak the KGB's First Chief Directorate, responsible like the CIA and Mossad for foreign intelligence gathering, had 15,000 case officers around the world, some three thousand based at the Yazenevo headquarters.
The Mossad has only between 1,200 and 1,500 employees at any time and fewer than forty case officers, called katsas.
That it can operate on such a slim budget and tiny staff and secure the "product" that it does depends on two factors. One is its ability to tap into the Israeli population at will--a population still amazingly cosmopolitan and containing a bewildering variety of talents, languages, and geographical origins.
The other factor is an international network of helpers or assistants, in Hebrew sayanim. These are diaspora Jews (they must be wholly Jewish on both sides) who, although probably loyal to the country in which they reside, will also sympathize with the State of Israel.
There are two thousand sayanim in London alone, five thousand in the rest of Britain, and ten times that number in the United States. They are never brought into operations, just asked for favors. And they must be convinced that the help they are asked to give is not for an operation against their country of birth or adoption. Conflicting loyalties are not allowed. But they enable operational costs to be cut by a factor of up to ten.
For example: A Mossad team arrives in London to mount an operation against a Palestinian undercover squad. They need a car. A used car sayan is asked to leave a legitimate secondhand car at a certain place with the keys under the mat. It is returned later, after the operation. The sayan never knows what it was used for; his books say it was out to a possible customer on approval.
The same team needs a "front." A property-owning sayan lends an empty shop, and a confectionery sayan stocks it with sweets and chocolates. They need a mail drop; a real estate sayan lends the keys to a vacant office on his roster.
Stuart Harris had been on vacation at the Israeli resort of Eilat when, at the bar of the Red Rock, he fell into conversation with a pleasant young Israeli who spoke excellent English. At a later conversation, the Israeli brought a friend, an older man, who quietly elicited from Harris where his feelings toward Israel lay. By the end of the vacation, Harris had agreed that, if there was ever anything he could do ...
At the end of the vacation Harris went home as advised and got on with his life. For two years he waited for the call, but no call ever came. However, a friendly visitor kept periodically in touch--one of the more tiresome jobs of katsas on foreign assignment is to keep tabs on the sayanim on their list.
So Stuart Harris sat in a wave of rising panic in the hotel room in Baghdad and wondered what to do.
The letter could well be a provocation--he would be intercepted at the airport trying to smuggle it out. Slip it into someone else's bag? He did not feel he could do that. ...And how would he recover it in London?
Finally, he calmed down, worked out a plan, and did it exactly right.
He burned the outer envelope and the note in an ashtray, crushed the embers, and flushed them down the toilet. Then he hid the plain envelope under the spare blanket on the shelf above the wardrobe, having first wiped it clean.
If his room were raided, he would simply swear he had never needed the blanket, never climbed to the top shelf, and the letter must have been left by a previous occupant.
In a stationery shop he bought a stout manila envelope, an adhesive label, and sealing tape; from a post office, enough stamps to send a magazine from Baghdad to London.
He abstracted a promotional magazine extolling the virtues of Iraq from the trade fair and even had the empty envelope stamped with the exhibition logo.
On the last day, just before leaving for the airport with his two colleagues, he retired to his room. He slipped the letter into the magazine and sealed them in the envelope. He addressed it to an uncle in Long Eaton and stuck on the label and the stamps. In the lobby, he knew, was a mailbox, and the next pickup was in four hours. Even if the envelope were steamed open by goons, he reasoned, he would be over the Alps in a British airliner.
It is said that luck favors the brave or the foolish or both. The lobby was under surveillance by men from the AMAM, watching to see if any departing foreigner was approached by an Iraqi trying to slip him something. Harris carried his envelope under his jacket and beneath his left armpit. A man behind a newspaper in the corner was watching, but a trolley of baggage rolled between them as Harris dropped the envelope into the mailbox. When the watcher saw him again, Harris was at the desk handing in his key.
The brochure arrived at his uncle's house a week later. Harris had known his uncle was away on vacation, and as he had a key in case of fire or burglary, he used it to slip in and retrieve his package. Then he took it down to the Israeli embassy in London and asked to see his contact. He was shown into a room and told to wait. A middle-aged man entered and asked his name and why he wanted to see "Norman." Harris explained, took the airmail envelope from his pocket, and laid it on the table. The Israeli diplomat went pale, asked him to wait again, and left.
The embassy building at 2 Palace Green is a handsome structure, but its classical lines give no indication of the wealth of fortifications and technology that conceals the Mossad London Station in the basement.
It was from this underground fortress that a younger man was summoned urgently. Harris waited and waited. Though he did not know it, he was being studied through a one-way mirror as he sat there with the envelope on the table in front of him. He was also being photographed, while records were checked to ensure he really was a sayan and not a Palestinian terrorist. When the photograph of Stuart Harris of Nottingham from the files checked with the man behind the one-way mirror, the young katsa finally entered the room. He smiled, introduced himself as Rafi, and invited Harris to start his story at the very beginning, right back in Eilat. So Harris told him.
Rafi knew all about Eilat (he had just read the entire file), but he needed to check. When the narrative reached Baghdad, he became interested. He had few queries at first, allowing Harris to narrate in his own time. Then the questions came, many of them, until Harris had relived all he had done in Baghdad several times. Rafi took no notes; the whole thing was being recorded. Finally he used a wall phone to have a muttered conversation in Hebrew with a senior colleague next door.
His last act was to thank Stuart Harris profusely, congratulate him on his courage and cool head, exhort him never to mention the entire incident to anyone, and wish him safe journey back home. Then Harris was shown out.
A man with antiblast helmet, flak-jacket, and gloves took the letter away. It was photographed and X-rayed. The Israeli embassy had already lost one man to a letter bomb, and it did not intend to lose another.
Finally the letter was opened. It contained two sheets of onionskin airmail paper covered in script. In Arabic. Rafi did not speak Arabic, let alone read it. Neither did anyone else in the London station, at least not well enough to read spidery Arabic handwriting. Rafi sent a copious and heavily encrypted radio report to Tel Aviv, then wrote an even fuller account in the formal and uniform style called NAKA in the Mossad. The letter and the report went into the diplomatic bag and caught the evening flight by El Al from Heathrow to Ben-Gurion.
A dispatch rider with an armed escort met the courier right off the plane and took the canvas bag destined for the big building on King Saul Boulevard, where, just after the breakfast hour, it found itself in front of the head of the Iraq Desk, a very able young katsa called David Sharon.
He did speak and read Arabic, and what he read in those two onionskin pages of letter left him with the same sensation he had felt the first time he threw himself out of an airplane over the Negev Desert while training with the Paras.
Using his own typewriter, avoiding both secretary and word processor, he typed out a literal translation of the letter in Hebrew. Then he took them both, plus Rafi's report as to how the Mossad had come by the letter, to his immediate chief, the Director of the Middle East Division.
What the letter said, in effect, was that the writer was a high-ranking functionary in the topmost councils of the Iraqi regime and that he was prepared to work for Israel for money--but only for money.
There was a bit more, and a post-office-box address at Baghdad's principal post office for a reply, but that was the gist of it.
That evening, there was a high-level meeting in Kobi Dror's private office. Present were he and Sami Gershon, head of the Combatants. Also Eitan Hadar, David Sharon's immediate superior as Director of the Middle East Division, to whom he had taken the Baghdad letter that morning. Sharon himself was summoned.
From the outset, Gershon was dismissive. "It's a phony," he said. "I've never seen such a blatant, clumsy, obvious attempt at entrapment. Kobi, I'm not sending any of my men in there to check it out. It would be sending the man to his death. I wouldn't even send an oter to Baghdad to try and make contact."
An oter is an Arab used by the Mossad to establish preliminary contact with a fellow Arab, a low-level go-between and a lot more expendable than a full-fledged Israeli katsa.
Gershon's view seemed to prevail. The letter was a madness, apparently an attempt to lure a senior katsa to Baghdad for arrest, torture, public trial, and public execution. Finally, Dror turned to David Sharon. "Well, David, you have a tongue. What do you think?"
Sharon nodded regretfully. "I think Sami almost certainly has to be right. Sending a good man in there would be crazy."
Eitan Hadar shot him a warning look. Between divisions, there was the usual rivalry. No need to hand victory to Gershon's Combatants Division on a plate.
"Ninety-nine percent of the chances say it has to be a trap," said Sharon. "Only ninety-nine?" asked Dror teasingly. "And the one percent, my young friend?"
"Oh, just a foolish idea," Sharon said. "It just occurred to me, the one percent might say that out of the blue, we have a new Penkovsky."
There was dead silence. The word hung in the air like an open challenge. Gershon expelled his breath in a long hiss. Kobi Dror stared at his Iraq Desk chief. Sharon looked at his fingertips.
In espionage there are only four ways of recruiting an agent for infiltration into the high councils of a target country. The first is far and away the most difficult: to use one of your own nationals, one trained to an extraordinary degree to pass for a national of the target country right in the heart of that target. It is almost impossible, unless the infiltrator was born and raised in the target country and can be eased back in, with a cover story to explain his absence. Even then, he will have to wait years to rise to useful office with access to secrets--a sleeper for up to ten years.
Yet once, Israel had been the master of this technique. This was because, when Israel was young, Jews poured in who had been raised all over the world. There were Jews who could pass as Moroccans, Algerians, Libyans, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Yemenis. This was apart from all those coming in from Russia, Poland, Western Europe, and North and South America.
The most successful of these had been Elie Cohen, born and raised in Syria. He was slipped back into Damascus as a Syrian who had been away for years and had now returned. With his new Syrian name, Cohen became an intimate of high-ranking politicians, civil servants, and generals who spoke freely to their endlessly generous host at his sumptuous parties. Everything they said, including the entire Syrian battle plan, went back to Tel Aviv just in time for the Six-Day War.
Cohen was exposed, tortured, and publicly hanged in Revolution Square in Damascus. Such infiltrations are extremely dangerous and very rare.
But as the years passed, the original immigrant Israelis became old; their sabra children did not study Arabic and could not attempt what Elie Cohen had done. This was why, by 1990, the Mossad had far less brilliant Arabists than one might imagine.
But there was a second reason. Penetration of Arab secrets is easier to accomplish in Europe or the United States. If an Arab state is buying an American fighter, the details can more easily be stolen, and at a lot less risk, in America. If an Arab high-up seems susceptible to an approach, why not make it while he is visiting the fleshpots of Europe?
That is why, by 1990, the vast bulk of Mossad operations were conducted in low-risk Europe and America rather than in the high-risk Arab states. The king of all the infiltrators, however, was Marcus Wolf, who for years had run the East German intelligence net. He had one great advantage--an East German could pass for a West German.
During his time "Mischa" Wolf infiltrated scores and scores of his agents into West Germany. One of them became the personal private secretary of Chancellor Willy Brandt himself. Wolf's speciality was the prim, dowdy, little spinster secretary who rose to become indispensable to her West German minister-employer--and who could copy every document that crossed her desk for transmission back to East Berlin.
The second method of infiltration is to use a national of the aggressor agency, posing as someone coming from a third nation. The target country knows that the infiltrator is a foreigner but is persuaded he is a friendly, sympathetic foreigner.
The Mossad again did this brilliantly with a man called Ze'ev Gur Arieh. He was born Wolfgang Lotz in Mannheim, Germany, in 1921.
Wolfgang was six feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, uncircumcised, and yet Jewish. He came to Israel as a boy, was raised there, took his Hebrew name, fought with the underground Haganah, and went on to become a major in the Israeli Army. Then the Mossad took him in hand.
He was sent back to Germany for two years to perfect his native German and "prosper" with Mossad money. Then, with a new gentile German wife, he emigrated to Cairo and set up a riding school.
It was a great success. Egyptian staff officers loved to relax with their horses, attended by the champagne-serving Wolfgang, a good rightwing, anti-Semitic German in whom they could confide. And confide they did.
Everything they said went back to Tel Aviv. Lotz was eventually caught, was lucky not to be hanged, and after the Six-Day War was exchanged for Egyptian prisoners.
But an even more successful impostor was a German of an earlier generation. Before the Second World War, Richard Sorge had been a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, speaking Japanese and with high contacts in Hideki Tojo's government.
That government approved of Hitler and assumed Sorge was a loyal Nazi--he certainly said he was. It never occurred to Tokyo that Sorge was not a German Nazi. In fact, he was a German Communist in the service of Moscow. For years he laid the war plans of the Tojo regime open for Moscow to study. His great coup was his last. In 1941, Hitler's armies stood before Moscow.
Stalin needed to know urgently: Would Japan mount an invasion of the USSR from her Manchurian bases? Sorge found out; the answer was no. Stalin could transfer forty thousand Mongol troops from the east to Moscow. The Asiatic cannon fodder held the Germans at bay for a few more weeks, until winter came and Moscow was saved.
Not so Sorge; he was unmasked and hanged. But before he died, his information probably changed history.
The most common method of securing an agent in the target country is the third: simply to recruit a man who is already "in place."
Recruitment can be tediously slow or surprisingly fast. To this end, talent spotters patrol the diplomatic community looking for a senior functionary of the other side who may appear disenchanted, resentful, dissatisfied, bitter, or in any way susceptible to recruitment.
Delegations visiting foreign parts are studied to see if someone can be taken aside, given a fine old time, and approached for a change of loyalty. When the talent spotter has tabbed a "possible," the recruiters move in, usually starting with a casual friendship that becomes deeper and warmer. Eventually, the "friend" suggests his pal might do him a small favor; a minor and inconsequential piece of information is needed.
Once the trap is sprung, there is no going back, and the more ruthless the regime the new recruit is serving, the less likely he will confess all and throw himself on that regime's nonexistent mercy.
The motives for being so recruited to serve another country vary. The recruit may be in debt, in a bitter marriage, passed over for promotion, revolted by his own regime, or simply lust for a new life and plenty of money. He may be recruited through his own weaknesses, sexual or homosexual, or simply by sweet talk and flattery.
Quite a few Soviets, like Penkovsky and Gordievsky, changed sides for genuine reasons of conscience, but most spies who turn on their own country do so because they share a quite monstrous vanity, a conviction that they are truly important in the scheme of things.
But the weirdest of all the recruitments is called the "walk-in." As the phrase implies, the recruit simply walks in, unexpected and unannounced, and offers his services.
The reaction of the agency so approached is always one of extreme skepticism--surely this must be a "plant" by the other side. Thus when, in 1960, a tall Russian approached the Americans in Moscow, declared he was a full colonel of the Soviet military intelligence arm, the GRU, and offered to spy for the West, he was rejected.
Bewildered, the man approached the British, who gave him a try. Oleg Penkovsky turned out to be one of the most amazing agents ever. In his brief thirty-month career he turned over 5,500 documents to the Anglo-American operation that ran him, and every one of them was in the secret or top secret category. During the Cuban missile crisis, the world never realized that President Kennedy knew the full hand of cards that Nikita Khrushchev had to play, like a poker player with a mirror behind his opponent's back. The mirror was Penkovsky.
The Russian took crazy risks, refusing to come out to the West while he had the chance. After the missile crisis he was unmasked by Soviet counterintelligence, tried, and shot.
None of the other three Israelis in Kobi Dror's room that night in Tel Aviv needed to be told anything about Oleg Penkovsky. In their world, he was part of legend. The dream hovered in all their minds after Sharon dropped the name. A real, live, gold-plated, twenty-four-carat traitor in Baghdad? Could it be true--could it possibly be true?
Kobi Dror gave Sharon a long, hard look. "What have you in mind, young man?"
"I was just thinking," said Sharon with feigned diffidence. "A letter ... no risks to anyone--just a letter ... asking a few questions, difficult questions, things we would like to know. ... He comes up or he doesn't."
Dror glanced at Gershon. The man who ran the illegal agents shrugged. "I put men in on the ground," the gesture seemed to say. "What do I care about letters?"
"All right, young David. We write him a letter back. We ask him some questions. Then we see. Eitan, you work with David on this. Let me see the letter before it goes."
Eitan Hadar and David Sharon left together. "I hope you know what the hell you're doing," the head of Middle East muttered to his prot間?
The letter was crafted with extreme care. Several in-house experts worked on it--the Hebrew version at least. Translation would come later.
David Sharon introduced himself by his first name only, right at the start. He thanked the writer for his trouble and assured him the letter had arrived safely at the destination the writer must have intended.
The reply went on to say that the writer could not fail to understand that his letter had aroused great surprise and suspicion both by its source and its method of transmission.
David knew, he said, that the writer was clearly no fool and therefore would realize that "my people" would need to establish some bona fides.
David went on to assure the writer that if his bona fides could be established, his requirement for payment would present no problem, but clearly the product would have to justify the financial rewards that "my people" were prepared to pay. Would the writer therefore be kind enough to seek to answer the questions on the attached sheet?
The full letter was longer and more complicated, but that was the gist of it. Sharon ended by giving the writer a mailing address in Rome for his reply.
The address was actually a discontinued safe house that the Rome station had volunteered at Tel Aviv's urgent request. From then on, the Rome station would keep an eye on the abandoned address. If Iraqi security agents showed up at it, they would be spotted and the affair aborted.
The list of twenty questions was carefully chosen and after much headscratching.
To eight of the questions Mossad already knew the answers but would not be expected to know. So an attempt to fool Tel Aviv would not work.
Eight more questions concerned developments that could be checked for veracity after they had happened.
Four questions were things that Tel Aviv really wanted to know, particularly about the intentions of Saddam Hussein himself.
"Let's see how high this bastard really goes," said Kobi Dror when he read the list.
Finally a professor in Tel Aviv University's Arabic Faculty was called in to phrase the letter in that ornate and flowery style of the written language. Sharon signed it in Arabic with the Arab version of his own name, Daoud.
The text also contained one other point. David would like to give his writer a name, and if the writer in Baghdad did not object, would he mind being known simply as Jericho?
The letter was mailed from the only Arab country where Israel had an embassy--Cairo.
After it had gone, David Sharon went on with his work and waited. The more he thought it over, the crazier the affair seemed to be. A postoffice box, in a country where the counterintelligence net was run by someone as smart as Hassan Rahmani, was horrendously dangerous.
So was writing top secret information "in clear," and there was no indication that Jericho knew anything about secret writing. Continuing to use the ordinary mail was also out of the question, if this thing developed. However, he reasoned, it probably would not.
But it did. Four weeks later, Jericho's reply reached Rome and was brought unopened in a blastproof box to Tel Aviv. Extreme precautions were taken. The envelope might be wired to explosives or smeared with a deadly toxin. When the scientists finally declared it clean, it was opened.
To their stunned amazement, Jericho had come up with paydirt. All the eight questions to which the Mossad already knew the answers were completely accurate. Eight more--troop movements, promotions, dismissals, foreign trips by identifiable luminaries of the regime--would have to wait for check-out as and when they occurred, if they ever did. The last four questions Tel Aviv could neither know nor check, but all were utterly feasible.
David Sharon wrote a fast letter back, in a text that would cause no security problems if intercepted: "Dear Uncle, many thanks for your letter which has now arrived. It is wonderful to hear that you are well and in good health. Some among the points you raise will take time, but all being well, I will write again soon. Your loving nephew, Daoud."
The mood was growing in the Hadar Dafna building that this man Jericho might be serious after all. If that was so, urgent action was needed. An exchange of two letters was one thing; running a deepcover agent inside a brutal dictatorship was another. There was no way that communication could continue on the basis of in-clear script, public mails, and post-office boxes. They were a recipe for an early disaster.
A case officer would be needed to get into Baghdad, live there, and run Jericho using all the usual tradecraft--secret writing, codes, dead-letter boxes, and a no-intercept means of getting the product out of Baghdad and back to Israel.
"I'm not having it," Gershon repeated. "I will not put a senior Israeli katsa into Baghdad on a black mission for an extended stay. It's diplomatic cover, or he doesn't go."
"All right, Sami," said Dror. "Diplomatic cover it is. Let's see what we've got."
The point of diplomatic cover is that a black agent can be arrested, tortured, hanged--whatever. An accredited diplomat, even in Baghdad, can avoid such unpleasantness; if caught spying, he will merely be declared persona non grata and expelled. It is done all the time.
Several major divisions of the Mossad went into overdrive that summer, especially Research.
Gershon could already tell them he had no agent on the staff of any embassy accredited to Baghdad, and his nose was already well out of joint because of it. So the search began to find a diplomat who would suit.
Every foreign embassy in Baghdad was identified. From the capital cities of every country, a list was acquired of all their staff in Baghdad.
No one checked out; no one had ever worked for the Mossad before, who could be reactivated. There was not even one sayan on those lists.
Then a clerk came up with an idea: the United Nations. The world body had one agency based in Baghdad in 1988, the UN Economic Commission for West Asia.
The Mossad has a big penetration of the United Nations in New York, and a staff list was acquired. One name checked out: a young Jewish Chilean diplomat called Alfonso Benz Moncada. He was not a trained agent, but he was a sayan and therefore presumably was prepared to be helpful.
One by one Jericho's tips came true. The checking process revealed that the Army divisions he had said would be moved were mewed; the promotions he foretold duly happened, and the dismissals took place.
"Either Saddam himself is behind this farrago, or Jericho is betraying his country from asshole to elbow," was Kobi Dror's judgment.
David Sharon sent a third letter, also innocently couched. For his second and third missives, the professor had not been needed. The third letter referred to an order by the Baghdad-based client for some very delicate glassware and porcelain.
Clearly, said David, a little more patience was needed so that a means of transshipment could be devised that would guarantee the cargoes from accidental disaster.
A Spanish-speaking katsa already based in South America was sent pronto to Santiago and persuaded the parents of Se駉r Benz to urge their son home immediately on compassionate leave because his mother was seriously ill. It was the father who telephoned his son in Baghdad. The worried son applied for and at once got three weeks' compassionate leave and flew back to Chile.
He was met not by a sick mother but by an entire team of Mossad training officers who begged him to accede to their request. He discussed the matter with his parents and agreed. The emotional pull of the needs of the Land of Israel, which none of them had ever seen, was strong.
Another sayan in Santiago, without knowing why, lent his summer villa, set in a walled garden outside the city near the sea, and the training team went to work.
It takes two years to train a katsa to run a deep-cover agent in hostile terrain, and that is the minimum. The team had three weeks. They worked sixteen-hour days. They taught the thirty-year-old Chilean secret writing and basic codes, miniature photography and the reduction of photographs to microdots. They took him out on the streets and taught him how to spot a tail. They warned him never to shake a tail, except in an absolute emergency, if carrying deeply incriminating material. They told him that if he even thought he was being followed to abort the rendezvous or the pickup and try again later.
They showed him how to use combustible chemicals stored in a false fountain pen to destroy incriminating evidence in seconds while hiding in any men's restroom or just around a corner.
They took him out in cars to show him how to spot a car tail, one acting as instructor and the rest of the team as the "hostiles." They taught him until his ears rang and his eyes ached and he begged for sleep.
Then they taught him about dead-letter boxes or drops--secret compartments where a message may be left or another collected. They showed him how to create one from a recess behind a loose brick in a wall, or under a tombstone, in a crevice in an old tree, or beneath a flagstone.
After three weeks, Alfonso Benz Moncada bade good-bye to his tearful parents and flew back to Baghdad via London. The senior instructor leaned back in his chair at the villa, passed an exhausted hand over his forehead, and told the team: "If that bugger stays alive and free, I'll make the pilgrimage to Mecca."
The team laughed; their leader was a deeply Orthodox Jew. All the time they were teaching Moncada, none of them had known what he was going to do back in Baghdad. It was not their job to know. Neither did the Chilean.
It was during the stopover in London that he was taken to the Heathrow Penta Hotel. There he met Sami Gershon and David Sharon, and they told him.
"Don't try and identify him," Gershon warned the young man. "Leave that to us. Just establish the drops and service them. We'll send you the lists of things we want answered. You won't understand them--they'll be in Arabic. We don't think Jericho speaks much English, if at all. Don't ever try to translate what we send you. Just put it in one of the you-to-him drops and make the appropriate chalk mark so he knows to go and service the drop.
"When you see his chalk mark, go and service the him-to-you box, and get his answer back."
In a separate bedroom Alfonso Benz Moncada was given his new luggage. There was a camera that looked like a tourist's Pentax but took a snap-on cartridge with more than a hundred exposures in it, plus an innocent-looking aluminum strut frame for holding the camera at exactly the right distance above a sheet of paper. The camera was preset for that range.
His toilet kit included combustible chemicals disguised as aftershave, and various invisible inks. The letter-writing wallet held all the treated paper for secret writing. Last, they told him the means for communicating with them, a method they had been setting up while he was training in Chile.
He would write letters concerning his love of chess--he already was a chess fan--to his pen pal Justin Bokomo of Uganda, who worked in the General Secretariat of the UN building in New York. His letters would always go out of Baghdad in the UN diplomatic mail pouch for New York. The replies would also come from Bokomo in New York.
Though Benz Moncada did not know it, there was a Ugandan called Bokomo in New York. There was also a Mossad katsa in the mail room to effect the intercepts. Bokomo's letters would have a reverse side that, when treated, would reveal the Mossad's question list. This was to be photocopied when no one was looking and passed to Jericho in one of the agreed drops. Jericho's reply would probably be in spidery Arabic script. Each page was to be photographed ten times, in case of smudging, and the film dispatched to Bokomo.
Back in Baghdad the young Chilean, with his heart in his mouth, established six drops, mainly behind loose bricks in old walls or ruined houses, under flagstones in back alleys, and one under a stone windowsill of a derelict shop. Each time, he thought he would be surrounded by the dreaded AMAM, but the citizens of Baghdad seemed as courteous as ever and no one took any notice of him as he prowled, apparently a curious foreign tourist, up and down the alleys and side streets of the Old Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the fruit and vegetable market at Kasra, and the old cemeteries--anywhere he could find crumbling old walls and loose flagstones where no one would ever think of looking. He wrote down the locations of the six drops, three to contain messages from him to Jericho and three for replies from Jericho to him. He also devised six places--walls, gates, shutters--on three of which an innocent chalk mark would alert Jericho that there was a message for him, and three others where Jericho would signal he had a reply ready and sitting in a dead-letter box awaiting collection.
Each chalk mark responded to a different drop. He wrote down the locations of these drops and chalk-mark sites so precisely that Jericho could find them on written description only.
All the time he watched for a tail, either driving or on foot. Just once he was under surveillance, but it was clumsy and routine, for the AMAM seemed to pick occasional days to follow occasional diplomats. The following day there was no tail, so he resumed again. When he had it all ready, he wrote it down using a typewriter, after having memorized every detail. He destroyed the ribbon, photographed the sheets, destroyed the paperwork, and sent the film to Mr. Bokomo. Via the mail room of the UN building on the East River in New York, the small package came back to David Sharon in Tel Aviv.
The risky part was getting all this information to Jericho. It meant one last letter to that damnable post-office box in Baghdad. Sharon wrote to his "friend" that the papers he needed would be deposited at exactly noon in fourteen days, August 18, 1988, and should be picked up no more than one hour later.
The precise instructions, in Arabic, were with Moncada by the sixteenth. At five to noon on the eighteenth, he entered the post office, was directed to the post box, and dropped the bulky package in. No one stopped or arrested him. An hour later, Jericho unlocked the box and withdrew the package. He too was not stopped or arrested.
With secure contact now established, traffic began to flow. Jericho insisted he would price each consignment of information that Tel Aviv wanted, and if the money was deposited, the information would be sent. He named a very discreet bank in Vienna, the Winkler Bank in the Ballgasse, just off Franzis-kanerplatz, and gave an account number.
Tel Aviv agreed and immediately checked out the bank. It was small, ultradiscreet, and virtually impregnable. It clearly contained a numbered account that matched, because the first transfer of twenty thousand dollars by Tel Aviv into it was not returned to the transferring bank with a query. The Mossad suggested that Jericho might care to identify himself "for his own protection, in case anything went wrong and his friends to the west could help." Jericho refused point-blank; he went further. If any attempt was made to survey the drops or close in on him in any way, or if ever the money was not forthcoming, he would shut off immediately.
The Mossad agreed, but tried other ways. Psychoportraits were drawn, his handwriting studied, lists of Iraqi notables drawn up and studied. All that the back-room boys could guess was that Jericho was middleaged, of medium education, probably spoke little or hesitant English, and had a military or quasi-military background.
"That gives me half the bloody Iraqi High Command, the top fifty in the Ba'ath Party, and John Doe's cousin Fred," growled Kobi Dror.
Alfonso Benz Moncada ran Jericho for two years, and the product was pure gold. It concerned politics, conventional weapons, military progress, changes of command, armaments procurement, rockets, gas, germ warfare, and two attempted coups against Saddam Hussein.
Only on Iraq's nuclear progress was Jericho hesitant. He was asked, of course. It was under deep secrecy and known only to the Iraqi equivalent of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist Dr. Jaafar Al-Jaafar. To press too hard would be to invite exposure, he reported. In the autumn of 1989 Jericho told Tel Aviv that Gerry Bull was under suspicion and under surveillance in Brussels by a team from the Iraqi Mukhabarat. The Mossad, who were by then using Bull as another source for progress on Iraq's rockets program, tried to warn him as subtly as they could.
There was no way they would tell him to his face what they knew--it would be tantamount to telling him they had an asset high in Baghdad, and no agency will ever blow away an asset like that.
So the katsa controlling the substantial Brussels station had his men penetrate Bull's apartment on several occasions through the autumn and winter, leaving oblique messages by rewinding a videotape, changing wineglasses around, leaving a patio window open, even placing a long strand of female hair on his pillow.
The gun scientist became worried all right, but not enough. When Jericho's message concerning the intent to liquidate Bull came through, it was too late. The hit had been carried out.
Jericho's information gave the a Mossad an almost-complete picture of Iraq in the buildup to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. What he told them about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction confirmed and amplified the pictorial evidence that had been passed over to them by Jonathan Pollard, by then sentenced to life in prison.
Bearing in mind what it knew and what it assumed America must also know, the Mossad waited for America to react. But as the chemical, nuclear, and bacteriological preparations in Iraq progressed, the torpor in the West continued, so Tel Aviv stayed silent.
Two million dollars had passed from the Mossad to the numbered account of Jericho In Vienna by August 1990. He was expensive, but he was good, and Tel Aviv decided he was worth it.
Then the invasion of Kuwait took place, and the unforeseen happened. The United Nations, having passed the resolution of August 2 calling on Iraq to withdraw at once, felt it could not continue to support Saddam by maintaining a presence in Baghdad. On August 7, the Economic Commission for West Asia was abruptly closed down, and its diplomats recalled.
Benz Moncada was able to do one last thing before his departure. He left a message in a drop telling Jericho that he was being expelled and contact was now broken. However, he might return, and Jericho should continue to scan the places where the chalk marks were put. Then he left. The young Chilean was extensively debriefed in London until there was nothing left he could tell David Sharon.
Thus Kobi Dror was able to lie to Chip Barber with a straight face. At the time, he was not running an asset in Baghdad. It would be too embarrassing to admit that he had never discovered the traitor's name and that now he had even lost contact. Still, as Sami Gershon had made plain, if the Americans ever found out ... In hindsight, perhaps he really should have mentioned Jericho.