The Volunteer (13 page)

After Onur left, I started concentrating on my primary concern: getting onto the car deck. Picking the lock wasn't an option—I had no idea how to do that. Nor did I have access to bolt cutters, or any other heavy tools that would allow me to destroy the lock. Even if I did, using brute force wouldn't be smart. It would turn the boat into a crime scene, and thereby invite all sorts of unwanted scrutiny. I was mortified at the thought of calling HQ and telling them a simple padlock had prevented me from performing my mission.

Early the next morning, I wove my way around the prostrate Muslims at prayer in the stairwells and corridors, and sought out the ship's chief steward. He was a crisply dressed and affable man with a wide smile and, like most of the men I met on the ship, a thick black moustache.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said, knocking on his office door. “I'm wondering if you can help me.”

“What can I do for you, young man?” he replied in perfect English. Something about our exchange reminded me of the sort of model dialogues that appear at the beginning of English-as-a-second-language textbooks.

“I seem to have left my chest medicine in my car. If I don't take it, I could get quite ill.” I tried to look contrite and desperate.

“I don't have the authority to open the car deck. Only the captain does.”

“Oh, goodness. Do you think we could go see him?”

“He's very busy.”

“I wouldn't bother either of you if this were not a serious matter.”

“Very well. Follow me to the bridge.”

The captain turned out to be a short balding man with a greying moustache and a white uniform. He looked like the responsible type—hardly the sort who would blurt out sensitive intelligence information about passengers to the custodial crew. He spoke to the steward again, who then motioned that I should follow him out of the bridge. “You can go, but a crew member will have to accompany you,” he told me as we retraced our footsteps.

“Great, thank you so much,” I replied. It was false gratitude. How could I attach a bomb with a Turkish sailor watching over my shoulder?

When we returned to his office, the steward summoned a crewman and gave him a key, along with a brief set of instructions in Turkish. This friendly young fellow then led me to the car deck, opened the padlock, and pulled back the big steel bulkhead door.

“I'll be right back,” I said. As I spoke these words, I looked him in the eye and motioned to him to remain where he was. To my surprise, he obeyed, smiling by the door as I wove my way in between the closely packed vehicles en route to my car.

I opened the car door and grabbed the pills sitting on the console next to the shift—yes, I had actually forgotten them there. Then, in case my crewman friend happened to have his eye on me, I made a show of dropping the bottle. I bent down to retrieve it and, while doing so, wrenched the magnetic casing containing the explosive device from the underside of my car.

I looked over toward the door to see if my fumblings were arousing any suspicion. But my guardian's attention was elsewhere. Making sure I kept the explosive charge out of his line of sight, I moved toward the 560SEL, which now sat in between me and the exit. I rechecked the license plate number, just to be certain, and repeated my bottledropping ruse. I then knelt down and attached the magnetic device.

As I walked over to the door, I held up the antibiotics for the crewman to see. Motioning to my chest, I said, “I really need these! Tes¸ekkür, tes¸ekkür.” He smiled at my thank-yous, pleased to be of service.

Later, at dusk, the ship passed through the Corinth Canal with what seemed to be only three feet or so of space to spare on either side. From the banks, Greek soldiers took no pains to hide their animosity for the Turkish crew, their ship, and their passengers. (Turkish ships actually had to lower the flag when sailing this canal.)

As I snapped photos of these scowling sentries, Ute sidled up and took my arm. In somewhat brusque fashion, I told her I had a dinner engagement, and walked off. I didn't want to be rude; too much had gone my way for me to blow it over a show of good manners to a flirtatious romantic. I took some food to my cabin and went to bed early.

Just after dawn the next morning, we pulled into a drizzly, foggy Izmir. The cars drove off the car deck in the reverse order that they entered. After pulling off and clearing customs, I watched my quarry do likewise. While I was waiting, I went to the nearest pay phone and reported in code that everything was a “go.” It struck me then that I never really got a good look at the man whose life I might have just helped terminate. It was just as well. For all I know, I passed him a dozen times in the ship. My ignorance ensured I never betrayed any sign of recognition.

Ute and her Kurdish friends drove off in a two-car convoy led by a dusty gold BMW 5 Series. As she passed, she smiled and waved at me. Evidently, there were no hard feelings. From her carefree manner, it seemed she had no idea she was being tailed. I only hope she didn't end up in a Turkish jail.

After dropping the car off with a local Mossad agent (alas, it was agency property), I typed out my reports in a hotel and caught a flight back to Europe, where I spent a lovely holiday with my family at Euro Disney in Paris. When I got back to work, one of my colleagues informed me that my target had detonated somewhere on a lonely stretch of highway in Kurdish bandit country near the Syrian border.

Overall, my mission at sea ranks as one of the high points in my tenure as a Mossad combatant. It ran for about five weeks and was a complete success. Finally, one of my set-up operations resulted in someone actually pulling the trigger.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

D
espite triumphs such as my mission in Turkey, life on the road was beginning to wear on me. Like many fathers whose jobs take them away from home for long stretches, I was beginning to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to opt for a more stable nine-to-five gig.

By now, I had put in almost seven years as a combatant. If you included my military service, my studies, and the Mossad training period, I hadn't been a full-time father and husband for a decade. I was starting to show signs of what we call in Hebrew
shchik
a—emotional wear and tear from living in lonely isolation. And although my family enjoyed France and my weekend visits, they were anxious to return to their home in Israel.

I needed a change and wanted to leave Caesarea for a different job in the Mossad. My personal ennui had begun to affect my professional attitude. I was frustrated at Charles's petty manipulations and Doron's surrender to his every whim and demand. The stress was such that I began lashing out in inappropriate ways. One telling incident occurred in Brussels, when I was boarding a crowded TGV train. A Frenchman pushed in front of me, and I became so enraged that I grabbed his wrist from behind and twisted it around over my head until he howled in pain. I knew then that I'd better make changes to my life, or I'd end up doing something that would get me into real trouble.

But I was faced with a dilemma. The usual career path for Mossad combatants returning to Israel was to become instructors for new recruits within Caesarea. This didn't appeal to me: I'd witnessed during my own training in Tel Aviv that instructors were called upon to work hours that were just as long and unpredictable as those of overseas combatants. Moreover, I felt that becoming an instructor wouldn't supply me with the real lifestyle change I needed. I wanted to throw myself into a field that was as far as possible from what I'd been doing in Europe.

There was another reason to avoid continuing my work with Caesarea: Charles.

Like me, Charles grew tired of life as a combatant. In 1996, he informed me that he was heading back to Israel to become an instructor. I knew that following his lead likely would mean we'd keep working together, and I had no appetite for a reprise of the friction and workplace irritations I'd endured over the last seven years.

As it turned out, Charles spent only a few months instructing combatants in training before taking on a role for which he was far better suited. He became a case officer in the Mossad division Tsomet, where he was responsible for recruiting “human intelligence sources” (moles and snitches) in foreign lands. Within a few years, Charles was Tsomet's golden boy—the top case officer in the Mossad, according to one of my well-informed colleagues. Thanks to their experience, former Mossad combatants typically make the best Tsomet case officers. Combatants interact with Arabs and Iranians all the time during the course of their tenure in the field and, in so doing, gain an insight into the mindset of potential human intelligence sources.

I would run into Charles at other times over the course of my career, and with each encounter my anger mellowed. Despite all our bickering, we'd done some important work together in the field. In fact, many people in HQ told us separately that in the early and mid-1990s we were considered the best operational team in the field. I like to think that while Charles had a hard time expressing his gratitude, he was nevertheless thankful for our pairing. I know I was. Whatever Charles's personal faults, his service to Israel was monumental. And I was always glad to know that he was on our side.

My opportunity for a new career within the Office came in 1996, a year after my trip to Turkey. This job would not only allow me to see a whole new side of the Mossad, but also give me an inside look at its much larger American cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. The man who got me in was none other than Avi, who'd recently been transferred from head of Caesarea to the top job at Tevel, the liaison and special political operations division.
¹¹

Tevel
is Hebrew for “world,” and it aptly describes the division's responsibilities. Like other Western nations, Israel freely shares all but its most sensitive intelligence with allies around the globe. Tevel's job was to make sure the information flowed in a free and timely fashion. Apart from intelligence sharing, the division's most important jobs are to develop joint projects targeting terrorist groups and rogue regimes, and to provide a
karit-raka
, or “soft landing,” should any of the Mossad's operatives get in trouble while on unilateral operations (also called “blue and white” operations, in reference to Israel's flag) in a friendly country.

In such cases, the objective is to extricate the agent in as discreet a manner as possible. But sometimes, despite everyone's best efforts, fate has other plans. For instance, when a Mossad operative was caught bugging a Hezbollah terrorist's apartment in Berne, Switzerland, in 1998, the Swiss intelligence service did its best to sweep the matter under the rug and released the officer. Ironically, the Israeli media blew the lid off the story and the Swiss government had no alternative but to launch a criminal investigation.

Tevel also acts as a sort of “shadow” foreign ministry by maintaining covert quasi-diplomatic relations with the governments of nations normally considered hostile to Israel, such as Indonesia and the Arab Gulf countries. It also maintains relations with stateless groups, such as the Kurds in northern Iraq.

Finally, Tevel arranges training courses and seminars to allied services on subjects of Israeli expertise, such as dealing with Islamist terror. India, in particular, has benefited enormously from the counterterrorism training it has received through Tevel. This should not be surprising; from a security point of view, Kashmir resembles nothing so much as a giant West Bank.

When I began work at Tevel, I got a lucky break. Because of my English-language fluency and Canadian background, I was seen as a good fit for the North American department, a plum assignment that would allow me to work on Tevel's most critical liaison relationship— that between the Mossad and the CIA. My mandate was to maintain the bilateral intelligence exchange on counterterrorism issues with my American counterparts and to develop joint operations on terrorist targets of mutual interest. I also had to cultivate good interpersonal working relationships with my CIA and FBI colleagues as a means to ensuring that things ran smoothly.

When I showed up for work in the fall of 1996, a six-foot-six-inch giant named Guy was assigned to show me the ropes. His job was similar to mine, except he managed the Mossad's counter-proliferation liaison relationship with the CIA.

Like most of the new colleagues I was now meeting, Guy didn't know what I had been up to before joining HQ. And I liked it that way. I saw my job at Tevel as an opportunity to leave behind the petty annoyances and rivalries of my previous role and make a fresh start in a new environment.

By the time I got the job, my family already had been living in France for five years. Uprooting them to a Tel Aviv suburb did not make for an easy transition. The kids—now ages twelve and six—were leaving behind friends and entering an entirely different education system. Dahlia had a serious lifestyle change to deal with, as well: I no longer had the enhanced pay and perks that went with an overseas assignment, so she had to look for a job.

It is worth saying a word here about the economics of intelligence work. In the Mossad, as in every intelligence agency, most experienced agents prefer to work on home soil. As a result, agencies have to provide large financial and professional incentives for serving overseas. This means, for instance, that combatants are credited triple value for years worked abroad when their pension entitlement is calculated.

The flipside is that domestic desk jobs typically pay poorly, because there is an overabundance of qualified individuals willing to staff them. In the households of many of my Tel Aviv colleagues, the non-Mossad spouse was the primary breadwinner. (This was certainly true of my wife, who got a plum job in Israel's booming tech sector.)

Ex-combatants such as myself are relatively rare at Mossad HQ. Having been at the sharp end of the Mossad's operational work overseas, they are treated with deference. There are also a few formal perks—such as receiving tenure within a year, as opposed to three years for other Mossad staff. On the other hand, ex-combatants are outsiders: most are foreign born, and all are novices at navigating the bureaucracy that their colleagues have spent years mastering. Overall, I was happy to be back in Tel Aviv, but there were many times I asked myself why I'd willingly gone from being a well-paid master of my domain to a mid-level civil servant fighting the morning traffic jams.

I was now what is known as a deskman and, despite the cut in pay and different occupational dynamic, I was working in one of the best jobs in the Mossad. It was both fascinating and exhausting to bring myself up to speed on the workings of this unique component of the Office. I came from an operational culture that was compartmentalized from the HQ way of working and I now had to learn everything as fast as I humanly could. I started with my new place of work. I found that the responsibilities within Tevel were divided up on a regional basis. The various departments included Far East, Western Europe “A” (northern Europe, including Germany, France, and the U.K.), Western Europe “B” (southern Europe, including Italy, Spain, and Greece), Eastern Europe, North America, Africa, Latin America (since absorbed into the North America department, which is now called The Americas), and another department that maintains covert intelligence ties with Muslim countries. Ill-informed Mossad staffers sometimes treated Tevel as if it were a glorified communications department. But, in fact, it brings in some seventy percent of the intelligence the Mossad receives—a testament to the value of goodwill and mutual exchange in international relations.

In our department, the relationship with the CIA was managed through a number of channels in Tel Aviv, including face-to-face exchanges, group briefings, and memos replying to intelligence requests from each other's HQ. I worked opposite CIA officers from the agency's Counterterrorism Center (CTC), a body created in the 1980s to coordinate counterterrorist activities among various U.S. agencies. My perspective was unique, because I was the only Mossad officer doing liaison work with both the CIA and FBI. The experience taught me an enormous amount about why America—and, by extension, the entire Western world—was so unprepared for 9/11 and its aftermath.

Traditionally, the number two at the CTC is a senior FBI officer appointed as a gesture to demonstrate the good working relations between these two agencies. In reality, I learned, the CIA and FBI despise one another, and even actively thwart each other when they can get away with it.

Much of our work was dictated by the terror threat-
du
-
jour
, which meant I had a steady diet of interrupted sleep, all-nighters, and working weekends. My plan to ease into a predictable nine-to-five didn't quite work out as planned.

Like a fire station that sends a truck out every time someone pulls an alarm, we treated each intelligence alert as if it were the real thing. Keeping up with all the threats often meant sixteen-hour shifts. I did it because it was my job—but also because if I got lazy or screwed up, people might die as a result. Dahlia wasn't particularly impressed, however, and I didn't blame her. We'd come back to Israel on the expectation that I'd be home more often, but I was still spending a lot more time at the office than I was with my kids. And on top of everything else, I was studying at university in my spare time.

I'd invariably end up getting a phone call in the wee hours of the morning from the Office's communications center, which operates 24/7, telling me that we had received information from one of our sources about an imminent attack on an Israeli and/or U.S. target somewhere in the world. Many times, the threats I was dealing with seemed real. Other times, I was quite sure they were bogus. The problem was that both the United States and Israel had a policy of putting their entire security and intelligence forces on alert just about every time a guy named Ahmed or Mohammed walked into an embassy asking for money in exchange for vague details about a massive attack supposedly in the works. With the rise of global terrorism, such frauds have become something of a cottage industry.

I'd have to drive into work and read the source report given to me by another sleep-deprived soul from the Mossad's counterterrorism department. Together we'd assess the information and simultaneously request permission to pass the details on to my colleagues in the CIA. We always managed to get the information released because no one was prepared to withhold information to another service when their citizens were at risk.

I'd then put together a paraphrased memo, fax it to my American colleague on the secure link, and wait for them to ask a million follow-up questions, which I couldn't answer because all we knew was what was in the memo. The device we used for encrypted communications was known as the STU, which is a special telephone and fax device that, with the push of a button, switches to a secure mode that ensures any eavesdropper will hear nothing but digitized gibberish. (A secondary, somewhat comical effect is that the decrypted voices come across on the other end as if they were emitted by chipmunks with a speech impediment.) In modern STU systems, a unique encryption code is generated electronically every time a secure call is made. But our 1998-era apparatus used a clunkier protocol, whereby the same code was used for a month, and then changed manually (by me, as it happens) when we received the new code from the Agency.