The Volunteer (28 page)

On June 6, 1982, Israeli tanks rolled into Lebanon as part of Operation Peace for Galilee, in response to an attack three days earlier by Palestinian terrorists on Israel's ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, outside London's Dorchester Hotel. By the time Israel withdrew most of its troops in 1985, about eighteen thousand people had been killed, 675 of them Israeli soldiers.

From professional observation, I learned during my career as an intelligence officer that polygraphing is an art, not a science. Its effectiveness is limited by the skill of the polygraph technician. Some subjects can fool even a highly proficient technician, which is why polygraphs are generally seen as just one tool in an investigator's arsenal.

Actually, the term I more often heard thrown around was “compartmentation.” I tried to convince my Mossad peers that no such word exists in the English language, but no one believed me. The principle of compartmentalization was applied assymetrically: every person from Caesarea's HQ with whom I worked knew everything about me, but I often knew nothing about them. At the time, I didn't even know where Caesarea's HQ was, or the range of activities performed by my own operational division. Compartmentalization is never implemented perfectly. Humans are social creatures and, over time, agents working closely together inevitably let some of their secrets out. This is why a Caesarea security officer would interview me and other combatants every few months, to find out what we knew (or had figured out on our own), so that they could prepare security risk assessments.

The “Scalphunters” (the fictional British equivalent to Mossad combatants) were, of course, the exception to this rule.

In actuality, Syria's military contribution to the Gulf War consisted of sending a token collection of ragtag soldiers and aging armored vehicles to bask in the sun well behind the frontlines. One report had the Syrians stating that they would not participate in the actual fighting. I also found it more than a little ironic that Syria's payback money from the Gulf states was being used to purchase Scud missiles similar to those that Saddam rained down on the Saudis. The episode seems to encapsulate the mind-bending logic of the Middle East and of the despots who rule the region.

Israel is home to a large community of Jews expelled from Morocco in the 1950s, and their descendants. Their culinary influence remains strong. They've given the country a million different kinds of salads, to say nothing of delectable dishes featuring couscous, meatballs, lamb, and chickpeas.

In spy novels and movies, this principle is often ignored; spies are told not only every detail of their mission, but operationally irrelevant information about how their mission fits into their paymaster's schemes.
The Bourne Identity
(2002) is a notable exception. Having seen all too many cheesy spy films, I was impressed that the “Treadstone” assassins were portrayed as operating in complete isolation and were told of their missions only through intermediaries who knew only their first names. Like all Hollywood films, this one contained a variety of credulity-stretching plot devices, of course. But in this particular respect, art imitated life to a T.

In 1999, Bashir successfully moved against Turabi, and consolidated power in his own hands.

The IAF has also performed its share of long-distance humanitarian missions in Africa. Aside from several times bringing relief supplies to war-torn African nations, Israel's air force, assisted by Mossad agents on the ground, brought fourteen thousand members of Ethiopia's beleaguered Jewish community to Israel in the early 1990s—likely the only time in human history when whites have brought legions of blacks from one continent to another for any reason other than enslavement.

I'd learned during my years on the job that photography truly is a spy's best friend. And I imagine it must be an even more useful tool in this age of digital cameras. I recently purchased one for my son's birthday, and the thing was only slightly larger than a credit card. Yet the pictures were just as good as those I took with my clunky film camera. It's the sort of gadget I really could have used in Khartoum—and a hundred other places.

This sort of horizontal movement was common in the Mossad. The only other career steps available to division chiefs in the agency's narrow hierarchical pyramid were the top job of director general or retirement to the private sector. Avi wasn't around long at Tevel. Shortly after bringing me on, he retired after being passed over for the DG's job.

SIGINT is typically seen as more valuable than HUMINT—intelligence conveyed directly from human sources—because people frequently lie. Moreover, disclosing SIGINT is sensitive because it implicitly entails disclosing your technical information-gathering capabilities, and the identity of those you're targeting. This explains why there is such an enormous taboo in the intelligence community about disclosing secret information without the permission of those who originally procured it. This applies not only between nations, but
within
spy agencies as well. I could no more take a piece of intelligence from another unit in the Mossad and pass it on to a third unit without permission than I could take a piece of CIA intelligence and pass it on to the British SIS. Breaking what is known in the trade as the “third-party rule” condemns you to the silent treatment evermore.

Arabs suspected of spying informally for Israeli intelligence also receive brutal treatment. Countless Palestinians have been summarily executed in the West Bank and Gaza after leading the Israeli army to terror cells. And when Lebanese citizens suspected of being Israeli informants were shot by Hezbollah in July 2006, the news was seen as so unremarkable that the media barely reported it.

The brigades are named after a Syrian sheikh, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, an Islamist who helped organize revolts against the French in 1921, and against the British in 1935. To this day, he is venerated by Palestinians as the embodiment of grassroots violent resistance. The Qassam rockets fired from Gaza are also named after him.

Conflicts between allied intelligence services such as the CIA and Mossad are rare, but they do happen. In the late 1990s, for instance, when it became clear that Iran was on a campaign to arm itself with unconventional weapons, its scientists became targets for HUMINT recruitment by the counter-proliferation departments of every Western intelligence service. There were so few targets, and so many eager to recruit them, that “deconfliction protocols” had to be established between services in order to insure that a potential target for recruitment wouldn't end up fielding calls from half a dozen different spies.

In at least one recent case, it was the Americans who reportedly misused Israeli-provided intelligence. In October 2005, Israel passed on to Washington the contents of a letter written by al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist group's leader in Iraq. The letter was not to be made public. But John Negroponte, the U.S. director of national intelligence, subsequently published it on his office website, and President George W. Bush mentioned it during a radio address. According to Israeli intelligence sources, who were reportedly furious over the episode, these indiscretions may have compromised their intelligence-gathering network in Iraq.

Al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya was also responsible for the murder of fifty-eight tourists in Luxor, Egypt, in November 1997, an attack so vicious that it prompted the Egyptian government to implement a major crackdown on homegrown terrorists. The strength of that crackdown is ultimately what motivated Zawahiri and other Egyptian terrorists to take their jihad beyond the Arab world.

For a variety of reasons, I never let on to the Americans that I was Canadian-born. To keep them guessing, I often would use expressions commonly used by South Africans and Brits. (I'd call the trunk of the car “the boot” and refer to street lights as “robots,” for instance.) Once, at a meeting with a high-level delegation that had arrived from the United States to discuss Hezbollah, I sat with a copy of a small dictionary that “translated” expressions from American to British English.

What makes America's approach odder is the fact that U.S. prosecutors launched criminal prosecutions against other embassy bombing conspirators. In October 2001, four of those men—Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali, Mohammed Odeh, Wadih el Hage, and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed—were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

I'd received a unit citation in 1998 in Tevel, along with my North America department colleagues. And I also shared a commendation with Etai, my friend from the Mossad's counterterrorism department, for nailing the three stooges in Baku, described in Chapter 16.