The Volunteer (4 page)

The next day, I had time on the long bus ride home to my kibbutz from the border town of Kiryat Shemona to reflect on the night's events. It was my first, and last, taste of real combat. I suppose that I was a lot closer than modern warfare allows most combatants these days.

After my army service ended in 1985, I received a discreet letter from an obscure department of the Israeli government inviting me for an interview. It was my first contact with the Mossad and thereafter my military service would turn into another kind of service.

Tom Bishop: “It's not a fucking game!”
Nathan Muir: “Yes, it is. That's exactly what it is. It's no kid's game, either,
but a whole other game. And it's serious, and it's dangerous, and it's not
one you want to lose.”

FROM THE MOVIE
Spy Game

I
t was mid-afternoon on a warm day in December 1989, and I was driving around Tel Aviv with no belt, no shoelaces—and little composure. My hands were shaking as I struggled to guide my tiny four-speed Subaru through traffic. I'd just suffered forty-eight hours of humiliating, painful interrogation. I was relieved but also afraid. I was happy to see the sky and feel the fresh air on my face after spending two days in a tiny cell. But I was also terrified that the ordeal might not be over—that I would be re-arrested and subjected to the same Kafkaesque scenario all over again.

I was looking for a pay phone, glancing nervously in my rear-view mirror every few seconds to see if I was being followed. From the parking lot of a gas station, I called Oren, my Mossad supervisor.

Speaking in code, I told him that I needed a “crash”—an emergency meeting with him at a pre-arranged location. Once the arrangements were made, I hung up, drove to a nearby hotel, and tried to clean up in the washroom. The staff and passing guests eyed me with distaste, probably thinking I'd woken up in a nearby alley after a bender. Having gone several days without a shower, I'm sure I smelled the part.

Once I felt halfway presentable, I made my way to a lounge overlooking a restless blue Mediterranean. While I waited for Oren, I calmed myself by watching the waves break against the rocks. As a young boy growing up in Oak Bay on Vancouver Island, I'd enjoyed a similar scene walking along Beach Drive and Dallas Road. Not for the first time, I thought about the circumstances that had conspired to make me trade that view for this one.

Oren arrived, accompanied by a Mossad psychologist named Elan. Almost before they'd taken their seats, I started pouring out everything that had happened. My voice broke here and there, but I managed to get through it without crying. They watched me with solemn expressions as I spoke, never interrupting.

When I'd signalled I was done, Oren looked at me and said, “I know all about it. I was in the next room while you were being interrogated. So was Elan. You were always within range of one of our cameras.”

I froze. Then I flashed back to my cell and the odd wall coverings placed throughout the room: the oil painting of a cornfield and the travel posters—one of Greece, the other of Croatia—opposite one another on the far sides of the rectangular room. I started thinking about that stock scene from a hundred TV dramas, in which a team of cops work over some poor sap while men in suits, casually drinking coffee and exchanging jaded wisecracks, watch from behind one-way glass. The roles were clear: these were the men in suits and I was the sap.

By this time, I was six months into my training as a Mossad agent. When I'd been arrested by narcs a few days before, I thought I'd stumbled into some sort of random snafu—an embarrassing screw-up that might get me labelled a druggie and kicked out of my training program. Now I realized this
was
my training program. The cell, the interrogation, this seaside debriefing—they were all part of a test to see if I could maintain my cover under duress.

Up until this point, I'd put up with everything that had been thrown at me. But arresting a guy, putting him in jail, knocking him around until he resembled a barely continent lowlife—this was too weird, too demeaning. My reaction to Oren's cool confession was that I wanted out.

“I don't think I'm cut out for this sort of thing,” I told him. “I'd like to go home.”

The journey to this moment began three years earlier, shortly after I'd finished reserve service in the Israeli Defense Forces. At the time, I was living with my wife and infant son on the kibbutz. Between working the land and taking care of my family, the kibbutz was my world. This was the era before the Internet or cheap international phone calls, so my communication with family and old friends was restricted to the blue aerograms that occasionally made it from Canada.

Then, one day, I received an odd piece of mail from the Israeli government. The brief letter was typewritten, unsigned, and composed in the formal style that typifies Israeli official correspondence. (Since I began learning Hebrew, I had observed that it is almost two separate languages, one spoken and one written. The written form is very formal, and uses words that are never used in the spoken form.) Yet something about the document stood out: the phrasing was cryptic and obfuscated by bureaucratic jargon. The upshot was that I'd been selected to interview for a vaguely defined job in the domain of “international co-operation.”

At the time, I was working on the kibbutz's cotton plantation. The job had its benefits—namely, tear-assing through the fields of the Bet Shean Valley on a dirt bike or in a dusty Jeep. My most vivid memory of life in the field was whiling away the hours spotting Dorcas gazelle, striped hyena, and the dreaded
tsepha
, or Palestinian viper, a snake so feared that it's used as a symbol for one of the IDF's paratroop battalions. On one occasion, I killed a
tsepha
in the field. When I proudly brought its carcass back to the plantation's offices, I was scolded for killing such an effective rodent hunter.

Notwithstanding such pleasures, however, I was beginning to realize that irrigation, fertilization, and pest control were not where my heart lay. I considered taking a leave of absence from the kibbutz and heading back to British Columbia with my wife and son, so that they could meet my family and experience life in Canada.

But I decided to at least see what this new opportunity might offer. I made arrangements to head to Tel Aviv—two bumpy, winding hours away on an Egged bus. After tracking down the address on the letterhead, I found myself in a nondescript office with a small waiting room filled with other young people. Eventually I was ushered into an equally generic office, where I met a fellow named Ari. After mechanically repeating some of the jargon I'd read in the letter, he explained that I'd been selected as a candidate for an overseas Israeli government “function.” His manner was reserved and bordered on obtuse. Indeed, the whole exercise was surreal. But I played along.

Ari handed me a questionnaire with a series of twenty questions, each requiring a one-word response. For example: “When attacked, the young man——?” or “The boy——his parents?” I did my best to produce sensible answers and handed Ari my completed questionnaire.

He gave a cursory glance at what I'd written, then put down my test and suddenly changed his tone. Dropping the jargon, he asked me all kinds of probing questions about my life, ideals, goals, and experiences. The interview lasted about an hour, and he took notes throughout. In many cases, he repeated questions, or otherwise revisited subjects he'd already covered. (I learned later that the point of the interview was to test an applicant's honesty. Telling a lie is easy. Telling it the same way twice is more difficult.)

There was also a test in which I was sent into a room with a pencil and a piece of paper. I was told to close my eyes and make X's in a series of circles printed on the page. The ostensible purpose was to test my “spatial” response, but I found out later that it was another honesty check. (A candidate who successfully puts all the X's in the circles is clearly cheating.) I didn't know that, however. So when I handed in my test—some X's in and most out—I thought I'd failed.

I finally got up the nerve to ask what this was all about. Ari said, “If you are interested, and we find you suitable, we will send you on a training course for about a year and then put you to work.” Despite Ari's evasions, I had an inkling of what was going on. Only one employer was this secretive about recruitment: Israel's famous intelligence service, the Mossad. When I realized this, I felt a slight tug in my gut.

To this day, I'm not one hundred per cent sure why the Mossad specifically recruited me, but I can assume that my nationality and Anglo-Saxon background were contributing factors in their decision. By the same token, I had many foreign-born Israeli friends who never received an invitation from the Mossad, so perhaps in their mysterious method of separating the wheat from the chaff, they saw a few grains of possibility in me that could be trained and indoctrinated for their purposes.

At the end of the interview, I told Ari that I was planning on returning to Canada for a year or so, and he gave me a plain white business card with a telephone number on it. He told me to call when I returned to Israel if I was still interested. I kept the card—all through the time I was in Canada.

I spent two years with my family in beautiful Vancouver. Upon my return to Canada, I quickly lucked into a decent-paying federal government job. I never had to take work home with me, and had every weekend and statutory holiday off. But despite the long lunch hours and slacker work schedule, something told me I needed to go back to Israel. I hadn't put in hard time during my conversion and army duty so I could stroll down streets or lie on a beach.

On this point, Dahlia didn't need much convincing: she was homesick. And so in the summer of 1988, we boarded an El Al flight and returned to Israel.

Once back, I didn't waste a lot of time before calling the number Ari had given me, and I was granted another interview. I had thought a lot about the opportunity the Mossad was presenting me and my family and, to be frank, didn't see myself growing cotton on a kibbutz for the rest of my days. I'd converted and made Israel my home for a higher purpose—and the Mossad seemed the perfect vehicle to put my ideals to the test.

The address they gave me this time was different, and when I arrived I noticed that many of the recruiters were new. I later found out that had I waited another week or so, the phone number on the card would also have been changed—all part of the Mossad's normal security procedures. The opportunity might have been gone, and I'd still be working the cotton fields.

In 2006, years after I'd left the Mossad and was trying my hand at writing, I had the good fortune to meet the renowned Canadian writer and iconoclast George Jonas—author, most famously, of
Vengeance
, upon which Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated film
Munich
was based. During lunch in Toronto, George told me a story about Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo ignited the First World War. On the fateful day in June 1914, his vehicle had made a wrong turn. But his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, had also been diverted. Somehow, they both turned up at the same street corner. Within four and a half years, fifteen million people would be dead on the battlefields of Europe.

George made the point that when something is fated to be—for good or ill—nothing will stand in its way.

My recruitment was a drawn-out affair. I understand that the process is more streamlined these days, but in my time, it involved months of waiting and uncertainty.

I first underwent casual interviews with people who identified themselves only by their first names. They asked me about my ambitions, what I thought about the situation in the Middle East, and how I felt about being separated from my family.

No one ever admitted that they belonged to something called the Mossad. In fact, the word
Mossad
was never used until the first day of my training course—and the only place it appeared was in one of my training manuals. Instead, we always used the expression
hamisrad
, which means “office,” even later when I was a veteran working in HQ. (Similarly, CIA agents have traditionally called their outfit “The Company.”) Running around calling ourselves “Mossad agents” seemed silly and made us feel self-conscious. To this day, I am uncomfortable using the actual name of the organization that once employed me.

Along with the interviews, there was a medical exam that measured just about every aspect of my physical health. Then came a battery of psychological and psychometric exams. These were real—nothing like the bogus honesty tests Ari had put me through a couple of years earlier. They lasted an entire day, and were conducted by an austere psychologist straight out of the movies. (He even had the requisite German accent.)

I had to make the two-hour commute from my kibbutz to Tel Aviv for each stage of my testing and interviewing. I must have made ten such trips. It was grueling and tedious. And unlike my army experience—during which I at least could rely on camaraderie to buoy my spirits—I had to go through the process on my own. If they were testing other candidates at the same time, I never met them. As I would learn years later, it was just a taste of the loneliness that awaited me.

As a twenty-seven-year-old who'd spent much of his adult life in the Canadian and Israeli armies, my personal history was hardly mysterious. But my background was complicated by the fact that, unlike just about every other Mossad agent, I wasn't born Jewish, and therefore had no pedigree that could be easily checked. The Mossad is an exclusively Jewish outfit: no matter if you have Israeli citizenship and serve faithfully in the military, if you are of another faith, you can't be recruited as a serving officer. There are no exceptions.

I'd learned something about Jews since my conversion: their communities are usually tightly knit, and the six degrees of separation that are said to link any two people in the world often shrink to two or three degrees when both of them are Jews—even if they're from opposite ends of the globe. If someone isn't related to you in a distant fashion, then his great-grandfather and yours prayed at the same synagogue in the same
shtetl
in Lithuania. Or Poland. Or Romania. Tell people you're from Canada, and they'll recite lists of friends you might know—or their favorite kosher delis. If your face doesn't light up with a flash of recognition at least once—well, that's suspicious.