The Volunteer (5 page)

Having lived in Israel for a few years, I'd been through this sort of conversation many times before. So rather than have the truth flushed out of me, during one of my early interviews I confessed to a fellow named Maor that I'd converted.

I half expected to be bounced then and there. But Maor, a kindly old fellow, looked at me and said, “We already know about your conversion. And we make no distinction—you are as Jewish as any of us.” I remember being moved by his simple declaration of acceptance. It made up for the various small-minded Israelis I'd met who clearly thought otherwise.

Next, I had to undergo a polygraph exam—commonly (and inaccurately) known as a lie detector test.
²
I was asked whether I was a mole working for a rival intelligence service, a criminal on the run, a drug user, or a homosexual. In each case, I truthfully said no.

Today, sexual orientation is no longer a subject of inquiry for Mossad recruits. In my day, however, being gay was seen as a negative because it was believed enemies could use it as a source of leverage against an officer. Thankfully, attitudes have changed—at least in countries such as Israel. (Homosexuality is still a capital offense in many less enlightened nations.)

Once I passed the tests, my training began. I was told to present myself with personal effects suitable for a two-night stay in Tel Aviv. The address turned out to be a well-appointed apartment, where I was met by a half-dozen men and women who looked me over with bemused detachment. After some basic introductions, their apparent leader, a tall, dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes named Halleck, told me to go into the next room and devise a cover story for both my identity and my reason for being in Israel. “Let your imagination go wild,” he told me. “The only rule is you can't be Canadian. We want to make this challenging.”

After fifteen minutes or so, I came up with what I thought was a winner: I was a U.S.-based journalist doing a background story on Tel Aviv for the
Los Angeles Times
. Once I worked out the biographical details, I came out of the room quite pleased with myself, and presented my invented identity to Halleck and his colleagues.

Unbeknownst to me, this was a stock exercise in the intelligence business. I was being asked to create something that every covert intelligence operative must have: a bogus but believable cover story about who you are, where you come from, and what you're doing. In intelligence parlance, this assumed identity is known as a legend. It sounds easy, but it's not, as Halleck demonstrated to me in about thirty seconds.

“Nice to meet you, Fred Porter,” he said in a casual tone after I'd introduced myself. “Welcome to Israel. May I ask where you're staying? The Hilton you say? Nice place. What's your room number? I'd like to call you later in the day.”

After I stammered who knows what unconvincing nonsense, he went to work on the rest of my cover story. “You sound disoriented,” he said. “Why don't we call up your editor in L.A. I bet he's worried. You must know the number off the top of your head, right? What's that? You don't know your own
area code
?”

I felt the eyes of Halleck's entourage on me, but they didn't interrupt the conversation. I was unnerved, and I couldn't help but feel that I was failing an audition of sorts—a kind of
American Idol
for spies, if you will—and at that particular moment, I was warbling hideously. After enduring some constructive criticism, I was sent back into the next room with my tail between my legs. Creating a convincing story is not the hard part, I realized. The challenge was in concocting a convincing story that was also virtually impossible to check out.

It took me several tries, but I eventually hit on something that held up under Halleck's preliminary probing. I was still a journalist, but for a small Christian community college with a generic-sounding name (this was the era before Google, remember). I was staying at a youth hostel. No, I couldn't remember its name and there are hundreds in Israel. And I'd checked out that morning anyway. Once my identity and raison d'être had been established, I was bundled into a van with Halleck and some of his retinue, and we drove into the epicenter of a bustling Tel Aviv afternoon.

There is a scene in the film
Spy Game
in which Robert Redford, the old CIA hand, takes his protégé, Brad Pitt, onto the streets of Berlin and runs him around to test his smarts. This was more or less what I was doing. I had to appear on a randomly chosen apartment balcony after convincing the tenant to allow me access; get the first three names from a hotel register; start a conversation with a complete stranger and hold his attention for twenty minutes; put a device in a public phone mouthpiece in the heart of the Hilton Hotel lobby without being noticed; and a whole host of other odd but challenging tasks.

In each case, I had to rely not only on an invented identity—my legend, or “status cover”—but also on what I later learned to refer to as my operational cover, that is, my fictional motive for being in a particular place and doing a particular thing at a particular time. A legend stays with you for years, but an operational cover is often invented on the spot.

One thing they don't show you in the spy movies: what the agents do at night. No, I'm not referring to bedding beautiful women with names like Plenty O'Toole and Pussy Galore. When the sun goes down, spies morph into paper-pushing bureaucrats. (I suppose that Canadian government job was good for something.) There is a saying in the Mossad: “If you complete a mission and don't report it, the mission never happened.” I was instructed to write reports about all of my activities during the day in any format I saw fit (this being 1988, I recorded everything in longhand). By the time my head hit the pillow, I was exhausted.

As I performed my various tasks over the next couple of days, Halleck and his colleagues sat in cafés and watched me. On the odd occasion, one of them would ask me why I did what I did, and I'd try to explain my thought process. These were not puzzles that had any correct answer. Rather, the idea was to test my judgment and ability to improvise. There was no going back to the office and thinking about it. I had to solve problems then and there.

In some cases, the tasks seemed plain impossible. But more often than not, I surprised myself. Hotel staff, I knew, would not make a guest registry available to just anyone who asked. So I simply told the desk clerk that I had the camera of one of their guests, and that the young lady had given me her last name but I had forgotten it. “Look,” I said in a pleading tone, “it's a very expensive camera and I'd like to return it to her . . . and truth be told, I really like her and would like to see her again . . .”

I found that, with a good story and a hint of personal disclosure, most people will try to meet you halfway—say, turning the registry in your direction so you can scan it, without actually handing it to you. In other cases, where accomplishing the task just wasn't in the cards, I had to realize as much and back off rather than force matters and cause a security problem. The adage that smart agents live to fight another day is an important principle in intelligence work.

The tests varied, but they all had the same goal: to see how far I could be pushed before I broke cover. In the spy business, I was gradually learning, you simply never break cover. A spy's cover is the most important weapon in his or her professional arsenal. These tests don't have a high pass rate because many promising candidates break cover at the first hint of a threat. It's a natural response: reverting to your true self feels like a safe move. It's an instinctive way of saying “I'm not playing anymore.” Those who can resist are highly valued by intelligence services.

I don't know what it says about me—that I'm a good liar or a decent actor, or that I just don't like to fail a test—but I never broke cover. After two days, Halleck and the anonymous ringleaders who'd been putting me through my paces told me I'd passed. No, I was not a Mossad officer yet—nowhere near, in fact. But I'd made it past the first big hurdle. They told me to go home. They'd call me when the next stage was set to begin.

It was now spring of 1988, and I admired the wildflowers growing in the Jezreel Valley as I rode the bus home to my wife and son. I had been away for longer than usual this time, and was glad to be back in the warm embrace of family. We had dinner together, and then Dahlia and I had a serious talk. I described a little of what I'd been through, and where I thought it was all leading. I was still riding the wave of pride that came from making the grade in Tel Aviv. But she was worried, and she told me so.

My mood changed quickly. Until now, I hadn't seriously considered the rather obvious fact that Dahlia wouldn't be thrilled about the prospect of my taking on a dangerous profession. She also reminded me that since we'd been married, we'd spent little time under the same roof. This training would keep me away from my family for months more. And if I got through, then what? Possibly a career that would make me an absentee husband permanently. Our child was then four years old. Did I want him to grow up without a full-time daddy?

Over hours of kitchen-table conversations with Dahlia, I decided that family life was more important than whatever awaited me in Tel Aviv. The next day, I called the Office. I couldn't reach my handlers, but spoke to a secretary and left a message: “Can you please let them know that I've thought things over, and would like to quit? Thanks.” Then I hung up, feeling comfortable with my decision.

It was back to the cotton fields for me. I quickly fell back into a life that couldn't have been more remote from the world I'd briefly tasted. I was out in the countryside, wearing nothing but shorts and sandals. I swam in the pool with my son and had barbecues with my buddies. Just an average Israeli kibbutznik.

I was not the first recruit to get cold feet. The Mossad, I now know, has established procedures for dealing with such situations. A few days after I'd come back to the kibbutz, one of the recruiters phoned and invited himself up for a chat. To be polite, I acquiesced. He would have his say, I expected. All I'd have to do was hear him out and then let him know my decision was final.

And so Benny appeared at our doorstep, and a lifelong friendship with my family was formed.

If the Office had dispatched a slick desk jockey with a canned sales pitch, I would have found it easy to recite back to him my prepared rejection. But Benny, himself a former “combatant” (as Mossad agents are called), took a different approach. He was over six feet tall, slim, with a shock of grey hair and blue eyes. His Hebrew was French-accented, and he had an easygoing manner. My son liked him instantly, and so did my wife.

He came into our small bungalow and we put a cup of coffee in his hand. Once my son was out of the room, he proceeded to give me a detailed picture of what awaited me should I change my mind and make it through the training program. Far from promising me roses and sunshine, he told me that my work would involve operating in hostile countries, often alone, while under foreign cover. He also outlined the risks of torture, long confinement, and even execution that I would face if I were caught.

Dahlia was in the room throughout the whole conversation. Benny wanted her there, because he knew she would probably be the one who needed the most convincing. He assured us that joining the Office was like joining a family, and that it takes care of its own. Speaking plainly to a morbid issue that both Dahlia and I had thought about, he told us that she would be looked after financially no matter where I was sent, or what happened to me.

As I watched her reaction, I could tell she was impressed that he was telling us the unvarnished truth—that he was leading us to an informed decision rather than trying to dazzle us with false assurances. The fear of the unknown is a powerful force, and contending with it had put both of us on edge. Benny gave us a clear indication of what lay ahead, and reassured us that we'd be able to navigate it together.

One of the questions that I am asked most frequently about my former career is how much a spy's spouse gets to know about what happens in the field. The Mossad's policy is unequivocal: the spouse has to know what his or her partner is doing, because more often than not, she (or he) is integral to the spy's ability to operate. The spouse keeps the family together during the other's absence, and has to face the inevitable prying questions from friends and relatives about the husband's (or wife's) occupation and long disappearances.

I never told Dahlia specifics about ongoing operations, but she knew the big picture. The truth is, she never pried, and I gave her the details only when I was stressed out and needed to talk. There are many incidents in this book that she didn't know about, and many that she knows more about than the reader will learn here.

Finally, after about two hours of conversation, I told Benny I'd go ahead with the training. When he saw his job was done, Benny stood to leave, and we shook hands. I then spent the next two months waiting for a phone call.

It was October when the call finally came. I was told to present myself in a Tel Aviv hotel lobby, where I would meet my instructor. (Spy agencies, I've concluded over the years, are what keep the hotel trade afloat.) Once again, I kissed my wife goodbye and hopped on a bus to the big city.

I remember sitting in the hotel with butterflies dancing in my gut, not knowing what hoops I'd be made to jump through this time around. Eventually, I was approached by a young man in his thirties who sat down and introduced himself as Oren. We spoke Hebrew, and it was only later that I discovered he spoke fluent English with a slight accent that made him sound like a cross between a Brit and a South African. (I never did find out where he actually came from.) Oren was tall and fair, with light brown curly hair and blue eyes. He wore glasses, jeans, a white dress shirt, and Timberland loafers. In fact, he looked and acted like a kibbutznik—fit, self-confident, and informal. “So, are you ready to start?” he asked me with a smile.