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 right-wing, anti-Semitic German in whom they could confide. And confide they did. Everything they said went back to Tel Aviv. Lotz was ev
entually 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 Hider 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 protégé.