“Chip, it’s okay. He’s back in town. I fixed a meeting for four o’clock. That gives you time to grab the last flight out of Ben-Gurion for Stateside. The guys say they’ll come by the office and pick us up.”
The Head of Station was calling from outside the embassy, so he spoke in generalities in case the line was tapped. It was tapped, of course, but only by the Israelis, who knew anyway.
The “he” was General Yaacov “Kobi” Dror, head of the Mossad; the office was the embassy itself, and the guys were the two men from Dror’s personal staff, who arrived in an anonymous car at ten minutes after three.
Barber thought fifty minutes was a lot of time to get from the embassy compound to the headquarters of the Mossad, which is situated in an office tower called the Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard.
But that was not where the meeting was to be. The car sped northward out of town, past Sde Dov military airfield, until it picked up the coastal highway to Haifa.
Just outside Herzlia is situated a large apartment-and-hotel resort called simply the Country Club. It is a place where some Israelis but mainly elderly Jews from abroad come to relax and enjoy the numerous health and spa facilities the place boasts. These happy folk seldom glance up the hill above the resort.
If they did, they would see, perched on the top, a rather splendid building commanding fine views over the surrounding countryside and the sea. If they asked what it was, they would be told it is the Prime Minister’s summer residence.
The Prime Minister of Israel is indeed permitted to come there, one of very few who are, for this is the Mossad training school, known inside the Mossad as the Midrasha.
Yaacov Dror received the two Americans in his top-floor office, a light, airy room with the air conditioning turned up high. A short, chunky man, he wore the regulation Israeli short-sleeve, open-neck shirt and smoked the regulation sixty cigarettes a day.
Barber was glad for the air conditioning; smoke played havoc with his sinuses.
The Israeli spy chief rose from his desk and came lumbering forward.
“Chip, my old friend, how are you these days?”
He embraced the tall American in a hug. It pleased him to rumble like a bad Jewish character actor and play the friendly, genial bear. All an act. In previous missions as a senior operative, as a katsa , he had proved he was very clever and extremely dangerous.
Chip Barber greeted him back. The smiles were as fixed as the memories were long. And it had not been that long since an American court had sentenced Jonathan Pollard of Navy Intelligence to a very long prison term for spying for Israel, an operation that had certainly been run against America by the genial Kobi Dror.
After ten minutes they came to the grist: Iraq.
“Let me tell you, Chip, I think you are playing it exactly right,” said Dror, helping his guest to another cup of coffee that would keep him awake for days. He stubbed his third cigarette into a big glass ashtray.
Barber tried not to breathe but had to give up. “If we have to go in,” he said, “if he won’t quit Kuwait and we have to go in, we’ll start with air power.”
“Of course.”
“And we’ll be going for his weapons of mass destruction. That’s in your interest, too, Kobi. We need some cooperation here.”
“Chip, we’ve been watching those WMDs for years. Dammit, we’ve been warning about them. Who do you think all that poison gas, those germ and plague bombs, are destined for? Us. We were warning and warning, and no one took any notice. Nine years ago we blew apart his nuclear generators at Osirak, set him back ten years in his quest for a bomb. The world condemned us. America too.”
“That was cosmetic. We all know that.”
“Okay, Chip, so now it’s American lives on the line, it’s not ‘cosmetic’ anymore. Real Americans might die.”
“Kobi, your paranoia is showing.”
“Bullshit. Look, it suits us for you to blow away all his poison gas plants, and his plague laboratories, and his atom bomb research. It suits us fine. And w
e even get to stay out of it because now Uncle Sam has Arab allies. So who’s complaining? Not Israel. We have passed you everything we have on his secret weapons programs. Everything we have. No holding back.”
“We need more, Kobi. Okay, maybe we neglected Iraq a bit these past years. We had the cold war to deal with. Now it’s Iraq, and we’re short of product. We need information—not street-level garbage, but real, high-level paydirt. So I’m asking you straight: Do you have any asset working for you, high in the Iraqi regime? We have questions to put, and we need answers. And we’ll pay—we know the rules.”
There was silence for a while. Kobi Dror contemplated the tip of his cigarette. The other two senior officers looked at the table in front of them.
“Chip,” said Dror slowly, “I give you my word. If we were running any agent right up inside the councils of Baghdad, I’d tell you. I’d pass it all over. Trust me, I don’t.”
General Dror would later explain to his Prime Minister, a very angry Itzhak Shamir, that at the time he spoke he was not lying. But he really ought to have mentioned Jericho.
Chapter 6