The Fist of God

His last act was to thank Stuart Harris profusely, congratulate him on his courage and cool head, exhort him never to mention the entire incident to anyone , and wish him safe journey back home. Then Harris was shown out.

A man with antiblast helmet, flak-jacket, and gloves took the letter away. It was photographed and X-rayed. The Israeli embassy had already lost one man to a letter bomb, and it did not intend to lose another.

Finally the letter was opened. It contained two sheets of onionskin airmail paper covered in script. In Arabic. Rafi did not speak Arabic, let alone read it. Neither did anyone else in the London station, at least not well enough to read spidery Arabic handwriting. Rafi sent a copious and heavily encrypted radio report to Tel Aviv, then wrote an even fuller account in the formal and uniform style called NAKA in the Mossad. The letter and the report went into the diplomatic bag and caught the evening flight by El Al from Heathrow to Ben-Gurion.

A dispatch rider with an armed escort met the courier right off the plane and took the canvas bag destined for the big building on King Saul Boulevard, where, just after the breakfast hour, it found itself in front of the head of the Iraq Desk, a very able young katsa called David Sharon.

He did speak and read Arabic, and what he read in those two onionskin pages of letter left him with the same sensation he had felt the first time he threw himself out of an airplane over the Negev Desert while training with the Paras.

Using his own typewriter, avoiding both secretary and word processor, he typed out a literal translation of the letter in Hebrew. Then he took them both, plus Rafi’s report as to how the Mossad had come by the letter, to his immediate chief, the Director of the Middle East Division.

What the letter said, in effect, was that the writer was a high-ranking functionary in the topmost councils ofthe Iraqi regime and that he was prepared to work for Israel for money—but only for money.

There was a bit more, and a post-office-box address at Baghdad’s principal post office for a reply, but that was the gist of it.

That evening, there was a high-level meeting in Kobi Dror’s private office. Present were he and Sami Gershon, head of the Combatants. Also Eitan Hadar, David Sharon’s immediate superior as Director of the Middle East Division, to whom he had taken the Baghdad letter that morning. Sharon himself was summoned.

From the outset, Gershon was dismissive.

“It’s a phony,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a blatant, clumsy, obvious attempt at entrapment. Kobi, I’m not sending any of my men in there to check it out. It would be sending the man to his death. I wouldn’t even send an oter to Baghdad to try and make contact.”

An oter is an Arab used by the Mossad to establish preliminary contact with a fellow Arab, a low-level go-between and a lot more expendable than a full-fledged Israeli katsa .

Gershon’s view seemed to prevail. The letter was a madness, apparently an attempt to lure a senior katsa to Baghdad for arrest, torture, public trial, and public execution. Finally, Dror turned to David Sharon.

“Well, David, you have a tongue. What do you think?”

Sharon nodded regretfully.

“I think Sami almost certainly has to be right. Sending a good man in there would be crazy.”

Eitan Hadar shot him a warning look. Between divisions, there was the usual rivalry. No need to hand victory to Gershon’s Combatants Division on a plate.

“Ninety-nine percent of the chances say it has to be a trap,” said Sharon.

“Only ninety-nine?” asked Dror teasingly. “And the one percent, my young friend?”

“Oh, just a foolish idea,” Sharon said. “It just occurred to me, the one percent might say that out of the blue, we have a new Penkovsky.”

There was dead silence. The word hung in the air like an open challenge. Gershon expelled his breath in a long hiss. Kobi Dror stared at his Iraq Desk chief. Sharon looked at his fingertips.

In espionage there are only four ways of recruiting an agent for infiltration into the high councils of a target country.

The first is far and away the most difficult: to use one of your own nationals, one trained to an extraordinary degree to pass for a national of the target country right in the heart of that target. It is almost impossible, unless the infiltrator was born and raised in the target country and can be eased back in, with a cover story to explain his absence. Even then, he will have to wait years to rise to useful office with access to secrets—a sleeper for up to ten years.

Yet once, Israel had been the master of this technique. This was because, when Israel was young, Jews poured in who had been raised all over the world. There were Jews who could pass as Moroccans, Algerians, Libyans, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Yemenis. This was apart from all those coming in from Russia, Poland, Western Europe, and North and South America.

The most successful of these had been Elie Cohen, born and raised in Syria. He was slipped back into Damascus as a Syrian who had been away for years and had now returned. With his new Syrian name, Cohen became an intimate of high-ranking politicians, civil servants, and generals who spoke freely to their endlessly generous host at his sumptuous parties. Everything they said, including the entire Syrian battle plan, went back to Tel Aviv just in time for the Six-Day War. Cohen was exposed, tortured, and publicly hanged in Revolution Square in Damascus. Such infiltrations are extremely dangerous and very rare.

But as the years passed, the original immigrant Israelis became old; their sabra children did not study Arabic and could not attempt what Elie Cohen had done. This was why, by 1990, the Mossad had far less brilliant Arabists than one might imagine.

But there was a second reason. Penetration of Arab secrets is easier to accomplish in Europe or the United States. If an Arab state is buying an American fighter, the details can more easily be stolen, and at a lot less risk, in America. If an Arab high-up seems susceptible to an approach, why not make it while he is visiting the fleshpots of Europe? That is why, by 1990, the vast bulk of Mossad operations were conducted in low-risk Europe and America rather than in the high-risk Arab states.

The king of all the infiltrators, however, was Marcus Wolf, who for years had run the East German intelligence net. He had one great advantage—an East German could pass for a West German.

During his time “Mischa” Wolf infiltrated scores and scores of his agents into West Germany. One of them became the personal private secretary of Chancellor Willy Brandt himself. Wolf’s speciality was the prim, dowdy, little spinster secretary who rose to become indispensable to her West German minister-employer—and who could copy every document that crossed her desk for transmission back to East Berlin.

The second method of infiltration is to use a national of the aggressor agency, posing as someone coming from a third nation. The target country knows that the infiltrator is a foreigner but is persuaded he is a friendly, sympathetic foreigner.