The letter was crafted with extreme care. Several in-house experts worked on it—the Hebrew version at least. Translation would come later.
David Sharon introduced himself by his first name only, right at the start. He thanked the writer for his trouble and assured him the letter had arrived safely at the destination the writer must have intended.
The reply went on to say that the writer could not fail to understand that his letter had aroused great surprise and suspicion both by its source and its method of transmission.
David knew, he said, that the writer was clearly no fool and therefore would realize that “my people”
would need to establish some bona fides.
David went on to assure the writer that if his bona fides could be established, his requirement for payment would present no problem, but clearly the product would have to justify the financial rewards that “my people” were prepared to pay. Would the writer therefore be kind enough to seek to answer the questions on the attached sheet?
The full letter was longer and more complicated, but that was the gist of it. Sharon ended by giving the writer a mailing address in Rome for his reply.
The address was actually a discontinued safe house that the Rome station had volunteered at Tel Aviv’s urgent request. From then on, the Rome station would keep an eye on the abandoned address. If Iraqi security agents showed up at it, they would be spotted and the affair aborted.
The list of twenty questions was carefully chosen and after much head-scratching. To eight of the questions Mossad already knew the answers but would not be expected to know. So an attempt to fool Tel Aviv would not work.
Eight more questions concerned developments that could be checked for veracity after they had happened. Four questions were things that Tel Aviv really wanted to know, particularly about the intentions of Saddam Hussein himself.
“Let’s see how high this bastard really goes,” said Kobi Dror when he read the list.
Finally a professor in Tel Aviv University’s Arabic Faculty was called in to phrase the letter in that ornate and flowery style of the written language. Sharon signed it in Arabic with the Arab version of his own name, Daoud.
The text also contained one other point. David would like to give his writer a name, and if the writer in Baghdad did not object, would he mind being known simply as Jericho?
The letter was mailed from the only Arab country where Israel had an embassy—Cairo.
After it had gone, David Sharon went on with his work and waited. The more he thought it over, the crazier the affair seemed to be. A post-office box, in a country where the counterintelligence net was run by someone as smart as Hassan Rahmani, was horrendously dangerous. So was writing top secret information “in clear,” and there was no indication that Jericho knew anything about secret writing.
Continuing to use the ordinary mail was also out of the question, if this thing developed. However, he reasoned, it probably would not.
But it did. Four weeks later, Jericho’s reply reached Rome and was brought unopened in a blastproof box to Tel Aviv. Extreme precautions were taken. The envelope might be wired to explosives or smeared with a deadly toxin. When the scientists finally declared it clean, it was opened.
To their stunned amazement, Jericho had come up with paydirt. All the eight questions to which the Mossad already knew the answers were completely accurate. Eight more—troop movements, promotions, dismissals, foreign trips by identifiable luminaries of the regime—would have to wait for check-out as and when they occurred, if they ever did. The last four questions Tel Aviv could neither know nor check, but all were utterly feasible.
David Sharon wrote a fast letter back, in a text that would cause no security problems if intercepted:
“Dear Uncle, many thanks for your letter which has now arrived. It is wonderful to hear that you are well and in good health. Some among the points you raise will take time, but all being well, I will write again soon. Your loving nephew, Daoud.”
The mood was growing in the Hadar Dafna building that this man Jericho might be serious after all. If that was so, urgent action was needed. An exchange of two letters was one thing; running a deep-cover agent inside a brutal dictatorship was another. There was no way that communication could continue on the basis of in-clear script, public mails, and post-office boxes. They were a recipe for an early disaster.
A case officer would be needed to get into Baghdad, live there, and run Jericho using all the usual tradecraft—secret writing, codes, dead-letter boxes, and a no-intercept means of getting the product out of Baghdad and back to Israel.
“I’m not having it,” Gershon repeated. “I will not put a senior Israeli katsa into Baghdad on a black mission for an extended stay. It’s diplomatic cover, or he doesn’t go.”
“All right, Sami,” said Dror. “Diplomatic cover it is. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
The point of diplomatic cover is that a black agent can be arrested, tortured, hanged—whatever. An accredited diplomat, even in Baghdad, can avoid such unpleasantness; if ca
ught spying, he will merely be declared persona non grata and expelled. It is done all the time.
Several major divisions of the Mossad went into overdrive that summer, especially Research. Gershon could already tell them he had no agent on the staff of any embassy accredited to Baghdad, and his nose was already well out ofjoint because of it. So the search began to find a diplomat who would suit.
Every foreign embassy in Baghdad was identified. From the capital cities of every country, a list was acquired of all their staff in Baghdad. No one checked out; no one had ever worked for the Mossad before, who could be reactivated. There was not even one sayan on those lists.
Then a clerk came up with an idea: the United Nations. The world body had one agency based in Baghdad in 1988, the UN Economic Commission for West Asia.
The Mossad has a big penetration of the United Nations in New York, and a staff list was acquired.