Jericho Mosaic jq-4

by Edward Whittemore

  I don't doubt Bell knows Assaf is my son, said Anna. One of them down there must have asked Assaf about his background, or Yousef could have talked about me or whatever, and Bell would have realized who Assaf is, I'm sure. Not that he'd say anything about it. But it's strange looking back, isn't it? It seems we all have these rare and beautiful moments hidden away within us, turnings we could have taken in life but somehow . .

  . didn't. Once or twice during those few weeks with Bell, you see, we both considered . . . well what? A life together? We didn't come out and say it in so many words, but it was there in front of us, seriously so. And if we had decided to try that, given his nature and mine, it probably would have gone on for a lifetime. As it happened the time wasn't right then, or so we thought. He needed to be sure of himself and to know he could manage on his own with his face, although I never had any doubts about that. And I thought I still needed to be able to wander, to be free to move around and find myself, although it couldn't have been so very important to me because soon after that I ended my wandering, with Yossi.

  What's strange about it to me now, said Anna, is that I know it could have worked with Bell. Oh yes, it could have worked and all the years would have been very different. Not better, but different. And how true it is that the turnings on the path are often so subtle, so unsuspected at the time, that we pass them by with a wave and a smile and a near arrogant ease. Yet when we look back in life the reasons for our choices seem unbearably flimsy and silly, which is confusing and even frightening. A totally different life which could have worked just as well as the one we have? That's something none of us likes to think about. Instead, we try mightily to forget our other worlds that might have been, and with good reason. But all the same those rare and beautiful moments from the past live on within us, no farther away than the smell of an olive wood fire or the sound of rain beating softly on a garden, time's unquiet ghosts, haunting our memories with secret whispers of what if? . . .

  ***

  Tajar lay in his hammock that summer night, gazing up at the stars above his cottage. Once long ago Anna had told him there were three men who counted in her life, himself and Yossi and one other. Now he knew who that third man was and it didn't surprise him. Bell's was a powerful life, lived deeply. That Anna had felt it so long ago only showed how deeply her own feelings ran.

  Her memories of Bell and the fondness of her recollections set Tajar to thinking in many ways. There was no question he had always loved Anna. He knew that. And everything she now said about Bell also applied to him and was meant for him. He and Anna had shared those rare and beautiful moments of which she spoke.

  They both were aware of that, and what if? . . .

  Years ago when they met, Anna was wandering and Tajar was energetic and ambitious in his work. They knew each other and parted, with a wave and a smile. Then later they met again after she had married Yossi, and all that was to be came about.

  Of course they were still together in other ways and shared many of the things a man and a woman could have. Not the same roof, it was true, and not sexual love . . . an automobile accident had seen to that. But they were much closer than many people who were married. And yet, what if he'd had the sense and the wisdom to try to make it permanent with Anna the first time they'd met? Wouldn't their life together be even richer now?

  As she said, it was confusing to think about such things and more than a little frightening. With Bell, if she'd made that decision, her life would have turned out very differently. But not so with him. With him it probably would have become much as it was now, the two of them living in Jerusalem with Tajar having his work and Anna her painting, perhaps a hammock strung on one of the balconies of the old stone house on Ethiopia Street, or in the courtyard below with the flowers. . . .

  Tajar's eyes flew open. He was looking up at a vast sky of stars. He had been drifting off to sleep in his hammock when suddenly he had thought of Assaf. All of this had started with Assaf's passion for the past and its secrets, with Assaf's interest in his uncle in Cairo during the world war and his trips to Jericho after another war a quarter of a century later, where he had met Bell who was linked to everyone, past and present.

  But would there even have been an Assaf if Anna, if Tajar, if Bell, if Yossi? . . .

  Tajar laughed, gazing up at the Jerusalem night. How wonderful were the young with their limitless belief in what might be. So grandly did they believe they could even go beyond it and make-believe, truly conjuring up the might-have-been in all its splendid glory.

  What a magnificent gift, thought Tajar. What joyous folly. Just by being, Assaf has told me extraordinary things about myself, and about Anna and me and the past, and especially and above all about right now.

  And Bell?

  Yes, more than ever Tajar wanted to see Bell. He still thought some time should pass before he made his journey to Jericho, but inevitably he would do it. They were connected in too many ways for it not to come to pass.

  EIGHT

  After Little Aharon's reign of more than a dozen years as director of the Mossad, it had been decided that five years was an appropriate term for the chief of intelligence. As General Dror's term came to an end, many in the Mossad hoped one of their own senior executives would be chosen to succeed him.

  Tajar never considered this a possibility, nor did he think it was in the Mossad's best interests. The army's influence had greatly increased since the Six-Day War, and Tajar felt a civilian director would be at a disadvantage dealing with the prestigious generals and former generals who were now so powerful in government. Dror stayed on longer than expected as the generals and former generals maneuvered against each other, promoting their various candidates as his replacement. In the end a general was chosen, but the choice surprised them all. General Ben-Zvi, on the verge of retirement, was as astonished as anyone by his appointment. He had no experience in intelligence and was not the sort of fighting general for which the army was famous. By any standard, in fact, Ben-Zvi was the least glamorous of Israeli generals. Most of his career had been spent in staff positions, particularly in training, then during the Six-Day War he was on assignment in Europe as a military attaché. As the other generals joked, for a professional officer not to have fought in the Six-Day War was akin to a man not consummating his marriage.

  The prime minister had outmaneuvered his powerful generals, yet the army couldn't complain because Ben-Zvi was one of their own. There was disappointment within the Mossad but none of the enormous internal turmoil that had accompanied Dror's appointment the last time around. Tajar, in any case, saw wisdom in the selection. Quoting Ben-Gurion, he said it was a tragedy that Israel's generals had begun to think of themselves as generals. Ben-Zvi's lack of swagger would serve the Mossad well, he felt. He even admired the fact that Ben-Zvi wasn't a military hero.

  On the other hand, Ben-Zvi was a conscientious officer who believed in professionalism. He worked night and day at the Mossad to master his job and combat the new kind of secret warfare faced by Israel: the international terrorism of the PLO, backed by the KGB. He wanted to draw the best he could from his staff and delegate authority when possible, but only after he knew what was involved. Having been a trainer, he valued instruction and was quick to recognize Tajar's immense experience and unique skills.

  By then a mystique had grown up around Tajar in the Mossad. He was a legend even to those who had only the vaguest notions of the Runner operation. To the few senior executives who did know something about the operation, the legend was firmly based in fact. And to the director of the Mossad, the only man beside Tajar who knew the true identity of the Runner, the fact that the Runner was an Israeli seemed a near superhuman accomplishment.

  But for most of Tajar's admirers the mystique was more general than that. Tajar, after all, was a man from Little Aharon's generation whose preeminence went back even further than Little Aharon's. As time went on Tajar's importance during the pre-independence years continued to be revealed in memoirs and
histories. In 1945, for example, when Ben-Gurion went to New York to ask a handful of influential American Jews to begin raising money for the coming struggle in Palestine, he took only two men with him to help him explain his case at that historic August meeting in Manhattan: his treasurer at the Jewish Agency and Tajar, his expert on Arab countries. And when Ben-Gurion needed a man to negotiate in trust and secrecy with Emir Abdullah of Transjordan in 1948, it was Tajar who drove alone at night through Jericho to the villa of the emir, King Hussein's grandfather.

  Further, many of the senior men in the Mossad were former Tajar commandos of another era, selected and trained by Tajar decades ago when he was all the country-to-be had in the way of a foreign intelligence service. Yet Tajar still wasn't so very old, only in his early fifties, which showed what awesome responsibilities men had taken upon themselves, at an early age, in order to create the state.

  Thus it was only natural that General Ben-Zvi, even more than Dror before him, needed what Tajar had to offer.

  So Tajar in his quiet way became Ben-Zvi's unofficial instructor and adviser, the trainer's trainer, working behind the scenes to make the studious general a master in Israel's lonely new secret war. Ben-Zvi was in the habit of working late at night in his office, reading reports, and that was when Tajar dropped in to talk with him. Ben-Zvi knew Tajar made his visits at night in order to be inconspicuous, so that his appearances would attract as little notice as possible within the Mossad. Tajar was always the modest tutor, and he didn't want to embarrass Ben-Zvi by drawing attention to himself.

  Besides, said Tajar, smiling, you have decisions to make in daylight. Only at night is there a moment to reflect and ponder.

  Sometimes they talked for an hour or more, sometimes less. If some specific problem was troubling Ben-Zvi, Tajar might recall a case from the past that seemed similar. Or he might suggest someone Ben-Zvi could discuss the matter with, or simply ruminate on the alternatives as he saw them. Tajar was careful to stay away from solutions and always stopped short of suggesting courses of action, for as he said, it was Ben-Zvi who had to be the director. At the same time he often consoled Ben-Zvi, since the general was apt to take his failures deeply to heart.

  Ours is a profession of failure, Tajar told him. Unlike paratroopers, we don't drop out of the sky and storm positions and then raise our flag in triumph. It's not land we deal with, it's just people. So if you think of it as a sad profession, you won't be so disappointed. Orwell said that any life when seen from the inside is simply a series of defeats. Well that's the only way we do see life: from the inside. Appearances are for others, our work is to get at the truth. But recall that in order to get at the truth, we have to deal far more deeply in subterfuge than society's criminals. That's the sadness and it takes a strong man to rise above it and not be dead inside. Others peddle cynicism and hatred but we can't afford to. You can't afford to. So when you come across a man without feelings, pack him off to retirement on a kibbutz where he can raise vegetables, because that's what he understands. . . .

  Along with death and hatred, there were many failures for the Mossad during those years when the PLO's terrorist campaign was at its height. Or at least the terrorists were able to continue with their terror, especially in Europe. The only real way to combat it was by building up files on the terrorist cells with the aim of penetrating them, and that kind of work took immense time and effort.

  For years there was no cooperation from the West European countries in combating the terror. As long as the campaign appeared to be merely the PLO against Israel, Arabs killing Jews, the Europeans refused to help. Oil above all, but also Third World opinion and the propaganda and manipulations of the KGB — there were many reasons why the Europeans wanted to stay out of the conflict, as Dror had predicted.

  Eventually the European attitude changed, as the Mossad was able to document the KGB's role in the terror and the PLO's connection to European terrorist cells. This was especially true after an Israeli commando raid on PLO offices in Beirut in the spring of 1973, when files were captured linking the KGB through the PLO to an international terrorist network, with detailed descriptions of money and arms, contact men and future plans. Ironically, these files captured by the Israelis helped a number of moderate Arab governments and leaders to survive, when information on terrorist networks in their countries was passed along to them by the CIA, the information having been given to the CIA by the Mossad for that purpose.

  ***

  The Runner operation, overall, turned out to be less vital against the terrorists than Tajar had expected. In the beginning the Runner provided crucial information on the KGB's involvement with the PLO, but before long the KGB moved its control of the terrorist campaign from Damascus to the island of Cyprus. The Russians found there were too many security leaks within the PLO in Damascus, where the Syrians had long been accustomed to running PLO factions for their own ends. But Cyprus had a weak government and its Greek and Turkish populations were always close to civil war, backed by agents from mainland Greece and Turkey, so for the KGB it was a convenient transit point from which to direct terrorist traffic between Europe and the main PLO training camps in Lebanon.

  An ideal gathering ground for jackals, as Tajar told Ben-Zvi. No bomb thrower could possibly look out of place in Cyprus, no matter what his cause or nationality.

  The Runner himself seemed to slip into a kind of malaise during those years. Or so Tajar secretly felt, without confiding his concern to anyone.

  The Runner was still a steady source of high-level information on the Syrian government and Syrian intentions, and Ben-Zvi had nothing but admiration for the Runner and for Tajar's handling of the case. To him the operation was the very essence of successful espionage, a model of careful planning over a long period of time, its accomplishments the standard by which any penetration was to be measured.

  But the working objectives of the Mossad had gradually changed since the Six-Day War. On the tactical level there was the constant preoccupation with the details of the terrorist cells, their potential targets and routes of supply and command, a quest which led from Beirut and the PLO camps in Lebanon to Cyprus, and from there to Europe. And on the strategic level the emphasis had shifted to nuclear power and the build-up of the Arab air forces by the Soviet Union, highly technical intelligence that was beyond the scope of the Runner operation. In those subjects as well, the quest for information was often outside the Middle East, in both East and West Europe and in the CIA satellites circling the earth.

  Or perhaps Tajar only imagined that the Runner was undergoing a period of malaise when he met with Yossi at safehouses in Beirut. It might have been that the frustrations everyone felt at home in dealing with the terrorists, or even his own sense of lessened responsibility, were causing him to see an uneasiness in Yossi which in fact wasn't there. Expectations had been great after the total victory of the Six-Day War, and now nothing seemed to be coming from them. Or rather, the security and hope for a better future weren't coming about. Yossi had never been as dazzled as most Israelis by the outcome of the war, although perhaps more so than Tajar because of his own enormous contribution to it. But now, little by little, it seemed that Yossi was becoming as deeply troubled as Tajar over the future.

  Yossi's mood disturbed Tajar but he was careful not to show it at their infrequent meetings in Beirut. His task was to encourage Yossi and that was what he did, subtly, in many little ways. From long experience Tajar knew even better than Yossi that a feeling of futility was the most dangerous enemy of all to the operation. In his own mind at least Yossi could never simply stand still, never just remain in place, because that wasn't part of the life the two of them had created for the Runner. It was the nature of the operation that the Runner had to keep on running.

  So the bombings and murders and hijackings went on and on with a few terrorists sometimes able to seize the attention of much of the world, as they did when they killed Israel's Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972, with only a minor and bumbl
ing show of resistance on the part of the Germans. That terrorist group was known as Black September, named after the month when Jordan's Arab Legion had expelled the PLO from Jordan in a particularly bloody campaign of Arab against Arab.

  But to Tajar the most gruesome episode of all was the massacre at Lod airport in May of that year, when three young Japanese men flew into Israel on an Air France plane from Rome, opened their suitcases and threw grenades and fired automatic weapons at random around the arrival hall of the airport, killing and wounding over a hundred passengers.

  The Japanese belonged to a tiny terrorist group grandly called the Red Army, of no consequence at all in Japan, which had come halfway around the world to carry out a suicide mission for Black September. The majority of those killed at the airport were Puerto Rican pilgrims, Roman Catholics on a visit to the Christian sites in the Holy Land. The one Japanese who survived, in explaining himself, said he had wanted to become a star in the heavens, visible in the night sky throughout eternity.

  Japanese idealists massacring Puerto Rican pilgrims in Israel? In the name of revenge by Palestinian Arabs against Jordanian Arabs? In the hope of becoming a star in the heavens?

  Another demented, grotesque act using the cause of human dignity as a mask for madness. Even given man's sad weakness for self-delusion and the clever manipulations of the KGB, the evidence of darkness and insanity in human affairs sometimes seemed overpowering to Tajar.

  NINE

  Bell's morning walks began at first light. He could no longer go all the way down to the river now that it was the border between Jordan and Israel, but he still set out east each morning to cross the parched empty plains of Jericho, the Dead Sea shimmering off to his right and the dark mass of the hills of Moab looming high in front of him on the far side of the valley. Just before the wire fence of the military zone, he turned north on the second leg of his circle and walked up the valley parallel with the river. The first rays of the new sun were breaking over the Moabite hills when he turned again, west this time. The sun bathed his back with a gentle warmth as he made his way home toward Jericho's lush greenery, the jagged heights of the Judean desert softly pink and glowing beyond the oasis. Bell walked at a brisk pace, savoring the ancient beauty and moods of that wild, haunting landscape.