“Because?”
“Because we aren’t looking for some company commander to storm the enemy, or some Don Juan who’ll get Assad’s wife into bed. We are looking for a combination of qualifications that is unique and a combination of sensitivities that is very rare, and only time will tell us if you have those or not.”
“And it all begins with a resemblance to this Canadian junkie.”
“Correct. Usually, we train a guy and then look for a passport for him. Very difficult today. In this case, we got the passport and looked for the guy. You can’t imagine what a great find it is, a genuine passport and someone who fits the picture. Now we have to train you.”
“And what about the family of the man in the picture?”
“The stamps in the passport show that he left Canada three years ago, and travelled all over the world. It’s not certain that he was in touch with his family. He went to Sinai from Egypt, and there’s no Israeli stamp in the passport, which makes it worth so much more.”
“And his body? Wasn’t it returned to Canada? Won’t he be registered as dead?”
“Let’s assume that the Bedouin buried him deep in the sand. They don’t want to tangle with the Egyptian police and to have to explain things. The passport got separated from its owner, who from our point of view and for all practical purposes, has disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“But, you can’t leave the family not knowing anything. He must have parents, perhaps a wife, siblings, people who care about him?”
“You’re a nice guy, and that’s something we’ll have to iron out,” said Udi, and this time there wasn’t even a hint of a smile on his lips. “We didn’t kill him, we didn’t bury his body, we have no responsibility for him.”
“Yes, but we know he is dead – and it’s unthinkable not to notify his family!”
“As an intelligence operative, you’ll have to be careful of the words ‘we know’. Also of the word ‘unthinkable’ or ‘impossible’. You are about to enter a world where ‘we know’ means we’ve seen it with our own eyes – and you haven’t seen the body and neither have I. And ‘unthinkable’ is a dirty word in our profession. Of course it is thinkable. To notify them would mean getting entangled in some way with responsibility for his death, and it would also mean the passport would be dead and buried. At the moment a living passport is preferable to a dead body.”
“But we aren’t speaking about him, it’s about his parents,” I objected.
“I don’t want to get into an argument over what’s better – parents who don’t know what happened to their son, or parents who are told their son is dead. In any case, the decisions about this have already been taken. Get it out of your system.”
I took a deep breath. I knew this was a critical moment for me. This little incident, this minor moral dilemma, probably embodied the character of the world at whose portal I was standing. The dilemmas down the road were liable to be far more weighty. This was a world in which, according to the books and films and rumours, one lied, deceived, framed, blackmailed, blew up cars and buildings, killed people in cold blood. I had to take a decision in principle. It was clear to me that there was no point in being stubborn about this specific situation. I breathed out. My decision was obvious. I was here to fight people who blow up buses. This could not be done pleasantly and politely.
“OK. It’s out of my system. At least for the moment,” I met myself halfway.
Udi stood up and gave me his hand. “We’ll discuss that moment down the road. But I’d rather have to work with good guys and make them bad than the other way round.” He looked me straight in the eye and I looked back at him. His grip was long and robust. “We start right now,” he said. “This is a one-man course, suited to your requirements. How much time do you need to get organized before we start?”
“I have to keep on teaching until the end of the school year. The course will have to fit in with that.”
“OK. Make whatever other arrangements you may have by Sunday, and report here. And for starters, I want you to leave this building without the guard or the receptionist seeing you.”
I went to the window and studied the branches of a nearby tree.
“That’s a sure-fire way to get kicked out of the course even before it begins,” I heard him say behind my back, and I was sorry because I had thought of that just before he spoke. I wouldn’t want to take the risk of passersby seeing me and calling the cops and alarming all the security officers of all the surrounding government buildings.
“Does anyone care about this?” I asked, pointing at my empty coffee cup.
“Don’t think so,” said Udi with some curiosity in his voice.
“And that one?” I asked, pointing at his.
“I’d sacrifice it for my country’s sake,” he smiled.
“Are you in on this game?” I asked
“I am a ghost,” he replied.
I took a look at the hallway and saw a little niche, covered by a curtain, off the staircase landing.
I checked it out, and it was empty. I smashed Udi’s cup on the floor outside his room and quickly hid in the niche. Seconds later, the alarmed receptionist came running up the stairs, past the niche. I ran down to the entrance, smashed the second cup on the floor, and hid behind the door. The guard dashed in to see what was happening, noticed that the receptionist wasn’t at her desk, and went to the staircase to look for her. This gave me time to slip outside.
I looked up and saw Udi at the window. He was shaking his head. I understood that he wasn’t pleased with the method I’d chosen. It probably wasn’t the office budget that worried him, but that he thought there were more elegant ways of leaving. I still had a lot to learn; actually, everything.
My course took place on the three days of the week that I wasn’t teaching. One morning I spent at the firing range; on the second, in a gym doing hand-to-hand combat, and the third day I spent in a language laboratory. Right at the start of the language course, it became clear that my English had picked up a Canadian accent during the two years that I’d been at school in Ottawa, where my father was studying forestry; this made my instructor in the lab very happy, but she still had a lot to teach me.
At most of the course, I was no more than mediocre. I didn’t become the fastest gun in the Middle East, and despite the long time I took to draw and aim, my scores were only middling. “Hand and eye, hand and eye,” the instructor yelled. “Aiming and firing is like pointing at someone. It’s a movement we make from the age of one!” But my hand worked better on a drawing pad than on the firing range.
And as someone who was not in any way particularly athletic, I never became a Bruce Lee. My kicks and punches were all right, but the combinations weren’t fast enough and, in the instructors’ opinion, they also didn’t have enough energy behind them. “Isn’t there someone you hate, so you can imagine you are punching or kicking him?” my karate instructor asked, and I had to tell him there wasn’t. I didn’t even hate the man who sent Dolly’s killer to blow himself up in the bus. I wanted to kill him, because that’s what should be done, in this conflict we were embroiled in. But I felt no hatred. The only time I had was as a child, when I hated Germans.
Luckily I was strong enough to take the physical punishment meted out in the hand-to-hand combat course without breaking. I was also determined enough not to give in to the instructors, who tried every possible dirty trick on me, including punches on the nose, and knees in the testicles. The problem was that I didn’t know how to drop this very conspicuous determination in street situations, and substitute some elegant flexibility.
In the afternoons, I would walk around the streets of Tel Aviv and execute various tasks that Udi gave me. Some of them were peculiar, but I felt that I was getting better at them. Udi was trying to root out the sapper officer in me who kept popping up, and to implant some subtlety and finesse instead.
“You don’t force anyone to do something, and you don’t threaten,” he told me often, when I
tried to get what I wanted in too assertive a manner. That’s what happened when he ordered me to examine the locking mechanism of the door to a certain balcony, and ruled out my suggestion that I climb onto it from the outside. He also vetoed my idea that I do it by posing as a municipal employee who had to measure the apartment for taxation purposes. Eventually, I did as he ordered by pretending to be a representative of the Beautiful Israel Association, which wanted to renovate balconies in the building, and this led to rapid and willing co-operation on the part of the residents. Another time, my assignment was to photograph from a certain high balcony two people meeting in the street below, and Udi nixed my idea of posing as a private eye. Instead, I used the cover of a student taking part in a photography competition titled “Tel Aviv from on high” and the amiable occupants even advised me what to shoot from their balcony, and then left me alone there.
I learned how to tail people, and grew to love this dance in the streets of Tel Aviv. It took some time to shed my combat-ready manner, and to grasp that my adversary was not only the person I was following but also everyone else in the street. I learned to adopt a normal, almost casual gait, aware of everything around me and keeping the back of my target or “object” (as subjects of surveillance, intel gathering or even elimination are called in Mossad parlance) in view out of the corner of my eye and at a suitable distance.
I was good at the drill for discovering when I was being tailed. To do this, I set up a little trap, entering a shop just after a corner and looking through the display window as the person following me came around the corner, showed surprise that I’d disappeared, and called up his surveillance team on his radio, unaware that I was a few metres away. Sometimes, I’d draw the tail after me into a main street, say Ben-Yehuda, and then duck down the passage by the cinema there into Ruppin Street. I knew that the team would have to put someone in right behind me, and if someone emerged from the passage half a minute after me and looked right and left to see which way I’d turned on Ruppin, I’d know I had a tail. Then the cat and mouse game of getting rid of it would begin.
“Stop being Rambo, because they can call in a whole army,” Udi rebuked me after I’d learned for myself, during the early exercises, how quickly a lone follower walking twenty or thirty metres behind me could become a whole team closing in on me from all directions. “And don’t behave like a thief, because they are the cops,” he added, when I tried evasion tricks like shinnying up a drainpipe on to a roof, and very soon saw the place surrounded by patrol cars. “You are always, but always, the innocent law-abiding citizen, going about your legitimate business, and everyone who sees you knows that’s what you are,” said Udi, trying to teach me the ABC of spy-craft, which was hard for me to digest.
“When you notice that they are following you, it’s a sign that they aren’t sure you’re a spy, otherwise they would arrest you, or they want to see who you’re going to meet, and to uncover the network one by one. So you go into innocent-activity mode. Make things easy for them. Go into a big shop, and pamper yourself with a nice shirt. Or go to a good restaurant, and chew everything really slowly. They’ll put someone in to see if you’re meeting anyone, and that guy will, incidentally, get a meal out of it, and thank you for that.”
There were many layers of the soldier in me that I had to peel away, a lot of roughness that I had to smooth out, before I could acquire the elegance of the secret agent. “You can’t sit at a bus stop and keep a lookout in the opposite direction from the one the bus would be coming,” Udi scolded me. And he also rebuked me when I took up a position for a night look-out, in the dark garden of the house across from the one I was watching. “You can’t put yourself at the mercy of some neighbour who in the best-case scenario would think you were there to take a leak and lose his temper, and in the worst case take you for a thief and call the police.”
In the evening, I read up on the history and geography of Canada, and practised my English until after midnight, as ordered. After that I read material on the countries of the Middle East. Now and again, I had sessions with experts on various subjects. I learned to take photographs secretly. I learned to dismantle and assemble locks and safes. I learned clandestine communications. I performed adequately at these crafts, and I didn’t need lessons on making and defusing explosive devices.
The months rolled by. During school vacations, when I had no teaching duties, I underwent intensive courses involving intelligence collection and simple operations. My less polished aspects came to light again towards the end, during the part of the course that dealt with interpersonal relations.
For some reason, I had a positive opinion of the way I got on with others. I thought I was interesting to talk to, even pleasant. I used to have lively conversations with my friends, teachers and students, and I knew quite a lot about a lot of subjects. On painting and art in general, obviously, but also on literature, science and politics. I also was familiar with places all over the world that could be the basis for conversation. After everything that happened in Japan, and after taking a brief break, I made a thoroughgoing tour of South and Central America, and in a separate journey, after my first year at Bezalel, I “did” Thailand, Myanmar, India and China. After graduating, I toured Europe several times, visiting most of the great museums in the capital cities, and as an architecture buff, most of the important palaces and cathedrals. I could talk freely and interestingly about all of the above.
But now, it became clear to me that I was actually shy. If someone approached me, or if the situation was suitable, I was able to hold a conversation amiably enough, but if I had to initiate the approach, it was difficult. And when, moreover, I had to lie to that someone – and I would always have to lie, whether about my identity or about the reason for my approach – my stomach turned over. It was easier for me to follow him, to watch him, to break into his home, than to start talking to him.
When I got dried up, time and again, wondering how to get a conversation going, or hesitantly began and got the cold shoulder, it seemed to me that Udi was about to give up on me. In a discussion halfway through the course, Udi told me that he had his doubts about me. I was still too tough, more the sapper than the spy. Too much of the company commander, too little of the secret agent. I reminded him that he’d told me he’d rather spoil a good guy, and that Moshe Dayan had said of Ariel Sharon that he preferred to have to restrain a wild horse than to whip a lazy mule. But Udi said the problem was that I hadn’t internalized yet that the spy was the weak man in the field, and as such had to adopt different habits and a different personality.
“There’ll be enough moments, at the critical stage of each operation, when you’ll have to be a superhero. Israman,” he smiled. “But until that moment, you must be the most ordinary person on the scene, to merge with the shadows on the wall, and you don’t get that by sticking your chest and chin out. Up until the time when there’s no more cover and you have to be a hero, you must play everyone you meet to your own advantage – the hotel receptionist, the housemaid, the taxi driver, your target’s assistant, your target himself – and this can’t be done if you’re too shy, or if you’re too fussy, but only if you’re a schemer.”
But apparently everything I had learned, plus my resemblance to the Canadian guy buried in the sands of Sinai, were enough of a reason for Udi to keep on trying, and for my part, I tried even harder.
As I’d discovered in the long runs during my basic training in the military, and the stretcher-carrying marches, which I found very difficult, I was able to stretch my limits further and further. If the first lie was hard, by the tenth lie my satisfaction at having accomplished my task was greater than the discomfort, and by the twentieth I even felt quite triumphant. Once I had managed to acquire the required amiability and smiles, I learned how to drag anyone into a friendly chat, adapting myself chameleon-like to the person in question, and the responses were surprisingly quick and positive. With an elderly person, I would stoop and talk softly, with a woman I was the perfect gen
tleman, with shorter people I could decrease my stature by drooping my shoulders and drawing in my chest, so as not to project a threatening image, and with tough businessmen I was an ambitious, self-confident alpha male. I had become an actor.
The country was aflame throughout this period, and I was ready to do anything to finish my training and begin actively fighting terror. One day, during the early stages of my training, I was in the middle of an evasion exercise at Tel Aviv’s new bus station, a place with innumerable exits and entrances that could be used to shake off a tail, when there was a terrorist bombing at the old bus station, not far away, that left twenty-three people dead. I called Udi and asked for permission to break off the exercise and help evacuate the wounded. That would be against all the rules, he replied angrily, and I had to carry on with my getaway game. In the middle of the course, while I was on another exercise, I heard about a bomb on a bus in Haifa with seventeen fatal casualties, and I decided to break the rules. After executing the procedure for discovering a tail, I called my parents from a payphone; they or either of my sisters or their kids could have been on that bus. I reported my deviation and I was rebuked, but Udi understood and allowed me to go on.
In the final months, when I was not teaching any more and free to get on with my training, I carried out complex operations all over Israel, many of them in Arab communities, first amongst Israeli Arabs in the Galilee and later amongst Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank. As a soldier and officer, I had done my stints of service in the Palestinian territories, and now I could hardly overcome an instinctive sense that I should be armed, and instead rely on a cover story. I tailed, watched, photographed, and prepared intelligence files on people and buildings, and Udi seemed particularly pleased with the drawings I made. In a matter of seconds, I would sketch the village, the alley or the home of my target, and sometimes the man himself. This was especially useful when I had no photographic equipment, and sometimes I could capture a perspective that a camera could not.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 7
