Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  I penetrated installations, laid dummy explosive devices, sniped at targets from a distance with blank ammunition, fired point blank with a cap gun at Mossad personnel I had trailed, and executed planned getaways. Luckily, none of the targets died of a heart attack or drew a real gun and shot me as I made off. To my surprise, neither did passersby. They stood by, shocked, or called the police. Now I understood what Udi meant when he spoke of the moment when there was no more cover and you had to be a hero – and all the moments before and after that when you had to merge with the shadows.

  I established contact with various bodies, some of them hostile to Israel, like straw companies that channelled funds to Hamas, using the Canadian identity that I had not yet polished, and forged firm ties with them. The butterflies in my stomach had gradually settled down, and in any case didn’t stop me from putting on the show as required. Udi decided that I was ripe for field assignments.

  In a summing-up talk, after almost a year of training, Udi told me he had never had to peel so many layers from a trainee, and that there had been times when he’d almost given up. It was my good luck, he said, that he liked the very integrity which had made it so difficult for me to become the chameleon that a secret agent has to be, and he had faith in me. “I never thought it would be so hard to take an honest guy and teach him how to lie,” he said.

  I had grasped that the usual trainees were types that screening had shown to already possess the suitable traits, whereas in my case my main qualification was that I resembled the dead Canadian. Without that, I might not have made it to trainee status. But Udi did let me know that some of my own abilities and not only my face, also helped him come to a favourable decision about me. “Not everyone manages to overcome his fears and to walk around Arab villages in the West Bank,” he continued, and I realized that my army service had also worked in my favour. “Not everyone is capable of keeping a lookout and sniping, and for sure not everyone is capable of storming a target and firing at him point blank.” So apparently Udi too, and not only Moshe Dayan, preferred to tame a wild horse.

  In this talk, for the first time, Udi was telling me I had successfully completed my training, and I was to become a fully-fledged Mossad operative. I was also informed for the first time what I had been recruited and trained for. “It’s your good fortune that Iran’s support for terrorism is increasing, as is the progress in their nuclear weapons project, and that I was ordered to recruit and train a squad to be assigned to this subject,” Udi told me, giving me to understand that the urgent needs of the state had tipped the scales in my favour.

  I did not know then who the other members of the crew were, and what stage they had reached in their training. What I did know was that Udi would also be our field commander, and I was happy about that. I sensed that I could trust him. He was a taciturn type, not overly congenial, but obviously a consummate professional, and that’s what was important here. If Udi was to head up the team, clearly he was more than a mere recruiter and instructor, but an experienced operative, someone who had already done all of the things that I had been prepared for, I thought to myself. He was ten years older than me, I guessed, and at least twenty pounds heavier. His clothes were a little rumpled and sometimes he turned up for our meetings unshaven and with bloodshot eyes.

  He didn’t seem physically fit enough to be operational, but when he was teaching me I saw how capable he was. Sometimes we did target practice together, and he always drew seconds faster than I did and emptied his magazine before I’d fired a single shot. When we walked up to our targets, I peeked at his and saw that his hits were tightly clustered on the heart. Now and again, he’d watch me doing hand-to-hand combat with the instructor and then step in and skillfully smooth out a movement of mine until I got it right – a punch, a kick or a shoulder throw. “Why go for the chin if you can sock him in the nose, or poke your fingers in his eyes, and turn him into a punching bag?” he asked once, proving that he was not exactly a stickler for fighting fair. He was always a few score yards behind me the first few times I went into Arab villages and he seemed quite tranquil and merged with his surroundings in his sloppy clothing and ponderous gait.

  I noticed the great respect with which Udi was treated by the various specialists we met, but it was never slaps on the shoulder or mutual friendly insults, the way the instructors related to each other, not even simple manifestations of camaraderie. Udi was aloof, and I didn’t forge a personal relationship with him during that entire year. We never just chatted, and he never said a word that didn’t arise from my training programme. I didn’t even know what his rank was in the Mossad’s hierarchy. All I knew about him was his name as it appeared on the business card he’d given me, and which was soon to turn out to be false: he remained a mystery to me.

  Straight after the summing-up talk, there was a brief initiation ceremony, in which apart from myself, the participants were Udi, some of the specialist instructors who’d taught me over the year, and Orit, the cute receptionist at the small house in the Kiryah, who’d forgiven me for the shattered cups. There were also two men from Mossad HQ, one of them a small, stern-looking man who didn’t say a word and was introduced as the intelligence officer who would be working with Udi’s team. The other, tall and smiling, would serve as the case officer working with operatives on their cover stories and liaising between the team and HQ when we were in the field. Orit poured white wine into plastic glasses and there were plates of pastries and pears on the table. Udi said some nice things about me, the case officer welcomed me on my joining the ranks of the organization – pending the completion of some necessary forms – and wished me well on the “long and winding road full of ups and downs” ahead of me. He informed me formally that my operational codename would be Boaz. The name Mickey Simhoni, my true identity, would never be mentioned within the walls of the Mossad, neither orally nor in writing. Everyone would know me as Boaz from now on. That’s when I realized that the name Udi Barkai was also a pseudonym.

  Udi told me to come to the small house at ten a.m. the next day, to start work.

  I was happy and proud, and on my way home it felt very strange that I had no one to tell about it. I was of course barred from sharing my happiness at launching my new career with my parents. But in any case, I would never have told them. They had been shaken by what had happened at the opening of my exhibition. The time until my sisters showed up after the blast had aroused old anxieties, and since then they had not returned to their usual selves. Knowing what I was up to would only have added to their fears.

  Arriving home that evening, Dolly’s absence hit me really hard. Ours may not have been a great love, but now with joy and pride filling my heart, and with the empty rooms of the apartment, I felt a profound loneliness. Some of Dolly’s belongings, which her family hadn’t taken, were still there, and for the first time since she died, I touched and stroked them. I even laid out one of her evening dresses on our double bed, but then I quickly pulled myself together and put it back in the wardrobe.

  During the past year, I had dated a few women. Generally these were casual encounters, and after an even more casual screw, there may have been another two or three meetings, and then it was over. Apparently I never made enough of an impression on these women, who were as lonely as I was, to make them want to keep the relationship alive. For my part, I wasn’t very keen on any of them. My mind had been focused on the course which didn’t leave me time to grieve for Dolly or to wallow in loneliness.

  The sudden loneliness that engulfed me now must have been connected to the need I felt to celebrate and not having anyone to do it with. I decided to do so on my own and went to a nearby bar, had a little too much to drink and ended the night in bed with a woman who was several years older than me. She was an immigrant from Russia, and at first light she sent me on my way, saying “See you again, my little shpion.” I racked my brains to try and remember if I’d said anything I shouldn’t have said.

  I decided to report the encounter to Udi
when we met, as agreed, in the little house. He was stern but sympathetic, and quoted the Bible at me: “It is not good that the man should be alone,” adding, “especially if he’s a spy.” But after ascertaining that the Russian woman didn’t know who I was or where I lived, he said that no harm seemed to have been done, but that drinking was out, “at least until you find a partner who can look after you.” But I shouldn’t bring him any new immigrants from Russia or anywhere else, because if she didn’t get the right security clearance, I would have to decide whether to split from her, or from the Office, as insiders called the Mossad.

  Then he went on to describe the next stage in my career.

  This, it turned out, was a serious matter, known in the jargon as “establishing cover”. For me, it would involve travelling to Canada to pick up the trail of the unfortunate druggie, whose name was now given to me for the first time, and to study and take on my new identity. His passport said he was born in Toronto, and that’s where it had been issued, but this was just the beginning. I would have to find out where in Toronto he was born and grew up, where he went to school, who his friends were, what family members of his were still alive and where they lived, and gradually become Ronald Friedlich.

  “What does that mean, ‘become Ronald Friedlich?’” I asked, rolling the name – which sounded both close and distant at the same time – on my tongue. It felt as if I was being asked to merge with an alien being who was about to become part of me, or I part of him.

  “It’s a lot simpler than it sounds,” Udi replied, and then he made me even more worried: “Wherever you go in the world, you’ll introduce yourself as Ronald Friedlich and if you get into trouble and have to verify your identity, you’ll have to be able to reply to any question that he could have answered, including the smallest details of his biography.”

  Really very simple, and very encouraging, I thought to myself. How would I get to know “the smallest details” of his life story, even if I do go hanging around Toronto? Where would I find information about his parents, his friends, the schools he went to: the concrete events of his life? The kind of things I could tell my interrogators, that they could check and verify. …

  The attempt to take the general outline of my assignment as given to me by Udi and break it down had suddenly made it seem very complex indeed.

  “I may look like the guy whose photo’s in the passport,” I said, “but what if the investigators send his family a picture of me?”

  “It will be identified by them as a picture of their son,” Udi answered with a calm that seemed to me like indifference to my fate.

  “And if they know he’s dead?”

  “They don’t. And they won’t come to a Damascus lockup to see if you are him,” he replied sending a red-hot dart into my gut.

  The language lab in which I’d spent dozens of mornings over the year had polished my accent, the many books I’d read about Canada had given me more knowledge than the average Canadian has about his country’s history, geography and politics. I don’t know how many Canadians would have been able to describe and explain the national emblem that I’d seen on the cover of Ronald Friedlich’s passport. Its formal name, the “Arms of Her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada” was as complicated as the thing itself, but I could explain it all, from St Edward’s crown at the top, to Canada’s maple leaves at the bottom.

  Memories of the period I had spent as a child in Ottawa began to surface, and could add some shades and aromas to my cover story, but I still had more than a few questions about my Canadian identity. I decided to put them aside for the time being. I had undergone training, there were many things that I could do and this was no time, before my first mission, to ask too many questions and display a lack of confidence. But nevertheless, I had one more question.

  “I can’t be the first to ask this,” I said. “What about my being a Jew? I mean, circumcised?”

  “In Canada, no one will examine you. And if they strip you naked in some Syrian lockup, you won’t be the first man they’ve seen without a foreskin. They’re all like that over there.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “So you’ll make up some story of a circumcision for medical reasons, or even of having a Jewish background. It’s your job to come up with answers for establishing your cover,” Udi growled with distinct impatience. Clearly, he hadn’t expected this flood of questions from a graduate of his course who was facing a relatively simple assignment. I could imagine the words that were probably going through his head: “If this is what he’s asking now, what’s he going to ask me before his first real mission, in an Arab country.”

  I was full of curiosity and excitement before my journey, which was open-ended but which Udi estimated should take two to three months, to meet up with my double’s life. More than that, it was a journey to meet and learn a life that was going to be my own life on any mission abroad. A feeling began to grow in me that I was also perhaps going on a journey to meet a life that could have been my life, if history had taken a slightly different course.

  3.

  First Stop, Limassol

  ACCORDING TO THE operational orders Udi had drawn up for me, I was to sail from Haifa to Cyprus, to carry out some lookout and intelligence-gathering assignments against Palestinian agents located on the island, to transmit my findings via secret communications to Mossad HQ, and only then to head for Toronto. At first I didn’t know what the purpose of the stopover was, and I assumed it was meant mainly to give me a taste of working abroad before I reached my destination and before I could endanger the precious passport by making some novice’s slip-up. But the briefing I received before setting out convinced me that it was serious: the intelligence officer I had met a few days before at my induction ceremony, who I now learned went by the name of Moshik, sat with me for a few hours. First he taught me about the island and the way things happened down there, and then about my targets, or “objects”. He showed me detailed intelligence files on each of them, with photographs of the men, their families, their homes and neighbourhoods, their vehicles and their regular haunts. The files showed me that these people were kept under constant watch, and I understood that the photographs I was to take and my reports were intended to bring the files up to date.

  This time the briefings were held at our squad’s base, and there I met Jerry and Ronen for the first time. They were operatives Udi had trained and had been engaged in intelligence-gathering assignments all over the world, while waiting for me and other recruits to complete our training and identity-establishment before we could start operating as a team.

  The base was part of a disused army camp outside Tel Aviv, with a central structure where we lived and adjoining buildings that were used for various purposes. There was a basketball court with crooked tiles and an old obstacle course, neither of which we ever used; storerooms where models could be built and trained on, and a firing range. Every now and again, shots were heard from the range and we guessed that other parts of the base were being used by other teams, hidden from us by modular concrete walls.

  The main building housed Udi’s office, which was empty most of the time, as were the rooms used by Moshik and the tall case officer, who introduced himself with a broad grin as Avi, when they visited our base. The other parts of the structure were our living quarters, a briefing room, classrooms, and a fully-equipped gym where we worked out between other activities.

  Moshik explained the importance of my planned recon assignment: “Some of these objects are recruiters and controllers of actual terrorists. There’s no knowing when one of them will summon a member of his gang from Gaza or the West Bank, who we’d then be able to identify and arrest on his return. For this, it’s vital to keep an eye on the controllers. Sometimes we have no more than twenty-four hours’ notice.”

  He never even hinted at where the tip-offs about the summons came from, or how the Office knew about the upcoming meetings. I presumed that a lot of intelligence capabilities were in play here. Terrorist att
acks were still occurring regularly, with suicide bombers blowing themselves up in buses, markets, and cafés. The importance of my assignment was clear, and I accepted it gladly.

  “Among the objects there are functionaries of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Islamic Jihad and the Global Jihad,” said Moshik, listing the main terrorist groupings. “There are moneymen and weapons purchasers. If we get info on a weapons deal, we may want to stop it, or after some terrorist attack we may want to settle scores, right away. To do this, we need updated intelligence files.”

  For the first time, I felt that I was actually about to start the job for which I had given up my truncated, bleeding career as an artist. I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps one of those objects was the individual who recruited or dispatched the suicide bomber to the No. 4 bus on Allenby Street, the man who murdered Dolly. Eventually, I couldn’t keep it in and told Moshik.

  “Oh, haven’t they updated you? In fact, we’ve known for quite a long time who they were. The suicide bomber was a guy called Iyad Radad, and had been recruited by a Hamas operative from Ramallah by the name of Mahmoud Sharitakh. The army captured him some time ago, and a few weeks ago a military court sentenced him.”

  Just like that, and all this time I’d known nothing. Udi and the rest of the insiders apparently sincerely believed that the matter of my personal revenge was all over. But in my heart, I never felt that. I had mixed feelings about the capture and imprisonment of the man responsible for Dolly’s death. I would’ve liked to have been involved in capturing him, and I wanted him to be dead, and not spending his time in prison with his comrades, eating, drinking and playing backgammon, until being freed in the next prisoner exchange.