The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  And so Benny appeared at our doorstep, and a lifelong friendship with my family was formed.

  If the Office had dispatched a slick desk jockey with a canned sales pitch, I would have found it easy to recite back to him my prepared rejection. But Benny, himself a former “combatant” (as Mossad agents are called), took a different approach. He was over six feet tall, slim, with a shock of grey hair and blue eyes. His Hebrew was French-accented, and he had an easygoing manner. My son liked him instantly, and so did my wife.

  He came into our small bungalow and we put a cup of coffee in his hand. Once my son was out of the room, he proceeded to give me a detailed picture of what awaited me should I change my mind and make it through the training program. Far from promising me roses and sunshine, he told me that my work would involve operating in hostile countries, often alone, while under foreign cover. He also outlined the risks of torture, long confinement, and even execution that I would face if I were caught.

  Dahlia was in the room throughout the whole conversation. Benny wanted her there, because he knew she would probably be the one who needed the most convincing. He assured us that joining the Office was like joining a family, and that it takes care of its own. Speaking plainly to a morbid issue that both Dahlia and I had thought about, he told us that she would be looked after financially no matter where I was sent, or what happened to me.

  As I watched her reaction, I could tell she was impressed that he was telling us the unvarnished truth—that he was leading us to an informed decision rather than trying to dazzle us with false assurances. The fear of the unknown is a powerful force, and contending with it had put both of us on edge. Benny gave us a clear indication of what lay ahead, and reassured us that we’d be able to navigate it together.

  One of the questions that I am asked most frequently about my former career is how much a spy’s spouse gets to know about what happens in the field. The Mossad’s policy is unequivocal: the spouse has to know what his or her partner is doing, because more often than not, she (or he) is integral to the spy’s ability to operate. The spouse keeps the family together during the other’s absence, and has to face the inevitable prying questions from friends and relatives about the husband’s (or wife’s) occupation and long disappearances.

  I never told Dahlia specifics about ongoing operations, but she knew the big picture. The truth is, she never pried, and I gave her the details only when I was stressed out and needed to talk. There are many incidents in this book that she didn’t know about, and many that she knows more about than the reader will learn here.

  Finally, after about two hours of conversation, I told Benny I’d go ahead with the training. When he saw his job was done, Benny stood to leave, and we shook hands. I then spent the next two months waiting for a phone call.

  It was October when the call finally came. I was told to present myself in a Tel Aviv hotel lobby, where I would meet my instructor. (Spy agencies, I’ve concluded over the years, are what keep the hotel trade afloat.) Once again, I kissed my wife goodbye and hopped on a bus to the big city.

  I remember sitting in the hotel with butterflies dancing in my gut, not knowing what hoops I’d be made to jump through this time around. Eventually, I was approached by a young man in his thirties who sat down and introduced himself as Oren. We spoke Hebrew, and it was only later that I discovered he spoke fluent English with a slight accent that made him sound like a cross between a Brit and a South African. (I never did find out where he actually came from.) Oren was tall and fair, with light brown curly hair and blue eyes. He wore glasses, jeans, a white dress shirt, and Timberland loafers. In fact, he looked and acted like a kibbutznik—fit, self-confident, and informal. “So, are you ready to start?” he asked me with a smile.

  We walked to Oren’s van, and drove to an apartment in Ramat Aviv, an upscale part of North Tel Aviv that houses professionals, diplomats, and the odd political figure. (Yitzhak Rabin lived a few streets over from where I was ensconced.) The place had a modern look—by 1980s standards, at least—with a glass-topped dining room table and contemporary furnishings, alongwith an incongruous combination safe. I was told this would be my home during training. Oren set the ground rules: “Everything you write or read goes into the safe. Anything you wish to discard goes into this bag, and you give it to me. I’ll see it gets destroyed.” (“Destroyed” was accurate. Years later, when I was at Mossad HQ, I saw how they got rid of paper: it was reduced to a powdery pulp in a gigantic processor.) He continued: “When you write, it’s on a single sheet of paper on a glass-topped surface. Otherwise, it leaves an imprint on anything under it.”

  Oren gave me a clunky camera—a chrome-finish Pentax Spotmatic. He also produced a low-tech typewriter of the kind Hemingway must have used to bang out his stories while covering the Spanish Civil War, saying, “Give me the ribbon when you wear it out.” I was confused, and then remembered that whatever I typed would be left on the ribbon.

  These were my first and basic lessons in spy tradecraft, a term that covers the entire gamut of how intelligence agents speak on the phone, walk, talk and interact with others, treat documents and identities, take notes, drive, and dress.

  Oren left me a huge pile of reading material to go through—basic primers on tradecraft. He also gave me an assignment: type out my autobiography, or at least as much of it as I could produce in a single night’s typing. “On the basis of your real life, we’re going to construct a fake one,” he said. He then left me to my writing, but not before giving me strict instructions on phone use and the importance of keeping the apartment secure. This included locking the doors and windows, storing my papers securely in the safe when I left the apartment, and leaving the radio on to give the impression that the apartment was occupied and to mask my conversations with Oren and any other visitors from HQ.

  As he turned to go, Oren stopped and looked at me. “Oh, yeah, you are no longer ‘Michael’ to any of us,” he said. “Your new name is ‘Rick.’ That is how you will sign all your reports and identify yourself when you call me on the phone.” I understood. If my real name were bandied about, it could find its way to the wrong people. By using my code name from an early stage in my training, I helped to ensure that even most Mossad colleagues wouldn’t discover my real identity. (And indeed, they didn’t; throughout my entire career in the Mossad, from the day those words came out of Oren’s mouth, I was known as Rick. For all my colleagues knew, my real name was Murray Schwartz.)

  “Write up your life story and get some rest,” Oren said. “I’ll be back tomorrow and then we really get to work.”

  During all the hundreds of hours of training I received, I don’t think there was an assignment I threw myself into more enthusiastically than this one. I sat at that glass-topped table and wrote and wrote. The hours slipped by, but I didn’t get sleepy until well after midnight. By the time I was done, I’d banged off a double-spaced tome.

  The next morning, Oren appeared with a slight bearded man named Shalom. I gave Oren the assignment, and he seemed impressed by its bulk. “I expected about ten pages—what have you got here, fifty?”

  Shalom would be my photography instructor, Oren explained. In the spy game, photographs really are worth a thousand words. But taking good ones, he told me, is about more than just point-and-shoot. Combatants are well trained in the art of photography—including covert practices. I cannot disclose the Mossad’s methods in this regard, but suffice it to say that a combatant could photograph you up and down from ten feet away without your noticing. For a week, Shalom instructed me on the Pentax’s features and sent me out onto the streets to take hundreds of shots of all kinds of things—cars, apartment buildings, people, shops, street signs. I learned how to take panorama photographs and how to cut them and process them into one folded image as long as your arm. After each assignment, Shalom developed and screened the photos on the spot.

  Photography never became a hobby outside of work, but I did take pride in it as part of my tradecraft. Over th
e years, I took some beauties when I was in the field: a panorama of a ship docked in Hamburg; terrorist safe houses in Khartoum; various landscapes and people from Africa—all of which, regrettably, are now just gathering dust in files somewhere.

  Next, Oren brought another expert from HQ: Yosef, a mild-mannered type who taught me clandestine radio communications. He also taught me some old-fashioned skills, like deciphering embedded messages using graph paper.

  For his part, Oren taught me something more fundamental: the art of human observation. He took me out into the city and asked me to assess all manner of things: the height of buildings, types of antennae on rooftops, cars, people, junction boxes, entrances, hotels, security systems. He’d ask me later what was written on a T-shirt worn by a random passerby. I was taught to notice the sort of mundane things that usually slide by us. The drill worked: I started to look at the world in a different way and to retain more of what I saw.

  As the days wore on, the exercises grew more elaborate. He would give me the photo of someone who worked somewhere within a specified neighborhood. I had to memorize the image, then head out and find the person. If I located him or her, I had to call Oren from a pay phone and tell him I’d seen “our friend,” providing the exact location.

  The targets were unwitting workers and residents—a cashier, an art gallery attendant, a barmaid, an office worker. I always picked out a combination of features on the faces in the small photos that was unique and easy for my eye to recognize, maybe the jaw line and hairstyle, or the way the nose and mouth were configured. I always scored one hundred per cent on this exercise.

  One day, after a few weeks of this expert training, Oren appeared and handed me a Teudat Zehut, a national identity card that all Israel’s citizens carry. There was my face on the card, but the name was different. Oren instructed me to make up a cover story for this fictional Israeli, and he’d return in a few days to hear it.

  Thinking about what I’d learned from Halleck’s demolition of my Los Angeles Times persona, I carefully worked out a legend that couldn’t be exposed, and that was simple enough that I wouldn’t get tripped up in the details. When Oren returned to test my story, it was with Elan, the psychologist, who asked only the occasional question about my thinking. It was clear that he was there to observe and assess me. Even though I knew this was part of the standard Mossad training protocol, something about Elan’s presence bugged me. Clearly, he wanted to see if I could take what Oren was dishing out. As it often did during my training, my competitive instinct helped me: I wasn’t about to give this shrink the satisfaction of seeing that I was bothered by anything.

  I had memorized the ID number on the Teudat Zehut and made up a story that relied somewhat on my real life. (This is the preferred practice; just as a good novelist ensures realism by sticking to the world he knows, so too does a spy.) My alter ego was a student auditing courses at Tel Aviv University. In preparation, I’d actually visited the campus and hung out at the library and registrar’s office, getting to know the place and what courses I was supposed to be taking. I’d sat in on the odd lecture and class and I had even been invited to a student party! The experience had given me the confidence and knowledge I needed to lay out my cover in a convincing way. Oren looked pleased.

  “What I like to see is that you are not some delusional egomaniac living in a complete fantasy world,” Oren said. “The problem in building a legend is that you have to walk a fine line between reality and fantasy. Stray too far in either direction and you have a security problem. You have to believe your story because it’s based on truth, but you have to keep it far enough from the truth so it can’t get back to you.”

  We fine-tuned my tale, with Oren pointing out some potential problems I hadn’t thought of (for example, where was my student card?). And with that, my legend was established—a momentous step in the career of an intelligence agent—even if this legend was merely for training purposes.

  Without further ado, Oren produced a file. In it were the details of what the Mossad calls an “object,” a person about whom the agency wants to know more, through physical surveillance and other means. The object was a Tel Aviv-area doctor who kept odd hours and swam in the sea each day at dawn. I had two days to observe him and perform intelligence collection tasks related to his daily habits and work. Oren and Elan left, and I got down to work.

  I lacked operational cover—that is, a story about what my alleged motivation was for being at the object’s hospital, his apartment block, or even the beach at dawn. I was quickly learning about one of the Mossad’s basic teaching philosophies: no one tells you how to do things. You have to figure it out for yourself, and only later are the mistakes analyzed and corrected. In training, as in the field, nobody holds your hand. I set myself to preparing possible operational cover scenarios: if I was taking pictures at the beach, I was a photography hobbyist. If I was in the hospital, I had shooting pains in my back that needed to be checked out, and so on.

  For the next forty-eight hours, I ran around after the doctor. I had to find his car and apartment, take pictures of him while he was swimming, and find his office in the hospital. To this day, I don’t know whether he was a witting participant in the exercise or not, but I had to perform my tasks without arousing his or anyone else’s suspicion. It was exhausting and difficult. I felt as if I was botching it, drawing attention to myself and standing out in every crowd.

  To my knowledge, the object never spotted me, but I was questioning my operational cover choices. Some were weak, and I doubted anyone would believe them—thankfully, I never had to use them. In one case, for instance, I crafted a convoluted story about a girl that I met at a bar who gave me an address in the same apartment building as the doctor.

  Making matters more difficult was the fact that I was going about this exercise in a particularly challenging environment—Israel. For good reason, Israelis are a nosy and paranoid lot. They watch for anything out of the ordinary and are not skittish about reporting odd behavior or simply asking a complete stranger, “What exactly are you doing?” To most Israelis, a guy with a camera is just a tourist or hobbyist. But a not insignificant portion of the population will look at you and think you’re collecting intelligence for a terrorist attack. The Mossad has never felt compelled to do their training outside of Israel; it’s easy to turn Israel into hostile territory for novice spies.

  When the grueling two days were over, I returned to my apartment, wrote up my reports, and waited for Oren and Elan to return. When they did, Oren asked me if I had had any security problems. I told him I hadn’t and walked them through the two days.

  We went over my operational cover stories, and I came to understand one of the reasons I’d felt uncomfortable at times: my stories were overly complex. It always sounded as if I was trying too hard to justify myself. As if reading my thoughts, Oren provided me with a simple rule of thumb that I never forgot.

  “Rick, if you are crossing the street and someone asks you why, you only have to say you are going to the grocery store,” he told me. “You don’t have to tell him what you’re going to buy there, or how you plan to cook it.” He continued, “Better yet, say nothing. If you’re going to walk to the beach at dawn and you’re worried about the cops checking you out, buy a cheap fishing rod and throw it over your shoulder. You don’t even have to speak to them because the fishing rod has already answered their questions.”

  I gave him the reports I had spent all day typing on that museum piece of a typewriter. He tucked the documents under an arm without glancing at them.

  “Aren’t you going to read them?” I asked, perplexed and a little annoyed.

  “Maybe, but the exercise wasn’t about the doctor. It was about you. It was about how you felt about being undercover. The rest was just to keep you busy.”

  During this phase of my training, I learned that I was being groomed to be the ultimate operational weapon in the Mossad’s arsenal: a combatant in the division known simply as “the unit.”
The unit has many names, but its most widely known cryptonym is “Caesarea.” It is legendary in the intelligence world, not least because of its oft- celebrated (and decried) mission to bring justice to the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack in 1972.

  Originally, Caesarea was a unit of the Israel Defense Forces charged with intelligence missions in neighboring Arab countries, but in 1953, after it met with a number of disasters that killed some of its members, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion transferred it to the nascent Mossad. Caesarea now operates as a completely compartmentalized “Mossad within the Mossad,” and its combatants do not enter or interact with Mossad HQ except through their controlling intermediaries. Their identities are kept secret, and they are told only what they need to know. (Think CIA agent Jason Bourne, of The Bourne Identity.) If a combatant is captured, you don’t want him to be able to reel off the Mossad’s personnel database to his interrogators. (Everyone talks when tortured. It’s only in the movies that they don’t.)

  Eventually, I moved on to more advanced training, and was outfitted with a foreign passport for lengthy exercises that more realistically simulated deployment in a foreign country. During this phase, I operated as if in hostile territory, with all the associated constraints and difficulties—maintaining strict communications protocols and hewing carefully to status cover. While on exercises, I was not permitted access to the apartment either.

  As in a computer game, each series of exercises contained a number of separate missions that I had to complete before advancing a level. Unbeknownst to me, I often was being observed by Mossad personnel. In many cases, they tried to trip me up through seemingly accidental mishaps, just to see how I’d react. In the most dramatic episode, a motorist insisted I’d hit his car with my rental and delayed me while I was en route to a tightly scheduled rendezvous.