The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  When I was ready, we drew up the operational order for my deployment, a document known in the Mossad by its Hebrew acronym, pakam, which stands for pekuda l’mivtza. No operation in the field is conducted without one. It contains all the relevant details about personnel, objectives, communication methods, logistics, security, timing, codes, itinerary, documents to be used, and so on. There is also a section called Mikrim v’ Tguvot (“occurrences and reactions”) designed to set out expected responses to contingencies that may arise. Once everything is written into the pakam, the contents have to be memorized: for obvious reasons, the Mossad doesn’t want its agents carrying comprehensive mission catalogues.

  When the pakam was complete and arrangements for my departure were set, I had one final meeting with Avi, so he could ensure that I understood my mission and its parameters before signing off on my initial deployment. I later learned that Avi did this every time a combatant was deployed on foreign soil. He felt responsible for us.

  People like Avi are the main reason that the Mossad is considered one of the best intelligence services in the world. Ultimately, intelligence work isn’t about satellites, budgets, oversight committees, or high-tech gadgetry. It’s about the motivation and skills of your people.

  As in other organizations, leadership in the Mossad is about making decisions. By this standard, Avi was one of the most impressive bosses I’ve ever met. In situations where most people would need to know seventyfive per cent of key variables to make the right call, Avi could do it with twenty-five per cent. Lives depended on this ability: the decisions he made weren’t about his stock portfolio or what color would be in this fall. He sent people into some of the most dangerous places on earth. And to my knowledge at least, he never lost any of them.

  As a bonus, Avi had a great sense of humor. He was a delight to work with and (on rare occasions) socialize with. Unlike most brilliant people, he didn’t have an outsized ego or antisocial quirks or strange emotional baggage. As the years went by, he and I developed a close relationship, and I came to see him as a father figure.

  During that final meeting with Avi, the two of us sat in my safe house in North Tel Aviv, and Avi grilled me about my mission. Once he was satisfied I knew my stuff cold, he set the pakam aside and gave me a few life lessons. “Rick, we are all human and everyone makes mistakes,” he said. “The key is to learn from those mistakes, and make them only once. I am forgiving of a mistake, but I am not forgiving when it is repeated. It means you didn’t learn from it, and that is deadly.

  “One more thing,” he said. “Before you do anything—regardless of how mundane you imagine it to be—think it through before you act. God gave you a brain. Use it.” He smiled warmly and shook my hand. “You’re ready,” he said. “Good luck.”

  I rented a car and returned to the kibbutz to say goodbye to my wife and sons. Dahlia had given birth to our second son in July, and here I was heading off to Europe a scant two months later. I knew they would be in good hands on the kibbutz, surrounded by family and friends, but it was a hard parting nonetheless. The kibbutz had come to terms with the fact that I would no longer be managing the cotton plantation. Kibbutzniks are a patriotic lot, and they understand better than most the sacrifices that have to be made to ensure Israel’s security. While my friends and neighbors didn’t know the specifics, they knew that I wasn’t going to work for the ministry of transport.

  That night, I was booked on an early flight out of Ben Gurion Airport. I was picked up by a unit driver, who was to take me to the VIP departures area (one of the rare perks of the trade). My chauffeur was a diminutive, balding guy with soulful eyes, and he collected me in a plain white van. As he helped me load my bag into the car, he said in a matter-of-fact voice, “You have some shaving cream behind your ears.” The way he said it, I thought he could have been telling me that I was wet behind the ears, and he’d have been perfectly correct in his assessment. As we drove to the airport, I thought about how far I’d come, and how much my life had changed. The last time I’d been in Europe, it was as a carefree Canadian backpacker in jeans and a T-shirt. Now I was returning in a suit and tie—with a new religion, a different name, and a secret job. Just eight years had passed, yet everything was different. If these two versions of me met one another in a departure lounge, they’d have little to talk about.

  I was nervous. In some ways, being an intelligence agent undercover is similar to being an actor. I was about to go on stage with my character and play my part as a different person. I was going to construct a new life piece by piece and live it as if it had always been my own. The difference was, if I didn’t give a credible performance, I might never be heard from again.

  When I arrived in Europe, I met Effi, the first of three Caesarea controllers I was to work with during my career, in a café and went over my pakam. He gave me money and I gave him my traveling Israeli passport (an alias) in exchange for my foreign operational papers. Controllers are the unit’s representatives who operate under diplomatic cover overseas and act as intermediaries between the Office and the combatant in the field. They are usually on official Israeli documents and have access to diplomatic missions. A combatant without a controller is, to put it simply, an expensive piece of equipment without someone to run it. Controllers convey the details of missions, bring funds, provide direction as per HQ commands, and are the combatant’s only contact with the “real” world outside of cover.

  Effi was one of the Mossad’s old hands—a short, affable polyglot who always looked tired, with dark circles under his eyes and unkempt hair. He made sure I signed for the money he was giving me. While movie spies are forever exchanging large stacks of bills as if they were restaurant matchbooks, the handling of currency is not nearly so casual within real intelligence agencies. In fact, accounting is a huge part of the spy trade. While the Mossad is generous in reimbursing field expenses, like all other bureaucracies, it is careful to keep track of who spends what.

  Despite my initial stage fright, developing my cover and ensconcing myself in the local community came surprisingly easy. I’d never had a problem getting people to like me, and my charm had survived my identity shift: within a few months, I had a network of acquaintances and casual friends. It was a fake life, but a comfortable one. (When I entered HQ as a staff officer in 1996, six years later, many of my nonoperational colleagues were impressed that I was able to stick it out under deep cover for so long. Six years may not sound like a long time, but years in the field are like dog years: multiply by six or seven.)

  I bought a wardrobe that would make Doron proud, and established myself as a respectable commodities broker. I kept an office in Switzerland as my business address, and even hired someone to answer the phone in the name of the cover company I’d devised. The people I met during that period of my life would be shocked to learn I was an intelligence agent—let alone in the Mossad. By all appearances, I was a profit-driven twenty-nine-year-old yuppie juggling any number of deals from Hong Kong to Madrid.

  After two months, when I was done establishing my cover in Europe, I flew back to Israel and basked in the praise of Doron and Avi. More importantly, I was able to spend some quality time with my family. Unfortunately, our reunion was to last only a few days. I had a life awaiting me in Europe, and the Mossad was ready for me to begin doing the real work of a combatant in the field.

  Too soon after I’d arrived back in Israel, Doron called me at the kibbutz. The time had come, he said, to meet Charles.

  5

  CHARLES

  Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN

  When two combatants meet for the first time, they don’t just walk up to each other in a darkened corner of the local souk and introduce themselves. As for a lunch date between two nervous singles, an abundance of protocols must be followed. Foremost among them is the information-guarding principle known as
“compartmentalization.”3 Like other combatants, I didn’t know the real names of anyone I worked with, or where they lived, or if they were married or had children. The more a Mossad agent knows, the more he will tell Israel’s enemies under interrogation.

  My first meeting with my future field partner, Charles, required extensive preparation. We had to conceive a mutually viable cover story that explained not only the circumstances of our initial meeting, but also the rationale for our continued working relationship. Moreover, our handlers had to decide what we could know about one another without compromising that important line separating cover from reality.

  Doron had trained both Charles and me, and thought us a good match. Coincidentally, it turned out that during one of my training missions, I’d completed the second half of a two-part operation that Charles had set up. The training operation consisted of my clearing a “dead letter box” that Charles had selected.

  (A “dead drop,” or “dead letter box” [DLB] as we called it, is not an actual mailbox, but a secret location for leaving items out of sight for pickup by another operative. The idea is to facilitate the transfer of an object between operatives without their having to meet in person. Widely used during the Cold War, DLBs allowed the transfer of things like documents, film, codebooks, and cameras. Selecting a suitable DLB is a fine art, as the drop site must be located in an area where the persons planting and clearing have sufficient cover to be present, yet not so public that every Tom, Dick, and Harry out walking the dog can find it. It also has to be somewhere that can be explained easily to a person who’s never visited the location.)

  After several weeks of back-and-forth meetings with Doron, arrangements were made for Charles and me to have the supposedly “chance” encounter that would blossom into our ongoing professional partnership. We met during the fall of 1990, at a Savile Row tailor in London—one of the many high-end sartorial establishments Doron had patronized during his time in Europe. Both of us were having suits made to order. During our fittings, we began to chat. In no time, Charles and I realized that we had overlapping business interests in various parts of the world. Our conversation was a charade, of course. But I like to think that to a third-party observer—say, a tailor—we convincingly appeared to be strangers enjoying a random social encounter.

  My first impression of Charles was that he was a man of contrasts. On the one hand, he had the air of a tough guy, with a nose that had clearly been broken more than once. I wasn’t surprised when I later learned he was a karate champion who’d served in Israel’s special forces. But he also spoke English with a refined accent and precise diction. I guessed he’d attended an elite private school in Britain or one of its former colonies.

  I never learned which corner of Queen Victoria’s world Charles had originally called home. Regardless, I felt some sense of cultural kinship, having grown up in a sleepy onetime colonial outpost best known for its English-style gardens. Victoria is now a more cosmopolitan—and less overtly Anglophile—place than it was when I grew up there in the 1960s and 1970s. But in my era, it maintained many of the Mother Country’s quainter traditions. At school assemblies, we sang “God Save the Queen” before “O Canada.” We called our male teachers “sir” and played rugby. My district of Oak Bay, the most old-fashioned of the city’s neighborhoods, is often referred to as the “Tweed Curtain.” Charles, I guessed, came from a similar sort of place.

  Despite his intimidating persona, Charles was of average build—maybe five foot eleven inches and 180 pounds, with dark hair, light brown eyes, and a square, dimpled jaw. As a fussy, effeminate tailor took our measurements, we bantered for our Savile Row audience. Charles seemed glib and relaxed. But even during our first superficial pleasantries, I detected an edge to his personality: he was clearly a man used to being in control.

  As our contrived session of male bonding played out, we “discovered” that we were both planning to visit the same Middle Eastern trade conference, scheduled for later that month in another European city. We agreed to meet for a drink during the event and then, after our suit fittings, went our separate ways.

  The conversation may have been phony, but the conference was real. Charles and I both attended, and we used the opportunity to establish a commercial partnership between our respective cover business’s operations. Soon after, we began meeting at Charles’s apartment—a comfortable two-bedroom flat on a bustling commercial street.

  Combatants select their apartments with care. Multiunit buildings in upscale areas, far from prying eyes, are preferred. So are buildings with plenty of exits, and a secure main entrance equipped with a camera and coded entry. Such precautions are aimed as much at thwarting common criminals as rival intelligence agents. Combatants often find themselves carrying large amounts of cash. (Credit cards are eschewed where possible because they leave a paper trail. Know a spy by this sign: he may make a hotel reservation or car rental with a credit card, but when he shows up, he’ll pay in cash.) In one unfortunate case, a courier carrying Charles’s and my operational passports and operating funds was robbed on a train. Luckily, the thief took only the money—about twelve thousand U.S. dollars—and dumped the rest of the pouch, which was recovered unopened.

  In time, Charles and I got our first assignment—a mission to Tunisia to verify the address of a Palestinian involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. During our preparations, we received a visit from Uzi, the head of our Caesarea unit, a tall professorial ex-combatant with spectacles and a hairstyle that reminded me of a mad professor.

  Until now, Charles and I had gotten on rather well—at least superficially. But the presence of an authority figure brought out an unattractive quality in him. From the time Uzi arrived, Charles needed to show he was the smartest person in the room. As he did at numerous subsequent meetings, Charles would not stop arguing a point until everyone gave up and agreed he was right.

  His manner that day struck me as petulant and bullying. From the deferential way Uzi treated him, however, it was clear he could get away with it. Charles, I would learn, was extremely gifted—probably one of the best combatants Caesarea had ever produced. The fact that he was willing to take advantage of his status made my life during the next six years extremely trying. But for Charles’s exasperating presence, I might well still be a Mossad combatant today.

  One time, Charles and I had an unfriendly encounter with some young drug dealers while in Europe. Sadly, many North African youth in Europe sell hard drugs on the streets. Young Moroccan men, in particular, often deal cocaine and hashish. Charles was making a call from a pay phone one evening while I stood nearby gazing at a shop window in mock interest when a young man tried to entice him with his product.

  Charles didn’t appreciate the interruption: calls from pay phones were the only way we kept in touch with our families and, for one reason or another, opportunities to use them had recently been hard to come by. He shooed the dealer away while holding his hand over the mouthpiece. Angry words were exchanged before the young man headed off to summon his buddies, two other young dealers standing on a corner nearby. “You’re making a big mistake,” I thought.

  The youth approached the pay phone again, gesticulating theatrically, with his buddies standing some fifteen feet behind him in what I thought to be a half-hearted show of solidarity.

  I knew how this episode would end. Charles was a former special forces soldier with a good knowledge of karate and a short temper. Sure enough, he hung up the phone, walked over and, without breaking stride, crouched down and punched his fist up into the Moroccan’s solar plexus. He crumpled like an aluminum can.

  I had read Charles’s body language before he hung up the phone, and had moved to back him up. The fellow on the ground moaned and tried to get up, but fell back down again when I gave him a solid kick to the thigh. (Anyone who’s had a bad charlie horse knows how that feels.) The other two, not quite committed to the encounter in the first place, ran off. We stood there in our business suits breathing hard,
feeling somewhat self-conscious. Charles said something to break the tension like, “I don’t think we’ll be using those phones again.”

  We reported the incident to our controller, Effi, when we met up with him a week later. HQ was furious: engaging local hoods in fistfights was a pointless misuse of our training. No good was going to come to Israel because some local drug dealer had been given a licking—it merely put our health and cover in jeopardy. Effi puffed on his cigarette and said, “Imagine if the cops had shown up—that guy could be dead for all we know.”

  “They’d probably thank us for helping out with the war on drugs,” I said, but Effi was not amused.

  Professionally, however, Charles was extraordinarily competent. As exasperating as his personality may have been, he knew enough to keep his attitude in check during missions, so we enjoyed a highly productive working relationship. In fact, we were the team Caesarea often turned to when they needed to staff a dangerous, difficult job with a minimum of preparation time. Charles may have regarded me as an overpaid factotum but, ego-jousting aside, we got the job done—and that’s what counted.

  For the most part, Charles was a workaholic. He drank copious amounts of black coffee, and seemed to sleep no more than four hours per night. But in the moments when he allowed himself to unwind, Charles could display a cutting sense of humor. Sometimes, for instance, we would thumb through the Yellow Pages and make prank calls to Europe’s fetishist bordellos. Charles would pretend to be a shy British civil servant on vacation and make inquiries about the rates for the most outrageous acts on offer. It was juvenile stuff, but it helped us unwind—and probably kept the two of us from killing one another.

  When the time came to execute the Tunisian mission, HQ decided that only one agent would go, and that agent would be Charles. Perennially short on manpower, the Mossad obeys the principle that the minimum of assets be used in any operation—never two men when one is enough.