The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  The answer is simple. Unlike all of these rival methods, shortwave radio broadcasts provide an eavesdropper with no means of identifying the person receiving the message, or, indeed, of determining if anyone is receiving the message. Moreover, the communication leaves no electronic residue and requires no specially configured gadgets; all you need is the sort of shortwave radio you can buy for fifty dollars at your local discount electronics store. Contrast this with e-mail and telephone lines, which are an open book to any counterintelligence service worth its salt (including, we now know, America’s National Security Agency). Even in the case of anonymous pay-as-you-go cellphones, government snoopers can use voice recognition, calling patterns, and signal tracking to zero in on a suspect user, especially in a totalitarian state such as Iran.

  Once Charles and I had received authorization from HQ, he left to take a second flight to a smaller Iranian city and I hopped in a rental car and set off for Natanz. My cover story was that I was visiting a picturesque oasis town south of Tehran. To back up my tale, I brought along a European tourist book with the town’s entry circled and annotated with enthusiastic scribblings. The hotel kitchen staff had packed me a lunch, and I made sure I blabbed to the concierge and desk clerk about my purported destination.

  As for my true target, the Natanz area, the truth is that I knew little about it at the time of my mission. I hadn’t even been informed that the site was connected with Iran’s nuclear program. All Effi gave me in his rudimentary briefing were a set of coordinates and a barebones geographical description.

  It may seem odd that a spy would be provided with so little background information about his target. But in the intelligence trade, this is hardly unusual. During my career as a combatant, I often was sent to photograph a house, collect a soil sample, or visually confirm the coordinates of a set of antennae on a building—but for what rhyme or reason, I was seldom told.

  It’s not that we were treated as brainless drones incapable of understanding complex projects; it was simply a matter of operational security. The expression “need-to-know” describes an important principle of intelligence work.7 Given the ruthless nature of Israel’s enemies, this adage is particularly appropriate to Mossad operations. Terrorist outfits and rogue nations such as Iran have sadists on their payroll who can extract information from the most stoic combatant with ease. The key, therefore, is to ensure the agent has nothing sensitive to divulge in the first place.

  As I later found out, the Natanz complex was just one part of a larger Iranian nuclear enrichment program. The oldest facility is the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, on Iran’s southwestern coast. Construction began with the assistance of the German government in the 1970s, when Iran was a stable Western ally under the control of the Shah. But after various stops and starts, the project was eventually mothballed by the leaders of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It was restarted in earnest with Russian help in 1992 thanks to two factors: Iran’s expanded regional ambitions and Moscow’s need for hard currency.

  Tehran acted in secret; it wasn’t until 2002 that a dissident Iranian group blew the lid off Tehran’s uranium enrichment program, thereby setting the stage for the lengthy high-stakes confrontation between Iran and the West that persists as of this writing. But farsighted Israeli intelligence analysts knew something was up a decade earlier, which is why Charles and I had been dispatched.

  After some wrong turns and a few near-misses with maniacal local drivers, I eventually found my way out of Tehran. Following the instructions I’d been given by HQ, I took photographs, including several panorama sequences, at prescribed locations along the route.

  When I reached the Natanz area, I parked the car and checked to make sure I hadn’t been followed. It was a flat, arid, isolated landscape. Aside from the two-lane road I’d travelled on, there was no sign of any human presence. Iran is a huge country, most of it empty, and my little solo adventure into the outback made me feel like a British explorer from the nineteenth century.

  I took some more photos, then slipped off a loafer—for speed, I’d avoided wearing laced shoes—and used it to scoop a large sample of sandy topsoil. I put it back on my foot, returned to the car, and drove to a second designated location. There, I took some more shots and filled the other shoe. Taking care to remember which shoe was which, I got back in the car and dutifully proceeded to the oasis town that was my ostensible destination. During my visit, I made sure to take a bunch of cheesy tourist photos: I had a cover story to protect, after all.

  Packing for home, I stuffed socks in my loafers and then sealed them in a plastic bag at the bottom of my suitcase. I told myself the soil I was bringing back was as precious to the analysts at the Mossad’s counter-proliferation department as the soil of the Holy Land is to Christian pilgrims.

  During Charles’s far more eventful trip, he happened to drive right into the largest military exercise held in Iran since the end of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. You can imagine how much fun it was for him, a lone Westerner stopped at a military roadblock in the middle of nowhere with the Iranian military running about. But naturally he finessed the situation easily: he immediately adopted an imperious manner (hardly a stretch), and demanded to speak to whoever was in charge. In no time, he had an Iranian army general eating out of his hand. I could imagine the scenario: the two of them sitting in the shade of a drooping pomegranate tree, drinking tea while Charles gave the general some pointers on how properly to deploy the forces under his command.

  8

  KHARTOUM : TERROR CENTRAL

  The bush fowl saw the chicken being carved up and laughed. The chicken told the bush fowl to stop laughing, for the same hands now carving up the chicken would be used to carve up the bush fowl.

  SUDANESE PROVERB

  Over the course of Israel’s short life, the country has endured thousands of terrorist attacks. Most Israelis, even the lucky ones who have not been directly affected through the loss of a friend or family member, retain the memory of at least one encounter with a victim.

  When Yael was introduced to me at a dinner party in Paris, it had already been several months since Hezbollah blew up Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires, but her face was still swollen and marked by stitched lacerations. Though Yael was unable to produce a full-blown smile with that wounded face, her eyes conveyed a strong, mirthful spirit. It was obvious she’d once been—and would become again—a beautiful woman. Her husband, Ronen, doted on her as she spoke. Together, they told me the tale of their ordeal.

  Yael and Ronen both worked at the embassy. On March 17, 1992, she was at her post when a pickup truck packed with high explosives smashed into the front of the building and detonated. The blast destroyed not only the embassy, but also a nearby church and school. Ronen, who’d briefly left the building on an errand at the time of the explosion, returned when he heard the blast. He searched frantically until, miraculously, he found his badly wounded wife amid the debris. Twenty-nine people died that day. But thanks to the life-saving medical intervention she received, Yael was not among them.

  My thoughts turned immediately to Yael and Ronen two years later, when I learned of a second Hezbollah truckbombing in Buenos Aires. On July 18, 1994, a terrorist had driven a van full of ammonium nitrate through the front gates of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA), the heart of Argentina’s Jewish community, reducing the seven-storey building to rubble. As with the 1992 attack, the victims were innocent civilians. The AMIA building housed everything from social welfare offices, where the elderly collected pensions, to the city’s Jewish burial society.

  The AMIA attack produced outrage in Israel, but also a sense of helplessness. Israel is remarkably effective at protecting itself from large-scale terrorist attacks, but it can do little to defend the many vulnerable Jewish communities scattered throughout the world, which are spiritually connected to the Jewish state but lie beyond its military protection. Iran, which through its proxy, Hezbollah, follows the terrorists’ cowardly course of attacking
the most defenseless targets available, is well aware of this. By such means do the ruling mullahs hold a sword of Damocles over Jewry’s collective head.

  Following the AMIA bombing, Israel opted to let Argentina prosecute the matter as a domestic crime. But the subsequent investigations were severely bungled—perhaps intentionally so. Numerous leads pointing to the complicity of Iran and Hezbollah were ignored. According to a lawyer for the AMIA victims, rubble and human remains from that blast were carried off and used as landfill before a nyone could inspect them for clues. Meanwhile, the investigating judge, Juan Galeano, was impeached for paying a witness to change his testimony and burning incriminating evidence. There have even been allegations that the former Argentine president, Carlos Menem, was bribed by the Iranian government in return for sabotaging the investigation. Whatever the truth of these claims, it was clear Argentina could not, or would not, bring the architects of the plot to justice. And so Israel, to punish the Iranians, devised a plan involving targeted killings of the Iranian intelligence cadres in Sudan, an operation in which the Mossad was expected to play a key role.

  My life had changed since my initial deployment to Europe. First, my family had moved from Israel to France. Although I was stationed in a different European city, I was close enough to visit regularly. For the first time since my basic training, I could take a meaningful role in the lives of Dahlia and the children.

  There had been changes in my professional environment as well. Effi, my chain-smoking controller, had finished his three-year stint and had been replaced by Kerouac, the beatnik who’d briefed me and Charles prior to the Al-Yarmouk operation. Stick around for a few years in the Mossad and you start to see the same faces pop up over and over again.

  When he took up his post in Europe, Kerouac had the same hippie manner I remembered from Tel Aviv. But that soon changed. Like many large cities in Western Europe, his new base of operations had a growing and culturally assertive Muslim population. On his way to one of his first meetings with Charles and me, a group of Arab men spotted him and waved to him as one of their own. While we all savoured the irony of a Mossad officer receiving such a warm welcome from the local Muslims, Kerouac took it as a sign that it was time to lose the extensive facial hair and dress in slightly more fashionable Western attire.

  I got along well with Kerouac, but he had a few cultural differences that complicated our relationship. For one thing, Charles and I were foreign-born Israelis with Anglo roots. Kerouac, on the other hand, was a sabra (native-born Israeli). And so a lot of the jokes, idioms, and euphemisms Charles and I threw around in casual conversation escaped his Mediterranean antennae.

  Secondly, Kerouac was maddeningly risk-averse. During the planning for any operation, he tended to divert our attention from important mission details to fret needlessly over implausible worst-case scenarios. For instance, he had a rule that Charles and I weren’t permitted to meet with the same target separately, lest one of us say something that was inconsistent with the other’s cover story. So if Charles met with a Syrian businessman in Damascus, then I couldn’t meet him in Zurich the next month unless Charles was also present, or vice versa. (When Doron took over as our handler a few years later, he said this policy was ridiculous and deep-sixed it immediately.)

  It was while I was getting to know Kerouac that the AMIA bombing occurred. Not long after, he presented me with my first mission under his stewardship—one I would have to perform on my own, since Charles was occupied with another assignment. During a meeting at my apartment, Kerouac emptied a diplomatic pouch from Mossad HQ onto my dining room table. As I sifted through the maps and documents, I quickly noted that all related to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum—or, as many of us then called the city, Terror Central.

  By 1994, forces from Israel and Hezbollah had been engaged in regular combat in southern Lebanon for more than a decade. But the Argentina bombings seemed to require retribution beyond that daily attrition. Khartoum provided the perfect venue: it was one of the few places in the world where Hezbollah maintained an official presence. Yet, unlike Iran, it was also sufficiently chaotic that a team of Israeli commandos might penetrate undetected, attack targets within the city, and escape quickly.

  As Julie Flint and Alex de Waal demonstrate in their outstanding book, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (2006), modern Sudan is beset by a bewildering welter of conflicts: Arabs versus Africans, herders versus farmers, Muslims versus Christians, riparian elite versus hinterland peasants and, suffusing everything else, tribe versus tribe.

  Even by the standards of other African nations, the country is poor, unstable, and fragmented.

  Since 1989, Sudan’s government has been controlled by an Arabsupremacist cabal led by Umar Hassan al-Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi, 8 fundamentalist Muslim ideologues who’ve done their best to exterminate the country’s religious minorities in the south and central parts of the country. In Darfur, Sudan’s government has applied the same brutal methods against fellow Muslims, hundreds of thousands of whom lie dead as a result. Yet few Islamic nations or organizations have spoken out against the Darfur genocide.

  In search of oil money and military aid, Sudan reached out to its fellow radical Islamist government in Tehran during the 1990s. Khartoum also put out the red carpet to the world’s leading terrorist organizations. Osama bin Laden himself lived in the city from 1991 to 1996. At around the same time, Khartoum was home to Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah leader who personally involved himself in some of the group’s most notorious crimes. Though the name Mughniyeh is little known in the West, I consider him a more skilled and influential terrorist than bin Laden. Mughniyeh got his start in Lebanon in the 1970s, when the PLO ruled the southern part of the country. He was then enlisted in Force 17, the elite security apparatus charged with protecting Yasser Arafat and his closest cronies. When the PLO was ousted from Lebanon by the 1982 Israeli invasion, he stayed behind and, with the assistance of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), formed and ran what we now know as Hezbollah. Mughniyeh has a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head—though, interestingly, it was put in place only after September 11, 2001.

  Hassan al-Turabi deliberately set out to make his country a unifying force in the terrorist war against the West. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, he “sought to persuade Shiite [Muslims] and Sunni [Muslims] to put aside their divisions and join against the common enemy. In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al-Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to co-operate in providing support—even if only training for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al-Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives.” Since 9/11, many have wondered how a ragtag bunch of Afghan veterans and hounded Egyptian Islamists coalesced into a terrorist confederacy capable of bringing down the World Trade Center. A large part of the answer, I believe, lay in the dusty alleys of Khartoum.

  Kerouac was candid about the purpose of my mission. “The prime minister wants to strike back at Iran,” he said. “And he’s decided that it’s going to be in Khartoum.” I was surprised at this blunt talk and even more surprised when he handed me my travel itinerary. Before flying into Khartoum, I was going to Tel Aviv. This mission, Kerouac told me, would require the sort of specialized preparation that a combatant couldn’t get in Europe.

  Once in Israel, I had a round of meetings with some serious-looking fellows from Caesarea’s operations department. My mission to Khartoum had several objectives. First, I was to collect intelligence on the Iranian embassy in Khartoum. Second, I was to survey the environs of the city in search of a landing area for Israeli Special Forces troops. Third, I was to study a neighborhood where most of the world’s Islamic terrorist organizations kept their offices. As I learned, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Egyptian al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya (also known as Islamic Group, or IG), and the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (also known as the GIA) all operated openly in Khartoum. In f
act, their offices were clustered together within a few blocks of one another—a sort of one-stop shop for mass murder.

  Khartoum is more than nine hundred fifty miles from the southern tip of Israel. But the Israeli military had launched this sort of long-distance special forces operation before. In 1973, for instance, seaborne Israeli troops—escorted by my Mossad forebears, operating locally—assassinated members of the PLO leadership in Beirut following the Munich massacre, an operation known as “Spring of Youth.” Three years later, Israeli special forces rescued 103 passengers of an Air France airliner hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. The Entebbe raid was a particularly complex operation, requiring the Israel Air Force (IAF) to transport two hundred soldiers, Jeeps, and a black Mercedes-Benz (intended to resemble Ugandan Dictator Idi Amin’s vehicle of state) two thousand miles into the heart of Africa. That mission was a complete success, with only one Israeli soldier being killed: commander Jonathan Netanyahu, the older brother of former (and perhaps future) Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.9

  In the Ugandan operation, Israeli planes simply flew into Entebbe International Airport—albeit under cover of darkness. For a variety of reasons, that would be impossible in Khartoum, and so something less conventional than a paved tarmac would have to be used. This is why I’d been brought to Israel: to fly in a Lockheed C-130 Hercules troop transport, and learn first-hand from Israeli pilots what kind of real estate the plane needed to land and take off.

  My boss for this part of my training was a Mossad veteran named Arik. He drove us out of Tel Aviv in a white Mitsubishi sedan, both of us wearing standard Israel Defense Forces combat fatigues. There were no markings on our uniforms except the IDF acronym over the breast pocket and rank badges on our epaulettes. I was designated a major, with one oak leaf, and Arik a lieutenant colonel, with two. (The oak leaves are referred to as “falafels” in the IDF. More morbidly, the three bars signifying a captain are termed “coffins.”)