The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  Arik was a tough old nut with a bald head and a nasty scar on his cheek. He looked familiar. And as we drove, it gradually dawned on me that I’d seen him once before, during my Mossad basic training. For some reason, he had come into my Tel Aviv apartment unannounced when I was still under the wing of my instructor, Oren, and, without a word of greeting or explanation, began rummaging through my wastebasket. At the time, I assumed he was checking to make sure I hadn’t discarded classified material in the regular trash but had disposed of it in the burn bag, as required. But neither he nor anyone else ever said a word about it to me one way or another, and so I’d always remained mystified by his odd cameo appearance.

  After we arrived at the base, Arik and I were introduced to two pilots, Ayal and Ronny. They were your typical Israeli air force types: young, tanned, fit, good-looking, confident, with matching Ray-Ban sunglasses and smiles. In Israel, pilots are seen as the crème de la crème of the military. It’s unfair, but true: the pilots get all the girls. Wings are the ultimate chick-magnet.

  Ayal and Ronny got us strapped into a C-130 Hercules, then put on an amazing demonstration of the craft’s flying abilities. With its four propeller engines and massive cargo capacity, the C-130 is a far cry from a fighter jet. Among Israeli military types, in fact, it is known as Karnaf, which means rhinoceros. But in these pilots’ hands, it seemed quick and nimble. (I’d actually flown in C-130s plenty of times in the Canadian army—under more conventional flying conditions. But I kept my mouth shut about that because, even among fellow Israelis, Mossad agents are never supposed to volunteer gratuitous background information about their own lives.) They flew the plane low, under the radar line, giving us an exhilarating ride. Though the pair never identified their unit, it was clear from their flying style that they were part of the elite corps of pilots who work with Israel’s special forces and Caesarea units on long-range covert operations.

  Fortunately, I got a seat in the cockpit. From experience, I was glad not to be seated in the Hercules’ large cargo “seating” area within the fuselage, which consists of nothing more than a mass of thick netting. Traveling long distances requires you to sit hunched over for hours at a time, practically in the lap of the soldier beside you. You can’t really sleep, and you can’t converse because your words are drowned out by the noise and vibrations.

  After wowing us with their flying skills, Ayal and Ronny briefed me on the plane’s technical specs. The most important of these, for my purposes, were the minimum dimensions of a tactical landing strip that could accommodate the plane: about one mile long and sixty feet wide. To help me appreciate what a patch of barren turf that size looks like, they turned south and flew Arik and me deep into the Negev Desert.

  After an hour’s flight, we flew over a ridge and then the aircraft banked. I held tight and we descended hard onto a flat plain in the desert valley. Once the wheels hit the ground, we decelerated rapidly. Then the pilots spun the plane around, kicking up a small dust storm in the process. For my benefit, everything was being done to mimic the methods used in a real covert ops fly-in.

  Once the plane stopped moving, the back ramp opened. Ronny told Arik and me to get out and sprint away from the landing area. As we scrambled off, the plane accelerated toward the other end of the runway. The noise from its engines and prop wash was deafening. Within seconds, the Karnaf was airborne again. As Arik and I waited for the aircraft to return, we walked the length of the landing strip and I paced off the distance.

  The plane came back after twenty minutes and we hopped on board. In no time, we were already starting to ascend for the short flight back to base. (With Israel being so small, in-country flights never take long.) We had a mission debrief and then retired for an excellent air force lunch. With my training now complete, my next stop was Sudan.

  As I walked down onto the Khartoum airport tarmac a week later, I was hit with a blast of hot air that seemed instantly to turn my hair into straw. I prayed that the air conditioning at the hotel wouldn’t be on the fritz. I also hoped the car I’d rented would have enough gas to get me there. Despite Sudan’s cozy relationship with oil-rich Iran, the country was then suffering from a shortage of refined gasoline.

  In fact, Sudan seemed to be suffering from a shortage of just about everything—except AK-47s and the skinny, vacant-eyed young men who held them. Even around the capital city, many of the roads were little more than windswept tracks of reddish-brown dirt and sand. The heat was so oppressive, the human landscape so destitute, that the city’s poor shantytowns carried an almost apocalyptic quality—as if the surrounding desert, sensing the misery of Khartoum’s residents, were seeking to close itself around this failed human experiment and return the land to its natural state.

  I arrived at the hotel and cleaned up using the trickle of water I could coax from the shower head. Then I called HQ’s Europe-based answering service and let them know that I was okay. (The telephone system wasn’t as bad as I’d expected.) There are only two decent hotels in Khartoum, and I was lucky to be in one of them. Despite the third world atmosphere, it wasn’t cheap—about eighty dollars a night, which is more money than your average Sudanese wage earner sees in a month.

  I had a meeting with a local businessman named Mustafa, a contact I’d cultivated through my commercial front operation in Europe. In Sudan, I couldn’t rely on my usual cover as an international shipping broker looking to close a deal. Private business opportunities for foreign companies are simply too scarce in Sudan to make the ruse credible. And so I’d told Mustafa and his country’s visa-issuing authorities that I was actually on my way to Kenya, and merely sought to visit Sudan en route to evaluate the country’s business climate in general. (To support the tale, I flew on to Nairobi from Khartoum—a scary trip that involved the same sort of white-knuckle flying that I experienced with Ayal and Ronny over the Negev Desert. I hope never again to fly on Kenya Airways.)

  Mustafa was a lot of help. Without any apparent concern for the position of his car’s fuel gauge, he gave me a driving tour of Khartoum. He also took me to Omdurman, a suburb on the western side of the Nile that contains the tomb of Muhammad Ahmad, a legendary Sudanese Islamist who led a revolt against Ottoman and British forces in the late nineteenth century. In some ways, Muhammad Ahmad was a man ahead of his time. A century before political Islam came to full bloom with Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the rise of Sunni fundamentalist movements, he was holding himself out as al-Mahdi al-Muntazar, the Muslim savior of prophecy who would create a perfect Islamic society based entirely on the teachings of the Koran. The pathetic squalor I saw in the city, not to mention the two million lives that had been lost in the country’s religious civil war, bore silent testament to the inevitable endpoint of such eschatological fantasies.

  On the way back from Omdurman, I asked Mustafa if we could stop at the Tutti-Frutti ice cream parlor in Khartoum, a well-known hangout among the few Western travellers Sudan attracts. I wanted him to take me there not because I had a craving for authentic Italian gelato, but because it provided cover to access the terrorists’ bazaar that I needed to photograph. With Mustafa’s help, I got a roll of great tourist shots featuring the two of us posing at various points of strategic interest with other accommodating locals.10

  By now, Mustafa and I were best friends. (I guess I’d learned a thing or two from watching Charles.) When we got back to the hotel, I insisted on giving him some U.S. currency for the gas he used, and he thanked me profusely. I extended a sincere invitation for him to visit me in Europe, where I promised to show him a good time. (During my time as a combatant, my conscience would occasionally bother me about the way I would deceive people like Mustafa for my own purposes, and I looked for ways to help them out when I could.)

  The next day, I picked up my rental car—with a full gas tank, I was happy to observe—and set out to a tourist-spot cover point close to the possible landing zones HQ, Kerouac, and I had identified on the maps before my departure. The key to the planned operati
on would be picking a spot that was far enough out of town not to arouse the interest of locals, yet close enough so that a force of special operations soldiers could get in and out of the city quickly without having to drive for miles.

  Within a few hours, I was able to inspect a variety of potential landing strips. Using the low-tech but relatively accurate means of my car’s odometer, I marked out their coordinates on my map. They were every bit as smooth and flat as the makeshift runway I’d seen days earlier in the Negev. Ayal and Ronny would have been proud.

  The next morning, I held meetings at my hotel with a few local contacts I’d managed to meet through Mustafa. In order to make it plain to any observers that I was actively engaged in commercial pursuits, I conducted these in the lobby. As I drank coffee with businessmen, I was able to make a casual survey of the hotel’s clientele—an interesting mix of NGO representatives, diplomats, foreign teachers, and journalists, many of them presumably waiting on permits to travel to the parts of the country that Sudan doesn’t want appearing on the nightly news.

  Then it was on to the last phase of my intelligence-gathering mission: taking photos of the Iranian embassy’s environs. I drove my rental car to a cover point near the Iranian embassy, then proceeded on foot. My knapsack had a mesh sleeve into which I had inserted my camera with the lens facing outwards. A remote control I carried in my pocket allowed me to snap photos without exposing the camera to public view. Such subterfuge was necessary: I remember Oren telling me that reconnaissance photography is essentially an aggressive act. Pointing and shooting a camera in the spy trade is like pointing and shooting a gun on a more conventional battlefield—it gets you noticed and brings down return fire.

  I was sweating profusely, in part due to the ninety-five-degree-plus heat, in part due to nerves. The Iranian embassy would be employing any number of countermeasures against surveillance, and I was worried about getting too close. From the lobby of a nearby office building, I fired off a number of shots. After visiting the adjacent bank to ask some inane questions about the commercial finance services on offer, I exited the building, snapping photos as I walked back to my vehicle. The sweat was now pouring down my back, and I recalled another one of Oren’s sage sayings: “Al rosh HaGanav bo’er HaKovah” (A hat burns only on a thief ’s head).

  I put the pack on the roof of the vehicle facing the embassy and took more shots. Pretending to fumble with the keys in my pocket, I pressed the remote over and over, listening to the whir-click of the shutter. When I was finished, I put the bag in the car and drove back to the hotel, all the while checking that I was not being followed. I then headed straight for the airport to catch my flight to Nairobi. Once I’d returned safely to Europe, my reports and developed photos were on the first diplomatic pouch back to Israel.

  In the end, however, nothing came of my efforts. Shortly after getting back, I learned that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had scuttled the mission on the grounds that it would only provoke more Hezbollah attacks against other overseas Jewish communities. According to one theory, the Argentine bombings themselves had been acts of purported revenge. (In February 1992, a month before the Buenos Aires embassy attack, Israel’s air force had decimated a Hezbollah motorcade, killing the group’s secretary general, Abbas al-Mussawi. Likewise, shortly before the 1994 AMIA bombing, Israel caught and jailed top Hezbollah leader Mustafa Dirani.) Rabin concluded that a large-scale attack on Hezbollah or its Iranian paymasters would likely bring more of the same, and so called off the Sudan mission. How ironic that a prime minister so concerned with the lives of his fellow Jews, regardless of where they lived, would fall victim to a Jewish assassin a year later.

  9

  THE ROAD TO ANKARA

  Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  It was one of those moments you remember as much for the music you were listening to as what you were doing. It was October 1995, a year after my trip to Khartoum, and I was driving a hardtop silver Mercedes 500SL, doing about 220 kilometers per hour on the Autobahn somewhere between Stuttgart and Munich. On this rare instance, I thought, my career truly did resemble a James Bond movie. Except I doubt Sean Connery, or even Roger Moore, would have been secure enough with their manhood to have had Depeche Mode’s Violator in their car stereo system. I had the volume cranked up, but the roar from the engine was so loud I could barely hear David Gahan belting out “Personal Jesus.”

  In a special magnetic compartment under my car was stashed a container of high explosives. Had it gone off, the explosion would have left a crater in the middle of the Autobahn, and the car’s fine appointments, along with my body parts, would have been strewn all over the Bavarian countryside. But I wasn’t particularly worried. The Mossad’s science and technology division had assured me I would have to drive the car off a cliff or into an oncoming truck to risk blowing the thing—in which case, the lethal effect of the blast would be redundant. As flying bombs go, I was fairly serene. Most people don’t realize that military-grade explosives such as Semtex typically will not detonate without a smaller ignition charge from a blasting cap or detonation cord. Heat itself is not enough: you can hold a match to the stuff and it won’t light up. To demonstrate that point, one of my IDF instructors had done just that in front of a group of terrified cadets.

  The explosive device was earmarked for a second Mercedes heading from Germany to Syria, via a ferry from Venice to Izmir, Turkey. Kerouac didn’t tell me who was driving the car; I’d guessed it was probably a member of Hezbollah or of a radical Palestinian outfit.

  The only thing marring my glorious 007 experience was the fact that I was recovering from pneumonia. And so I had a small bottle of antibiotics in the car, which I was supposed to take once a day. I mention this boring fact not to garner pity, but because that container would play an important part in preventing what almost became one of the most colossal screw-ups of my career. To this day, I’m a big believer in fate, and that little bottle is one of the reasons why.

  Under a clear, bright sky I sped southward into Austria, then through the Brenner Pass and on into the Italian Alps. Every turn in the road brought a new postcard-quality vista. When I got to Venice, I felt disappointed. In all my life, I’d never enjoyed a driving experience so thoroughly.

  I checked into a Venetian hotel across the causeway from the working-class suburb of Mestre. It was Thursday, and I was booked to sail on Saturday night aboard a Turkish Maritime Lines vessel that would arrive in Izmir early Tuesday morning. At some point during the voyage, I would have to transfer the explosives sitting under my car to the target. I wouldn’t detonate the device—that was a job for my operational colleagues at Caesarea and the Israeli military. My only job was to put it in place.

  Why do this at sea? There were two reasons. The first was that we didn’t want to blow him up on European soil. The event would make front-page headlines across the Continent, a professional police investigation would be opened, and—who knows—the Mossad might even be implicated. Instead, we wanted the bomb to go off in a remote part of the Middle East, where exploding cars (and people) are a more common and accepted phenomenon.

  The second reason was that doing the job this way meant the target car would be at my disposal in the dark bowels of a long-distance ferry, away from prying eyes, for two full days and nights. This was a lot less risky than taking my chances in the parking lot of a European office complex or apartment building.

  While in Mestre, I visited a tiny family-run restaurant to meet with a representative from Mossad HQ. Neil was an unassuming, cherubic polyglot with glasses and curly brown hair. He was a brilliant man who’d risen to high office in the Mossad after serving in just about every operational role the agency offers. After discussing our cover story for the meeting (business associates), we talked about the mission in a relatively open fashion, as combatants do when meeting in public places; we don’t speak loudly so that others can hear and, given the technical nature of the job, few wou
ld understand what we are talking about anyway. Not all briefings can be conducted in safe houses, and it’s quite common to meet in cafés and hotel lobbies, as they provide the needed cover for clandestine conversations.

  Being a gourmand of the first order, Neil made a superb dinner companion. We ate a five-course meal with gusto, enjoying not only the fine food but the endearing sight of the owner’s young children scampering underfoot. I can’t say I enjoyed every mission I received, but this one was turning out to be great. I particularly liked the fact that I was working alone, as I had in Khartoum. It was nice to get a break from Charles’s hectoring presence. I would have enjoyed that fine meal a lot less if he had been there lecturing Neil and me about how we should stick to bread and water lest we disobey the rules of kashrut.

  The next day, I did the sightseeing drill—including sipping an exorbitantly priced coffee in the Piazza San Marco among the pigeons and the tables they’d befouled. Then, decked out as a tourist, complete with gelato and camera in hand, I visited the port to collect intelligence, with a particularly keen interest in the security procedures for vehicles.

  I spent a few hours checking out the embarkation area and watching cars roll onto the docked boats. Nothing I saw suggested there was any chance that a discreetly camouflaged package attached to the underside of a vehicle would be discovered by anybody. I wandered over to a bank of pay phones near the cruise-ship terminal building and called an HQ relay to let them know I was good to go. Then I returned to my hotel, went out onto the terrace, and watched the controlled chaos of gondolas and small boats plying the canals.