The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  In such cases, the objective is to extricate the agent in as discreet a manner as possible. But sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, fate has other plans. For instance, when a Mossad operative was caught bugging a Hezbollah terrorist’s apartment in Berne, Switzerland, in 1998, the Swiss intelligence service did its best to sweep the matter under the rug and released the officer. Ironically, the Israeli media blew the lid off the story and the Swiss government had no alternative but to launch a criminal investigation.

  Tevel also acts as a sort of “shadow” foreign ministry by maintaining covert quasi-diplomatic relations with the governments of nations normally considered hostile to Israel, such as Indonesia and the Arab Gulf countries. It also maintains relations with stateless groups, such as the Kurds in northern Iraq.

  Finally, Tevel arranges training courses and seminars to allied services on subjects of Israeli expertise, such as dealing with Islamist terror. India, in particular, has benefited enormously from the counterterrorism training it has received through Tevel. This should not be surprising; from a security point of view, Kashmir resembles nothing so much as a giant West Bank.

  When I began work at Tevel, I got a lucky break. Because of my English-language fluency and Canadian background, I was seen as a good fit for the North American department, a plum assignment that would allow me to work on Tevel’s most critical liaison relationship— that between the Mossad and the CIA. My mandate was to maintain the bilateral intelligence exchange on counterterrorism issues with my American counterparts and to develop joint operations on terrorist targets of mutual interest. I also had to cultivate good interpersonal working relationships with my CIA and FBI colleagues as a means to ensuring that things ran smoothly.

  When I showed up for work in the fall of 1996, a six-foot-six-inch giant named Guy was assigned to show me the ropes. His job was similar to mine, except he managed the Mossad’s counter-proliferation liaison relationship with the CIA.

  Like most of the new colleagues I was now meeting, Guy didn’t know what I had been up to before joining HQ. And I liked it that way. I saw my job at Tevel as an opportunity to leave behind the petty annoyances and rivalries of my previous role and make a fresh start in a new environment.

  By the time I got the job, my family already had been living in France for five years. Uprooting them to a Tel Aviv suburb did not make for an easy transition. The kids—now ages twelve and six—were leaving behind friends and entering an entirely different education system. Dahlia had a serious lifestyle change to deal with, as well: I no longer had the enhanced pay and perks that went with an overseas assignment, so she had to look for a job.

  It is worth saying a word here about the economics of intelligence work. In the Mossad, as in every intelligence agency, most experienced agents prefer to work on home soil. As a result, agencies have to provide large financial and professional incentives for serving overseas. This means, for instance, that combatants are credited triple value for years worked abroad when their pension entitlement is calculated.

  The flipside is that domestic desk jobs typically pay poorly, because there is an overabundance of qualified individuals willing to staff them. In the households of many of my Tel Aviv colleagues, the non-Mossad spouse was the primary breadwinner. (This was certainly true of my wife, who got a plum job in Israel’s booming tech sector.)

  Ex-combatants such as myself are relatively rare at Mossad HQ. Having been at the sharp end of the Mossad’s operational work overseas, they are treated with deference. There are also a few formal perks—such as receiving tenure within a year, as opposed to three years for other Mossad staff. On the other hand, ex-combatants are outsiders: most are foreign born, and all are novices at navigating the bureaucracy that their colleagues have spent years mastering. Overall, I was happy to be back in Tel Aviv, but there were many times I asked myself why I’d willingly gone from being a well-paid master of my domain to a mid-level civil servant fighting the morning traffic jams.

  I was now what is known as a deskman and, despite the cut in pay and different occupational dynamic, I was working in one of the best jobs in the Mossad. It was both fascinating and exhausting to bring myself up to speed on the workings of this unique component of the Office. I came from an operational culture that was compartmentalized from the HQ way of working and I now had to learn everything as fast as I humanly could. I started with my new place of work. I found that the responsibilities within Tevel were divided up on a regional basis. The various departments included Far East, Western Europe “A” (northern Europe, including Germany, France, and the U.K.), Western Europe “B” (southern Europe, including Italy, Spain, and Greece), Eastern Europe, North America, Africa, Latin America (since absorbed into the North America department, which is now called The Americas), and another department that maintains covert intelligence ties with Muslim countries. Ill-informed Mossad staffers sometimes treated Tevel as if it were a glorified communications department. But, in fact, it brings in some seventy percent of the intelligence the Mossad receives—a testament to the value of goodwill and mutual exchange in international relations.

  In our department, the relationship with the CIA was managed through a number of channels in Tel Aviv, including face-to-face exchanges, group briefings, and memos replying to intelligence requests from each other’s HQ. I worked opposite CIA officers from the agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), a body created in the 1980s to coordinate counterterrorist activities among various U.S. agencies. My perspective was unique, because I was the only Mossad officer doing liaison work with both the CIA and FBI. The experience taught me an enormous amount about why America—and, by extension, the entire Western world—was so unprepared for 9/11 and its aftermath.

  Traditionally, the number two at the CTC is a senior FBI officer appointed as a gesture to demonstrate the good working relations between these two agencies. In reality, I learned, the CIA and FBI despise one another, and even actively thwart each other when they can get away with it.

  Much of our work was dictated by the terror threat-du-jour, which meant I had a steady diet of interrupted sleep, all-nighters, and working weekends. My plan to ease into a predictable nine-to-five didn’t quite work out as planned.

  Like a fire station that sends a truck out every time someone pulls an alarm, we treated each intelligence alert as if it were the real thing. Keeping up with all the threats often meant sixteen-hour shifts. I did it because it was my job—but also because if I got lazy or screwed up, people might die as a result. Dahlia wasn’t particularly impressed, however, and I didn’t blame her. We’d come back to Israel on the expectation that I’d be home more often, but I was still spending a lot more time at the office than I was with my kids. And on top of everything else, I was studying at university in my spare time.

  I’d invariably end up getting a phone call in the wee hours of the morning from the Office’s communications center, which operates 24/7, telling me that we had received information from one of our sources about an imminent attack on an Israeli and/or U.S. target somewhere in the world. Many times, the threats I was dealing with seemed real. Other times, I was quite sure they were bogus. The problem was that both the United States and Israel had a policy of putting their entire security and intelligence forces on alert just about every time a guy named Ahmed or Mohammed walked into an embassy asking for money in exchange for vague details about a massive attack supposedly in the works. With the rise of global terrorism, such frauds have become something of a cottage industry.

  I’d have to drive into work and read the source report given to me by another sleep-deprived soul from the Mossad’s counterterrorism department. Together we’d assess the information and simultaneously request permission to pass the details on to my colleagues in the CIA. We always managed to get the information released because no one was prepared to withhold information to another service when their citizens were at risk.

  I’d then put together a paraphrased memo, fax it to my American coll
eague on the secure link, and wait for them to ask a million follow-up questions, which I couldn’t answer because all we knew was what was in the memo. The device we used for encrypted communications was known as the STU, which is a special telephone and fax device that, with the push of a button, switches to a secure mode that ensures any eavesdropper will hear nothing but digitized gibberish. (A secondary, somewhat comical effect is that the decrypted voices come across on the other end as if they were emitted by chipmunks with a speech impediment.) In modern STU systems, a unique encryption code is generated electronically every time a secure call is made. But our 1998-era apparatus used a clunkier protocol, whereby the same code was used for a month, and then changed manually (by me, as it happens) when we received the new code from the Agency.

  I mention the STU not just because it’s an interesting piece of technology, but because it exemplifies the way the Mossad and the CIA work together. The equipment, which belongs to the CIA, is kept at Mossad HQ in a locked, soundproof room, specially constructed by our science and technology division. The phone itself is sealed by the CIA with special holographic stickers to prevent our opening it. This odd arrangement serves as a metaphor for the relationship between the two intelligence services: intimate and co-operative—to a point. The CIA, having been penetrated by Soviet moles, has some serious trust issues when it comes to outsiders.

  The other main liaison channel was through our station in Washington. Our officers would meet with their CIA counterparts at Langley, Virginia, and perform the same function as the CIA station representatives did in Tel Aviv. Maintaining an office in Washington was important, as it allowed us to have a presence close to America’s primary power circles. But it also caused a turf war with the Mossad’s Tel Aviv station, since both offices wanted the relationship with the Americans managed on their end. The winner of such battles was often decided, indirectly, by the Americans. If the CIA’s Tel Aviv chief of station was a powerful appointee, as Stan Moskowitz was under Bill Clinton, then our Washington office pulled the short straw.

  Aside from Uri (our volcanic department head), his deputy, Guy, and Lucinda, an English girl who had served eleven years in Caesarea before joining Tevel, there were three other members of our department. We all shared Uri’s secretary, and we had access to a departmental translator for translating documents from Hebrew into English. That was the extent of our manpower, which explained why our department was by far the hardest working in the division.

  Uri was your classic powder-keg type personality. Every issue was handled as if it were a major crisis. He had never served on the operational side of the fence but had instead risen through the ranks in the liaison division. He had previously done a stint in Washington as number two of a three-person Mossad station and had a good feel for the Americans. His favorite expression was “This is a carnival of insanity !” which was so weird that it always made me laugh.

  He had his critics within the department, but Uri was highly intelligent, and led by example as one of the most diligent individuals I’d ever met. He also was forced to work under immense pressures. Both the Mossad director general and the division head had him at their beck and call whenever they needed information the United States might find valuable. Because of the enormous importance of the CIA-Mossad relationship to U.S-Israel relations in general, he was even faced with urgent requests passed down directly from the prime minister’s office. Finally, he also had to contend with Stan Moskowitz, a self-important Beltway climber who drove around Tel Aviv in the back seat of a white Mercedes sedan. There was no love lost between the two men. And the mere mention of Moskowitz’s name usually was followed by some malediction uttered by Uri.

  Moskowitz was a Jew from the Bronx. But odd though it may seem, Israelis do not cheer when a Jewish person is appointed to a top job like chief of station Tel Aviv. There’s always a feeling that the Jewish appointee might need to overcompensate to dispel any doubts about his or her loyalty to the United States. We’d seen it many times: being a badass to the Israelis was presented as evidence of being a fair broker.

  The number two at the CIA station was a very personable and hardworking case officer named Mike who did all the real administration tasks. I liked Mike, an athletic, fifty-something former marine officer who’d become a successful case officer in Africa (and elsewhere) in the Agency’s clandestine service. He looked about thirty-five years old, and I often told him that his portrait was aging in someone’s attic. The moment I met him at Mossad HQ in 1996, I could tell he was from the operational side of the fence, and he knew the same of me. We both regarded our respective HQs’ bureaucracy and power plays with the eyeball-rolling disdain that all field men share.

  There was also Pete, an old boy from Oklahoma who had served with the CIA during the Vietnam era. He was full of down-home sayings like “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass.” When he got together with Roscoe, the station’s admin officer, they sounded like characters from a Hee Haw sketch.

  When I started off at Tevel, I was sharing an office with Guy. But soon after I started, he moved upstairs a floor to take over the nuclear weapons branch of the counter-proliferation department, and was replaced in the North America department by Danny, a newly minted twenty-something graduate of the Mossad’s case officer course. He’d come to Israel from the United States with his family in the mid-1980s, and had also spent some of his adult years in east Asia.

  Every year on the Fourth of July, our CIA colleagues would invite members of Tevel’s North America department to the U.S. ambassador’s party at his seaside residence on the sandy cliffs of Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. In keeping with the crudest anti-American stereotypes, the ambassador’s staff would set up food stands sponsored by such worldwide culinary legends as Burger King, McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. Danny and I loved the stuff. One year, he and I brought garbage bags and filled them up with this valuable loot. The Marine guards laughed at us, but when I got home I was a hero with my kids, for whom the Fourth of July was synonymous with an all-you-can-eat feast of Whoppers and chocolate donuts. (They normally ate a healthy Mediterranean diet, so we didn’t mind indulging them once a year.)

  A few months after I joined the team, Uri decided I would also take on liaison duties with the newly opened FBI station in Tel Aviv (which was formally described as the office of the FBI’s legal attaché, or “Legat” for short). Legat was manned by two FBI agents named Paul and Wayne. Like an inordinate number of FBI agents, Paul was a Mormon, and hailed from sin-filled Las Vegas. He was tall, distant, and patrician. His wife suffered from health problems, but she was a lovely and engaging woman who had mothered half a dozen sons. This was to be Paul’s last posting before retirement.

  His deputy, Wayne, was a Jew from Chicago, a Ph.D. who considered himself an expert on Persian and Arabic culture. He was short, bespectacled, and somewhat timid—what Yiddish-speakers would call a nebbish. Neither he nor Paul gave me any reason to doubt their professional competence, but in an organization like the FBI individual skills don’t count for much: both men had been ground down by their agency’s bureaucratic bungling and petty turf wars.

  This Odd Couple pair were often undermined by their own HQ, which seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in keeping foreign FBI offices in the dark on key files. In many cases, key information about FBI activities in Israel would come to me through my colleagues in Washington before it would come to Wayne and Paul. Wayne, in particular, was humiliated by this treatment, and vented his anger to me with extraordinary candor. One time, he called me in such a froth that Paul had to physically wrestle the phone away from him. I felt bad for both of them. Whatever petty slights I’d endured in the Mossad, it was nothing compared to what these men had to go through. Even more bizarre was the fact that FBI HQ sometimes failed to communicate at all with its Legats and field offices. Often the Mossad officer in Washington would meet with his FBI counterpart and receive updates and memos about joint operations, meetings, and visits to take place in Israel
and Washington as part of the bilateral relationship between the services. After such a meeting, he would cable me a report detailing the various topics discussed. But the FBI never bothered to tell their own Legats anything, which meant it would fall to me to update them about things they should have heard through their own FBI channels—including basic information like what their HQ was planning and who would be visiting from stateside. On more than one occasion, I found myself playing amateur psychologist to Legat staff members who would complain bitterly about this state of affairs.

  If anything, I thought I was being given too much authority. In particular, I argued with Uri that the relationship with the FBI really belonged to the Israel Security Agency, our domestic security service. The ISA had been lobbying hard to have a direct relationship with the FBI independent of the Mossad, and I was sympathetic. Although the Mossad is supposed to handle all liaison with foreign intelligence services, the FBI is essentially a glorified law enforcement agency. At the time, moreover, there already was an ISA officer in Washington who was part of the Mossad’s D.C. station. And by all accounts, he was managing the liaison relationship between his shop and the FBI quite well.

  I also pointed out that the Mossad is a foreign intelligence service that on occasion operates in breach of other nations’ sovereignty. The strait-laced Joe Friday types at the FBI were paranoid that the Mossad was trying to spy on the U.S., and putting the two agencies in liaison contact was not exactly a match made in heaven.

  Eventually, my view prevailed; the FBI file did pass over to the ISA. The only caveat was that the ISA update the Mossad on their joint goings-on. It was a fair and logical arrangement, a triumph of common sense over bureaucratic inertia and turf squabbles.

  Before that happened however, the Mossad and the FBI had one last hurrah together, an operation centerd around a Hezbollah agent operating in the U.S.