The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  John, Pete, and I jumped into the lead Passat, and I gave Yigal, our driver, the signal to make for the Sheraton. As the car roared off, I reached up and placed the strobe on the roof. Sure enough, we immediately hit a traffic jam on the No. 1 Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. Yigal managed to avoid the gridlock by riding on the shoulder—until some idiot ahead of us tried the same trick without looking in his rear-view mirror first. We were doing about 430 feet an hour when Yigal hit the brakes, almost rear-ending the jackass.

  The next day, security was especially tight at the PM’s office: Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated just two years earlier, and the place was swarming with buff, heavily armed people from the ISA’s protective security division.

  In the few minutes before Tenet’s motorcade appeared at the PMO, I noticed a white Peugeot 605 sedan pull into the secure parking area. It was one of the Mossad DG’s cars, and I recognized his driver, Golan, as he stepped out to open the back door. Ephraim Halevy emerged and stood waiting for Tenet. Rather than leave him standing idly, I walked over and shook his hand. I liked Halevy, and was gratified by this rare opportunity to spend some one-on-one time with him.

  Halevy was British born, a nephew of Sir Isaiah Berlin, the renowned political philosopher and historian. Many considered him remote and donnish, but I could understand his sense of social detachment: he was a foreign-born Jew. Being an Israeli-born sabra is still a badge of honor. (In my case, even after living in Israel for many years, and serving in both its military and intelligence services, I was often jokingly called Kanadi, or Canadian, by my colleagues. They meant no harm, but the appellation served as a constant reminder that I, like everyone else, was marked by my birth.)

  Halevy reminded me of George Smiley—John le Carré’s fictional spymaster, as famously brought to life on screen by the late Alec Guinness—perhaps more than anyone else I encountered in my career. Like Smiley, he was bookish and reserved, while at the same time passionate about his cause—Israel, the Jewish people, and their continued survival. As a young child, he endured the Nazi Blitz in Britain, a formative experience that allowed him to appreciate the same brand of murderous hatred when it manifested itself in Middle Eastern garb following his emigration to Israel in 1948.

  Despite his fame and power, Halevy was humble. I recall one day being passed a personal letter from his secretariat on the top floor of Mossad HQ, which I was supposed to hand deliver to the liaison officer in London. I was permitted to read the note, and saw that it was a personal missive from Halevy to British playwright Tom Stoppard (author of the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, among other famous works), whom Halevy had never met.

  Stoppard is also Jewish, and he endured a similarly tumultuous childhood during the Second World War. In his note, Halevy reached out to Stoppard by lamenting all the common travails they’d endured in their younger years. It was a poignant letter that seemed entirely motivated by empathy rather than by any desire on Halevy’s part to ingratiate himself with a famous personality. It says something about Halevy’s humility that he started the letter out by explaining his job position as director general of the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service. This was during a period when the Mossad DG’s name appeared regularly in every major newspaper in the world. I’m sure Tom Stoppard would have known who Ephraim Halevy was.

  At the prime minister’s office, I exchanged a few pleasantries with Halevy, and he inquired how the visit was proceeding. I told him that it was going off without a hitch and, barring any unforeseen incidents, was likely to remain as such. He nodded and I escorted him into the entrance of the building and then continued my vigil outside to wait for Tenet’s arrival.

  Once the motorcade arrived, Tenet had a cordial meeting with Netanyahu and a clutch of diplomats—Danny, Uri, and me included. There was much general discussion of the ongoing peace process, and the PM duly praised the CIA’s efforts. It was mostly bromides about the need to co-operate and promote democratic principles in the world, but there was also some substantive discussion, and Netanyahu didn’t hide his disdain for Arafat. Tenet was savvy enough not to make any remarks signalling his commitment one way or the other. I don’t know if he was buying into Clinton’s peace plan, but he wasn’t about to let on in a room full of Israelis looking for signs of dissent.

  Next, we took off for the IDF’s headquarters, where I flashed my military ID card at the front gate. The document was supposed to allow me access to any military installation in the country. Unfortunately, the guard didn’t recognize it and called his superior, at which point I had to go through the same discussion with a very serious young lieutenant. (This is why diplomatic motorcades generally have an advance car ten minutes ahead—so the VIP himself doesn’t have to sit there waiting through such shenanigans.) I could have ordered the man to do what I wanted in a matter of seconds merely by pulling rank as a Mossad officer, but Mossad rules forbade doing this. All I was permitted to tell the lieutenant and his boss was that I was a special assistant in the “prime minister’s office.” (The vagueness of this job description made it useful in a wide variety of situations. In fact, even as late as 2003, long after my departure from the Mossad, I would describe myself in this way in the credit line of articles that I published in Western newspapers.)

  After Tenet’s visit to IDF HQ, the motorcade sped off to the last meeting at Mossad HQ, where we all took the elevator from the main entrance atrium to the DG’s suite on the top floor. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the only foreign intelligence official in the world who is received in this way; all others, regardless of rank, must meet in the Mossad’s liaison meeting rooms.

  This was the meeting I was waiting for. I knew it was a golden opportunity for Halevy to tell Tenet what my colleagues and I already knew—that the Mega Affair was merely a misunderstanding arising from a single misinterpreted comment on a bugged phone line. The tone of the meeting was friendly—jovial, even. After a routine discussion of the many issues in which the two services have a shared interest, Halevy surprised everyone there—including me—by passing on a prime, top-secet intelligence resource, one that would supply the CIA with a steady stream of data for years. While I cannot divulge details, I can report that Tenet was impressed.

  Unlike Tenet’s meeting with the PM, this one did not deal much with the implementation of the Oslo Accords. Halevy merely warned Tenet about Arafat’s duplicity, and affirmed the fact that the Mossad, as an apolitical government agency, could not be involved in peacemaking. Despite the heavy subject matter of their discussions, there was an obvious warmth and chemistry between the two men, and it was gratifying to see them discussing matters on such good terms. While there is a lot of distrust between the two agencies, there is also a converse, friendlier side to the relationship, which proves that the CIA and the Mossad could accomplish just about anything together if they set aside their mutual suspicion. Some of the incredibly successful joint operations the two agencies have performed are monuments to their respective strengths.

  Throughout it all, not a word was said about Mega. Whether this was because the Mossad had provided the CIA with the appropriate explanations through back channels (which I doubt), or because Halevy believed it was too hot a topic to be brought up in mixed company, I have no idea. But I remember being disappointed that he did not take the opportunity of this august meeting to definitively put the Mega scandal to rest.

  The boring truth is that Mega had nothing to do with a Mossad secret agent buried deep in the heart of U.S. national security. It’s half of the Mossad cryptonym for the CIA’s Israel branch liaison at their HQ in Langley. Just as Tenet was known as “Greaseball,” this particular CIA officer—with whom the tiny Mossad station in Washington met almost daily—was known as “Megazord,” a whimsical nickname derived from a character on the sci-fi children’s television program Power Rangers. A Mossad officer had picked the cryptonym off the computer because his kid happened to like the show.

  The Washington Mossad station in questio
n was a two-person outfit consisting of Yoram, a U.K.-educated Mossad veteran, and Irit, a thirty-something intelligence analyst. Irit’s liaison posting in D.C. was her first stint overseas, and it was her inexperience that led to the whole scandal.

  Here is what happened:

  Israel’s ambassador in Washington, then Eliahu Ben-Elissar, called Irit at her embassy office and requested a copy of a letter written by former secretary of state Warren Christopher to Yasser Arafat concerning the 1997 Hebron Agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.

  Not knowing how to handle a request of this sort, Irit called Yoram, her superior, on a normal landline telephone to his home in Chevy Chase. She passed on the ambassador’s request and asked if they should take it to Mega, which would have been an entirely appropriate and aboveboard thing to do.

  Yoram, apparently irritated by his own ambassador’s request, told her flatly, “No, this is not something we can use Mega for.” The comment was heard by a National Security Agency snooper, who passed it up the chain. And along the line, someone apparently thought it was juicy enough to leak to the Washington Post. The story that touched off the scandal was based on a verbatim rendering of the leaked NSA intercept. This in itself served as evidence to us in the Mossad that someone with a political agenda hostile to the Mossad-CIA relationship stood behind the leak. NSA transcripts are classified top secret and their dissemination is very controlled. (I wasn’t surprised years later when I read that newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak outed Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer, in retaliation for public criticisms made by her husband about the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq.) If there was any scandal at all, it was that the NSA had bugged the Israeli embassy and the residences of its staff, which suggests that, in the late 1990s, the U.S. intelligence community was spending a lot of its precious time and resources chasing allies instead of terrorists. In any case, the NSA should have known that Israel didn’t need them or some super-secret mole to find out about Christopher’s letter to Arafat. There were plenty of Palestinians ready to tell us that. Netanyahu knew the contents of the letter within two weeks of its being sent to Arafat.

  Despite the manner in which his words were misinterpreted, Yoram was right to deny his underling’s request. The Mossad does not pester the CIA liaison with queries that are unrelated to intelligence matters. Certainly, during my tenure as a liaison officer, I never called up my CIA or FBI counterparts to ask for copies of diplomatic correspondence or the like.

  And that’s really all there was to it—except for one little six-degrees-of-separation detail: Mega, as we all knew in Tevel’s North America department, was none other than Harry, the same smooth CIA Hezbollah analyst who was visiting us in Tel Aviv for talks when two of our combatants were captured in Jordan.

  To my knowledge, this true version of the Mega scandal has not been publicly revealed prior to the publication of this book. The real irony is that if Irit had simply said “Harry” instead of “Mega,” the whole brouhaha would have been avoided. I don’t know why Irit used a cryptonym on an open line anyway and can only put it down to her inexperience.

  The morning after Tenet’s visit to the PA, Danny and I stood on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport next to the stairs of Tenet’s U.S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter as the CIA director approached to say his farewells. He shook our hands, and his parting words to us were “I wish I could have spent more time with you guys.”

  “Me, too,” I said. But what I really wanted to say was, “Say hi to Harry for me!”

  16

  JUST CALL ME MR. BOB

  Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

  AFRICAN PROVERB

  My first face-to-face encounter with the entity the world now knows as al-Qaeda began on Friday, August 7, 1998, the day the group detonated truck bombs outside U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 291 innocents, including twelve U.S. citizens (among them the unreported death of a CIA resident officer of the Agency’s Nairobi station), and injuring over 4,500 African bystanders. On August 7, I was at home in Israel, enjoying a rare day off, but soon after the blasts my pager went off. It was an urgent request to call the Mossad’s 24/7 communications center. I checked in by phone, then raced to HQ in my tiny Renault, and ran up the two flights of stairs to the counterterrorism department.

  There, I found Etti, now an analyst in the World Jihad branch (known informally as the “department of awful Ahmeds”), and a few others studying the cable traffic from our liaison station in Nairobi. I noticed Etti had a cigarette going; a tough old hand like Etti could get away breaking the no-smoking rule under these circumstances. She greeted me with her usual flurry of casual obscenities and handed me a stack of reports that brought me up to speed.

  I sat at my desk and took a deep breath. As the point man in the Mossad’s counterterrorism liaison relationship with the CIA and FBI, I knew my phone was about to start ringing off the hook. The first call came from Mike at the CIA station in Tel Aviv. After commiserating over the bombings in general terms, he hung up and called me back on the secure telephone unit. Mike’s voice warbled through the line as he went through a series of questions. Did we know anything about the attacks? Had we received any prior warnings? Could the Mossad help find the perpetrators?

  I answered no to the first two questions and a definite yes to the third.

  In the summer of 1998, the Mossad and CIA were exchanging daily memos on a number of liaison issues: unconventional weapons proliferation; Islamic terrorism; and the activities of rogue states such as Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Iraq—to name a few. Sometimes, the memos were exchanged during face-to-face meetings held in the liaison division’s conference rooms. At other times, they were exchanged at the Mossad’s front gate in plain manila envelopes. Mike usually called to find out if any U.S. citizens had been killed or injured in the latest terrorist attack on Israeli soil by Hamas or Islamic Jihad (almost two hundred thousand American citizens live in Israel). Now he was calling me because his country had been attacked directly. The evolution in our relationship was grim confirmation of something I’d instinctively realized years before: Israel’s battle would eventually become the world’s.

  Mike and I agreed to set aside other matters and work single-mindedly on the African file. Over the next seventy-two hours, I leaned hard on the Mossad’s counterterrorism department, calling on Etti and her colleagues repeatedly for any tidbit of information the Americans might find useful. Etti dismissed me as a nudnik, a Yiddish term that translates roughly to “boring pest.” But I wanted to show the CIA that the Mossad was eager to help America in its time of need.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out who had committed the embassy bombings. On February 23 of that same year, Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri (the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was soon to be subsumed into al-Qaeda), issued a fatwa telling followers that “to kill Americans and their allies, civilians, and military is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able.” A few months later, bin Laden told ABC News that al-Qaeda intended to launch attacks on U.S. targets around the world. Shortly thereafter, in July, U.S. and local authorities succeeded in foiling a planned attack by al-Jihad al-Islami (also known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad) on the U.S. embassy in Tirana, Albania. (Those terrorists were promptly extradited to Egypt, where they were likely interrogated and executed after a speedy, meaningless trial.)

  A few days after the embassy attacks, I found myself in a room with Uri, the liaison department head; Etai, head of the counterterrorism department’s World Jihad branch; and Etti. We were watching video footage from Nairobi taken shortly after the bombing by a team of Israel Security Agency counterterrorism experts and a contract civilian struct
ural engineer. It was horrific to watch; ruined and dismembered bodies were strewn everywhere and many of them were charred and smoking. Some of the people were clearly still alive and had been spared bleeding to death only because their wounds were instantaneously cauterized by the flash of the explosion. Many people were trapped under the rubble, and those that had the strength to do so were screaming. To have been there must have been to witness hell on earth.

  In our professional capacities, we’d all seen the results of suicide bombings before. But this one was particularly awful. The Kenyans were clearly unprepared to deal with such a scenario, and mass confusion ruled. Even hours after the blast, when the footage was taken, wounded victims were still staggering about. No doubt, dozens died for lack of timely medical care.

  Sadly, Israel is experienced like no other nation on earth in dealing with such post-attack emergency-management scenarios. In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the wounded typically are cared for within minutes. And it’s not uncommon for commercial venues that have been attacked to be up and running within days, as if nothing had happened. The speed reflects the proficiency of our first responders and forensics teams. But such haste also carries apolitical message to the terrorists: “Yes, you hurt us, but life goes on.” Personally, I think the bravest people in the world are the shop and café owners who open their doors again after having suffered a terrorist attack. That takes more guts and determination than strapping on an explosive belt and blowing up innocent men, women, and children.

  I watched the video with a mix of revulsion and anger. There was a personal connection for me: by coincidence, I had been in Kenya only the previous year with my Dad. He had invited me to go on safari, and it was one of the best times we’d ever shared together. I loved the place, warts and all.