The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

  The Iranians were moaning and crying in Farsi. I walked up and grabbed them both by the hair, jerking their heads up. “If you or any of your colleagues come back, I am going to take you to some friends of ours in Soweto,” I told them. “They will put a tire around your neck, pour petrol on it, and light it. It’s a very nasty way to die.”

  I asked them if they understood. They nodded and tried to say yes through the tape. Nemati was blubbering, and I thought the fat man was going to have a seizure. We took the duct tape off their mouths.

  Though I’d given them both a solid beating, I never hit either of them in the head. I didn’t want to drop off at the airport two guys who looked like they’d gone fifteen rounds with Lennox Lewis. I also could have killed them. Most people don’t realize how vulnerable the head area is. A single solid blow to the back of the head, or even the brainstem area of the neck, can easily be fatal.

  The four of us drove to the airport in silence. When we pulled up at departures, I gave them my final speech: “You will proceed to the nearest counter and take the first flight to anywhere out of South Africa. I don’t care where as long as it’s not here. We have cameras and security personnel inside who will be watching you.” At this point, Russ started to have a fake conversation on his cellphone with our imaginary NIA colleagues in the terminal. We were both being careful. Airports, unlike hotels and industrial parks, are crawling with all kinds of serious security—not the sort of people you can bluff with tall tales.

  I ended with a pledge that, should they deviate from my instructions, I’d take them to the veldt, shoot them in the legs, and leave them to the hyenas. (Apparently, the awakened sadist in me enjoyed thinking of ways to kill these two using local props.) At this point, Nemati kept praying over and over again in Farsi. “Your details have been circulated to our allies in other countries,” I added. “Tell your superiors to stick to selling caviar and carpets.”

  With that, Russ cut their flex-cuffs with a quick jerk of his expensive Buck knife. The sight of Russ brandishing his knife at them probably scared them much more than all my antics had. The Iranians got out of the car, still blubbering. I thought they looked like sentimental airline passengers crying at the thought of leaving sunny South Africa. I guess a lot of the other departing passengers thought so as well because no one stared. “Have a nice flight,” I said as they walked off.

  We watched them go into the terminal and look around for a departure desk. My guess is they were headed for Lufthansa. (Germany is Iran’s largest trading partner. The MOIS and IRGC both maintain large contingents in the country to watch over dissidents and spy on the West.) Russ and I drove to the warehouse. We cleaned it up, changed the car’s license plates, and went for a drink. I was exhausted.

  “I thought you were going to kill them for a second,” he said, cupping his beer.

  “I really wanted to,” I replied truthfully. He didn’t ask me to elaborate, and that was just fine with me because I couldn’t explain the cascade of anger that had been welling inside of me for so long. The frustration of working with Charles, the suicide bombings, the anti-Semitism had all been digging away at my calm for some time. Russ wasn’t in the Mossad and hadn’t seen the sort of things that I had, and any attempt by me to explain would have come out an incoherent mess.

  We went down to Cape Town because I needed to decompress. We took a tour of the wine farms, and I got soundly drunk and did my best to forget about Mortazavi and Nemati. I flew back to Tel Aviv a day later and filed my reports. I didn’t give them a blow-by-blow account of the rough stuff because I wasn’t sure how far I was allowed to take the beatings. My division head, Itzik, had told me just to make it look very convincing. He left the details to me, but I have to admit that a big part of my omission in reporting the beatings was that I also didn’t feel like lying on a couch talking to a Mossad shrink. I could only imagine the heavy weather they would have made of my emotional state and apparent anger management problem.

  Later on, I heard that Tsomet, the Mossad’s human intelligence division, was sniffing around South Africa, looking for sources to recruit—Iranians, Syrians, the usual suspects. But after a while, they shut down because there weren’t enough targets. Apparently, the IRGC and MOIS contingent that operated out of the embassy had gone home. Somewhere in Tehran and Johannesburg, I hope there are still South African and Iranian bureaucrats trying to figure out what happened. I had no illusions that Tehran had been scared out of South Africa permanently. It’s been more than five years since all of this happened, and for all I know the country is now swarming with Iranian agents. With a country like Iran, the point isn’t to land a knockout punch, but to play for time. Eventually, the people there will grow sick of being lorded over by a clique of aging theocrats, and the ayatollahs will go the way of the Shah. The Mossad’s job is to ensure that day comes before Iran gets the Bomb.

  Meanwhile, the fate of Ron Arad is still a mystery. During a quiet weekend at home, a couple of months after returning to Israel, I was catching up on the Israeli newspapers when I spotted an op-ed written by the pilot who had flown Arad’s F-4 two-seater. He too had bailed out near Sidon. But once they hit the ground, the two were separated. The pilot was rescued in dramatic fashion—holding onto the landing skid of an Israeli rescue helicopter under heavy fire from Lebanese gunmen.

  Writing under a pseudonym to protect his identity, he explained how heavily traumatized he’d been by Arad’s fate—classic survivor’s guilt. One of his coping mechanisms, he wrote, was to fantasize about Arad’s safe return. In this fantasy, the two take off again in their Phantom. Only this time, they both land safely together at their airbase in Israel.

  Arad disappeared two decades ago. But in Iran nothing has changed. It remains the brutal dictatorship Ayatollah Khomeini created in 1979. Even in Canada, you cannot escape it. In 2003, shortly after I returned to British Columbia, Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-born freelance photographer residing in Montreal, was beaten to death in government custody during a visit to Tehran—punishment for photographing the outside of the city’s infamous Evin Prison. The Iranians originally claimed the middle-aged woman had died of either a “stroke” or an “accident.” But on March 31, 2005, Shahram Azam, a former staff physician in Iran’s defense ministry, disclosed the results of his examination of Kazemi, four days after her arrest. Azam reported that Kazemi showed obvious signs of torture, including brutal rape, broken fingers, missing fingernails, a skull fracture, abdominal bruising, and marks from flogging.

  Meanwhile, the country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, continues to maintain close connections with the IRGC. In fact, a former Revolutionary Guards commander, Ezatollah Zarghami, has been named to run Iran’s state television and radio network. And the head of the country’s judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, named a former IRGC commander to be his legislative liaison. Not only is the Iranian government continuing to support terror in Israel, it is now doing the same in Iraq. In October 2005, a senior British official accused the IRGC of supplying infrared trip wires to Iraqi bomb makers through Hezbollah intermediaries. And, of course, we know that Iran supplied most of the sophisticated weaponry that Hezbollah used to kill Israeli soldiers during the brief Lebanon war of 2006.

  Some readers may think I’m no better than these people. Admittedly, I may have sunk to their level for a few dark moments in that Johannesburg warehouse, and dark moments they were. Had Russ not been there to restrain me, I would have pulled the trigger, if only to let go of the murderous rage accumulating inside of me. I had a wife and two children in Israel and the constant threat by Israel’s enemies to annihilate them had created a monster that surprised even me. But in the end, Messrs. Mortazavi and Nemati got to go home to their wives and children. My feelings have not softened since that muggy day in South Africa, and with each passing year since there are more days that I wish I had shot them than days when I am glad that I didn’t. Perhaps that doesn’t sit well with our sensibilities and indulgent Western value system, b
ut as far as I was concerned all I did was administer a few welldeserved welts and bruises. If only Ron Arad, Zahra Kazemi, and the thousands of other victims of Iranian brutality had been so lucky.

  20

  SECRET RELAY

  A man should never be ashamed to own he has been wrong, which is but saying that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

  ALEXANDER POPE

  When I began work with the Mossad in 1988, my instructor Oren told me that each agent is like a box of matches. One by one, the matches are burned up, until there is nothing left but ash. Some of us may have more matches than others. But we all have a finite number.

  It was in early 2001, while working as branch chief in Southeast Asia, that I realized my box was nearly empty. It wasn’t a dramatic realization—certainly nothing resembling that trite set piece from spy movies in which the middle-aged protagonist barely cheats death, then tells his partner, “Man, I’m getting too old for this.” I’d seen it coming for years: a gradual deterioration in job satisfaction brought on by stress and isolation. After the incident in Johannesburg, I knew that, like an old airplane, I was showing signs of mental fatigue.

  The decisive moment came when my superiors asked me to attend a management course—a one-day test designed to evaluate an agent’s decision-making and prioritizing skills through a series of simulated problems. Such requests were reserved for those being considered for command positions back in Israel, and most of my colleagues would have jumped at the opportunity. But not me: the prospect of gossiping over office politics around a Tel Aviv water cooler seemed even less appealing than fieldwork. I was forty years old, still young enough to begin a new career—but only if I acted quickly. It was time to leave the Mossad.

  After giving notice in the summer of 2001, I stayed on the job for several months to help break in my replacement, Klaus. Having worked as a case officer for several years, Klaus already knew the basics of the spy trade. But I still needed to introduce him to my assets in Southeast Asia.

  It was also important for Klaus to understand the nature of the Mossad’s mission in this part of the world. Since the explosion of militant Islam following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Southeast Asia had become a hotbed of fundamentalist terror groups—including al-Qaeda and its homegrown offshoots—seeking to target Israel and its allies.

  Even before 9/11, terrorist organizations and their sponsors were finding it increasingly difficult to work in Europe. Asia’s Muslim areas, including Malaysia, Indonesia, southern Thailand, and parts of the Philippines, provided a friendlier environment for attracting recruits and organizing attacks. And thanks to the links forged among jihadists who’d travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, as well as the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s, local terrorist cells had little trouble communicating with one another.

  As well as briefing Klaus on such matters, I had to teach him the basics of operating in Asia. His previous experience had been gained in Europe, the agency’s traditional hunting grounds. Things were less complicated there. Doing a surveillance detection route on the genteel streets of Paris is one thing; doing it amid the confusion and sweltering heat of Kuala Lumpur is quite another.

  Finally, there was the sensitive issue of religion. Klaus, I noticed, had a habit of conducting his Orthodox Jewish rituals in public. This was a problem. Don’t get me wrong. I have no issue with people of faith. But when Klaus started performing the morning shachar prayer in the waiting lounge of a regional Asian airport, complete with ceremonial tzitzit prayer shawl and tefillin on head and arm, I got nervous. Once his prayers were done, I explained to him—as diplomatically as possible—that not everyone had to know we were Jews. At Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle, that sort of thing wasn’t a big deal. But in this part of the world, things were different. I urged Klaus to go talk to his rabbi. No doubt, he’d agree that a Mossad officer on assignment shouldn’t feel guilty about missing a prayer or two when discretion was the wiser course.

  But such quirks were few and minor. The important thing was that my assets seemed to trust Klaus, which meant they’d likely stay in our Rolodex. As my final trip as an intelligence officer wrapped up, I took comfort in the fact that my territory was being left in competent hands.

  Then, with just days left in Klaus’s training, al-Qaeda terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, and a third into the Pentagon. In an instant, the reams of instructions I’d delivered to my replacement were suddenly obsolete.

  Like everyone else, I remember exactly where I was on September 11, 2001: standing in my hotel room in a Southeast Asian city I’ll leave unidentified, after a long day of meetings, freshly unknotted tie in hand, watching CNN, as I always did before going to bed.

  At first, I thought some amateur pilot with more bravado than brains had miscalculated the height of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. During the first confused minutes, in fact, that was what some news outlets were reporting. But then, as I kept watching, a second plane, United Airlines flight 175, plunged into the South Tower. It was obvious that I was watching a massive terrorist attack.

  For anyone in my profession—and even many outside it—9/11 didn’t come as a complete surprise. Al-Qaeda and other terrorists had dreamed of humbling America for years. It was the scale and sophistication of the operation that astonished me. I’m not an overly profane man, but all I could say was “fuck” in a low, astonished whisper. I suspect millions of other TV watchers around the world uttered that same syllable at the same moment.

  I began to speculate about the enormous planning that went into the attack. Even the relatively simple terrorist attacks that take place in Israel and Iraq typically require weeks, if not months, of planning, as well as the involvement of a variety of logistical and munitions experts. The 9/11 attacks took terrorism to another level, and I wasn’t surprised to learn later that Mohammed Atta and his fellow ringleaders had been planning it since 1999.

  Eyes still glued to the television, I made three phone calls. I called my family back in Israel and then my Dad in Canada. Finally, I dialed Klaus in his room. “Are you watching?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he replied.

  “I’m calling the office. I suggest you get some sleep because we’re not going to get any for a while. Barring any instructions from the office, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Almost immediately after hanging up, I heard the ring tone from my cell phone—a “sanitized” unit with an unattributable number, working off a SIM card I’d purchased through a local pay-as-you-go service. It was Etti, now the deputy head of my department.

  “There’s been an attack on the Twin Towers in New York,” she told me. Her tone was matter of fact—as if planes smashing into skyscrapers were a common nuisance. “You need to get to an embassy. We will probably have further instructions at that point. It’s going to be a zoo around here. The Americans are going to be at our gates very soon, looking for whatever information we’ve got.”

  I knew she had plenty of other calls to make, so I kept the chitchat to a minimum. After hanging up, I called a regional airline and secured two flights to Canberra, Australia—site of the nearest Israeli embassy equipped with a Mossad communication station that serviced the Mossad’s regional Tevel officer. Then I slept—or tried to, anyway.

  I’d started hearing the name Osama bin Laden as far back as the early 1990s, when he was a mujahideen leader in Afghanistan. (As 9/11 conspiracy theorists constantly remind us, he was then allied with the Americans, fighting his jihad against the Soviets with CIA backing.) When the Twin Towers fell, my thoughts drifted back to 1996, when I met with a gaunt low-level analyst from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center who asked us if we had anything on Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. This was shortly after the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen American servicemen. At the time, it seemed like a large death toll. Seen in retrospect, it looked like peanuts.

  For obvious reasons, Israel’s intelligence services
have traditionally focused on Palestinian terrorist groups and other local threats. But in the 1980s, the Mossad had christened a new department, the World Jihad branch, to track global Islamic terror organizations then sprouting up in Southeast Asia, Kashmir, Pakistan, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. It was a strange department, because up until the 1990s, most terrorist organizations were secular in nature. This new hybrid of Islamic extremism and terror was the tip of a very big iceberg that was headed in our direction.

  Unfortunately, like the CIA, the World Jihad branch never cracked al-Qaeda. There’s been a lot of speculation about whether anyone in Israel knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand. Witness the stubborn theory—originally spread by Al-Manar TV, a Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese television station—that four thousand Jews stayed home from their World Trade Center jobs on September 11, 2001. As a former Mossad agent, allow me to set the record straight: we knew nothing.

  During a visit to Mossad HQ in late 2002, about a year after my retirement, I caught up with Etai, the head of the Mossad’s World Jihad branch. I remember putting the question directly to him: “Did you know a major attack was about to be perpetrated on U.S. soil?”

  He looked at me squarely and replied: “We intercepted plenty of suspicious chatter. And sometimes, there were even references to this or that attack. But we didn’t have a clue about 9/11.”

  At the moment the Twin Towers fell, I learned, Etai was in Poland on an intelligence exchange program, as a guest of that country’s secret service. Al-Manar viewers take note: if the Israelis knew anything, I doubt the head of the branch mandated with covering al-Qaeda would have been sitting in Warsaw, suffering its lousy autumn weather and making polite industry chitchat about lord only knows what with his Polish hosts.