The Volunteer

by Michael Ross

Most of the embassies in Canberra are located in a lush suburb called Yarralumla, and mimic the architectural style of their home countries. The Israeli embassy is a case in point, a small, tasteful structure built in the Mediterranean art deco style that’s popular in Tel Aviv. It’s a short walk from its more grandiose American counterpart, a large red-brick colonial mansion that sits imposingly on a hilltop.

  As our taxi neared Turrana Street, Klaus and I were met by a roadblock manned by the Australian Federal Police (AFP). In the background, I could see buses evacuating U.S. embassy personnel. Despite flashing my diplomatic passport to all and sundry, I could not convince the AFP to allow us into the diplomatic neighborhood. Being unaccredited, I didn’t have the necessary ID card that is supposed to accompany the diplomatic credentials. I told the driver there was a fat tip in it for him if he circled around to the other side of the U.S. embassy. He immediately complied. (No doubt, it was the most exciting fare he’d ever received: Canberra is quite possibly the most boring capital city in the world.) After being dropped off near the Polish embassy, just three hundred fifty feet from Israel’s, Klaus and I made a dash for it as the AFP scanned for traffic in the other direction.

  The Israeli embassy in Canberra has a Mossad liaison station, complete with a “strong-room”—a small chamber, secured by a bankstyle vault door, that contains classified material, as well as facilities for transmitting and receiving encrypted communications. When we arrived, the building was officially closed because of the 9/11 attacks. But the security officer and the ambassador, Garbi Levi, were onsite.

  I went into the ambassador’s office to brief him on what I knew. I didn’t have much to tell him, but the mere act of sitting down for a conversation was an important courtesy, something I did with every Israeli ambassador when I was visiting a diplomatic mission. You never knew when such small acts of kindness would need to be repaid. We were traveling on diplomatic documents, after all, and if I got myself into trouble, I’d be relying on the ministry of foreign affairs to deal with the official fallout.

  Unlike some of my Mossad colleagues, I had a lot of respect for the diplomatic side of Israel’s overseas operations. Yes, they spend a lot of their time performing eye-glazing protocol functions. But being Israelis, they also face a lot of danger—and unlike most intelligence agents, they don’t have the benefit of operating undercover. Even low-level employees at Israeli embassies and consulates are potential targets for terrorists, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites. When overseas Israeli diplomats are taken to task for the Israeli Defense Forces’ allegedly heavy-handed counterterrorist tactics, I always wonder how they can resist responding to such lectures by asking, “And which one of us checked the underside of his car for explosives before driving his kids to school this morning?”

  I’d met Levi on a few previous occasions. He was a smart, solidly built, compact man with a head of thick white hair. He also struck me as kind and generous in that gruff Israeli manner, offering up the use of his chauffeur-driven armored Volvo S80 whenever he wasn’t using it.

  This was just half a day after the 9/11 attacks, and Levi still looked shaken as he watched CNN on the big-screen TV in his office. “How did this happen?” he asked me as I walked in.

  Obviously, it was a question I couldn’t answer. On September 12, 2001, who could? And yet my immediate reaction was to find something meaningful to say. As an intelligence officer, I felt embarrassed to stand there and tell him I hadn’t a clue. (I can only imagine how much more acute the embarrassment was for my CIA counterparts, who were at that moment presumably enduring more pointed variations on the same question.)

  After mumbling something about al-Qaeda, I told him I needed to check the cable traffic, but that I’d be out of his hair by the next day. I went back to the liaison station, where Klaus was waiting for me, and we headed to the communication room in the basement. On a normal day, there would be a cipher clerk to handle communications. But today being 9/12 and all diplomatic missions having been evacuated, the room was empty. We would have to improvise.

  It was hard to make head or tail of the various computers and beeping, blinking peripheral devices laid out before us. But eventually, after a few tries, we managed to send a cable to my desk officer and department head at Mossad HQ. We then spent the afternoon and most of the night reading classified updates about the attacks on the Twin Towers. All told, it didn’t add a lot to what we’d already learned from CNN.

  We were given our mission by Etti and it was simple: meet with established assets in the region and see if there was intelligence of any kind pointing to another impending terrorist attack. We were also asked to press our assets for any information they had on known al-Qaeda cells.

  I knew this would probably be a waste of time: if any of our sources had known anything about people crashing airplanes into buildings or anything similar, they would have come to me long ago. But we went about our business anyway on the theory that doing something was better than doing nothing—and that maybe, just maybe, after the enormity of 9/11, some of the rats would go scurrying for cover and inadvertently reveal themselves.

  So my days after the 9/11 attacks were consumed by traveling around Southeast Asia, where Klaus and I were responsible for a region that spanned millions of square miles. Over two weeks, we flew from city to city, meeting with assets plugged into the Islamic communities, as well as checking the security status of potential targets such as synagogues in Singapore and Hong Kong. As predicted, we learned nothing. But we still had to write long reports for HQ. This did little but give already busy people extra sheaves of paper to read. But we had no choice. Every business has its bureaucratic protocols, and spy work is no different.

  The only real lead I had was an al-Qaeda money-laundering ring that one of my assets who worked in the Thai banking industry had uncovered a year earlier. My contact had noticed that a small group of Middle Eastern men were transferring funds to a Jordanian Barclays Bank account believed to be controlled by Hamas. I asked my asset to photocopy all the available documents relating to the suspicious transactions. At great risk to himself, he gave me everything, which I sent home for my colleagues to analyze.

  They eventually traced the money to Afghanistan, but that’s where the snooping ended. In the pre-9/11 world, there were a lot of leads like that. In retrospect, they seemed tantalizing, but at the time, following them didn’t seem like a useful investment of resources. Jihadi financiers moving money from “Afghan Arabs” to Asia and the Middle East were common creatures. In any case, we didn’t have the manpower to follow the cell around, and we couldn’t pass the details on to the local secret service as we wanted to protect our assets. (If you don’t take care of your sources, its difficult to recruit others. Even in the post-9/11 era, the Mossad wouldn’t have passed the intelligence I’d gathered on to the local security services until it was “whitened”—that is, sourced to a fictitious third party.)

  During the weeks that the world was still reeling from the Trade Towers attacks, I wish I could say that I was single-mindedly devoted to my professional investigations. But the truth was that the screwed-up state of the world was competing for my attention with the screwed-up state of my own life. While this book is about the former, I would not be giving readers a complete picture if I didn’t at least mention the latter.

  For one thing, I was in the midst of a divorce. Things had soured with Dahlia, the dog-walking kibbutznik who’d been such a big part of my settling in Israel in the first place. As well, I was leaving my job, and had nothing lined up to replace it. I was experiencing what I now recognize as your standard and banal midlife crisis—compounded by the not-so-standard occupational stress that goes along with the spy trade.

  There was something else gnawing at me as well: after almost two decades of being away from my native Canada, I missed it. In recent years, I’d travelled with my family back to Victoria when on leave, and each time I found it tough to return to Israel. One reason was that my father’s health began a s
teady decline in the late 1990s. I hadn’t spent much time with him after my parents divorced when I was three, and I wanted to make up for the lost decades as best I could.

  Though the romantic attachment I’d developed to Israel in my younger years hadn’t vanished entirely, I now saw the country’s flaws as well. I was tired of the endless traffic jams, the scorching heat, the low wages, and the confiscatory tax rates. And, of course, I was sick of the terrorism. I’d seen the results of a suicide bombing up close in 1997 while working as a counterterrorism liaison officer. Ironically, we were escorting two agents from the FBI who’d flown in for an intelligence exchange relating to U.S. citizens killed in a previous attack on Israeli soil. While out with our Shin Bet hosts, we were notified of a bombing at a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem. We arrived at the scene shortly thereafter and bore silent witness to the carnage that resulted in four deaths and almost two hundred wounded.

  “Wounded” doesn’t sound so bad in news reports. But when you see the destroyed limbs, the missing eyes, and the horrific burn injuries, it somehow seems worse than death. I’ll always remember the sight of the intact head and shoulders of one of the Hamas suicide bombers propped on an auxiliary light junction box against a stone wall some twenty-five feet above the street. This sort of thing takes its toll.

  (As a footnote to this story, I returned to the scene of the bombing about a month later with two different FBI agents dispatched from Washington and a jovial Shin Bet officer from the Israel Security Agency’s Jerusalem office. The FBI is mandated to investigate terrorist incidents in which American citizens are involved outside of the United States. We toured around and I described the scene to the FBI agents while our Shin Bet host talked us through the attack. You’d never have known there had been carnage and death at the pedestrian mall just a few weeks before: the shops and cafes were doing a brisk trade. According to our host, the suicide bombers had disguised themselves as women in an effort to avoid suspicion amidst the crowd of shoppers and coffeehouse patrons. He kept referring to them as “transverters,” and our FBI guests were doing their best to keep a straight face. I couldn’t bear it anymore and told the poor fellow that the term was “transvestite.” He didn’t have an accent, but his vocabulary was at times bizarre. The strangely comic and completely human moment was a wonderful respite from my memories of the chaos, gore, and death that had occurred on the same spot.)

  Such scenes shouldn’t have affected my decision to leave Israel: in an ideal world, we’d all ignore the threat of suicide bombings in order to ensure we weren’t “letting the terrorists win.” But in truth, everybody thinks about it. Whatever they tell you about the low statistical likelihood of getting blown up, you still can’t help but let your mind ponder worst-case scenarios. I didn’t want to end up that way: my arm on the sidewalk and my torso sitting on a mailbox and no one knowing which pair of legs belonged to me.

  I filed my reports, submitted my expenses, and returned to Israel in late September. My official retirement date was October 1, 2001. I didn’t hang around for the retirement party and stayed in Israel only long enough for my divorce to come through.

  The timing of my retirement was ironic. For almost two decades, I’d helped Israel fight terrorism and the Middle East’s rogue powers during a period when the Western world’s attention was focused elsewhere. And now, in late 2001, at exactly the moment when this campaign had become the central front in the great clash of civilizations—with terrorism and jihad suddenly the topics du jour among journalists, authors, academics, and government officials—I was withdrawing from the fray. I suppose part of me wanted to stay on for this reason. But whenever those second thoughts came to me, I remembered what Oren told me: When the matches are gone, there’s nothing left but ash.

  21

  LOOKING FORWARD

  A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

  OSCAR WILDE

  Long before I took up spying as a profession, I loved reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien abhorred allegory in all its forms, and like any good story, his masterpiece can be easily ruined if one tries to read too many real-world lessons into the narrative. But at least one basic theme from the book has helped me make sense of the challenges this world faces, and the way we must respond to them.

  Like the Hobbits in Tolkien’s shire, many young Westerners today grew up largely oblivious to the modern-day Mordors of North Korea, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The period between the Cold War and 9/11 was one in which we collectively retreated into our own safe, prosperous societies. As Canadian columnist Mark Steyn wrote the day after 9/11, “From the end of the Gulf War to September 11th, 2001, the world’s only superpower took a long weekend off, loaded up the SUV, and went to the mall.”

  But the deaths of 2,973 innocents on that day tragically communicated the message that we cannot remain holed up in such places. In this global age, jihadist terrorists are but a cheap plane ride away. And unless we go out and fight them where they breed, they will come attack us where we live.

  My active role in this fight is now over. But I worry about my two sons, who both still live in Israel near their mother. They come to visit me in Canada regularly. And it’s always a hard moment when I have to put them back on an airplane. Every parent who has a child serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the other fronts in this strange new war knows what I’m talking about. I wave goodbye and simultaneously say hello to a rush of memories that lead me along the path that brought me to where I now stand in 2007. When I think of my children, I cannot help but feel a twinge of guilt. I have projected my fight against Israel’s enemies onto my children: my eldest has fought Hezbollah as a member of the IDF, and his younger brother will have to do his military service in three more years.

  The world is a very different place from the one it was on that fall day in 1982 when I departed on what turned out to be a two-decade-long adventure. In 1987, only a few years after I finished my military service, the first intifada erupted. Then came the Oslo Accords, the emergence of Yasser Arafat’s corrupt Palestinian Authority and, finally, Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza. As the Palestinians have gained more autonomy, the area has descended into anarchy. Many areas in the West Bank are now ruled by violent clans, with the Palestinian Authority the government in name only. And Gaza, as I write this, is teetering on full-blown civil war. Which is better: chaos and autonomy, or occupation and order? I still don’t know. When it comes to the seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli conflict, I’m still not sure I have a better idea than anyone else of how a permanent settlement can be achieved.

  There have been other changes in the Middle East. Iraq is now free but wartorn. Iran is sponsoring conferences for Holocaust deniers. Hezbollah has more or less taken over Lebanon. Palestinians are doing their best to destroy the state that Israel has given them. And everywhere, Muslim extremists are blowing themselves up in the deluded belief that killing innocent civilians is the path to holy salvation. This path upon which the Muslim world now finds itself evokes the place the poet John Milton imagined over three hundred years ago: “To bottomless perdition, there to dwell.”

  There’s another difference, too: the very nature of war has changed. In 1982, wars were still fought with tanks and planes, and you could draw the battle lines on a map. Nowadays, you’re more likely to get blown up on King George Street in Jerusalem than you are hiking along the Syrian border. Moreover, the Israeli generals who fought the 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and even 1982 wars never had to deal with roundthe-clock news channels, including saturation coverage of every civilian killed in the fog of war. Until the creation of the International Criminal Court, Israeli generals never had to worry about being arrested abroad as war criminals. Nor did conventional war provoke in Western societies the wrenching trade-offs we are now making between security and civil liberties.

  But from an Israeli perspecti
ve, perhaps the biggest difference I’ve observed in the last quarter-century is the re-emergence of bald-faced anti-Semitism as a mainstream ideology in many parts of the world. The phenomenon is confined mostly to the Muslim world, but it is encouraged by the international community as well—the most glaring example being the UN’s 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, at which the imprimatur of the United Nations was hijacked by bigots who want to see Israel wiped off the map. Left-leaning NGOs have been an active partner in this process. This is one area in which nothing has changed since the Cold War. Then, as now, the bleeding hearts who lecture the United States and Israel have a curious willingness to overlook the far greater abuses committed by the Robert Mugabes, Mahmoud Ahmadinejads, Fidel Castros, and Hassan Nasrallahs of the world.

  The fight between Israelis and Palestinians has long been a media obsession in the West. But now, thanks to the emergence of Arabiclanguage satellite television stations seeking incendiary footage, the problem has gotten worse, and skewed, lurid coverage of Palestinian casualties is being used as a terrorist recruiting tool. Even in the early days, when I lived on my kibbutz in the 1980s, I was stunned by what I saw on the English-language television channel that broadcast from Jordan. It was as if there was no other news on the planet worthy of being reported except Israel’s latest purported outrage. And Jordan is considered a moderate regime in the region. The Syrians, Saudis, and Egyptians produce programs that would make a Nazi propagandist blush.

  Despite all the threats facing Israel, however, I am optimistic that the men and women protecting the country remain highly motivated and competent. Since my retirement, I have visited my former Mossad colleagues on several occasions. Although they cannot share with me the sort of information I was privy to as an active agent, I’ve learned enough to know that the organization is in good hands. True, I had many trying, frustrating moments during my career. Yet I have nothing but admiration for this small, secretive organization that has been so often misunderstood and maligned. I know that on more occasions than I can count (or am permitted to describe), it took measures to eliminate threats against not only Israel, but other countries that were oblivious to the fact.