The man with the white hair nodded as he went through some papers he brought into the room with him.
“Dan,” the woman said, “tell us what your worst personal quality is.”
“I have no patience for idiots,” I said immediately.
“Is that all?” she insisted.
“No. I also tend to prefer working independently rather than in a team, and I find it difficult to follow stupid instructions without questioning them first, at least in my mind.”
“So you're the judge of what is and what is not a stupid instruction?” There was a negative tone to the question.
“No,” I replied quickly trying to control the damage, “I'm certainly not an expert on anything. But I have some common sense and principles, and if my instincts or my brain tell me that something is wrong, I ask. I'm sure you've seen my military file. I was never court-martialed for disobedience, and I was involved in many sensitive incursions across the Syrian border that demanded strict adherence to orders. But if you're looking for someone to follow any orders, with no questions asked, then I'm the wrong person. On the other hand, if original thinking and an inquisitive mind are traits that fit the job, then I'm your man.”
The white-haired old man sitting in the center of the panel seemed to like my answer. He smiled.
“Let me hear your views about politics.”
We talked local politics for an hour. I didn't think he wanted to hear my opinion; he simply wanted to be assured that I wasn't a radical on either end of the political spectrum. Then it was over.
“You'll hear from us,” Shani said as he escorted me out.
Weeks went by with no word. Then one afternoon there was a knock on the door of my parents’ home. I answered the door. Michael walked in and, without any prefatory comment, asked me to join him for a meeting elsewhere. I didn't ask any questions and went along to his car. Ten minutes later, we arrived at the Mossad headquarters. I followed Michael through the corridors and was asked to wait in an empty conference room. After what was for me an agonizing interval, Michael entered with Shani, who shook my hand and said with a broad smile, “Congratulations! You're in.”
I was so unprepared that I didn't know whether I should be happy or sorry. Despite the long wait, it all seemed very sudden.
Michael handed me a stack of documents. “This is an oath of confidentiality,” he said, pulling out two stapled pages. “Read it carefully, because it will remain valid all your life, even when you are no longer in the service.”
I looked at the statement. “As a member of the Central Intelligence Institute, I understand that I will have access to confidential and top-secret information which concerns Israel's national security. By signing this statement, I am indicating my understanding of my responsibilities to maintain confidentiality and agree to the following.” There followed a list of penalties for breach, of which prison seemed the lightest.
I signed.
In those few minutes, though I didn't realize it then, I had just begun the most fascinating time of my life.
It was only May, but Tel Aviv was already hot and humid. My acceptance came right on time; graduation from university was only two months away. I broke the news to my parents at the dinner table that evening.
“What about your plans to go to law school and then join my firm?” my father asked, looking at me and then my mother.
“It'll have to wait for a while,” I responded. I don't think they liked the answer but they said nothing to discourage me. I didn't realize then that “a while” meant years.
On my first day on the job I was assigned to the archive. Thousands upon thousands of files, reeking of mildew, welcomed me. “Don't worry,” consoled Michael when he saw my gloomy face, “this is how everyone starts.” It took me two months to get the picture, reading endless files. I saw how many so-called accidents that had befallen terrorists had their roots in those files, in that stale room.
I was assigned to field training six months later, the first of its kind at the Mossad.
I packed a few things and took a bus to the Mossad training camp, twenty miles northeast of Tel Aviv, for what was called an “operations course.” The camp was located in an agricultural area, on an old military base that was surrounded by citrus orchards and small red-roofed houses. It included an airstrip that had been built and used by British forces until 1948, when Jewish resistance made them give up their mandate over Palestine, leading to the establishment of Israel. Several elite forces of the Israeli armed forces had taken over the base. Behind a seven-foot gated metal fence topped by razor wire stood a few one-story buildings. The smell of cow dung hung in the air. There was no sign on the fence.
I showed the guard in the small concrete booth my invitation letter. He asked me for my government-issued photo ID, compared it with my face, and picked up his telephone and said something. With a nod, he hung up and opened the electric gate, which screeched as it slowly rolled on its rails. I walked inside the camp.
Manhattan, New York City, September 1990
The office secretary, Lan, knocked on my door, walked in unceremoniously, and handed me a file folder.
“This just came in,” she said. “It looked like something you'd want to see right away.” I reached across my desk, took the folder, and began to read a cover memo.
OFFICE of INTERNATIONAL ASSET RECOVERY AND MONEY LAUNDERING
Memorandum
To: Dan Gordon, Investigative Attorney
From: David Stone, Director
Date: September 15,1990
Re: U.S. v. Raymond DeLouise
I'm assigning you this matter.
The subject Raymond DeLouise, born in Bucharest, Romania.
DOB: July 15,1927.
Whereabouts: Last known address: 44-21 Glendale Boulevard, Los
Angeles, CA 90021. Current address: unknown.
The subject absconded from the United States soon after federal regulators discovered a $90 million shortfall at First Federal Bank of Westwood, California, where he was chairman and chief executive officer as well as principal shareholder. The FDIC took over after the bank's collapse and paid back the depositors as required, up to $100,000 per account. The FDIC has referred the matter to this office to attempt retrieval of the missing funds. They found sufficient evidence showing that the shortfall was not an accounting error or an accrued loss but was rather a result of possible defalcation, probably by Raymond DeLouise. Remarkably, there are no suspicious international wire transfers in large amounts or other evidence of the whereabouts of the missing funds.
The criminal aspects of this matter were referred to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California, which instructed the FBI to investigate. A grand jury is considering indicting him on multiple charges, including bank fraud and money laundering. Since the FBI believes that DeLouise has left the country, INTERPOL will be put on notice if he is indicted.
My office has been asked to locate DeLouise and recover the lost money that we suspect was laundered through foreign entities. Neither the FDIC nor the Department of Justice has a clue where Raymond DeLouise might be. I enclose the FDIC report together with its attachments. Please report your findings to this office.
David
I went through the twenty-page FDIC report and a brief FBI report. They looked very thorough but lacked a bottom line: If DeLouise or his money were outside the United States, they expected me to find both — and fast.
The government's working assumption was that he'd left the country — they all do. But where did he go? Was he sunbathing in the Bahamas? gambling in Monte Carlo? skiing in St. Moritz? Certainly with ninety million dollars in his pockets he didn't escape to a one-star hotel where, for an additional buck, they give you a mousetrap for your room. This guy probably wanted to keep his money in the dark and himself in the sun. The problem was that there were dozens of these sorts of places around the world. The FBI report indicated that his wife and adult son, who still lived in California, didn't kn
ow his whereabouts — or at least they claimed not to know.
I prepared a note to Lan.
I'm attaching David Stone's memo with the new file. Please call your contact at the INS and ask for Raymond DeLouise's file. His social security number is in the new file. The subject was born in Romania and lived in the United States; therefore he must have an INS file. Ask your friend if it would be possible to get the file before the end of the millennium.
Dan
The last time I'd asked the INS for assistance in retrieving an immigration file, it had taken six months. “It's a black hole out there,” a Justice Department veteran had once told me. “Unless you know someone in the particular office you need, you're nonexistent. They're so overworked and underbudgeted that they look through you as if you were air. Their telephone extension numbers are kept secret even from other government agencies. If you call for telephone directory assistance, you get an 800 number with nothing but long recorded messages. You can punch all the selections, but you'll never talk to a live body.”
Lan walked into my office. “I gave the INS the social security number you gave me for DeLouise, but they say another name came up.”
“Ask them to send a copy of that file anyway, we'll figure it out.”
The guy Lan knew at the INS must have owed her big-time, because I had the file on my desk within two days. I opened an old manila folder and read through it.
Bruno Popescu was born in Bucharest, Romania, on July 15, 1927. He first entered the United States on a tourist visa in 1957. He then sought political asylum and permanent residence, alleging that his life would be in peril if he ever returned to Romania. According to some documents in the file, Popescu claimed that he was suspected by the Romanian secret police as being “a provocateur in service of the decadent West.” There was no indication in his asylum application, or in any of the other documents, that he in fact was politically active in Romania. The file contained no evidence corroborating his claim of fear of persecution. Asylum was granted.
Was Popescu DeLouise? I read the INS file again and compared it with the documents Stone had given me. There were several similarities: same date and place of birth, identical social security number and entry date to the United States. It was possible therefore that Popescu had changed his name to DeLouise after he had been naturalized. I made a note to revisit that issue.
The whole thing was unusual, though; DeLouise or not, how had Popescu obtained a tourist visa to enter the United States before he filed for asylum? The year 1957 was a time of great tension between the West and the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc countries. The Cold War was at its peak. In tandem with France and the United Kingdom, Israel had just invaded Soviet-sponsored Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and faced down Soviet and U.S. threats demanding its withdrawal. Polish students and workers were up in arms. Hungary had simmered politically until the rebellion finally erupted — the Soviets had sent in tanks in 1956 to quell it.
As a consequence the United States was substantially limiting entry of visitors from the Eastern Bloc countries, fearing that spies and saboteurs would arrive disguised as tourists. In that political climate, then, there must have been a good reason for an American Consulate to grant Popescu a U.S. tourist visa. But his asylum application wasn't convincing or supported by any evidence. So how had Popescu managed it?
I turned the yellowed pages and found a summary document, handwritten by the INS examiner of Popescu's asylum application. Among the routine bio data, I almost missed some information at the bottom of a folded page:
Passport: Romanian, issued in Bucharest, Romania, on February 21, 1947, valid for five years. U.S. visitor's visa issued by the American Consulate in Tel Aviv on November 23, 1957. Date of arrival to Idlewild Airport, New York, December 14, 1957.
“I'll be damned,” I whistled in surprise. If this was the DeLouise file, what did he have to do with Israel? Nothing in the other documents showed any reference to his ethnic origin or how he might have ended up in Israel. This was really strange, I thought. If this person's Romanian passport had been issued for five years in 1947, it had expired in 1952. There was no indication that the passport had been renewed. Why did the American consul in Tel Aviv stamp a visa in 1957 when the passport had expired in 1952? That couldn't have occurred. Something else must have happened, something that was not reflected in this slender file. The passport could not just have been renewed. A whole slew of other possibilities quickly passed through my mind. Photocopy machines were rare in 1957, however, and there was no copy of the passport in the file. My seeds of suspicions would have to wait for further information in order to germinate and bear fruits of success. The INS file showed that DeLouise was issued asylee status pending the review of his political asylum application. The asylum application was approved on March 8,1958, and subsequently a green card was issued, giving him permanent-resident status. Five years later, on July 4, 1963, Popescu was naturalized and became a U.S. citizen. There were no further records in the file.
I smelled a rat, but I didn't know where it was buried. Not yet.
I put the file aside, leaned back, and closed my eyes, shutting out the intense light in my office. If Popescu and DeLouise were the same person, he had been in Israel of all places! At the beginning of my career at the Justice Department I'd worked mostly on Israeli legal matters, but the scope of my work had gradually broadened to include international asset-recovery cases, some with an Israeli flavor. Eventually the asset-recovery cases I'd received had no known Israeli connection. This case was the first I'd seen to connect what seemed to be a non-Israeli matter with Israel, although the connection was hair thin.
I called my friend Benny's home number in Israel.
“Shalom,” said a man's voice.
“Hi, Benny,” I said, and went on without waiting for a response. “It's Dan.”
“Hold on,” said the man on the other end, “It's not Benny, I'll get him for you.” I heard him shouting, “Dad, it's for you.”
“Dad”? A grown man was calling Ben “Dad”? When I last saw Lior, Ben's son, he was ten years old. But that, I realized, had been ten years ago.
“Erev tov, good evening,” said the voice on the other end.
“Hi, Benny,” I answered. “It's Dan Gordon. How are you?”
“Still pulling,” he said.
“And your family?”
“Being schlepped.”
“And how's Batya?” I'd always liked his wife.
“Well, on one of these days I'm going to catch pneumonia because of her.”
“Why?”
“Because each time she sings in the shower, I have to go out to the balcony so that the neighbors won't think I'm beating her up,” he said, and I realized that he hadn't changed.
“I need help.”
“I'm here,” he said.
“Well,” I said, sounding a bit apologetic, “this time it's ancient history. Could you please see what you have on Bruno Popescu, born in Romania, a July 15 birth date? He could be a person I'm looking for, a man named Raymond DeLouise. I suspect he was in Israel in November 1957.”
“What did he do?” Benny asked curiously. “Steal something?”
“Yeah,” I said, “ninety million dollars.”
“Is that all? Fax me what you have and I'll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, Benny,” I said, “and if this works out, I'll owe you lunch.”
Benny mumbled his thanks. He knew he would not be making a sacrifice. As an observant Jew, he ate only kosher food, and there are few restaurants in Tel Aviv that are both kosher and good.
“Give me a little time,” said Benny. “I'll call you right away if I find something.”
Benjamin Friedman had been the odd man out in the Mossad's cadet course. The other eleven of us had been secular Israelis, like a substantial majority of the country's population. Benny was the son of Holocaust survivors who had owned a grocery store in central Tel Aviv. I used to stop by their store with Benny during our training yea
rs. His mother worked behind a tall display refrigerator that doubled as a counter. She wore the typical clothes of an Orthodox woman: head covering and long sleeves even in the height of summer.
I noticed that Benny was embarrassed each time we stopped by his family's store. His mother would approach him, asking, “Have you eaten yet? Come have a piece of cake, you look too pale.” It hadn't mattered that Ben was a grown man of robust appearance. To his mother, he was still a child in need of her care.
The store was cramped and smelled of the matjes herring and pickles in brine kept in open wooden casks. The smell always made me hungry. But I'd always restrained my urge to pluck a pickle while her own son was sidestepping her attempts to feed him. Benny never made an issue of his self-imposed dietary restrictions and unwillingness to work on Saturdays and other Jewish holidays. He had come to the cadet course from AMAN, the military intelligence division, where the words were not an oxymoron. AMAN was by far the largest intelligence agency in Israel. It was responsible for gathering all military intelligence concerning the surrounding Arab states and for submitting the periodic intelligence overview to the prime minister. All Benny had told us was that he'd served as a captain in what is now known as 8200, AMAN's secret communication and computer unit. Basically it did what the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) did: intercept radio, telephone, fax, computer, and other communications; decipher their content; and draw intelligence conclusions.
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