Agents of Innocence (33 page)

“There is one thing that I should tell you in all candor,” said Stone, downing his second martini.

“What’s that?” asked Rogers.

“I don’t believe I mentioned to you earlier that on my way here from Washington, I stopped off in Rome for several hours. I had one of the boys from the Office of Security give this Libyan fellow—Mr. Mumtazz—a polygraph test.”

“What happened?”

“Generally, he did fine. But on that absurd business about the assassination plot, he flunked.”

Hoffman raised his glass in a toast.

“You did a swell job,” said Hoffman. “No bullshit. It’s a pleasure to watch a real pro at work. But I gotta tell you, my friends, that the fun in this case is just beginning.”

The glasses clinked. There was an interlude of silence as they drank and reflected on the extraordinary events of the past few days. Rogers remembered something Hoffman had said the previous day.

“Tell me about Willy, the agent from Budapest,” said Rogers.

“Naw, you don’t want me to tell that old story now,” said Hoffman. “Not when we’re celebrating.”

“Yes I do,” said Rogers.

Hoffman looked at Stone. The division chief nodded yes. Tell him the story.

“Okay, but it doesn’t have a very happy ending.”

“Just tell me the damn story,” said Rogers, who was slightly drunk.

“All right. We were running a string of agents in Eastern Europe after the war. A lot of them had worked for the Germans. They were tough little men. They hated the Russians and were eager to work for Uncle Sam. But they were also scared shitless that we would sell them out.”

“Why?”

“Because they weren’t stupid. You said you wanted to hear the story, so shut up.”

“Sorry,” said Rogers.

“Willy was the one I liked the best,” continued Hoffman. “He was a Hungarian, about forty years old. His whole family had been killed in the war. Blown to smithereens. At first I thought he was trying to atone, or get revenge, or something. Later on it occurred to me that he was probably just trying to make some money. Who knows? Anyway, we were running him in Hungary and he was doing jim-dandy work for us. He had a friend in the Hungarian security service who let him photograph documents. It was a nice little operation.”

“What went wrong?”

“One day the Brits approached us. They said they had evidence that our little man was a crook. Supposedly he was smuggling American cigarettes into Budapest to make a little extra dough. It was stupid of him and made him a security risk. So we were pissed. We called in our man for a crash meeting. We did it in an insecure way. Sent him a letter at his home address. Nobody gave a shit. We thought the guy had screwed us. In any event, this poor little fucker came to the meeting with me and Stone shaking like a leaf. He was a mess. He didn’t have good answers to any of our questions.

“I still kind of liked him. Felt sorry for him. I don’t know why. But the Brits said he was bad news. Mr. Stone agreed, and I agreed. Everybody agreed. So we told him sayonara.”

“Did you ever corroborate what the Brits said?” asked Rogers.

“No,” said Hoffman. “I told you. Nobody gave a shit.”

“What happened to Willy?”

“He was dead within six months,” said Hoffman. “Served him right, in a way”

“Why?” asked Rogers.

“Because he was a fool, to have trusted us.”

Stone stopped by Rogers’s office the next morning on his way to the airport. The older man looked fit and pink-cheeked. He was dressed in what, for him, were casual clothes: a bow tie, tweed jacket, gray trousers, and ancient but well-shined brown Oxfords. Stone closed the door behind him, looked for the couch, and when he realized there wasn’t one, sat down in a chair beside the desk.

“You are couchless,” observed Stone.

“Yes, sir,” said Rogers.

“What rank are you these days?”

“I’m an R-6,” said Rogers.

“And when will you receive your leather couch and cherry-wood credenza?”

“R-3.”

“Ah well, that’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?” said Stone sardonically. “Sometimes I marvel at the pettiness of the United States government. Do they really imagine that people are motivated by the desire to obtain additional office furnishings?”

“Some people probably are,” said Rogers.

“Would you like a couch?” queried Stone. “I’ll get you one.”

“I don’t really care, to be honest.”

“No, of course you don’t.”

Stone adjusted his bow tie so that the two ends were precisely even and then got down to business.

“I want to discuss details,” said Stone.

“About handling the Palestinian?”

“Precisely,” said Stone. “God is in the details.”

Rogers nodded. Where is the Devil? he wondered.

“Now then,” said Stone. “I think that you should meet with
PECOCK
every few months, you or one of your agents. Keep him on a long leash. Don’t inquire too much about what he does. You’re not his nursemaid.”

“What do we do about the Israelis?” asked Rogers.

“Nothing.”

“But won’t they try to do something about Jamal?”

“I have no idea,” said Stone. “I can’t predict what anyone will do. Not the Israelis. Not us. Not our Palestinian friend.”

“What is he, exactly?” asked Rogers.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, is
PECOCK
an agent? An asset? A contact? What sort of relationship do we have with him?”

“Ah, yes,” said Stone. “Sticky wicket. What
is
this all about? Strictly for bookkeeping purposes, we will treat what took place yesterday as a recruitment, even though it wasn’t one in the usual sense. We will enroll this fellow immediately as an active agent, assuming that he follows through in Rome. The fact that he doesn’t consider himself an agent is fine.”

“That doesn’t pose any problem?” asked Rogers, remembering all the consternation this same question had provoked two years earlier in the discussions with Marsh and Stone.

“No problem whatsoever,” replied Stone serenely.

“Forgive me for asking, but does that mean the Palestinian won the argument?”

“Nobody won,” said Stone. “It simply means that we have learned our lesson and will not insist on control. In essence, we are accepting his definition of the relationship. If he asks, you should encourage him to believe that we have embarked on a sort of ‘liaison’ with him as a senior inteligence officer of Fatah. We have such arrangements with all sorts of disagreeable people. As I say, it isn’t a problem.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rogers.

“Good,” said Stone, rising from his chair.

“Can I ask one more question?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think that the Palestinian is involved in Black September?”

“Possibly.” said Stone. “Quite probably.”

“Does that bother you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Does it bother you that we are working with a terrorist?”

“Oh,” said Stone.

He turned and gazed out the window.

“Let me answer your question frankly, and you will forget that I ever said these words. Morality in the abstract is too large a problem for me to get my arms around. I leave it to moral philosophers. What I do understand is the practical matter of protecting the lives of American citizens. I have no doubt—none whatsoever—that the relationship we are embarking on will serve that goal. The rest is too complicated.”

Tel Aviv; June 1972

Yakov Levi’s desk at Mossad headquarters looked out on the disorderly urban landscape of Tel Aviv. The building was in the center of Tel Aviv, near the old Haifa railway station, in the midst of the noise and commotion of the city. Levi was settling into his new job as the desk officer handling intelligence about the Palestinian guerrillas. He was still savoring his transformation. He was a hero. He had an office. He was home.

Levi gloried in the ordinariness of his new life. In Beirut he had gone to the office each day trussed in a silk tie and a business suit. Here he wore an open-neck shirt, loose-fitting gabardine slacks, and, in summer, a pair of sandals. Levi’s body seemed to relax as well. His hair lost the tight, wiry curl of Beirut and became softer and looser. The knot in his stomach also seemed to loosen and he stopped chewing antacid pills. He spoke Hebrew all day and night and revelled in it. When newly arrived immigrants approached him on the street speaking English or French, he would feign incomprehension.

Levi liked taking long walks at lunchtime. He would leave the Mossad headquarters building and walk down Arlosoroff Street toward the sea. He would pass Dizengoff Street, where many of the fine shops and stores were located, then continue past Ben Yehuda Street until he reached the beach and the Mediterranean. How different the sea looked here than it had in Beirut. So much calmer and cleaner, breaking on the soft sand of Israel rather than the rocky coast of Lebanon.

What Levi couldn’t quite fathom as he took these walks through the city was that all of the people around him were Jews! The people watching the movie in the theater on Ben Yehuda; the women in the department stores, the sales ladies and the customers, too; and the beautiful girls on the beach with golden brown skin, and the men playing paddle ball who were trying so hard to impress them. They were all Jews. That was the miracle of it. There was no one else to impress, to seduce or be seduced by.

The first few months he was back in Israel, Levi sometimes acted a little crazy. He went one day to a kiosk on Dizengoff Street that sold hand-lettered T-shirts. Levi asked the shirt man to make one that said in Hebrew: “The Arabs can go to Hell!” He wore it back to the office where a colleague told him gently to take it off.

Israel in 1972 was a country that, like Levi, was trying to learn how to relax. The great battles to establish the state had been fought and won. The problems now were of less heroic dimensions, like those of most other countries. The effort to fill the land with people had brought a huge migration of poor Sephardic Jews from Morocco. As a result, there were now rich and poor Jews in the land of Israel. The rich ones were white and from Europe and the poor ones were black and from North Africa. And there were the problems that result from being powerful: The 1967 war had annexed vast amounts of land, far larger than the nation itself, which had to be policed and administered. It was a new sensation for Israelis, to act as an occupying army and see the looks of fear and hatred on the faces of their defeated enemies. Why do they hate us so? the Israelis wondered. We are only fighting for our right to exist.

A new word came into general use during the early 1970s to explain what the Israelis were fighting against. It wasn’t the Egyptians or the Syrians, who had already been trounced. It certainly wasn’t the Palestinians, whose name most Israelis preferred not to pronounce. It was the “terrorists.” They were the enemy of Israel, and of the whole world.

Israel in 1972 revelled in its ordinariness, but also feared it. The country was pulled in two directions at once: inward, toward the particular and unique identity of the Jewish people, which Judaism has celebrated throughout history; and outward, toward universal values and emotions.

Levi wondered whether that was the paradox of modern Israel: If the Jews were now like everyone else, with a state and army of their own, how then were they still special and different from everyone else? Had they been chosen by God to be, after 5,000 years of suffering, a people with the ordinary problems of combating terrorism, maintaining defensible borders, and administering occupied lands?

Levi threw himself into his new job. He had arrived home just as the trauma of Black September was beginning, so there was plenty of work in his department. He spent the day collating information, analyzing it, struggling to see the pattern in the lengthening string of terrorist operations in Europe. He combed the files looking for the names, dates, and places that would help solve the riddle of Black September.

It was slow going. Some days he spent so much time looking at the pictures of Palestinian suspects, reading the transcripts of intercepted Arabic communications, and analyzing the Lebanese press that he wondered whether he had really left Beirut after all.

Levi worked in a section with ten other officers. He wasn’t the most senior man but, thanks to his recent tour in Beirut, he was the most experienced analyst of the fedayeen organizations, and the other officers deferred to him. Levi gradually realized, too, that the Old Guard of Mossad regarded him as one of their own. Levi wasn’t sure why—perhaps it was his European background—but he was pleased. Things like that mattered a great deal in the Mossad. There was no private club in the world that had a more elaborate status hierarchy than the Israeli security service.

The members of the Old Guard had nearly all been born outside of Israel. Many of them had been intelligence officers for the Haganah or Lehi or Irgun at the time of the war of independence in 1948. They had arrived in Palestine from every corner of the globe. Refugees all, they had fled Europe in the 1930s for China, Russia, India, America—and travelled from there to Eretz Israel. They seemed to speak every language in the world. Was there an operation in Ethiopia? There was sure to be a Mossad man who spoke fluent Amharic. Was there an operation in the Far East? There were speakers of the Mandarin and Cantonese dialects of Chinese, speakers of Japanese, Korean, Thai, all of whom had suffered through the war years and made their way to the Jewish homeland. The Old Guard had been trained in the cruelest school the world has ever known, and they didn’t let the younger men forget it.

The younger Mossad officers were a different breed. They had come into the security service not from the desperate exile world of the 1930s and 1940s, but from the Israeli Army, from the proud and self-reliant military arm of the new Jewish state. They had joined Mossad after proving themselves in the special operations units of the army and navy. They were, in their own way, just as tough as the refugee generation.

When Levi looked at his younger colleagues, he saw hard, muscular bodies and dark faces. Many of them were Oriental Jews, whose families had lived in Baghdad or Casablanca or Cairo. They might have difficulty speaking English and German. But they spoke perfect Arabic. And that, Levi suspected, was exactly what the state of Israel needed in the 1970s.

The glory days of the Mossad were over. Eichmann and the other Nazi war criminals had been caught. The Jewish networks in the Soviet Union, which had allowed Mossad to obtain Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 1956 Party Congress, had mostly been broken. There wasn’t much need, any more, to send terrified couriers through Russia and Eastern Europe gathering the tidbits of intelligence that Mossad had used to trade with the Western intelligence services. The Israelis didn’t need to beg and barter just to stay alive any more. That much had been assured.

Now the tasks were different. The problem was manipulating the environment around Israel. Rewarding friends and punishing enemies in the Middle East. The young men around Levi had earned their reputations not in Moscow or Rome but parachuting into Kurdistan to help the Shah of Iran make trouble for Iraq; or parachuting into southern Sudan to help foment a civil war. Or travelling secretly to Morocco to help teach the Moroccan Army how to defeat the Polisario guerrillas. Those were the new challenges, and they involved what the new breed of Mossad liked best: Playing games with the Arabs, driving the Arabs crazy.

The security establishment prospered because everyone accepted the rules. Every able-bodied Israeli male served in the military—every journalist, politician, avant-garde intellectual—and they all accepted the basic imperatives of military discipline. The interests of national security came first: the journalist agreed to be censored; the politician agreed not to question the government about certain sensitive matters; everyone agreed to protect the security agencies—Mossad; Shin Beth, the Israeli FBI; Aman, or military intelligence; Unit 8200 of Aman, which collected signals intelligence; Unit 269 of the army general staff, which conducted secret operations; and the Scientific Research Bureau, or “Lekem.” And of all these elite units, the most elite was Mossad—the Institute. If the security of Israel was the nation’s secular religion, the officers of the Mossad were its high priests.

Levi submerged himself in the world of Black September. He became the daily watch officer for that account, the person who sifted through each day’s harvest of agents’ reports and communications intercepts for information that might help the Israelis to prevent the next attack. Levi found that easy. He was a well-organized man. He liked to make lists, read through old files, pull bits of information from his memory and match them with current intelligence.

Levi worried that he was always a few steps behind the people he was tracking. His gut told him that Black September was a ruse, that its operations were really the work of Fatah. But that wasn’t enough. He needed proof: the names of the people who planned the operations, who provided the weapons, who serviced the drops, who paid the gunmen. He needed to peel away the cover and see the machine at work, to see how each piece fit together in the covert organization.

As an exercise, Levi gathered every fact he could find about two Black September operations: the bombing of an electronics plant in Hamburg and the sabotage of an oil terminal at Rotterdam. He began to see a pattern, a distinctive signature that identified these operations and others as the work of a particular individual. The operations had several obvious common characteristics:

—They were meticulously planned. The bombs exploded where they were supposed to, when they were supposed to. They did the damage that was intended, no less and no more. Warnings were delivered when appropriate. Credit was taken in a distant capital, usually just a few minutes after the attack.

—They were clean. There were no obvious clues. Frightened Arabs weren’t caught running from the scene. Fingerprints weren’t found. Guns with traceable serial numbers weren’t captured.

—They were professional. Levi suspected that the planner must be a trained intelligence officer, who knew how to cover his trail. Checks of the Arab underworld in Europe, and of agents who operated on the fringe of the guerrilla movement, failed to turn up any clues. Inquiries with arms dealers who might have supplied weapons and explosives also produced nothing. Whoever was planning the operations was skillful enough to keep several layers of cut-outs between himself and his handiwork.

—They were the work of someone who spoke German. Though Black September operated across Europe, it seemed to strike in West Germany with unusual regularity. Whoever was planning the operations felt comfortable there, spoke the language, understood the culture.

The German-speaking requirement triggered something in Levi’s memory. There was a Palestinian operative in Beirut who had been renowned for his continental charm, and his ability to bed down women from every province of Europe. What Levi remembered now was the voice of that Palestinian, recorded by a surveillance tap placed by a Mossad agent, declaring his love in German to a beautiful Fraülein. Levi began then to focus his research on this particular Palestinian. When he imagined the face of Black September, he saw not an anonymous figure in the shadows, but a smooth-shaven young man in a black leather jacket.

Levi had another hunch, one that he had begun to formulate long ago in Lebanon. The Americans are not stupid, Levi reasoned. They must have tried to penetrate Fatah, just as we have. In recruiting an agent, where would the CIA turn? To the intelligence service of Fatah, of course! That’s what spies do. They recruit other spies. Otherwise, what was the point?

So Levi opened a second, parallel investigation. He asked the registry for the files that Mossad had compiled on American penetration of the Fatah leadership. The librarian was apologetic. There wasn’t one particular file on that subject. Mossad officers had gathered information on the topic, of course, but it was scattered among various files. So Levi began reading.

He came across a crucial bit of evidence almost by accident. He was sitting one morning in the registry, a dark and windowless room in the center of the Mossad headquarters building, trying to decide what files to request that day. He had already combed the registry on Fatah, on the Old Man, on Jamal Ramlawi and a dozen other Palestinians.

On a hunch, he requested the files on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Perhaps the PFLP had explored the possibility that Fatah had been penetrated by the Americans. Levi spent the morning reading reports from agents and case officers. He worked through lunch. Late that afternoon, as he was opening what seemed like the hundredth manila folder of the day, out fell something that looked eerily familiar. It was the coded message that had been hidden inside the elephant box in the diabolical maze of the Damascus souk. Attached to it was a decoded version in Hebrew, which he had never read before.

Levi could scarcely believe what he was reading. The PFLP intelligence report seemed to confirm that Levi’s two investigations were focusing on the same subject. The operations chief of Black September and the American penetration agent in Fatah appeared to be the same person!

Levi reported his initial findings to his division chief.

“Go slow,” said the chief. “It’s too speculative.”