The Fist of God Read online

  That was all. Stuart Harris had been panic-stricken, terrified. He knew the reputation of Iraq, of its dreaded Secret Police. Whatever was in the plain envelope could get him arrested, tortured, even killed.

  To his credit, he kept cool, sat down, and tried to work things out. Why him? for example. There were scores of British businessmen in Baghdad. Why pick Stuart Harris? They could not know he was Jewish, that his father had arrived in England in 1935 from Germany as Samuel Horowitz, could they?

  Though he would never find out, there had been a conversation two days earlier in the fairground canteen between two functionaries of the Iraqi Transportation Ministry. One had told the other of his visit to the Nottingham works the previous autumn; how Harris had been his host on the first and second days, then disappeared for a day, then come back. He—the Iraqi—had asked if Harris was ill. It was a colleague who had laughed and told him Harris had been off for Yom Kippur.

  The two Iraqi civil servants thought nothing more of it, but someone at the next booth did. He reported the conversation to his superior. The senior man appeared to take no notice but later became quite thoughtful and ran a check on Mr. Stuart Harris of Nottingham, establishing his room number at the Rashid.

  Harris sat and wondered what on earth to do. Even if, he reasoned, the anonymous sender of the letter had discovered he was Jewish, there was one thing they could not have known. No way. By an extraordinary coincidence, Stuart Harris was a sayan .

  The Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, founded in 1951 on the order of Ben-Gurion himself, is known outside its own walls as the Mossad, Hebrew for “Institute.” Inside its walls it is never, ever called that, but always “the Office.” Among the leading intelligence agencies of the world, it is by far the smallest. In terms of on-the-payroll staff, it is tiny. The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, has about 25,000 employees on its staff, and that excludes all the outstations. At its peak the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible like the CIA and Mossad for foreign intelligence-gathering, had 15,000

  case officers around the world, some three thousand based at the Yazenevo headquarters.

  The Mossad has only between 1,200 and 1,500 employees at any time and fewer than forty case officers, called katsas .

  That it can operate on such a slim budget and tiny staff and secure the “product” that it does depends on two factors. One is its ability to tap into the Israeli population at will—a population still amazingly cosmopolitan and containing a bewildering variety of talents, languages, and geographical origins.

  The other factor is an international network of helpers or assistants, in Hebrew sayanim . These are diaspora Jews (they must be wholly Jewish on both sides) who, although probably loyal to the country in which they reside, will also sympathize with the State of Israel.

  There are two thousand sayanim in London alone, five thousand in the rest of Britain, and ten times that number in the United States. They are never brought into operations, just asked for favors. And they must be convinced that the help they are asked to give is not for an operation against their country of birth or adoption. Conflicting loyalties are not allowed. But they enable operational costs to be cut by a factor of up to ten.

  For example: A Mossad team arrives in London to mount an operation against a Palestinian undercover squad. They need a car. A used car sayan is asked to leave a legitimate secondhand car at a certain place with the keys under the mat. It is returned later, after the operation. The sayan never knows what it was used for; his books say it was out to a possible customer on approval.

  The same team needs a “front.” A property-owning sayan lends an empty shop, and a confectionery sayan stocks it with sweets and chocolates. They need a mail drop; a real estate sayan lends the keys to a vacant office on his roster.

  Stuart Harris had been on vacation at the Israeli resort of Eilat when, at the bar of the Red Rock, he fell into conversation with a pleasant young Israeli who spoke excellent English. At a later conversation, the Israeli brought a friend, an older man, who quietly elicited from Harris where his feelings toward Israel lay. By the end of the vacation, Harris had agreed that, if there was ever anything he could do ...

  At the end of the vacation Harris went home as advised and got on with his life. For two years he waited for the call, but no call ever came. However, a friendly visitor kept periodically in touch—one of the more tiresome jobs of katsas on foreign assignment is to keep tabs on the sayanim on their list.

  So Stuart Harris sat in a wave of rising panic in the hotel room in Baghdad and wondered what to do.

  The letter could well be a provocation—he would be intercepted at the airport trying to smuggle it out.

  Slip it into someone else’s bag? He did not feel he could do that. And how would he recover it in London?

  Finally, he calmed down, worked out a plan, and did it exactly right. He burned the outer envelope and the note in an ashtray, crushed the embers, and flushed them down the toilet. Then he hid the plain envelope under the spare blanket on the shelf above the wardrobe, having first wiped it clean.

  If his room were raided, he would simply swear he had never needed the blanket, never climbed to the top shelf, and the letter must have been left by a previous occupant.

  In a stationery shop he bought a stout manila envelope, an adhesive label, and sealing tape; from a post office, enough stamps to send a magazine from Baghdad to London. He abstracted a promotional magazine extolling the virtues of Iraq from the trade fair and even had the empty envelope stamped with the exhibition logo.

  On the last day, just before leaving for the airport with his two colleagues, he retired to his room. He slipped the letter into the magazine and sealed them in the envelope. He addressed it to an uncle in Long Eaton and stuck on the label and the stamps. In the lobby, he knew, was a mailbox, and the next pickup was in four hours. Even if the envelope were steamed open by goons, he reasoned, he would be over the Alps in a British airliner.

  It is said that luck favors the brave or the foolish or both. The lobby was under surveillance by men from the AMAM, watching to see if any departing foreigner was approached by an Iraqi trying to slip him something. Harris carried his envelope under his jacket and beneath his left armpit. A man behind a newspaper in the corner was watching, but a trolley of baggage rolled between them as Harris dropped the envelope into the mailbox. When the watcher saw him again, Harris was at the desk handing in his key.

  The brochure arrived at his uncle’s house a week later. Harris had known his uncle was away on vacation, and as he had a key in case of fire or burglary, he used it to slip in and retrieve his package.

  Then he took it down to the Israeli embassy in London and asked to see his contact. He was shown into a room and told to wait.

  A middle-aged man entered and asked his name and why he wanted to see “Norman.” Harris explained, took the airmail envelope from his pocket, and laid it on the table. The Israeli diplomat went pale, asked him to wait again, and left.

  The embassy building at 2 Palace Green is a handsome structure, but its classical lines give no indication of the wealth of fortifications and technology that conceals the Mossad London Station in the basement.

  It was from this underground fortress that a younger man was summoned urgently. Harris waited and waited.

  Though he did not know it, he was being studied through a one-way mirror as he sat there with the envelope on the table in front of him. He was also being photographed, while records were checked to ensure he really was a sayan and not a Palestinian terrorist. When the photograph of Stuart Harris of Nottingham from the files checked with the man behind the one-way mirror, the young katsa finally entered the room.

  He smiled, introduced himself as Rafi, and invited Harris to start his story at the very beginning, right back in Eilat. So Harris told him. Rafi knew all about Eilat (he had just read the entire file), but he needed to check. When the narrative reached Baghdad, he became interested. He had fe
w queries at first, allowing Harris to narrate in his own time. Then the questions came, many of them, until Harris had relived all he had done in Baghdad several times. Rafi took no notes; the whole thing was being recorded. Finally he used a wall phone to have a muttered conversation in Hebrew with a senior colleague next door.

  His last act was to thank Stuart Harris profusely, congratulate him on his courage and cool head, exhort him never to mention the entire incident to anyone , and wish him safe journey back home. Then Harris was shown out.

  A man with antiblast helmet, flak-jacket, and gloves took the letter away. It was photographed and X-rayed. The Israeli embassy had already lost one man to a letter bomb, and it did not intend to lose another.

  Finally the letter was opened. It contained two sheets of onionskin airmail paper covered in script. In Arabic. Rafi did not speak Arabic, let alone read it. Neither did anyone else in the London station, at least not well enough to read spidery Arabic handwriting. Rafi sent a copious and heavily encrypted radio report to Tel Aviv, then wrote an even fuller account in the formal and uniform style called NAKA in the Mossad. The letter and the report went into the diplomatic bag and caught the evening flight by El Al from Heathrow to Ben-Gurion.

  A dispatch rider with an armed escort met the courier right off the plane and took the canvas bag destined for the big building on King Saul Boulevard, where, just after the breakfast hour, it found itself in front of the head of the Iraq Desk, a very able young katsa called David Sharon.

  He did speak and read Arabic, and what he read in those two onionskin pages of letter left him with the same sensation he had felt the first time he threw himself out of an airplane over the Negev Desert while training with the Paras.

  Using his own typewriter, avoiding both secretary and word processor, he typed out a literal translation of the letter in Hebrew. Then he took them both, plus Rafi’s report as to how the Mossad had come by the letter, to his immediate chief, the Director of the Middle East Division.

  What the letter said, in effect, was that the writer was a high-ranking functionary in the topmost councils ofthe Iraqi regime and that he was prepared to work for Israel for money—but only for money.

  There was a bit more, and a post-office-box address at Baghdad’s principal post office for a reply, but that was the gist of it.

  That evening, there was a high-level meeting in Kobi Dror’s private office. Present were he and Sami Gershon, head of the Combatants. Also Eitan Hadar, David Sharon’s immediate superior as Director of the Middle East Division, to whom he had taken the Baghdad letter that morning. Sharon himself was summoned.

  From the outset, Gershon was dismissive.

  “It’s a phony,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a blatant, clumsy, obvious attempt at entrapment. Kobi, I’m not sending any of my men in there to check it out. It would be sending the man to his death. I wouldn’t even send an oter to Baghdad to try and make contact.”

  An oter is an Arab used by the Mossad to establish preliminary contact with a fellow Arab, a low-level go-between and a lot more expendable than a full-fledged Israeli katsa .

  Gershon’s view seemed to prevail. The letter was a madness, apparently an attempt to lure a senior katsa to Baghdad for arrest, torture, public trial, and public execution. Finally, Dror turned to David Sharon.

  “Well, David, you have a tongue. What do you think?”

  Sharon nodded regretfully.

  “I think Sami almost certainly has to be right. Sending a good man in there would be crazy.”

  Eitan Hadar shot him a warning look. Between divisions, there was the usual rivalry. No need to hand victory to Gershon’s Combatants Division on a plate.

  “Ninety-nine percent of the chances say it has to be a trap,” said Sharon.

  “Only ninety-nine?” asked Dror teasingly. “And the one percent, my young friend?”

  “Oh, just a foolish idea,” Sharon said. “It just occurred to me, the one percent might say that out of the blue, we have a new Penkovsky.”

  There was dead silence. The word hung in the air like an open challenge. Gershon expelled his breath in a long hiss. Kobi Dror stared at his Iraq Desk chief. Sharon looked at his fingertips.

  In espionage there are only four ways of recruiting an agent for infiltration into the high councils of a target country.

  The first is far and away the most difficult: to use one of your own nationals, one trained to an extraordinary degree to pass for a national of the target country right in the heart of that target. It is almost impossible, unless the infiltrator was born and raised in the target country and can be eased back in, with a cover story to explain his absence. Even then, he will have to wait years to rise to useful office with access to secrets—a sleeper for up to ten years.

  Yet once, Israel had been the master of this technique. This was because, when Israel was young, Jews poured in who had been raised all over the world. There were Jews who could pass as Moroccans, Algerians, Libyans, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Yemenis. This was apart from all those coming in from Russia, Poland, Western Europe, and North and South America.

  The most successful of these had been Elie Cohen, born and raised in Syria. He was slipped back into Damascus as a Syrian who had been away for years and had now returned. With his new Syrian name, Cohen became an intimate of high-ranking politicians, civil servants, and generals who spoke freely to their endlessly generous host at his sumptuous parties. Everything they said, including the entire Syrian battle plan, went back to Tel Aviv just in time for the Six-Day War. Cohen was exposed, tortured, and publicly hanged in Revolution Square in Damascus. Such infiltrations are extremely dangerous and very rare.

  But as the years passed, the original immigrant Israelis became old; their sabra children did not study Arabic and could not attempt what Elie Cohen had done. This was why, by 1990, the Mossad had far less brilliant Arabists than one might imagine.

  But there was a second reason. Penetration of Arab secrets is easier to accomplish in Europe or the United States. If an Arab state is buying an American fighter, the details can more easily be stolen, and at a lot less risk, in America. If an Arab high-up seems susceptible to an approach, why not make it while he is visiting the fleshpots of Europe? That is why, by 1990, the vast bulk of Mossad operations were conducted in low-risk Europe and America rather than in the high-risk Arab states.

  The king of all the infiltrators, however, was Marcus Wolf, who for years had run the East German intelligence net. He had one great advantage—an East German could pass for a West German.

  During his time “Mischa” Wolf infiltrated scores and scores of his agents into West Germany. One of them became the personal private secretary of Chancellor Willy Brandt himself. Wolf’s speciality was the prim, dowdy, little spinster secretary who rose to become indispensable to her West German minister-employer—and who could copy every document that crossed her desk for transmission back to East Berlin.

  The second method of infiltration is to use a national of the aggressor agency, posing as someone coming from a third nation. The target country knows that the infiltrator is a foreigner but is persuaded he is a friendly, sympathetic foreigner.

  The Mossad again did this brilliantly with a man called Ze’ev Gur Arieh. He was born Wolfgang Lotz in Mannheim, Germany, in 1921. Wolfgang was six feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, uncircumcised, and yet Jewish. He came to Israel as a boy, was raised there, took his Hebrew name, fought with the underground Haganah, and went on to become a major in the Israeli Army. Then the Mossad took him in hand.

  He was sent back to Germany for two years to perfect his native German and “prosper” with Mossad money. Then, with a new gentile German wife, he emigrated to Cairo and set up a riding school.

  It was a great success. Egyptian staff officers loved to relax with their horses, attended by the champagne-serving Wolfgang, a good right-wing, anti-Semitic German in whom they could confide. And confide they did. Everything they said went back to Tel Aviv. Lotz was ev
entually caught, was lucky not to be hanged, and after the Six-Day War was exchanged for Egyptian prisoners.

  But an even more successful impostor was a German of an earlier generation. Before the Second World War, Richard Sorge had been a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, speaking Japanese and with high contacts in Hideki Tojo’s government. That government approved of Hider and assumed Sorge was a loyal Nazi—he certainly said he was.

  It never occurred to Tokyo that Sorge was not a German Nazi. In fact, he was a German Communist in the service of Moscow. For years he laid the war plans of the Tojo regime open for Moscow to study.

  His great coup was his last. In 1941, Hitler’s armies stood before Moscow. Stalin needed to know urgently: Would Japan mount an invasion of the USSR from her Manchurian bases? Sorge found out; the answer was no. Stalin could transfer forty thousand Mongol troops from the east to Moscow. The Asiatic cannon fodder held the Germans at bay for a few more weeks, until winter came and Moscow was saved.

  Not so Sorge; he was unmasked and hanged. But before he died, his information probably changed history.

  The most common method of securing an agent in the target country is the third: simply to recruit a man who is already “in place.” Recruitment can be tediously slow or surprisingly fast. To this end, talent spotters patrol the diplomatic community looking for a senior functionary of the other side who may appear disenchanted, resentful, dissatisfied, bitter, or in any way susceptible to recruitment.

  Delegations visiting foreign parts are studied to see if someone can be taken aside, given a fine old time, and approached for a change of loyalty. When the talent spotter has tabbed a “possible,” the recruiters move in, usually starting with a casual friendship that becomes deeper and warmer. Eventually, the

  “friend” suggests his pal might do him a small favor; a minor and inconsequential piece of information is needed.

  Once the trap is sprung, there is no going back, and the more ruthless the regime the new recruit is serving, the less likely he will confess all and throw himself on that regime’s nonexistent mercy.