Agents of Innocence

15

Beirut; March 1970

Yakov Levi noted Rogers’s return to Beirut on a file card in a box he kept at the office. Levi entered the dates of the trip and the notation: “Kuwait.” The entry followed one marked: “Amman.” The information came from a contact at the airport who provided passenger lists and, when necessary, photographs of passengers.

It was a puzzle, Levi thought to himself. Why was Rogers taking these trips? What was he doing? Who was he meeting?

Levi fretted about such puzzles, and about most things. He was a short, wiry man, with dark features and a look of perpetual uneasiness. His family was from Marseilles, he told friends, with a few distant relatives from Corsica. He was a nervous man with a bad stomach, who chewed antacid pills through the day in the vain hope that they would relieve the tension that was eating away at his gut.

Yakov Levi’s problem was that he didn’t exist. Not in Beirut, at least. There was no one in the city by that name. There was instead a Frenchman, an import-export trader named Jacques Beaulieu, and Levi lived inside his skin. The worldly Monsieur Beaulieu worked in an office on the Rue de Phenice in West Beirut, several blocks from the St. Georges Hotel. The brass plaque on the door said “Franco-Lebanese Trading Co.” It was a busy little import-export firm, quite profitable, it was said, staffed by a handful of bright young men and women who were well-mannered, spoke French, English, and Arabic, and had a wide circle of acquaintances in Lebanon. Members of the firm travelled extensively in the Arab world and had a reputation for paying generous commissions on business deals.

Levi’s import-export firm was, in reality, the Mossad station in Beirut. His family had indeed lived in Marseilles once, but no longer. The survivors now lived in Israel. All except for Yakov Levi, who called himself Beaulieu. He was a Jew, living secretly in the midst of Arabs who wanted to kill him, and he was perpetually frightened. A fear so deep and constant that it had entered his body and flowed in his veins. He had been in Beirut for three years, burning out his circuits day by day. A few months ago they had promised him a fancy desk job back home at the end of the year, but he didn’t believe them. It was a lie, told to keep him living a few more months in Hell.

The Mossad station in Beirut, the very fact of its existence, was one of the few true secrets in a town where gossip and spying were a way of life. The station had been in operation, in various locations, since 1951. The Americans hadn’t a clue where it was, nor had the Deuxieme Bureau, nor had anyone else. The Israelis who worked for Franco-Lebanese Trading didn’t tell a soul their true identities or what they were really doing.

They were Israel’s eyes and ears in the Arab world. They serviced dead drops, acted as couriers, spotted potential agents, scouted the terrain. They might recommend the recruitment of a particular Lebanese or Palestinian, but they never did the actual recruiting or handling. That was too dangerous. One false move would blow the station’s cover. They left such tasks to Mossad officers in Europe, who could meet agents easily in Paris or Rome, receive their information, pay them their stipends. In Lebanon, the handful of Mossad officers were under a cover so deep that they didn’t like to talk, even to each other, about their real work.

Watching the Americans was part of Levi’s job. Identifying the intelligence agents among them, tracking them, trying to understand what they were doing in secret in the Middle East behind the veil of America’s public policy. Levi was perfect for the job. He believed almost nothing that anyone said, least of all the Americans.

Levi had been watching Tom Rogers for more than six months. He was convinced that he was a CIA case officer, but that part was easy. All you had to do was study the diplomatic list and look for the odd man out. The person whose resume didn’t quite make sense: who had been a consular officer one place and a commercial attache somewhere else and was now a political officer. Or you could look for social quirks: a political officer who didn’t attend the Christmas party given by the head of the political section at the embassy. Or if you were still stumped, you could look at the State Department’s foreign service list, published in Washington. With chilling precision it listed the CIA officers under diplomatic cover as “reserve” officers of the foreign service-“FSRs,” they were called-rather than as full-fledged FSOs.

Some cover! thought Levi. The Americans could afford to be so sloppy. They were rich and powerful. And they were not Jews.

Walking to his office on the Rue de Phenice, Levi could see the grand facade of the American Embassy on the Corniche. He would look to the fifth floor, where the CIA officers worked, and try to imagine what they were doing and thinking. It was easy with some of them. The case officers who handled Lebanese politicians were so clumsy they left footprints all over town. Others, like the new man Rogers, were more careful. They looked, from a distance, as if they were almost clever enough to be Mossad officers. That worried Levi, and it made his stomach hurt.

Watching the Palestinians was the other part of Levi’s job. In some ways that was easier than watching the Americans. It was almost too easy, with too many tidbits of information in the air and too many tracks to follow. The Palestinians were braggarts. Rather than trying to conceal their military and intelligence operations, they boasted about them. And they fought over who would control them. Levi made it a practice to check out gunfights in Fakhani, because they often involved rival Fatah officers dueling for control of units, or operations, or money.

Levi despised the Palestinians. That hatred was part of what kept him going. The Palestinians were so thoroughly corrupt. And they were spoiled by the other Arabs, who were terrified of them. To become rich, all a PLO official needed to do was gather up a band of scruffy refugees in a place like Qatar or Abu Dhabi, let the local Emir know that trouble was brewing, and wait for the payoff to arrive. It was so easy to buy PLO officials that Levi wondered whether the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict might lie, not in another war, but in a takeover bid.

He watched the Palestinians with a horrid fascination, hating what he saw, his hatred in turn feeding his curiosity about the nature of his enemies. He was fascinated by their sexual habits. The Old Man, for example, had never been known to sleep with a woman. Who, then, did he sleep with? Levi wanted to believe that he slept with little boys. That would be exactly, perfectly right. Levi wanted evidence to support his theory, but where could he look? He couldn’t very well ask young boys in Fakhani whether they had ever been molested by a man in guerrilla fatigues.

And then there were the playboys, the young men in Fatah’s so-called intelligence service. There was Abu Namli, who bought his whisky by the case and frequented the whorehouses of Zeituny with a fat roll of dollar bills, buying two or three girls at a time. There was Abu Nasir, cool and austere, who liked to use women for other tasks, such as planting bombs.

And there was Abu Nasir’s assistant, a flamboyant young man named Jamal Ramlawi. Levi was convinced that Ramlawi was the mystery Palestinian in the recent scandal involving the French diplomat’s wife. There was no proof, but there were many rumors. Agents had even seen a dark-haired European woman near Ramlawi’s office in Fakhani. It had to be Ramlawi. He was notorious in Beirut as a ladies’ man. He had been seen in every nightclub and bistro in town. He was almost reckless in his behavior. So reckless that Levi wondered, as he thought about it, whether the young Palestinian’s disregard for what most people liked to keep secret might conceal a deeper secret. That was a possibility. Levi made a note to open a new index card in the Palestinian file. And to start checking Ramlawi’s travels more carefully.

Levi could remember dimly the time when he hadn’t been scared. That was before he joined Mossad, when he was just a simple soldier. When all he was required to do for the state of Israel was to risk the chance of dying once, in war. As an intelligence officer, he had already died a thousand times.

Levi liked to remember how he had joined the Israeli intelligence service. It was a way of pinching himself, reminding himself that he had once had another life.

He had been serving in the army. That wasn’t unusual. All Israelis join the army. But he was very fit and very clever, so he was allowed to join the paratroops, which made his parents proud. And he was so good in the paratroops that they asked him to join the special operations unit, where he was a team leader.

Perhaps the fear began then. Levi had made a jump into southern Sudan, with a team of Israelis who were helping to foment a civil war there between the Moslems of the north and the Christians of the south. The Israelis provided guns and training for the southerners, on the theory that if the Moslem-dominated regime in Khartoum was pinned down by internal strife, it couldn’t do much to help Nasser in Egypt make war on Israel. That assignment was only frightening for the few minutes before the jump. After that it was easy. Either you died or you didn’t.

After a year in special operations, he left the military and attended university. It was enough, he had done his service. A few months later the phone rang. Go to an address in downtown Tel Aviv tomorrow. No explanation, except that it was for the army. They spent four days asking questions, assembling every detail of his life history. The family’s background in France. Old addresses and telephone numbers in Marseilles. Old passport numbers and the names and addresses of dead relatives. A former girlfriend called to ask whether he had done anything wrong, because an investigator had just spent the entire day asking questions about him.

And then the ruse. He was called back to the army for more training. A three-month advanced intelligence course. Okay. Fine. No problem. Everyone in Israel is in the army. Then another course. A more advanced intelligence course, at a much higher salary, the salary of an Israeli Army captain, which was a small fortune in those days. By this time it was becoming obvious what was happening. The subjects covered in the course included covert communications, demolition, small-arms training, how to operate inside urban areas.

And finally the graduation ceremony. He was roused from bed in the middle of the night and taken to the airport, where he was given a false French passport and $10, put on a plane, and flown to Frankfurt, West Germany. Leaving the plane they gave him an address and told him to be there in ten days. Until then he was on his own, speaking no German, with $10 in his pocket. He had to survive in a strange country for more than a week without giving away his identity.

So what did he do? He survived. He stole a car and drove around Germany. He was a French student on holiday, he told people. He lived by stealing money. Purses, wallets. It helped that he hated Germans. He arrived ten days later at the address they had given him driving a brown Mercedes, with a new set of clothes and the lipstick of his German girlfriend still on his cheek. He was one of the few recruits who made it. Some of the other boys had slept in the bushes near the airport, eaten food from trash cans, and called the Israeli Embassy in desperation after two days. They were not survivors, like Levi. Perhaps they were not scared enough.

They said, Okay. You have survived. You are one of us. Go to France, to Marseilles. Settle down. Disappear. Take classes at the university. Build an identity. Apply for a passport. It’s legal; you were born in France. Here are the supporting documents. Money arrived every month at a numbered bank account in Nice. It was like a long vacation, until the French passport arrived in the mail. A few days later came a message from a Mossad case officer, and the beginning of the awful fear.

Levi went to work as a courier, making runs behind the Iron Curtain. He travelled as a French businessman, servicing dead drops and agents in Warsaw, Prague, Lithuania, Kiev, Moscow. He carried money, messages, assignments for Mossad agents in the East. They were Jews, nearly all of them. People as frightened and determined to survive as Levi was. He would collect their information in a quick meeting at a railway station in Warsaw, or in a brush pass in a Moscow subway station, or by retrieving a set of documents from a metal can hidden in the spout of a rain gutter in Bratislava. He travelled on a precise itinerary, pre-programmed down to the minute. Each contact set for a precise time, with a fall-back twenty-four hours later in a different place if the agent didn’t show or the dead drop was empty.

All he could really remember about those trips was the fear. The perspiration dripping down his shirt as he stood in the line for passport control, the struggle to control his voice when a policeman stopped him on the street on his way to meet an agent and asked him where he was going. So scared that he worried he would shit in his pants. So scared that he couldn’t think of anything else except surviving and staying alive. And when he had crossed the frontier at last, and made it out alive, he would go back to Marseilles and wait, like a condemned man, to do it again.

He was very good at it. One of the best. That was Levi’s curse. It had landed him in Beirut.

We are pushing at the seams, the chief of the Mossad station in Beirut liked to tell his young officers. Pushing at the seams of a garment that is unravelling. The Arab world is a myth. There are no Arabs. There are Christians and Moslems; Palestinians and Syrians and Lebanese; Sunnis and Shiites and Druse and Maronites and Melchites and Alawites and Copts and Kurds. They live in make-believe countries that were created by the colonialists of Europe. The fabric is ready to break, the station chief would say. The false thread of Arabism won’t last another generation. Just look, he would say, at Lebanon.

The chief of station was a man named Ze’ev Shuval and Levi was in awe of him. He became convinced, in the way that a junior officer can, that it was Shuval who kept them all alive. But for the station chief, Levi thought, they might all walk through the streets of Beirut singing the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikva. Shuval was restless, thoughtful, playful, and furtive. He had translucent skin, a face that was slightly reddish and freckled, and a balding head with the few remaining strands of hair combed carefully over the top. He looked like a prim and proper French businessman. His French was nearly flawless, but there was a hint of another accent-perhaps Dutch-from long ago.

Shuval invited Levi to dinner one night in the spring of 1970. Did Levi remember, as he rang the doorbell that evening, that there was anything special about that particular night? And was he surprised to see several other people from the station at the chief’s house? The other guests included a young woman who worked as a courier when she wasn’t typing letters and weigh bills, and a couple in their mid-forties who handled bugs and cameras and other surveillance gear.

Levi did not realize what was happening at first that night at Shuval’s apartment. He saw Shuval’s wife go to the window and close the blinds tightly, but that was normal enough. He noticed that there was one extra place at the dinner table, but maybe they were expecting someone else for dessert. It was only when he looked carefully at the table itself that he realized what Shuval had done. Laid out on the table were a plate with three pieces of matzoh; a roasted shank bone; a sprig of parsley next to a dish of salted water; the top of a horseradish root; a boiled egg; and a paste made of apples and nuts.

Shuval is mad, thought Levi. It is too dangerous to celebrate Passover here. Someone will see us. Someone will hear us. But Shuval emerged from the kitchen smiling broadly. He had on his head a yarmulke and presented one to Levi and the other male guest.

“Will someone please turn on the radio,” said Shuval. Levi turned the knob. The radio was tuned to the Voice of the Arabs from Cairo, which was repeating a week-old speech by President Nasser. The Egyptian leader was talking in a monotone about the efficiency of Egyptian industry.

“Thank you,” said Shuval.

The lights were dimmed and Shuval’s wife went to light the candles. With tears streaming down his face, Levi listened as Shuval recited the traditional blessing of the candles in a voice that was quiet, just above a whisper, but still rising above the drone of Nasser’s speech.

Barub Atab Adonai Elobeinu…

“In praising God, we say that all life is sacred. In kindling festive lights, we preserve life’s sanctity.”

Levi was crying. So was the code clerk. But Shuval’s voice was strong and full of hope.

“With every holy light we kindle, the world is brightened to a higher harmony. We praise thee, O Lord our God, majestic sovereign of all life who hallows our lives with commandments and bids us kindle festive holy light.”

“Sit down, everyone,” said Shuval’s wife.

Levi looked at the table. The matzoh, because there had been no time fleeing Egypt to make leavened bread. The tender herbs of spring, the green of hope and renewal, to be dipped in the salt water of tears. And the maror, the bitter horseradish root, standing for the bitterness of life in Egypt, and the greater bitterness and pain of the 2,500 years of exile in the Diaspora. And the sweet paste of apples and honey, the mortar with which we build our dreams.

For once, Levi felt that he understood what he was doing in Beirut and remembered that he was part of a very long journey indeed.