Counter Attack

Chapter 34

Finding a small internet cafe in the locals-only part of Phnom Penh, Mac bought a pot of coffee and took the computer in the far corner. Using the protocols Charlie had given him, he went through a series of pop-up windows until a tag-line in the bottom right-hand corner informed him he was operating from the remote computer network Charlie had stipulated; by the jumble of letters, it looked like a tractor parts distributor based in Wisconsin.

Activating the graphics-free Mozilla browser, Mac found the ASIS website, logged in with his passwords and held his breath, almost expecting Urquhart, Lance and Marlon to burst in the door as soon as he was in the ASIS system.

He searched in the ASIS databases for mentions of Israeli, IDF or Mossad activity in Indochina. There were fifteen files, and Mac opened them one by one. The oldest, from the 1970s, were scanned files in PDF format. He grinned as he scrolled through the old typewritten and telex-printed reports and memos, some sent over the wire from consular communications offices in Hanoi and Bangers, others typed and pouched out of Saigon, Nha Trang and Phnom Penh. One looked like it had started life in Vientiane — an Aussie SIS asset, a coffee importer from Melbourne, had run across a couple of interlopers in the Laotian capital who were talking about big coffee contracts and trying to talk down the Aussie and North American coffee buyers. The report noted that they looked Lebanese but used names like ‘John Baker’. One claimed to be from San Francisco, but he hesitated when talking about the view from Russia Hill: a view he should have known. The local asset decided they were Israeli when he saw their appalling driving.

Chuckling, Mac cycled through the files. They were in a report format — there was no desk analysis on Israeli intelligence in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Peninsular Malaysia or Thailand, and there were no assessments generated in Canberra based on field intelligence of Israeli activity.

The reports rattled off the basics: Mossad and IDF special forces had trained units in the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore; Israel, according to one report, had paid informers in northern Burma, but that didn’t mean much — a paid informer in South-East Asia was someone who’d been shown a stack of greenbacks, and didn’t see the harm. Mac didn’t take it too seriously because many European intelligence agents in South-East Asia allowed the locals to think they were Mossad, as a way of covering where they really came from. It evened out since Mossad agents liked to intimate that they were from the CIA or British SIS when dealing with informers. There were entire cadres of Mossad agents trained to pass for Syrians, Iraqis and Jordanians.

What he was looking for was mention of a bunch of hairy-chested Mossad operators, not hiding behind a film production company or a photography bureau. The kind of pros who would push Quirk for access to a computer network and then drop him when it suited them; a bunch of tough guys who would put a light-bulb bomb in Mac’s hotel room. People like that — no matter how far they’d drifted off as privateers — always gained attention during their official careers.

Pouring his coffee as the traffic outside went about its theatrics, Mac looked at the last file in the ASIS search result. It was stamped April, a year ago. He clicked it open.

It started with a basic intelligence bio card, which was a file containing a passport picture and all the information that defines a person. It was titled RADOFF, Bernard Levi and proceeded to list details of Mr (Bernie) Radoff’s social persona: a French businessman, former banker, now an import-exporter with textile and printing interests in Thailand, Burma and Cambodia.

The second part of the file told the real story: Bernie Radoff was born Marcel Beyer, French-Israeli, former IDF air force, graduated with a law degree from the University of Haifa in 1991, post-grad economics at the Sorbonne in 1992, trained at Mossad in the early 1990s (while still in Paris), joined Banque Nationale in 1993 as a management trainee in its institutional division and spent the rest of his career drawing two cheques: one from the French bank as a bond writer, and the other from King Saul, the Tel Aviv street where Israel’s famous security service was located.

The file noted that Beyer had risen to a senior position with BNP and run the bank’s bond desk out of Hong Kong and then Singapore. Australian intelligence estimated that Beyer ceased being an active Mossad agent in 2005.

Mac was about to log out when he realised there were two attachments to the Marcel Beyer file. The first was a story from Associated Press, tagged Bangkok, Thailand, from eight months ago.

Reading quickly, Mac grew impatient with the lack of clear information.

The other attachment was a black and white photograph. It showed Radoff in what looked like the forecourt of the Sheraton Saigon on Dong Du Street, just around the corner from the Grand. He was sleek, tanned and arrogant, and grinning at the camera, which was being wielded by a photographer from the Saigon Times. The caption read: French financier Bernard Radoff has been touring some of Vietnam’s pulp and paper operations in the Mekong region as he looks for suitable investments to augment his holdings in Thailand and Cambodia.

Mac was about to close the photograph when something caught his eye. Radoff was standing in front of a white 4x4. Mac looked closer — it looked like a Ford Explorer SUV, although he couldn’t be certain. The photographer had cropped the picture so only the front portion of the Explorer stuck into the picture — it stopped at the windscreen pillar. The window of the vehicle had a faint glare bouncing off it but Mac could see that a driver sat behind the wheel, a baseball cap pulled over his eyes.

His pulse quickening, Mac used the Photoshop software in the ASIS system to draw a box around the driver’s face and magnify it.

Saving the magnified image to a notepad, Mac selected the ‘repixelate’ option in the menu and waited for the processors in Canberra to take the blown-up, blurry pixels of that driver and make their estimations about how it should look as a reconstituted image.

The result stunned Mac as it finally clarified like a fog lifting. Despite the glare of the glass and the shadow-forming peak of the cap, he knew he was looking at the Israeli with the scary eyes — the man in the red shirt who’d killed Quirk.

Cutting and pasting the repixelated image into the ‘search’ field of the ASIS databases, Mac clicked on the ‘match to identity’ option and hit search.

The search tumbled for more than six minutes as the digital information was thrown at every facial image in the Australian intel database — a database which had been compiled over eighty years.

Finally, a bio card popped up. The man’s name was Joel Dozsa, born 20 March 1970 in — as Mac had surmised — Hungary.

Dozsa had emigrated to Israel as a teenager, and it was suspected he’d been recruited by Mossad in his first months of university at Haifa, Bernie Radoff’s alma mater.

Joel Dozsa had done his doctoral work in military history at the Australian National University in Canberra, and had augmented his research with a junior lectureship at the Royal Military College Duntroon, teaching Australian Army officer cadets.

Having finished his thesis, Dozsa was offered a lecturer’s position at Duntroon but the offer was suddenly withdrawn after an unfavourable report from the Defence Security Authority, the military’s internal intelligence and vetting agency. The reason for the retraction was not in the report, but Mac assumed the Mossad connection had filtered back to DSA.

The last paragraph of the Joel Dozsa bio was both vague and clear:

Mac finally breathed out. He now had a name and bio. Joel Dozsa was smart and organised, and he’d almost embedded himself in Australia’s military establishment. RMC Duntroon trained the elite of Australia’s and the Pacific’s military leaders, and a powerful position such as lecturer would have given Mossad some interesting leverage in the Asia-Pacific region.

Logging out of the ASIS portal, Mac stared at the bare-bones Mozilla screen, still operating off a parts department hard drive in Wisconsin. Bringing up Google, he typed in the words: light bulb bomb Thailand 1993.

The first item was an old Associated Press report from July 1993 — Thai criminal investigators were resiling from their initial statement that the Indonesian businessman Ibrahim Sarno had been killed at his golf-resort bungalow at Phuket because of a freak gas explosion. The police investigation had been joined by a team from Thailand’s military intelligence agency and the possibility had been raised that Sarno had been blasted to pieces while turning on the bathroom light…

Mac looked around, his skin crawling. He’d seen first-hand how the light-bulb bomb worked, and he felt nauseous having to read those words.

Police, according to the AP report, were now accepting the possibility that Sarno had been assassinated by some form of IED triggered by the light switch. The journalist had obviously got wind of foul play once the military spooks had entered the investigation, because the writer concluded with the sentence: Police refused to confirm that Ibrahim Sarno was a conduit for South-East Asian funding of the PLO, or that his suspicious death was an assassination by Israeli intelligence agents.

Mac had his man. The light-bulb-in-the-bathroom MO confirmed it. But what now played on his mind was Dozsa’s possible success during his time in Canberra.

Mac wanted to believe that the people Dozsa had approached would have told him to rack off, but experience told him otherwise…