Agents of Innocence

35

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 Fraulein. 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.”

“Speculative?” asked Levi, feeling a knot in the stomach he remembered too well from the old days.

“And too dangerous if you’re wrong. Look some more.”

So Levi went back to his files. He read them once again. He found more details. Then in early June there was a startling development in the case. A piece of intelligence arrived from Europe-from a friendly official in Rome-that was so unmistakably clear and so obvious that it forced Levi’s superiors to pay attention to what he was saying.

Levi delivered his briefing on Jamal Ramlawi to the intelligence chiefs in late June 1972. They met away from the downtown offices, in a more modern compound on a hill overlooking the Haifa Road, just before the turn for Herzliya. The sign out front said: “Ministry of Defense, Bureau of Research.”

The group was called in Hebrew the Rashai. The Chiefs. That was enough.

Levi waited in the hall outside the meeting room for the Chiefs to finish another piece of business. He was nervous. Not the fear in his gut he had known when he was an officer conducting operations in enemy territory. It was more like shyness. In Beirut, his only true emotion had been fear, and that had necessarily been mute. Now Levi had to speak for himself.

A uniformed aide opened the door and motioned for him to come in. He was surprised by how bright it was, bright with the sunlight of Israel in midsummer.

The men at the conference table were dressed as Levi was, in open-neck, short-sleeve shirts. Most of them were smoking. Many of them were bald. It might have been a philosophy seminar at the Hebrew University. The faces and the room would have looked almost the same.

Levi’s eye focused on an older man sitting at the far end of the table. He was a short man with bushy eyebrows, and he was smoking a pipe. Levi imagined that he must be the chief of the Mossad. In truth, Levi had never met the chief and wasn’t even sure of his real name.

“So?” said the little man with the bushy eyebrows. It was a brief rhetorical question, which he answered for himself. “So this young man is Mr. Levi, and he has come to us today to tell us about his research into Black September. Is that right?”

“Yes,” said Levi. His voice sounded like a frog croaking.

“So?”

“My briefing concerns a Palestinian named Jamal Ramlawi,” began Levi. “First, I will tell you what we know about him. Then I will tell you what we suspect.”

“Yes, yes,” said the short man with bushy eyebrows. “Don’t keep us waiting.”

“Yes, chief,” said Levi.

“Don’t call me chief,” said the little man.

“Yes, sir,” said Levi. He must be the head of the service, Levi thought. That is the way the head of Mossad should look. Like everyone’s uncle.

“First, what we know,” said Levi. “We know that Jamal Ramlawi is a leader of Black September. Until two weeks ago, that was a near-certainty. Now it is a certainty, thanks to a piece of intelligence that we obtained from Rome. I believe that most of you have heard the tape recording of Jamal Ramlawi. Yes? I have brought along a tape recorder and can play it now if anyone would like to hear it.”

“We’ve heard it,” said the man with the bushy eyebrows.

“The Rome tape proves what we have suspected for many months,” said Levi.

“What is that?” asked the little man skeptically, puffing on his pipe.

“It proves that Jamal Ramlawi, a senior Fatah intelligence officer, is the chief logistician of Black September. It proves that he obtained weapons and explosives for Black September in Italy, and probably in other countries of Europe, too. The tape is evidence of what we have been trying to tell the world. Black September is Fatah.”

Another man spoke up. One that Levi had missed in looking around the room. He didn’t look like an Israeli; he looked like an American. A professor at the Harvard Law School, maybe. He was tall and thin, so fit that his body seemed almost stringy. He was dressed in loose khaki slacks and a white button-down Oxford-cloth shirt. He wore a pair of clear plastic glasses, which gave him a slightly boyish look. He spoke with a quick, sharp tone of voice that was at once intelligent and impatient.

“The tape doesn’t prove that,” said the button-down professor. “What you said may be true. I personally have no doubt that it is true. But the tape does not prove it. The tape proves only that Ramlawi made arrangements to obtain four automatic pistols and one hundred kilos of explosive in Rome. It doesn’t even prove that, actually, but we will take that on faith.”

Levi’s throat felt dry. He took a drink of water and continued his briefing.

“The tape is only the final piece of information. We have collateral evidence of Ramlawi’s role in Black September. We have photographs of him meeting with a man who was arrested in Cairo last year after the Black September attack on the Jordanian prime minister.”

“Soooo?” said another voice from around the table. He was a fat man wearing a knitted yarmulke. “So what do photos prove? Proximity. Contact. And what is that, my friend? Nothing!”

“We have transcripts of the Egyptian interrogation of the Black September terrorists in which they say they received training from a man who fits the description of Ramlawi.”

“Oh very nice!” said a tall, thin man sitting by the window. “So now we’re depending on the Egyptians for our intelligence? God forbid! How do they know anything? What are they all of a sudden, geniuses?”

Everyone laughed.

Levi realized then that he was getting razzed. That this group liked nothing better in the world than giving young officers a hard time. He set his feet more squarely under him and continued the briefing.

“We have other collateral evidence about Ramlawi’s involvement in Black September, but I won’t bore you with it. Take my word for it. I have analyzed the evidence carefully, and I tell you on my honor that it is accurate. The man is involved in Black September operations. Period. Take my word for it or find another analyst.”

“Not so loud, please,” said the man with bushy eyebrows. He relit his pipe. He was happy now. He didn’t want facts. For all Levi knew, the Chiefs had all spent more time with the files than he had. They wanted analysis.

“Now I will turn to the interesting part,” said Levi. “Here we are not dealing with hard facts, but with speculations-guesses-that are based on the available evidence.”

“What is your speculation?” said the little man. “Just tell us. Don’t make a big production of it, please.”

“The speculation is that Jamal Ramlawi is an American agent.”

There was a momentary silence in the room, broken by the sound of chairs moving, cigarettes being lit, pipes being puffed.

“That’s crazy,” said the little man with bushy eyebrows. “Completely crazy. Why would our friends the Americans do this? Tell us the evidence for this crazy theory.”

“The evidence is complicated,” said Levi.

“Soooo?” said the fat man with the knitted yarmulke. “Do we look stupid?”

“First, we know that Ramlawi is impulsive. We know that in Beirut he led a wild life. Chasing women. Dozens of women. We think that he even had an affair with the wife of a French diplomat.”

“Very nice,” said the tall, thin man by the window. “They deserve each other.”

“We know Ramlawi is a pet of the Fatah leadership,” continued Levi. “We know that he was one of the Fatah men who was sent to Egypt for a special training course in intelligence. We know that he speaks many languages, including English, French, Italian, and German. We know that he has travelled extensively.”

“Sooooo?” queried the fat man. “What does this have to do with the CIA.”

“I’m coming to that,” said Levi. “In Beirut, we collected the travel histories of everyone flying in and out of Beirut International Airport.”

“We know. We know,” said the man with the bushy eyebrows. “Whose idea do you think that was? Eh?”

“I’m coming to the important part,” said Levi testily. “In analyzing the travel records, we find two instances in which Jamal Ramlawi was out of Lebanon in 1970 at the same time as a CIA case officer working under diplomatic cover at the American Embassy in Beirut.”

The law school professor rapped his pen against his glass.

“Mr. Levi,” said the law school professor quietly. “What is the name of this CIA officer?”

“Rogers. Thomas Rogers.”

“And where did they go, the terrorist and the CIA man?”

“To Kuwait in March 1970, and to Egypt in May 1970. We cannot confirm that they actually met. But we are sure that they went to those countries at the same time.”

“It could be a coincidence, of course,” said the button-down profesor. “Even twice in one year. But it is interesting, I must admit.”

“Yes,” said the little man with the bushy eyebrows.

“Yes,” said the fat man in the yarmulke.

“Continue,” said the professor.

“The second important piece of evidence is an agent report in the files about a visit to Rome in July 1970 by an American intelligence officer. I wouldn’t have found it at all, since it never went into the Fatah file. I noticed it when I was researching the background of the Italian general in Rome who provided us with the tape.”

“Go on, go on,” said the little man. “Spare us the details.”

“According to this agent in Rome, the American intelligence man had flown in specially to meet with an Arab agent, a Palestinian perhaps. The Italians never figured out who he was supposed to meet. Neither did we. But last week I had one of our friends do a travel check to see if anyone interesting had travelled from Beirut to Rome in July 1970. And guess who popped out from one of the MEA passenger lists, travelling with a phony Algerian passport that he has used several times since then?”

“Ramlawi,” said several voices around the table.

“Correct,” said Levi, beaming.

“And who was this American who came to Rome?” asked the button-down professor.

“Marsh. John Marsh.”

“And why did Mr. Marsh come, and not Mr. Rogers?”

Levi thought for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he said eventually.

“Good,” said the professor. “If you had answered that question, I would have suspected that you were making everything up. Sometimes the correct answer is that we don’t know what the correct answer is.”

Heads around the table nodded sagely. Levi nodded too.

“Go on!” barked the little man with bushy eyebrows. “What are you waiting for?”

“After Rome, everything gets a little fuzzy,” said Levi. “We have a report from an agent in Lebanon. I know a little about him, since I used to collect his reports from dead drops. He is a priest, and something of an amateur detective in his spare time. This may be a little hard to understand, so bear with me. The priest had received from his Mossad case officer in Europe a list of people in whom we had some intelligence interest. One of them was Jamal Ramlawi. So he took it upon himself to put a question to Rogers, the CIA man, about Ramlawi.”

“He did what?” asked the fat man with the knitted yarmulke.

“He asked Rogers, the CIA man, for information about Ramlawi.”

“What an idiot!” said the fat man. “And what did Rogers say?”

“He told the priest to ask the Israelis.”

“Ach!” said the fat man. “What an idiot we have for an agent.”

“What else?” asked the professor.

“One last thing. An agent’s report that I carried out of Syria myself. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a report from a Palestinian inside the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”

“Yes, yes. We know the name of the group,” said the little man with bushy eyebrows. “What did the report say?”

“It said that the leadership of the PFLP was convinced that there was an American agent inside Fatah. The PFLP leadership wasn’t sure about the identity of the agent, but they suspected that it was Ramlawi.”

“Well, well, well,” said the little man. As he talked, he inserted a pipe cleaner in the stem of his pipe and withdrew a wad of wet brown goo. “So, now we are getting our intelligence from the lunatics in the PLO, is that what you are telling me?”

“We take it wherever we can get it,” said Levi.

“Correct,” said the law school professor with the clear plastic glasses. “And since you understand that fact of life so well, perhaps you can answer the big question.”

“What is that?” said Levi.

“The big question is what should we do about all of this?”

“You want my recommendation?”

“Why not?”

“Let me think.”

“Not too long,” said the professor. “If you think too long, you will become like the rest of us. Don’t think. Just say.”

“We could try to use Ramlawi ourselves. Threaten to expose his contacts with the Americans if he doesn’t agree to work with us.”

“Wrong,” said the professor. “Interesting, but wrong. The Palestinian would just assume that the Americans had told everything to their Israeli friends. Trying to blackmail him would accomplish nothing. It would only cut off the American connection. Any more ideas?”

“We could make an approach to Rogers, the CIA officer. Or to Marsh, the one who was in Rome.”

“Wrong again. Too risky. We do not want to start recruiting CIA officers. We don’t need the aggravation. Do you want to know the correct answer?”

“Of course,” said Levi.

“Don’t do anything. At first, that is always the best thing to do. Nothing. Just watch and wait. Don’t make the water muddy by stirring it up. Be patient.”

“Yes, sir,” said Levi.

That was it. People began rising from their seats. Levi felt deflated, somehow, to have travelled this far, assembled all this material, only to be told to do nothing. Perhaps it showed, because as the group was filing out of the room, the button-down professor and the diminutive man with the bushy eyebrows both walked over to Levi.

Levi watched them approach and wondered, which one is the boss? Which one is the true face of Mossad? The wily little man with the sardonic sense of humor or the clipped, carefully controlled analyst? The man in the button-down shirt approached Levi first and shook his hand.

“My name is Natan Porat,” said the man in the clear glasses. “I am the chief of the service. You did a fine job today. Keep up the good work.”

He motioned to the short man with bushy eyebrows.

“This is my deputy, Avraham Cohen,” said Porat.

“You give a nice briefing, Mr. Levi,” said Cohen.

Porat took Levi aside. He seemed even more American up close. He didn’t sweat. His hair was trim. His voice was clipped. He didn’t gesture when he talked. He seemed to Levi almost bloodless. Porat looked with his clear eyes through his clear glasses. He spoke the language of the “A” students who run the modern-day security services around the world.

“We will do something about the Ramlawi problem, I assure you,” said Porat. “But you must understand that it is delicate. It is a little awkward to learn that an American agent is directing the operations of the leading terrorist group in the world.”