Back Blast

45

The Mossad officer looked out the window through the early evening’s haze to the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv and then beyond, into the vast blue of the Mediterranean Sea.

The man retained the clarity of mind to know this view was probably very beautiful, but he was not able to enjoy it as he should. He was a captive here in this room, and the big city, so close it looked as if he could touch it, just drew a deeper contrast to his predicament.

He understood his situation intellectually. The men and the guns and the orders to sit and wait made it clear he was a prisoner. But despite this difficult predicament, the Mossad officer did not understand what the hell he had done to find himself here in the first place.

Yanis Alvey had served in Israeli intelligence for twenty-six years, most of these as a member of Metsada, a paramilitary and direct action arm of the Mossad. He had been a shooter, then when he reached the age where he could not keep up with the younger men in his unit any longer, he graduated from black Nomex and balaclavas to an Armani suit and a BlackBerry. He became a coordinator for Metsada operations, overseeing logistics and planning of the unit’s kill/capture missions all over the globe.

Life in the Mossad had been good to Alvey, until very recently that was, when he was shot during an in extremis operation in Hamburg, Germany. He spent most of the following month recovering at Tel HaShomer Hospital in Ramat Gan, a suburb east of Tel Aviv, before finally being released to go home for a lengthy convalescence.

After several weeks his wound had all but healed, and he was nearly ready to return to work. Then, just five days ago, he was called in to a meeting at Mossad’s headquarters on the Coastal Highway north of Tel Aviv. Here he met with a superior officer who asked him a question that tipped Alvey off he was in serious trouble.

“Yanis, yes or no. Did you, in any way, facilitate the escape of the Gray Man from Europe last month?”

Yanis Alvey had done exactly that, and he’d done it without authorization. That his superiors suspected likely meant that his career in the Mossad was in jeopardy.

But Alvey told the truth because he was a man of good character. “Yes. I alone helped the Gray Man leave Europe.”

There were no more questions. He was told to stand and then he was handcuffed. It was done politely — no one thought the legendary Yanis Alvey was any sort of a threat — but he was restrained nevertheless. He was driven a kilometer east to Ramat HaSharon, a northern suburb of Tel Aviv, to a Mossad safe house on a gentle hillside. He’d visited here many times in his career, but this time, for the first time, it was clear he was a captive. He was uncuffed and led into a small apartment in the expansive home and told to remain inside. Security forces patrolled the garden and the driveway outside, and in the home outside Yanis’s door, bored Mossad officers half his age sat around and smoked and watched TV, keeping one eye on the older man locked in the apartment.

They brought Alvey his food and a collection of daily newspapers, but he had no more contact with the outside world, and no information about what was going to happen to him.

After the first day Alvey demanded to speak with Menachem Aurbach, director of the Mossad, but Alvey’s minders here had no way to make that happen, and to Yanis his handlers looked as if they had less of a clue about what was going on than he did.

So he just sat there, waiting for answers. He knew this strategy, of course. Aurbach was keeping him prisoner, softening him up, taking his time to allow Alvey to spend some time realizing the severity of his predicament and coming to terms with the fact his career, and his freedom, could be so easily threatened.

Late in the evening of his fifth full day here in the Ramat HaSharon safe house he sat looking out the window at the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv to the south and the water to the west. His near catatonic state was broken by some commotion outside of his room, and then the door opened.

Menachem Aurbach, the swarthy old man who ran the Mossad, stood in the doorway, along with two younger officers. In his right hand Aurbach held a thin blue file folder. He entered with a tired little smile and a nod to Alvey, and then with a wave of the folder he bade Alvey to follow him over to a small sitting area with a table in the corner.

Yanis did as his director asked, and soon the two men sat close to each other without a word, Aurbach calm and relaxed; Alvey tense and on edge.

The director of the Mossad waved his hand in the air and the two other men left the room. Only when they were gone and the door was shut did Aurbach speak.

“Shalom. Ma nishma, Yanis?” Hello. How are you, Yanis?

“Tov, Menachem. Toda.” Fine, Menachem. Thank you.

“The wound to your stomach has healed?”

“The wound is better. But I do not understand why I am here. I do not deserve this treatment from the service I served loyally for so long.”

Aurbach looked around the little apartment. “Five days of house arrest. You are still young, relative to me, anyway. I can see how a few days locked in a home, even a nice home like this, could be a nuisance for you. Me? I’d consider house arrest a wonderful holiday.” He laughed aloud and patted Yanis on the knee. “Why won’t someone sentence me to a little vacation?”

Alvey did not smile. He leaned forward, feeling the pinch of tethered scar tissue in his midsection as he did so. The gunshot wound had healed, but the scar, like the memory of the pain, would remain with him forever. “I know why you put me here, but I don’t know what I did wrong. I helped the man who saved our prime minister from assassination. How can that be bad?”

Aurbach put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a wooden match from a box he pulled from his pocket, then extinguished the match with a swirl of his wrist. As he blew out smoke he said, “You did it unilaterally, without telling your control. Without telling me. Why was that?”

Alvey spoke plainly and honestly. “Because the Americans wanted this man dead, and I worried you would give him to them. Your good relationship with the USA is a great benefit to this service and to our nation, don’t misunderstand me. But your good relationship with them would have meant the death of Mr. Gentry, and I thought we owed him better after what he did for us.”

Aurbach nodded. Clearly he couldn’t have been happy with the explanation his subordinate had just given. The man was, after all, confessing to going behind Aurbach’s back on an operation. But the old man did seem to appreciate the candor.

The seventy-two-year-old gently placed the thin blue file folder on the table between the men, and then he laid his rough hand on it. Patting it gently, he said, “I am going to tell you a little story, but before I begin the story, I will tell you how the story will end. It will end with you covering your head with your hands and begging forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness for what?”

“Forgiveness for your complicity in allowing the Gray Man to live after what he has done.”

Alvey just said, “Tell me.”

“What do you know about a Mossad asset with the code name of Hawthorn?”

Alvey shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve never heard the name.”

“Well, believe me, you know the man’s work.” The statement hung in the air a long time. It was all the more curious to Alvey because he never knew the plainspoken Aurbach to speak with such melodrama.

The younger man just replied, “Who is he?”

Slowly Menachem leaned back in his chair and puffed on his cigarette. “He was Iraqi. Hawthorn’s father worked for us first. He was a pilot in Saddam’s air force. This was the eighties, mind you, shortly after Osirak. We recruited the father while he was on leave in Cyprus. It wasn’t an ideological recruitment; he was chasing money and girls, and we gave him a little taste, then offered him much more of both for helping us. He agreed. He wasn’t terribly useful at first, he didn’t provide us much in the way of intelligence about Saddam’s air power capabilities, so we cut him loose, not wanting to throw good money after bad.

“We thought that was that, but after he left the military he became a pilot for Middle East Airlines, and we reached out again. MEA flew all over the region, so we thought he might be able to provide bits of intelligence for us here and there.”

“Did he?”

Aurbach waved a hand in the air. “Nothing relevant to our discussion tonight, Yanis. We will talk about his son.”

Yanis Alvey shrugged. “Okay. The son. Code name Hawthorn. We got him through his dad?”

Aurbach took another long drag from his cigarette. “The father relocated to MEA’s home office in Beirut in 1990, and his eighteen-year-old son came with him. He went to the university there, got caught up in a student movement against Shia dominance of the government, and was arrested by the police during a peaceful sit-in.

“The police were controlled by Hezbollah, of course, so they threw him into a cell along with some of his friends. Beat them night and day. Hawthorn was the only student who survived the ordeal.

“We learned all this from his father, and with his blessing we made a soft approach. He agreed to work for us in Lebanon against Hezbollah, but within a few years he was informing against the more radical Sunni groups, as well.”

“Sounds like a useful asset,” Alvey said. Yanis Alvey was a commando, so he didn’t run agents himself, but he certainly benefited from their intelligence product. He’d conducted countless operations in Lebanon, so he couldn’t help but wonder if Hawthorn’s product had served him and his various missions.

Menachem agreed. “He was one of my best agents, and he was good at his work, but I knew he could be even more valuable if we left him alone. I gave him the code name Hawthorn because it is a plant that grows here in the Levant. If raised in the wild, on its own, it bears plentiful fruit. My philosophy was to let him stay in Lebanon as our inside man, for the next time our army traveled north to clean the country of terrorists.”

“But why did he agree to help us?”

“He hated Hezbollah, hated all the radical and jihadist groups, Sunni and Shia alike. He had no great love for Judaism or our state, but as Hezbollah took over Lebanon and al Qaeda began to grow in the Middle East, he saw the radical philosophies as insidious cancers, and he saw Israel as something of a surgeon, cutting away the bad.”

Alvey understood. “I imagine as his case officer, you painted exactly that picture in his mind. You gave him a purpose. A reason.”

“That is it, entirely.” The old man smiled sadly. “And then came 9/11. And then came Iraq.”

Alvey said, “We didn’t share him with the Americans, did we?”

Aurbach shook his head, still smiling. “No. He was ours alone.”

Alvey was not surprised. The Mossad was notoriously stingy with its intelligence sources.

“We sent him to the nation of his birth just after the invasion. He was on the ground during the insurgency. Doing enough to remain credible to the militias, but keeping us informed on developments.”

Aurbach added, “This became a problem, though, when he was picked up by the U.S. Marines in Tikrit in 2006 and put in a prison camp. CIA sent his picture to us, along with hundreds of others, to see if we had any information about terrorist ties, or any interest in interviewing him ourselves. You can imagine how difficult it was when I saw the face of the man I had been running for over a decade, knowing he was rotting away in an American detainment facility, and was forced to tell the Americans I had no knowledge of or interest in the man.”

Alvey said nothing, but he knew Aurbach well enough to imagine it wasn’t very difficult at all for him to leave his man swinging in the breeze. Hawthorn was an asset for Aurbach, after all, not one of his children.

Aurbach continued. “I left him in detainment, said nothing to the Americans about knowing the man, unsure if he would ever see the light of freedom. Fortunately the CIA decided he possessed no value, and he was eventually released. As it turned out, his detainment was the best thing that could have happened to him operationally. He joined al Qaeda in Iraq with his newfound credibility, and he began passing us critical intelligence, some of which we traded with the U.S., some of which we used to influence matters in other ways.

“Soon the idea came to me that we should grow Hawthorn into a long-term deep-penetration asset of al Qaeda. To get him as close to the core leadership as possible. When much of AQ was rolled up by the Americans during their surge in Iraq, we protected Hawthorn.”

Alvey was impressed. “Incredible. That was many years ago. How far has he gotten since then?”

Aurbach crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray, taking his time in doing so. It seemed to Alvey as if his boss was hesitating with his story. Finally the old man looked up. “Yanis, why, in God’s name, are we not drinking?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Aurbach shouted to the men outside the room, surprising Alvey. “A bottle of scotch, please! Whatever you have lying around will do. And two glasses.”

When the booze came, Menachem Aurbach drank, and while he drank, he told Yanis Alvey everything.

The director of the Mossad took an entire hour to finish his story, and then he went to the toilet. Yanis Alvey remained in his chair, his eyes unfixed, generally pointing to a spot on the wall, but focusing on nothing. After a long time, time enough for Aurbach to return and to light another cigarette, Alvey’s head slowly collapsed down, like he was an inflatable doll with a leak. Finally his head settled, forehead down, on the table. He covered his head with his hands.

He spoke in a whisper. “I did not know.”

“Of course you didn’t. You can’t know everything, can you? That’s why there is a chain of command. That’s why unilateral actions like the one you took are dangerous. Foolish.”

“I am truly sorry.”

Alvey sat up straight now, his eyes rimmed with red, glassy and blurring with tears of shame.

Before he could speak, Menachem said, “You are free to leave here. You will not be held, you will not be prosecuted. Just know that by your actions you have hurt your nation. You are a good man, so knowing this is punishment enough.”

Alvey’s water-rimmed eyes returned to the wall.

The older man stood. “Go home, Yanis. Take some more time off, look inside yourself. Try to put this behind you. After some period you and I together will decide if you can continue in your career in some fashion.” He turned back to the younger man, still seated. “But know this. It won’t be the same. Nothing will ever be the same.”

Without another word the director of the Mossad left the little room, leaving the door open behind him.

Yanis sat still for a long time before he rose and walked through the open door.