Chapter 27
The first espionage squad of the Mossad was made up of two young agents who pretended to be interior designers on a scouting trip for a wealthy client, looking for a house in Zurich. This allowed them to provide a quick explanation, if police stopped them as they were moving through the restricted streets of the Witikon neighborhood.
They arrived to Zurich in January 2016, tracked down the house of Dora and Louis, and started to shadow them. They soon realized that Louis was rather unpredictable in his errands. He often stayed home the whole day with just a short evening walk. Dora followed a far more regular routine. She always left the house at around nine-thirty in the morning and returned just before noon.
This made her a much better target for an abduction, but from the Tel Aviv headquarters, Yaakov had made it clear that the target was Louis and no one else. The surveillance team was then forced to spend hours waiting in the car, or take long walks around the neighborhood, to properly log Louis’ habits. This eventually made them blip on the radar of Frau Glockner.
Their Middle Eastern looks made her immediately categorize them as Muslim immigrants, and as they were loitering around during the day, she guessed they were also probably without a job.
One misty February morning, she decided to confront them and knocked on the windows of their car asking what they were doing around her neighborhood. They answered with very poor German accents, that Frau Glockner could barely understand. All she could grasp was that they were looking for sites for their clients. What sites? What clients? Then she suddenly realized. These guys were probably looking for a new site to build another mosque, as if the one in the nearby Forchgasse street was not enough.
She still remembered how fiercely her former husband had opposed that project, before dying of cancer. Frau Hannelore Glockner was convinced the mosque story had had a part in his husband’s fatal illness. No, Muslims would not take over Zurich, at least as long as she was alive.
The surveillance squad had fully realized that Frau Glockner risked becoming a major problem, so they started to circle around Louis’ house from a distance. They failed to take into account Frau Glockner’s tenants, though.
Frau Hannelore had called all her Serbian renters to the dining room and persuaded them to side with her. Some of them had had relatives killed by the Muslim militias in the bloody Bosnian war of the early nineties of the last century. Now their host country was under a similar danger and she needed their help to fight off this new wave of invaders, starting with the first two young men who had been patrolling the neighborhood for the last several days.
She wanted to know their whereabouts at all times, to be ready to report them to the police as soon as something went wrong, which surely it would. They used to move around the street, but after she had confronted them they had appeared less frequently. Her tenants accepted to help, more out of fear of losing their rooms than of a Muslim invasion.
By the time the other two members of the attack squad arrived in late February, Frau Glockner’s household had tracked the whole recognition squad and was dutifully reporting the daily positions to their landlady, who recorded them on an old city map.
The abduction squad decided they would act the first week of March. The plan was very simple, the surveillance squad would follow Louis on the first occasion he left the house in the late afternoon, while the abduction team would wait on the main road. Louis would be distracted by the surveillance squad just before reaching the corner between his street and the main road. There, one of the members of the abduction squad would sedate him from behind, and load him quickly into the car with the help of the other two. Then, three people would bring Louis to the private terminal of the airport and take a private jet to Tel Aviv, while the last member of the surveillance squad would return to the car and fly back to Israel alone on a commercial flight.
The plan worked perfectly, except that as soon as Louis was being loaded into the car, unconscious, one of Frau Glockner tenants was already calling her with a full description of the kidnappers’ vehicles.
Two Swiss police patrols, equipped with heavy weapons, intercepted the squad when they were still one mile away from the airport.
The last member of the commando was arrested, completely unaware of the interference at the Hertz rental car return area. As the Swiss policemen had quickly disarmed the squads, the Israelis did not have time to tell anybody in the Mossad headquarters that the operation had miserably failed.
In Tel Aviv, Tamir Pardo received a call from Yaakov in the afternoon that the operation had started and it should have finished by 7 PM. Fifteen minutes past seven, no departure confirmation had arrived yet, but this could be due to a number of reasons, like traffic jams. However, the call that Tamir received around 7.30 PM came unexpectedly. It was the Israeli Foreign Minister in person, who put him in conference call with a furious Yigal Canspi, the Israeli ambassador of Switzerland.
Yigal had just been invited to attend an urgent meeting with both the Swiss Interior and Foreign ministers to discuss an unfortunate episode that had just happened.
“How unfortunate?” Yigal asked.
“Very,” was the blunt answer of the Swiss Foreign minister.
The instructions from the Israeli Foreign minister were crystal clear; the damage had to be minimized to try to mend the relationship with Switzerland in the shortest possible time.
After he hung up the call with the minister and the ambassador, Tamir called an open-ended meeting with Yaakov and his staff, starting at ten-thirty in the evening. They would not finish until a decent recovery plan would be set.
When Yaakov entered the office of Tamir a few hours later, he knew all too well that the recovery plan depended on him, as he was responsible for the failed mission. His goal as an experienced officer was not to avoid being laid off, but rather to leave in the most professional way and, most importantly, to ensure a legacy in his office.
Yaakov achieved the first goal by exposing the backup plan he had prepared in case of failure. The reaction of the Mossad was focused on the defamation of Louis Picard. The line to be kept with Swiss authorities was to admit to using the wrong way of an illegal abduction, in order to achieve the respectable goal of securing the safety of Israel from a dangerous drug dealer who was producing on Swiss soil.
The allegations came with a complete file of the activities of Louis and his team members in the past few years. If the Swiss asked why the Mossad had not followed a legal path to get cooperation from the Swiss authorities, the answer was easy.
There was overwhelming evidence that Louis was well connected in the financial, industrial, and even academic community of Switzerland, so the Israelis feared something might have leaked, putting him on alert.
Tamir Pardo appreciated the attention given to preparing Plan B. It was as accurate as the main plan, that had unfortunately failed. He thought it was really a pity to have to fire Yaakov, most probably for circumstances that were beyond his control, but he needed a victim to placate his government and the Swiss one, and Yaakov was the perfect culprit.
The meeting ended shortly after midnight, Tamir dismissed all the team with the exception of Yaakov. The people in the room left in silence. As soon as the last one closed the door behind, Yaakov took the envelope with his resignation from a pocket in his computer bag. He handed it over to Tamir, who set it aside on his desk, without bothering to open it.
“I need to ask you a few final questions before letting you go, Yaakov,” Tamir said plainly. “First, do you already have any ideas for your new life out of Mossad? We can help you build a new career, of course. And second, I would be very interested to get your advice on your successor as head of foreign operations.”
Yaakov did not miss out on the opportunity to leave his legacy at the office that he had run for the last eight years.
“Well, Tamir, let’s start from the end. No matter how well we get out of this accident, I think we are heading into more difficult times. There
fore I think you need somebody who is even more focused than I was on the security of Israel and much more attentive to details. I think Eyal would be a good choice but it is your decision, of course.”
Tamir paused, then after a few seconds he grabbed the envelope and continued impatiently.
“You have not answered my first question.”
“Oh, my future..”, Yaakov paused for a while, “...you know, I have managed to set up some connections over the past years. I do not think feeding my family will be an issue. Believe me, Tamir, focus on protecting our country. It will require all your energy.”
Yaakov stood up, without waiting for permission, shook hands with Tamir and left the room for good.