The motives for being so recruited to serve another country vary. The recruit may be in debt, in a bitter marriage, passed over for promotion, revolted by his own regime, or simply lust for a new life and plenty of money. He may be recruited through his own weaknesses, sexual or homosexual, or simply by sweet talk and flattery.
Quite a few Soviets, like Penkovsky and Gordievsky, changed sides for genuine reasons of conscience, but most spies who turn on their own country do so because they share a quite monstrous vanity, a conviction that they are truly important in the scheme of things.
But the weirdest of all the recruitments is called the “walk-in.” As the phrase implies, the recruit simply walks in, unexpected and unannounced, and offers his services.
The reaction of the agency so approached is always one of extreme skepticism—surely this must be a
“plant” by the other side. Thus when, in 1960, a tall Russian approached the Americans in Moscow, declared he was a full colonel of the Soviet military intelligence arm, the GRU, and offered to spy for the West, he was rejected.
Bewildered, the man approached the British, who gave him a try. Oleg Penkovsky turned out to be one of the most amazing agents ever. In his brief thirty-month career he turned over 5,500 documents to the Anglo-American operation that ran him, and every one of them was in the secret or top secret category.
During the Cuban missile crisis, the world never realized that President Kennedy knew the full hand of cards that Nikita Khrushchev had to play, like a poker player with a mirror behind his opponent’s back.
The mirror was Penkovsky.
The Russian took crazy risks, refusing to come out to the West while he had the chance. After the missile crisis he was unmasked by Soviet counterintelligence, tried, and shot.
None of the other three Israelis in Kobi Dror’s room that night in Tel Aviv needed to be told anything about Oleg Penkovsky. In their world, he was part of legend. The dream hovered in all their minds after Sharon dropped the name. A real, live, gold-plated, twenty-four-carat traitor in Baghdad? Could it be true—could it possibly be true?
Kobi Dror gave Sharon a long, hard look.
“What have you in mind, young man?”
“I was just thinking,” said Sharon with feigned diffidence. “A letter ... no risks to anyone—just a letter ...
asking a few questions, difficult questions, things we would like to know. ... He comes up or he doesn’t.”
Dror glanced at Gershon. The man who ran the illegal agents shrugged. “I put men in on the ground,” the gesture seemed to say. “What do I care about letters?”
“All right, young David. We write him a letter back. We ask him some questions. Then we see. Eitan, you work with David on this. Let me see the letter before it goes.”
Eitan Hadar and David Sharon left together.
“I hope you know what the hell you’re doing,” the head of Middle East muttered to his protégé.
The letter was crafted with extreme care. Several in-house experts worked on it—the Hebrew version at least. Translation would come later.
David Sharon introduced himself by his first name only, right at the start. He thanked the writer for his trouble and assured him the letter had arrived safely at the destination the writer must have intended.
The reply went on to say that the writer could not fail to understand that his letter had aroused great surprise and suspicion both by its source and its method of transmission.
David knew, he said, that the writer was clearly no fool and therefore would realize that “my people”
would need to establish some bona fides.
David went on to assure the writer that if his bona fides could be established, his requirement for payment would present no problem, but clearly the product would have to justify the financial rewards that “my people” were prepared to pay. Would the writer therefore be kind enough to seek to answer the questions on the attached sheet?
The full letter was longer and more complicated, but that was the gist of it. Sharon ended by giving the writer a mailing address in Rome for his reply.
The address was actually a discontinued safe house that the Rome station had volunteered at Tel Aviv’s urgent request. From then on, the Rome station would keep an eye on the abandoned address. If Iraqi security agents showed up at it, they would be spotted and the affair aborted.
The list of twenty questions was carefully chosen and after much head-scratching. To eight of the questions Mossad already knew the answers but would not be expected to know. So an attempt to fool Tel Aviv would not work.
Eight more questions concerned developments that could be checked for veracity after they had happened. Four questions were things that Tel Aviv really wanted to know, particularly about the intentions of Saddam Hussein himself.
“Let’s see how high this bastard really goes,” said Kobi Dror when he read the list.
Finally a professor in Tel Aviv University’s Arabic Faculty was called in to phrase the letter in that ornate and flowery style of the written language. Sharon signed it in Arabic with the Arab version of his own name, Daoud.
The text also contained one other point. David would like to give his writer a name, and if the writer in Baghdad did not object, would he mind being known simply as Jericho?
The letter was mailed from the only Arab country where Israel had an embassy—Cairo.
After it had gone, David Sharon went on with his work and waited. The more he thought it over, the crazier the affair seemed to be. A post-office box, in a country where the counterintelligence net was run by someone as smart as Hassan Rahmani, was horrendously dangerous. So was writing top secret information “in clear,” and there was no indication that Jericho knew anything about secret writing.
Continuing to use the ordinary mail was also out of the question, if this thing developed. However, he reasoned, it probably would not.
But it did. Four weeks later, Jericho’s reply reached Rome and was brought unopened in a blastproof box to Tel Aviv. Extreme precautions were taken. The envelope might be wired to explosives or smeared with a deadly toxin. When the scientists finally declared it clean, it was opened.
To their stunned amazement, Jericho had come up with paydirt. All the eight questions to which the Mossad already knew the answers were completely accurate. Eight more—troop movements, promotions, dismissals, foreign trips by identifiable luminaries of the regime—would have to wait for check-out as and when they occurred, if they ever did. The last four questions Tel Aviv could neither know nor check, but all were utterly feasible.
David Sharon wrote a fast letter back, in a text that would cause no security problems if intercepted:
“Dear Uncle, many thanks for your letter which has now arrived. It is wonderful to hear that you are well and in good health. Some among the points you raise will take time, but all being well, I will write again soon. Your loving nephew, Daoud.”
The mood was growing in the Hadar Dafna building that this man Jericho might be serious after all. If that was so, urgent action was needed. An exchange of two letters was one thing; running a deep-cover agent inside a brutal dictatorship was another. There was no way that communication could continue on the basis of in-clear script, public mails, and post-office boxes. They were a recipe for an early disaster.
A case officer would be needed to get into Baghdad, live there, and run Jericho using all the usual tradecraft—secret writing, codes, dead-letter boxes, and a no-intercept means of getting the product out of Baghdad and back to Israel.
“I’m not having it,” Gershon repeated. “I will not put a senior Israeli katsa into Baghdad on a black mission for an extended stay. It’s diplomatic cover, or he doesn’t go.”
“All right, Sami,” said Dror. “Diplomatic cover it is. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
The point of diplomatic cover is that a black agent can be arrested, tortured, hanged—whatever. An accredited diplomat, even in Baghdad, can avoid such unpleasantness; if ca
ught spying, he will merely be declared persona non grata and expelled. It is done all the time.
Several major divisions of the Mossad went into overdrive that summer, especially Research. Gershon could already tell them he had no agent on the staff of any embassy accredited to Baghdad, and his nose was already well out ofjoint because of it. So the search began to find a diplomat who would suit.
Every foreign embassy in Baghdad was identified. From the capital cities of every country, a list was acquired of all their staff in Baghdad. No one checked out; no one had ever worked for the Mossad before, who could be reactivated. There was not even one sayan on those lists.
Then a clerk came up with an idea: the United Nations. The world body had one agency based in Baghdad in 1988, the UN Economic Commission for West Asia.
The Mossad has a big penetration of the United Nations in New York, and a staff list was acquired.
One name checked out: a young Jewish Chilean diplomat called Alfonso Benz Moncada. He was not a trained agent, but he was a sayan and therefore presumably was prepared to be helpful.
One by one Jericho’s tips came true. The checking process revealed that the Army divisions he had said would be moved were mewed; the promotions he foretold duly happened, and the dismissals took place.
“Either Saddam himself is behind this farrago, or Jericho is betraying his country from asshole to elbow,”
was Kobi Dror’s judgment.
David Sharon sent a third letter, also innocently couched. For his second and third missives, the professor had not been needed. The third letter referred to an order by the Baghdad-based client for some very delicate glassware and porcelain. Clearly, said David, a little more patience was needed so that a means of transshipment could be devised that would guarantee the cargoes from accidental disaster.
A Spanish-speaking katsa already based in South America was sent pronto to Santiago and persuaded the parents of Señor Benz to urge their son home immediately on compassionate leave because his mother was seriously ill. It was the father who telephoned his son in Baghdad. The worried son applied for and at once got three weeks’ compassionate leave and flew back to Chile.
He was met not by a sick mother but by an entire team of Mossad training officers who begged him to accede to their request. He discussed the matter with his parents and agreed. The emotional pull of the needs of the Land of Israel, which none of them had ever seen, was strong.
Another sayan in Santiago, without knowing why, lent his summer villa, set in a walled garden outside the city near the sea, and the training team went to work.
It takes two years to train a katsa to run a deep-cover agent in hostile terrain, and that is the minimum.
The team had three weeks. They worked sixteen-hour days. They taught the thirty-year-old Chilean secret writing and basic codes, miniature photography and the reduction of photographs to microdots.
They took him out on the streets and taught him how to spot a tail. They warned him never to shake a tail, except in an absolute emergency, if carrying deeply incriminating material. They told him that if he even thought he was being followed to abort the rendezvous or the pickup and try again later.
They showed him how to use combustible chemicals stored in a false fountain pen to destroy incriminating evidence in seconds while hiding in any men’s restroom or just around a corner.
They took him out in cars to show him how to spot a car tail, one acting as instructor and the rest of the team as the “hostiles.” They taught him until his ears rang and his eyes ached and he begged for sleep.
Then they taught him about dead-letter boxes or drops—secret compartments where a message may be left or another collected. They showed him how to create one from a recess behind a loose brick in a wall, or under a tombstone, in a crevice in an old tree, or beneath a flagstone.
After three weeks, Alfonso Benz Moncada bade good-bye to his tearful parents and flew back to Baghdad via London. The senior instructor leaned back in his chair at the villa, passed an exhausted hand over his forehead, and told the team:
“If that bugger stays alive and free, I’ll make the pilgrimage to Mecca.”
The team laughed; their leader was a deeply Orthodox Jew. All the time they were teaching Moncada, none of them had known what he was going to do back in Baghdad. It was not their job to know.
Neither did the Chilean.
It was during the stopover in London that he was taken to the Heathrow Penta Hotel. There he met Sami Gershon and David Sharon, and they told him.
“Don’t try and identify him,” Gershon warned the young man. “Leave that to us. Just establish the drops and service them. We’ll send you the lists of things we want answered. You won’t understand them—they’ll be in Arabic. We don’t think Jericho speaks much English, if at all. Don’t ever try to translate what we send you. Just put it in one of the you-to-him drops and make the appropriate chalk mark so he knows to go and service the drop.
“When you see his chalk mark, go and service the him-to-you box, and get his answer back.”
In a separate bedroom Alfonso Benz Moncada was given his new luggage. There was a camera that looked like a tourist’s Pentax but took a snap-on cartridge with more than a hundred exposures in it, plus an innocent-looking aluminum strut frame for holding the camera at exactly the right distance above a sheet of paper. The camera was preset for that range.
His toilet kit included combustible chemicals disguised as aftershave, and various invisible inks. The letter-writing wallet held all the treated paper for secret writing. Last, they told him the means for communicating with them, a method they had been setting up while he was training in Chile.
He would write letters concerning his love of chess—he already was a chess fan—to his pen pal Justin Bokomo of Uganda, who worked in the General Secretariat of the UN building in New York. His letters would always go out of Baghdad in the UN diplomatic mail pouch for New York. The replies would also come from Bokomo in New York.
Though Benz Moncada did not know it, there was a Ugandan called Bokomo in New York. There was also a Mossad katsa in the mail room to effect the intercepts.
Bokomo’s letters would have a reverse side that, when treated, would reveal the Mossad’s question list.
This was to be photocopied when no one was looking and passed to Jericho in one of the agreed drops.
Jericho’s reply would probably be in spidery Arabic script. Each page was to be photographed ten times, in case of smudging, and the film dispatched to Bokomo.
Back in Baghdad the young Chilean, with his heart in his mouth, established six drops, mainly behind loose bricks in old walls or ruined houses, under flagstones in back alleys, and one under a stone windowsill of a derelict shop.
Each time, he thought he would be surrounded by the dreaded AMAM, but the citizens of Baghdad seemed as courteous as ever and no one took any notice of him as he prowled, apparently a curious foreign tourist, up and down the alleys and side streets of the Old Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the fruit and vegetable market at Kasra, and the old cemeteries—anywhere he could find crumbling old walls and loose flagstones where no one would ever think of looking.
He wrote down the locations of the six drops, three to contain messages from him to Jericho and three for replies from Jericho to him. He also devised six places—walls, gates, shutters—on three of which an innocent chalk mark would alert Jericho that there was a message for him, and three others where Jericho would signal he had a reply ready and sitting in a dead-letter box awaiting collection.
Each chalk mark responded to a different drop. He wrote down the locations of these drops and chalk-mark sites so precisely that Jericho could find them on written description only.
All the time he watched for a tail, either driving or on foot. Just once he was under surveillance, but it was clumsy and routine, for the AMAM seemed to pick occasional days to follow occasional diplomats.
The following day there was no tail, so he resumed again.
/>
When he had it all ready, he wrote it down using a typewriter, after having memorized every detail. He destroyed the ribbon, photographed the sheets, destroyed the paperwork, and sent the film to Mr.
Bokomo. Via the mail room of the UN building on the East River in New York, the small package came back to David Sharon in Tel Aviv.
The risky part was getting all this information to Jericho. It meant one last letter to that damnable post-office box in Baghdad. Sharon wrote to his “friend” that the papers he needed would be deposited at exactly noon in fourteen days, August 18, 1988, and should be picked up no more than one hour later.
The precise instructions, in Arabic, were with Moncada by the sixteenth. At five to noon on the eighteenth, he entered the post office, was directed to the post box, and dropped the bulky package in.
No one stopped or arrested him. An hour later, Jericho unlocked the box and withdrew the package. He too was not stopped or arrested.
With secure contact now established, traffic began to flow. Jericho insisted he would price each consignment of information that Tel Aviv wanted, and if the money was deposited, the information would be sent. He named a very discreet bank in Vienna, the Winkler Bank in the Ballgasse, just off Franzis-kanerplatz, and gave an account number.
Tel Aviv agreed and immediately checked out the bank. It was small, ultradiscreet, and virtually impregnable. It clearly contained a numbered account that matched, because the first transfer of twenty thousand dollars by Tel Aviv into it was not returned to the transferring bank with a query.
The Mossad suggested that Jericho might care to identify himself “for his own protection, in case anything went wrong and his friends to the west could help.” Jericho refused point-blank; he went further.
If any attempt was made to survey the drops or close in on him in any way, or if ever the money was not forthcoming, he would shut off immediately.
The Mossad agreed, but tried other ways. Psychoportraits were drawn, his handwriting studied, lists of Iraqi notables drawn up and studied. All that the back-room boys could guess was that Jericho was middle-aged, of medium education, probably spoke little or hesitant English, and had a military or quasi-military background.