Blood Line: 1

  “Oh no, what did they want her to do this time?” Leecy asked.

  “This time they had good news. Good news, that is, with a caveat. They laid out plans for a new secret organization that would be in what we now know as Israel.”

  “But there was no Israel in June of 1947. I studied that in history. The UN General Assembly passed the partition of Palestine resolution in August.”

  “Right, A-plus for your studious efforts. But Jews had been living in Palestine for years before the UN vote. There were several underground outlaw groups fighting the British, before they finally left, and the Palestinians, who had been living there for generations. You’ve heard of the Irgun, who were responsible for the famous King David Hotel bombing in 1946?”

  “Right!” said Leecy. “That was awful.”

  “Yes, but it had a big impact on popular opinion both for and against. But these men who recruited your Granny Granny Leona weren’t from the Irgun, but another group still in the planning stage within the Labor Party government formed by David Ben Gurian. A group that started out as the Central Institute of Coordination, and eventually became known as Mossad. They offered her a job in the new organization, but she declined. Then they upped the ante and said they’d provide financial assistance of any kind to any member of her future family, assuming she would have one of course, as long as they agreed to become part of the Mossad. She asked them why such interest in her future family. Why sign up her children or her children’s children when they’d have all of Israel to select candidates?”

  “Yes, that’s weird, Mom. What did they say?” Leecy asked.

  I smiled at the questions. Not because I knew the answer, but because I understood the reasoning behind the approach the then fledgling Mossad was taking.

  “They said it was Leona’s bloodline.”

  “Bloodline?”

  “And they were right,” I chimed in.

  “Yes, dear. They wanted to recruit the best and brightest; to pursue the future generations of those bloodlines deemed to be extraordinary to protect Jews and Jewish interests around the world. The men told her the new organization wouldn’t forget what she had done during the war and would be waiting to answer her call. They left her with contact information. She never saw them in person again.”

  “So the Mossad paid for your education and you worked for them?”

  “Yes, that’s correct. I was sixteen, same age as you are, when Leona told me the stories I’ve just told you. She took me to the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead, Atlanta. We had tea. She said she hadn’t thought twice about the offer when her sons were born, or when my brothers were born. No, she said it never entered her mind to act on the offer till she held me in her arms. She said she knew in an instant what my future would be.”

  “So, spill it. What happened? What did you do?”

  “I jumped at the chance. Not because I wanted to be a spy. No, I wanted to go to college, and Dad’s business was struggling. There was no way he could afford to pay tuition. So, I told Leona, ‘let’s do it.’ The next thing I know, I was an early enrollee at Yale, and there was only one request made of me while I was there.”

  “What was that?” Leecy asked.

  “I had to learn Russian.”

  “Russian? Why Russian?”

  “All in due course,” Valerie said and then continued. “So, I was at Yale and it’s the fall of 1985. I loved school and, like you, I never seemed to have enough to do. But the great thing about college is you can take on as much work as you can handle. I was racing through my classes with a double load each semester. The only wrinkle was that during holiday breaks in the schedule I didn’t get to come home; I was sent to Mossad training camps. My first camp was in upstate New York near Lake Placid.”

  “Sounds like you just studied all the time and never had any fun,” Leecy said.

  “I had fun. Plenty of fun. For me it was exhilarating. I was with other girls like me. We all shared similar backgrounds and did everything together. I was learning a fighting style called Krav Maga. I learned how to shoot everything from a pistol to a sniper rifle. Actually, I learned how to fire several different sniper rifles, like the Russian Mosin-Nagant, the US Army XM21, and the Israeli ImiGaltaz. I also learned basic pharmacology: drug interactions, drug contraindications and side effects, which in most cases resulted in death. I was doing what I loved to do, which was learning. I soaked it all up like a sponge. About midway through my first training session, I was given a dossier.”

  “You mean a file on somebody?” Leecy asked.

  “Yes, a file on a target to be precise.”

  “That didn’t take long.”

  “Well, I wasn’t there to learn to bake a cake. Anyway, the first assignment was easy. See, the dossier wasn’t just given to me. All of my fellow students also received a copy.”

  “Why?”

  “We were told to memorize the contents of the dossier and develop a strategy for eliminating the target in a way that wouldn’t attract the attention of the police, or arouse any suspicion of foul play.”

  “Why would the Mossad care about police attention? They’re known for high profile public assassinations. It’s how they send the message to their enemies.”

  “You’re right, of course, but that’s not always the case. This target, as well as the next three I was eventually given, were to be handled in a much more discrete fashion. The death was what was important, not taking credit for the death.”

  “Okay, so give me the details.”

  “Like I said, every girl was given the same task, and we had to present our solutions forty-eight hours after receiving the dossier. My solution was chosen. I’d made use of the extensive background information on the target’s daily habits and routines, as well as the target’s medical history. In January of 1986, I traveled to Buenos Aries and dispatched a Nazi war criminal that had escaped detection for almost forty years.

  “Waiel Hiemlich, the Nazi in our dossier, had been tried in absentia at the Nuremberg Trials and found guilty of murdering Latvian Jews. He’d been sentenced to death, but escaped Europe and lived in seclusion in Argentina. The Mossad found Hiemlich by spreading lots of money around the region. I arrived on a Monday evening and made my way through the city to a hotel near the café the target frequented every morning. He would drink two cups of coffee and smoke two cigarettes to start his day. My plan was simple. I knew from the medical portion of his dossier he suffered from hypertension and refused to take medication for the condition. That fact coupled with his smoking was a deadly combination, and one I could use to my advantage.

  “I arrived at the café early Tuesday morning before the target. I wore a loose fitting blouse and bikini top underneath, and short shorts and sandals. The pictures I’d seen of the target showed a thin, older man, very reminiscent of his younger self. I hoped my attire would help provide the distraction I needed. I didn’t have to wait long before I saw the target approaching the café. He took a seat at the outdoor table next to mine and even greeted me. The information in his file proved accurate, and as a waitress appeared as if on cue with his first cup of coffee, I leaned over towards him, letting my breast caress his shoulder, and asked him for a light. As I held my cigarette, I slipped a tiny capsule of colorless, odorless epinephrine into his coffee as he produced his lighter. He lit my cigarette and one of his own, and we chatted in Spanish and sipped our coffees. When he ordered a second cup, I leaned over again and dropped in another dose of epinephrine. Then I got up slowly and said goodbye with a smile and a light kiss on his cheek.

  “As I walked away from the café, I heard the screams from the waitress. I was back at school before the Buenos Aires newspaper reported the death of the local man as a heart attack. A copy of the article was slipped under the door of my dorm room at Yale.”

  “Did you feel bad killing an old man?”

  “Not a bit. This man was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Latvian men, women
and children. All Jews. Not a soldier among them. And he was free, living a comfortable life without a drop of guilt or remorse. He’d already lived longer than he should’ve.”

  “You mentioned three other missions. Can you tell me about those?”

  “I didn’t have another mission for a while. My training continued and by the middle of my second year at Yale, I knew I would have enough credits to graduate early. Like I said, I hadn’t had much contact with the family back home, because the schedule I was keeping was intense, but I knew the family business was struggling. So, I called Leona and asked her to ask her contacts about my attending graduate school. Whoever they were, they were all too happy to pay once again and like before, there was only one caveat: I had to get an MBA, a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, with a specialty in international economy. I agreed and they paid, so off to Wharton I went. My plan was two-fold. One part of the plan was to save the family business by growing sales overseas, and the other was fulfilling my obligation to the Mossad. I owed them one year of service for every year of education I received. That was the deal I agreed to.”

  “By the start of my first year at Wharton, I’d been able to pitch my new plan for INESCO’s future to your Uncles David and Isaac. Then the three of us convinced our father. I was on schedule to graduate in the spring of 1989. I was on cloud nine. I was a graduate from Yale and a soon-to-be graduate of the Wharton Business School, and all in four years. INESCO was moving in the right direction, and I was working with the Mossad fulfilling my four-year commitment.

  “My second assignment was a little more complicated. I was sent to Beirut to assassinate a Lebanese scientist working to help Palestine develop a long-range missile program. It was the summer of 1987, and the Lebanese Civil War had been ongoing since 1982. My pre-mission briefing took place in a hotel near the Wharton campus. I met with half a dozen members of the Mossad over a two-day period. The importance of drawing little or no attention at all to my mission’s objective was reinforced repeatedly. Two assassinations in Athens in 1986 had garnered too much press. I was directed to take out the target without any blowback on Israel.

  “The target was Fakald Juli. The report said he had a personal security guard of five to six men at all times, except when he slept or was visited by prostitutes, but even then he wasn’t really alone, just out of sight of the guards. It seemed that Fakald had a bad habit of liking sex outdoors, so he’d take these women out on the balcony.

  “Big mistake.

  “I was flown into the Israeli-controlled security zone and my contact drove me to an empty, bombed-out building in the heart of the Syrian section, directly across from the target. The two buildings were separated by a one square block park. Really just a few trees and shrubs, but no grass to speak of, just dirt.

  “I was left alone in the third floor apartment with a twelve hour window to do the job. The sun had set and it was dark outside. It was six p.m. local time. War was sporadic by 1987, but it was still very dangerous. I was scared of being found. I knew what opposition forces would do to me. So, I busied myself setting up my Sardius sniper rifle with suppressor and night vision scope. I knew from my intelligence report that he took a lover about every three days. If the pattern held true, he would be at it again that night. All I had to do was wait.”

  “You’re in war torn Beirut in 1987 trying to assassinate someone in the dead of night from how far away?” Leecy asked.

  “300 meters, give or take.”

  “Jesus Mom, if you’d been captured they would’ve tortured you or worse.”

  “Well, I wasn’t captured. As a matter of fact, I was never even seen. Fakald appeared naked on his balcony with his back to my position at two a.m. He was dead a second later.”

  “What about the prostitute? He wasn’t out on the balcony alone, was he?”

  “No, she was there. She was just out of my line of sight, and ran back into the room screaming for his bodyguards. I took the rifle with me when I left the room, after signaling my contact to pick me up. We were back inside the Israeli safe zone in minutes, and I was on a plane within the hour. The killing was treated as an accident, because of all the regular shooting and street fighting in that area. There was no blowback on Israel. We were in the clear.”

  “Tell me something: how far can you shoot and hit the target?” Leecy asked.

  “800 meters was my longest shot in practice, but I’ve never had to shoot that far for real. I thought my next mission was going to be a long distance shot, because of all the training they were putting me through, but it turned out to be something quite different. I was sent back to South America in the fall of 1988 to assassinate another Nazi war criminal named Mikhail Klein.

  “Klein lived in the central region of Argentina near Lake Laguna Mar Chiquita. He had this cabin near the abandoned Gran Hotel Vienna. I arrived in Cordoba, Argentina, and was met by my local contact and driven to a location northeast of the city.

  “The target was known to be an avid fisherman, taking a small boat out on Lake Laguna Mar twice a day. I thought about how to do this job, and decided that drowning would be the best way. Actually, all I had to do was separate him from his boat and let fatigue do the work for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the lake isn’t very deep, but it is large. I swam behind him at a discrete distance until he reached the deepest part of the lake and began fishing. I eased up very quietly behind his little boat that was no bigger than a kayak, really, and tipped it over. He never saw me, and by the time I’d swum to shore he’d drowned. The locals treated it as it was: a drowning. No fuss. Just an accident.”

  “Crap, Mom, that’s cold blooded.”

  “Maybe so. All I knew at the time was it was the end of a very bad man. As all the assignments to that point had been. But that all changed, when I got a very unusual call.”

  “Oh no, why do I sense danger of some kind?” Leecy asked.

  “Couldn’t it just be bad news? Why do you think something dangerous is about to happen?” Valerie asked.

  “I was just thinking about that time in history. Reagan was the President till January of 1989. He’d given his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech imploring the Soviet leader Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall in 1987. When the wall started to come down two years later on November 9, 1989, there was unrest throughout Europe, but never more so in Russia. The tide was turning away from Communism in the Soviet Union. The world waited for the Soviet Union’s collapse, and though it took another two years, the Soviet Union did collapse in 1991. Gorbachev resigned and was replaced by Yeltsin and the Democratic Russian Movement had taken hold.”

  “Like mother, like daughter,” I said.

  “What?” Leecy asked.

  “Nothing. I just bet there aren’t fifty people that can recite the geo-political history of the late 1980s and early 1990s without using Google, but you and your mother have it memorized,” I said.

  “So what, I remember everything I read,” Leecy said.

  “Why do you think I said like mother, like daughter? You’re both geniuses.”

  “Oh, I thought you were poking fun.”

  “I would never do that. Never,” I said.

  “Are you two finished or do we all need to kiss and hug for another ten minutes?” Valerie asked.

  “Enough said.” I shut up.

  “Leecy, you’re spot on with your history lesson. The geo-political climate was very unstable. Not everyone involved was ready for the change that was coming. That’s part of the reason why the Soviet Union held on two years after the wall came down. The dominos eventually fell, but it took a little help to get them all down, and that’s why my phone rang in the winter of 1989.”

  “Wait, you were involved in all this?” Leecy asked.

  “Yes, I was. But before I get into that you need to know something. You need to understand the Mossad had become far more than just assassins. Sure, there are assassins in
the agency. That’s true. There were also some of the world’s brightest minds and forward thinkers working to predict world events. And they get more than their fair share of predictions right.” Valerie paused and stepped across another downed tree. Then she said, “So, I get a call instructing me to report to a local hotel for a meeting. That was standard operating procedure, like I told you already. I had done it so many times, but from the moment I walked into that hotel room I knew this meeting was different. There was only one person there, not the usual half dozen, and I’d never seen her before. She introduced herself only as my mission liaison. I remember asking at the time what was meant by mission liaison. The woman never gave me her name, nor did she ever answer my question, at least not directly.”

  “So, what did she say, Mom?”

  “She said I’d been chosen because of my marksmanship. I’d scored as expert with the soviet Dragunov SVDSN sniper rifle and, coupled with my Russian language skills, I was the perfect candidate.” Valerie stopped talking.

  Leecy didn’t say a word. I assumed she was running through the many possible scenarios that her mother might’ve been involved with. I could almost see her putting together the bits and pieces of data like the sniper rifle, the language skills, and the training to piece together the puzzle. That’s why it didn’t shock me when Leecy arrived at the correct assumption.

  “So, Mom…you’re responsible for the rumored assassination of Victor Wilhelm Volodarsky, the old Soviet hardliner leader back in 1989? The death had been covered up and the only reason I’m aware of it is that one of my assignments in AP History involved a lot of research on the U.S.S.R., and I found a website dedicated to the conspiracy theory about his death. His own people were said to have carried it out, because they feared he was turning moderate in his views. There was even a story about ex-KGB officers conspiring to kill him, which is why the Soviet government swept the whole thing under the rug. He’d been a man of the Party, so to speak, but his growing popularity had put him at odds with some other hardliners and they killed him. But now you’re telling me you did it and helped pave the way for Boris Yeltsin to be elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia. That assassination helped the Democratic movement in Russia to take a firm grip on the region. Holy crap, are you kidding me?” Leecy said.