Agents of Innocence (12 page)

“You listen to Bob Dylan?” asked Rogers.

“I am a child of the 1960s,” said Jamal. “A flower child.”

My ass, thought Rogers. But he was right in a way. There was something about Jamal that captured the spirit of the time. The long hair, the sexuality, the worldliness that he seemed to have soaked up during his years of travel in the Mideast and Europe.

“Let me ask you a question,” said the Palestinian. “Why are you going to so much trouble to meet with me?”

Rogers thought for a moment. Tell him the truth, he said to himself.

“The United States Government wants to establish a direct line of contact with you. They authorized me to take whatever measures I thought were appropriate.”

“But why did you go to Amman during the fighting? You might have been kidnapped or killed.”

“Do you want an honest answer?” asked Rogers.

“Of course.”

“Because I felt that without some personal gesture by me, something that would challenge your assumptions about my organization, the operation would fail. Anyway, it wasn’t really dangerous. Nobody in the Middle East would dare harm a representative of the United States.”

“This is what I like about Americans,” said Jamal. “They are so naive. And so sincere.”

Rogers smiled.

“It is true,” he replied. “We are naive. But in this part of the world, where everyone is so worldly, perhaps that is not such a bad thing.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jamal.

“I’ve spent ten years now in the Arab world,” answered Rogers. “I’ve watched things go from bad to worse. I’ve seen the Arabs turned into cripples, humiliated by their enemies, mistrusted by their friends. Always blaming the Israelis for everything that goes wrong.”

Jamal nodded, It was true. Who could deny it?

“But the Israelis aren’t to blame for the tragedy of the Arabs,” continued Rogers. “I blame the Arabs themselves. They have become corrupted. By money, by the Russians, by too many lies. I truly believe that the only answer for the Arabs—above all, for your people, the Palestinians—lies with the United States. And I believe that we—you and I—can alter this story.”

Jamal clucked his tongue.

“I am serious,” said Rogers.

“What are you saying?” demanded Jamal.

“I am telling you that you and I, personally, can help change the story of the Middle East.”

“How?” answered Jamal. “Impossible!”

“I mean exactly what I said. I believe that a secret relationship between you and me—between Fatah and the United States—can change the history of this part of the world.”

“Your words may be sincere,” said the Palestinian. “But the dream is impossible.”

The sun had set now and the desert was turning chilly. The two men rose from the blanket and walked together back to the beach house.

“Do you have any whisky in the house?” asked Jamal. “I am a corrupted Arab.”

Rogers poured a double Scotch for Jamal and one for himself. He thought for a moment about the tape recorder and decided the hell with Langley. He turned on a radio, near the microphone in the living room. That should drive the transcribers crazy, he said to himself. Hours of Arabic ballads and chanting from the Koran.

“Come out on the deck,” he said to Jamal.

The Palestinian appreciated the gesture. He brought with him the bottle of whisky.

“So how do we change history?” asked Jamal, sipping his whisky and looking at the play of moonlight on the calm waters of the Gulf.

“By making peace,” said Rogers.

“On whose terms? Ours or the Zionists’?”

“Neither,” said Rogers. “Those of the United States of America.”

“For you Americans, the word ‘peace’ is like a narcotic. It lulls you to sleep, and you think it will do the same for everybody else. But it won’t!”

“There is an American peace plan on the table,” said Rogers. “I sent you a copy.”

“Yes, and the Old Man was pleased to receive it. But the Soviets told him when he was in Moscow last month that the American peace plan is dead.”

“They may be right, about the current version,” said Rogers.

Jamal looked at him with genuine astonishment. In the Middle East, such candor was rare indeed.

“The situation isn’t ripe yet,” continued Rogers. “The Egyptians and Israelis are telling us privately that they are interested in negotiations. But they are also in the midst of a war of attrition along the Suez Canal. For now, they would both probably rather fight than make peace.”

“That is what the Old Man says,” answered Jamal. “He is waiting for the next war.”

“So are we,” said Rogers. “That is the sad truth about the Middle East. The opportunities for creative diplomacy come after wars.”

“People who are humiliated in war cannot make peace,” said Jamal. “The Arabs must win this time.”

Rogers poured another glass of whisky for Jamal and one for himself.

“Let us suppose that after the next war, there are peace negotiations,” said Rogers. “Would Fatah agree to join in discussions?”

“That depends,” replied the Palestinian.

“On what?” pressed Rogers.

Jamal laughed.

“You are asking questions as if I was a foreign minister,” he said. “But I don’t even have a country.”

They stopped for food and more drink. The bottle of whisky was soon gone and they opened another. It was past midnight when they turned to the most delicate topic: the looming conflict in Jordan between the king and the commandos.

Jamal probed to understand the American position.

“If there is a real civil war in Jordan, will the United States stay out?” he asked.

“I can’t answer that,” said Rogers.

“Suppose there was a constitutional monarchy, with a Palestinian prime minister. Would America recognize such a government?”

“I can’t answer that either,” said Rogers.

“Well, what
can
you tell me?” demanded Jamal.

Rogers spoke very carefully. He had been briefed in detail on how to respond to queries about the situation in Jordan.

“The United States believes that the problems of the Palestinian people shouldn’t be solved at the expense of Jordan. The King is a loyal friend of America, and the United States will support him in taking appropriate measures to protect his kingdom. We hope that Fatah will act responsibly to avoid a confrontation. Fatah shouldn’t doubt American resolve on the Jordan issue.”

Jamal listened intently. Rogers suspected that he was trying to commit the statement to memory.

“Would you like that in writing?” asked Rogers.

“Please,” said the Palestinian. He looked embarrassed, as if he had been caught in the midst of his own espionage operation.

Rogers retreated to the bedroom and retrieved from his brief case two sheets of paper. He handed Jamal the one that contained the Jordan position, nearly word for word identical to what he had just said.

Jamal read the text several times.

“It looks to me as if you are telling us to go to hell!” said the Palestinian.

“No,” said Rogers. “But perhaps we are telling you to go to Lebanon.”

“And then?”

“On behalf of the President, I give you a commitment that the United States respects the legitimate rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people and will seek a just solution to the Palestinian problem in all its aspects, based on the principles set forth in United Nations Resolution 242.”

“Copy, please.”

Rogers handed him the second sheet of paper, stating the American position on the Palestinian problem.

“What does this statement mean?” asked Jamal.

“We shall discover that together,” said the American, more than a little curious himself.

The sun rose in a quick burst of pink at the eastern rim of the Persian Gulf, and then climbed majestically in the sky amid deeper tones of red and gold. Rogers and Jamal watched this splendid sight from their chairs on the deck of the beach house, where they sat drinking Turkish coffee.

“What do you want from me?” asked Jamal as he sipped his coffee.

“We want security assistance. We want to know about terrorist operations that endanger the lives of Americans. We want more of what you just brought me: names, dates, passport numbers, work names. You say that you oppose international terrorist operations. Then help us!”

“What is the benefit for Fatah?”

“The promise of American help in resolving the Palestinian problem. If you are honest, you will realize that this provides the only realistic chance of achieving your goals.”

“How will you protect me from the Israelis?” asked Jamal.

“We won’t. That’s your problem. But we do guarantee to keep the fact of your contact with us secret. If you agree to continue meeting with me, your identity will be known by only four people: me, the chief of station in Beirut, my division chief, and the Director of Central Intelligence. All of us will do our best to protect this operation.”

“And if you make a mistake?”

“We don’t make mistakes,” said Rogers. “I haven’t lost an agent in ten years.”

“I’m not an agent!” said Jamal sharply.

“Of course not,” answered Rogers quickly. He thought for a moment that he had blown it.

Jamal rubbed his eyeballs. In the soft morning light, he looked younger and more vulnerable than he had the previous day.

“Will you work with us?” said Rogers. He was a salesman now and it was time to close the deal.

“It’s not my decision alone. I have to discuss it with the Old Man.”

“That’s not enough. I need an answer!”

“You already have it.”

“What is it?” said Rogers, raising his voice.

“It is not no.”

“Say it!”

“Yes,” said Jamal at last. “I will work with you. If the Old Man approves.”

“Will you tell him everything about our meeting?”

“Almost everything. But not everything. There are some things he wouldn’t understand.”

“Then we have a deal,” said Rogers, shaking Jamal’s hand.

He sat back in his chair, put his lucky cowboy boots up on the railing of the deck, and watched the sun climb upwards in the heavens.

Beirut; March 1970

Yakov Levi noted Rogers’s return to Beirut on a file card in a box he kept at the office. Levi entered the dates of the trip and the notation: “Kuwait.” The entry followed one marked: “Amman.” The information came from a contact at the airport who provided passenger lists and, when necessary, photographs of passengers.

It was a puzzle, Levi thought to himself. Why was Rogers taking these trips? What was he doing? Who was he meeting?

Levi fretted about such puzzles, and about most things. He was a short, wiry man, with dark features and a look of perpetual uneasiness. His family was from Marseilles, he told friends, with a few distant relatives from Corsica. He was a nervous man with a bad stomach, who chewed antacid pills through the day in the vain hope that they would relieve the tension that was eating away at his gut.

Yakov Levi’s problem was that he didn’t exist. Not in Beirut, at least. There was no one in the city by that name. There was instead a Frenchman, an import-export trader named Jacques Beaulieu, and Levi lived inside his skin. The worldly Monsieur Beaulieu worked in an office on the Rue de Phenice in West Beirut, several blocks from the St. Georges Hotel. The brass plaque on the door said “Franco-Lebanese Trading Co.” It was a busy little import-export firm, quite profitable, it was said, staffed by a handful of bright young men and women who were well-mannered, spoke French, English, and Arabic, and had a wide circle of acquaintances in Lebanon. Members of the firm travelled extensively in the Arab world and had a reputation for paying generous commissions on business deals.

Levi’s import-export firm was, in reality, the Mossad station in Beirut. His family had indeed lived in Marseilles once, but no longer. The survivors now lived in Israel. All except for Yakov Levi, who called himself Beaulieu. He was a Jew, living secretly in the midst of Arabs who wanted to kill him, and he was perpetually frightened. A fear so deep and constant that it had entered his body and flowed in his veins. He had been in Beirut for three years, burning out his circuits day by day. A few months ago they had promised him a fancy desk job back home at the end of the year, but he didn’t believe them. It was a lie, told to keep him living a few more months in Hell.

The Mossad station in Beirut, the very fact of its existence, was one of the few true secrets in a town where gossip and spying were a way of life. The station had been in operation, in various locations, since 1951. The Americans hadn’t a clue where it was, nor had the Deuxième Bureau, nor had anyone else. The Israelis who worked for Franco-Lebanese Trading didn’t tell a soul their true identities or what they were really doing.

They were Israel’s eyes and ears in the Arab world. They serviced dead drops, acted as couriers, spotted potential agents, scouted the terrain. They might recommend the recruitment of a particular Lebanese or Palestinian, but they never did the actual recruiting or handling. That was too dangerous. One false move would blow the station’s cover. They left such tasks to Mossad officers in Europe, who could meet agents easily in Paris or Rome, receive their information, pay them their stipends. In Lebanon, the handful of Mossad officers were under a cover so deep that they didn’t like to talk, even to each other, about their real work.

Watching the Americans was part of Levi’s job. Identifying the intelligence agents among them, tracking them, trying to understand what they were doing in secret in the Middle East behind the veil of America’s public policy. Levi was perfect for the job. He believed almost nothing that anyone said, least of all the Americans.

Levi had been watching Tom Rogers for more than six months. He was convinced that he was a CIA case officer, but that part was easy. All you had to do was study the diplomatic list and look for the odd man out. The person whose résumé didn’t quite make sense: who had been a consular officer one place and a commercial attaché somewhere else and was now a political officer. Or you could look for social quirks: a political officer who didn’t attend the Christmas party given by the head of the political section at the embassy. Or if you were still stumped, you could look at the State Department’s foreign service list, published in Washington. With chilling precision it listed the CIA officers under diplomatic cover as “reserve” officers of the foreign service—“FSRs,” they were called—rather than as full-fledged FSOs.

Some cover! thought Levi. The Americans could afford to be so sloppy. They were rich and powerful. And they were not Jews.

Walking to his office on the Rue de Phenice, Levi could see the grand facade of the American Embassy on the Corniche. He would look to the fifth floor, where the CIA officers worked, and try to imagine what they were doing and thinking. It was easy with some of them. The case officers who handled Lebanese politicians were so clumsy they left footprints all over town. Others, like the new man Rogers, were more careful. They looked, from a distance, as if they were almost clever enough to be Mossad officers. That worried Levi, and it made his stomach hurt.

Watching the Palestinians was the other part of Levi’s job. In some ways that was easier than watching the Americans. It was almost too easy, with too many tidbits of information in the air and too many tracks to follow. The Palestinians were braggarts. Rather than trying to conceal their military and intelligence operations, they boasted about them. And they fought over who would control them. Levi made it a practice to check out gunfights in Fakhani, because they often involved rival Fatah officers dueling for control of units, or operations, or money.

Levi despised the Palestinians. That hatred was part of what kept him going. The Palestinians were so thoroughly corrupt. And they were spoiled by the other Arabs, who were terrified of them. To become rich, all a PLO official needed to do was gather up a band of scruffy refugees in a place like Qatar or Abu Dhabi, let the local Emir know that trouble was brewing, and wait for the payoff to arrive. It was so easy to buy PLO officials that Levi wondered whether the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict might lie, not in another war, but in a takeover bid.

He watched the Palestinians with a horrid fascination, hating what he saw, his hatred in turn feeding his curiosity about the nature of his enemies. He was fascinated by their sexual habits. The Old Man, for example, had never been known to sleep with a woman. Who, then, did he sleep with? Levi wanted to believe that he slept with little boys. That would be exactly, perfectly right. Levi wanted evidence to support his theory, but where could he look? He couldn’t very well ask young boys in Fakhani whether they had ever been molested by a man in guerrilla fatigues.

And then there were the playboys, the young men in Fatah’s so-called intelligence service. There was Abu Namli, who bought his whisky by the case and frequented the whorehouses of Zeituny with a fat roll of dollar bills, buying two or three girls at a time. There was Abu Nasir, cool and austere, who liked to use women for other tasks, such as planting bombs.

And there was Abu Nasir’s assistant, a flamboyant young man named Jamal Ramlawi. Levi was convinced that Ramlawi was the mystery Palestinian in the recent scandal involving the French diplomat’s wife. There was no proof, but there were many rumors. Agents had even seen a dark-haired European woman near Ramlawi’s office in Fakhani. It had to be Ramlawi. He was notorious in Beirut as a ladies’ man. He had been seen in every nightclub and bistro in town. He was almost reckless in his behavior. So reckless that Levi wondered, as he thought about it, whether the young Palestinian’s disregard for what most people liked to keep secret might conceal a deeper secret. That was a possibility. Levi made a note to open a new index card in the Palestinian file. And to start checking Ramlawi’s travels more carefully.

Levi could remember dimly the time when he hadn’t been scared. That was before he joined Mossad, when he was just a simple soldier. When all he was required to do for the state of Israel was to risk the chance of dying once, in war. As an intelligence officer, he had already died a thousand times.

Levi liked to remember how he had joined the Israeli intelligence service. It was a way of pinching himself, reminding himself that he had once had another life.

He had been serving in the army. That wasn’t unusual. All Israelis join the army. But he was very fit and very clever, so he was allowed to join the paratroops, which made his parents proud. And he was so good in the paratroops that they asked him to join the special operations unit, where he was a team leader.

Perhaps the fear began then. Levi had made a jump into southern Sudan, with a team of Israelis who were helping to foment a civil war there between the Moslems of the north and the Christians of the south. The Israelis provided guns and training for the southerners, on the theory that if the Moslem-dominated regime in Khartoum was pinned down by internal strife, it couldn’t do much to help Nasser in Egypt make war on Israel. That assignment was only frightening for the few minutes before the jump. After that it was easy. Either you died or you didn’t.

After a year in special operations, he left the military and attended university. It was enough, he had done his service. A few months later the phone rang. Go to an address in downtown Tel Aviv tomorrow. No explanation, except that it was for the army. They spent four days asking questions, assembling every detail of his life history. The family’s background in France. Old addresses and telephone numbers in Marseilles. Old passport numbers and the names and addresses of dead relatives. A former girlfriend called to ask whether he had done anything wrong, because an investigator had just spent the entire day asking questions about him.

And then the ruse. He was called back to the army for more training. A three-month advanced intelligence course. Okay. Fine. No problem. Everyone in Israel is in the army. Then another course. A more advanced intelligence course, at a much higher salary, the salary of an Israeli Army captain, which was a small fortune in those days. By this time it was becoming obvious what was happening. The subjects covered in the course included covert communications, demolition, small-arms training, how to operate inside urban areas.

And finally the graduation ceremony. He was roused from bed in the middle of the night and taken to the airport, where he was given a false French passport and $10, put on a plane, and flown to Frankfurt, West Germany. Leaving the plane they gave him an address and told him to be there in ten days. Until then he was on his own, speaking no German, with $10 in his pocket. He had to survive in a strange country for more than a week without giving away his identity.

So what did he do? He survived. He stole a car and drove around Germany. He was a French student on holiday, he told people. He lived by stealing money. Purses, wallets. It helped that he hated Germans. He arrived ten days later at the address they had given him driving a brown Mercedes, with a new set of clothes and the lipstick of his German girlfriend still on his cheek. He was one of the few recruits who made it. Some of the other boys had slept in the bushes near the airport, eaten food from trash cans, and called the Israeli Embassy in desperation after two days. They were not survivors, like Levi. Perhaps they were not scared enough.

They said, Okay. You have survived. You are one of us. Go to France, to Marseilles. Settle down. Disappear. Take classes at the university. Build an identity. Apply for a passport. It’s legal; you were born in France. Here are the supporting documents. Money arrived every month at a numbered bank account in Nice. It was like a long vacation, until the French passport arrived in the mail. A few days later came a message from a Mossad case officer, and the beginning of the awful fear.

Levi went to work as a courier, making runs behind the Iron Curtain. He travelled as a French businessman, servicing dead drops and agents in Warsaw, Prague, Lithuania, Kiev, Moscow. He carried money, messages, assignments for Mossad agents in the East. They were Jews, nearly all of them. People as frightened and determined to survive as Levi was. He would collect their information in a quick meeting at a railway station in Warsaw, or in a brush pass in a Moscow subway station, or by retrieving a set of documents from a metal can hidden in the spout of a rain gutter in Bratislava. He travelled on a precise itinerary, pre-programmed down to the minute. Each contact set for a precise time, with a fall-back twenty-four hours later in a different place if the agent didn’t show or the dead drop was empty.

All he could really remember about those trips was the fear. The perspiration dripping down his shirt as he stood in the line for passport control, the struggle to control his voice when a policeman stopped him on the street on his way to meet an agent and asked him where he was going. So scared that he worried he would shit in his pants. So scared that he couldn’t think of anything else except surviving and staying alive. And when he had crossed the frontier at last, and made it out alive, he would go back to Marseilles and wait, like a condemned man, to do it again.

He was very good at it. One of the best. That was Levi’s curse. It had landed him in Beirut.

We are pushing at the seams, the chief of the Mossad station in Beirut liked to tell his young officers. Pushing at the seams of a garment that is unravelling. The Arab world is a myth. There are no Arabs. There are Christians and Moslems; Palestinians and Syrians and Lebanese; Sunnis and Shiites and Druse and Maronites and Melchites and Alawites and Copts and Kurds. They live in make-believe countries that were created by the colonialists of Europe. The fabric is ready to break, the station chief would say. The false thread of Arabism won’t last another generation. Just look, he would say, at Lebanon.

The chief of station was a man named Ze’ev Shuval and Levi was in awe of him. He became convinced, in the way that a junior officer can, that it was Shuval who kept them all alive. But for the station chief, Levi thought, they might all walk through the streets of Beirut singing the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikva. Shuval was restless, thoughtful, playful, and furtive. He had translucent skin, a face that was slightly reddish and freckled, and a balding head with the few remaining strands of hair combed carefully over the top. He looked like a prim and proper French businessman. His French was nearly flawless, but there was a hint of another accent—perhaps Dutch—from long ago.