The Fist of God (31 page)

4. To appear to welcome but in fact to frustrate any peace plan that might enable Iraq to escape unscathed from her present dilemma. Clearly the UN Secretary-General, Paris, and Moscow are the principal dangers here, likely to propose at any time some naive scheme capable of preventing what must be done. The public, of course, will continue to be assured of the opposite.

Respectfully submitted,

PIAG

“Itzhak, we really have to go along with them on this one.”

The Prime Minister of Israel seemed, as always, dwarfed by the big swivel chair and the desk in front of it, as his Deputy Foreign Minister confronted him in the premier’s fortified private office beneath the Knesset in Jerusalem. The two Uzi-toting paratroopers outside the heavy, steel-lined timber door could hear nothing of what went on inside.

Itzhak Shamir glowered across the desk, his short legs swinging free above the carpet, although there was a specially fitted footrest if he needed it. His lined, pugnacious face beneath the grizzled gray hair made him seem even more like some northern troll.

His Deputy Foreign Minister was different from the Prime Minister in every way: tall where the national leader was short, well-tailored where Shamir was rumpled, urbane where he was choleric. Yet they got along extremely well, sharing the same uncompromising vision of The Fist of God

their country and of Palestinians, so that the Russian-born Prime Minister had had no hesitation in picking and promoting the cosmopolitan diplomat.

Benjamin Netanyahu had made his case well. Israel needed America: her goodwill, which had once been automatically guaranteed by the power of the Jewish lobby but was now under siege on Capitol Hill and in the American media; her donations, her weaponry, her veto in the Security Council. That was an awful lot to jeopardize for one alleged Iraqi agent being run by Kobi Dror from down there in Tel Aviv.

“Let them have this Jericho, whoever he is,” urged Netanyahu. “If he helps them destroy Saddam Hussein, the better for us.”

The Prime Minister grunted, nodded, and reached for his intercom.

“Get on to General Dror, and tell him I need to see him here in my office,” he told his private secretary. “No, not when he’s free. Now.”

Four hours later, Kobi Dror left his Prime Minister’s office. He was seething. Indeed, he told himself as his car swung down the hill out of Jerusalem and onto the broad highway back to Tel Aviv, he did not recall when he had been so angry.

To be told by your own Prime Minister that you were wrong was bad enough. To be told he was a stupid asshole was something he could have done without.

Normally he took pleasure in looking at the pine forests where, during the siege of Jerusalem when the highway of today had been a rutted track, his father and others had battled to punch a hole through the Palestinian lines and relieve the city. But not today.

Back in his office, he summoned Sami Gershon and told him the news.

“How the hell did the Americans know?” he shouted. “Who leaked?”

“No one inside the Office,” Gershon said with finality. “What about The Fist of God

that professor? I see he’s just got back from London.”

“Damned traitor,” snarled Dror. “I’ll break him.”

“The Brits probably got him drunk,” suggested Gershon. “Boasting in his cups. Leave it, Kobi. The damage is done. What have we got to do?”

“Tell them everything about Jericho,” snapped Dror. “I won’t do it.

Send Sharon. Let him do it. The meeting’s in London, where the leak took place.”

Gershon thought it over and grinned.

“What’s so funny?” asked Dror.

“Just this. We can’t contact Jericho anymore. Just let
them
try. We still don’t know who the bastard is. Let them find out. With any luck, they’ll make a camel’s ass out of it.”

Dror thought it over, and eventually a sly smile spread across his face.

“Send Sharon tonight,” he said. “Then we launch another project. I’ve had it in my mind for some time. We’ll call it Operation Joshua.”

“Why?” asked Gershon, perplexed.

“Don’t you remember exactly what Joshua did to Jericho?”

The London meeting was deemed important enough for Bill Stewart, Langley’s Deputy Director (Operations) to cross the Atlantic personally, accompanied by Chip Barber of the Middle East Division.

They stayed at one of the Company’s safe houses, an apartment not far from the embassy in Grosvenor Square, and had dinner with a Deputy Director of the SIS and Steve Laing. The Deputy Director was for protocol, given Stewart’s rank; he would be replaced at the debriefing of David Sharon by Simon Paxman, who was in charge of Iraq.

David Sharon flew in from Tel Aviv under another name and was met The Fist of God

by a
katsa
from the Israeli embassy in Palace Green. The British counterintelligence service MI-5—which does not like foreign agents, even friendly ones, playing games at the port of entry—had been alerted by SIS and spotted the waiting
katsa
from the embassy. As soon as he greeted the new arrival, “Mr. Eliyahu,” off the Tel Aviv flight, the MI-S group moved in, warmly welcoming Mr. Sharon to London, and offering every facility to make his stay pleasant.

The two angry Israelis were escorted to their car, waved away from the concourse entrance, and then followed sedately into central London.

The massed bands of the Brigade of Guards could not have done a better job.

The debriefing of David Sharon began the following morning, and it took the whole day and half the night. The SIS elected to use one of their own safe houses, a well-protected and efficiently “wired”

apartment in South Kensington.

It was (and still is) a large and spacious place, of which the dining room served as the site for the conference. One of the bedrooms housed the banks of tape recorders, and two technicians who recorded every word spoken. A trim young woman brought over from Century commandeered the kitchen and masterminded a convoy of trays of coffee and sandwiches to the six men grouped around the dining table.

Two fit-looking men in the lobby downstairs spent the day pretending to mend the perfectly functioning elevator, while in fact ensuring that none but the other known inhabitants of the building got above the ground-floor level.

At the dining table were David Sharon and the
katsa
from the London embassy, who was a declared agent anyway; the two Americans, Stewart and Barber from Langley; and the two SIS men, Laing and Paxman.

The Fist of God

At the Americans’ bidding, Sharon started at the beginning of the tale and told it the way it had happened.

“A mercenary? A walk-in mercenary?” queried Stewart at one point.

“You’re not putting me on?”

“My instructions are to be absolutely frank,” said Sharon. “That was the way it happened.”

The Americans had nothing against a mercenary. Indeed, it was an advantage. Among all the motives for betraying one’s country, money is the simplest and easiest for the recruiter agency. With a mercenary one knows where one is. There are no tortured feelings of regret, no angst of self-disgust, no fragile ego to be massaged and flattered, no ruffled feathers to be smoothed. A mercenary in the intelligence world is like a whore. No tiresome candle-lit dinners and sweet nothings are necessary. A fistful of dollars on the dressing table will do nicely.

Sharon described the frantic search for someone who could live inside Baghdad under diplomatic cover on extended stay, and the Hobson’s-choice selection of Alfonso Benz Moncada, his intensive training in Santiago, and his reinfiltration to run Jericho for two years.

“Hang on,” said Stewart. “This
amateur
ran Jericho for two years?

Made seventy collections from the drops and got away with it?”

“Yep. On my life,” said Sharon.

“What do you figure, Steve?”

Laing shrugged. “Beginner’s luck. Wouldn’t have liked to try it in East Berlin or Moscow.”

“Right,” said Stewart. “And he never got tailed to a drop? Never compromised?”

“No,” said Sharon. “He was tailed a few times, but always in a sporadic and clumsy way. Going from his home to the Economic Commission building or back, and once when he was heading for a The Fist of God

drop. But he saw them and aborted.”

“Just supposing,” said Laing, “he actually
was
tailed to a drop by a real team of watchers. Rahmani’s Counterintelligence boys stake out the drop and roll up Jericho himself. Under persuasion, Jericho has to cooperate. ...”

“Then the product would have gone down in value,” said Sharon. “But Jericho really was doing a lot of damage. Rahmani wouldn’t have allowed that to go on. We’d have seen a public trial and hanging of Jericho, and Moncada would have been expelled, if lucky.

“It seems the trackers were AMAM people, even though foreigners are supposed to be Rahmani’s turf. Whatever, they were as clumsy as usual. Moncada spotted them without trouble. You know how the AMAM is always trying to move into counterintelligence work.”

The listeners nodded. Interdepartmental rivalry was nothing new—it happened in their own countries.

When Sharon reached the point where Moncada was abruptly withdrawn from Iraq, Bill Stewart let out an expletive.

“You mean he’s switched off, out of contact? Are you telling us Jericho is on the loose with no controller?”

“That’s the point,” said Sharon patiently. He turned to Chip Barber.

“When General Dror said he was running no agent in Baghdad, he meant it. The Mossad was convinced that Jericho, as an ongoing operation, was belly-up.”

Barber shot the young
katsa
a look that said, “Pull the other leg, son.

It’s got bells on.”

“We want to reestablish contact,” said Laing smoothly. “How?”

Sharon laid out all six of the locations of the dead-letter boxes. During his two years Moncada had changed two of them; in one case because a location was bulldozed for redevelopment, in another because a The Fist of God

derelict shop was refurbished and reoccupied. But the six functioning drops and the six places where the alerting chalk marks had to be placed were the up-to-date ones that had come from his final briefing after his expulsion.

The exact location of these drops and of the sites for the chalk marks were noted to the inch.

“Maybe we could get a friendly diplomat to approach him at a function, tell him he’s back in action and the money’s better,”

suggested Barber. “Get around all this crap under bricks and flagstones.”

“No,” said Sharon. “It’s the drops, or you can’t contact him.”

“Why?” asked Stewart.

“You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I swear it’s true. We never found out who he is.”

The four Western agents stared at Sharon for several minutes.

“You never identified him?” asked Stewart slowly.

“No. We tried. We asked him to identify himself for his own protection. He refused, threatened to shut off if we persisted. We did handwriting analyses, psychoportraits. We cross-indexed the information he could produce and the stuff he couldn’t get at. We ended up with a list of thirty, maybe forty men, all around Saddam Hussein, all within the Revolutionary Command Council, the Army High Command, or the senior ranks of the Ba’ath Party.

“Never could get closer than that. Twice we slipped a technical term in English into our demands. Each time they came back with a query. It seems he only speaks no or very limited English. But that could be a blind. He could be fluent, but if we knew that, it would narrow the field to two or three. So he always writes in script, in Arabic.”

Stewart grunted, convinced. “Sounds like Deep Throat.”

The Fist of God

“Surely Woodward and Bernstein identified Deep Throat?” suggested Paxman.

“So they claim, but I doubt it,” said Stewart. “I figure the guy stayed in deep shadow, like Jericho.”

Darkness had long fallen by the time the four of them finally let an exhausted David Sharon go back to his embassy. If there was anything more he could have told them, they were not going to get it out of him.

But Steve Laing was certain that this time the Mossad had come clean.

Bill Stewart had told him of the level of the pressure that had been exercised in Washington.

The two British and two American intelligence officers, tired of sandwiches and coffee, adjourned to a restaurant half a mile away. Bill Stewart, who had an ulcer that twelve hours of sandwiches and high stress had not improved, toyed with a plate of smoked salmon.

“It’s a bastard, Steve. It’s a real four-eyed bastard. Like the Mossad, we’ll have to try and find an accredited diplomat already trained in all the tradecraft and get him to work for us. Pay him if we have to.

Langley’s prepared to spend a lot of money on this. Jericho’s information could save us a lot of lives when the fighting starts.”

“So who does that leave us?” said Barber. “Half the embassies in Baghdad are closed down already. The rest must be under heavy surveillance. The Irish, Swiss, Swedes, Finns?”

“The neutrals won’t play ball,” said Laing. “And I doubt they’ve got a trained agent posted to Baghdad on their own account. Forget Third World embassies—it means starting a whole recruiting and training program.”

“We don’t have the time, Steve. This is urgent. We can’t go down the same road the Israelis went. Three weeks is crazy. It might have worked then, but Baghdad is on a war footing now. Things have to be The Fist of God

much tighter in there. Starting cold, I’d want a minimum three months to give a diplomat the tradecraft.”

Stewart nodded agreement.

“Failing that, someone with legitimate access. Some businessmen are still going in and out, especially the Germans. We could produce a convincing German, or a Japanese.”

“The trouble is, they’re short-stay chappies. Ideally, one wants someone to mother-hen this Jericho for the next—what? Four months.

What about a journalist?” suggested Laing.

Paxman shook his head. “I’ve been talking with them all when they come out; being journalists, they get total surveillance. Snooping around back alleys won’t work for a foreign correspondent—they all have a minder from the AMAM with them, all the time. Besides, don’t forget that outside an accredited diplomat, we’re talking about a black operation. Anyone want to dwell on what happens to an agent falling into Omar Khatib’s hands?”