Gideon's Spies полностью

Since 1964, the club had also received other visitors, Chinese in safari suits, slab-faced Russians, and men whose nationality could have been of any country around the Mediterranean basin. They were not there for the cold beer or what the club advertised as “the hottest girls in all-Africa.” These men worked for intelligence services fighting to gain a foothold in central Africa, where once only Britain’s MI6 had secretly operated. The newcomers represented the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Soviet KGB, and Mossad. Each service had its own agenda, playing one off against the other. No one had become better at this than Mossad.

All told, there were a dozen katsas scattered along the equator, operating from Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean to Freetown on the shore of the Atlantic. Possessing an impressive number of false passports, young and superbly fit, the operatives, as well as all their normal skills, had acquired the basics of field medicine and surgery to enable them to survive in the bush, where predatory lions and leopards roamed, as well as hostile tribesmen.

Mossad’s African adventure had begun shortly after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 and started to export his revolution. His first success began when his surrogate, John Okello, a self-styled “field marshal,” was plucked out of the jungle by a Castro recruiter, given a short course in guerrilla warfare in Havana, and told to go and seize the small island of Zanzibar off the East African coast. His sheer height and bulk—he was three hundred pounds—terrified the island’s small police force into submission. Okello’s ragtag army stamped their brutal authority on a population whose only weapons were the primitive tools they used to harvest the spices that made Zanzibar world famous. The island became Castro’s launchpad for penetrating the African mainland. There was a Chinese ethnic population in the port of Dar es Salaam, and their reports home about what was happening came to the notice of the Beijing government. Realizing the opportunity the embryonic revolution offered for China to gain a greater hold on the continent, the CSIS was ordered to establish itself in the region and to provide all possible support for the revolutionaries.

Meantime, Castro had set up a full-scale operation to Cubanize the now burgeoning black liberation movement. The focus was the port of Casablanca on the West African coast. Shiploads of Cuban weapons arrived and on the return voyages to Havana the boats were filled with guerrilla trainees from all over central Africa. Soon the CSIS was helping to select them.

The prospect of thousands of trained and well-armed revolutionaries being within a few hours’ striking distance of Israel was alarming to its politicians and intelligence services. But to provoke this guerrilla army when they had offered no direct threat could lead to a confrontation Israel did not want. With its hands already full fighting off the threat from Arab terrorists, to become embroiled in direct action against black revolutionaries was to be avoided. Meir Amit ordered his katsas in Africa to keep a close watch but not to become actively involved.

The arrival of the KGB on the scene changed all that. The Russians brought an offer would-be terrorists could not refuse: the opportunity to be trained at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. There they would receive the wisdom of the KGB’s best instructors in guerrilla tactics and how to exploit them under the guise of helping the dispossessed, powerless, and unelectable in democratic states. To help sell the idea, the KGB brought along some of the most successful graduates of Patrice Lumumba: Arab terrorists.

Meir Amit reinforced his African katsas with kidons. His new orders were to disrupt by all means possible the relations between the Russians and their African hosts and between the KGB and the CSIS; to kill Arab activists when the opportunity arose; and to foster relations with black African revolutionaries by promising them that Israel would assist their movements to progress beyond guerrilla tactics and allow their organizations to achieve political legitimacy. All Israel wanted in return was a guarantee it would not be attacked by these movements.

The Oasis Club had become part of the battle for the hearts and minds of African revolutionaries. The nights were filled with long discussions of how, without publicity, terrorism was a weapon firing only blanks, and of the need to never lose sight of the ultimate goal: freedom and independence. Within the club’s stifling atmosphere plots were hatched, deals made, targets identified for execution or destruction. Some victims would be ambushed driving on a dirt road, others killed in their beds. One day it would be a KGB agent, the next a CSIS spy. Each side blamed the other for what Mossad had done.