The sum had focused Joseph. He could bribe officials, organize an escape route. With that money he could somehow move the entire family out of Iraq. The more he thought about it, the more feasible it became. Munir loved his mother; he would do anything for her—even stealing his plane for a million dollars. And there would be no need for Joseph to have to organize the family’s escape. He would let the Israelis do that. Everyone knew they were clever at such things. That was why he had sent Salman to the embassy.
“And now you are here, my friend!” Joseph beamed at Bacon.
“What about Munir? Does he know any of this?”
“Oh, yes. He has agreed to steal the MiG. But he wants half the money down now, then the balance delivered just before he does so.”
Bacon was astounded. Everything he had heard sounded both genuine and feasible. But first he had to report to Meir Amit.
In Tel Aviv, the Mossad chief listened for an entire afternoon while Bacon reported every detail.
“Where does Joseph want to be paid?” Meir Amit finally asked.
“Into a Swiss bank. Joseph has a cousin who needs urgent medical treatment not available in Baghdad. The Iraqi authorities will give him permission to go to Switzerland. When he arrives, he expects to have the money already deposited by us.”
“A resourceful man, your Joseph,” Meir Amit commented wryly. “Once the money is in that account, we’ll never get it back.”
He put one more question to Bacon. “Why do you trust Joseph?”
Bacon replied. “I trust him because it is the only choice.”
Meir Amit authorized half a million U.S. dollars should be deposited in the main branch of Credit Suisse in Geneva. He was gambling more than money. He knew he could not survive if Joseph turned out to be the brilliant fraud some Mossad officers still believed he was.
The time had come to brief Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. Both men green-lighted the operation. Meir Amit had not told them he had taken one more step—withdrawing the entire Mossad network from Iraq.
“If the mission failed, I didn’t want anyone’s head on the block except my own. I set up five teams. The first team was the communications link between Baghdad and me. They would break radio silence only if there was a crisis. Otherwise I didn’t want to hear from them. The second team was to be in Baghdad without anyone knowing. Not Bacon, not the first team, no one. They were there to get Bacon out of the country if there was trouble, and Joseph, too, if possible. The third team was to keep an eye on the family. The fourth team was to liaise with the Kurds who would help in the last stages of getting the family out. Israel was supplying them with arms. The fifth team was to liaise with Washington and Turkey. For the MiG to be flown out of Iraq, it would have to fly over Turkish air space to reach us. Washington, who had bases in northern Turkey, would have to persuade the Turks to cooperate by saying the MiG was going to end up in the United States. I now knew that the Iraqis feared the possibility of a pilot defecting to the West, so they kept fuel tanks only half-full. That was something we could do nothing about.”
There were still other problems. Joseph had decided that not only his immediate family but distant cousins should have the opportunity of escaping from the harsh Iraqi regime. In all he wanted forty-three persons to be airlifted to safety.
