Meir Amit agreed—only to face a new worry. From Baghdad, Bacon sent a coded message that Munir was having second thoughts. The Mossad chief “sensed what was happening. Munir was first and foremost an Iraqi. Iraq had been good to him. Betraying his country to Israel did not sit well. We were the enemy. All his life he had been taught that. I decided the only way was to convince him the MiG would go straight to America. So I flew to Washington and saw Richard Helms, then DCI [director of the Central Intelligence Agency]. He listened and said no problem. He was always very good like that. He arranged for the U.S. military attaché in Baghdad to meet Munir. The attaché confirmed the plane would be handed over to the United States. He gave Munir a lot of talk about helping America catch up with the Russians. Munir bought it and agreed to go ahead.”
The operation now took on a pace of its own. Joseph’s relative received his Iraqi exit permit and flew to Geneva. From there he sent a postcard: “The hospital facilities are excellent. I am assured of a total recovery.” The message was the signal that the second five hundred thousand dollars had been deposited.
Reassured, Joseph told Bacon the family were ready. On the night before Munir would make his flight, Joseph led them in a convoy of vehicles north, to the cool of the mountains. Iraqi checkpoints did not trouble them; residents moved every summer away from the stifling heat of Baghdad. In the foothills Kurds waited with the Israeli liaison team. They led the family deep into the mountains, where Turkish air force helicopters were waiting. Flying below radar, they crossed back into Turkey.
An Israeli agent made a call to Munir telling him his sister had safely delivered a baby girl. Another coded signal had been safely transmitted.
Next morning, August 15, 1966, at sunup, Munir took off for a practice mission. Clear of the airfield he kicked in the MiG’s afterburners and was over the border with Turkey before other Iraqi pilots could be instructed to shoot him down. Escorted by U.S. Air Force Phantoms, Munir landed at a Turkish air base, refueled, and took off again. Through his headphones he heard the message, in plain talk this time. “All your family are safe and on the way to join you.”
An hour later the MiG touched down at a military air base in northern Israel.
Mossad had become a serious player on the world stage. Within the Israeli intelligence community the way matters were conducted in the future would be known as “BA”—before Amit—or “AM”—after Meir.
Exiting the highway north of Tel Aviv, Meir Amit continued to maintain his speed at a little above the speed limit. Discreetly bucking the system had continued to be part of his life since, almost forty years before, he had masterminded the theft of an Iraqi jet.
He put down blindly refusing to follow the rule book as stemming from his Galilean background: “We are a stubborn lot.” He had been born in King Herod’s favorite city, Tiberias, close to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and spent most of his early life on a kibbutz. Long ago all traces of the region’s flat accent had been smoothed away by his mother, an elocution teacher. She had also instilled her son’s sense of independence, his refusal to tolerate fools, and a barely concealed contempt for city dwellers. Most important of all, she had encouraged his analytical skills and ability to think laterally.
In his long career he had used those qualities to discover an enemy’s intention. Often action could not wait for certainty, and motive and deception had been at the center of his work. At times his critics in the Israeli intelligence community had been concerned at what they saw as his imaginative leaps. He had one answer for them all: Read the case file on the stolen MiG.
On this March morning in 1997, as he continued to drive out of Tel Aviv, Meir Amit was officially on the retired list. But no one in Israeli intelligence believed that was the case; his vast knowledge was too valuable to be put in cold storage.
The previous day Meir Amit had returned from Ho Chi Minh City, where he had visited former Vietcong intelligence officers. They had swapped experiences and had found common ground over besting superior opposition: the Vietnamese against the Americans, Israel fighting the Arabs. Meir Amit had made other trips to places where his secret maneuvers had once created havoc: Amman, Cairo, Moscow. No one dared to question the purpose of these visits, just as during his five momentous years as director general of Mossad—1963–68—no one had mounted a successful challenge over his sources or methods.
