Gideon's Spies полностью

Soon Lotz had developed a circle of clients that included the deputy head of Egyptian military intelligence and the chief of security for the Suez Canal zone. Emulating Cohen, Lotz persuaded his newfound friends to show off Egypt’s formidable defenses: its rocket launchpads in Sinai and on the Negev frontier. Lotz also obtained a complete list of Nazi scientists living in Cairo who were working in Egypt’s rocket and arms programs. Soon they were systematically executed by Mossad agents.

After two years under cover, Lotz was finally arrested and convicted. The Egyptians, sensing he was too valuable to kill, kept him alive in anticipation he could be traded for Egyptian soldiers captured in a future war with Israel. Once again, Meir Amit was deeply concerned over Lotz’s capture.

Meir Amit wrote to Egypt’s then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, asking him to exchange Lotz and his wife in return for Egyptian POWs Israel had captured. Nasser refused. Amit applied psychological pressure.

“I let the Egyptian prisoners know they were all being held because Nasser refused to hand over two Israelis. We allowed them to write home. Their letters made their feelings very clear.”

Meir Amit wrote to Nasser again saying Israel would publicly give him all the credit for recovering his POWs and would keep quiet about the return of Lotz and his wife. Nasser still did not agree. So Amit took the matter to the United Nations commander responsible for keeping the peace in the Sinai. The officer flew to Cairo and obtained the assurance that Lotz and his wife would be set free “at some future date.”

Meir Amit “understood the coded language. A month later Lotz and his wife left Cairo in complete secrecy for Geneva. A few hours later they were back in my office.”

Meir Amit recognized his katsas would need support in the field. He created the sayanim, volunteer Jewish helpers. Each sayan was an example of the historical cohesiveness of the world Jewish community. Regardless of allegiance to his or her country, in the final analysis a sayan would recognize a greater loyalty: the mystical one to Israel, and a need to help protect it from its enemies.

Sayanim fulfilled many functions. A car sayan, running a rental agency, provided a katsa with a vehicle without the usual documentation. A letting agency sayan offered accommodation. A bank sayan might unlock funds outside normal hours. A sayan physician would give medical assistance—treating a bullet wound for example—without informing the authorities. Sayanim only received expenses for their services.

Between them they collected technical data and all kinds of “overt” intelligence: a rumor at a cocktail party, an item on the radio, a paragraph in a newspaper, a half-finished story at a dinner party. They provided leads for katsas. Without its sayanim Mossad could not operate.

Again, Meir Amit’s legacy would remain, though vastly expanded. In 1998 there were over four thousand sayanim in Britain, almost four times as many in the United States; while Meir Amit had operated on a tight budget, Mossad, to maintain its worldwide operations, now spent several hundred million dollars a month maintaining its “assets,” paying the expenses of sayanim, running safe houses, providing logistics and covering operational costs. He had left them one other reminder of his time as their chief: a language of their own. Its report writing system was known as Naka; “daylight” was the highest form of alert; a kidon was a member of Mossad’s assassination team; a neviot was a specialist in surveillance; yaholomin was the unit that handled communications to katsas; safanim was the one that targeted the PLO; a balder was a courier; a slick was a secure place for documents; teuds were forgeries.

On that March morning in 1997, as he drove to keep a rendezvous with the past, Meir Amit knew so much had changed in Mossad. Pressured by political demands, most notably from Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, Mossad had become dangerously isolated from the foreign intelligence services Meir Amit had so carefully courted. It was one thing to live by the credo “Israel first, last, and always. Always.” It was quite another, as he put it, to be caught “going through the pockets of your friends.” The key word was “caught,” he added with another bleak smile.

An example had been Mossad’s increased penetration of the United States through economic, scientific, and technological espionage. A special unit, code-named Al, Hebrew for “above,” prowled through California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 for high-tech secrets. In a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA had identified Israel as one of six foreign countries with “a government-directed, orchestrated, clandestine effort to collect U.S. economic secrets.”