Gideon's Spies полностью

He did not return until the next day. He appeared even more tense, saying to, among others, Kim Fletcher—a freelance journalist then working for the Daily Mail—that “it’s all right for you lot; you’re British born and bred. I’m an Iranian. That makes me different.” Fletcher was not alone among the English reporters who wondered if this was “Bazoft banging on again about how hard it was to have a background like his.”

Bazoft spent most of the day pacing the hotel lobby or in his suite. Twice he left the hotel for short periods. In the lobby he had several conversations with Nicholas Davies, who later said that Bazoft was “like anyone on a story, wondering if he would get what he wanted.” For his part, the Mirror foreign editor announced he would not be writing anything, “because there is nothing here to interest Captain Bob.”

Late that afternoon, Bazoft once more left the hotel. As usual he was followed by an Iraqi minder. But when Bazoft reappeared, he was alone. Reporters heard Bazoft tell Davies he wasn’t “going to be followed around like a bitch in heat.”

Davies’s laughter, however, did little to lighten Bazoft’s mood. Once more he went to his suite. When he next appeared in the lobby, he told several reporters that he would not be returning to London with them. “Something’s come up,” he said in the mysterious voice he liked to use at times.

“It would have to be a good story to keep me here,” Fletcher said.

Hours later Bazoft left the hotel. It would be the last any of his companions would see of him until he appeared on a video distributed worldwide by the Iraqi regime seven weeks after his arrest, having confessed to being a Mossad spy.

During that time, Bazoft was on a Mossad mission that would have taxed the skills of a trained katsa. He had been ordered to try to discover how advanced were Gerald Bull’s plans to provide Iraq with a supergun. That the journalist was given such a task was a clear indicator of how far his controllers were prepared to exploit him. Mossad had also taken its own steps to ensure that, if Bazoft was caught, it would appear he was working for a London-based company, Defence Systems Limited (DSL). When Bazoft was arrested close to one of the supergun test sites, the Iraqi agents also found he had in his possession a number of documents indicating that Bazoft had made several calls from the hotel to the offices of DSL. The company has denied all knowledge of Bazoft, or having any contact with Mossad.

On the videotape, Bazoft’s eyes at times stared vacantly, before suddenly blinking rapidly and darting around the room, with its pleasant backdrop of a curtain patterned with flowing tendrils. He looked like a person who believed he was powerless to avoid his annihilation.

Mossad’s psychologists in Tel Aviv studied every frame. For them the stages of Bazoft’s disintegration followed the same pattern Israeli interrogators had noticed when they extracted confessions from a captured terrorist. First Bazoft would have experienced disbelief, an instinctive denial that what was happening was actually happening to him. Then would have come an overwhelmingly sudden and shattering realization: It was happening to him. At that stage, the helpless reporter may have experienced two other reactions: paralyzing fright and a compulsion to talk. This would have been the time he made his confession on the video that he was a Mossad agent.

His monotonous tone suggested he had experienced bouts of exogenous depression while in captivity, a result of being removed from familiar surroundings and having his normal lifestyle totally disrupted. He would have felt continuously tired, and what sleep he was permitted would have left him unrefreshed. That would be when self-accusation had been at its most destructive, and his sense of hopelessness maximized. Self-accusation would have gripped him. Like the prisoner in Kafka’s The Trial, he would have felt “stupid” over the way he had behaved and put others at risk.

On the video, Bazoft’s eyes showed signs he had been drugged. Mossad’s pharmacologists found it impossible to decide what drugs had been used.

Nahum Admoni knew that such an abject confession as the video contained was the prelude to Bazoft’s execution. The Mossad chief ordered his psychological warfare specialists to launch a campaign to deflect embarrassing questions about the service’s involvement with Bazoft.

Members of Parliament in Britain soon publicly criticized The Observer for sending Bazoft to Iraq. At the same time, trusted reporters were fed stories that Saddam Hussein was viewing videos of every stage of Bazoft’s interrogation. It may well have been true. More certain, it was an excuse to remind the world that torture and murder were instruments of state policy in Iraq. Bazoft was hanged in Baghdad in March 1990. His last reported words on the gallows were: “I am not an Israeli spy.”