The first few months he was back in Israel, Levi sometimes acted a little crazy. He went one day to a kiosk on Dizengoff Street that sold hand-lettered T-shirts. Levi asked the shirt man to make one that said in Hebrew: “The Arabs can go to Hell!” He wore it back to the office where a colleague told him gently to take it off.
Israel in 1972 was a country that, like Levi, was trying to learn how to relax. The great battles to establish the state had been fought and won. The problems now were of less heroic dimensions, like those of most other countries. The effort to fill the land with people had brought a huge migration of poor Sephardic Jews from Morocco. As a result, there were now rich and poor Jews in the land of Israel. The rich ones were white and from Europe and the poor ones were black and from North Africa. And there were the problems that result from being powerfuclass="underline" The 1967 war had annexed vast amounts of land, far larger than the nation itself, which had to be policed and administered. It was a new sensation for Israelis, to act as an occupying army and see the looks of fear and hatred on the faces of their defeated enemies. Why do they hate us so? the Israelis wondered. We are only fighting for our right to exist.
A new word came into general use during the early 1970s to explain what the Israelis were fighting against. It wasn’t the Egyptians or the Syrians, who had already been trounced. It certainly wasn’t the Palestinians, whose name most Israelis preferred not to pronounce. It was the “terrorists.” They were the enemy of Israel, and of the whole world.
Israel in 1972 revelled in its ordinariness, but also feared it. The country was pulled in two directions at once: inward, toward the particular and unique identity of the Jewish people, which Judaism has celebrated throughout history; and outward, toward universal values and emotions.
Levi wondered whether that was the paradox of modern Israeclass="underline" If the Jews were now like everyone else, with a state and army of their own, how then were they still special and different from everyone else? Had they been chosen by God to be, after 5,000 years of suffering, a people with the ordinary problems of combating terrorism, maintaining defensible borders, and administering occupied lands?
Levi threw himself into his new job. He had arrived home just as the trauma of Black September was beginning, so there was plenty of work in his department. He spent the day collating information, analyzing it, struggling to see the pattern in the lengthening string of terrorist operations in Europe. He combed the files looking for the names, dates, and places that would help solve the riddle of Black September.
It was slow going. Some days he spent so much time looking at the pictures of Palestinian suspects, reading the transcripts of intercepted Arabic communications, and analyzing the Lebanese press that he wondered whether he had really left Beirut after all.
Levi worked in a section with ten other officers. He wasn’t the most senior man but, thanks to his recent tour in Beirut, he was the most experienced analyst of the fedayeen organizations, and the other officers deferred to him. Levi gradually realized, too, that the Old Guard of Mossad regarded him as one of their own. Levi wasn’t sure why-perhaps it was his European background-but he was pleased. Things like that mattered a great deal in the Mossad. There was no private club in the world that had a more elaborate status hierarchy than the Israeli security service.
The members of the Old Guard had nearly all been born outside of Israel. Many of them had been intelligence officers for the Haganah or Lehi or Irgun at the time of the war of independence in 1948. They had arrived in Palestine from every corner of the globe. Refugees all, they had fled Europe in the 1930s for China, Russia, India, America-and travelled from there to Eretz Israel. They seemed to speak every language in the world. Was there an operation in Ethiopia? There was sure to be a Mossad man who spoke fluent Amharic. Was there an operation in the Far East? There were speakers of the Mandarin and Cantonese dialects of Chinese, speakers of Japanese, Korean, Thai, all of whom had suffered through the war years and made their way to the Jewish homeland. The Old Guard had been trained in the cruelest school the world has ever known, and they didn’t let the younger men forget it.
The younger Mossad officers were a different breed. They had come into the security service not from the desperate exile world of the 1930s and 1940s, but from the Israeli Army, from the proud and self-reliant military arm of the new Jewish state. They had joined Mossad after proving themselves in the special operations units of the army and navy. They were, in their own way, just as tough as the refugee generation.
When Levi looked at his younger colleagues, he saw hard, muscular bodies and dark faces. Many of them were Oriental Jews, whose families had lived in Baghdad or Casablanca or Cairo. They might have difficulty speaking English and German. But they spoke perfect Arabic. And that, Levi suspected, was exactly what the state of Israel needed in the 1970s.
The glory days of the Mossad were over. Eichmann and the other Nazi war criminals had been caught. The Jewish networks in the Soviet Union, which had allowed Mossad to obtain Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 1956 Party Congress, had mostly been broken. There wasn’t much need, any more, to send terrified couriers through Russia and Eastern Europe gathering the tidbits of intelligence that Mossad had used to trade with the Western intelligence services. The Israelis didn’t need to beg and barter just to stay alive any more. That much had been assured.
Now the tasks were different. The problem was manipulating the environment around Israel. Rewarding friends and punishing enemies in the Middle East. The young men around Levi had earned their reputations not in Moscow or Rome but parachuting into Kurdistan to help the Shah of Iran make trouble for Iraq; or parachuting into southern Sudan to help foment a civil war. Or travelling secretly to Morocco to help teach the Moroccan Army how to defeat the Polisario guerrillas. Those were the new challenges, and they involved what the new breed of Mossad liked best: Playing games with the Arabs, driving the Arabs crazy.
The security establishment prospered because everyone accepted the rules. Every able-bodied Israeli male served in the military-every journalist, politician, avant-garde intellectual-and they all accepted the basic imperatives of military discipline. The interests of national security came first: the journalist agreed to be censored; the politician agreed not to question the government about certain sensitive matters; everyone agreed to protect the security agencies-Mossad; Shin Beth, the Israeli FBI; Aman, or military intelligence; Unit 8200 of Aman, which collected signals intelligence; Unit 269 of the army general staff, which conducted secret operations; and the Scientific Research Bureau, or “Lekem.” And of all these elite units, the most elite was Mossad-the Institute. If the security of Israel was the nation’s secular religion, the officers of the Mossad were its high priests.
Levi submerged himself in the world of Black September. He became the daily watch officer for that account, the person who sifted through each day’s harvest of agents’ reports and communications intercepts for information that might help the Israelis to prevent the next attack. Levi found that easy. He was a well-organized man. He liked to make lists, read through old files, pull bits of information from his memory and match them with current intelligence.
Levi worried that he was always a few steps behind the people he was tracking. His gut told him that Black September was a ruse, that its operations were really the work of Fatah. But that wasn’t enough. He needed proof: the names of the people who planned the operations, who provided the weapons, who serviced the drops, who paid the gunmen. He needed to peel away the cover and see the machine at work, to see how each piece fit together in the covert organization.