“All in all, they met up on four occasions in Israel, she couldn’t make it the one year, and he went to meet her overseas once, too, in Freiburg, Germany. He flew to Frankfurt and took a train from there to his sweetheart. She was a translator, so she had told him, and she sometimes accompanied businessmen from Moscow, her beloved hometown where she lived with her sick husband and their daughter, who studied at a high school for the sciences.
“Their letters were their only compensation for the distance between them and the time spent apart. Oh, my, the letters she wrote to him. No, she didn’t want them to speak on the phone, she didn’t like the phone in general, certainly not for very long conversations and definitely not for personal ones. It was also very expensive, he said to me as someone for whom frugality is a way of life. She would pour her heart out to him in her letters, she would tell him all her thoughts, so she had said, and so she did, he recounted, somewhat bashfully. He sent his letters to a post-office box in Moscow and she wrote to his address in Bat Yam.”
“You said that a person named Katrina Geifman never entered Israel. That’s classic KGB,” Michael said. “This woman was obviously using various identities and several passports. But why Igor? What did the KGB want from him?”
“That’s just it, apparently nothing. You can take my word for it, Aharon, based on all my experience, all my intuition, Igor Abramovich wasn’t a spy. And I can tell you with same degree of certainty that Katrina Geifman, if that was her name, was indeed a KGB field operative. I don’t know what she was doing in Israel, and I have no knowledge of her assignment or what she wanted from Igor Abramovich. Who knows, maybe she did really fall in love with him. But it was something we never managed to resolve.”
“Didn’t you bring her in the next time she came to Israel?”
“She never came back, at least not under any of the names we knew. And she definitely never visited Igor again. They remained in touch via the letters for a few more months, and then she wrote to tell him that things had become complicated and that her husband had found out, and that she couldn’t any longer. And that’s it.”
“And Igor Abramovich?”
“Igor Abramovich is dead. He died on August 7, 1998. I was still working for the Shin Bet, and I remember the date as if it were yesterday. Stomach cancer, he died at Tel Hashomer Hospital. He’s buried in the Holon cemetery.”
22
TEL AVIV, JANUARY 2013
“Got it,” Adi said, “14 Halevona Street, Kiryat Ono.”
It took Adi less than four hours to locate Gal Ya’ari, the late Igor Abramovich’s only daughter. A bit of Googling, the websites of the Interior Ministry and Chief Rabbinate, and a little work on Facebook.
“Show me how you do it one more time,” Michael asked, and Adi guided him through the process step-by-step, until the Facebook search stage, at which he nodded without really getting it, and Adi, who sensed as much, decided not to make things more complicated for him. “And that’s it,” she concluded, and Michael breathed a sigh of relief.
“How’s your database coming along?” he asked.
“I’m working on it. It would have been a lot easier, of course, to get all the data from the Defense Ministry’s Security Authority…”
“That’s just it, we can’t ask for help from anyone at all. Cobra, as far as we’re concerned, could be anywhere. He could be the director of the Security Authority himself.”
The SA, a department of the Defense Ministry, was responsible for security at the ministry as well as the country’s defense industry facilities. Among other things, it maintained a list of names of anyone and everyone who has been privy to state secrets.
Without access to this database, Michael had suggested that they compile one of their own, to include the names of individuals who, in keeping with specific criteria, could be Cobra. His working assumption was that Cobra was privy to secrets to which only someone with the highest security clearance had access. And if the Russians did indeed have such an agent, then the State of Israel had a big problem and a sophisticated traitor in its midst. Michael knew there were several shortcomings to this working assumption: First, someone can be a very high-value agent even if he is privy to only so called lower-level secrets, such as intelligence community secrets or the plans of the IDF’s Northern or Southern commands. Second, in light of the Israeli disorder with which he was so familiar, he believed that a relatively large number of people were party to vital secrets even if they hadn’t received the required clearance. That’s just how things worked. An aide to an aide joins the staff of a senior minister, and somehow no one remembers that the eighth copy of the most top-secret report is forwarded to the said minister’s bureau, for his eyes only, of course. But the minister has no intention of opening the double envelopes himself or personally completing the forms to confirm receipt of the material, so the aide to the aide does it in his stead. And on occasions when a multiparticipant discussion is under way somewhere, and they get to the truly classified issue, very rarely does the individual responsible request that those without the necessary clearance leave the room. And even if some of the participants do leave, others remain, and no one really knows who has the required clearance and who hasn’t. It’s certainly possible, therefore, that although Cobra’s name perhaps did not appear on the official list of individuals with the highest security clearance, he still constituted a major threat. But they had no choice, they had to start somewhere.
Michael asked Adi to compile a table of names and particulars of all officeholders in the political establishment and security apparatus who could be considered high-value agents. The table would be put together gradually, and would include, insofar as was possible, names, countries of origin, dates of birth, residential addresses, and the like. It was painstaking work, with piece after piece of information collected in the hope that something they uncovered during the course of their investigation could be cross-referenced with the data in the table. Breakthroughs are sometimes made like this, too, with the help of shots in the dark, no less so than through systematic and orderly office work.
“I want Ya’ara to go see Abramovich’s daughter,” Michael said. “Amir, tell her please to come here, I’ll brief her before she goes.”
23
KIRYAT ONO, JANUARY 2013
Ya’ara and Gal Ya’ari were sitting in the bright kitchen of Gal’s apartment, steaming cups of coffee warming their hands. Her parents named her Galina at birth, and she changed her name officially when she enlisted in the army. Ya’ara recognized the remains of an accent only in the manner in which she pronounced the guttural letters.