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Her name as a young child wasn’t Ya’ara. That’s the name she chose shortly before enlisting in the army. She had walked out of the Interior Ministry shaking with pride, her new ID document clasped in her hand. Ya’ara Anna Stein. The name her parents gave her was still there, but from now on, she said to herself, she would be Ya’ara. A Hebrew name, literally meaning honeycomb. A symbol of her new autonomy. Her independence. She felt reborn. She was on her own. Ya’ara, Ya’ara, the name filled her with joy, intoxicated her, and she reveled in its fragrance and whispered to herself, so lovely, so lovely.

27

TEL AVIV, JANUARY 2013

The team convened at two. Aharon joined them a few minutes late, concluding a call as he walked in, taking off his raincoat, sinking into the old leather armchair left vacant for him.

“Okay,” Michael said, “let’s see what we have so far.” He looked at Adi and asked her to kick things off.

Adi fidgeted with her gold necklace and blushed. “So here’s the story,” she began. “Shortly before her death, a retired Stasi archivist tells her priest in Dresden that the Stasi once had a high-ranking source in Israel. The source’s code name: Cobra. According to her, about two years prior to the collapse of East Germany, the KGB stepped in to take charge of the source, deeming the operation important enough to warrant its commandeering from the Stasi and also the assassination of the officer in charge on behalf of the East German intelligence service, probably to ensure the secret remained unexposed. The priest relayed this information to his contacts in the West German intelligence service, which by then had become the intelligence service of the united Germany. The information eventually reached the former German intelligence chief, the head of the BND, who then passed it on to the former Israeli Mossad chief, Aharon Levin, who sits here now with us dozing in an armchair.”

Aharon, whose eyes were actually closed, muttered: “True, sleeping, but not missing a single word. Go on, Adi, go on.”

“Hagar Beit-Hallahmi, the Shin Bet’s leading expert on Soviet intelligence matters in general and the KGB in particular, managed to dredge up from memory an unresolved affair, one that centers on the character of a woman, presumably a Soviet intelligence operative, who visited Israel several times under different names, and then disappeared. I need to stress that there’s no proof, no proof at all, that this affair is tied to the one we’re investigating.”

Sunk in his armchair, Aharon interjected again. “That’s true,” he said, “we have no proven connection, or even a circumstantial one, between this woman and Cobra, but let me remind you that this matter in particular, out of all the numerous unresolved incidents related to KGB activity in Israel, was the one that popped into Hagar’s mind, and specifically in the context of our affair. Hagar Beit-Hallahmi is a very serious woman. Very experienced. Her intuition is beyond me, but as far as I’m concerned this is something we have to consider seriously and try to figure out as best we can. Besides, we have no other leads. All we have is the hint of an old and faint scent that an aging bloodhound has got wind of and is now telling us to follow.”

“No offense—as my kids would say,” Amir remarked, and then went silent again, his cheeks turning red.

Adi continued: “Okay, so this woman, who appeared under several names and then disappeared, is our lead. What do we know about her? Almost nothing. She had a relationship with an Israeli man, an immigrant from the Soviet Union by the name of Igor Abramovich, who’s no longer alive. And the nature of the relationship? Hagar Beit-Hallahmi says the Shin Bet was sure that Igor wasn’t a spy. Ya’ara will elaborate shortly on what she came up with and her thoughts on him. He, Igor, knew the woman as Katrina Geifman. Her real name? Who knows? In any event, she entered Israel in 1992 using a passport with a different name. On her previous visits to Israel—Igor mentioned three others during his questioning—she came into the country under a different name or different names. We’re assuming they were different names because the Shin Bet at the time wasn’t able to find the ones they knew of in the border control records.”

“Katrina Geifman, Katrina Geifman,” Aharon said. “What do we know about her? Ya’ara?”

Ya’ara told them about making contact with the Association of Russian Artists in Bat Yam and her meeting with Galina, Gal Ya’ari today, Igor’s daughter. She had gone through, in a cursory manner at least, the boxes from Galina’s home that contained papers and sketches and small items belonging to her father, who died in 1998, almost fifteen years ago. And she had read the letters sent by Katrina to Igor and the last letter Igor sent to her, a letter he took the trouble to copy and save, several times.

“I think Katrina Geifman is her real name. It may have been a little reckless on her part to write as she did, but her letters rang true to me. They come from the heart. They’re touching. Yes, letters like that can also be fabricated. They can be prepared as part of an overall operation. But I don’t see any operation here, any reason for the KGB to want something from Igor Abramovich, and even if they were interested in him for whatever reason, why did they invest so much effort in him? I therefore think, like Hagar Beit-Hallahmi said, that Igor wasn’t a KGB spy. So what do we have here then? I think we’ve stumbled upon a love story. Real, intense, naïve, like in the movies. Katrina probably did work for the KGB. We have no knowledge of what she did for them, what her assignments were, but we know she came to Israel quite regularly over a period of several years, using different passports. As I see it, the fact that she managed to give the Shin Bet surveillance team the slip means she was a highly skilled field operative. Don’t forget, she was probably on a mission the first time they followed her. The following day, when they came across her again by chance, she may no longer have been doing something she needed to hide. She was busy instead with the private part of her life, her affair with Igor, and not a KGB operation. And that’s why she didn’t look for a surveillance team and didn’t find one either, and as far as she was concerned the Israeli Shin Bet could keep watch on whatever she was doing. If she was hiding her relationship with Igor, she was hiding it from the KGB. And that’s the reason—and this is total guesswork on my part—her relationship with Igor ended so abruptly. Igor was her secret. We don’t know if Katrina Geifman was married to someone or not, but she was certainly hitched to the KGB. If she was involved in a love affair with Igor, if she did indeed make the mistake that we sometimes make, too”—she paused for a moment and smiled—“and against all the rules she fell in love, it was clearly in violation of KGB regulations. And when they found out, one way or another, she was ordered to put an end to it. Immediately. If not something worse. And that’s why she wrote her final letter.”

“A real love affair with someone in Israel could actually be an excellent cover story for her trips to the country,” Aslan commented with obvious skepticism.

“True, but if it was all part of a plan, if it was part of an operation, she would have given Igor the name that appeared in her passport. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a cover or anything at all. Imagine this: She goes through passport control at Ben Gurion Airport as Elena Yampolsky—that’s the passport she used, after all—and they ask her, ‘What is the purpose of your visit, madam?’ And following some persistent questioning, she shyly admits to a love affair with someone, Igor Abramovich, and when they check with him, he innocently confirms it, telling them that he’s involved romantically with a Russian woman by the name of Katrina Geifman, and yes, that’s really her picture, and boom, the cover story becomes an incriminating one, or something suspicious, at least. No. It was a real love affair, and Katrina, the KGB operative, broke numerous rules in order to follow her heart. The connection between this high-class woman from Moscow and a humble artist from Bat Yam remains a mystery, but you can never tell when it comes to these kinds of things. The letters, in my opinion, indicate that it happened, and that it was real.”