of the trip and the notation: “Kuwait.” The entry followed one marked: “Amman.” The information came from a contact at the airport who provided passenger lists and, when necessary, photographs of passengers.
It was a puzzle, Levi thought to himself. Why was Rogers taking these trips? What was he doing? Who was he meeting?
Levi fretted about such puzzles, and about most things. He was a short, wiry man, with dark features and a look of perpetual uneasiness. His family was from Marseilles, he told friends, with a few distant relatives from Corsica. He was a nervous man with a bad stomach, who chewed antacid pills through the day in the vain hope that they would relieve the tension that was eating away at his gut.
Yakov Levi’s problem was that he didn’t exist. Not in Beirut, at least. There was no one in the city by that name. There was instead a Frenchman, an import-export trader named Jacques Beaulieu, and Levi lived inside his skin. The worldly Monsieur Beaulieu worked in an office on the Rue de Phenice in West Beirut, several blocks from the St. Georges Hotel. The brass plaque on the door said “Franco-Lebanese Trading Co.” It was a busy little import-export firm, quite profitable, it was said, staffed by a handful of bright young men and women who were well-mannered, spoke French, English, and Arabic, and had a wide circle of acquaintances in Lebanon. Members of the firm travelled extensively in the Arab world and had a reputation for paying generous commissions on business deals.
Levi’s import-export firm was, in reality, the Mossad station in Beirut. His family had indeed lived in Marseilles once, but no longer. The survivors now lived in Israel. All except for Yakov Levi, who called himself Beaulieu. He was a Jew, living secretly in the midst of Arabs who wanted to kill him, and he was perpetually frightened. A fear so deep and constant that it had entered his body and flowed in his veins. He had been in Beirut for three years, burning out his circuits day by day. A few months ago they had promised him a fancy desk job back home at the end of the year, but he didn’t believe them. It was a lie, told to keep him living a few more months in Hell.
The Mossad station in Beirut, the very fact of its existence, was one of the few true secrets in a town where gossip and spying were a way of life. The station had been in operation, in various locations, since 1951. The Americans hadn’t a clue where it was, nor had the Deuxieme Bureau, nor had anyone else. The Israelis who worked for Franco-Lebanese Trading didn’t tell a soul their true identities or what they were really doing.
They were Israel’s eyes and ears in the Arab world. They serviced dead drops, acted as couriers, spotted potential agents, scouted the terrain. They might recommend the recruitment of a particular Lebanese or Palestinian, but they never did the actual recruiting or handling. That was too dangerous. One false move would blow the station’s cover. They left such tasks to Mossad officers in Europe, who could meet agents easily in Paris or Rome, receive their information, pay them their stipends. In Lebanon, the handful of Mossad officers were under a cover so deep that they didn’t like to talk, even to each other, about their real work.
Watching the Americans was part of Levi’s job. Identifying the intelligence agents among them, tracking them, trying to understand what they were doing in secret in the Middle East behind the veil of America’s public policy. Levi was perfect for the job. He believed almost nothing that anyone said, least of all the Americans.
Levi had been watching Tom Rogers for more than six months. He was convinced that he was a CIA case officer, but that part was easy. All you had to do was study the diplomatic list and look for the odd man out. The person whose resume didn’t quite make sense: who had been a consular officer one place and a commercial attache somewhere else and was now a political officer. Or you could look for social quirks: a political officer who didn’t attend the Christmas party given by the head of the political section at the embassy. Or if you were still stumped, you could look at the State Department’s foreign service list, published in Washington. With chilling precision it listed the CIA officers under diplomatic cover as “reserve” officers of the foreign service-“FSRs,” they were called-rather than as full-fledged FSOs.
Some cover! thought Levi. The Americans could afford to be so sloppy. They were rich and powerful. And they were not Jews.
Walking to his office on the Rue de Phenice, Levi could see the grand facade of the American Embassy on the Corniche. He would look to the fifth floor, where the CIA officers worked, and try to imagine what they were doing and thinking. It was easy with some of them. The case officers who handled Lebanese politicians were so clumsy they left footprints all over town. Others, like the new man Rogers, were more careful. They looked, from a distance, as if they were almost clever enough to be Mossad officers. That worried Levi, and it made his stomach hurt.
Watching the Palestinians was the other part of Levi’s job. In some ways that was easier than watching the Americans. It was almost too easy, with too many tidbits of information in the air and too many tracks to follow. The Palestinians were braggarts. Rather than trying to conceal their military and intelligence operations, they boasted about them. And they fought over who would control them. Levi made it a practice to check out gunfights in Fakhani, because they often involved rival Fatah officers dueling for control of units, or operations, or money.
Levi despised the Palestinians. That hatred was part of what kept him going. The Palestinians were so thoroughly corrupt. And they were spoiled by the other Arabs, who were terrified of them. To become rich, all a PLO official needed to do was gather up a band of scruffy refugees in a place like Qatar or Abu Dhabi, let the local Emir know that trouble was brewing, and wait for the payoff to arrive. It was so easy to buy PLO officials that Levi wondered whether the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict might lie, not in another war, but in a takeover bid.
He watched the Palestinians with a horrid fascination, hating what he saw, his hatred in turn feeding his curiosity about the nature of his enemies. He was fascinated by their sexual habits. The Old Man, for example, had never been known to sleep with a woman. Who, then, did he sleep with? Levi wanted to believe that he slept with little boys. That would be exactly, perfectly right. Levi wanted evidence to support his theory, but where could he look? He couldn’t very well ask young boys in Fakhani whether they had ever been molested by a man in guerrilla fatigues.
And then there were the playboys, the young men in Fatah’s so-called intelligence service. There was Abu Namli, who bought his whisky by the case and frequented the whorehouses of Zeituny with a fat roll of dollar bills, buying two or three girls at a time. There was Abu Nasir, cool and austere, who liked to use women for other tasks, such as planting bombs.
And there was Abu Nasir’s assistant, a flamboyant young man named Jamal Ramlawi. Levi was convinced that Ramlawi was the mystery Palestinian in the recent scandal involving the French diplomat’s wife. There was no proof, but there were many rumors. Agents had even seen a dark-haired European woman near Ramlawi’s office in Fakhani. It had to be Ramlawi. He was notorious in Beirut as a ladies’ man. He had been seen in every nightclub and bistro in town. He was almost reckless in his behavior. So reckless that Levi wondered, as he thought about it, whether the young Palestinian’s disregard for what most people liked to keep secret might conceal a deeper secret. That was a possibility. Levi made a note to open a new index card in the Palestinian file. And to start checking Ramlawi’s travels more carefully.
Levi could remember dimly the time when he hadn’t been scared. That was before he joined Mossad, when he was just a simple soldier. When all he was required to do for the state of Israel was to risk the chance of dying once, in war. As an intelligence officer, he had already died a thousand times.
Levi liked to remember how he had joined the Israeli intelligence service. It was a way of pinching himself, reminding himself that he had once had another life.
He had been serving in the army. That wasn’t unusual. All Israelis join the army. But he was very fit and very clever, so he was allowed to join the paratroops, which made his parents proud. And he was so good in the paratroops that they asked him to join the special operations unit, where he was a team leader.
Perhaps the fear began then. Levi had made a jump into southern Sudan, with a team of Israelis who were helping to foment a civil war there between the Moslems of the north and the Christians of the south. The Israelis provided guns and training for the southerners, on the theory that if the Moslem-dominated regime in Khartoum was pinned down by internal strife, it couldn’t do much to help Nasser in Egypt make war on Israel. That assignment was only frightening for the few minutes before the jump. After that it was easy. Either you died or you didn’t.
After a year in special operations, he left the military and attended university. It was enough, he had done his service. A few months later the phone rang. Go to an address in downtown Tel Aviv tomorrow. No explanation, except that it was for the army. They spent four days asking questions, assembling every detail of his life history. The family’s background in France. Old addresses and telephone numbers in Marseilles. Old passport numbers and the names and addresses of dead relatives. A former girlfriend called to ask whether he had done anything wrong, because an investigator had just spent the entire day asking questions about him.
