West to combat international Islamic terrorism and show solidarity with Israel. Not that there was anything wrong with that, nor did the Israelis not take it seriously. All and any help was appreciated. However, the general ignorance and insensitivity of the Europeans, British and Americans to the Israeli cause never failed to astound Raz, and, more often than not, anger him. But he was forced to suffer it, not only because Israel needed the West’s support, but also their approval, more so now than ever, and Israel had to accept the various pros and cons that came hand-in-hand with that support.
Things had changed a great deal in Raz’s twenty-one-year career in Shin Bet, and the army before that. In the early days of Middle East terrorism, it appeared to most other nations to be primarily an Israeli problem and so they were left pretty much alone to deal with it as they saw fit. But now that the West was as much a target as Israel, the big two in the fight, namely America and Britain, wanted to show Israel the correct way to deal with the situation, as if they suddenly knew what they were doing and possessed all the answers.The British should have been the easiest to deal with since they were the most experienced in terrorism and the Middle East, but that was not always the case, as far as the Israelis were concerned. Ironically, the Israelis had modelled Mossad on British military intelligence after spending several years as their bitter enemy. It was no secret that the current international intervention was due in part to the perception that Israel, with its heavy-handed tactics, was in many ways as much a part of the problem. Israel had little choice but to bow to outside pressure or at least to be seen to, since the country practically depended on an annual three and a half billion dollar handout from America, and much more than that in recent years. There was also the perceived increased threat to Israeli national security due in no small part to the stirring of the terrorist pot caused by the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq,Western threats against Iran and Syria and the ‘occupation’ of the Middle East and North African oil states by Western companies. Mossad and Shin Bet had enjoyed a great deal of assistance from British and American intelligence over the years; however, any help these days often came at a price in the form of concessions to the Palestinians and Israel’s other Arab neighbours. That ran counter to everything the average Israeli had been indoctrinated with from childhood concerning the threat from its neighbours to their very survival. This resentment of Western tampering was even stronger in Shin Bet because of its more right-wing politics. It was Raz’s nature, as well as a prerequisite of his employment, to be suspicious, but when he laid eyes on this odd pair, he became convinced that the American and British story about a Russian bomb-making instructor was bullshit.
Raz had lived his whole life on his intuition and he was no ordinary man. He was ruthless but not exceptionally so by Shin Bet standards. Planning and selecting targets for execution was a regular activity which had dulled his conscience over the years and Shin Bet was very much behind the force that maintained the right to torture suspects for the purpose of gathering information. Raz had spent years as an interrogator in Lebanon and had become adept at interpreting the four prescribed legal methods of torture in Israel, namely shaking, sleep deprivation, music and cramped positions. The interpretations of these guidelines were broad and many prisoners had died from exhaustive combinations of them, although Raz could say, with his hand on his heart, none of those were his direct responsibility. Many of his comrades regarded the Palestinian as a low form of life and therefore brutalising them was not a human-rights issue. Raz did not feel the same way but he could never share the reason for that sentiment with any of his colleagues.
Most traditional Hebrew names for people have meanings and Raz’s was tailor-made for him. Raz means secret and, living up to the reputation of the family name, everything about him had some mystery attached. His wife of twenty-one years and his two children, both now in their late teens, knew he worked for Shin Bet, but that was the extent of their knowledge. He told them nothing of what he did or where he did it, and they knew better than to ask. There was very little routine in his life, which was essential for his personal survival; he left his house at any time of the day or night and returned hours or days later. One of the many rules of Shin Bet is that an agent cannot work near where he lives, and since Raz’s patch had been Jerusalem for nearly a decade now, he had chosen to live with his family in the town of Kokhav Ya’ir, east of Tel Aviv, on the border with the West Bank. Selecting Kokhav was not just because of its convenience. Raz had always been keen for promotion, as were most Shin Bet agents, and the competition was tough. Kokhav was populated by many high-ranking army and security members and considered somewhat exclusive to those fraternities. His promotion to head of the Islamic division in Jerusalem was in no small part due to careful fraternisation with selected neighbours.
Raz was an Ashkenazi Jew from a third-generation middle-class family of European roots. It was practically unheard of to get into Israeli intelligence without hailing from a second-generation family at least. He was the only son of a schoolteacher and recruited into Shin Bet after serving three years’ mandatory service in the army. The examination of his past went back the standard two generations although, it was rumoured, to reach the higher echelons of intelligence, that examination went much deeper.
Raz had spent most of his three years as a conscript in the Gaza Strip and it was during his last couple of months that a senior member of intelligence approached him to join the Sherut Bitachon Klali, shortened to Sha-bak or, more commonly, Shin Bet. Raz’s father had wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, and Raz might well have become a teacher since although life in intelligence appealed to him, he did not believe he had the slightest chance of gaining entry because of what he had done as a young man which was far worse than any ordinary crime. It was while he was serving in Gaza and even though he had been careful to hide it from even his closest friends, he fully expected Shin Bet to find out once they investigated his past. He could have declined the offer to join and avoid the possible consequences, but he did not. Perhaps it was the gambler in him, or the fatalist, or perhaps it was something as simple as his conscience as the discovery of his secret would have freed him from many years of mixed feelings that included guilt.
The vetting of recruits into the intelligence community was historically intense for obvious reasons, the most important one being the fear of enemy infiltration. Many potential recruits never learned why they failed to gain entry. They were simply invited to leave without explanation. All through the selection period, while he carried out various aptitude tests and examinations including foreign languages such as English and Arabic, he expected at any time to be asked to pack his bags and never darken their doors again, and possibly even receive some form of retribution for his past crime. And if they never told him why, he would know. He became so convinced they would find out he remained extremely blase throughout the selection programme, right-wing and even at times aggressive towards his teachers, which, ironically, began his reputation for being self-assured, arrogant and unflappable. Add highly intelligent to the mix and his reputation spread.
It was not until he was given his first posting that it dawned on him they had not discovered his secret. His first thought was that perhaps the rumours about the effectiveness of Israeli intelligence were greatly exaggerated. It took several years on the job before he appreciated how he had slipped through the cracks due to the complex rules of intelligence compiling and how the three basic means of the process of information gathering were applied. The first was to direct precise interrogatives towards precise focuses for precise answers, usually because those answers were already known. In Raz’s case, no one in Shin Bet had considered if he had ever had an affair with a Palestinian woman and so there was no specific investigation of that nature.The second was the collation of data, which needed to be sorted, cross-referenced and placed in correct acquisition pools with the correct links. There were countless stories of Israeli soldiers fraternising with locals, but, again, in Raz’s case, since he had called himself David and was just a regular conscript, the spies inside Rafah had produced nothing that pointed a finger directly at him. Finally, piecing together information from the multitude of sources to form a picture relied on many things and one of those was luck, and Raz appeared to have had an adequate amount of that. His past, or that one small part of it, had been overlooked. The information was there somewhere that could link him to a Palestinian woman and her son, but it had not been pieced together.
By the time he received his first promotion and had taken up a new posting on the Lebanese border, one of the most dangerous and interesting offices of all the divisions that assured promotion if successful, he was confident enough to once more make contact with the girl and open up a bank account for her and their child. Despite his politics and, since being in Shin Bet, developing an unhealthy hatred for the Arab in general, his sense of honour and duty to the child he had seen only a handful of times was startling and ensured he watched over the young Abed as best he could. Raz did many vile things throughout his career in the name of national survival but, strangely, the hand he reached out to Abed and his mother remained a precious redemption of his soul and served in part to forgive him some of his sins.
Raz monitored Abed for over twenty years and not once was he disappointed in the boy who had managed to grow up so wise. Because of Abed’s strength of character, due to or despite his difficult existence, he had become far more fascinating to Raz than his Israeli children had ever been. Raz’s marriage was one of convenience, arranged by his and his wife’s families, which Raz went along with in his inimitable way - it was not important
