The Fist of God

“There is no such thing as a friend of Israel, except maybe a diaspora Jew,” he told them. “The world is divided into two: our enemies and neutrals. Our enemies we know how to deal with. As for neutrals, take everything, give nothing. Smile at them, slap them on the back, drink with them, flatter them, thank them for their tipoffs, and tell them nothing.”

“Well, Kobi, let’s hope they never find out,” said Gershon.

“How can they? There’s only eight of us who know. And we’re all in the Office.”

It must have been the beer. He was overlooking someone.

In the spring of 1988 a British businessman called Stuart Harris was attending an industrial fair in Baghdad. He was sales director of a company in Nottingham that made and sold road-grading equipment.

The fair was under the auspices of the Iraqi Ministry of Transport.

Like almost all Westerners, he had been staying at the Rashid Hotel on Yafa Street, which had been built mainly for foreigners and was always under surveillance.

On the third day of the exhibition, Harris had returned to his room to find a plain envelope pushed under his door. It had no name on it, just his room number, and the number was correct.

Inside was a single sheet of paper and another completely plain envelope of the airmail type. The slip of paper said in English and in block capitals: “On your return to London pass this envelope unopened to Norman at the Israeli embassy.”

That was all. Stuart Harris had been panic-stricken, terrified. He knew the reputation of Iraq, of its dreaded Secret Police. Whatever was in the plain envelope could get him arrested, tortured, even killed.

To his credit, he kept cool, sat down, and tried to work things out.

Why him? for example. There were scores of British businessmen in Baghdad. Why pick Stuart Harris? They could not know he was Jewish, that his father had arrived in England in 1935 from Germany as Samuel Horowitz, could they?

Though he would never find out, there had been a conversation two days earlier in the fairground canteen between two functionaries of the Iraqi Transportation Ministry. One had told the other of his visit to the Nottingham works the previous autumn; how Harris had been his host on the first and second days, then disappeared for a day, then come back. He—the Iraqi—had asked if Harris was ill. It was a colleague who had laughed and told him Harris had been off for Yom Kippur.

The two Iraqi civil servants thought nothing more of it, but someone at the next booth did. He reported the conversation to his superior. The senior man appeared to take no notice but later became quite thoughtful and ran a check on Mr. Stuart Harris of Nottingham, establishing his room number at the Rashid.

Harris sat and wondered what on earth to do. Even if, he reasoned, the anonymous sender of the letter had discovered he was Jewish, there was one thing they could not have known. No way. By an extraordinary coincidence, Stuart Harris was a sayan.

The Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, founded in 1951 on the order of Ben-Gurion himself, is known outside its own walls as the Mossad, Hebrew for “Institute.” Inside its walls it is never, ever called that, but always “the Office.” Among the leading intelligence agencies of the world, it is by far the smallest. In terms of on-the-payroll staff, it is tiny. The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, has about 25,000 employees on its staff, and that excludes all the outstations. At its peak the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible like the CIA and Mossad for foreign intelligence-gathering, had 15,000 case officers around the world, some three thousand based at the Yazenevo headquarters.

The Mossad has only between 1,200 and 1,500 employees at any time and fewer than forty case officers, called katsas.

That it can operate on such a slim budget and tiny staff and secure the “product” that it does depends on two factors. One is its ability to tap into the Israeli population at will—a population still amazingly cosmopolitan and containing a bewildering variety of talents, languages, and geographical origins.

The other factor is an international network of helpers or assistants, in Hebrew sayanim. These are diaspora Jews (they must be wholly Jewish on both sides) who, although probably loyal to the country in which they reside, will also sympathize with the State of Israel.

There are two thousand sayanim in London alone, five thousand in the rest of Britain, and ten times that number in the United States. They are never brought into operations, just asked for favors. And they must be convinced that the help they are asked to give is not for an operation against their country of birth or adoption. Conflicting loyalties are not allowed. But they enable operational costs to be cut by a factor of up to ten.

For example: A Mossad team arrives in London to mount an operation against a Palestinian undercover squad. They need a car. A used car sayan is asked to leave a legitimate secondhand car at a certain place with the keys under the mat. It is returned later, after the operation.

The sayan never knows what it was used for; his books say it was out to a possible customer on approval.

The same team needs a “front.” A property-owning sayan lends an empty shop, and a confectionery sayan stocks it with sweets and chocolates. They need a mail drop; a real estate sayan lends the keys to a vacant office on his roster.

Stuart Harris had been on vacation at the Israeli resort of Eilat when, at the bar of the Red Rock, he fell into conversation with a pleasant young Israeli who spoke excellent English. At a later conversation, the Israeli brought a friend, an older man, who quietly elicited from Harris where his feelings toward Israel lay. By the end of the vacation, Harris had agreed that, if there was ever anything he could do ...

At the end of the vacation Harris went home as advised and got on with his life. For two years he waited for the call, but no call ever came. However, a friendly visitor kept periodically in touch—one of the more tiresome jobs of katsas on foreign assignment is to keep tabs on the sayanim on their list.

So Stuart Harris sat in a wave of rising panic in the hotel room in Baghdad and wondered what to do. The letter could well be a provocation—he would be intercepted at the airport trying to smuggle it out. Slip it into someone else’s bag? He did not feel he could do that.

And how would he recover it in London?

Finally, he calmed down, worked out a plan, and did it exactly right.

He burned the outer envelope and the note in an ashtray, crushed the embers, and flushed them down the toilet. Then he hid the plain envelope under the spare blanket on the shelf above the wardrobe, having first wiped it clean.

If his room were raided, he would simply swear he had never needed the blanket, never climbed to the top shelf, and the letter must have been left by a previous occupant.

In a stationery shop he bought a stout manila envelope, an adhesive label, and sealing tape; from a post office, enough stamps to send a magazine from Baghdad to London. He abstracted a promotional magazine extolling the virtues of Iraq from the trade fair and even had the empty envelope stamped with the exhibition logo.

On the last day, just before leaving for the airport with his two colleagues, he retired to his room. He slipped the letter into the magazine and sealed them in the envelope. He addressed it to an uncle in Long Eaton and stuck on the label and the stamps. In the lobby, he knew, was a mailbox, and the next pickup was in four hours. Even if the envelope were steamed open by goons, he reasoned, he would be over the Alps in a British airliner.

It is said that luck favors the brave or the foolish or both. The lobby was under surveillance by men from the AMAM, watching to see if any departing foreigner was approached by an Iraqi trying to slip him something. Harris carried his envelope under his jacket and beneath his left armpit. A man behind a newspaper in the corner was watching, but a trolley of baggage rolled between them as Harris dropped the envelope into the mailbox. When the watcher saw him again, Harris was at the desk handing in his key.

The brochure arrived at his uncle’s house a week later. Harris had known his uncle was away on vacation, and as he had a key in case of fire or burglary, he used it to slip in and retrieve his package. Then he took it down to the Israeli embassy in London and asked to see his contact. He was shown into a room and told to wait.

A middle-aged man entered and asked his name and why he wanted to see “Norman.” Harris explained, took the airmail envelope from his pocket, and laid it on the table. The Israeli diplomat went pale, asked him to wait again, and left.