A lot of new material’s come in, Harel grumbled and snuffed his nose. Alright, let’s get started.
And so began Tamir’s great plunge. He plunged into the brightly-lit bunker, deeper and deeper, until he felt he might never resurface. Antennas probed the skies and picked utterances voiced into the receiver of every possible communications device in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon like ripe fruit. Tamir likened them in his mind to giant mouths, perennially hungry, extending long tongues into the heavens, hunting bits of speech like flies, as they race their way from some communications device in a pickup-truck near Nabatieh to another device in the Chouf Mountains, gobbling them up ravenously and absorbing them into their bustling bellies, down their intricate web of digestion pipes and tubes, finally discharging them in producers’ stations where they are processed and compressed, tumbling from one desk to another, tossed into the digestive system of headquarters to be compacted into shapeless material, their cellulose excreted into carboard toilets and eventually shipped to the shredder, with whatever juices left being recycled into the bloodstream of the intelligence system for research evaluation and annual reviews.
But occasionally, something landed on Tamir’s desk that seemed interesting or relevant, in which case it underwent a different metabolic process: regurgitation. The raw materials were excavated from the stations, the transcribers restored them in their entirety, and the translators toiled over them until they were revived and sent up as an offering to the ever-curious, ever-hungry system, perpetually craving information— but not before he himself labored over them, edited them and annotated them to explain who is speaking to whom, deciphering encrypted place names and code words. He learned this craft from Harel, and by reading manuals drafted in headquarters about the different organizations, as well as by going over hundreds and thousands of previously-processed communications. But mainly, he learned through on-the-job training, by processing new communications sent in by producers.
That was how Tamir spent his time, managing the ‘daily’— the endless stream of conversations and radio checks— first under the supervision of Harel, and then by himself. In the off time, when he wasn’t working on the daily, he immersed himself with instruction material. He learned a whole new field he knew almost nothing about before, one that was hardly ever mentioned in his training course: the Palestinian and Shi‘ite organizations in Lebanon, along with a few more bodies like the Lebanese Army, Druze military units in Lebanon, Sunni parties, Christian militias, and more. To understand how they all communicated, he had to have a command of those bodies, as Harel would say, down to the level of the cook’s driver.
Tamir took his job seriously and devoted himself to studying the different organizations as in depth as he could. He even managed to develop a keen interest in some rather tiresome matters, such as their communications routine. It was completely different to anything he learned about the Syrian army: Palestinian radio procedures were disorderly, and the communications networks of organizations like the Shi‘ite Amal Movement or Hezbollah were nothing short of chaotic. All of that necessitated a deep familiarity with individual actors— that is, the people behind the radio— their habits, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies. Tamir became familiarized with the radio operator of the Democratic Front at the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp who was always late for his shifts; the Amal spotter in the Merkava sector nicknamed Hamudi who sung poignant love songs over the radio; the representative of Force 17 of the PLO in Sidon with his easily-recognizable hoarse voice; and the Hezbollah gunner who roamed around Nabatieh in his pickup-truck, reciting the Qur’an alongside juicy swear words in Lebanese dialect.
There was something enticing about the intimacy of getting to know individual people’s routine and conduct without their knowledge. Tamir also had long dialogues placed on his desk, obtained from an array of communications media, further deepening his sense of voyeurism. He was surprised to discover that he strangely enjoyed it; it was something akin to the excitement he had derived from porno magazines in his youth, especially ones that depicted credible scenes, that is, resembling how sex between people actually looked. Perusing them filled Tamir with a mixture of awkwardness and strange excitement. Sometimes, he actually preferred the outlandish, over-the-top depictions of sex which resembled actors performing for a crowd, where everyone in the room knows it’s just an act, and that knowledge regulates the experience of both the performers and the audience— toying with a sense of truth, but only within the limits of consensual simulation. Tamir felt comfortable in that conceptual framework. In contrast, when the sexual scene depicted emulated the intimacy of the act people engage in when they believe they are shielded from the prurient curiosity of outsiders, he would writhe awkwardly in his bed, embarrassed and excited, reserved and ravenous. So was the case now, in front of transcripts of conversations between low-level functionaries and operatives— their bickering, quarrels, and inner-organizational power struggles, their politics, smoking habits, and secret lovers. He read it all, at first embarrassed and excited, reserved and ravenous, but over time increasingly less embarrassed, less excited, less reserved, and less ravenous. Like pornography, this was starting to become routine.
Life outside the bunker rapidly became an insignificant afterthought. On a regular day, Tamir would go down to the bunker around 9 a.m., leave it once
