days. I opened an old manila folder and read through it.
Bruno Popescu was born in Bucharest, Romania, on July 15, 1927. He first entered the United States on a tourist visa in 1957. He then sought political asylum and permanent residence, alleging that his life would be in peril if he ever returned to Romania. According to some documents in the file, Popescu claimed that he was suspected by the Romanian secret police as being “a provocateur in service of the decadent West.” There was no indication in his asylum application, or in any of the other documents, that he in fact was politically active in Romania. The file contained no evidence corroborating his claim of fear of persecution. Asylum was granted.
Was Popescu DeLouise? I read the INS file again and compared it with the documents Stone had given me. There were several similarities: same date and place of birth, identical social security number and entry date to the United States. It was possible therefore that Popescu had changed his name to DeLouise after he had been naturalized. I made a note to revisit that issue.
The whole thing was unusual, though; DeLouise or not, how had Popescu obtained a tourist visa to enter the United States before he filed for asylum? The year 1957 was a time of great tension between the West and the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc countries. The Cold War was at its peak. In tandem with France and the United Kingdom, Israel had just invaded Soviet-sponsored Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and faced down Soviet and U.S. threats demanding its withdrawal. Polish students and workers were up in arms. Hungary had simmered politically until the rebellion finally erupted – the Soviets had sent in tanks in 1956 to quell it.
As a consequence the United States was substantially limiting entry of visitors from the Eastern Bloc countries, fearing that spies and saboteurs would arrive disguised as tourists. In that political climate, then, there must have been a good reason for an American Consulate to grant Popescu a U.S. tourist visa. But his asylum application wasn't convincing or supported by any evidence. So how had Popescu managed it?
I turned the yellowed pages and found a summary document, handwritten by the INS examiner of Popescu's asylum application. Among the routine bio data, I almost missed some information at the bottom of a folded page: Passport: Romanian, issued in Bucharest, Romania, on February 21, 1947, valid for five years. U.S. visitor's visa issued by the American Consulate in Tel Aviv on November 23, 1957. Date of arrival to Idlewild Airport, New York, December 14, 1957.
“I'll be damned,” I whistled in surprise. If this was the DeLouise file, what did he have to do with Israel? Nothing in the other documents showed any reference to his ethnic origin or how he might have ended up in Israel. This was really strange, I thought. If this person's Romanian passport had been issued for five years in 1947, it had expired in 1952. There was no indication that the passport had been renewed. Why did the American consul in Tel Aviv stamp a visa in 1957 when the passport had expired in 1952? That couldn't have occurred. Something else must have happened, something that was not reflected in this slender file. The passport could not just have been renewed. A whole slew of other possibilities quickly passed through my mind. Photocopy machines were rare in 1957, however, and there was no copy of the passport in the file. My seeds of suspicions would have to wait for further information in order to germinate and bear fruits of success. The INS file showed that DeLouise was issued asylee status pending the review of his political asylum application. The asylum application was approved on March 8,1958, and subsequently a green card was issued, giving him permanent-resident status. Five years later, on July 4, 1963, Popescu was naturalized and became a U.S. citizen. There were no further records in the file.
I smelled a rat, but I didn't know where it was buried. Not yet.
I put the file aside, leaned back, and closed my eyes, shutting out the intense light in my office. If Popescu and DeLouise were the same person, he had been in Israel of all places! At the beginning of my career at the Justice Department I'd worked mostly on Israeli legal matters, but the scope of my work had gradually broadened to include international asset-recovery cases, some with an Israeli flavor. Eventually the asset-recovery cases I'd received had no known Israeli connection. This case was the first I'd seen to connect what seemed to be a non- Israeli matter with Israel, although the connection was hair thin.
I called my friend Benny's home number in Israel.
“Shalom,” said a man's voice.
“Hi, Benny,” I said, and went on without waiting for a response. “It's Dan.”
“Hold on,” said the man on the other end, “It's not Benny, I'll get him for you.” I heard him shouting, “Dad, it's for you.”
“Dad”? A grown man was calling Ben “Dad”? When I last saw Lior, Ben's son, he was ten years old. But that, I realized, had been ten years ago.
“Erev tov, good evening,” said the voice on the other end.
“Hi, Benny,” I answered. “It's Dan Gordon. How are you?”
“Still pulling,” he said.
“And your family?”
“Being schlepped.”
“And how's Batya?” I'd always liked his wife.
“Well, on one of these days I'm going to catch pneumonia because of her.”
“Why?”
“Because each time she sings in the shower, I have to go out to the balcony so that the neighbors won't think I'm beating her up,” he said, and I realized that he hadn't changed.
“I need help.”
“I'm here,” he said.
“Well,” I said, sounding a bit apologetic, “this time it's ancient history. Could you please see what you have on Bruno Popescu, born in Romania, a July 15 birth date? He could be a person I'm looking for, a man named Raymond DeLouise. I suspect he was in Israel in November 1957.”
“What did he do?” Benny asked curiously. “Steal something?”
“Yeah,” I said, “ninety million dollars.”
“Is that all? Fax me what you have and I'll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, Benny,” I said, “and if this works out, I'll owe you lunch.”
Benny mumbled his thanks. He knew he would not be making a sacrifice. As an observant Jew, he ate only kosher food, and there are few restaurants in Tel Aviv that are both kosher and good.
“Give me a little time,” said Benny. “I'll call you right away if I find something.”
Benjamin Friedman had been the odd man out in the Mossad's cadet course. The other eleven of us had been secular Israelis, like a substantial majority of the country's population. Benny was the son of Holocaust survivors who had owned a grocery store in central Tel Aviv. I used to stop by their store with Benny during our training years. His mother worked behind a tall display refrigerator that doubled as a counter. She wore the typical clothes of an Orthodox woman: head covering and long sleeves even in the height of summer.
I noticed that Benny was embarrassed each time we stopped by his family's store. His mother would approach him, asking, “Have you eaten yet? Come have a piece of cake, you look too pale.” It hadn't mattered that Ben was a grown man of robust appearance. To his mother, he was still a child in need of her care.
The store was cramped and smelled of the matjes herring and pickles in brine kept in open wooden casks. The smell always made me hungry. But I'd always restrained my urge to pluck a pickle while her own son was sidestepping her attempts to feed him. Benny never made an issue of his self-imposed dietary restrictions and unwillingness to work on Saturdays and other Jewish holidays. He had come to the cadet course from AMAN, the military intelligence division, where the words were not an oxymoron. AMAN was by far the largest intelligence agency in Israel. It was responsible for gathering all military intelligence concerning the surrounding Arab states and for submitting the periodic intelligence overview to the prime minister. All Benny had told us was that he'd served as a captain in what is now known as 8200, AMAN 's secret communication and computer unit. Basically it did what the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) did: intercept radio, telephone, fax, computer, and other communications; decipher their content; and draw intelligence conclusions.
I could still hear Meir Amit, then-head of the Mossad, lecturing us on the opening day of our course. “An intelligence service is expected to gather information concerning the enemy's intentions and capabilities – period,” Amit said. “Governments that extend the scope of these duties are likely to lose control, because secret organizations have dynamics of their own.”
Years later I grew to appreciate how right he was. Amit had been in the middle of his term as head of the Mossad, but his earlier bitter struggle with Isser Harel, his predecessor who mixed internal politics with his official
