After being shown around the rocky quarters, not much more than elaborate caves, and consuming some dreadful retsina (the monks didn’t drink it themselves) we continued to Jericho and a typical lunch of dried figs, a bread-like pastry and melon and hot fragrant tea. Then we made our way to the Negev. Over the years Ted had befriended some of the local Bedouins and we were greeted like old friends at several encampments. We spent one night at an Israeli meteorological center/desert inn near a Nabatean ruin. There seemed to be antennae and electric sensors everywhere, and as we used to say in those days, gray men in London, Washington, Moscow, and Beijing could probably hear every sparrow-fart in the desert. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if Ted had ever really retired? Was he still, in this case, visiting his “controller,” and using me as his cover?
Several months later, when Ted sent me a post card urging me to save a spot on an upcoming list for his next novel, the design on the card was a Byzantine mosaic of “the Tree of Life” Ted and I had seen on the stone floor of a ruin in Jericho. I took it to the art director at Norton where I was then a senior editor. He agreed with me that it would make an excellent design for a book jacket. All we needed was a manuscript.
Jericho Mosaic arrived before the end of the year, a fitting culmination to Whittemore’s marvelous Quartet. In my opinion, Jericho Mosaic is the most original espionage story ever written. The novel is based on events that actually took place before the Six Day War and Whittemore demonstrates his total knowledge of the craft of intelligence and its practitioners, his passion for the Middle East, his devotion to the Holy City, and his commitment to peace and understanding among Arabs, Jews, and Christians. The novel and the novelist maintain we can overcome religious, philosophical, and political differences if we are ready to commit ourselves to true understanding for all people and all ideas.
This humanistic message is imbedded in a true story involving Eli Cohen, a Syrian Jew who sacrificed his life (he managed to turn over to Mossad the Syrian plans and maps for the defense of the Golan Heights) in order that Israel might survive. In the novel Whittemore tells the story of Halim (who is clearly based on Eli Cohen) a Syrian Jew who returns to his homeland from Buenos Aires where he has been pretending to be a Syrian businessman to forward the Arab revolution. Halim becomes an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, he is the conscience of the Arab cause, “the incorruptible one.” But Halim is an agent for the Mossad; his code name is “the Runner,” his assignment to penetrate the heart of the Syrian military establishment. At the same time the novel is a profound meditation on the nature of faith in which an Arab holy man, a Christian mystic, and a former British intelligence officer sit in a garden in Jericho exploring religion and humanity’s relation in its various facets.
There were fewer reviews of Jericho Mosaic and even fewer sales than before. Arabs and Jews were involved in a bloody confrontation on the West Bank, there were lurid photographs in the newspapers and magazines and on television every day, and even more horrific stories. The times were not propitious for novelists defending the eternal verities, no matter how well they wrote. One critic did, however, proclaim Whittemore’s Quartet “the best metaphor for the intelligence business in recent American fiction.”
Shortly after Jericho Mosaic was published Whittemore left Jerusalem, the Ethiopian compound, and the American painter. He was back in New York living during the winter with Ann, a woman he had met years before when her husband had been teaching at Yale. In the summers he would take over the sprawling, white, Victorian family home in Dorset, Vermont. The windows had green shutters, and an acre of lawn in front of the house was bounded by immense stately evergreen trees. Twenty or so rooms were distributed around the house in some arbitrary New England Victorian design, and the furniture dated back to his grandparents, if not great-grandparents. Ted’s brothers and sisters by now had their own houses and so Ted was pretty much its sole occupant. It was not winterized and could only be inhabited from May through October. But for Ted it was a haven to which he could retreat and write.
In the spring of 1987 I became a literary agent and Ted joined me as a client. American book publishing was gradually being taken over by international conglomerates with corporate offices in Germany and Great Britain. They were proving to be more enamored of commerce than literature and it seemed to me I could do more for writers by representing them to any of a dozen publishers rather than just working for one.
I regularly visited Ted in the fall in Dorset. “The foliage season,” late September, early October, is a very special time of year in New England: crisp clear days, wonderfully cool moonlit nights. We walked the woods and fields of southern Vermont by day, sat in front of the house after dinner on solid green Adirondack chairs, drink in hand and smoking. Actually I was the one drinking (usually brandy) because Ted had stopped years ago. While we talked I would smoke a cigar or two, Ted would merely smoke one evil-looking cheroot. Comfortably ensconced on the lawn near the United Church, where his great-grandfather had been a minister, within sight of the Village Green and the Dorset Inn, our talk would turn to books and writing, family and friends. To his family, Ted must have cut a romantic figure, the Yalie who had gone off to the CIA, had, so to speak, burned out, had come home via Crete, Jerusalem, and New York as a peripatetic novelist whose books received glowing reviews that resulted in less than glowing sales. But they, and “his women,” supported him and continued to believe in him.
It was during these early fall visits that I discovered that his Prentiss great-grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister who had made his way up the Hudson River by boat from New York to Troy and then over to Vermont by train and wagon in the 1860s. In the library of the white, rambling Victorian house in Dorset there were shelves of fading leather-bound volumes of popular romances written by his great-grandmother for shop girls, informing them how to improve themselves, dress, and find suitable husbands. I gathered she was the Danielle Steele of her day, and the family’s modest wealth was due to her literary efforts and not the generosity of the church’s congregation.
We talked about the new novel. It was to be called Sister Sally and Billy the Kid and it was to be Ted’s first American novel. It was about an Italian in his twenties from the Chicago of the roaring Twenties. His older brother, a gangster, had helped him buy a flower shop. But there was a shoot-out, the older brother was dead, and Billy has to flee to the West Coast where he meets a faith healer not unlike Aimee Semple McPherson. The real-life McPherson disappeared for a month in 1926, and when she returned claimed she had been kidnapped. The stone house in which Billy and his faith healer spend their month of love (from the beginning it is clear that the idyll must be limited to one month) has a walled garden behind it full of lemon trees and singing birds. Although that house is in southern California, the garden bears a close resemblance to another garden in the Ethiopian compound in Jerusalem with a synagogue on one side and a Cistercian convent on the other.
Then one day in early spring 1995, Ted called me. Could he come by the office that morning? I assumed it was to deliver the long-awaited manuscript. There had been two false starts after Jericho Mosaic. Instead Ted told me he was dying. Would I be his literary executor? A year or so earlier Ted had been diagnosed as having prostate cancer. It was too far along for an operation. His doctor had prescribed hormones and other medication and the cancer had gone into remission. But now it had spread. Less than six months later he was dead. They were terrible months for him. However, during those last weeks and days while he slipped in and out of consciousness, he was looked after by Carol, who had never really left his life.
There was a hushed memorial service in the United Church in Dorset that August. Afterwards, a reception was held on the large lawn in front of the family house. It was there that the disparate parts of Ted’s world came together, perhaps for the first time; there was his family, his two sisters and two brothers and their spouses, nieces, and nephews with their own families (but not Ted’s former wives or
the two daughters who had flown to New York to say “goodbye”); there were neighbors, Yale friends, and a couple of colleagues from the Lindsay years. Were there any “spooks” in attendance? One really can’t say, but there were eight “spooks” of a different sort from Yale, members of the 1955 Scroll and Key delegation. Ann and Carol were, of course, there.
Jerusalem and Dorset. The beautiful Holy City on the rocky cliffs overlooking the parched gray-brown desert. A city marked by thousands of years of history, turbulent struggles between great empires and three of the most enduring, vital religions given by God to mankind. And the summer-green valley in Vermont (covered by snow in the winter and by mud in the spring) where Dorset nestles between the ridges of the softly rolling Green Mountains. Once one of the cradles of the American Revolution and American democracy, and later a thriving farming and small manufacturing community, it is a place where time has stood still since the beginning of the twentieth century. One was the subject of Whittemore’s dreams and books; the other the peaceful retreat in which he dreamt and wrote the last summers of his life.
Ted had finally come home to New England. It had been a long journey: Portland, New Haven, Japan, Italy, New York, Crete, Jerusalem, New York, and now Dorset. Along the way he had many friends and companions; he was not a particularly good husband or father and disappointed many. But gradually he had found his voice, written his novels, and fallen in love with Jerusalem. I would like to think that Ted died dreaming of his Holy City. In a sense he was at one with that stonecutter turned medieval knight, turned antiquities dealer, Haj Harun. For Whittemore was the eternal knight-errant who “made it” at Yale in the 1950s, “lost it” in the CIA, and then made himself into a wonderful novelist with the voice of a mystic. The voice of a mystic who had absorbed the best of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His great-grandfather the minister and his great-grandmother the writer would have been equally proud of him. His spirit rests peacefully in Dorset, Vermont.
Tom Wallace
New York City, 2002
INTRODUCTION
IT LOOKS AND FEELS like a book, I know, but I promise you that what you hold in your hand is an axe. A paper axe, it’s true, but an axe nonetheless.
I’ll explain.
Jericho Mosaic is the capstone of Ted Whittemore’s Jerusalem Quartet, one of the most ambitious literary endeavors of the 20th Century. Like Robert Musil’s Man of Qualities and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Whittemore’s magnum opus explores the great themes of this and every other age. War and peace, friendship and death, loss and betrayal. Dreams.
An historical novel of subtle and ferocious dimensions, Jericho Mosaic is, above all else, a tale of espionage inspired by the tragic heroism of a spy named Eli Cohen.
A Syrian Jew and native Arab-speaker raised in Egypt, Cohen was taken up by the Mossad when he and his family emigrated to Israel in the 1950s. Like Whittemore’s protagonist, Yossi-Halim, Cohen was given training and sent to Argentina with a false identity, there to build a legend for himself as a prelude to his real mission: posing as a businessman while ferreting out the secrets of the Syrian Army’s general staff in Damascus.
For Halim, as for Cohen, nothing could have been more dangerous or more likely to end in a dusty square, with a tortured man at the end of a rope. And yet, knowing the dangers, Cohen left everything behind—family, country and identity—to risk his life for a dream.
Forty years later, Syria and Israel are still arguing over his bones.
For Whittemore, the spy was the quintessential figure of his time. And why not? Whittemore was born into an era of assassination and conspiracy, conflict and coup, world wars and Cold War. Spies like Richard Sorge, whose espionage operations provided the framework for Whittemore’s first novel, were men whose lives became the secret fulcrums of their age.
A graduate of Yale, that great incubator of spooks, Whittemore was himself an intelligence agent for many years. Entering the CIA in the 1950s—the very apex of the Cold War—he became a spy in the truest sense. Not an espionage bureaucrat on the 9-to-5 shift in suburban Langley, but a NOC—a field agent under Non-Official Cover working against unforgiving adversaries. It is the spook’s equivalent of a trapeze-artist working without a net. Slip, and the embassy won’t save you.
So he had an inkling, at least, of the slow-motion heart attack that must have been Eli Cohen’s daily life. It is not an existence that is easily imagined. Immured within a fiction, a man such as Cohen lives in an atmosphere of secret and unremitting anxiety. Like background radiation from the Big Bang, it is everywhere and nowhere, suffusing the very air he breathes. Surveillance is presumed, spontaneity forbidden. Exposure waits like a tick in the tall grass, biding its time for a single, careless gesture. Under such circumstances, life is reduced to a series of desperate and lonely calculations, even as the spy plays a gregarious and carefree role.
And yet … as Whittemore knew so well, there are moments—still and timeless instants in which the world is suddenly, briefly, apprehended as a God-given fact, a reality that transcends even the most frightening circumstances. One such moment occurs on the Syrian-Lebanese border, after Halim has been taken for an unexpected ride by a Syrian intel-officer who may, or may not, mean him well. Standing on the terrace of a small stone house overlooking the Bekaa valley,
Halim was struck by the … stillness and the sweeping beauty of the view. Goats’ bells tinkled from some distant crevice in the hills. A thin line of smoke rose far away in the clear sky. The terrace was blissfully remote, rich with the smell of earth and sunshine. Colonel Jundi smiled, gesturing toward the valley.
Syria. he said.
Well, Lebanon, anyway.
Whittemore gets it right. He gets all of it right. His grasp of the Middle East, its history, customs and geopolitics, is deep and unerring. As deep, almost, as his grasp of human nature, and its primacy over borders and maps, the abstractions of generals and politicians. At one point, when Halim’s game has been run, an Israeli general opines that he was “the most valuable agent Israel ever had.” To which Halim’s handler, Tajar—himself the founder of the Mossad and the “grand rabbi of espionage”—replies, “Oh yes … he was that too.”
Nor is it only the natures of great men that Whittemore reveals. Like Dickens, he understands the tragedy of great souls with small destinies. And so we’re given Halim’s closest friend, Ziad, the hack-journalist and Baath party hanger-on, of whom Tajar remarks, “I wouldn’t imagine he’ll go very far. But then most people don’t … anywhere, do they?”
The ellipses are Whittemore’s—and Tajar’s.
The simple truth is that Ted Whittemore was one of the best and least-known writers of a lowdown, dark, and dishonest age. The books that he’s given us, beginning with Quin’s Shanghai Circus, are among the great “war novels” of our time as luminous as The Red Badge of Courage, as chastening as The Naked and the Dead. That the wars are fought without “lines” or uniforms hardly matters: the wounds go just as deep, and sometimes deeper than, bullets.
Kafka understood:
I think we ought to read only the kinds of books that wound and stab us …We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Here then, reader, is an axe Ted Whittemore made.
Jim Hougan
Charlottesville, 2002
Jim Hougan, a former editor of Harper’s magazine, novelist and journalist, has written extensively about the U.S. intelligence community. His most recent novel, Kingdom Come, was published by Ballantine in the summer of 1999.
Part 1
ONE
JERUSALEM IN THE EARLY twentieth century was a vibrant little city only newly awakened from medieval obscurity by the coming of the British at the end of the First World War—a dream from antiquity suddenly stirring to life after four hundred years of s
lumber under the stupefying decadence of the Ottoman Empire. With their penchant for order and proper hygiene, the British briskly built hydraulic works and piped fresh water up to Jerusalem, but many people in the walled Old City still drank from the cisterns of the past, those underground reservoirs from other ages which never saw the light of day. For Jerusalem was a place where many eras still crowded together, and where no event from history was too remote for a morning’s gossip, since the very ruins of that event might well be providing shade for the day’s transactions of commerce and hope.
Stately Nubian doormen reigned in splendid solemnity at the entrances of hotels. Wily merchants hovered in dim shops fingering the purses on their sleek bellies, waiting with patience for fate and guides to bring them their quota of fools who would be as deaf as they were to the cries of beggars and holy men.
Preceded by a shabbily uniformed kavass clearing a way with his thumping staff, Turkish grandees in red tarbooshes swayed by to assignations in flowering courtyards, already glassy-eyed from a nargileh or two of hashish at breakfast. Fierce bedouin and European travelers haggled side by side over bunches of garlic and sacks of dates, and over ancient coins bearing pale green profiles of Alexander the Great or some heavy-nosed emperor of Rome or Byzantium.
Jericho Mosaic (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 4) Page 2