And then she told him. Told him about the period of the war, and about the Red Army soldiers who had savagely raped her. But so many women were raped back then, so who was going to grieve about it? Who had the time? You survived, and that was the main thing. So many died. There wasn’t a single home that hadn’t lost someone. And of her recruitment into the Stasi she told him with unconcealed pride, certainly unapologetically, and although he didn’t say a word, Marlene adamantly said, “What’s there to be sorry for? After all, we built this country on the ruins of terrible destruction. We had to do so resolutely, without balking, without going astray. Everyone had to do his bit. I wish I had been able to give more.” And she told him about her boys, about their quests in faraway places, about the dangers and horrors they confronted. And about the general, Markus Hertz, who instructed her personally to set up the Special Ops Archives in Dresden, so that the cache of the big secrets wouldn’t be accessible to each and every political commissioner who happened to pass through headquarters in Berlin. Markus, Markus. She saw him so infrequently during her years at the Archives, but when he did come there, he always devoted some time to her, made a point of sitting down with her, drinking tea with her, and winking at her as he added a kick to both their cups of tea with a shot of alcohol, why not, couldn’t the two of them enjoy themselves a little? He then had her transferred to his bureau, and later came the big fall . . .
And then she spoke about Gunther, Gunther who took her breath away, who was their top field operations officer. There wasn’t a person out there whom he couldn’t recruit, turn into his best friend, turn into a secret soldier in the service of the revolution. Because as she saw things, it was and remained a revolution. No less. And she told him about Gunther’s murder, “Of course it was murder, who goes for a walk by the side of the highway on a dark rainy night, in the middle of nowhere? The big bosses from Moscow show up and take the Cobra dossiers just a few weeks earlier, and all of a sudden Gunther is dead. Just like that? He just happened to be killed? My sweet Gunther.”
“What do you know about Cobra?” the priest asked in a whisper, holding her dry burning-hot hand.
“Nothing, almost nothing,” she replied. “That was our system. Nobody knew the full picture. Only those who needed to. What did I know? I knew that Werner, Gunther that is, recruited him from nowhere. That his wonderful senses had led him to believe that Cobra was worth it. All the risks and effort. That he would go far. Thanks to agents like him, Markus and Gunther were able to walk tall even in Dzerzhinsky Square, at the KGB headquarters. I didn’t know his real name. I only knew he was from Israel, from the Holy City, from Jerusalem. A highly intelligent young man, an aide to a senior minister. Gunther used to say that he’d be a minister himself one day, or a very senior government official. I knew he was important enough for the Russians to take him for themselves and destroy everything that could expose him. We were already at a point of no return when they demanded that we hand him over. At some point, after all, we knew it was all over, right? But why did they have to kill him?” she asked, and her tears streamed silently down her cheeks and dripped onto the hand of the priest that was holding hers. “Why did he have to be killed? Gunther would never have betrayed Cobra. He may just as well have killed himself.” She sobbed softly, her breath catching now and then on a quiet whimper. “Why kill him like a dog on the side of a highway, in a dark field, with the rain pouring down on him incessantly, and his eyes staring up at nothing but black skies?” It was plain to see that she had pictured that horrific image in her mind on numerous occasions, and that it remained as distinct as ever. The priest clasped both his large hands around her bare fingers. He stroked her thin hair and said, “Marlene, Marlene, that’s enough now, it’s passed, it was a long time ago. And Gunther knew, I’m sure, Gunther knew you had feelings for him. Someone like him would surely have known. Only his work, his loyalty, the war he was waging stopped him from telling you that he knew, from telling you that he loved you, too. That’s how we were in those days, right? That’s just the way things were. Too often,” he whispered. He stroked Marlene’s head, trying to soothe and comfort her. We all carry a cross on our backs, he thought. A cross and a bag of sins alongside. Living a blemish-free life in those days was impossible. The truly good managed to keep some piece of their soul out of reach, untainted. But the truly good also had to survive, also had to give something in return for their lives. Father Jacobs wondered about the constant compromises, endless small humiliations, uncountable acts of betrayal that had allowed him to go on living, to continue leading his small congregation, small and ostracized, which found sanctuary in itself, comfort and a little warmth in those days, days that one couldn’t even term black. No, it was worse. They were days of dreariness, of obscurity, like opaque windows that had been smeared with brown paint and dirt that could never be scraped off.
11
BERLIN, JANUARY 2013
The Hotel Adlon’s elegant concierge raised his eyes and gazed in irony at the elderly man struggling to get inside. The doorman, wrapped in a thick coat, his stately uniform underneath, as if he were an admiral in the Imperial Navy, was patiently holding the door, while the old professor—thus he appeared to the concierge observing him—was trying with his one hand to hold on to his hat, so that it wouldn’t blow off in the sharp and icy gusts of wind, and with his other to close his umbrella, which had folded in on itself in the opposite direction, as his body pressed ahead, determined to feel the pleasant warmth that permeated the lobby. And indeed, a huge fireplace was ablaze in one of its corners, and a yellowish light, homely looking, dripped onto the ornate marble floor, from the direction of the bar. The professor finally made it through the doorway, mumbling a word of thanks to the doorman, nodding in the direction of the concierge, and waving his umbrella around as if he were fencing with a ghost, trying with his movements to fold it back to its natural state. His casquette was in his hand now, after almost falling to the floor, and he made his way toward the bar in long and spritely strides, hopping with surprising agility up the two steps, his coat already open and flapping, his gray hair tousled. And there we go, the old man had spotted the man who was waiting there for him, who rose from the plush armchair to greet him. At the same time, he also noticed the young man at the corner of the bar whose muscles seemed to be fighting to get out of his gray suit. The young man went tense upon seeing him and readied to rise from his chair, too, but the man who had already stood and moved toward him with his hand outstretched in greeting signaled to the muscular young man with a glance—it’s okay, it’s him, you can relax.
The two embraced like old friends. “Walter, Walter, it’s good to see you.” “Good to see you, too, Aharon, good to see you too. Thank you for coming on such short notice.” They looked at each other with affection. Walter returned to his leather armchair, Aharon dragged a second leather armchair closer, dropping his umbrella and coat on a third. “A cognac, if you please,” he requested from the waiter who had appeared discreetly at their table. “A glass of hot wine, please,” Walter said, and waited for the waiter to walk away.
“I see you’ve yet to get rid of your bodyguard,” Aharon remarked with a smile. “I, on the other hand,” he added in the same breath, “am no longer considered important enough. As you can see, fame is fleeting. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .” he went on, failing as usual to complete the sentence and allowing it instead to fade out.
• • •
Aharon Levin and Dr. Walter Vogel—the former head of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, known as the Israeli Mossad, and the former chief of the BND, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. Vogel had retired a few months earlier and, in keeping with procedure, was still entitled to a security detail, or required one, depending on how you looked at it and who was doing the looking. Vogel had spent his entire professional life in the West German intelligence service, signing up shortly after earning his Ph.D. in law from the University of Goettingen. He had spent his wh
ole career fighting the communist threat. He loathed the KGB, and felt the same loathing for the Stasi, too, which had imposed a reign of terror on the citizens of East Germany, the celebrated German Democratic Republic, whom it was supposed to have protected and whom it was supposed to have served. He reserved respect and admiration, accompanied nevertheless by hatred, only for the Stasi’s foreign espionage division, the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, in which he had seen not only bullying fists, but also artistry, from professional and sensitive hands that knew their craft well.
“Look,” Walter said to Aharon, “I’ll get straight to the point. It sounds like an old-timers’ thing—you and me, and an old priest from Dresden, and an old woman who served in the Stasi and has passed away.”
Aharon remained silent and nodded his head. He was a good listener. A log caught alight in the fireplace, casting a sudden glow over his wrinkle-grooved face. Walter continued:
“I was contacted on the very eve of Christmas by a source I used to handle, an East German priest, who also worked at the time with the Stasi, like everyone almost, because let’s face it, who had a choice back then? He didn’t know if it was important or not, but he wanted to share it with me. Anyway, it’s a secret that got someone killed. He doesn’t know much, and all he does know he heard from a dying and bitter old woman. And like I said, she did in fact die a few days after speaking with him. I’m giving you the gist of what he told me, and believe me, Aharon, I sat with the priest for hours to listen to the story again and again, from every possible angle. The old woman who told him the story was an archivist for the Special Ops Unit of the Stasi’s Main Directorate for Reconnaissance. Listen carefully, Aharon. According to her, the East Germans recruited and operated a high-ranking Israeli asset. They called him Cobra. The KGB was aware of the asset and the Stasi passed on all the intelligence he delivered to them. By the end of the 1980s, Cobra was already a parliamentary aide or perhaps even a ministerial aide, with further advancement apparently to come. The East Germans believed in him. Expected him to go very far. When the ground in East Germany began to shake, the KGB demanded full control over the asset. All the material pertaining to him was handed over to two KGB officers who were sent to collect the dossiers from the Special Ops Archives in Dresden. The archivist, by the name of Marlene, said that she did indeed hand over all the material to them. The order to do so was handed down by the then-director of the foreign espionage division, General Heinrich Krueger, and relayed to her personally by the officer in charge of the operation, who went by the name of Gunther. Gunther dryly told her that the operation was being handed over to their comrades in Moscow, and she said he was left furious and despondent. In any event, Gunther was hit by a truck and killed on the side of a highway north of Berlin less than two months later. The poor driver said he hadn’t even seen him before he was thrown under the wheels of the vehicle. According to Marlene, Gunther was assassinated. Cobra was such a high-value asset that the KGB took action to ensure that no one who knew his real identity was left behind. As I understand things, the Stasi handled Cobra under the guise of being Americans, for reasons I’m not aware of and can only speculate on.
“And as you know,” Walter quietly continued, “Markus Hertz, the serving division chief when Operation Cobra came into being and moved ahead, died a few months after the unification of the two Germanys, while under house arrest imposed by us. He had more than enough crimes for which to pay, but more so than anything he wasn’t a well man, and despite our grave suspicions, we weren’t able to prove that he didn’t die of natural causes.”
“Why didn’t the KGB assassinate Marlene, too?” Aharon asked. “Did the priest ask her? Was she able to explain that?”
“Marlene wasn’t aware of Cobra’s real identity. A fact, according to her, that was plain to see in the dossiers the KGB took from the Archives. That was the explanation she offered for being spared. The priest did indeed ask her that same question. But it’s possible, too, that they believed that Marlene would never talk. Or that they simply screwed up. We all make mistakes, right? Even the KGB isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t kill unnecessarily either. Whatever the case may be, Marlene went on living for many years after the Cobra file was handed over to the Russians, keeping her secrets to herself. Truth be told, even when she chose to tell someone—even when she sensed that her days were numbered, even when she needed someone, anyone, even a priest who knew her as no one but a worshipper in his church, to understand that she had known love for a man in her arid life—even then she was hardly able to say anything at all.”
“Tell me, Walter, why have you come to me with this? Why haven’t you notified someone currently in office in the BND? Why haven’t you approached someone serving today in the Mossad? After all, you’re acquainted with our people. I’m retired now, whereas your ties still remain intact, at least as far as I understood things . . .”
“I thought it best to approach you. Honestly, I don’t know if the information is important or of no significance at all, but my gut tells me it’s important, that we’re onto something big here. Marlene was speaking on her deathbed. People don’t make up such stories. Not at a time like that. And if Gunther really was murdered, there was a reason for it. If the Russians were intent on shielding Cobra against any risk of exposure, the comrades in Moscow must have viewed Cobra as a particularly high-value asset, an agent to be safeguarded at all costs. Who knows how many more Stasi officers they assassinated in order to safeguard their secrets when everything came crashing down? And if this story about Cobra turns out to be true, that means that no one has a clue regarding his whereabouts today, the material to which he is privy, and the information he is passing on to Moscow, perhaps even to this day. I couldn’t risk approaching just anyone; Cobra, after all, mustn’t know that someone may be on his trail. Besides, I have the privileges of the elderly now, I don’t have to speak to anyone and everyone, only to those I love. And you, my dear, I love. A love shared by old spies, right?”
And thus, in the dimming light of the large fireplace, with the night’s dark shadows filtering through the bar’s windows, they continued to sit there, fighting back the chill within themselves with another drink, appalled by the thought that they’d soon have to step out again into the street’s petrifying cold, into the loneliness that always lies in wait for people like them.
12
JERUSALEM, PRESIDENT’S RESIDENCE, JANUARY 2013
A silver Toyota Avensis pulled up outside the heavy ornate iron gate of the President’s Residence. It was five-twenty in the afternoon, yet winter’s darkness had already settled over the homes of the Talbieh neighborhood, just beyond the tops of the pine trees swaying in Jerusalem’s icy wind. Aharon Levin himself was behind the wheel. One would be hard-pressed, very hard-pressed indeed, to say he was a good driver, and as always, it seemed that only a miracle prevented him from crashing into the gate. A security guard armed with an M-16 approached the vehicle, and the electric window slid down silently. “Shalom, sir, I recognize you, and we know you are expected, but I need to see some ID anyway. Thank you, sir,” he said on returning the pensioner’s card Levin chose to produce. “Straight on and immediately to the right. Park next to the black Volvo.”
The president was waiting for him on his own in the main reception room, in the large hall adorned with the ceiling mural by Naftali Bezem. It was strange for him to see the reception room empty and dark, and the figure of the president appeared as a silhouette. Light coming through one of the doors that opened into the hall shone around his host, as if his entire person was aglow. “Mr. President,” Levin said by way of greeting. “Aharon, Aharon, good to see you. Come, come, let’s go sit down in here, we can talk in peace.”
The two men sat down together in a small meeting room, sinking into gold-colored armchairs. An elderly server came in quietly and placed two cups of tea and a small plate of cookies and dates stuffed with walnuts on the small table.
“Mr. President,” Levin began, “I’v
e come to you because I don’t know who I should take this to.”
• • •
The president and the former Mossad chief had met for the first time when Aharon Levin took up his position as head of the intelligence agency. They had never crossed paths before then. The president moved back and forth between the academic world and the political sphere, feeling at home in both, and making the transitions between the two with a degree of ease and elegance that left Aharon Levin in awe. Levin had operated all the while in the covert world of the Mossad, recruiting and handling agents, conducting his meetings in luxurious hotels, dingy brothels, and cold and anonymous safe houses in rural towns of distant lands. And because the worlds of politics and academe were so remote to him, he could only marvel at the seemingly effortless and natural manner with which the president conducted himself between the two. As in the case of his predecessors, following his appointment to the position of Mossad chief, he began meeting regularly with the prime minister. Some of the meetings were conducted in private, he and the prime minister alone, the recording devices switched off, the military secretary waiting outside the room. At the request of the president and with the prime minister’s approval, he started meeting from time to time with the president, too, updating him on whatever was necessary, talking to him about the trends and upheavals in the Middle East, the activities in the region of the superpowers, and listening to the ideas and thoughts expressed by the president, who was always curious, creative, far-sighted. Over time, a quiet sense of trust developed between them, two somewhat elderly Jews, well educated, contemplative but striving to take action. In this sense, too, the president was no ordinary man. Unlike his predecessors, he wasn’t willing to make do with the symbolic and ceremonial nature of his position, and instead felt profoundly responsible for the fate and future of the nation. He had seen a great deal in his life, and the more he saw the greater his concern. He knew that the existence of the state couldn’t be taken for granted at all, and he never tired of saying, and believed with all his heart, that if Israel wasn’t always at its best, if it didn’t have the ability to reap all the talent, creativity, and daring of its people, it wouldn’t survive. And thus, on more than one occasion, and entirely discreetly, he would offer the utmost of his abilities for the sake of that campaign, which never ceased.
Traitor Page 5