Traitor

by Jonathan de Shalit

  She paged through the notebooks, trying to rekindle that spark of memory that had flashed through her mind while listening to Aharon Levin’s story, that elusive inkling that was playing tricks on the edges of her consciousness.

  When she got to the fifth notebook, it all came back to her.

  21

  ASHDOD, JANUARY 2013

  “Since you’ve come all the way back here again, I’ll tell you. It happened in the early 1990s, in the winter of 1992. A year after the Gulf War, to be precise. As always, a team from the Operations Division was monitoring the movements and activities of the usual suspects. They weren’t busy with any special assignment, and the team leader was running things at his own discretion, sniffing things out as he saw fit. And it was only the intelligence officer’s inexplicable gut feeling that prompted him into action at the time. Based on intuition, he decided to keep tabs on an attractive and well-groomed woman in her forties who was seen leaving one of the locations they monitored from time to time, on a routine basis. They followed her for more than two or three hours, and she did nothing. And the next minute she was gone. Either they lost focus momentarily, a possibility that cannot be ruled out, or she managed to lull them into complacency and then grabbed her chance. The fact is she disappeared. She and the large bag that was slung over her shoulder. A fake crocodile-skin bag, the report said. Seriously? They’re fashion experts all of a sudden now, too? They came across her again the following day completely by chance, while combing the area around Arlosoroff Street. The team leader swore not to allow her to give them the slip again. And they stuck with her for four days. Four days around the clock. And nothing. Absolutely nothing. They weren’t able to come up with anything on her at all. Apart from the lover!”

  The three of them were sitting together again at a round table at the café in the square, but the strong winds had forced them indoors this time. Aharon remained silent and allowed Hagar to remember and recount her story at her own pace. Michael was looking at her, and Hagar Beit-Hallahmi suddenly appeared younger than she had the day before, her old blue eyes open wide and aglow.

  “She met up with someone in Bat Yam. An older man. They spent four days together. Talking. Holding hands, like two young lovers. Sitting together in a park, having a picnic on a bench, vodka and cheeses and expensive cold cuts.” Hagar spoke dreamily as if she, too, was sitting on the bench with them. And that’s just when Michael realized that she was far more cunning and dangerous than she appeared. Hagar Beit-Hallahmi had never been a romantic or sentimental soul. He had met people like her, people who immerse themselves in the finer details seemingly out of a sense of solidarity, only to be able to snare their prey with a single sudden motion. “They went by bus to Tel Aviv,” she continued. “Visited used-book stores. Strolled arm in arm along the promenade. Dined three evenings in a row at Shtsupak, holding hands over plates of fish cooked whole on the grill. They slept at his place, his home, a shabby apartment in a tenement building in Bat Yam. Three nights . . .”

  Aharon indicated to Michael that Hagar could do with another cup of tea. Go, go, he motioned with his eyes, go get some tea to keep her warm. The wind raged outside, and although it was warm inside the café, a chill went through him, as with the first signs of flu. Aharon stared intently into Hagar’s face. She went on, plucking the facts from memory without having to look even once at her notes.

  “Naturally, we ran a background check on him right away. Igor Abramovich. An artist, a painter. Immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Widowed a few years later. An only daughter. No ties to anything that could interest the Russians. Not to the military, not to the electricity corporation. Not even to the Egged bus company. His daughter served in the IDF’s Southern Command, in a liaison unit of a reserves brigade. He hadn’t left the country since immigrating, aside from just two short trips. Once, when his wife was still alive, they went to Cyprus for five days. And on another occasion, in the late 1980s, he went away alone for a week. Border control records showed that he had flown to Frankfurt. His paintings barely sell. He had a small degree of success in Russia, locally, but in Israel—nothing. Igor Abramovich made a living teaching art at a junior high school. He wasn’t a rich man, not at all, but he was debt-free. A responsible and cautious individual when it came to his financial affairs. Nothing owed to the income tax or social security authorities. No overdraft at the bank. The apartment was his, the mortgage fully paid off two years before we came into the picture.”

  Aharon didn’t say a word. And Hagar, too, went silent.

  “And . . . ?”

  “Abramovich was called in for a talk the moment the woman boarded a flight out of Israel to Vienna. We were still acting on a gut feeling, even though we hadn’t found a thing. There’s no arguing with gut feelings, as you know. We called it a routine background check, and either he believed us or he simply didn’t care. Abramovich came in without a fuss. Someone who grows up in the Soviet Union probably gets used to being summoned for a ‘talk’ or clarification, and he doesn’t even think of asking why. That’s just the way it is. He was called in to the Beit Dagan police station—we had use of several rooms there, back then, at least, I don’t know if the same arrangement still holds today. We showed him our Shin Bet IDs. I was there and one of the investigators from the division joined me. We asked him about acquaintances, about ties he had abroad, about relatives who were still living in the Soviet Union. He was either a great actor or truly was an innocent and simple man. He answered all our questions. Aside from the death of his wife, almost nothing in his life had changed since his initial interview, some twenty years earlier. Yes, as you know, we checked them out one by one, there wasn’t a single immigrant we didn’t meet. Everything was recorded and everything was filed. That’s how we worked back then. And everything he had told us the first time remained unchanged, apart from a few new acquaintances, neighbors in the tenement building, two or three painters from the Bat Yam Artists Association.”

  “And the woman, what about the attractive woman who was with him?”

  “He didn’t try to hide her, but was very shy. He told us about her, too, but blushed like a young boy, and tried to find in me, in me of all people, someone who’d understand the delicate nature of the relationship, who’d understand that it was an affair of the heart, that it needed to be viewed differently, with sensitivity.

  “He told us that four or five years earlier, in the winter of ’87—he was more precise after thinking about it for a moment—he met a woman he found very attractive at the Tel Aviv Museum one day. He had been a widower for several years already, he took the trouble to explain, and when he suddenly saw the woman narrow her eyes, tilt her pretty head, take a step or two back to look again, differently, at a painting—a piece by Monet—when he saw her, he told us in a thick accent, his heart was overcome with a sense of warmth that melted the block of ice he had there. Those were his words, that’s how he described his first encounter with Katrina Geifman. And that was the beginning of a wonderful romance, he recounted, a romance kept alive from one year to the next via the exchange of letters. No, she couldn’t come to see him more than once a year, and no, he wasn’t able to visit her in the Soviet Union either. She was married, she had told him, a bad and unhappy marriage, but her husband wasn’t well, and it was all too painful and complicated in general, and there was no way out at the time, and she would see him when she visited Israel, and maybe, if she got the chance, she would let him know when she would be traveling to Europe. Paris, maybe London. And perhaps he could join her there.

  “All in all, they met up on four occasions in Israel, she couldn’t make it the one year, and he went to meet her overseas once, too, in Freiburg, Germany. He flew to Frankfurt and took a train from there to his sweetheart. She was a translator, so she had told him, and she sometimes accompanied businessmen from Moscow, her beloved hometown where she lived with her sick husband and their daughter, who studied at a high school for the sciences.

&nb
sp; “Their letters were their only compensation for the distance between them and the time spent apart. Oh, my, the letters she wrote to him. No, she didn’t want them to speak on the phone, she didn’t like the phone in general, certainly not for very long conversations and definitely not for personal ones. It was also very expensive, he said to me as someone for whom frugality is a way of life. She would pour her heart out to him in her letters, she would tell him all her thoughts, so she had said, and so she did, he recounted, somewhat bashfully. He sent his letters to a post-office box in Moscow and she wrote to his address in Bat Yam.”

  “You said that a person named Katrina Geifman never entered Israel. That’s classic KGB,” Michael said. “This woman was obviously using various identities and several passports. But why Igor? What did the KGB want from him?”

  “That’s just it, apparently nothing. You can take my word for it, Aharon, based on all my experience, all my intuition, Igor Abramovich wasn’t a spy. And I can tell you with same degree of certainty that Katrina Geifman, if that was her name, was indeed a KGB field operative. I don’t know what she was doing in Israel, and I have no knowledge of her assignment or what she wanted from Igor Abramovich. Who knows, maybe she did really fall in love with him. But it was something we never managed to resolve.”

  “Didn’t you bring her in the next time she came to Israel?”

  “She never came back, at least not under any of the names we knew. And she definitely never visited Igor again. They remained in touch via the letters for a few more months, and then she wrote to tell him that things had become complicated and that her husband had found out, and that she couldn’t any longer. And that’s it.”

  “And Igor Abramovich?”

  “Igor Abramovich is dead. He died on August 7, 1998. I was still working for the Shin Bet, and I remember the date as if it were yesterday. Stomach cancer, he died at Tel Hashomer Hospital. He’s buried in the Holon cemetery.”

  22

  TEL AVIV, JANUARY 2013

  “Got it,” Adi said, “14 Halevona Street, Kiryat Ono.”

  It took Adi less than four hours to locate Gal Ya’ari, the late Igor Abramovich’s only daughter. A bit of Googling, the websites of the Interior Ministry and Chief Rabbinate, and a little work on Facebook.

  “Show me how you do it one more time,” Michael asked, and Adi guided him through the process step-by-step, until the Facebook search stage, at which he nodded without really getting it, and Adi, who sensed as much, decided not to make things more complicated for him. “And that’s it,” she concluded, and Michael breathed a sigh of relief.

  “How’s your database coming along?” he asked.

  “I’m working on it. It would have been a lot easier, of course, to get all the data from the Defense Ministry’s Security Authority . . .”

  “That’s just it, we can’t ask for help from anyone at all. Cobra, as far as we’re concerned, could be anywhere. He could be the director of the Security Authority himself.”

  The SA, a department of the Defense Ministry, was responsible for security at the ministry as well as the country’s defense industry facilities. Among other things, it maintained a list of names of anyone and everyone who has been privy to state secrets.

  Without access to this database, Michael had suggested that they compile one of their own, to include the names of individuals who, in keeping with specific criteria, could be Cobra. His working assumption was that Cobra was privy to secrets to which only someone with the highest security clearance had access. And if the Russians did indeed have such an agent, then the State of Israel had a big problem and a sophisticated traitor in its midst. Michael knew there were several shortcomings to this working assumption: First, someone can be a very high-value agent even if he is privy to only so called lower-level secrets, such as intelligence community secrets or the plans of the IDF’s Northern or Southern commands. Second, in light of the Israeli disorder with which he was so familiar, he believed that a relatively large number of people were party to vital secrets even if they hadn’t received the required clearance. That’s just how things worked. An aide to an aide joins the staff of a senior minister, and somehow no one remembers that the eighth copy of the most top-secret report is forwarded to the said minister’s bureau, for his eyes only, of course. But the minister has no intention of opening the double envelopes himself or personally completing the forms to confirm receipt of the material, so the aide to the aide does it in his stead. And on occasions when a multiparticipant discussion is under way somewhere, and they get to the truly classified issue, very rarely does the individual responsible request that those without the necessary clearance leave the room. And even if some of the participants do leave, others remain, and no one really knows who has the required clearance and who hasn’t. It’s certainly possible, therefore, that although Cobra’s name perhaps did not appear on the official list of individuals with the highest security clearance, he still constituted a major threat. But they had no choice, they had to start somewhere.

  Michael asked Adi to compile a table of names and particulars of all officeholders in the political establishment and security apparatus who could be considered high-value agents. The table would be put together gradually, and would include, insofar as was possible, names, countries of origin, dates of birth, residential addresses, and the like. It was painstaking work, with piece after piece of information collected in the hope that something they uncovered during the course of their investigation could be cross-referenced with the data in the table. Breakthroughs are sometimes made like this, too, with the help of shots in the dark, no less so than through systematic and orderly office work.

  “I want Ya’ara to go see Abramovich’s daughter,” Michael said. “Amir, tell her please to come here, I’ll brief her before she goes.”

  23

  KIRYAT ONO, JANUARY 2013

  Ya’ara and Gal Ya’ari were sitting in the bright kitchen of Gal’s apartment, steaming cups of coffee warming their hands. Her parents named her Galina at birth, and she changed her name officially when she enlisted in the army. Ya’ara recognized the remains of an accent only in the manner in which she pronounced the guttural letters.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Gal said. “I just got in from work, and with two teenage boys at home, you know. . . . Do you have kids?”

  “Not yet, but soon, my boyfriend and I moved in together just a few months ago,” Ya’ara responded. “My mother’s anxious, too,” she added with a smile.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to grill you, I was just asking. They’re so messy, my boys, I can’t even remember the last time this place was clean and tidy. Sneakers everywhere, jackets thrown all over the place, socks . . .” She ended her mini rant and continued: “So you want to make a movie about my father?”

  “Not only about your father. About the Russian Artists Association in Bat Yam. It’ll be my final project for school. Like I told you on the phone, I go sometimes to the Bat Yam Museum. It’s not really a museum, as you know, but more of a large gallery. And sometimes, alongside the main exhibition, they show pieces by a local artist. Those small side exhibits always move me deeply. They immediately offer one a sense of the loneliness of the artists, their determination, the dreams they’re trying to force into a measure of reality. Okay, I’m rambling on. Anyway, I got in touch with the association, and I think there’s a story there through which I can shine a light on those people, artists working on the sidelines of the Israeli art scene, and also tackle pertinent questions concerning immigration and life on the margins of society. And the people at the association mentioned your father, and they showed me two of his pieces that are on display in their small office, and rather than begin with the current situation, I thought it could be interesting to start off with the early years, when the association was first established.”

  Gal was staring at her intently with her green eyes, which reminded Ya’ara of a cat’s. “Yes,” she said, “I spoke to Vladislav and he told me you had been to
the association. He and my father were friends, many years ago. My father passed away almost fifteen years ago. It seems so far away all of a sudden. She’s a very attractive young woman, that’s how Vladi described you. How do you like that, even at his age he has an eye for beautiful women.”