I was on my second koffe when he came through the door. I hadn’t seen Avi Ben Gal in almost a decade. He looked much the same as I remembered him—just a little bit older and maybe a touch grayer around the edges. He’s an olive-skinned, short, slightly built man, diminutive in the way that doesn’t grab attention when he enters a room. Today, he was wearing a long, thick, double-breasted wool coat over floppy dark gray flannel trousers, which were tucked somewhat haphazardly into a pair of fleece-topped, oiled leather, rubber-soled hunting boots that looked as if they’d come directly from L.L. Beanski.
He nattered at the babushka behind the counter in full auto AK-47 Russian. Her glower turned to smile, she put hands on hips, threw head back, wiggled her wattles and laughed, displaying half a dozen or so Stalin-era stainless steel teeth in the process. Her head nodded vigorously. “Da, da, da.”
He shrugged himself out of his coat on the way to the table, dropped it over the back of the closest chair, then thrust his right hand in my direction. “At last we get to meet face-to-face again.” he said warmly. “Welcome to the dikiy vostok—the wild, wild East. I’m sorry it’s taken us so long to get together.”
“Me too.” I was sorry—and not only because I’m fond of Avi. I’d called him from Washington and we’d scheduled a working session for the evening I arrived, only to have to cancel because he’d been suddenly called back to Tel Aviv on urgent business the day before I arrived. Even so, he’d managed to arrange my introduction to Boris Makarov by long-distance.
I was grateful for that, and told him so, grasping his size seven hand in my size ten paw and shaking it warmly, looking down as I always had, my eyes drawn to the stubby nub where his little finger should have been. The pinky was two-thirds missing. It had, as I recall, been shot off during an altercation with a bunch of nasties in south Lebanon when Avi was a greenhorn—a young lieutenant serving with a Saye’eret (reconnaissance) platoon of the Golani Brigade’s elite Egoz battalion.
Instead of releasing my hand he kept hold of it with both of his, turning it over critically so he could examine the inked Cyrillic crib marks on my palm and wrist with some obvious amusement. Nothing gets by Avi. “Good tactical idea,” he finally said. “Mind if I borrow it sometime?”
“I thought you speak Russian.”
He grinned at me. “Yes, but I might be caught in real unknown, hostile territory some day—New York, or maybe Washington.”
“Go to hell.” I knew that Avi knew New York and Washington as well as he knew Tel Aviv or Haifa. I resumed my seat and picked up my coffee. “Been keeping busy?”
He shrugged and dropped into the chair to my right with a sigh. He kept his back to the side wall. “A little of this, a little of that,” he said, a mischievous twinkle flickering in his gray eyes. “The boring life of the agricultural attaché.”
Yeah, right, agricultural attaché. And me? I’d come to Moscow on a Martha Stewart Fellowship to deliver lectures about flower arranging. “Well, that’s what you people get for making the deserts bloom. Now you’ve got to go out and teach other folks how to do it, too—even in countries where there ain’t no deserts and very little bloom, right?”
“You got it, Dickie.” He chuckled, and started to continue, pausing as a shadow fell over the table. Avi lapsed into his mother tongue: “Biduke—exactly right.” All conversation stopped as the babushka waddled over (pa-doom, pa-doom), her felt-swathed ankles and slipper-clad feet scraping across the dirty tile floor. She was bearing a tray on which sat a huge, two-handled cup of frothy black coffee, a plate with half a dozen thick slices of crusty black bread, a pile of oily herring topped with chopped onion and a big cracked ramekin filled with what looked like a quarter-pound chunk of sweet, white butter. She clucked like a fucking mother henski as she set it all in front of him.
His round face beaming, Avi smiled up at her like a grateful kid—I honestly thought she was going to ruffle his hair and pinch his cheeks. He slipped her a five-dollar bill, and she withdrew, beaming, tucking the money into the huge bosom of her white smock.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped his knife, then slathered two pieces of bread with the butter, forked some chunks of herring onto it, sprinkled some salt on top, carefully added chopped onion to the pile, then cut the bread in half, and took a huge bite.
Finally he paid me about half the attention he was paying to the food. “So—how did it go last night with Boris and the boys?”
“Do you want the quick sit-rep or the detailed one?”
He sipped his coffee. “The quick one. I have an appointment tomorrow and I know how verbose you can get.”
I was glad to see that he hadn’t lost any of his sarcasm in the years since I’d seen him. “It was a complete goatfuck.”
He chewed some more of the black bread and herring. “Do you know how they say goatfuck in Russian? Ya veh pizde.” He wiped a smear of butter from the corner of his mouth and cracked a smile. “It means, ’I am stuck in a very deep vagina.’”
“The Russian equivalent of being fucked very much.”
“Yup.” Still smiling, he chawed on another slice of the herring, onion, and bread and washed it all down with a big swallow of coffee. Then his expression grew serious. “Look—like I told you Boris is probably still okay. The question is why, and I guess it’s because they haven’t met his price yet.”
“But you say ’Yet.’”
“Da. Yet. The reality is that I haven’t met a Russian who can’t be bought. So I can’t really vouch for Misha, or any of the rest of ’em. Fact is, boychik, the whole damn country is like a sieve when it comes to leaking information, or just about anything else ”
If anyone should know about information—or anything else—it would be Avi. Like I said, here in Moscow he was accredited as an agricultural attaché. In fact, he was a colonel in Zahal—which is how they refer to the Israeli Defense Forces in Tel Aviv—and he worked for AMAN, an acronym that stands for Agaf Modiin, which translates from the Hebrew roughly as “The Intelligence Branch of the General Staff.” (Y’know, thinking of that, I just realized the Israelis have always been able to take huge mouthfuls of English words and stuff ’em into real tight Hebrew jackets. How the hell do they do that? Maybe it comes from living in such a small country.)
While Avi’s finishing his breakfast, let me give you a little interpersonal history to put things in perspective. Avi Ben Gal and I met in the mideighties, just after I’d been infiltrated into Lebanon through Cyprus. My assigned task, as outlined by the then-CNO, Black Jack Morrison, endorsed by the national security adviser, and sanctioned by the president’s scrawled signature on the bottom of a national security finding, was to perform some discreet neutralization upon the leadership of a small, fundamentalist Islamic tango cell that had become both nettlesome and lethal while operating against Americans in the region. That, at least, was what Black Jack had told the National Security Council, the CIA liaison, and the Senate Armed Services Committee staff.
In reality, I had a more complex and covert assignment, one known only to the president, the secretary of defense, CNO, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I was to infiltrate into Syria and map as much of the Soviet communications network as I could. Having done that, I would incorporate my findings into a METL—that’s a Mission Essential Task List—so that, in case of what the politicians call a Serious Conflict, a SpecWar unit could be quickly deployed and destroy all the Soviet C3I (which is pronounced C-cubed-eye, incidentally, and stands for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence) capabilities in Syria, blinding the Sovs and incapacitating them, which would make them much easier to kill.
You see, back in the seventies and eighties, the Soviets used Syria as their main listening post in the Middle East, sweeping the skies for U.S., Israeli, and NATO SIGINT (SIGnals INTelligence), ELINT (ELectronics INTelligence) and other COMINT (COMmunications INTelligence). We used bases and listening posts in Turkey and, until the shah was kicked out, Iran to do
the same to them.
By ship and by plane, the Soviets brought in thousands of tons of electronic equipment. Ostensibly, it was all used to build the Syrian military communications system. But there was more (there always was, with the Russkies, which is why I’m so suspicious even these days). At the same time they were providing military aid to the Syrians, they were piggybacking their own communications and eavesdropping networks onto the Syrian system. Our SIGINT capabilities allowed us to narrow the Soviet C3I nerve centers to a dozen locations. But satellites can only tell you so much—and what DIA learned through a human source was that three-quarters of the C3I installations were dummies—set up as diversions.
Which ones were real? That’s why I’d been put on the case. It was my job to pinpoint the real eavesdropping centers. That meant I had to actually inspect more than a dozen Syrian military installations. It was the only way to see which bases the Soviets were using as camouflage, and which ones they’d actually built their systems in.
The sneak-and-peek aspect wouldn’t be hard—not for me. But maintaining cover in Syria over an extended period might pose a certain problem. Arabic is not one of my strong languages. It isn’t even one of my weak languages. And while I may resemble your archetypal swarthy Syrian, amber Arabian, or earthy Egyptian, I can’t talk like any one of them—except, of course, to tell you to go fuck yourself and the camel you rode in on.
The problem was solved way above my pay grade when someone with four stars on his collar and a great respect for the Israeli military decided to hitch me up with an Arab-speaking Israeli officer who was performing a similar task in the AO—or Area of Operations. Enter Avi Ben Gal, stage right.
Avi was a young captain at the time, detailed to Lebanon by AMAN. He headquartered out of the Alexandre Hotel in East Beirut and made long, unaccompanied trips to the terrorist-controlled areas of the Chouf mountains and Bekáa valley, busily (even ostentatiously) assembling dossiers on terrorist factions and compiling lists of possible tango targets in conjunction with the Lebanese Forces, the Christian militia, which controlled East Beirut. But Avi’s outward task, just like mine, was simply a cover story. His real mission was to get inside Syria and evaluate the level of Soviet Army staff penetration of Syrian combat troops stationed in the rough quadrant between Damascus, Beirut, Horns, and Highway 7. The Israelis wanted to learn how well the Sovs were able to operate inside the Syrian military structure—and so they’d sent the officer who, according to CNO, was probably their greatest expert on Soviet tactics for a firsthand look. Why? Simple: because when the next Middle East war occurred, the Israelis wanted to know whether they’d be fighting Syrians, or Soviets.
Now, the reason behind all this subterfuge lay in the unpleasant but incontrovertible fact that neither the Israeli military intelligence apparatus—the folks at AMAN-nor their American military equivalents, the generals at DIA, trusted their civilian counterparts. Hey, hey, hey—don’t skip this material and go looking for the next action sequence, because what I’m going to tell you here will take on a shitload of significance in about 150 pages.
So read and learn, tadpoles, okay?
Fact: from the early eighties on, DIA began to pare down its relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.
Fact: DIA mistrusted CIA’s Soviet military assessments because DIA believed they were totally unrealistic.
Fact: DIA suspected that the Agency had been drawn into a political role by a series of ideological directors, and that its data reflected political bias, not dispassionate, objective intelligence.
Fact: most of all, DIA feared that CIA had been devastatingly penetrated by the KGB and was being fed disinformation.
On each one of these counts, history has shown that DIA was correct in its assessment.
For its part, AMAN had a similar set of problems with Mossad Letafkidim Meouychadiym (the Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Duties), more commonly known to the trade as Mossad. Mossad is the Israeli equivalent of the CIA. In the years that followed Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the generals who ran AMAN believed that Mossad was becoming too political in its assessments—telling the prime minister’s office what it wanted to hear, rather than what it needed to know. They resented Mossad’s considerable involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, because they considered Oliver North and the rest of those concerned in the matter well-meaning but naive bunglers who would, in the end, screw things up.
They also thought that certain employees of the Israeli spy agency made a huge mistake when they became peripherally entangled in the recruitment and running of the American traitor Jonathan Pollard as an Israeli agent. Pollard, a U.S. Navy civilian analyst with access to raw intelligence materials (that is a polite way of saying he had the run of the fucking farm), supplied a rogue Israeli intelligence operation with 360 cubic feet of documents—yeah, that number, which sounds incredible, is absolutely correct. The pile of paper he turned over was six feet deep, six feet high, and ten feet wide—of highly classified, code-word sensitive documents, photographs, and signals intercepts. Including sources. Including methods. Raw effing data. The whole nine fucking yards—except in Pollard’s case, it was the whole thirteen (cubic) yards. The data ostensibly went to an Israeli techno-intelligence organization known as LEKEM (Leshkat Kesher Madao, or Bureau of Scientific Relations).
But a number of those documents somehow (!) found their way into Mossad files. Mossad, in turn, traded some of their newly acquired gems to other intelligence services. One of the recipients was the KGB, with which Mossad has had a long and troubled relationship.
Moreover, AMAN suspected for many years that Mossad had been heavily infiltrated by the KGB.
And so, because neither his bosses nor mine trusted the civilian intelligence apparatus, Avi Ben Gal and I were ordered to work together, share information, and keep what we discovered from falling into either Mossad or CIA hands, so the details would not become compromised. Our initial sessions were not easy—for either of us. I did not like the fact that I’d been assigned a partner whose operational capabilities were unknown. In fact, for a long time I’d enjoyed the luxury of being able to select those with whom I worked. For his part, Avi wasn’t overjoyed at being forced to work with an ugly American who didn’t speak, read, or write the language of the AO—that’s the Area of Operations—and whose reputation for attracting attention to himself made the quiet Israeli justifiably nervous.
But, as is so often the case, we soon developed the kind of deep mutual respect and rapport that successful two-man patrols in hostile environments can (and indeed must) enjoy. After three weeks in close proximity, we could act—and react—without thinking. We’d bonded into a unit, despite the fact that two more disparate personalities would probably be hard to find.
Avi is diminutive, quiet, bookish, and given to introspection. I am large and somewhat flamboyant, in case you haven’t noticed. He is happily married and monogamous. I am divorced and libidinously impetuous. But operators come in all shapes, sizes, and personalities. And Avi was a hell of an operator. You already know that his Russian is fluent and unaccented. Well, his Arabic was perfect, too—in fact, he had a hell of an ear for it.
I discovered that on the third day we worked together. I’d insisted on getting out of the city, so against his better judgment we were in his beat-up Datsun, about eight kliks east of the highway (and what an overstatement that depiction is!), which winds east and north up the Bekáa valley from Zahle to Baalbek. We’d turned off the main road onto a rutted dirt track leading toward the Biquar salient—a kind of promontory from which you can look down into Syria—to watch a Syrian Eighth Armored Corps FX, which stands for Field Exercise. We bypassed a small town called An Nabi Shit (I noticed unmistakable signs of tango activity there and made a mental note to ask the folks at the National Reconnaissance Office to assign a satellite to the area), then fishhooked south, along a series of small wadis, or dry stream beds, until we came to a village whose sign, Avi told me, read Janta.
From there, we turned the Datsun eastward again, paralleling a decrepit narrow-gauge railroad line that ran between the foothills, climbing slowly into the Shariq mountains.
Just over halfway to the top, we came upon a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums that had been rolled out and strung haphazardly across the narrow road. Behind the drums, a dozen lanky preadolescents in ragtag khaki holding AK-47s flagged us down. We had no weapons in the car. I wasn’t even carrying a knife. Oh, we had papers—but I wasn’t sure that anybody behind the barricade was old enough to read.
Now, lemme tell you something, friends: there are few things as frightening in this world as a roadblock manned (childed?) by twelve-year-olds. Because twelve-year-olds will kill you as soon as look at you because they have no concept of death. They kill. Not for fun. Not for sport. Not for challenge. They simply kill.
“And keep your mouth shut,” Avi whispered through clenched teeth as we pulled up slowly—not that he had to cue me. My lips were sealed.
He stopped the car short of the roadblock by eight or nine yards. He’d already rolled his window down without being asked. The biggest kid of the bunch, a redhead who wore a blue and gold UCLA T-shirt above his stained BDUs and stowed a half-smoked cigarette behind his left ear, nonchalantly stuck the barrel of his AK over the windowsill. even with Avi’s chest.
Without looking directly at the kid I checked him out. He had the kind of dead eyes that told me he was extremely dangerous. I could see his finger on the trigger just above the window line.
There was a pause that made my heart catch. Then the kid asked Avi an insolent question. Avi paid neither the insolence nor the AK any mind at all. He nodded matter of factly, then rattled off a bunch of quick Arabic gibberish.
The kid must have liked what he’d heard, because the AK’s muzzle rasped off the sill, scraped down the door of the car. and came to rest pointed at the ground.
Avi pulled a hunch of Lebanese pound notes out of his pocket, rolled them into a wad, and thrust them across the window at the kid. who took the money without a word. Then he threw a thumb toward the roadblock. The knot of kids dissolved. They slung their weapons and rolled the drums out of our path.
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