by Michael Ross
But I decided to at least see what this new opportunity might offer. I made arrangements to head to Tel Aviv—two bumpy, winding hours away on an Egged bus. After tracking down the address on the letterhead, I found myself in a nondescript office with a small waiting room filled with other young people. Eventually I was ushered into an equally generic office, where I met a fellow named Ari. After mechanically repeating some of the jargon I’d read in the letter, he explained that I’d been selected as a candidate for an overseas Israeli government “function.” His manner was reserved and bordered on obtuse. Indeed, the whole exercise was surreal. But I played along.
Ari handed me a questionnaire with a series of twenty questions, each requiring a one-word response. For example: “When attacked, the young man——?” or “The boy——his parents?” I did my best to produce sensible answers and handed Ari my completed questionnaire.
He gave a cursory glance at what I’d written, then put down my test and suddenly changed his tone. Dropping the jargon, he asked me all kinds of probing questions about my life, ideals, goals, and experiences. The interview lasted about an hour, and he took notes throughout. In many cases, he repeated questions, or otherwise revisited subjects he’d already covered. (I learned later that the point of the interview was to test an applicant’s honesty. Telling a lie is easy. Telling it the same way twice is more difficult.)
There was also a test in which I was sent into a room with a pencil and a piece of paper. I was told to close my eyes and make X’s in a series of circles printed on the page. The ostensible purpose was to test my “spatial” response, but I found out later that it was another honesty check. (A candidate who successfully puts all the X’s in the circles is clearly cheating.) I didn’t know that, however. So when I handed in my test—some X’s in and most out—I thought I’d failed.
I finally got up the nerve to ask what this was all about. Ari said, “If you are interested, and we find you suitable, we will send you on a training course for about a year and then put you to work.” Despite Ari’s evasions, I had an inkling of what was going on. Only one employer was this secretive about recruitment: Israel’s famous intelligence service, the Mossad. When I realized this, I felt a slight tug in my gut.
To this day, I’m not one hundred per cent sure why the Mossad specifically recruited me, but I can assume that my nationality and Anglo-Saxon background were contributing factors in their decision. By the same token, I had many foreign-born Israeli friends who never received an invitation from the Mossad, so perhaps in their mysterious method of separating the wheat from the chaff, they saw a few grains of possibility in me that could be trained and indoctrinated for their purposes.
At the end of the interview, I told Ari that I was planning on returning to Canada for a year or so, and he gave me a plain white business card with a telephone number on it. He told me to call when I returned to Israel if I was still interested. I kept the card—all through the time I was in Canada.
I spent two years with my family in beautiful Vancouver. Upon my return to Canada, I quickly lucked into a decent-paying federal government job. I never had to take work home with me, and had every weekend and statutory holiday off. But despite the long lunch hours and slacker work schedule, something told me I needed to go back to Israel. I hadn’t put in hard time during my conversion and army duty so I could stroll down streets or lie on a beach.
On this point, Dahlia didn’t need much convincing: she was homesick. And so in the summer of 1988, we boarded an El Al flight and returned to Israel.
Once back, I didn’t waste a lot of time before calling the number Ari had given me, and I was granted another interview. I had thought a lot about the opportunity the Mossad was presenting me and my family and, to be frank, didn’t see myself growing cotton on a kibbutz for the rest of my days. I’d converted and made Israel my home for a higher purpose—and the Mossad seemed the perfect vehicle to put my ideals to the test.
The address they gave me this time was different, and when I arrived I noticed that many of the recruiters were new. I later found out that had I waited another week or so, the phone number on the card would also have been changed—all part of the Mossad’s normal security procedures. The opportunity might have been gone, and I’d still be working the cotton fields.
In 2006, years after I’d left the Mossad and was trying my hand at writing, I had the good fortune to meet the renowned Canadian writer and iconoclast George Jonas—author, most famously, of Vengeance, upon which Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film Munich was based. During lunch in Toronto, George told me a story about Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo ignited the First World War. On the fateful day in June 1914, his vehicle had made a wrong turn. But his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, had also been diverted. Somehow, they both turned up at the same street corner. Within four and a half years, fifteen million people would be dead on the battlefields of Europe.
George made the point that when something is fated to be—for good or ill—nothing will stand in its way.
My recruitment was a drawn-out affair. I understand that the process is more streamlined these days, but in my time, it involved months of waiting and uncertainty.
I first underwent casual interviews with people who identified themselves only by their first names. They asked me about my ambitions, what I thought about the situation in the Middle East, and how I felt about being separated from my family.
No one ever admitted that they belonged to something called the Mossad. In fact, the word Mossad was never used until the first day of my training course—and the only place it appeared was in one of my training manuals. Instead, we always used the expression hamisrad, which means “office,” even later when I was a veteran working in HQ. (Similarly, CIA agents have traditionally called their outfit “The Company.”) Running around calling ourselves “Mossad agents” seemed silly and made us feel self-conscious. To this day, I am uncomfortable using the actual name of the organization that once employed me.
Along with the interviews, there was a medical exam that measured just about every aspect of my physical health. Then came a battery of psychological and psychometric exams. These were real—nothing like the bogus honesty tests Ari had put me through a couple of years earlier. They lasted an entire day, and were conducted by an austere psychologist straight out of the movies. (He even had the requisite German accent.)
I had to make the two-hour commute from my kibbutz to Tel Aviv for each stage of my testing and interviewing. I must have made ten such trips. It was grueling and tedious. And unlike my army experience—during which I at least could rely on camaraderie to buoy my spirits—I had to go through the process on my own. If they were testing other candidates at the same time, I never met them. As I would learn years later, it was just a taste of the loneliness that awaited me.
As a twenty-seven-year-old who’d spent much of his adult life in the Canadian and Israeli armies, my personal history was hardly mysterious. But my background was complicated by the fact that, unlike just about every other Mossad agent, I wasn’t born Jewish, and therefore had no pedigree that could be easily checked. The Mossad is an exclusively Jewish outfit: no matter if you have Israeli citizenship and serve faithfully in the military, if you are of another faith, you can’t be recruited as a serving officer. There are no exceptions.
I’d learned something about Jews since my conversion: their communities are usually tightly knit, and the six degrees of separation that are said to link any two people in the world often shrink to two or three degrees when both of them are Jews—even if they’re from opposite ends of the globe. If someone isn’t related to you in a distant fashion, then his great-grandfather and yours prayed at the same synagogue in the same shtetl in Lithuania. Or Poland. Or Romania. Tell people you’re from Canada, and they’ll recite lists of friends you might know—or their favorite kosher delis. If your face doesn’t light up with a flash of recognition at least once—well, that’s suspicious.
Having lived in Israel for a few years, I’d been through this sort of conversation many times before. So rather than have the truth flushed out of me, during one of my early interviews I confessed to a fellow named Maor that I’d converted.
I half expected to be bounced then and there. But Maor, a kindly old fellow, looked at me and said, “We already know about your conversion. And we make no distinction—you are as Jewish as any of us.” I remember being moved by his simple declaration of acceptance. It made up for the various small-minded Israelis I’d met who clearly thought otherwise.
Next, I had to undergo a polygraph exam—commonly (and inaccurately) known as a lie detector test.2 I was asked whether I was a mole working for a rival intelligence service, a criminal on the run, a drug user, or a homosexual. In each case, I truthfully said no.
Today, sexual orientation is no longer a subject of inquiry for Mossad recruits. In my day, however, being gay was seen as a negative because it was believed enemies could use it as a source of leverage against an officer. Thankfully, attitudes have changed—at least in countries such as Israel. (Homosexuality is still a capital offense in many less enlightened nations.)
Once I passed the tests, my training began. I was told to present myself with personal effects suitable for a two-night stay in Tel Aviv. The address turned out to be a well-appointed apartment, where I was met by a half-dozen men and women who looked me over with bemused detachment. After some basic introductions, their apparent leader, a tall, dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes named Halleck, told me to go into the next room and devise a cover story for both my identity and my reason for being in Israel. “Let your imagination go wild,” he told me. “The only rule is you can’t be Canadian. We want to make this challenging.”
After fifteen minutes or so, I came up with what I thought was a winner: I was a U.S.-based journalist doing a background story on Tel Aviv for the Los Angeles Times. Once I worked out the biographical details, I came out of the room quite pleased with myself, and presented my invented identity to Halleck and his colleagues.
Unbeknownst to me, this was a stock exercise in the intelligence business. I was being asked to create something that every covert intelligence operative must have: a bogus but believable cover story about who you are, where you come from, and what you’re doing. In intelligence parlance, this assumed identity is known as a legend. It sounds easy, but it’s not, as Halleck demonstrated to me in about thirty seconds.
“Nice to meet you, Fred Porter,” he said in a casual tone after I’d introduced myself. “Welcome to Israel. May I ask where you’re staying? The Hilton you say? Nice place. What’s your room number? I’d like to call you later in the day.”
After I stammered who knows what unconvincing nonsense, he went to work on the rest of my cover story. “You sound disoriented,” he said. “Why don’t we call up your editor in L.A. I bet he’s worried. You must know the number off the top of your head, right? What’s that? You don’t know your own area code?”
I felt the eyes of Halleck’s entourage on me, but they didn’t interrupt the conversation. I was unnerved, and I couldn’t help but feel that I was failing an audition of sorts—a kind of American Idol for spies, if you will—and at that particular moment, I was warbling hideously. After enduring some constructive criticism, I was sent back into the next room with my tail between my legs. Creating a convincing story is not the hard part, I realized. The challenge was in concocting a convincing story that was also virtually impossible to check out.
It took me several tries, but I eventually hit on something that held up under Halleck’s preliminary probing. I was still a journalist, but for a small Christian community college with a generic-sounding name (this was the era before Google, remember). I was staying at a youth hostel. No, I couldn’t remember its name and there are hundreds in Israel. And I’d checked out that morning anyway. Once my identity and raison d’être had been established, I was bundled into a van with Halleck and some of his retinue, and we drove into the epicenter of a bustling Tel Aviv afternoon.
There is a scene in the film Spy Game in which Robert Redford, the old CIA hand, takes his protégé, Brad Pitt, onto the streets of Berlin and runs him around to test his smarts. This was more or less what I was doing. I had to appear on a randomly chosen apartment balcony after convincing the tenant to allow me access; get the first three names from a hotel register; start a conversation with a complete stranger and hold his attention for twenty minutes; put a device in a public phone mouthpiece in the heart of the Hilton Hotel lobby without being noticed; and a whole host of other odd but challenging tasks.
In each case, I had to rely not only on an invented identity—my legend, or “status cover”—but also on what I later learned to refer to as my operational cover, that is, my fictional motive for being in a particular place and doing a particular thing at a particular time. A legend stays with you for years, but an operational cover is often invented on the spot.
One thing they don’t show you in the spy movies: what the agents do at night. No, I’m not referring to bedding beautiful women with names like Plenty O’Toole and Pussy Galore. When the sun goes down, spies morph into paper-pushing bureaucrats. (I suppose that Canadian government job was good for something.) There is a saying in the Mossad: “If you complete a mission and don’t report it, the mission never happened.” I was instructed to write reports about all of my activities during the day in any format I saw fit (this being 1988, I recorded everything in longhand). By the time my head hit the pillow, I was exhausted.
As I performed my various tasks over the next couple of days, Halleck and his colleagues sat in cafés and watched me. On the odd occasion, one of them would ask me why I did what I did, and I’d try to explain my thought process. These were not puzzles that had any correct answer. Rather, the idea was to test my judgment and ability to improvise. There was no going back to the office and thinking about it. I had to solve problems then and there.
In some cases, the tasks seemed plain impossible. But more often than not, I surprised myself. Hotel staff, I knew, would not make a guest registry available to just anyone who asked. So I simply told the desk clerk that I had the camera of one of their guests, and that the young lady had given me her last name but I had forgotten it. “Look,” I said in a pleading tone, “it’s a very expensive camera and I’d like to return it to her . . . and truth be told, I really like her and would like to see her again . . .”
I found that, with a good story and a hint of personal disclosure, most people will try to meet you halfway—say, turning the registry in your direction so you can scan it, without actually handing it to you. In other cases, where accomplishing the task just wasn’t in the cards, I had to realize as much and back off rather than force matters and cause a security problem. The adage that smart agents live to fight another day is an important principle in intelligence work.
The tests varied, but they all had the same goal: to see how far I could be pushed before I broke cover. In the spy business, I was gradually learning, you simply never break cover. A spy’s cover is the most important weapon in his or her professional arsenal. These tests don’t have a high pass rate because many promising candidates break cover at the first hint of a threat. It’s a natural response: reverting to your true self feels like a safe move. It’s an instinctive way of saying “I’m not playing anymore.” Those who can resist are highly valued by intelligence services.
I don’t know what it says about me—that I’m a good liar or a decent actor, or that I just don’t like to fail a test—but I never broke cover. After two days, Halleck and the anonymous ringleaders who’d been putting me through my paces told me I’d passed. No, I was not a Mossad officer yet—nowhere near, in fact. But I’d made it past the first big hurdle. They told me to go home. They’d call me when the next stage was set to begin.
It was now spring of 1988, and I admired the wildflowers growing in the Jezreel Valley as I rode the bus home to my wife and
son. I had been away for longer than usual this time, and was glad to be back in the warm embrace of family. We had dinner together, and then Dahlia and I had a serious talk. I described a little of what I’d been through, and where I thought it was all leading. I was still riding the wave of pride that came from making the grade in Tel Aviv. But she was worried, and she told me so.
My mood changed quickly. Until now, I hadn’t seriously considered the rather obvious fact that Dahlia wouldn’t be thrilled about the prospect of my taking on a dangerous profession. She also reminded me that since we’d been married, we’d spent little time under the same roof. This training would keep me away from my family for months more. And if I got through, then what? Possibly a career that would make me an absentee husband permanently. Our child was then four years old. Did I want him to grow up without a full-time daddy?
Over hours of kitchen-table conversations with Dahlia, I decided that family life was more important than whatever awaited me in Tel Aviv. The next day, I called the Office. I couldn’t reach my handlers, but spoke to a secretary and left a message: “Can you please let them know that I’ve thought things over, and would like to quit? Thanks.” Then I hung up, feeling comfortable with my decision.
It was back to the cotton fields for me. I quickly fell back into a life that couldn’t have been more remote from the world I’d briefly tasted. I was out in the countryside, wearing nothing but shorts and sandals. I swam in the pool with my son and had barbecues with my buddies. Just an average Israeli kibbutznik.
I was not the first recruit to get cold feet. The Mossad, I now know, has established procedures for dealing with such situations. A few days after I’d come back to the kibbutz, one of the recruiters phoned and invited himself up for a chat. To be polite, I acquiesced. He would have his say, I expected. All I’d have to do was hear him out and then let him know my decision was final.