His audience’s disgruntlement merely served to infuriate him. Zimmer, who knew exactly what was about to happen, jumped up on the stage and tried to have Cornfield finish his speech, but Cornfield didn’t even notice him. He surveyed the lecture hall with a baleful gaze, leaned back on the podium and said with characteristic bluntness: “Gentlemen, it’s time for you to get your thumbs out of your asses and pull yourselves together.”
“You’re not in boot camp here; you need to show us a little respect!” A voice was heard from one of the front rows and Cornfield, half blind, was unable to recognize the speaker again. He took a mental note to ask Zimmer to identify those who had spoken against him. Dissent among the employees grew, and they gradually rose to their feet and left the lecture hall. Cornfield, who was used to absolute obedience from his underlings, was shocked by their behavior.
“Just a minute!” he shouted at the emptying lecture hall. “Don’t leave yet. I’d like to introduce you to the most decorated major general in IDF history, Mot’ke Hassin, the man who served as the commander of the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit and the head of General Staff. He will help me undertake the necessary organizational changes in Mossad and bring back some fighting spirit to this office. It is my intention to appoint him as Deputy Director and head of the Special Operations Division.”
In the front row, the row intended for department heads, Arik sat by himself. He felt so frustrated that he couldn’t even bring himself to get up and leave. The appointment of Major General Mot’ke “Steak Face” Hassin was a terrible blow for Arik. He absolutely detested Mot’ke. Now, that terrible man was about to be his new superior.
Cornfield’s eye singled out Arik’s face. “Bar-Nathan,” he called him, “get up and come with me to my office. I need to talk to you right now.”
Chapter 13
Mossad Director’s Office—Much Ado About Nothing
Cornfield examined Arik who was looking at the photo of the Warsaw Ghetto child. “Powerful image, isn’t it?”
Arik couldn’t help himself. “Were you, yourself, in the ghetto?”
“Were you?” Cornfield fired back.
“All my life,” replied Arik.
Cornfield was surprised by his answer and hurried to change the subject. “Let’s begin. I want some explanations about the mess you’ve been causing throughout the country. First, there was a fire right here next to Mossad Headquarters. We’re still unsure about who started it. Maybe it was you. Then there was an accident next to the President’s House, in which all parties involved disappeared, leaving you the only one on the road. You don’t miss out on any strategic site, do you? What’s next? A mess right next to the Dimona nuclear reactor?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Look,” an evil gaze and a sly smile stretched the corners of Cornfield’s lips, “we all know you screw anyone who has two legs and a pair of tits. Do I really need to spell it out for you?”
“Yes, you do,” Arik said coolly.
“Just try to think, which of the ones you screwed lately has a jealous husband?”
Arik smiled.
“That’s not funny!” Cornfield rumbled.
Arik thought it was very funny and even ironic. The one husband who really fit the profile was Cornfield himself, Amira’s husband.
“And what’s worse, your adventures made that dork, Doctor Alex-something, think someone is trying to hunt down our division heads. That’s why I was urgently called back in the middle of a vacation in Sicily. First time after years that I get a chance to spend some quiet time with my wife…”
It’s about time, Arik thought and smiled again.
“What’s so funny? Stop smiling all the time!” Sparks of anger rose in Cornfield’s single eye. “Start explaining. What in God’s name is going on here?”
“Director, sir, there’s no jealous husband. Alex received information from a confirmed source that a Chechen assassin is roaming the country with the intention of killing the person responsible for the murder of his father and the injury of his brother during an operation we conducted in the borders of Argentine, Brazil and Paraguay. As the head of the Caesarea Division, I am his number one target, and Fischer suggested that I be assigned a bodyguard.”
“I didn’t agree to that,” Cornfield hissed.
“You’ll be surprised. Neither did I. And yet…”
“And yet what?”
“I can’t prove anything, of course, but I have a feeling someone was there during the last assassination attempt. Someone saved my life.”
“An angel?” Cornfield mocked him.
“Something like that. An angel with a big car. A female angel, actually.”
“You see? She found out about her husband’s plan to kill you and tried to prevent it. She must love you very much. Think hard, there must be one husband who’d be willing to—”
“I suggest we stop right here,” Arik interrupted him. “If you don’t trust Alex’s sources, either fire him or seek verification from other sources.”
“Are you crazy? You want me to risk other agents and send them to collect nonexistent information? Then pay more staff workers to analyze it and Alex to write an unfounded report? Let me tell you something.” Cornfield went around the table and stood in front of Arik. Arik, a full head shorter than Cornfield, could feel the breath of his new boss as if his face.
“Alex is going to go home real soon. I’m going to keep two, maybe three departments from his entire division open. The Soviet Union is gone, so I don’t need any Russian Bolshevik bullshit here. I won’t have any Potemkin villages built on my shift.”
“Alex is really not like that—”
“Forget about him now. It’s more important that we talk about your division,” Cornfield examined the paperwork on his desk, which had rows and data highlighted with a yellow marker. “I’d like to know why your division headcount has risen by forty-seven percent in the past three years. I’d like to know how many of your men are soldiers and how many are actually out in the field.”
“Is this now a work meeting?” Arik asked.
Cornfield replied by waving his hand dismissively, and Arik gave up and cooperated. “The increase in manpower was necessary,” he said, speaking slowly, like a therapist explaining something to his patient. “The world’s changing, and the classic definitions differentiating field men and office employees have changed with it. A large part of the operations we conduct have to do with cyber warfare and financial threats.”
Cornfield snorted with contempt. “I’ve run operations. Major coordinated operations that involved commando and ground troops. I can’t be fooled by your bullshit. I still don’t understand why you needed to add hundreds of pen pushers to your roster.”
“Sir, you commanded a special forces unit about thirty years ago, right?” Arik prepared a counter-blow. “The only unit you consider to be a fighting unit in Mossad is the Kidon Task Force, which is a part of my division, right?”
Cornfield approved with a nod and waited.
“Well, with all due respect, the Kidon is the not the sharpest pencil in the box under my command. Nowadays, people sitting in air-conditioned rooms in front of plasma screens can cause much more strategic damage to an enemy state than an entire tank division.”
Cornfield’s expression demonstrated his doubt and distrust.
Arik smiled. “Let me tell you about our Cyber Warfare unit, which we call by the codename ‘Digital Fortress.’ It is headed by Dr. Maayan Dermer, a former mathematician for the Weizmann Institute, specializing in cryptography. This is a unit we’ve labored very hard to prepare by stealing top high-tech personnel and approving the payment of high salaries. If we pay them a crummy government salary, they wouldn’t stay here a single day. These people are using a mouse and a keyboard as weapons rather than guns and tanks. Currently, they are planning, in cooperation with the NSA, a cyber-attack against strategic centers in Iran and Syria using Stuxnet worms and Flame worms we’ve developed here
. They’ve managed to program the worms into the assembly lines of Taiwanese computer manufacturers. Unknowingly, the computer manufacturers we’ve infiltrated sold such worm-infested computers to the Iranian companies.”
“What are these worms?” asked Cornfield.
“A type of malware,” Arik explained patiently. “In order to create them, you need a lot of knowledge and creative thinking. Let me give you an example. We’ve developed a system that allows us to infiltrate the enemy’s encrypted communication systems. Our system sees the enemy’s radar sensors and allows us to take them over. If any of our planes infiltrate enemy airspace, our men here can simply reprogram their radar system to monitor unrelated areas, far from our airplanes. The enemy won’t even know its systems were compromised, so everything is in order, as far as they are concerned.”
“And this was all developed by your cyber people?” said Cornfield with disbelief.
“This system is so new and original that we needed to draft young hackers, some of them sociopaths with criminal records, teenagers who hacked into the computers of large companies. We even have two employees on the autism spectrum with Asperger’s Syndrome.”
Cornfield erupted. “You mean to tell me you’re paying such high salaries to criminals and retards?”
“These ‘criminals and retards’ can attack and delay the systems in charge of developing nuclear weapons while significantly damaging the enemy’s centrifuges and nuclear reactors. They are able to harm command and control centers of enemy countries, such as major power stations and other strategic facilities, and they are able to take over vehicle navigational computer systems and cause a multi-vehicle accident on a major highway.”
“And this is all called ‘cyber,’ right?” asked Cornfield, trying to hide the fact that he had never been exposed to the world of Internet and computers.
“Sort of. ‘Cyber’ is a term referring to the entire cybernetic space. Six billion interconnected devices worldwide.”
Cornfield didn’t know anything about computers and actually hated technology. He believed in field soldiers, tanks, and cannons. He had some vague knowledge about the abilities of sophisticated fighter jets, submarine or battleships, but regarded all the rest as a type of computer game. “All right, so let’s suppose for a minute, we need the cyber criminals like we need collaborators. What about the office employees not working with computers?”
“That’s the unit I take most pride in. The Backdoor Unit, which specializes in economic warfare against terrorism, is headed by Mrs. Sarah Haji-Yaakob, a brilliant economist with a PhD, a Harvard Law School graduate. We snatched her from the corridors of the New York Deutsche Bank’s research department. All the people in her department are economy and finance experts. Some are veterans of local and international banks, specializing in clearing systems. They were able to achieve some great results. Our ‘finint’—financial intelligence department—has recently sent the CIA’s financial department a list containing information about financial assets belonging to Iranian, Libyan and Syrian heads of state. The Americans suspect those men of committing war crimes and financing terror organizations. Since they cannot be taken out of their countries, the American president has decided to punish them in a different way and issued a presidential decree freezing their assets in American banks. He was able to do it thanks to the information we’ve provided.”
Cornfield finally smiled. Victory was something he could always appreciate.
Arik cheered up. “Sir, nowadays, the smart way to go is to allow all of our various divisions and departments to work in harmony and cooperation. That way, every bit of information that comes in from the intelligence-gathering department is immediately classified by automatic computers, analysts, distributed by distribution algorithm and keyword tools and immediately brought to the attention of all field and office departments. We also have excellent cooperation with the Military Intelligence Directorate, Israel Secret Service, police, and all the national security and intelligence agencies in Europe and all United States agencies. All this information is filtered by Dr. Alex Abramovich, head of the Intelligence and Research Division and goes into a database called The ‘Pool’, which accumulates all the information. Access to this database is determined according to the security clearance and position of the asking party. Dr. Abramovich received the Israel Defense Prize for initiating this project.”
A thin and focused smile rose on Cornfield’s face. “What I still don’t get, is why all these departments need to be in your division of all places? Why not transfer the financial warfare department to the National Security Advisor’s department and the cyber unit to the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 8200, which is responsible for collecting signal intelligence and code decryption?”
Arik was beginning to lose his patience. “Look, Cornfield,” he said angrily. “These are all operational divisions. Our vast advantage lies in the painstaking work invested by the people that preceded us and created The Pool. It served as the foundation upon which we’ve been able to build layer upon layer of knowledge. Such a collection of information can be created only in a place in which a flow of information is constantly collected and analyzed in perfect coordination. If you separate departments and divisions, a lot of information will simply slip through the cracks due to a lack of proper perspective.”
Cornfield’s face demonstrated his doubt.
“You must have heard about 9/11, the collapse of the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center two years ago and the attack on the Pentagon,” Arik said fervently. “Did you know that the CIA had concrete advance intelligence about the terrorist attack but did not share it with the FBI, which, in turn, was following those same Saudi students who carried out the attacks? This all happened because the organizations weren’t working in coordination and were busy fighting various battles of ego,” Arik concluded
“I’ve already heard all that from David Fischer.” Cornfield spat the name of his predecessor as if it were a curse. “So what is Kidon doing in the meanwhile? Playing computer games?”
Arik did the best he could to maintain a relaxed expression. “Kidon is doing what it does best, and you know exactly what I mean. But it can’t operate in a vacuum. I send the agents of Kidon to carry out assassinations with surgical precision only when I have a reliable and clear picture of the situation in the field based on solid intelligence. Without proper intelligence we might end up leaving a trail of dead soldiers behind us.”
A low beeping sound rose from the telephone lying on the new wooden desk. Cornfield pressed a button, and the door of the room opened. Shlomo Zimmer, the new bureau chief came in and placed a note on the table between the thick arms of Cornfield, who glanced at it and said, “All right.”
Zimmer saw it as a sign for him to leave. After Zimmer had left, Cornfield swayed back and forth on his large chair, pensive. A minute or two later, he said, “As you probably heard in the lecture I gave regarding my vision of the organization’s future, I’ve asked Major General Hassin to join us and serve as Deputy Director. He will take care of all operational activities and initiate an all-encompassing organizational change. Anything that doesn’t belong to the core of Mossad—to its DNA, as I see it—will need to go. And I say that with all due respect to your geniuses from The Pool.”
“What about Gideon Perry, the current deputy director?”
“He asked to retire, and I approved. He wants to talk to the prime minister. I agreed to that as well. I hope you know it won’t really help, right?” Cornfield laughed. “The prime minister wants the same thing I do: to instill some order here after too many years of David Fischer.”
“Sir,” Arik spoke in a formal tone again, “with all due respect, I don’t like this aggressive approach and the way you look down on everything that had taken place before your appointment. Perhaps it’s time for me to ask for an early retirement as well. All my army friends retired when they were forty five.”
“And who’s going to protect you from the
crazed husband that wants to kill you?” Cornfield shouted, holding the note he’d received and waving it about. “When you got here, I asked our redheaded security officer to carefully check your SUV, just in case someone placed a bomb to blow you up within the complex. Would you like to hear what he found?”
Arik waited.
“A satellite tracking device, attached to the inner side of your fuel tank. A place that’s normally left unchecked. They smeared it with black grease, just to be on the safe side. That husband sure wants to know where you’re having a good time with his wife.”
The conversation had become too tiresome for Arik. “Like I already said, I’m resigning my post,” he insisted. “I’ll place my official discharge request with your secretary first thing tomorrow.”
“Don’t make a scene here. I’m not going to beg you to stay.”
Arik approved with a nod.
“But I need you here!” Cornfield surprised him with a shout. “Israel needs you here!”
Arik tilted his head back. All the tension, the resentment he felt toward Cornfield, the fear he felt about the possible ruin of the amazing organization he had inherited and cultivated, they all burst out of him in the form of a bitter fit of laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“You haven’t changed. All those years have passed, yet you, like some sort of withered tree, stayed the same old Ben-Ami Cornfield. ‘The Butcher’ who believes acting like a bully and using force can solve just about anything. And now, you’re bringing Steak Face Mot’ke to back you up.”
“I won’t allow you to call him that!” Cornfield raged. “The man lost his face and hands for the sake of this country, and I won’t have him ridiculed.” He stood up and turned his back on Arik, looking through the window at the vehicles passing down the coastal highway. When he finally turned around, the anger was gone from his voice. “Give Mot’ke Hassin a chance. He’s a good man.”
“He’s a mad dog. I’ve seen him slaughter collaborators he no longer deemed necessary with his own hands. I’ve also heard everything about his misdeeds in the previous roles he’d filled. I don’t want to serve in a Mossad he is a part of. I don’t even want to be in the same room with him.”
To Kill a Shadow Page 8