Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thrillers) Page 4

  “Why such an urgent request for relocation? Why now?” I asked the inevitable question. An asset the caliber of Madani is almost always more valuable while on location. Once he’s removed from his home turf and debriefed, and any remaining information is squeezed out of him, his intelligence value becomes zilch. His information is nothing but shopworn goods. In the Mossad, the term we used to describe thorough debriefing was peeling him like an onion.

  Eric answered, “He’s reported that he’s been under heavy surveillance by VEVAK and could likely be arrested within a short time. He doesn’t know whether the chatter around him relates to his contacts with us, but he’s scared.”

  “Iran hangs spies in public,” Benny said. “Sometimes they hoist them up with a crane with a noose around their neck.” The room went silent for a moment.

  “We think,” Eric said, “that the increased security scrutiny by VEVAK most likely resulted from the sudden deaths and unexplained ‘accidents’ in strategic locations and against key nuclear scientists—both those that have already happened, and those that just could happen very soon. We simply can’t allow him to stay in Iran any longer. If we abandon him, nobody would ever work for us. Period.”

  Those that could happen soon? What? I found Eric’s premonition funny, but I didn’t laugh. I tensed up.

  “Got you,” I said. “What’s my role in this operation?”

  “You’ll run the extrication operation on location.”

  I felt proud. Benny noticed it. “In the Chameleon Conspiracy operation, you successfully infiltrated Iran, identified a potential defector, and managed to leave alive—all of which made Eric put you on board and at the helm on location. We supported that decision.”

  I nodded in thanks, remembering the chase of the evasive Chameleon and his conspiracies throughout Iran, Pakistan, and Australia.

  “Where do I sign?” I asked.

  “Read this.” Eric gave me a thick blue folder with the CIA’s golden emblem embossed on the top. I opened it. Inside were approximately one hundred pages of intelligence reports and a faded photo of a man with a thick mustache. He looked to be around fifty, with a roundish face and hard eyes—hard even through the faded photo.

  “This folder doesn’t leave this room,” said Eric. “That put you on the bigot list, a short list of people privy to that information. You can take notes, but the notes stay here as well.” Eric and Paul got up to leave. “We’ll be in the adjoining office if you need us,” said Paul as he stepped out, “I’ll see you in the afternoon. Lunch will be brought in an hour.”

  Eric didn’t bother to say anything. He just scowled and left.

  IV

  October 2006, Washington, DC

  I poured myself a cup of water from the cooler and read through the folder labeled Tango Defection. Tango’s access to real-time intelligence on Iran’s progress in developing nuclear arms and sponsorship of terrorism made him invaluable. His fear of being captured created a real dilemma—pulling him out to save his life and getting our last bit of intel when he’s debriefed in Langley versus leaving him there, hoping that the chatter he noticed around him was just cicadas, not VEVAK agents closing in on him.

  Madani would be an incredibly valuable asset to lose. And Iranian assets were hard to come by. Very hard.

  The most important part of the Tango folder was the section dealing with the strategic timetable. It gave a new meaning to the word urgent. According to the brief, the world would have little time to stop the Iranians before it would be too late. Your arsenal of strategies against a rogue state armed with nuclear weapons is ill-stocked if not empty. The year 2015 could mark the turning point—by then, Iran was expected to have nuclear weapons that would deter any potential attackers, as well as the means to deliver them. Iran would deploy the Russian-made air defense system S-300PMU2, serving as an advanced Ballistic Missile Defense in addition to an advanced SAM air-defense system. The Iranian Navy would be able to threaten commercial shipping and military naval forces in the Arabian Gulf, and stop oil tankers passing through the Straits of Hormuz.

  By 2012 or 2013, Iran would also have accurate short, medium, and long-range ballistic missiles, which could carry nuclear warheads and reach Europe and the US Eastern Seaboard. Finally, Iran will increase its support to its proxy terrorist groups to launch attacks against American interests and allies anywhere.

  Urgent? Maybe the terms critical and burning would be more appropriate.

  Eric returned to the office with Benny. “Have you read it?”

  I nodded. “What’s my specific role?”

  “You’ll be the person to meet Madani face-to-face in a crossing point on the Iranian-Armenian border, identify him, and escort him to safety. A seven-man unit will be around you as backup and security. You’re leaving tomorrow for a week of training in Ramstein, Germany, and then a few more days in another location in Germany where you’ll also get the final operational instructions.”

  We spent the next seven hours reviewing the master plan.

  “Any more questions?” asked Benny.

  I had plenty, but I kept my big mouth shut for once. I was certain that they would be answered during the final instruction session in Germany. I’ve been through the process before. Almost nothing is left for self-initiative. In the Mossad operations, on the other hand, there was always room for improvisation as conditions in the field changed. It was where Israeli operatives excel—and sometimes fail.

  Paul McGregor gave me a travel folder. “At Frankfurt airport, an Agency representative will give you a duffel bag with a US Army uniform and documentation. Change into the uniform and travel by train to Ramstein Air Base. There are travel vouchers in the folder.”

  Ramstein Air Base, in the rural district of Kaiserslautern, Germany, was the headquarters for the US Air Forces in Europe and a NATO installation.

  “Bear in mind that besides Americans, the base also includes Canadian, German, British, French, Belgian, Polish, Czech, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch personnel. Only if asked, say that you are a part of a US Army teachers’ team that travels to US bases outside the United States to teach Civics. See further details in your travel folder. Use that cover story only if you can’t shake the person talking to you in any other manner, polite or impolite.

  “And”—he looked me in the eye—“stay out of trouble.”

  Dozing off on the plane, I was in awe at how the Mossad had been able to recruit Tango. I recalled how Alex, my Mossad Academy instructor, taught us the art of identifying and cultivating a defector. “Think of MICE,” he said. “Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego.” He looked intently at our cadet class with his watery blue eyes, and added, “Motivating an asset to defect is a huge leap forward, even when compared with turning a person into an intelligence asset. Pushing a person to defect means uprooting him from his country, language, culture, friends, and sometimes even from his family. Above all, he will have to live in fear for the rest of his life that his old compatriots would find him, and—”

  He moved his hand across his throat.

  This was a different case, however. There was no need to motivate Tango to defect. It was his own decision. Nonetheless, the mere fact that the Mossad, and later the CIA, were able to recruit him was a considerable achievement. I was hoping not to screw things up and compromise the very end of this case—bringing him to freedom.

  I could picture Alex at his lectern, in his glasses, always rubbing the fabric of his aged tweed jacket:

  Forget the stories about kidnapping the enemy’s top generals. We cannot afford Soviet Cold War practices, and besides, that could backfire and force the enemy country to retaliate in kind. Very recently, we successfully completed Operation Diamond. Munir Radfa, an Iraqi pilot, defected to Israel with his MiG-21 fighter jet, the pride of the Soviet aircraft industry. Up to now, no country outside the Soviet Bloc could closely inspect a MiG-21. After the Israeli Air Force completes the review of the aircraft’s capabilities and drawbacks, the MiG-21 will be sen
t to the US.

  Indeed, shortly after Alex’s presentation, that defection made the headlines. Few people outside the intelligence community know that these defections rarely end well for the defector. Their home countries don’t forget, and definitely don’t forgive. An Iranian pilot who defected with his missile-armed plane to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s was traced by Iranian agents to Europe and was killed. Captain Mahmood Abbas Hilmi, an Egyptian pilot who defected with his plane to Israel, was located by Egyptian agents in Buenos Aires, Argentina, six months after he left Israel, and was killed.

  Alex trained us in how to collect nuggets of information, or to sniff out a potential asset for recruitment. He concentrated first on the rules of recruiting, cultivating, coaching, motivating, and finally going in for the kill—motivating the asset to work for you as an informer, or to defect, or both. Decades later, true to the saying “Difficult during training, easier at combat,” I remember the rules vividly. Most intelligence services maintain special sections tasked with identifying potential assets or defectors within an enemy’s ranks. Spotters survey enemy ranks for a weak link—people who were passed over for a promotion, or those with personal or financial troubles. A spotter is like a vulture on a treetop waiting for a sick or weak animal to lose its ability to defend itself. Once a suitable location is identified, an approach plan is devised. This is a very complex and detail-rich scheme of deceit.

  The recruiter’s “legend”—his cover story that enables the contact with the target—must be carefully crafted. Obviously, the recruiter’s identity can be anything but that of an intelligence operative, unless of course he has a death wish or aspires to dine on local prison food for the indefinite future.

  A team of psychologists and intelligence experts analyzes the potential asset’s background to create a suitable legend. Who should approach the target? A male or a female? Young or old? Where will the contact be made? Under what pretext would the recruiter initiate the first conversation? What to do if the target recoils and refuses any cold turkey contact, or luckily appears to be open to the dynamics of the contact? How would the relationship continue, and for how long? When will the target become a real asset—that is, shift from being a valuable person within an enemy’s ranks, to becoming a spy or a defector?

  According to Alex, motivating an asset to defect is always a serious consideration for the recruiting intelligence service. What would serve its interests best? Leaving the asset in place as a spy, or extricating him to debrief him thoroughly? But what do you do with him once the information he has is squeezed out? Maybe engage him as an instructor for intelligence combatants intending to infiltrate the asset’s former country? Would he qualify? Would he risk the combatants if he returns?

  Alex used to lean on his lectern, and say in his English-accented Hebrew, “Listen to me, don’t take notes; we’ll rehearse all this in the field so many times that it’ll be engraved in your minds.”

  And indeed it is. Alex’s first rule of recruiting: “Be careful.” I listened to him from the front row:

  Did I already say careful? I mean extremely careful. Any potential asset who you think is ready for the move could betray you when you least expect it. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. In the intelligence business in general, and in recruiting in particular, there are no morals, no ethics, no sentiments, no friendships—only interests. That means you can’t trust anyone. Therefore, all recruiting attempts should be made outside the target’s country. If you try recruiting a target in his home country, you never know who he’ll be bringing to the next meeting—it could be half of his country’s counterintelligence agents to make your life miserable for years, not to mention that they may be scoping a potential target for their own recruitment. Therefore, Rule Number Two is: ‘If at all possible, approach a potential asset when he is out of his home country.’

  With that wisdom in mind, it was clear to me why international conventions attended by scientists, government officials, or anyone with access to national security secrets are recruiters’ favorite safaris. In these circumstances, the approach can be especially well disguised, with the spotter or the recruiter actually participating in the convention as a bona fide professional. A nuclear scientist won’t be nearly as suspicious if he’s approached during a convention by another scientist wearing the convention’s ID tag.

  “I’ve read your recent work, and I’m really fascinated by your findings” could be an opening line. A little brown-nosing never hurt anyone. Then comes more talk about the “findings,” maybe a few drinks at the bar. You exchange business cards and depart as friends. Then you send him a short courtesy letter with a benign question: “On page one hundred twenty-three of your article you said that…could you elaborate a bit?” When an answer comes—and it always comes because scientists love talking about their papers—you thank him, suggesting you’d like to return the favor regarding his “articles” and asking whether he’ll go to the next convention.

  Once you meet again, you’re already good friends. You suggest jointly authoring an article to be published in a top peer-reviewed scientific magazine. You say, “The editor was my brother’s classmate. It doesn’t mean that he’ll publish an article not fit for print, but with so much congestion on his desk, it might put ours on the top of the pile waiting for peer review.”

  And so on.

  In a class of twelve cadets in the Operational Course at the Mossad, only three were sent to international conventions to try out recruiting techniques. The rest were told that budgetary constraints prevented their going. Luckily, I was chosen to go—not as a scientist, since I was too young to pass as one, but as the son of a fifty-six-year-old microbiology professor who attended a convention called “An Annual Update in Allergy and Autoimmune Diseases” in Joao, Paraiba, one of the oldest cities in Brazil. The hotel was constructed as a circle; each room had either a view of the internal gardens, or of the beach. The sand was bone-white and stretched as far as the eye could see. My window faced the beach. During my entire time there, I saw absolutely no one on it. This was a convention of serious scientists who, it seemed, preferred the semi-dark interior of the hotel’s lecture halls.

  My legend for this convention described me as a sociology major at UCLA, joining my Canadian mother who was attending the convention. Professor Janice Webber, my “mother,” was a tall, willowy woman who kept her hair back in a bun. She could have been an aging model, but she wasn’t. She was the real thing, a genuine scientist who didn’t ask too many questions when her close friend, a Mossad confidant, asked her to allow me to pose as her son: “He’s doing research on interactions among strangers during short-term multinational conventions, and how social barriers are removed. He couldn’t ask the organizers to enroll because he doesn’t qualify as a natural sciences researcher, and couldn’t reveal he was doing research, fearing that any disclosure could tilt the results.”

  To this day, I don’t know if Janice bought the story, although she had no reason to suspect any ulterior motive. Once, she looked at me with probing eyes and asked me about my research methods. Luckily, I was fresh out of the Tel Aviv University Political Science faculty. One of the most hated classes there was Research Methods. But now it came to my aid.

  Now: Whom do you recruit in a scientific convention when you are not a scientist, but a man in his late twenties posing as a student who came to meet his mother? The answer: recruit a young man or a woman in a similar situation.

  During breakfast, I carefully viewed the tables to see if there were any young men or women who were too young to be university professors. There were three tables with such individuals. I passed by their tables and identified the name tag of a young woman sitting next to an elderly man. Their last names were identical. She must be his daughter, I assumed. She was rather plain, blonde with a Russian name, and stout in that way some Russian women seem to get, though the process had started early with her. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

 
; I later examined the list of the convention participants and saw the man’s name, Professor Igor Malshenkov from Ukraine. The woman, Anya Malshenkova, was not on the list. OK, I said to myself, Russia and Ukraine share a border, so maybe she was Russian after all, as if it mattered. During lunch, I found an excuse to approach and befriend her. She was happy to talk to me, and soon we were walking in the hotel’s gardens, walking and talking. I told her what I knew about “my mother’s” research and then asked her about the area of expertise of her father.

  “Father?” she giggled. “Igor is my husband.”

  When she saw my embarrassment, she smiled and said, “Never mind, many people make that mistake. I was his student and we got married.” We stopped at the pool bar; she ordered a drink I didn’t catch the name of, but it was blue and came with a shish kebab of tropical fruits. I ordered soda water. I never drink alcohol while on assignment unless it is part of the role I’m playing.

  It became clear why she was happy to talk to me: She was deeply bored. She made vague allusions to the “difficulties” that come with having a much older husband. She said she’d relinquished her studies to keep house, and was trying to give him a child. We ended up back in their hotel room, “to have coffee,” as she suggested. When she excused herself to the bathroom, I used the opportunity to take photos of documents that were on the coffee table. This was my proof to Alex and my other instructors that I could obtain documents from a scientist. I had no idea what I was copying; the documents were handwritten in Cyrillic. Anya came out from the bathroom wrapped barely in a towel. She sat next to me and said, “To be around my own age, very nice,” with that guttural Russian accent. Her voice was low, and I could smell rum.

  I quickly told her I had to meet my mother for dinner, and slipped out. There was a limit to the things I was willing to do for my country during training—and having sex with an unattractive married woman wasn’t one of them, particularly when I already had what I really wanted, which was copies of documents.