Page 54

One name checked out: a young Jewish Chilean diplomat called Alfonso Benz Moncada. He was not a trained agent, but he was a sayan and therefore presumably was prepared to be helpful.

One by one Jericho’s tips came true. The checking process revealed that the Army divisions he had said would be moved were mewed; the promotions he foretold duly happened, and the dismissals took place.

“Either Saddam himself is behind this farrago, or Jericho is betraying his country from asshole to elbow,”

was Kobi Dror’s judgment.

David Sharon sent a third letter, also innocently couched. For his second and third missives, the professor had not been needed. The third letter referred to an order by the Baghdad-based client for some very delicate glassware and porcelain. Clearly, said David, a little more patience was needed so that a means of transshipment could be devised that would guarantee the cargoes from accidental disaster.

A Spanish-speaking katsa already based in South America was sent pronto to Santiago and persuaded the parents of Señor Benz to urge their son home immediately on compassionate leave because his mother was seriously ill. It was the father who telephoned his son in Baghdad. The worried son applied for and at once got three weeks’ compassionate leave and flew back to Chile.

He was met not by a sick mother but by an entire team of Mossad training officers who begged him to accede to their request. He discussed the matter with his parents and agreed. The emotional pull of the needs of the Land of Israel, which none of them had ever seen, was strong.

Another sayan in Santiago, without knowing why, lent his summer villa, set in a walled garden outside the city near the sea, and the training team went to work.

It takes two years to train a katsa to run a deep-cover agent in hostile terrain, and that is the minimum.

The team had three weeks. They worked sixteen-hour days. They taught the thirty-year-old Chilean secret writing and basic codes, miniature photography and the reduction of photographs to microdots.

They took him out on the streets and taught him how to spot a tail. They warned him never to shake a tail, except in an absolute emergency, if carrying deeply incriminating material. They told him that if he even thought he was being followed to abort the rendezvous or the pickup and try again later.

They showed him how to use combustible chemicals stored in a false fountain pen to destroy incriminating evidence in seconds while hiding in any men’s restroom or just around a corner.

They took him out in cars to show him how to spot a car tail, one acting as instructor and the rest of the team as the “hostiles.” They taught him until his ears rang and his eyes ached and he begged for sleep.

Then they taught him about dead-letter boxes or drops—secret compartments where a message may be left or another collected. They showed him how to create one from a recess behind a loose brick in a wall, or under a tombstone, in a crevice in an old tree, or beneath a flagstone.

After three weeks, Alfonso Benz Moncada bade good-bye to his tearful parents and flew back to Baghdad via London. The senior instructor leaned back in his chair at the villa, passed an exhausted hand over his forehead, and told the team:

“If that bugger stays alive and free, I’ll make the pilgrimage to Mecca.”

The team laughed; their leader was a deeply Orthodox Jew. All the time they were teaching Moncada, none of them had known what he was going to do back in Baghdad. It was not their job to know.

Neither did the Chilean.

It was during the stopover in London that he was taken to the Heathrow Penta Hotel. There he met Sami Gershon and David Sharon, and they told him.

“Don’t try and identify him,” Gershon warned the young man. “Leave that to us. Just establish the drops and service them. We’ll send you the lists of things we want answered. You won’t understand them—they’ll be in Arabic. We don’t think Jericho speaks much English, if at all. Don’t ever try to translate what we send you. Just put it in one of the you-to-him drops and make the appropriate chalk mark so he knows to go and service the drop.

“When you see his chalk mark, go and service the him-to-you box, and get his answer back.”

In a separate bedroom Alfonso Benz Moncada was given his new luggage. There was a camera that looked like a tourist’s Pentax but took a snap-on cartridge with more than a hundred exposures in it, plus an innocent-looking aluminum strut frame for holding the camera at exactly the right distance above a sheet of paper. The camera was preset for that range.

His toilet kit included combustible chemicals disguised as aftershave, and various invisible inks. The letter-writing wallet held all the treated paper for secret writing. Last, they told him the means for communicating with them, a method they had been setting up while he was training in Chile.

He would write letters concerning his love of chess—he already was a chess fan—to his pen pal Justin Bokomo of Uganda, who worked in the General Secretariat of the UN building in New York. His letters would always go out of Baghdad in the UN diplomatic mail pouch for New York. The replies would also come from Bokomo in New York.

Though Benz Moncada did not know it, there was a Ugandan called Bokomo in New York. There was also a Mossad katsa in the mail room to effect the intercepts.

Bokomo’s letters would have a reverse side that, when treated, would reveal the Mossad’s question list.

This was to be photocopied when no one was looking and passed to Jericho in one of the agreed drops.

Jericho’s reply would probably be in spidery Arabic script. Each page was to be photographed ten times, in case of smudging, and the film dispatched to Bokomo.

Back in Baghdad the young Chilean, with his heart in his mouth, established six drops, mainly behind loose bricks in old walls or ruined houses, under flagstones in back alleys, and one under a stone windowsill of a derelict shop.

Each time, he thought he would be surrounded by the dreaded AMAM, but the citizens of Baghdad seemed as courteous as ever and no one took any notice of him as he prowled, apparently a curious foreign tourist, up and down the alleys and side streets of the Old Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the fruit and vegetable market at Kasra, and the old cemeteries—anywhere he could find crumbling old walls and loose flagstones where no one would ever think of looking.