Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

A handful of us were instructed to meet at a certain café. A transit van with tinted windows picked up the small group and took it to a training facility in the middle of what looked like an abandoned army base. At long last we heard the words we had been waiting for: Welcome to the Mossad. Immediately after this greeting we were told: That’s the first and the last time you’ll hear that word in this place. Then it was straight down to business as we were each handed a pair of blue overalls and marched to a pistol-shooting range. Before the weapon itself was handed out there was a brief explanation of how pistols are handled and some safety instructions. I was a good marksman with various types of assault rifles, but had hardly ever fired a pistol. At first my results were nothing short of mediocre. An hour or so later there were some signs of improvement but when we began practising instinctive shooting and fast draws I was back to square one. Towards the end of the session I got slightly better results in these areas as well and left the shooting range with a feeling of cautious optimism tinged with some hesitance about my real abilities–a mixture of feelings that stayed with me throughout the year’s training.

After the shooting practice, we were given tracksuits, taken to a hangar that turned out to be a gym, and had our first session on the martial art of face-to-face combat. Each of us in turn had to charge at a human wall formed by our fellow trainees and dive into it. The others were all taller than me, perhaps an advantage to them during the more advanced stages of close combat training. But they were also slimmer than I was, a definite plus for me during this early phase of the exercises.

I got home just before midnight, tired and in pain. Orit listened to my account of the day impassively, restricting herself to one comment only: just so long as they don’t turn you into a killer. I was surprised. She knew I’d taken out quite a few terrorists in Lebanon and the Territories, and she’d never said a word about it.

Inexorably, the course removed me from the routine of domestic life. We studied until late in the evening and by the time I got back to Orit I was dead to the world. Then, when our field training began, the exercises lasted well into the night. There were also surveillance and round-the-clock intelligence-gathering drills when I didn’t get home at all. The studying, the training, and the action fascinated me, and I was a bit saddened by the fact that Orit didn’t share my view of it all. She didn’t think that uncovering a surveillance team tailing you was at all exciting, or that to follow and observe someone without them suspecting a thing could be in any way thrilling. As was common among people who joined the military at the same time, she had readily listened to the tales of my exploits in the army. But she described my training to become an Israeli James Bond as amounting to nothing more than ‘playing at being cowboys’.

My commanding officers apparently assumed that I was going to complete the course successfully. So, before exposing me to even more important and highly confidential information, they invited Orit to a meeting at which a psychologist was also present. I didn’t join them but from what Orit told me afterwards I got the gist of what had been said.

I know he’s a patriot, Orit had told them, and that making a contribution to the state is very important to him. But he’s neither right-wing nor an ultra-nationalist. As for me, well, I’m even a bit of a lefty. I know he killed in the army, but the army’s the army and one thing is certain–he’s no murderer. I want a man at my side whose hands and conscience are both clean.

My commanders assured Orit that the Mossad isn’t engaged in liquidations, and that I wouldn’t be involved in any such actions. True, my role would be operational, including some tasks she knew I’d been training for; intelligence gathering, covert photography, and occasionally breaking into places to gather valuable intelligence. But the training I’d received in close combat and gunfire was mainly for the purposes of self-defence.

Perhaps once in a decade, they told her, the Mossad does kill someone. But that wouldn’t be part of my work and the chances that I would be involved in anything like that were remote.

Orit came home clearly perturbed. I’m no psychologist, she said, but I could tell from the way they fidgeted, wriggled in their seats, exchanged looks, that they were lying. I expect that you will never dare lie to me, never. I can cope with all the rest.

Her candour and courage made me love her all the more, and she had every reason to believe that I wouldn’t ever lie to her. I was as straight as they come, lying wasn’t my way.

The next stage of the course hadn’t yet begun. Indeed, I was not even aware of its existence or of the fact that it dealt with such matters as recruitment and handling human sources, inventing cover stories, deception and lying to trap targeted people, frame them, and then recruit them.

I enjoyed the operational side of the first part of the course and even became good at it. But the second part turned my stomach. More than once I very nearly failed to carry out the assignment and faced being kicked out. Towards the end, my superiors found a compromise; I would do as little Humint–human intelligence–work as possible, and be more involved in the operational side of things. Inventing cover stories and lying was something I was clearly no good at. It runs counter to your inner being and basic values, wrote my commanders in their final evaluation of my performance. So instead of doing that which did not come naturally to me, they decided I should gain experience in intelligence gathering in an area of the world close to my heart: I was sent to the Far East.

MY SUPERIORS THOUGHT it would be easy for me to pass myself off as the son of an Indo-Canadian marriage who had lived most of his life in Canada. My appearance–average height and dark skinned–fitted such origins, as did my English accent which, though not Canadian, was not Israeli either. The spoken English of someone who had grown up in Canada with an Indian parent was bound to sound slightly different. But such an impersonation required me to get to know India, find the place where I had supposedly been born and had lived during the first few years of my life. I would have to invent parents–preferably a Canadian father and Indian mother–find out where and how they’d met and what they had done with their lives, and be able then to continue the storyline in Canada.

I asked to take Orit with me to India, arguing that this needn’t interfere with my mission. Hatching a cover story was itself in many ways a kind of journey and after the long and exhausting course I had been through we needed time to be together. But my request was met with a hostile look from my controllers, who sent me off to the Mossad’s library to prepare for the trip.

Nothing could have prepared me for my head-on encounter with the reality of a place I had only read and heard about. Bombay greeted me with a stifling airlessness and an unfamiliar odour. The first thing I saw in the dim light of pre-dawn as the cab drew away from the terminal and headed for the main road, was a row of bare bottoms squatting over a roadside gutter. I rubbed my eyes to confirm the sight but by then we were already passing the hovels of cardboard and plastic sheeting that lined the sides of the road where three million of the city’s homeless lived.

My next reality check was Bombay’s beggars. Getting out of the cab I was immediately surrounded by girls–who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old–clutching their babies, pointing to their mouths to let me know they were hungry. I didn’t yet have any local money, just large dollar bills. After this experience I made sure that my pockets were lined with rupees which I lavished on the many needy people who continually approached me. Until, that is, I discovered that such generosity was turning me into an all too recognizable a person in the neighbourhoods I frequented while evolving my legend. Even in the Temples I revisited to understand the liturgy better, people began to look at me suspiciously.