Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

In their hour of need, Udi and Levanon appointed me to be HQ’s representative in various operations. The truth is that I felt so uneasy in the corridors of the Mossad, with the judgmental looks I was getting from all sides, that I preferred to be abroad. Most Mossad people are intelligent and hard working; those who serve in operational roles are also courageous and ready to sacrifice themselves; those in positions of command are level-headed and determined. All are lovers of the homeland. But there is one trait with which not all of them are blessed–the capacity to forgive. The ethical code of many Mossad personnel is totally rigid. If someone strays from that code, he is condemned to persistent and eternal infamy. There are almost no cases of disciplinary hearings in the organization. There are only investigations and committees of enquiry into operations that were unsuccessful. The trial by one’s friends is conducted by word of mouth, by whispers. It’s in the corridors that sentence is served. There they knew everything about my ‘attempted defection’. And, just as many years earlier every glance at me in HQ’s passageways was one of appreciation, now every look was of hatred. The trips abroad were a godsend.

The thought crossed my mind that the first operation I was now sent on in Europe was merely a dummy run intended to make sure I wasn’t a double agent and wouldn’t betray the team. Otherwise it’s really difficult for me to understand the ease with which the guys reported that they got into the Russian Embassy, photographed the documents, and withdrew without being discovered. I sat in the ‘communications centre’ in the suite of a nearby hotel together with the telephonist who handled all communications between the team members. My role was merely to give advice and be in touch with Israel in the event of any complications. However, I had attended the team’s briefings in Israel and the details of the plan were all well known to me. Had I been a double agent I could easily have handed the team over to the other side.

And so came the second operation and then the third. They went like clockwork. The teams of youngsters were efficient, the preparations were good, communications worked well, and the results were excellent. There was almost no need for me to interfere. In between operations I didn’t have much to do. I continued to feel out of place at HQ and as someone whose presence wasn’t wanted, even though no one actually said anything. After one particularly sleepless night I simply decided not to go to work that day and my commanders turned a blind eye to it. In the Mossad people are not fired, nobody wants embittered departing employees freely wandering the streets. Such people are hung out to dry at home without being given any kind of role and they continue to be paid until their conscience is pricked and they leave of their own accord. Twice I asked Udi if he wanted me to quit and his unambiguous answer on each occasion was that no, I was still needed.

And, indeed, Udi made a small office next to Levanon’s available to me and gave me the title of ‘Assistant to the Head of the Division for Methodology’. We work with unrecorded verbal principles, he said. And as one generation is on its way out and its successor takes over, it’s worth our while to save the new generation from having to invent types and methods of operations which the previous generation has perfected to a tee. As the person who had had more operational experience than anybody else now in HQ–except for Udi and Levanon, that was indeed the case–I was asked to piece together the principles and write them up as a manual on how operations were carried out.

The months passed by, I wrote what I wrote, and once every few weeks took part in various operations as HQ’s representative. ‘My’ operations were mostly the simpler ones, all the rest were handled by other senior HQ staff.

My new role gave me access to the division’s entire archive, including the operational files so that I could extract its operational principles from them. And there, to my utter astonishment, and horror, I came across my file, tagged The Cat. The tag was based on one remark included in the transcript, made by the Head of Division about me settling down in Russia: Yogev is a cat, Udi had said. He becomes troubled by his own reasoning, he confuses himself, but in the end he falls on his feet. He looks like a domesticated pet but he’s a born hunter. And, somebody else added, asking that his name not appear in the record, he fucks and cries, just like a real cat. Goes to show how wrong even those who’d known me for a long time could be. This cat, who didn’t want to hunt anyone, had fallen flat on its face–for the second time. The separate file on the operation conducted against me in St Petersburg was labelled ‘Cat in Snow’.

No one was farsighted enough to think of the possibility that as a result of my free access to the archive both The Cat and Cat in Snow files would fall into my hands. And so, before anybody became aware of this lapse, all the material relating to me and Anna was mine to read: transcripts of discussions, records of internal phone conversations, operational orders, reports of intelligence-gathering rounds, debriefings, memoranda, operation logbooks.

When I found Cotton Field’s reports they seemed to me to be utterly fatuous. As Levanon had commented at the time, obviously he would say that she was a KGB woman, and so guarantee himself additional debriefings and further payments. So, it was on this they based their whole thinking? On a slippery ex-KGB guy? On the basis of this flimsy evidence they decided to destroy my life?

But before I’d done anything with these feelings, I came across Udi’s reports from St Petersburg, the material about incriminating Anna, and the outrageous web of deception that had been woven around me. I was dumbfounded. Not because I hadn’t sensed it–after all, something about the photographs and cassette had seemed strange. What astounded me was that the Division had invested so much in a psychological warfare operation, a method that wasn’t at all part of its usual routine. Also shocking were some of the small details I now discovered. How could it possibly have occurred to me that at the time they’d broken into my home, Alex had seen the tickets for the opera, and that that was how Eugene Onegin became part of their plan, a part that finally broke me? I remembered what Anna had said about the death of Pushkin, that if it hadn’t been so tragic it could well have been woven into a satire of his. I felt I was an actor playing a role in the Theatre of the Absurd.

Appalled and consumed by regret for having bowed to rationality and not gone with my gut feelings, I again demanded an urgent meeting with Udi.

He was unnerved by the very idea that in addition to all the other operational documents I’d also gone into the files related to me. Before confronting me, he gave an order to transfer all these files to the archive in the Bureau of the head of the Mossad to which I, of course, had no access.

Don’t twist things, I fumed. Fortunately for you, in a weird kind of way, going through the files has enabled me to see things from the Mossad’s point of view and to understand what would have happened if I’d refused to cooperate. You would have tried to kidnap me and God only knows where we would all have ended up. Me, you, the team, and Anna. So I’m not going to war because of the way you chose to make me come back to Israel, even though what I should do before anything else is to turn your desk over. I haven’t the strength for that right now. All I want is for you to admit to having made a mistake and enable me to go to wherever Anna is or, alternatively, bring her here.

I respect your assessment of Cotton Field’s information, Udi said, keeping his cool. But the information per se isn’t the determining factor. It’s what his controllers say that counts. In their view he is credible and reliable, something that’s been proven by many other reports of his. Enough Yogev, he said, almost pleading with me. We’ve been here before and your request was rejected. Nothing new has happened since then and everything you have discovered is known to us and was considered by us. It’s nearly a year since you left St Petersburg, and face it, Anna has not made contact with you in all that time. Tel Aviv is full of thirtysomething, single women. Pick one, change path, and start living again.