Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

I left Udi’s office, picked up my few belongings from my room, my passport from the documentation office, left the gates of the Mossad behind me, and never returned.

NO ONE CAME running after me or applied pressure on me to return. It was clear to both sides that the breach between us was beyond repair. My interpretation of Anna’s arrest was difficult to argue with. She and I had been sacrificed, the Mossad and the FSB were the sacrificers. The details weren’t relevant. There was only one possible conclusion to be drawn. In light of this bottom line there could be no lingering doubts.

From then on my communications with the office went through Gedalyahu. On one occasion I met the person in the prime minister’s office responsible for hostages and missing persons. He wanted to hear a firsthand account of ‘Anna’s story’. Gedalyahu was in touch once a week to update me on what was being done. For the most part he had nothing new to tell me and I assumed that this was the office’s way of maintaining contact and keeping abreast of what was happening to me and what state of mind I was in. I also assumed that my phone was being tapped and that I was under some sort of surveillance. The office turned over responsibility for me back to the Shin Bet, and any judge receiving a request from them to allow phone tapping or filming under the heading ‘suspicion of espionage’ was bound to grant such a petition. The other way of keeping contact with me was via my salary which, for some reason, kept on being deposited in my bank account on the first of every month.

Gedalyahu gave me to understand that the state was adopting Anna as ‘one of ours’, and that she was being treated no differently from any other missing person or hostage. Anna’s case is not clear-cut, he said. It’s a bit awkward for us to go to the Russians and say she’s ‘ours’–were we to do that she’d get twenty years instead of the ten she’s already been sentenced to and would never be allowed out of Russia.

This was the first time I’d heard that Anna had been sentenced to ten years. I felt dizzy. Gedalyahu was surprised that I didn’t know–this detail was also included in Cotton Field’s information.

Believe me we are doing everything possible to get her freed but it’s complicated, Gedalyahu told me. We only have fragments of information as to what the Russians know or think. The ‘Field’ says they know you got to Tel Aviv but assume this was only a stopover. According to him you are listed by them as being a CIA operative.

How come? I remonstrated, as I saw Anna’s release slipping from our grasp.

No one understands why. As far as the Russians are concerned Tel Aviv, like Copenhagen, was only an attempt to mislead them. If Anna’s release is at all possible it will be in the context of a deal between them and the CIA. Not long ago we brought the CIA into the frame, and there’s a chance that they will ask for her in exchange for Russian spies held in the US. But they’re not going to do that without making us pay. Right now they’re talking about another big gesture from us to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas, and even Hamas, by agreeing to a further release of Palestinian prisoners. And for your information, because of this demand the prime minister himself is now involved in Anna’s case. In a nutshell it’s very very complicated.

I believed Gedalyahu that it was very complicated, indeed too complicated for me to be able to just sit back and do nothing, waiting for a move which might never happen. I began to plan my own private rescue operation. It was no longer a matter of activating some Russian immigrant to establish contact. It had now become an operation in every sense of the word.

The hundreds of intelligence files I’d helped create in the distant past and which I’d reviewed ahead of missions I’d planned and approved more recently, enabled me to work in a very organized way. I made a list of exactly what I needed to know and how I was to obtain this information, starting off by dipping into unclassified sources.

Alex had said that Anna was being held in a Moscow jail. I soon had a full file on Moscow and its prisons that I found on various internet sites, as well as clearly defined pictures from Google Earth. First of all I needed to find out which one Anna was in. I would also have to look at exits from prisons. Did the inmates work beyond the boundaries of the jail itself–in factories, in various forms of forced labour? And if they did, how were they taken there and what sort of surveillance were they under while working? Were they let out of jail on ‘home leave’ as prisoners in Israel were? Russia was, after all, still a police state. But if they were allowed short stays out of prison–how much time did a prisoner have to serve before being granted such leave and what kind of surveillance were they under while out? It was clear to me that my best chance of rescuing Anna was to kidnap her when she was outside the prison and not from inside it.

With the help of various organizations of immigrants from the Soviet Union, I located some who’d been jailed in these very same prisons, and arranged to visit them, making myself out to be a ‘government official’. My aim was to find out what the security arrangements were in these places and what the prisoners’ daily routines consisted of. I even found one woman–a ‘refusenik’ who’d been in the women’s prison in Moscow and, decades later, was able to dredge up astonishingly detailed memories of her time there. But she was an exception. The majority of immigrants I questioned had been in Soviet jails a long time before, and the answers I was given were contradictory and confusing. Whereas my ‘refusenik’ and the internet referred to Novinskaya prison as a women’s prison, there were others who insisted that it had been closed down many years earlier and that all political prisoners were now incarcerated in Lefortovo prison. The most worrying detail I learned was that all jails in Moscow were no more than detention and interrogation centres, and that once sentence had been passed the accused were sent to a Zona , a name denoting a prison in a remote area. In this context, two of those I talked to even told me the same sad joke: They say that the Lubyanka–today the headquarters of the secret service and where, over the years, opponents of the regime were detained and interrogated in the basement–is the highest building in Moscow. And do you know why? Because from there you can see Siberia.

Knowing where Anna was being held was, of course, the precondition for any operation. The immigrants I talked to said that this probably wasn’t classified information and that I could perhaps discover where she was by sending her letters and addressing them to a number of prisons. I knew that her mail would be read by the prison authorities and I considered, therefore, sending her postcards with a rented mailbox as a return address and a name and contents that only she would be able to fathom.

If that didn’t succeed I would need inside information. That was only obtainable if I could mobilize a male or female guard working in one of the jails to help. I thought that for a decent amount of money I’d find someone willing to supply me with information about both her whereabouts and her movements. But to get hold of someone like that I would have to track down a male or female guard on their way home from the prison.

In the absence of information about where she was being held, all I could do was plan the abduction and getaway in the most general of terms. I’d need transport and an apartment; I’d need to check the fastest routes out of Russia, to the Republics, and identify unmanned border crossings or those that could be bypassed. And even when I had found out where they were, I would need to gather intelligence from the field before I could mount the operation. That would take quite some time.