Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The reminder worked. Suddenly Madeleine began to explain how she had traveled by sea to Haifa, a tourist come to see Israel. On the boat she made friends with a family of new immigrants who had a child about the age of Joselle. She had led the little girl down the gangplank at Haifa, and the immigration officer had taken the child as Madeleine’s own. He made a note of this in his records. A week later, under the very noses of Israeli police, she had boarded a flight to Zurich with her “daughter.” Madeleine had even persuaded Joselle to dress in girl’s clothing and have his hair dyed.

For a while Joselle had lived in an Orthodox school in Switzerland where Rabbi Shai Freyer was a teacher. Following his detention, Madeleine flew with Joselle to New York, placing him with a family who were members of the Neturei Karta sect. Harel only had one more question for her: “Will you give me the name and address of the family?”

For a long moment there was silence before Madeleine calmly said: “He is living at 126 Penn Street, Brooklyn, New York. He is known as Yankale Gertner.”

For the first time since their encounter, Harel smiled. “Thank you, Madeleine. I would like to congratulate you by offering you a job with Mossad. Your kind of talent could serve Israel well.”

Madeleine refused.

Mossad agents flew to New York. Waiting for them was a team of FBI agents, authorized to cooperate by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He had received a personal request from Ben-Gurion to do so. The agents traveled to the apartment house at 126 Penn Street. Mrs. Gertner opened the door. The agents rushed past her. Inside, her husband was praying. Beside him was a pale-faced boy with a yarmulke on his head and dark side-curls framing his face.

“Hello Joselle. We have come to take you home,” one of the Mossad men said gently.

Eight months had passed since Mossad had begun its search. Close to a million U.S. dollars had been spent on the operation.

The safe return of Joselle did nothing to bridge the religious divide within the country. Successive governments would continue to totter and fall at the whim of small ultra-Orthodox groups elected to the Knesset.

Successful though he had been in finding the boy, Isser Harel returned to Israel to face a powerful new critic, General Meir Amit, the newly appointed chief of Aman, military intelligence. Just as Harel had connived against his predecessor, he now found himself on the receiving end of Amit’s barbed criticisms over the operation to rescue Joselle.

Amit, a formidable field commander, had become close to Ben-Gurion in the ever-shifting political sands of Israel. He told the prime minister that Harel had “wasted resources,” that the whole rescue operation had been the sign of an intelligence chief who had been too long in the job. Forgetting that he had ordered Harel to mount the operation, Ben-Gurion agreed. On March 25, 1963, bruised by many weeks of intensive sniping, Isser Harel, at the age of fifty, resigned. Grown men were close to tears as he shook their hands and walked out of Mossad headquarters. Everyone knew it was the end of an era.

Hours later a tall, spare man with the hawkish good looks of the actor he could once have been strode briskly through its doors: Meir Amit had taken over. No one needed to be told that radical changes were about to happen.

Fifteen minutes after settling himself behind his desk, Mossad’s new chief summoned his department heads. They stood in a group before him while he silently eyeballed them. Then, in the brisk voice that had launched countless battleground attacks, he spoke.

There would be no more operations to recover lost children. No undue political interference. He would protect each one of them from external criticism, but nothing could save their jobs if they failed him. He would fight for more money from the defense budget for the latest equipment and backup resources. But that was not a signal to forget the one asset he placed above all others: humint, the art of human intelligence gathering. He wanted that to be Mossad’s greatest skill.

His staff found they were working for a man who saw their work as beyond day-to-day operations, but bearing results in years to come. The acquisition of military technology fell into that category.

Shortly after Meir Amit took command, a man who gave his name as “Salman” had walked into the Israeli embassy in Paris with an astounding proposition. For one million U.S. dollars in cash he could guarantee to provide what was then the world’s most secret combat aircraft, the Russian MiG-21. Salman had concluded his astounding offer to an Israeli diplomat with a bizarre request. “Send someone to Baghdad, call this number, and ask for Joseph. And have our million dollars ready.”

The diplomat sent his report to the resident katsa in the embassy. He had been one of those who had survived the purging that followed Meir Amit’s appointment. The katsa sent the report to Tel Aviv, together with the phone number Salman had provided.

For days Meir Amit weighed and considered. Salman could be a confidence trickster or a fantasist, or even part of an Iraqi plot to try to entrap a Mossad agent. There was a very real risk that other katsas working under deep cover in Iraq would be compromised. But the prospect of getting hold of a MiG-21 was irresistible.

Its fuel capacity, altitude, speed, armaments, and turnaround servicing time had made it the Arab world’s premier frontline fighter aircraft. Israel’s air force chiefs would cheerfully have given many millions of dollars for just a glimpse of the MiG’s blueprint, let alone for the actual plane. Meir Amit “went to bed thinking of it. I woke up thinking of it. I thought of it in the shower, over dinner. I thought about it every spare moment I had. Keeping up with an enemy’s advanced weapons system is a priority with any intelligence service. Actually getting your hands on it almost never happens.”

The first step was to send an agent to Baghdad. Meir Amit created an alias for him, as English as the name in his passport, George Bacon: “No one would think a Jew would have a name like that.” Bacon would travel to Baghdad as the sales manager of a London-based company selling hospital X-ray equipment.

He arrived in Baghdad on an Iraqi Airways flight with several sample boxes of equipment and demonstrated how well he had absorbed his brief by selling several items to hospitals. At the beginning of his second week, Bacon made the call to the number Salman had provided. Bacon’s reports to Mossad contained vivid descriptions.

“I used a pay phone in the hotel lobby. The risk the phone was tapped was smaller than making the call from my room. The number was answered at once. A voice asked in Farsi who was speaking. I replied in English, apologizing I must have the wrong number. The voice then asked, also in English, who was speaking. I said I was a friend of Joseph’s. Was there someone there by that name? I was told to wait. I thought maybe they were tracing the call, that this was a trap after all. Then a very cultured voice was on the line saying he was Joseph and that he was glad I had called. He then asked if I knew Paris. I thought: Contact!”

Bacon found himself agreeing to a meeting in a Baghdad coffeehouse the following noon. At the appointed hour, a man smilingly introduced himself as Joseph. His face was deeply etched, his hair white. The agent’s later report once more captured the surreal atmosphere of the moment:

“Joseph said how very pleased he was to see me, as if I was some long-awaited relative. He then started to talk about the weather and how the quality of service had dropped in cafés like this one. I thought, here I am in the middle of a hostile country whose security service would surely kill me if they had the chance, listening to an old man’s ramblings. I decided whoever he was, whatever his connection was with Salman in Paris, Joseph was certainly not an Iraqi counterintelligence officer. That calmed me. I told him my friends were very interested in the merchandise his friend had mentioned. He replied, ‘Salman is my nephew who lives in Paris. He is a waiter at a café. All the good waiters have left here.’ Joseph then leaned across the table and said, ‘You have come about the MiG? I can arrange it for you. But it will cost one million dollars.’ Just like that.”