Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

On the flight, Farzad Bazoft was quiet, saying little to the others, confining himself to talking to the flight attendants in Farsi. At Baghdad Airport his language skills helped to ease the translation difficulties with the Iraqi “minders” assigned to the party. In a stage whisper, Davies said they were really security agents. “The dozy buggers wouldn’t recognize a spy if he was pointed out,” Davies said prophetically.

At the Palestine-Meridian, the man from the Mirror informed his traveling companions he was only there because he was “bloody bored with London.” But he made it clear he had no intention of following the official itinerary, which included a visit to the Basra battlefield, where the Iraqi army was eager to display the spoils of war after its victory over the Iranian forces. Bazoft said he didn’t think the trip south to the gulf would interest his newspaper.

That April Friday evening in 1988, having spent hours in the hotel lobby watching the arms dealers come and go, and sharing several conversations with Davies, Farzad Bazoft ate alone in the hotel coffee shop. He declined an invitation to join other reporters from London, saying he had to “think through my schedule.” During the meal he was called to take a telephone call in the lobby. He returned a few minutes later looking pensive. Having ordered dessert, he abruptly left the table, ignoring ribald jokes from some of the reporters that he had a girl stashed away.

He did not return until the next day. He appeared even more tense, saying to, among others, Kim Fletcher—a freelance journalist then working for the Daily Mail —that “it’s all right for you lot; you’re British born and bred. I’m an Iranian. That makes me different.” Fletcher was not alone among the English reporters who wondered if this was “Bazoft banging on again about how hard it was to have a background like his.”

Bazoft spent most of the day pacing the hotel lobby or in his suite. Twice he left the hotel for short periods. In the lobby he had several conversations with Nicholas Davies, who later said that Bazoft was “like anyone on a story, wondering if he would get what he wanted.” For his part, the Mirror foreign editor announced he would not be writing anything, “because there is nothing here to interest Captain Bob.”

Late that afternoon, Bazoft once more left the hotel. As usual he was followed by an Iraqi minder. But when Bazoft reappeared, he was alone. Reporters heard Bazoft tell Davies he wasn’t “going to be followed around like a bitch in heat.”

Davies’s laughter, however, did little to lighten Bazoft’s mood. Once more he went to his suite. When he next appeared in the lobby, he told several reporters that he would not be returning to London with them. “Something’s come up,” he said in the mysterious voice he liked to use at times.

“It would have to be a good story to keep me here,” Fletcher said.

Hours later Bazoft left the hotel. It would be the last any of his companions would see of him until he appeared on a video distributed worldwide by the Iraqi regime seven weeks after his arrest, having confessed to being a Mossad spy.

During that time, Bazoft was on a Mossad mission that would have taxed the skills of a trained katsa . He had been ordered to try to discover how advanced were Gerald Bull’s plans to provide Iraq with a supergun. That the journalist was given such a task was a clear indicator of how far his controllers were prepared to exploit him. Mossad had also taken its own steps to ensure that, if Bazoft was caught, it would appear he was working for a London-based company, Defence Systems Limited (DSL). When Bazoft was arrested close to one of the supergun test sites, the Iraqi agents also found he had in his possession a number of documents indicating that Bazoft had made several calls from the hotel to the offices of DSL. The company has denied all knowledge of Bazoft, or having any contact with Mossad.

On the videotape, Bazoft’s eyes at times stared vacantly, before suddenly blinking rapidly and darting around the room, with its pleasant backdrop of a curtain patterned with flowing tendrils. He looked like a person who believed he was powerless to avoid his annihilation.

Mossad’s psychologists in Tel Aviv studied every frame. For them the stages of Bazoft’s disintegration followed the same pattern Israeli interrogators had noticed when they extracted confessions from a captured terrorist. First Bazoft would have experienced disbelief, an instinctive denial that what was happening was actually happening to him. Then would have come an overwhelmingly sudden and shattering realization: It was happening to him. At that stage, the helpless reporter may have experienced two other reactions: paralyzing fright and a compulsion to talk. This would have been the time he made his confession on the video that he was a Mossad agent.

His monotonous tone suggested he had experienced bouts of exogenous depression while in captivity, a result of being removed from familiar surroundings and having his normal lifestyle totally disrupted. He would have felt continuously tired, and what sleep he was permitted would have left him unrefreshed. That would be when self-accusation had been at its most destructive, and his sense of hopelessness maximized. Self-accusation would have gripped him. Like the prisoner in Kafka’s The Trial, he would have felt “stupid” over the way he had behaved and put others at risk.

On the video, Bazoft’s eyes showed signs he had been drugged. Mossad’s pharmacologists found it impossible to decide what drugs had been used.

Nahum Admoni knew that such an abject confession as the video contained was the prelude to Bazoft’s execution. The Mossad chief ordered his psychological warfare specialists to launch a campaign to deflect embarrassing questions about the service’s involvement with Bazoft.

Members of Parliament in Britain soon publicly criticized The Observer for sending Bazoft to Iraq. At the same time, trusted reporters were fed stories that Saddam Hussein was viewing videos of every stage of Bazoft’s interrogation. It may well have been true. More certain, it was an excuse to remind the world that torture and murder were instruments of state policy in Iraq. Bazoft was hanged in Baghdad in March 1990. His last reported words on the gallows were: “I am not an Israeli spy.”

In London, Nicholas Davies read the report on the execution on a Reuters message that came to the Daily Mirror foreign desk. As instructed about all stories emanating from the Middle East he judged to be important, Davies took the report up to the office of Robert Maxwell.

Since 1974, the publisher had been the most powerful sayan in Britain. Davies would remember: “Bob read the report without comment,” but could not recall “in all honesty” what he had felt about Bazoft’s death.

In Tel Aviv, among those who read about the execution was one of the most colorful characters to have served Israel’s spymasters, Ari Ben-Menashe. Until then he had never known of the existence of Bazoft. But typically, that did not stop the mercurial Ben-Menashe feeling a sense of grief that “another good man had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.” It was emotional judgments like that which had made the darkly handsome, quick-witted Ben-Menashe such an unlikely candidate for a key position in the Israeli intelligence community. Yet, for ten years, 1977–87, he had held a sensitive post in the External Relations Department (ERD) of the Israel Defense Forces, one of the most powerful and secret organizations in the intelligence community.

ERD had been created in 1974 by then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Smarting over the way Israel had been completely surprised by the Syrian-Egyptian onslaught in the Yom Kippur War, he had decided the only way to avert such an intelligence failure occurring again was to have a watchdog to monitor other intelligence services and, at the same time, conduct its own intelligence gathering.