Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

Ziad was able to find a job for himself in the ministry of information, the most substantial position he had ever held.

Halim began entertaining in his home and Ziad turned up with his new friends, mostly Baath army officers.

Ziad also brought along women to these evenings. With the ways of regular journalism now behind him and no longer a source of income, with his success now dependent upon army officers, he had come up with a new service for those in power — pandering. Always pathetically unsuccessful himself with women, he now found he could enjoy their company on the strength of the important men he would introduce them to. Slightly hysterical and already a little drunk, he appeared at Halim's door early in the evening with a woman on each arm, and rushed off to try to gather up a few more who might or might not be waiting for him. Then he gulped Scotch and spent the rest of the evening flitting around Halim's living room, refilling glasses and telling raucous anecdotes.

Halim himself acted as a quiet host at these gatherings, in keeping with his more reserved manner. While Ziad chattered noisily from group to group, Halim was apt to be in conversation with someone off to the side.

Most of the women brought along by Ziad were secretaries from government ministries, but occasionally he captured a more glamorous prize. One evening he turned up with a popular singer, a vivacious and ambitious young woman. Halim introduced her to a colonel and took the two of them for a stroll in his garden, applying all his charm to making the encounter a success. For the colonel, who was the new commander of the paratroop brigade on the Golan Heights, that evening in the shadows of Halim's garden was the beginning of a passionate love affair with the singer, and he always felt warmly toward Halim for bringing her into his life.

There were also other kinds of friendships for Halim. The austere minister of information, educated in Paris and the leading intellectual of the Baathist regime, was a man of a different sort. Halim met him through Ziad but thereafter they got together without Ziad, the better to discuss Latin American politics and pursue the minister's scheme, first suggested by Halim, of securing financial support for the Baath from the Syrian community in Buenos Aires. Halim wrote letters to Argentina and collected some funds for the minister. But as the minister said, the amount of money wasn't as important as the principle of Syrians overseas taking part in the rejuvenation of their ancient homeland.

***

Halim was busy, always busy. The machinery company in which he was a partner had been given a contract to improve the ventilation systems of bunkers on the Golan Heights, which accommodated armored vehicles as well as artillery and tank crews, a whole complicated series of connecting underground fortresses. Each bunker was different and presented a slightly different set of ventilation problems. Halim worked on the diagrams with his master machinists, making modifications and finding practical solutions.

For his central office Halim still used the suite of rooms he had acquired originally in the large building off Martyrs' Square, the building with the hotel on the top floor. Now he had to find space in the suite to work on these ventilation schemes. The only free area was the seating arrangement at the end of his own room, where a company director normally sat with his guests over coffee. Halim moved the overstuffed chairs to his manager's office and put in draftsman's tables and lighting fixtures and banks of deep flat cupboards with dozens of drawers to hold the blueprints and diagrams. When his partner came by and found Halim and the master machinists pouring over their papers, he joked that Halim's room looked more like a crowded architect's den than a successful businessman's office.

It was crowded and there were papers everywhere, but nothing was done by chance in the Runner's life. The entrance to Halim's offices lay at the end of one of the two corridors that ran the length of the building on each floor. The elevators opened between the first and the second corridors. In the second corridor was the room with toilets and sinks for the smaller offices on the floor which were without toilets of their own. The entrance to Halim's offices was in the first corridor, but his rooms extended to the blank wall of the second corridor.

And the far end of his own room, now crowded with draftsman's cupboards and tables, backed exactly against the wall where the toilet stalls were.

In redesigning the room the Runner had done some special work of his own. If he set the screws in the back of one of his cupboards in a certain way, a man in the second corridor could enter the toilets and lock himself in the last stall, unfasten a panel in the back wall and another panel in Halim's wall, and reach through into Halim's cupboard — to remove the cardboard cylinder that had been placed there for him. The panel in the toilet stall could conceivably have been opened by chance, but if that happened it would have revealed nothing. The next panel through Halim's wall, giving access to Halim's cupboard, couldn't be discerned. Nor could that second panel be opened accidentally, since only a correct combination of screw turns on Halim's side allowed it to open.

There was risk involved. No dead drop was ideal when bulk material had to be transferred frequently. Either the Runner repeatedly carried compromising material on his person to some neutral location in Damascus, or the dead drop had to be adjacent to his office. Tajar felt the lesser risk was for the Runner never to have the compromising maps and diagrams on his person. Better for the couriers to bear that danger and make it their main concern. The arrangement also freed the Runner to be only Halim when he moved around Damascus, a subtle and important consideration to Tajar's mind. Thus setting the screws at the back of the office cupboard was Yossi's task. And later when Halim walked out of the office he could simply be himself, a man who carried nothing he need fear. Risk was inherent for the Runner, but Tajar knew the risk was lessened the more Halim could be Halim. In any case, Tajar expected the dead drop to be in use for only a limited period of time. The underground fortresses on the Golan were extensive, but not infinite.

So there were intricate risks and dangers in the Runner's progress, and precise precautions and continual readjustments. To Ziad as to anyone else who knew him in Damascus, Halim's early steps in the Syrian capital had always seemed to follow naturally and easily one upon the other: where he lived and where he worked, the hotel on the top floor and then the offices on a lower floor of the same building, the villa out of the center of town, the way his life and business came to be what they were. But behind it all were the careful decisions of a master planner.

***

Hectic, busy years for the Runner then, and soon there were to be many changes around him because the Middle East was slipping toward the Six-Day War, that utterly disastrous defeat for the Arabs. God was said to have created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and certainly the 1967 war completely reworked the destiny of the Middle East in only six days. But it did so with a secret promise of years of brutal struggle instead of a seventh day of peace. Ziad lost his job and added espionage to his list of failures. After the war, the young nephew of the former army chief-of-staff lapsed back into the obscurity of his Druse village.

The minister of information, more fortunate than many, went into exile as the Syrian ambassador in Paris.

And the paratroop colonel took part in a failed coup attempt and then escaped to Baghdad, only to reenter Damascus clandestinely with the help of Iraqi agents, disguised as an old peasant woman, to be immediately arrested and tried and shot, all within twenty-four hours.