Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

Ziad was cynical and excited.

An Alawite as president? he said to Halim. An inconceivable thing, it's never happened before. People will see him as representing all those who have always been wronged, which is naturally most of the country. So now we have a real presidente , our very own Perón to be the father of the shirtless ones, but far cleverer in the ways of the souk and not a banana dictator. Oh no, a genuine Levantine leader who knows how to scheme and cut throats. A despised Alawite? An ex-peasant whose first act is to turn on the man who made him?

Despised minorities produce patient, angry men, and people will love him for that kind of treachery. Secretly, it's what they all dream of. And this ex-peasant even had the foresight to change his name to Lion as a young man. The king of the beasts as our dictator? It's apt. It fits. Maybe he'll even be strong enough to get back our land from the Israelis. Dominate or be dominated? Anyone who is different is inferior? This Alawite knows how it is. He has to. He is an Alawite, after all.

Ziad was also enthusiastic because once again he sensed a new future for himself. A new government meant new loyalties. A dictator meant new kinds of opportunities. And a dictator from a minority sect which was despised by most Moslems meant there was suddenly a chance for little men, failed men, to rise in society.

***

Ziad found his new life — in espionage. He was hired by one of the new men, a captain in Syrian intelligence whose agency ran a Palestinian militia which was establishing itself in southern Lebanon, after having been expelled from Jordan. The new Syrian government was continuing the old government's policy of not mounting operations against Israel from Syria itself, to avoid reprisals. With Jordan now closed to the PLO militias, the Syrian secret services were redirecting their money and arms into Lebanon.

The intelligence agency Ziad worked for was one of a dozen secret services maintained by the Syrians.

These secret services were independent of each other in their budgets and tasks and authority. All of them kept their own files, controlled their own agents, and pursued the goals set for them by the man at the top of their organization, who might be a major or a colonel, a minister or the president. Some of the intelligence agencies were much larger than others, with those run by the army and the defense ministry being the largest of all. But size didn't necessarily signify importance. An agency employing many thousands might not be as influential, at a given time, as a much more secret organization with only a few dozen key agents.

These intelligence agencies operated out of the defense ministry, the foreign ministry, the interior ministry, the army, the Baath, the president's office — all the centers of power in Syria.

The agencies were seldom separated into the usual spheres of intelligence: foreign or domestic, espionage or counterespionage. Most of them worked both sides of any question, since friends and enemies abroad were as crucial to the power center in Syria as friends and enemies at home. Nor were the military and political functions separate, since there was no strength in one without the other. The military agencies also had political targets, and the civilian agencies also worked in the army.

Some of the Syrian intelligence agencies had more specialized interests. The Baath Party in Syria had long run an intelligence agency devoted solely to Iraq, where a Baathist party was also in power. This civilian service concentrated on manipulating and subverting Baathists of consequence in Baghdad, under the guise of fraternal relations with like-minded comrades, while countering the constant subversion by Iraqi Baathists in Damascus.

Egypt, as the largest Arab country, was another special case. In the past Syria had been briefly controlled by Egypt in a political union, and there were still pro-Egyptian officers in the intelligence agencies run by the army and the defense ministry. But the intelligence agencies run by the interior ministry were fervently anti-Egyptian. Jordan, as a neighbor, was the province of the secret services run by the army and the foreign ministry. Liaison with the KGB was ostensibly handled by a secret service in the foreign ministry and another in the defense ministry, but in fact a second defense ministry agency was deeply involved.

As a matter of course most Syrian intelligence agencies tried to penetrate each other, or at least have a source in the others with access to some of the files. This was done most aggressively by the secret services run by the Baath — its civilian wing, its military wing — which planted men wherever it could in addition to its regular counterintelligence service, which it ran as a counterweight to the counterintelligence service run by the interior ministry.

Secret money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil states, an important source of funds for covert operations, was another special case and was channeled through the secret services of the defense ministry. But other agencies could acquire it for selected targets, or if they had the right connections. In one way or another all the Syrian secret services operated in Lebanon and all of them used Palestinians. In the Middle East, Beirut was the meeting place for the agents of every secret service, not just those of Syria, and the Palestinians were the foot soldiers and mercenaries who ran the errands.

A gigantic Mafia-style operation was the way Tajar described Beirut. Lebanon, he said, is gangsterism on a scale the world has never even imagined before.

Lastly in Damascus, there were the small secret services run directly by the president's office, the most special case of all. In the past these highly clandestine services had never been involved in field operations.

Their job was to keep the president informed on the other agencies, even though in order to get where he was the president would already have been in control of some combination of the army and defense ministry intelligence agencies, and more recently those of the Baath as well.

These competing secret services in Damascus were always in the process of splitting apart and swallowing each other as fortune changed and a new group or new individuals gained power at the expense of others.

The agencies sprang up, disappeared, completely altered their targets and size and influence.

Sub-departments drifted away over a weekend to find a new home in another agency, or were liquidated, or suddenly became independent in another ministry on the other side of town. Even the most stable among them — the military intelligence agencies — radically shifted in importance as power accrued in some army field command or was pulled back into the central offices of the defense ministry. What was astonishing was that the total number of secret services in Syria — twelve — remained constant and had done so since the end of the Second World War, when the French left.

This devious confusion bewildered the Syrians as much as anyone, but fortunately for the Runner there was an expert who understood the Syrian intelligence services far better than most Syrians did, certainly far better than any other non-Syrian. That man of course was Tajar, for decades the Mossad's wizard on arcane Arab lore of any kind.

It's the magic number twelve that has always puzzled me, Tajar once said to Yossi. No other country in the world has half that many intelligence agencies, but the Syrians always do. Why? It's curious. Why have all these fellows tripping over each other? The Russians get along with just one or two. The Americans, who like free enterprise and competition, allow for three or four. And all other countries, even the most untrusting and paranoid, make do with no more than that. But not the Syrians. The Syrians insist on a dozen of the monsters. What a headache. How can they keep track of anything? The cost, the duplication, the inefficiency