Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

He did a minor trade in Swiss watches, smuggling one or two at a time into Syria in the false bottom of his briefcase, along with the sealed envelopes. One night in Beirut, drunker than he realized and made forgetful by the enchanting pink and blue lights, he left his briefcase in a bar. The moment he awoke the next morning with a shattering headache, he knew what had happened. He vomited in the sink of his sordid hotel room and rushed through town to the bar, where a cleaning man knew nothing. Miserable and sick, Ziad sat in the foyer until a man in a suit finally showed up at noon and retrieved the briefcase from a cupboard, which also revealed a shoe and a cane and a soiled address book, the lost-and-found remnants from the previous evening of glory. Ziad tipped the man outrageously and rushed back to his hotel room to examine the false bottom of the briefcase. It hadn't been opened. One of his hairs was still pasted across the secret opening inside — a trick he had learned from a spy movie. He was ecstatic and celebrated by getting drunk in an alley behind the hotel.

Ziad was absurdly enthusiastic over his new role and had to tell Halim all about it. He told Halim far more than he should have and Halim was seriously concerned for his friend's safety, both with his employer and in Lebanon itself. Ziad didn't seem to realize that along with its freedom and glitter, Beirut was a city of real danger. The bars of Beirut were not the same as the coffeehouses of Damascus, which Ziad had grown up with and understood intuitively. Life could be dangerous in Damascus, but Syria was also ruled. Only those in authority could kill people. The dangers of Beirut, with its gangsterism, were totally different.

Halim was worried by his friend's reckless behavior. He felt he had to caution Ziad. Halim knew Beirut well from the export-import business he had done there over the years, and he knew a briefcase carried into bars and alleys at night could be mistaken for something worth stealing, a delivery of drugs or foreign currency.

There were safe places to store baggage — lockers with keys in public places. Thus under the guise of warning his friend in a practical way, the Runner now found himself in the odd position of training Ziad in some of the fundamentals of his new job in Syrian espionage.

Fortunately for Halim, there was never any question of the Runner having to use what he learned from Ziad.

Ziad's kind of low-level information was readily available to the Mossad in Lebanon. The Runner operated at a much higher level, using as sources the well-placed Palestinians whom he had befriended years ago in the refugee camps of Jordan.

***

The KGB began to find Damascus a hazardous place from which to direct the PLO agents of its terrorist campaign in Europe. The Syrians ran so many Palestinian groups of their own, for so many different purposes, that the Russians were finding it impossible to maintain security among their Palestinians. The Syrian intelligence agencies routinely penetrated each other, and although the KGB's use of the PLO wasn't a target for them, information on the KGB's operations invariably slipped out. To regain security, the KGB

moved the headquarters for its European terrorist campaign to the island of Cyprus. There, the internal conflict was between Greeks and Turks and the KGB could exert greater control over its Palestinian agents flying in and out of Europe.

Unhappily, it means the Runner is going to have much less to tell us about airplane hijackings and other things, Tajar said to General Ben-Zvi, the director of the Mossad. But I suppose it was inevitable that the Russians should learn their lesson like everyone else. Having the Syrians as allies is one thing, but working out of Damascus is another. As the Egyptians used to say, quoting their brothers the Iraqis, who had it from their brothers the Jordanians, who borrowed the saying from their brothers the Palestinians, who were repeating an old proverb of their brothers the Lebanese: With brothers like the Syrians, who needs? . . .

Led by Sadat of Egypt, the October war of 1973 was launched against Israel. Syria's tank brigades fought well on the Golan Heights and briefly it looked as if they might win back the territory taken by Israel in the Six-Day War. But Israeli air power was too sophisticated for the Syrians and their army was beaten with dreadful losses. Once more Ziad came to sit through long evenings with Halim on his friend's broad empty verandahs, above the overgrown gardens where the villa's solitary broken statues could be glimpsed among the trees and hanging vines, elegiac guardians of lost memories.

Ziad was especially gloomy. It's hopeless, he said. I was sure we were at least going to break even this time.

But no matter how well we fight, we lose anyway. The Russians give us last year's weapons in abundance, but the Americans give the Israelis next year's weapons and there's no comparison. Courage has nothing to do with it. Technology decides the outcome and we can never fight them as equals. If we did we might win, and who knows, maybe even the Russians don't want that. What's the point of it all? We're simply used as murderous toys. . . .

As after the previous war, the Russians rearmed the Syrians with improved weaponry and the Americans rearmed the Israelis accordingly. In matters of electronic guidance for shells and missiles and bombs, and counterelectronic systems to overrule them, nothing could compare to tests under actual battlefield conditions.

More then ever Beirut flourished as the Middle Eastern entrepôt for pleasure and money and arms and drugs, the convenient meeting place for everyone with something or someone to buy or to rent or to sell. The oil embargoes had arrived with the October war and oil became the great black weapon of the world as the price shot up. The industrial nations of Europe scrambled to strike covert deals with the sheiks of the desert.

Enormous sums were to be made by entrepreneurs at every level. Western banks and corporations came to Beirut to help the oil princes dispose of their stupendous new wealth. And everyone in Beirut had to be serviced: the bankers and sheiks and corporations, the myriad business representatives from every country with oil or in need of oil, the arms dealers and smugglers, the drug merchants from Africa and the West, the intelligence agencies from all the countries of the Middle East, the intelligence agencies from the major countries of Eastern and Western Europe, and the biggest players of all with their spy satellites roaming the heavens — the KGB and the CIA.

Plots and schemes and trade. This for that in Beirut, with a cut for the smiling industrious people who provided the sun and the waterskiing, the seaside hotels and the dark back alleys, the appropriate setting for any transaction.

Trade in every guise had been the vocation of the Lebanese coast since the time of the Phoenicians, five thousand years ago. The temples of true believers had always been elsewhere, beside the Nile and the Tigris and the Euphrates and in Jerusalem and Damascus.

***

It was almost a surprise for Halim to realize how great a distance the Runner had traveled in the last years. A pattern had settled over his business enterprises and he no longer had to concern himself much about them, now that he wasn't trying to start up in new fields. The same earnest manager still ran his office in the building that had the Hotel Brittany on the top floor. The man had been with him more than a decade and they were old friends. Halim seldom had to interfere with his decisions.

In addition to his export-import business, Halim was generally involved in two or three partnerships which turned some profit. He wasn't wealthy but he was successful for a Syrian. He gave part of his income to charity as would any worthy Moslem in his position. The Runner's back-up team was Tajar's expense, but the Runner himself cost the Mossad nothing. In any case the back-up team was smaller than it had been before the Six-Day War, when the Runner was concentrating on tactical intelligence and moving a great deal of material, quickly. The cupboard-toilet dead drop was almost never used anymore.