“We thought that was that, but after he left the military he became a pilot for Middle East Airlines, and we reached out again. MEA flew all over the region, so we thought he might be able to provide bits of intelligence for us here and there.”
“Did he?”
Aurbach waved a hand in the air. “Nothing relevant to our discussion tonight, Yanis. We will talk about his son.”
Yanis Alvey shrugged. “Okay. The son. Code name Hawthorn. We got him through his dad?”
Aurbach took another long drag from his cigarette. “The father relocated to MEA’s home office in Beirut in 1990, and his eighteen-year-old son came with him. He went to the university there, got caught up in a student movement against Shia dominance of the government, and was arrested by the police during a peaceful sit-in.
“The police were controlled by Hezbollah, of course, so they threw him into a cell along with some of his friends. Beat them night and day. Hawthorn was the only student who survived the ordeal.
“We learned all this from his father, and with his blessing we made a soft approach. He agreed to work for us in Lebanon against Hezbollah, but within a few years he was informing against the more radical Sunni groups, as well.”
“Sounds like a useful asset,” Alvey said. Yanis Alvey was a commando, so he didn’t run agents himself, but he certainly benefited from their intelligence product. He’d conducted countless operations in Lebanon, so he couldn’t help but wonder if Hawthorn’s product had served him and his various missions.
Menachem agreed. “He was one of my best agents, and he was good at his work, but I knew he could be even more valuable if we left him alone. I gave him the code name Hawthorn because it is a plant that grows here in the Levant. If raised in the wild, on its own, it bears plentiful fruit. My philosophy was to let him stay in Lebanon as our inside man, for the next time our army traveled north to clean the country of terrorists.”
“But why did he agree to help us?”
“He hated Hezbollah, hated all the radical and jihadist groups, Sunni and Shia alike. He had no great love for Judaism or our state, but as Hezbollah took over Lebanon and al Qaeda began to grow in the Middle East, he saw the radical philosophies as insidious cancers, and he saw Israel as something of a surgeon, cutting away the bad.”
Alvey understood. “I imagine as his case officer, you painted exactly that picture in his mind. You gave him a purpose. A reason.”
“That is it, entirely.” The old man smiled sadly. “And then came 9/11. And then came Iraq.”
Alvey said, “We didn’t share him with the Americans, did we?”
Aurbach shook his head, still smiling. “No. He was ours alone.”
Alvey was not surprised. The Mossad was notoriously stingy with its intelligence sources.
“We sent him to the nation of his birth just after the invasion. He was on the ground during the insurgency. Doing enough to remain credible to the militias, but keeping us informed on developments.”
Aurbach added, “This became a problem, though, when he was picked up by the U.S. Marines in Tikrit in 2006 and put in a prison camp. CIA sent his picture to us, along with hundreds of others, to see if we had any information about terrorist ties, or any interest in interviewing him ourselves. You can imagine how difficult it was when I saw the face of the man I had been running for over a decade, knowing he was rotting away in an American detainment facility, and was forced to tell the Americans I had no knowledge of or interest in the man.”
Alvey said nothing, but he knew Aurbach well enough to imagine it wasn’t very difficult at all for him to leave his man swinging in the breeze. Hawthorn was an asset for Aurbach, after all, not one of his children.
Aurbach continued. “I left him in detainment, said nothing to the Americans about knowing the man, unsure if he would ever see the light of freedom. Fortunately the CIA decided he possessed no value, and he was eventually released. As it turned out, his detainment was the best thing that could have happened to him operationally. He joined al Qaeda in Iraq with his newfound credibility, and he began passing us critical intelligence, some of which we traded with the U.S., some of which we used to influence matters in other ways.
“Soon the idea came to me that we should grow Hawthorn into a long-term deep-penetration asset of al Qaeda. To get him as close to the core leadership as possible. When much of AQ was rolled up by the Americans during their surge in Iraq, we protected Hawthorn.”
Alvey was impressed. “Incredible. That was many years ago. How far has he gotten since then?”
Aurbach crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray, taking his time in doing so. It seemed to Alvey as if his boss was hesitating with his story. Finally the old man looked up. “Yanis, why, in God’s name, are we not drinking?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Aurbach shouted to the men outside the room, surprising Alvey. “A bottle of scotch, please! Whatever you have lying around will do. And two glasses.”
When the booze came, Menachem Aurbach drank, and while he drank, he told Yanis Alvey everything.
The director of the Mossad took an entire hour to finish his story, and then he went to the toilet. Yanis Alvey remained in his chair, his eyes unfixed, generally pointing to a spot on the wall, but focusing on nothing. After a long time, time enough for Aurbach to return and to light another cigarette, Alvey’s head slowly collapsed down, like he was an inflatable doll with a leak. Finally his head settled, forehead down, on the table. He covered his head with his hands.
He spoke in a whisper. “I did not know.”
“Of course you didn’t. You can’t know everything, can you? That’s why there is a chain of command. That’s why unilateral actions like the one you took are dangerous. Foolish.”
“I am truly sorry.”
Alvey sat up straight now, his eyes rimmed with red, glassy and blurring with tears of shame.
Before he could speak, Menachem said, “You are free to leave here. You will not be held, you will not be prosecuted. Just know that by your actions you have hurt your nation. You are a good man, so knowing this is punishment enough.”
Alvey’s water-rimmed eyes returned to the wall.
The older man stood. “Go home, Yanis. Take some more time off, look inside yourself. Try to put this behind you. After some period you and I together will decide if you can continue in your career in some fashion.” He turned back to the younger man, still seated. “But know this. It won’t be the same. Nothing will ever be the same.”
Without another word the director of the Mossad left the little room, leaving the door open behind him.
Yanis sat still for a long time before he rose and walked through the open door.
46
As usual, the eight p.m. Wednesday night class at Georgetown Yoga had been a full house, and Catherine had been lucky to find a spot to lay her mat, arriving as she had at the last minute. She’d almost canceled her session tonight due to the Ohlhauser murder in nearby Dupont Circle, but after spending the entire day and early evening in her office, and the realization that she’d probably be pulling an all-nighter to get an article together, she gave herself permission to rush out for an hour and a half to attend to herself and make her favorite class of the week.
As soon as her hour-long practice was over Catherine rolled up her mat, zipped up her orange hoodie, and headed for the door. She didn’t even bother to make small talk with the other ladies, the vast majority of whom were roughly half her age, and almost none of whom could perform a forearm stand scorpion pose half as well as she could. Catherine stood at the curb, hoping to catch a cab back to her office. Spying a taxi a block to the east she stepped into the street with her hand raised, but before the cab even saw her wave, a black Mercedes sedan pulled to a stop in front of her. An older man with a beard sat behind the wheel, and a young bald-headed man in a gray suit climbed out of the passenger’s side, hurried around the front, and opened the back door, right next to Catherine.