The reports rattled off the basics: Mossad and IDF special forces had trained units in the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore; Israel, according to one report, had paid informers in northern Burma, but that didn’t mean much — a paid informer in South-East Asia was someone who’d been shown a stack of greenbacks, and didn’t see the harm. Mac didn’t take it too seriously because many European intelligence agents in South-East Asia allowed the locals to think they were Mossad, as a way of covering where they really came from. It evened out since Mossad agents liked to intimate that they were from the CIA or British SIS when dealing with informers. There were entire cadres of Mossad agents trained to pass for Syrians, Iraqis and Jordanians.
What he was looking for was mention of a bunch of hairy-chested Mossad operators, not hiding behind a film production company or a photography bureau. The kind of pros who would push Quirk for access to a computer network and then drop him when it suited them; a bunch of tough guys who would put a light-bulb bomb in Mac’s hotel room. People like that — no matter how far they’d drifted off as privateers — always gained attention during their official careers.
Pouring his coffee as the traffic outside went about its theatrics, Mac looked at the last file in the ASIS search result. It was stamped April, a year ago. He clicked it open.
It started with a basic intelligence bio card, which was a file containing a passport picture and all the information that defines a person. It was titled RADOFF, Bernard Levi and proceeded to list details of Mr (Bernie) Radoff’s social persona: a French businessman, former banker, now an import-exporter with textile and printing interests in Thailand, Burma and Cambodia.
The second part of the file told the real story: Bernie Radoff was born Marcel Beyer, French-Israeli, former IDF air force, graduated with a law degree from the University of Haifa in 1991, post-grad economics at the Sorbonne in 1992, trained at Mossad in the early 1990s (while still in Paris), joined Banque Nationale in 1993 as a management trainee in its institutional division and spent the rest of his career drawing two cheques: one from the French bank as a bond writer, and the other from King Saul, the Tel Aviv street where Israel’s famous security service was located.
The file noted that Beyer had risen to a senior position with BNP and run the bank’s bond desk out of Hong Kong and then Singapore. Australian intelligence estimated that Beyer ceased being an active Mossad agent in 2005.
Mac was about to log out when he realised there were two attachments to the Marcel Beyer file. The first was a story from Associated Press, tagged Bangkok, Thailand, from eight months ago.
Reading quickly, Mac grew impatient with the lack of clear information.
The Thai Ministry of Finance has confirmed that French national Mr Bernard Radoff has been handed a suspended sentence in exchange for a guilty plea in a four-month legal action that has been shrouded in secrecy.
The Ministry continued its suppression of proceedings in the Supreme Court today, claiming the charges against Mr Radoff — a French financier with many business interests in South-East Asia — were ‘classified’ under national security laws and would not be disclosed.
‘Mr Radoff has pleaded guilty to the charges brought by the government and the court has passed sentence,’ said a brief written statement from the Ministry. ‘The Ministry of Finance has no further comment.’
Mr Radoff was arrested five months ago following a series of spectacular raids in Surin province. His suspended sentence means he is free to go — foreign nationals given suspended sentences in Thailand are usually allowed 48 hours in which to leave the country.
Mr Radoff’s lawyer, Mr Mati Sutramat, scoffed at questions about his client’s possible ties to the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok.
‘I can be arrested for talking about the facts of this case,’ he said. ‘The matter is closed.’
The other attachment was a black and white photograph. It showed Radoff in what looked like the forecourt of the Sheraton Saigon on Dong Du Street, just around the corner from the Grand. He was sleek, tanned and arrogant, and grinning at the camera, which was being wielded by a photographer from the Saigon Times. The caption read: French financier Bernard Radoff has been touring some of Vietnam’s pulp and paper operations in the Mekong region as he looks for suitable investments to augment his holdings in Thailand and Cambodia.
Mac was about to close the photograph when something caught his eye. Radoff was standing in front of a white 4x4. Mac looked closer — it looked like a Ford Explorer SUV, although he couldn’t be certain. The photographer had cropped the picture so only the front portion of the Explorer stuck into the picture — it stopped at the windscreen pillar. The window of the vehicle had a faint glare bouncing off it but Mac could see that a driver sat behind the wheel, a baseball cap pulled over his eyes.
His pulse quickening, Mac used the Photoshop software in the ASIS system to draw a box around the driver’s face and magnify it.
Saving the magnified image to a notepad, Mac selected the ‘repixelate’ option in the menu and waited for the processors in Canberra to take the blown-up, blurry pixels of that driver and make their estimations about how it should look as a reconstituted image.
The result stunned Mac as it finally clarified like a fog lifting. Despite the glare of the glass and the shadow-forming peak of the cap, he knew he was looking at the Israeli with the scary eyes — the man in the red shirt who’d killed Quirk.
Cutting and pasting the repixelated image into the ‘search’ field of the ASIS databases, Mac clicked on the ‘match to identity’ option and hit search.
The search tumbled for more than six minutes as the digital information was thrown at every facial image in the Australian intel database — a database which had been compiled over eighty years.
Finally, a bio card popped up. The man’s name was Joel Dozsa, born 20 March 1970 in — as Mac had surmised — Hungary.
Dozsa had emigrated to Israel as a teenager, and it was suspected he’d been recruited by Mossad in his first months of university at Haifa, Bernie Radoff’s alma mater.
Joel Dozsa had done his doctoral work in military history at the Australian National University in Canberra, and had augmented his research with a junior lectureship at the Royal Military College Duntroon, teaching Australian Army officer cadets.
Having finished his thesis, Dozsa was offered a lecturer’s position at Duntroon but the offer was suddenly withdrawn after an unfavourable report from the Defence Security Authority, the military’s internal intelligence and vetting agency. The reason for the retraction was not in the report, but Mac assumed the Mossad connection had filtered back to DSA.
The last paragraph of the Joel Dozsa bio was both vague and clear:
Mr Dozsa did not dispute the retraction of the job offer and departed Canberra airport for Melbourne two hours after being informed of the retraction. DSA officers XXX and YYY followed Mr Dozsa to Melbourne, where he disappeared in what appeared to be ‘aided’ counter-surveillance. Defence Security officers PPP and QQQ attended Mr Dozsa’s apartment in the Duntroon residential halls and found a stripped apartment. Fellow residents said two men in grey coveralls had loaded a small van with the contents of Mr Dozsa’s apartment. Surveillance tape of RMC Duntroon showed a Toyota HiAce van with false registration plates. Subsequent interagency discussions revealed Australian Federal Police had opened a file on Mr Dozsa following an ANU exchange week in Bangkok, June 1993. Mr Dozsa was observed by an off-duty AFP officer at the Siam City Hotel in Phayathai, Bangkok — a known RV of French national Bernie RADOFF. Radoff is an institutional banker with BNP and a private investor across the Mekong Delta region; he is also understood to be a senior Mossad ‘agent-runner’ responsible for many deniable operations on behalf of the Israeli government. DSA made a pro forma request to the Israeli Embassy for explanations as to Mr Dozsa’s sudden and ‘aided’ disappearance at Melbourne airport. No explanation was forthcoming.