Spies of No Country by Matti Friedman

Author:Matti Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2019-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14: Casino Méditerranée

One of our four spies was still missing in the early fall of 1948—the volatile Yakuba. He was still in Israel. He’d been held back to learn to use new explosives, some recently arrived in shipments from Czechoslovakia and others developed by Israeli scientists, like cone-shaped bombs that could blow through doors and walls.

Yakuba was just twenty-four, but he’d been in the Section for six years, longer than any of the others. Explosives, and mayhem more generally, were considered his department. He’d carried out the garage bombing with Isaac, as you’ll remember, and a string of actions with the Palmach before that. During an operation that came to be known as the Night of the Bridges, when the fighters blew up transport links across Palestine to paralyze the British, he’d fought a man hand to hand on a bridge over the Jordan and drove a knife into his opponent’s throat. He was also one of three fighters responsible for the Palmach’s best-known vigilante operation in the early years: they went into the Arab town of Beisan in disguise, seized a man suspected of raping several Jewish women in the Jordan Valley, drugged him, and castrated him. This was around 1943. The rapes stopped, and the operation was celebrated for a time around Palmach campfires, though it isn’t mentioned now. People know how it sounds. Yakuba didn’t celebrate violence. Sometimes, as in the incident with the rapist, it made him sick. But he understood it was his job.

One day that fall he was finally summoned to a military headquarters in Tel Aviv. In the midst of the fighting, the old Hagana, the underground organization of which the Palmach was part, had morphed into the beginnings of a real army, the Israel Defense Forces. This army had an intelligence branch. The apparatus wasn’t yet divided into the distinct arms that would exist later—military intelligence, Shin Bet for internal security, Mossad for activities abroad—and it was all run by an officer known as Big Isser, who was waiting for Yakuba with four large crates.*

Listen, the officer said. You’re crossing to the other side. I want operations. I want missions. I want terror attacks. I want to pin them down and paralyze them, keep them busy, drive them crazy.

Absolutely, the young agent said.

I trust you, said Big Isser, and then, with irony that may or may not have been intentional, he said, Go in peace.

In the crates were explosives, pistols, and a radio intended for the second station planned for Damascus. There was a new Czech Parabellum for Yakuba and £10,000 for the Beirut cell, more money than the kid from the Jerusalem slum had ever seen.

The borders between Palestine and the neighboring Arab states were now sealed, so the agent and his cargo were to be delivered in a nighttime sortie by the Israeli navy. The navy, like the state itself, was just a few months old and more aspiration than reality—a few modest vessels, some found leaking at anchor in the Haifa port when the British left, all of them with previous lives.

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