An Absence of Light

“I’m going to leave you here with this,” Arnette said, lifting her chin at the solitary envelope. “After you’ve read it, step outside and have Quinn buzz me. Then we’ll talk.”

“Quinn’s the blonde on the radio.”

“Right.”

Graver nodded and Arnette walked out of the library and closed the door behind her. Graver pulled out a chair and sat down. There was a code number along the left side of the file, a long string of digits and letters. He pulled the file over in front of him and opened it It was a thick, single-spaced dossier on Yosef Raviv.

Raviv was born in 1936 to Jewish parents in Athens, Greece. His father was a locksmith in the Jewish district who in 1943 smuggled his family aboard a ship in Galatas and fled with them to British-partitioned Palestine. They settled in Ashdod on the Mediterranean coast, and the elder Raviv joined the prestate Lehi underground, a radical Jewish group that, along with another underground group known as the Irgunists, conducted terrorism against the British and Arabs in an effort to hasten the creation of a Jewish state. Three months before Jewish independence was announced in 1948, the elder Raviv was killed when a bomb he was assembling accidentally exploded. Yosef was twelve years old.

In 1953 at age seventeen Raviv enrolled in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he spent the next six years studying languages. When he left the university in 1959 at the age of twenty-three, he spoke French, English, Italian, and Spanish fluently and had a working knowledge of German, Arabic, and Russian.

After university, Raviv entered the Israeli Army for his mandatory three years service. At the end of that period, in 1962, he was immediately summoned by Tsomet, the Mossad’s recruiting branch, at a time when a new era was beginning for Israel’s foreign intelligence. Meir Amit, the Mossad’s new director, was restructuring the agency and was emphasizing the recruitment of young men who had distinguished themselves in the military or university. He specifically sought men who exhibited “aggressiveness, cunning, initiative, eagerness for engagement with the enemy, and determination.” After three years of instruction, Raviv graduated from the Institute in late 1965 as a Mossad katsa, or case officer.

Raviv was immediately sent to Marseille to replace a case officer whose Arabic language abilities were sorely needed in Israel at this time. All Israeli intelligence agencies, Mossad, Aman, and Shin Bet, strained to prepare for the war with the Arabs that everyone felt was inevitable. Raviv was still in Marseille in June of 1967 when the Six Day War rocked the Middle East.

Under the direction of Meir Amit, the Mossad policy known as the “peripheral concept” gained even greater favor and momentum. This philosophy was based on the belief that Israel needed to form alliances-sometimes secret ones-with the countries bordering the Arab world. In doing this, the Mossad also sought to form stronger ties with their counterpart agencies in the West In the developing nations such as Africa and Latin America, they established diplomatic relations, proposed a variety of aid programs, and then opened embassies where Mossad agents went to work under diplomatic cover, offering their intelligence expertise to the host country’s counterparts and thereby greatly expanding their own knowledge of that country’s security operations. They also set up permanent Israeli military delegations in some countries. In Western Europe, the Mossad expanded its ties with their foreign security counterparts by joining a secret group called “Kilowatt” which was created to combat international terrorism. At every turn and available opportunity, Israel was increasing its knowledge of foreign intelligence and security operations all over the world.

In 1969 Raviv participated in a joint mission with Aman that was eventually to determine the shape of his career. After the Six Day War, the French clamped an embargo on munitions, aircraft, and boats that Israel already had bought and paid for, but which France had not yet delivered. The Israelis were in particular need of five missile boats that were part of the embargo, and they could not wait for the slow wheels of diplomacy to free them. Raviv received orders to travel to Normandy where the missile boats were kept in the shipyard at Cherbourg and to use agents to reconnoiter the weak points of the shipyard security so that the Israelis’ naval operatives could plan a repossession.

On Christmas Eve, Israeli naval officers who had flown into France several weeks earlier and had been briefed by Raviv and his agents, entered the Cherbourg shipyards and sailed the five missile boats through Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean.