Gideon's Spies

Its fuel capacity, altitude, speed, armaments, and turnaround servicing time had made it the Arab world’s premier frontline fighter aircraft. Israel’s air force chiefs would cheerfully have given many millions of dollars for just a glimpse of the MiG’s blueprint, let alone for the actual plane. Meir Amit “went to bed thinking of it. I woke up thinking of it. I thought of it in the shower, over dinner. I thought about it every spare moment I had. Keeping up with an enemy’s advanced weapons system is a priority with any intelligence service. Actually getting your hands on it almost never happens.”

The first step was to send an agent to Baghdad. Meir Amit created an alias for him, as English as the name in his passport, George Bacon: “No one would think a Jew would have a name like that.” Bacon would travel to Baghdad as the sales manager of a London-based company selling hospital X-ray equipment.

He arrived in Baghdad on an Iraqi Airways flight with several sample boxes of equipment and demonstrated how well he had absorbed his brief by selling several items to hospitals. At the beginning of his second week, Bacon made the call to the number Salman had provided. Bacon’s reports to Mossad contained vivid descriptions.

“I used a pay phone in the hotel lobby. The risk the phone was tapped was smaller than making the call from my room. The number was answered at once. A voice asked in Farsi who was speaking. I replied in English, apologizing I must have the wrong number. The voice then asked, also in English, who was speaking. I said I was a friend of Joseph’s. Was there someone there by that name? I was told to wait. I thought maybe they were tracing the call, that this was a trap after all. Then a very cultured voice was on the line saying he was Joseph and that he was glad I had called. He then asked if I knew Paris. I thought: Contact!”

Bacon found himself agreeing to a meeting in a Baghdad coffeehouse the following noon. At the appointed hour, a man smilingly introduced himself as Joseph. His face was deeply etched, his hair white. The agent’s later report once more captured the surreal atmosphere of the moment:

“Joseph said how very pleased he was to see me, as if I was some long-awaited relative. He then started to talk about the weather and how the quality of service had dropped in cafés like this one. I thought, here I am in the middle of a hostile country whose security service would surely kill me if they had the chance, listening to an old man’s ramblings. I decided whoever he was, whatever his connection was with Salman in Paris, Joseph was certainly not an Iraqi counterintelligence officer. That calmed me. I told him my friends were very interested in the merchandise his friend had mentioned. He replied, ‘Salman is my nephew who lives in Paris. He is a waiter at a café. All the good waiters have left here.’ Joseph then leaned across the table and said, ‘You have come about the MiG? I can arrange it for you. But it will cost one million dollars.’ Just like that.”

Bacon sensed that perhaps, after all, Joseph was more than he appeared. There was a quiet certainty about him. But as he began to question him, the old man shook his head. “Not here. People could be listening.”

They arranged to meet again the following day on a park bench along the Euphrates River, which flowed through the city. That night Bacon slept very little wondering if, after all, he was being slowly hooked, if not by Iraqi intelligence, then by some very clever con men who were using Joseph as a front.

The next day’s meeting revealed a little more of Joseph’s background and motives.

He came from a poor Iraqi Jewish family. As a boy he had been employed as a servant by a rich Marionite Christian family in Baghdad. Then, after thirty years of loyal service, he had been abruptly dismissed, wrongly accused of stealing food. He found himself, on his fiftieth birthday, cast out into the streets. Too old to find other work, he existed on a modest pension. He had also decided to seek out his Jewish roots. He discussed his quest with his widowed sister, Manu, whose son, Munir, was a pilot in the Iraqi air force. Manu admitted she too had a strong desire to go to Israel. But how could they possibly do that? Even to mention the idea was to risk imprisonment in Iraq. To leave anyone behind would guarantee the authorities would punish them severely, perhaps even kill them. And where would the money come from? She had sighed and said it was all an impossible dream.

But in Joseph’s mind the idea took hold. Over dinner Munir had often told how his commander boasted that Israel would pay a fortune for one of the MiGs he flew, “perhaps even a million U.S. dollars, Uncle Joseph.”