Site Map

PROFITS OF WAR -- INSIDE THE SECRET U.S.-ISRAELI ARMS NETWORK

1.  Youth

PERHAPS IT WAS written that political chaos would follow me through life. I was born into it in Tehran, Iran, in 1951. My parents, affluent Iraqi Jews, had been married in Baghdad in 1945, but settled in Tehran the same year. Briefly, in late 1950 and early 1951, they visited Israel to explore the possibility of moving there. On that trip, in Jerusalem, I was conceived. But my parents, for the time being, decided to return to Iran, a country deeply divided against itself.

Shortly after their return, the Majlis -- the Parliament -- passed an act nationalizing oil. The British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company withdrew; and Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh found himself in charge of a nation that was in an uproar, with fierce rows among the country's leaders and rioting in the streets.

Even within the Jewish community in Iran there were divisions. The Iraqi Jews, who had a highly developed sense of Western and European culture and Jewish awareness, would not mix with the Iranian Jews, who regarded themselves as Iranians who happened to have another religion.

Those Iranian Jews who emigrated to Israel were generally financial refugees without emotional connection to their new home. They certainly didn't leave Iran because of oppression. There was little anti-Semitism in Iran, and still isn't, even under the new regime. Historically, it was Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, who granted the Jews freedom, and, later, Islam recognized Judaism and the Prophets of Judaism. Even though Reza Shah Pahlavi, the father of the last Shah, sided with the Nazis during the Second World War, he never adopted Hitler's anti-Semitic ways, and most Iranians harbored none of the hatred of Jews that existed in Europe.

The Iraqi-Jewish community living in Tehran was closely knit, with its own social club, synagogue, and school. Nevertheless, most of the city's Iraqi-Jewish children attended the American Community School, where the first language taught was English, followed by French and Farsi, or Persian. At home, Arabic was spoken because of the parents' background, so I, in keeping with many other sons and daughters of Iraqi Jews, was brought up with four languages. (Later I also learned Hebrew and Spanish. As for my sense of identity, I never felt Iranian even though I was born in Iran. I was Jewish.

Like all the boys in the Iraqi-Jewish community, I was taught to pray in Hebrew toward the bar mitzvah at the age of 13. After finishing high school, most Iraqi-Jewish children would be sent to university in the United States. Although proud to be Jewish, their parents saw no future in sending their sons and daughters to Israel, which they regarded as a nation of poor refugees and Hasidic Jews from Eastern Europe. The U.S. Embassy was well aware of the status of Iraqi Jews and readily granted visas for the teenagers, who often stayed on in America, married, and settled down.

My father Gourdji, though, was something of an oddball in all this. He had received a French education in the Alliance School in Baghdad, and before entrenching himself in Iran, he had traveled the world extensively, spending time in India, France, Palestine, and the Soviet Union.

In Palestine, during 1940, he hooked up with a group of Jewish terrorists who called themselves LEHI -- a Hebrew acronym for Fighters for the Liberation of Israel. Although the organization had a reputation as rightwing, many of its members were formerly part of the communist movement. They were better known as the Stern Gang, after their leader David Stern, who was virulently anti-British.

Stern's successor, Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister of Israel, was equally anti-British and was even willing to negotiate with the Nazis for Jewish lives. He offered to fight alongside German troops against the British if the Germans would allow the Jews who were interned in European concentration camps to emigrate to Palestine. As expected, the British and U.S. governments and the Jewish labor movement, whose leader, David Ben-Gurion, was comfortably ensconced in New York, did everything in their power to thwart such a plan, and the Stern people were persecuted and hunted down, even by other Jews in Palestine.

Shamir and his colleagues from the Stern Gang are anti-American to this day, because they believe that the slaughter of six million Jews in Europe could have been prevented with a bit of American cooperation. Most of the people affiliated with the Stern Gang were not welcome to stay in the State of Israel after it was established because the Labor coalition government that took over looked askance at them. Shamir himself was an exception, becoming a prominent figure in the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion said of him, "If a terrorist, let him be my terrorist."

My father, finding Israel less than welcoming, set up shop in Iran. He joined his brother in the import-export business. From the Soviet Union, for example, he imported furs and leather. Later, during the 1950s, he acquired the Mercedes Benz/Bosch car and spare-parts franchise for Iran. But my father always yearned to pull up roots and go to live in Israel whenever the political climate changed.

For my part, I loved to listen to my father talk about his travels and his philosophies. Sometimes we'd go up to the walk-on roof of our three-story house in the northern suburbs of Tehran for long discussions. At other times, we'd find a shady spot in the yard. And while I was taught languages, math, geography, and history at the American School, it was from my father that I really learned about life.

He enjoyed talking about his experiences in the Soviet Union. While my three sisters and I grew up surrounded by the American propaganda that was flooding Iran in the 1950s and 1960s, which portrayed the Soviet Union as an evil place, my father would say: "It's really just another way of life. In the Soviet Union you don't see indigent people in the streets. Everybody has a bare minimum to live, and they get their basic needs from the state. If they don't have any business initiative, they won't find themselves living in dire poverty or close to starvation. Growing up with a bare minimum is better than starving."

This was his way of explaining the differences between East and West to growing children. His was an unusual philosophy then in an affluent, capitalist, American-oriented society. My father expressed his views openly, and there was no doubt why he was never fully accepted by others in the Iraqi-Jewish community.

Despite my father's socialist sympathies, the Labor coalition in power in Israel was not acceptable to him. This was not because of ideology, but because he saw these so-called socialists as "peasants" whose main aim was to enrich themselves -- bringing economic chaos while making it clear that Middle Eastern Jews, regardless of their education, would always be second-class citizens in Israel. Furthermore, the Labor coalition "socialists" were, ironically, intertwined with the capitalist United States.

My father supported the Gahal (today known as the Likud Party), a merger of Menachem Begin's Herut Party and the Israel Liberal Party. Although they saw themselves as a conservative party because of their strong emphasis on Jewish identity, they also supported progressive social programs. Their leaders, Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, became folk heroes to the party loyalists. I would compare the Gahal -- and today's Likud Party -- to the Peronists in Argentina: rightwing populists. The Labor coalition, which later became the Labor Party, was in favor of close relations with South Africa and of cutting relations with the Soviet Union altogether; on the other hand, the Likud tried to open up relations with the Soviet Union and tone down the ties with South Africa.

Because of what I learned from my father, I was fascinated during my school years in Tehran with the concept of world revolution -- not as a violent uprising but as a redistribution of wealth. From my youthful philosophical perspective, centrally controlled economies and ways of life were a necessary first step in educating the masses and preparing them for a more open society.

By July of 1966, when I was 14, I was feeling increasingly foreign in Iran, with my Iraqi-Jewish background and my American schooling. Like most adolescents, I was searching for my identity, a place I could feel at home. Under the influence of my father and sharing the vision of an Israeli state, I decided I wanted to live in Israel. So my mother -- a pragmatic and street-smart woman -- took me and my sisters Claris, Evon, and Stella, to Israel, where Stella and I were enrolled at the American International School in Kfar Smaryahu, north of Tel Aviv. My two oldest sisters went to college. Five years later, my parents moved from Tehran to Israel, lock, stock, and barrel.

I had the best of both worlds. Most of the pupils at the school were white Americans or the children of foreign diplomats stationed in Israel. There weren't too many Jewish resident children attending the school, and while sometimes I felt something of a misfit, we all got along well. When I left at the end of each day, I would mix with Israeli kids in Ramat Gan, the Tel Aviv suburb where we were living. Once in a while I'd go to a party, take a girlfriend to the cinema, or just go for a long walk, some three or four kilometers, to the sea.

***

After their graduation from high school at the age of 18, my Israeli friends were drafted into the army. My American pals left for the U.S. to attend university. I, meanwhile, found myself in a peculiar situation once again. Because I still had an Iranian passport, I could not be drafted. So I joined a kibbutz. I was a religious Jew at the time, hardly orthodox but at least keeping kosher and observing the sabbath. I was the only one on this socialist kibbutz who wore a yarmulke. Even though I did not identify with their way of life, I wanted to experience the East European ethos, and rub shoulders with the avant garde. Curiously, it was a move that set me on the road to a life enmeshed in political intrigue.

Half of each day at Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon was spent studying Hebrew, the rest doing volunteer work in the fish ponds, engaged in the extremely difficult task of sorting out male and female trout. Sometimes I would work through the night in the bakery, preparing for the early morning sale of bread.

My roommates that year, 1969, were two non-Jewish volunteers in their 30s. One was an Australian member of the Church of God, Michael Dennis Rohan, the other an American Baptist named Arthur. They were in the kibbutz because they had had visions of Christ ordering them to come to the Holy Land. The kibbutz was an economical way of doing the Lord's work. As long as they went about certain daily tasks, they didn't have to pay anything for their keep.

Rohan, a tall slim man with thinning brown hair, had a vision that he was to be the king of Israel who would prepare the way for the return of Christ. Arthur's vision was slightly different: he saw Christ's return as imminent and knew that the Jews had to be saved from themselves. God had sent them His only son 2,000 years earlier, and they had not accepted Him.

It was a crazy situation. There I was keeping an eye out for any girls I might be able to lure into my bed -- life in a kibbutz is not all work and prayer -- while sharing a room with two Westerners who were following a different kind of heavenly calling. Not that Rohan was not human. He fell for a very attractive Hebrew teacher who came into the kibbutz daily. He sent her his photograph with a note that he would be king of Israel one day and he'd like her to be his queen. She ignored him.

At night Rohan, dressed in his khaki work clothes, talked to me about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. For Moslems this was the holiest place after Mecca and Medina. On the mount is El Aqsa Mosque which has been built over a rock imprinted with a footstep said to be that of the Prophet Mohammed, who ascended to heaven from that spot.

"To rebuild the temple, this mosque has to be destroyed," Rohan told me. "In order for Jesus to come back, the Third Temple has to be built, but this can only be done by getting rid of the mosque." The Second Temple had been destroyed by the Romans.

Rohan started receiving visits from two men wearing yarmulkes -- who, he explained, were from the Jewish Defense League, a New York-based extreme rightwing organization associated with Rabbi Meir Kahane. Rohan never said how he got involved with them. A month after I met him, Rohan packed his bags to leave for Jerusalem. "I'm going to prepare the way for the second coming of Christ," he said. Then he astonished me by donning a suit and tie. With a wave of his bony hand, he set out on the Lord's work.

Two weeks later I learned that Rohan had meant all he had said. The news was dominated by a report that the El Aqsa Mosque had been burned in an arson attack. Moslems around the world were outraged and were calling for a jihad, a holy war, against Israel. Some Arab newspapers claimed that Israeli military helicopters had firebombed the mosque, but I guessed something far different -- which was soon to be confirmed.

Rohan was waiting for me in my room, again dressed in his smart suit. "I've just got back from Jerusalem," he said. "If you'd permit me, I'd like to stay here for the weekend." His bed was still free.

I made no mention of the news at that stage. "Dennis, I have no problem," I said, "but you realize that if you stay longer than a few days, you'll have to register."

That evening, joined by Arthur, we started talking again, and this time I mentioned the burning of the mosque. "Is this a sign that the Third Temple is going to be built?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Did you have anything to do with it?"

"It was God's work, but through my hands."

"Dennis, you realize the whole world is looking for who did it. What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to turn myself in."

I didn't know whether to trust him to do that or not. But I knew that action had to be taken. Israel was being blamed for what he had done.

He asked to be left to have a good sleep that night, promising he wouldn't leave.

Arthur said, "Dennis, I'll be praying all night for your soul."

At breakfast the next morning, I asked Rohan if he had any matches.

"Sure I do," he said. "I used them for a good cause."

After breakfast, with Rohan's permission, I went to a pay phone and called the police emergency 100 number, identified myself to an officer, and told her that the most wanted man in Israel was in my room at the kibbutz. When I said he was an Australian, she told me she had had a lot of crank phone calls and her patience was running out, but she listened to me carefully.

Forty-five minutes after the call, the kibbutz was invaded by heavily armed Israel Police Border Guards, the police paramilitary unit, in their green uniforms. They surrounded the block in which our room was located. Then three officers in civilian clothes knocked on the door. Dennis was treated kindly, handcuffed, and led away to be charged with grand arson of a holy site.

I traveled later to Jerusalem with Arthur, the two of us just scruffy young guys from the kibbutz, and the Israeli police put us up at the King David Hotel, the best in town. We were interrogated about Rohan for hours, and when I mentioned the Jewish Defense League, my interrogators jumped. They said it was vital I not say anything about Rohan, particularly his connections with the JDL.

"There should he no traces of Jewish hands in this," said one of the senior officers.

Rohan never had a trial. He pleaded guilty at a public hearing and was sent for psychiatric observation, and was later declared by the court to be mentally ill. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital south of Haifa.

Three months later Rohan turned up at my flat in Ramat Gan, where I was then living.

"I escaped," he said. "But don't worry. I only came to say hello. I'm going back later."

This time he gave me more details, explaining he had carried out the deed in coordination with the JDL. But he believed his lawyer, Yitzhak Tunic, who was later to be appointed as the state comptroller -- the ombudsman -- had "sold him down the river" because he was afraid Rohan might mention the JDL if he took the witness stand. My own subpoena had been canceled because there were worries that I might also mention the JDL.

"Is it Russia," he asked, "where a man of God is put away and accused of being crazy?"

All this made me think: Is there any justice in the world? In some respects, the Israeli court system was one of the fairest in the world, yet "for reasons of State interests" this case had been suppressed. Rohan had been prepared to admit the crime and was willing to go to jail for ten years or more for what he believed in, but he wanted a platform to talk about his motives. The Israeli legal system was not going to allow that to happen.

Rohan gave himself up to the authorities after chatting with me. Three months later he was deported to Australia.

***

In 1972 while studying political science and modern history at Bar Han University, along with working toward a teacher's license, I became pals with another student, Adel Mohammad Atamna. An Israeli citizen, he was a Palestinian from an Arab village, Kfar Kara'a, located inside the pre-1967 Israeli border. At the time, I was renting a small apartment in Qiryat Ono, not far from the university, and Adel had been renting a flat close by because his village was two hours' drive from Tel Aviv. One day, he invited me to his home, set in a traditional Arab village, which itself lay within a Westernized society. It amazed me how he was able to live in both worlds.

Our friendship developed further when his Jewish landlady got cold feet about having an Arab on her property and threw him out. When I found out why he was looking so miserable, I decided to give my apartment to him while I stayed at my parents' house. He started calling me his brother. One day in late 1972 he said, "I've found you a job. How would you like to teach English in our village high school?"

I loved the idea. There was an abundance of Jewish English teachers, but none wanted to teach in an Arab village. Although I had not yet obtained my degree or my teaching license, I was able to get a temporary permit. So I started teaching teenage boys and girls three times a week, traveling the two hours each way by bus.

One day, out of the blue, I received a letter from the Prime Minister's Office. In essence, it said: Dear Sir, We have a very interesting position to offer you with a lot of future prospects. We would like you to come for an interview in Tel Aviv.

An address and a date were specified. If I couldn't make it, I was told to phone and ask for Kohava.

At the time I was dating a woman three years my senior who had just finished serving in the army and was working for the SHABAK -- the secret police-style internal security service. When I showed her the letter, she smiled.

"This is from the Mossad or the SHABAK," she said. "This is a SHABAK interview address. They're going to offer you a great job, I'd say."

The address turned out to be a regular apartment building. I walked up to the third floor and knocked on the door. A young man answered. He led me into a room and asked me to sit and wait for ten minutes. I found out later that I was under observation throughout that period.

A man in his early 50s called me into a larger room and, when I was seated, said right away:

"Whatever I'm going to tell you right now is governed by the Official Secrets Act. You are not permitted to divulge this conversation or even that it took place or where we met. Please sign this statement which holds you to secrecy."

He handed me a piece of paper, which I signed.

"We have been looking at your background, your file," he said.

"Who are you? What file?"

"The El Aqsa Mosque affair. We've read about the way you helped."

It was never stated, but I assumed he meant that they were pleased I had cooperated when asked to keep my mouth shut about the possible Jewish Defense League involvement.

"Who are you?" I asked again.

"We're from the Prime Minister's Office, and the internal security of the Jewish state is on our shoulders. You have the privilege of being invited to join our family."

He explained that I was not being invited just yet. I had to go through security clearance, my background would be checked further, and I would have to pass tests. But he said my file left him convinced they would be in a position to make me an offer.

"Even though you are not an Israeli citizen yet, you are going to become one, which will make you subject to the draft." What he said was quite true. At this point I intended to become an Israeli citizen. In 1973 I actually got the final papers.

"We can make you a better offer than going into the army," said my host. "You will sign a contract to work for us for at least five years and you will stay teaching in the Arab village where you are working right now. All you have to do is just answer some questions once in a while to the person in charge of security in that area. You will be getting a salary from the school and a salary from us. And who knows, if you're good, you could be promoted to chief of security in that region and you could eventually be stationed abroad -- the future is open to you."

I looked at him without saying a thing.

"If you are agreeable, we will schedule you for tests right away."

"You want me to be a manyak [Hebrew slang for a snitch]?" I asked.

He was taken aback. This was something he had not expected.

"No, no -- we want you to be an undercover agent for the most prestigious and noble organization in the State of Israel. We want to put some of the burden of the security of the Jewish state, which I personally believe is a great honor, on your shoulders."

He was asking me to spy on my friends, to spy on Adel.

"No, thank you," I said. "I'm not prepared to betray friendships."

"But these are Arabs, our enemies."

"Stop the nonsense. Sure they're Arabs, but they're also Israeli citizens."

He suddenly became very angry. "You know what will happen if you turn this down. They'll take you into the army."

"I don't mind serving my country. I just don't want to be a manyak."

I left with his final words ringing in my ears: "We'll give you a week to change your mind. After that, we're gone."

When I got home, my girlfriend was waiting. I told her what had happened.

"Are you crazy?" she asked. She spent the following week trying to persuade me to accept the offer. But I never called them back.

A year later, in 1973, after I had become an Israeli citizen but while I was still studying and teaching, I received another letter. This time, it was from the Ministry of Defense, inviting me to an interview in Tel Aviv. They had a "very special" position to offer me in connection with my upcoming military service.

It was a different apartment. A young woman who opened the door took me in to meet a chubby, balding man who introduced himself as Lt. Col. Sasson. He brought out a file and said he understood I was about to be drafted by the military. He had an offer, but before it was made, he asked me to sign a secrecy statement. I had a feeling of deja vu.

"You have to serve three years in the military. But if you pass all the tests and if you get a security clearance, we will ask you to sign on for an extra two years for career service, meaning you will serve five years in the military. We will give you a very special position and we'll also send you to officers' school."

"Great," I said. "What am I supposed to do?"

"When will you be ready to join the military?"

"My studies finish some time at the end of this year."

Because of my background, my education, and my fluency in Farsi, Hebrew, and English, I had been selected to work for Military Intelligence. As long as I didn't have to spy on my friends, I had no problem with this. I was committed to Israel and wanted to serve the country -- all the better if it was a good, prestigious job as well. I agreed to undergo security clearance procedures.

They began the following morning. At the offices of Field Security I was asked to fill in tens of pages of questions that covered my background, the names of my family and friends, and others who could provide references. This was followed by three days of psychological and aptitude tests.

I was to be assigned to work at the Iranian desk at the codecracking SigInt-Signals Intelligence-unit. But there were more tests to come, including a physical, in order to be able to join the military in a special unit.

My draft date was set for May 6, 1974. When I asked why this was so far away, I was told I had been scheduled for a pre- military course in codebreaking starting in Jerusalem in mid-November 1973. It turned out that my basic training would be in a special infantry unit known as Golani, in which I would undertake a special high-explosives sabotage course. This would be followed by an officers' course, and then I was to be put into the codebreaking unit.

"Why," I asked, "is all this necessary for a man who's to be working as a codebreaker?" I was told I asked too many questions. Lt. Col. Sasson asked if I was going to sign for the extra two years or not. If I refused, I would be assigned to a regular army unit for three years. I signed.

During my codebreaking course, I was introduced to the Iranian method of cryptography. It was pointed out that all the Iranian embassies around the world used a model of the Swiss Haglin coding machine, and they transmitted in Farsi, but using the Roman alphabet.

We were taught the method of breaking the code sent by the Haglin machine. Using a computer, even without knowing the starting point of the machine, the Israelis had found a method of breaking the code. But a new problem came up. The Iranians started double-coding -- making a code out of a code -- and nobody was able to break it. The only way the Israelis could read communications was by "acquiring" the black book that was sent weekly by diplomatic pouch to the communications officer in the unofficial Iranian embassy in Ramat Gan in Israel.

For "security reasons," Iranian diplomatic pouches had to lay over for 24 hours at Ben-Gurion Airport before the embassy received them. This allowed the SHABAK to get into the pouches. These pouches are sealed, but the SHABAK people were experts at breaking the seals and then repairing them after the black book had been "borrowed" and photocopied. On one occasion a sloppy job was done on the resealing, but that was quickly overcome -- the Iranian communications officer was also the man in charge of picking up the pouch. When he discovered the broken seal, he was paid handsomely, which made life a lot easier thereafter. He simply photocopied the weekly code and passed it to us.

After my course was finished, I was stationed in Unit 8200, in the code-breaking department in the non-Arab branch of SigInt. Unit 8200 was housed in a base consisting of a number of white and grey concrete buildings located near a country club some ten kilometers north of Tel Aviv. Close by, on an elevation, was a grey-white building known as the villa, belonging to Mossad, where top-secret security meetings were held. About a kilometer away were several intelligence corps service bases and the intelligence school.

Each department in Unit 8200 was run on a need-to-know basis. A person from one department could not enter another without special permission. The unit commander was Col. Yoel Ben-Porat, known as Buffy, the Hebrew acronym of his name. The number two person in the code-breaking department, Lt. Col. Sasson Yishaek, was the man who had recruited me, as "Lt. Col. Sasson."

The department's commander, Col. Reuben Yirador, had been involved in a discovery a few years earlier. In 1972 he had decoded a Soviet intercept which had not been encrypted in the regular way. It was one of the same VENONA intercepts that British MI-5 agent Peter Wright mentions in his book Spycatcher, although he doesn't say it was the Israelis who cracked this code in Rome. Col. Yirador found out that the Soviets were bugging the office of the prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir. The bugs had been planted by two technicians, Soviet immigrants to Israel, who were working in the Prime Minister's Office. Someone leaked the fact that the Israelis were on to the bugging by the Soviets. The two technicians disappeared from Israel before they could be arrested.

The discovery of the bugs meant, of course, that the Soviets were privy to many of the goings-on in Golda Meir's office in I972 -- a very significant year. The Soviets had a special interest in Israel that year because it was then that Golda Meir had met Leonid Brezhnev in Finland, and had rejected his proposal for a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East. As a result of that meeting and the bugging, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was well informed by the Soviets about Israel's attitude. The intelligence he had been fed may well have prompted Sadat to launch a war against Israel to force it to sit down at the peace table.

***

The branch of Unit 8200 I was assigned to was headed by an older civilian woman, Shulamit Ingerman, one of Israel's best cryptographers, who had twice won the highest award for contributions to Israel's security. A likable woman who cared more about her career than her sloppy appearance, she introduced me to the Iranian team of six.

While it was accepted wisdom that -- like Israel's encrypting system -- NATO and Soviet codes could rarely be broken because the coding method was always being randomly changed, my task of reading the Farsi material was not difficult. This was because the "starting point" was being stolen from the Iranian pouch. It was only a matter of translation. However, it was still necessary to try to crack the code because at some point the black book might not be available.

One night, when I was duty officer and working with a young woman in the unit, I decided to try looking for the secret of the code around the word noghteh, which in Farsi means "full stop" or "period." This, of course, appears frequently in telegrams, and the messages to and from Tehran were no exception. The Iranians used the letter W to represent the spaces between words, but our computer had been designed to delete the Ws. I instructed the computer to put the Ws back in and to look for the word noghteh with Ws on each side. I believed that if we could find a certain frequency of these stops and spaces we would crack the code. Sometime in the dead of night we broke through. No longer would we need the little black book.

The young woman on duty and I shrieked with joy. I immediately called Shulamit, Col. Yirador, Col. Buffy, and Lt. Col. Yishaek. They said they'd be around right away.

The only problem I had that night was that, against regulations, I did not have a uniform on. I was wearing shorts, having traveled in for my night shift by bicycle from Ramat Gan -- it was a pleasant ride. On their arrival shortly after 3:00 A.M., the heavy brass of the unit expressed their delight and extended their congratulations. Suddenly Buffy turned to me with a stern face and demanded: "When is your shift over?"

I told him at eight in the morning.

"At 8:05 you will come to my office to stand court martial for being insubordinate and out of order."

Everyone in the room was taken aback.

"Sir?" I asked.

"The next time you break a code," he said, "make sure you are in uniform."

At eight in the morning I made my way in a borrowed uniform to Buffy's office. He told me right away that he was sentencing me to 14 days in jail for disorderly conduct. He ordered me to sit. I sat. Then he broke into a smile and said, "But I'm suspending the sentence. I have a driver outside with a car. Go home, take a shower, have a shave, and be back in an hour."

I did as I was told. Then other members of the Iranian desk and I were taken to see the director of Military Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, where we were all commended.

Life with the military held promise. Or so I thought.

Go to Next Page