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By Way of Deception

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120 BY WAY OF DECEPTIONFor full-fledged katsas, there was a message system that wouldkick in on request, conveying something brief, such as "Hi, I'mfrom the <strong>of</strong>fice. Your husband won't be coming home as planned.He'll contact you as soon as he can. If you should have anyproblems in the interim, please call Jakob."It was done deliberately. You can't imagine the importance sexplays in the life <strong>of</strong> a katsa. The whole uncertainty factor meanttotal freedom. If a katsa ran into a soldier girl and wanted to spendthe weekend with her, well, his wife was quite used to the fact thathe might not be home. That kind <strong>of</strong> freedom was openly desired.But the real joke was that you couldn't be a katsa if you weren'tmarried. You couldn't go abroad. They said that someone whowasn't married would be running around and might meet a girlwho had been planted. On the other hand, everybody else wasscrewing around, making a real case for blackmail, and they knewit. It was always a total mystery to me.For the computer course, one <strong>of</strong> the rooms on the second floor <strong>of</strong>the Academy had been cleared out and tables arranged in a C-shape with consoles for everyone to work at. The instructorprojected images on the wall screen for all to see: we learned firsthow to fill in the personnel data file <strong>of</strong> a subject according to the"carrot page," an orange page containing a series <strong>of</strong> questions thathad to be answered before you could access the computer system.These training consoles were the real thing, tied in directly withheadquarters, giving us access to real files, teaching us how tooperate the existing program, finding and retrieving data accordingto different cuts <strong>of</strong> interest.One memorable episode during the course involved a systemcalled ksharim ("knots"), which means the records <strong>of</strong> anindividual's contacts. Arik F. sat down at the instructor's consoleone day when she was not there and keyed in "Arafat," and then"ksharim." Because Arafat was PLO, he had priority on thecomputer. The higher the priority <strong>of</strong> the person you were askingabout, the more quickly you'd be answered.Priorities don't come much higher than Arafat, but the realproblem was his hundreds <strong>of</strong> thousands <strong>of</strong> ties, so when thecomputer began running vast lists <strong>of</strong> names on the screen,

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