By Way of Deception

BY WAY OF DECEPTION 133once said to him, "How can you manage all this?" and he said,"You work hard, you save, and you can manage." Yeah, sure.I was next assigned to the Tsomet (or Meluckah) department andput on the Benelux desk, where part of my job was approvingDanish visa applications.In Tsomet, the desk is there to service the station, not to instructit. The head of a station in Tsomet is the boss and, in most cases,equals the rank of the head of the branch he's under. (This is theopposite of Kaisarut, where I had just been working. There,decisions are taken at the desk and the branches, so that theliaison station head in London, for example, is the directsubordinate of the head of the London desk in Tel Aviv, which hastotal control.)The first branch of Tsomet had several desks. One, called theBenelux desk, handled Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg,and also Scandinavia (with stations in Brussels and Copenhagen);then there were the French and the British desks, with stations inLondon, Paris, and Marseille.There was also a second major branch with the Italian desk, andstations in Rome and Milan; the German and Austrian desk, thenwith a station in Hamburg (changed later to Berlin); and a jumperdesk, called the Israeli station, in Tel Aviv, with katsas jumping toGreece, Turkey, Egypt, and Spain, when needed.The head of a station had the rank of the head of a branch andcould overrule him if need be, then go directly to the head ofdepartment. The structure was flawed, because if his case failedwith the head of department, he could still turn to the head ofEurope, in Brussels. As a field command, that would override eventhe head of department. It became a constant struggle, and withevery change in personnel there, the power base shifted.There was no such thing as orders in the Mossad. It was nicer thatway. First, they didn't want to make anybody angry, and then,nobody really had to do what you asked them to do. Most peoplehad a horse or two in the system —