By Way of Deception

78 BY WAY OF DECEPTIONthere is no problem making slicks by using simple things you canbuy in a hardware or even a variety store.One of the simplest hiding places is a door with plywood on bothsides and a frame in the middle. To hide something, you drill ahole through the top edge of the door and hang things inside it.Then there's the pipe that holds hangers in a clothes closet.There's lots of room in that. They might take your clothes off thehangers, but very few people will look at the pipe they're hangingon.Another common way of taking a secret document or moneythrough customs is to buy two newspapers and cut part of oneout, making a little pocket inside. Then you cut out the same thingfrom the other paper and glue it over the spot. It's an oldmagicians' trick. We used to read a lot of magicians' books. Youcan walk right up to customs carrying the newspaper — evenhand it to the officer to hold while you go through.The next set of exercises, called "coffee," involved the traineesworking in groups of three. Yosy, Arik E, a religious, six-foot-sixinchgiant of a man, and I, with Shai Kauly as our instructor, wentto the Hayarkon Street hotel strip, sat in the café for a while, thenwere taken one at a time into a hotel lobby. Each of us had aphony passport and cover story, and Kauly would walk into thelobby with us, look around, then tell us to make contact withwhomever he chose. Sometimes they were plants, sometimes not,but the idea was to obtain as much information about them aspossible and make another appointment.I went up to one man who was a reporter for Afrique-Asie andasked him if he had a match. That led to a conversation andultimately, I did well. He turned out to be a plant, though, a katsawho had covered a PLO convention in Tunis in the guise of areporter for that newspaper. He actually wrote several articles forthem.As usual, after each such exercise we had to write a completereport on how we had made contact, what had been said,everything that had taken place. Back in class the next day, wecritiqued each other. Oddly, sometimes you'd come to class andfind your subject sitting there.