other-side-of-deception-victor-ostrovsky

there, and no one was coming or going until the man was on his way.""One man?""Yes, one. He'll instruct his friends when he gets back there.""And you trust him to do the job?" It sounded fishy to me. It wasalmost standard procedure in the Mossad that acts of sabotage werecarried out only by our people, and that the locals were set up for thefall if something went wrong. Sending a team to get secondhand trainingwas suicidal."He'll do the job.""I'm willing to bet that he either blows himself up or gets caught.""I sure hope you're right, because that is exactly what I'm bankingon. What I mean is, he'll probably get caught, and by the time he's finishedspilling the beans, the Kuwaitis will be positive that the man isworking for the Iraqis, and that he's there to try and help overthrowthe Kuwaiti royal family.""And what the hell would be achieved by that?""Agitation, my boy, agitation, what else? Then we'll see where wecan take it. After all, there's still a war going on between Iran andIraq, and the Kuwaitis together with the Saudis are paying for most ofit."I was grateful to Ephraim for talking to me in such detail aboutthings I had no direct connection with. It made me feel I was still partof it all. Within the Mossad, everybody told everybody else abouteverything. Had Ephraim not done that, we both knew he would havelost me.I was now dumping large quantities of marmalade onto theremaining toasts and washing down the loaded triangles with hot coffee.Coffee, extra bacon, jelly, cigarettes, alcohol-it's funny how,when the pressure's on, healthy habits fly out the window."So what happened with our little escapade?" asked Ephraim."You said the Russians didn't call you back?""No.""Call them now."I got up and took from my wallet the scrap of paper the Russianhad given me. I dialed the number and waited."Hello?" came a heavy Russian-accented voice."I was waiting for your call.""Is this Victor?""Yes. Do you have anything for me?""I'm sorry, but we will not be talking to you anymore. I'm sorry."And he hung up. He couldn't know how happy he made me feel."Well?" Ephraim was craning his head in my direction as thoughhe could catch what I had to say faster if he was closer. He also helpedhimself to a piece of my toast."They don't want me.""Yes!" He got up, punching a fist at an imaginary opponent. "Yes!We got the bastard.""Who did you get?""I told you it couldn't be from operations. We got a request fromthe prime minister's office for information on several people that werelet go from the Mossad in the last year. We sent up four files; yourswas one. I had someone from Prudot [technical], using some halfassedstory, set it up so that we could see which of the files were handledand by whom. The result was as I'd expected. Only yours wasopened. It was ordered by the man in charge of security for the primeminister's office, a guy by the name of Levinson.""Is he from Shaback?""No, he's office security, documentation, telephones, that sort ofthing. They couldn't get someone in a better position if they recruitedthe head of the Shaback.""What now?""It will take a while. but we will nail him before the end of theyear. I passed a warning to my friend in the Shaback. I told him I got itfrom a liaison, but he can't use it formally because that would burnthe source. He knows the situation, but he'll have to catch him on hisown.""So we did it," I exclaimed. "We actually did it, didn't we?"He nodded. "Yes, it seems we did."I was happy. After all, it wasn't every day that you nailed a Sovietspy. And it was so easy, thinking back on it now. It was a stroll in thepark.