“What do you know about a Mossad asset with the code name of Hawthorn?”
Alvey shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve never heard the name.”
“Well, believe me, you know the man’s work.” The statement hung in the air a long time. It was all the more curious to Alvey because he never knew the plainspoken Aurbach to speak with such melodrama.
The younger man just replied, “Who is he?”
Slowly Menachem leaned back in his chair and puffed on his cigarette. “He was Iraqi. Hawthorn’s father worked for us first. He was a pilot in Saddam’s air force. This was the eighties, mind you, shortly after Osirak. We recruited the father while he was on leave in Cyprus. It wasn’t an ideological recruitment; he was chasing money and girls, and we gave him a little taste, then offered him much more of both for helping us. He agreed. He wasn’t terribly useful at first, he didn’t provide us much in the way of intelligence about Saddam’s air power capabilities, so we cut him loose, not wanting to throw good money after bad.
“We thought that was that, but after he left the military he became a pilot for Middle East Airlines, and we reached out again. MEA flew all over the region, so we thought he might be able to provide bits of intelligence for us here and there.”
“Did he?”
Aurbach waved a hand in the air. “Nothing relevant to our discussion tonight, Yanis. We will talk about his son.”
Yanis Alvey shrugged. “Okay. The son. Code name Hawthorn. We got him through his dad?”
Aurbach took another long drag from his cigarette. “The father relocated to MEA’s home office in Beirut in 1990, and his eighteen-year-old son came with him. He went to the university there, got caught up in a student movement against Shia dominance of the government, and was arrested by the police during a peaceful sit-in.
“The police were controlled by Hezbollah, of course, so they threw him into a cell along with some of his friends. Beat them night and day. Hawthorn was the only student who survived the ordeal.
“We learned all this from his father, and with his blessing we made a soft approach. He agreed to work for us in Lebanon against Hezbollah, but within a few years he was informing against the more radical Sunni groups, as well.”
“Sounds like a useful asset,” Alvey said. Yanis Alvey was a commando, so he didn’t run agents himself, but he certainly benefited from their intelligence product. He’d conducted countless operations in Lebanon, so he couldn’t help but wonder if Hawthorn’s product had served him and his various missions.
Menachem agreed. “He was one of my best agents, and he was good at his work, but I knew he could be even more valuable if we left him alone. I gave him the code name Hawthorn because it is a plant that grows here in the Levant. If raised in the wild, on its own, it bears plentiful fruit. My philosophy was to let him stay in Lebanon as our inside man, for the next time our army traveled north to clean the country of terrorists.”
“But why did he agree to help us?”
“He hated Hezbollah, hated all the radical and jihadist groups, Sunni and Shia alike. He had no great love for Judaism or our state, but as Hezbollah took over Lebanon and al Qaeda began to grow in the Middle East, he saw the radical philosophies as insidious cancers, and he saw Israel as something of a surgeon, cutting away the bad.”
Alvey understood. “I imagine as his case officer, you painted exactly that picture in his mind. You gave him a purpose. A reason.”
“That is it, entirely.” The old man smiled sadly. “And then came 9/11. And then came Iraq.”
Alvey said, “We didn’t share him with the Americans, did we?”
Aurbach shook his head, still smiling. “No. He was ours alone.”
Alvey was not surprised. The Mossad was notoriously stingy with its intelligence sources.
“We sent him to the nation of his birth just after the invasion. He was on the ground during the insurgency. Doing enough to remain credible to the militias, but keeping us informed on developments.”
Aurbach added, “This became a problem, though, when he was picked up by the U.S. Marines in Tikrit in 2006 and put in a prison camp. CIA sent his picture to us, along with hundreds of others, to see if we had any information about terrorist ties, or any interest in interviewing him ourselves. You can imagine how difficult it was when I saw the face of the man I had been running for over a decade, knowing he was rotting away in an American detainment facility, and was forced to tell the Americans I had no knowledge of or interest in the man.”