The paperwork, briefings, and stern warnings consumed the entire first day. On the second her formal education commenced. She felt rather like a graduate student in a private university of one. In the mornings, immediately following breakfast, she learned techniques for replacing her own identity with an assumed one—tradecraft, they called it. After a light lunch she embarked on Palestinian studies, followed by Islamic and jihadist studies. No one ever referred to her as Natalie. She was Leila, no family name, only Leila. The instructors spoke to her only in Arabic and referred to themselves as Abdul, Muhammad, or Ahmed. One two-person team of briefers called themselves Abdul and Abdul. Natalie called them Double-A for short.
The last hour of daylight was Natalie’s exclusively. With her head spinning with Islam and jihad, she would set out for training runs along the dusty farm roads. She was never permitted to go alone; two armed security guards followed her always in a dark-green ATV. Often she returned to the house to find Gabriel waiting, and they would walk a mile or two through the perfumed twilight of the valley. His Arabic was not sufficiently fluent for prolonged conversation, so he addressed her in French. He spoke to her about her training and her studies but never about his childhood in the valley or its remarkable history. As far as Leila was concerned, the valley represented an act of colonial theft and dispossession. “Look at it,” he would say, pointing toward the Arab village on the hillock. “Imagine how they must feel when they see the accomplishments of the Jews. Imagine their anger. Imagine their shame. It is your anger, Leila. It is your shame.”
As her training progressed, she learned techniques for determining whether she was being followed. Or whether her flat or office was bugged. Or whether the person she assumed to be her best friend, or her lover, was in fact her worst enemy. The teaching team of Abdul and Abdul instructed her to assume she was being followed, observed, and listened to at all times. This was not a problem, they said, so long as she remained faithful to her cover. A proper cover was like a shield. The typical undercover Office field agent spent far more time maintaining his cover than actually gathering intelligence. Cover, they told her, was everything.
During the second week at the farm, her Palestinian studies took a decidedly harder turn. The entire Zionist enterprise, she was told, was based upon a myth—the myth that Palestine was a land without a people waiting for a people without a land. In fact, in 1881, the year before the first Zionist settlers arrived, the population of Palestine was 475,000. The vast majority were Muslim and were concentrated in the Judean Hills, the Galilee, and the other portions of the land that were then habitable. Roughly that same number of people were driven into exile during al-Nakba, the catastrophe of Israel’s founding in 1948. And still another wave fled their villages in the West Bank after the Zionist conquest of 1967. They languished in the refugee camps—Khan Yunis, Shatila, Ein al-Hilweh, Yarmouk, Balata, Jenin, Tulkarm, and dozens more—and dreamed of their olive groves and lemon trees. Many kept the deeds to property and homes. Some even carried keys to front doors. This unhealed wound was the seedbed of the Arab world’s grief. The wars, the suffering, the lack of economic progress, the despotism—all this was the fault of Israel.
“Spare me,” groaned Natalie.
“Who said this?” demanded one of the Abduls, a cadaverous-looking creature, pale as milk, who was never without a cigarette or a cup of tea. “Was it Natalie or was it Leila? Because Leila does not question these assertions. Leila knows in her bones they are true. Leila drank it with her mother’s milk. Leila heard it from the lips of her kin. Leila believes the Jews to be descendants of apes and pigs. She knows they use the blood of Palestinian children to make their matzo. She thinks they are an intrinsically evil people, children of the devil.”
Her Islamic studies grew more rigid, too. After completing a crash course in the basics of ritual and belief, Natalie’s instructors immersed her in the concepts of Islamism and jihad. She read Sayyid Qutb, the dissident Egyptian writer regarded as the founder of modern Islamism, and slogged her way through Ibn Taymiyyah, the thirteenth-century Islamic theologian who, according to many experts in the field, was the wellspring for it all. She read Bin Laden and Zawahiri and listened to hours of sermons by a Yemeni-American cleric who had been killed in a drone strike. She watched videos of roadside bombings of American forces in Iraq and surfed some of the more salacious Islamic Web sites, which her instructors referred to as jihadi porn. Before switching off her bedside lamp at night, she always read a few lines of Mahmoud Darwish. My roots were entrenched before the birth of time . . . In dreams she walked through an Eden of olive groves and lemon trees.
The technique was something akin to brainwashing, and slowly it began to work. Natalie packed away her old identity and life and became Leila. She did not know her family name; her legend, as they called it, would be given to her last, after a proper foundation had been poured and a frame constructed. In word and deed, she became more pious, more outwardly Islamic. In the evenings, when she ran along the dusty farm roads, she covered her arms and legs. And whenever her instructors were talking about Palestine or Islam, she wore her hijab. She experimented with several different ways of securing it but settled on a simple two-pin method that showed no hair. She thought she looked pretty in the hijab, but didn’t like the way it focused attention on her nose and mouth. A partial facial veil would solve the problem, but it wasn’t consistent with Leila’s profile. Leila was an educated woman, a doctor, caught between East and West, present and past. She walked a tightrope that stretched between the House of Islam and the House of War, that part of the world where the faith was not yet dominant. Leila was conflicted. She was an impressionable girl.
They taught her the basics of martial arts but nothing of guns, for knowledge of weaponry didn’t fit Leila’s profile, either. Then, three weeks into her stay at the farm, they dressed her from head to toe as a Muslim woman and took her for a heavily guarded test drive in Tayibe, the largest Arab city in the so-called Triangle. Next she visited Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian authority in the West Bank, and a few days later, and on a warm Friday in mid-May, she attended Friday prayer services at the al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a tense day—the Israelis forbade young men from entering the Noble Sanctuary—and afterward there was a violent protest. Natalie briefly became separated from her undercover security guards. Eventually, they dragged her, choking on tear gas, into the back of a car and spirited her back to the farm.
“How did it make you feel?” asked Gabriel that evening, as they walked through the cool evening air of the valley. By then, Natalie was no longer running, for running didn’t fit Leila’s profile, either.
“It made me angry,” she said without hesitation.
“At whom?”
“The Israelis, of course.”
“Good,” he replied. “That’s why I did it.”
“Did what?”
“Provoked a demonstration in the Old City for your benefit.”
“You did that?”
“Trust me, Natalie. It really wasn’t that difficult.”