Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thriller) by Haggai Carmon Read Free Book Online

can’t shake the person talking to you in any other manner, polite or impolite. And,” he looked me in the eye, “Stay out of trouble.”
    Dozing off on the plane, I was in awe at how the Mossad had been able to recruit Tango. I recalled how Alex, my Mossad Academy instructor, taught us the art of identifying and cultivating a defector. “Think of MICE,” he said, Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego.” He looked intently at our cadet class with his watery blue eyes, and added, “ Motivating an asset to defect is a huge leap forward, even when compared with turning a person into an intelligence asset. Pushing a person to defect means uprooting him from his country, language, culture, friends, and sometimes even from his family. Above all, he will have to live in fear for the rest of his life that his old compatriots would find him, and…" He moved his hand across his throat.  However, here the case was different. There was no need to motivate Tango to defect. It was his own decision. Nonetheless, the mere fact that the Mossad, and later the CIA, were able to recruit him was a considerable achievement. I was hoping not to screw things up and compromise the very end of this case – bringing him to freedom.
    I could picture Alex perfectly at his lectern, in his glasses, always rubbing the fabric of his aged tweed jacket:
    “ Forget the stories about kidnapping the enemy’s top generals. We cannot afford Soviet Cold War practices, and besides, that could backfire and force the enemy country to retaliate in kind. Very recently, we successfully completed Operation Diamond. Munir Radfa, an Iraqi pilot, defected to Israel with his MiG21 fighter jet, the pride of the Soviet aircraft industry. Up to now, no country outside the Soviet Bloc could closely inspect a MiG-21. After the Israeli Air Force completes the review of the aircraft’s capabilities and drawbacks, the MiG 21 will be sent to the U.S.”
    Indeed, shortly after Alex’s presentation, that defection made the headlines. Few people outside the intelligence community know that these defections rarely end well for the defector. Their home countries don’t forget, and definitely don’t forgive. An Iranian pilot who defected with his missile-armed plane to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s was traced by Iranian agents to Europe and was killed. Captain Mahmood Abbas Hilmi, an Egyptian pilot who defected with his plane to Israel, was located by Egyptian agents in Buenos Aires, Argentina, six months after he left Israel and was killed.
    Alex trained us in how to collect nuggets of information, or to sniff out a potential asset for recruitment. He concentrated first on the rules of recruiting, cultivating, coaching, motivating, and finally going in for the kill: causing the asset to work for you as an informer, or to defect, or both. Decades later, true to the saying, ‘ Difficult during training, easier at combat, ’ I still remember the rules vividly. Most intelligence services maintain special sections tasked with identifying potential assets or defectors within an enemy’s ranks. “Spotters” survey enemy ranks for a weak link -- people who were passed over for a promotion, or those with personal or financial troubles.  A spotter is like a vulture on a treetop waiting for a sick or weak animal to lose its ability to defend itself. Once a suitable location is identified, an approach plan is devised. This is a very complex and detail-rich scheme of deceit.
    The recruiter’s “legend,” his cover story that enables the contact with the target, must be carefully crafted.  Obviously, the recruiter’s identity can be anything but that of an intelligence operative, unless of course he has a death wish or aspires to dine on local prison food for the indefinite future. A team of psychologists and intelligence experts analyzes the potential asset’s background to create a suitable legend. Who should approach the target? A male or a female? Young or old?