1
STILL REELING FROM MELISSA’S death, I closed my eyes and recalled the simple phrase she would repeat to me when the chips were down: “Good wins.”
With my faith already shattered by losing my wife too early, the notion of goodness in general seemed remote as I stared at the cave mouth of a suspected mass grave in the Iranian high mountain desert.
Major Sally McCool had landed our MH-60 Pave Hawk in a narrow defile less than ten miles from the village of Tabas, or Desert One, where Operation Eagle Claw had ended in a giant fireball in 1979.
I walked toward Master Sergeant Joe Hobart, my senior operative. We were wearing our new Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, that displayed the terrain in front of us like a video game. The outline of Hobart’s body looked like that of a high-definition avatar. Normally a man of composed indifference, Hobart was rhythmically tapping his right thigh, his nervous energy compelling the entire situation to move more quickly. He knew we had precious little time on the objective area.
To Hobart’s right was the dark, inverted U-shape of the cave mouth. To his left was a soldier named Randy Van Dreeves. These two men were my longtime teammates and best operators.
I was proud to be a member of this small team. If I had known ahead of time any of what was about to transpire, I was certain I would have made different decisions along the way, but we did the best we could with the information we had. The moment never waited—you either commanded it or it commanded you, and even when you owned it, everything could go wrong.
The ghost of the failed American raid to rescue our hostages over forty years ago in this same province hung in the air like spent gunpowder. As prepared as ever, I reached Hobart, who nodded, whispered, “Boss,” and then turned to Van Dreeves, who was scanning in the opposite direction from a rock crevice like a parapet on a medieval castle. He tapped Van Dreeves on the shoulder and said, “Masks.”
We all removed and stowed our IVAS devices, then donned our protective masks, the large eyes and circular metal filter making us appear as if we emerged from a World War I trench in Verdun after a heavy German artillery barrage. The mask focused me inward instead of outward. The rubber smell, the mechanical voices, and the amplified breathing created an illusion of claustrophobia. Our masks had sturdy rubber tubes running over our shoulders into small oxygen tanks. It was not that we didn’t trust the filters the army provided, but after the COVID-19 outbreak, we were prepared for any virus, bacteria, or chemical that could wilt a standard protective mask filter. We followed Van Dreeves into the dark cavern, flashlight beams crisscrossing in the blackness.
The night was crisp here in the Eshdeger Mountain Range of central Iran as we transitioned from arid to damp in a matter of seconds. Hobart and Van Dreeves shined their lights as my Pave Hawk crew, Sergeant Jackson and Corporal Brown, secured the mouth of the cave. They had left McCool and her copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Jimmy Rogers, in the idling helicopter.
As we journeyed deeper into the cave, Van Dreeves’s Polimaster chemical agent detector, a small handheld device, suddenly lit up like a million-dollar slot machine.
“Picking up chemicals, but not identifying them,” Van Dreeves said.
“This way,” Hobart said. His uncharacteristic use of more than one word made me want to smile in the darkness, but the heavy weight of the mission and Melissa’s death were constant reminders of life’s fragility. While on these missions, I took comfort in the teamwork and camaraderie, like a basketball team that could do behind-the-back passes and alley-oops without discussing the plays beforehand.
We were traveling in a diamond wedge now. Van Dreeves was on point with the Polimaster, Hobart to my right front, holding his M4 carbine at the ready. Jackson, a former NFL linebacker, ducked to avoid scraping his head along the cave ceiling to my left front. Brown, behind me, was ready to ward off anyone chasing us from the rear. Our breathing collectively sounded like Darth Vader on steroids as we sucked in oxygen through the tanks on our backs. The rubbery taste and odor of the mask replaced the dank smell of the cave.
Van Dreeves was still winning millions in Vegas as the Polimaster’s blinking red lights gave way to a steady red glow. I stepped forward and looked over his shoulder, noticing that the meter simply read: Unidentified Agent.
Van Dreeves had reached a dead end. Our flashlights were dancing on a textured wall that was inconsistent, flat, whereas everything around it had contours, ridges, spines, impressions, bumps, and grooves like a bas-relief.
“Fake,” Hobart explained.
“Here,” Van Dreeves said. His hand found a seam in the wall and slid open the thin divider, which was a sheet of heavy, lead-filled cloth—like an x-ray vest—painted gray to blend into the tunnel walls.
As Van Dreeves stepped into the dimly lit area to our front, Brown quietly said from behind me, “Movement.” I continued staring into the expansive cavern beyond the divider, not only because I trusted Brown to handle the problem but because the piles of dead bodies were beyond anything that I had ever seen. Twisted forms, frozen by rigor mortis, with grotesque grimaces, arms eternally reaching as if praying to an elusive god. There must have been over five hundred bodies stacked in deepening layers at the far end of the cave, maybe fifty meters away. Near my feet there were three women, mouths open, silent screams ringing in my ears. They were gray with death, maybe two or three days dead, an image seared into my mind.
The cave floor was littered with mobile phones. Some of the dead bodies were still clutching phones held high, as if taking postmortem selfies.
The entire landscape was barren of life. It was a scene that could make a person lose all faith in mankind, the depressing escape of hope and conviction replaced by the brutal reality that mankind was evil. The pre-briefing intelligence had been accurate in one sense. It was a mass grave, but it was also more than that. These people had not been buried. They appeared to have made a pilgrimage here, climbing over one another toward the opposite end of the cave, all the while holding their phones like compasses.
“Movement,” Brown said again.
I turned with the rest of my team to notice a man crawling. He was one with the ground, arms outstretched, clawing the shale. I debated whether he was coming toward us or following the pilgrimage to whatever altar lay at the far end of the tunnel.
The man was wearing a ripped protective mask, gray with dust. The eye coverings were a hanging flap, making his face clearly visible. I knelt down and put a rubber-gloved hand on his face not only out of compassion but because I recognized him.
I was surprised to find my friend Dr. Ben David crawling toward me, perhaps beyond me, in a cave full of bodies in the middle of the Iranian desert.
The events that have unfolded since are well known today; the ghastly story behind them, not so much.
2
I FIRST MET MOSSAD agent Ben David fifteen years from when I found him in the cave in central Iran. I had been in a small Israeli Defense Force command center near the Gaza Strip, and he had just exfiltrated through a mile-long tunnel connecting a cement factory in Beit Lahia to a small kibbutz near Shikma Reservoir.
He credited me with saving his life that day, but it was actually the Israeli soldiers at the command center who chose not to fire that prevented his death. I had traveled from Anbar Province, Iraq, through Jordan, and into southern Israel for discussions with the Israeli Defense Forces. We needed to ensure they understood the nature of our surge of forces in Iraq in 2006 and how it was intended to revive the moderate Sunnis, who were necessary to establishing what was characterized as peace in the Fertile Crescent.
Remote ground sensors had detected movement near the Walid Cement Factory west of the Gaza boundary fence. The radar indicators were a pattern of eight pulses followed by a pause and then followed by another eight pulses. This pattern had repeated itself enough that I knew it was not random movement; rather, it was a code of some sort. It certainly wasn’t Morse code, not that I was an expert in that cipher, but it was a message, nonetheless.
The Israelis were lying in wait, weapons trained on the fence a mile away. David told me later that he was thankful for that distance, because it gave me a few minutes to realize that he was transmitting Eli Cohen’s Mossad code name. After checking on the radar analysts, I followed the outpost commander, Colonel Itzhak Begin, to the roof of the observation tower, where a mile of flat, uninterrupted land spread out before us. Through the binoculars’ magnified lenses, there was considerable “Hamas movement,” as my guide referred to it, into the cement factory on the opposite side of the border. The eighty-eight code still swam in my head as I processed what was happening.
The colonel ordered two drones—primitive by today’s standards—into the air to monitor the situation, all the while not realizing that the threat was burrowing beneath us. I found it odd that dozens of Hamas soldiers poured into the factory, but none seemed to come out. It was a grander version of the old-fashioned game of cramming a phone booth.
Only the Hamas soldiers were funneling—into the tunnel they had drilled into Israel in pursuit of Mossad agent Ben David, a man of many faces and languages. What ensued was nothing short of artful.
I said to Colonel Begin, “Do you know of any Mossad agents in Hamas?”
“Why do you bother me with such questions, Colonel?” he replied.
“Because I don’t want you to kill one,” I said. That got his attention, most likely as he considered the career consequences of doing so.
“Explain,” he demanded. Sweat trickled down his neck, an obvious sign that he was feeling the pressure of an uncertain situation that could take several paths, none of them spectacular for him except maybe one.
“If you had a Mossad agent in Gaza, is it likely he or she would know where the ground radars are located?”
“If we had one there, yes, they would know everything about our defenses so that they could report to us where we might be vulnerable.”
“Then maybe repeating two eights, side by side several times, is a way of telling us ‘Eli Cohen’ is there,” I said.
Begin scoffed but then caught himself, again perhaps considering the severe implications of not remembering Eli Cohen’s deep-cover call sign in Syria when he had been masquerading as Kamal Amin Thaabet, the merchant. From 1961 to 1965, Israeli hero and spy Eli Cohen had been deep within the Syrian government’s inner sanctum and was subsequently captured and executed for “treason.” One country’s traitor was another country’s hero. Today, Eli Cohen was lionized and revered in Israel. Was it likely that Israel now had a deep-cover asset in Gaza? It was certainly possible, and Begin seized on that thread of probability to warn his men of the likelihood that a “friendly” element may be attempting to escape.
Within ten minutes of Colonel Begin issuing clarifying instructions to his team, David came pouring from the mouth of a tunnel no less than fifty meters from our observation post. The ground seemed to produce David as if he were appearing from a trapdoor on a stage. The Israelis had no idea the tunnel existed, and to this day, I am amazed at the restraint shown by the soldiers who, judging by the puzzled look on Colonel Begin’s face, had been surprised by the tunnel. Covered in grime and white, chalky dust, David stumbled and ran toward the Israeli soldiers, who, thanks to Begin’s guidance, did not whittle him to shreds with a fusillade of machine-gun fire. David shouted, “Eighty-eight, eighty-eight, eighty-eight!” as he reared up from the hole in the ground.
I had felt satisfaction in helping Begin and his outpost recover David, who had found the Hamas tunnel during one of his resupply missions. In a moment of excitement, he had snapped some pictures of the tunnel from his phone and was detected doing so by a garden-variety Hamas fighter, who had been suspicious of him. He killed the soldier and fled.
And so it was a situation that seemed to make sense to the crack IDF troops peering through their sights.
Unfortunately for the Hamas soldiers who stumbled out behind David, the Israeli soldiers had shown no such restraint, placing accurate and withering fire onto the mouth of the tunnel. The IDF defenses held against twenty or so Hamas militants, to include a woman who appeared to be the first out of the tunnel behind David.
My stunned tour guide Colonel Begin immediately called Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv and relayed the results of his initial interrogation of David, who was theatrical, if not convincing. Because of my status in the Joint Special Operations Command and responsibility for several dark sites—a euphemism for prisons, dungeons, or chambers—Colonel Begin allowed me to witness the combination debrief and interrogation. Bound and haggard, David relayed an incredible account of four years behind enemy lines in the Gaza Strip and beyond.
David was an Iranian Jew whose Arabic and Persian skills were unparalleled. He was able to mimic Anbar Province’s dialect to avoid suspicion as he served as a logistics officer in Hamas, shuttling supplies between Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, with the occasional venture into Palestinian territory. He had graduated as a medical doctor from the Ben-Gurion University but had ditched that degree to serve the highest of Jewish callings—the Mossad. Passing himself off as an Iranian special forces soldier, David operated under the nom de guerre Xerxes, an homage to the infamous Persian warrior of the empire era.
During the interrogation, David/Xerxes was visibly upset as he recounted that he had been smuggling people and supplies between Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. He would disappear into the souks of Basra and reappear in Iran, providing his ersatz masters there enough intelligence to remain in their graces. During his tenure, he gravitated upward in the chain of command and was ultimately responsible for delivery of all weapons and ammunition from Iran to Hamas. He had expressed feelings of remorse over supplying the means of warfare to Israel’s sworn enemies, but his frequent contacts with Mossad agents in Baghdad had allowed him to assuage the guilt.
Copyright © 2021 by A. J. Tata
