The Marsh Angel Read online

  No, not ours, Harel said, the Syrianists’. Ours is there. He pointed towards an extension of the room which Tamir hadn’t noticed until that moment. It wasn’t much more than a small niche with a desk and two simple office chairs. There were two computer screens on the desk, one small and one large; four phones— a plain black phone; a white phone called gecko, Harel explained; a red phone called amethyst; and an SB phone used to communicate with different operational bodies. There were also two trays with stacks of small papers. Later, Tamir would learn that these papers were communications summaries provided by the reception room. The intelligence analyst— that is, him— was to go over these communications and determine which of them were routine and which were worth paying attention to. The routine communications were filed and transferred to headquarters where they were studied as part of an ongoing process of familiarization with the different organizations and their structure. Communications which contained unusual, sometimes even urgent matters, were converted to annotated documents. These documents were transmitted to the relevant bodies among research departments and decision-making echelons, both military and civilian. The intelligence analyst was entrusted to decide whom this information concerned, the degree of its urgency, and the mode of its distribution. In particularly consequential cases, he was to consult the IAO— but Tamir would soon find out, after completing his apprenticeship period, that for the most part, he would be left with significant leeway and tremendous responsibility. In fact, he would have to make most decisions on his own.

  A lot of new material’s come in, Harel grumbled and snuffed his nose. Alright, let’s get started.

  And so began Tamir’s great plunge. He plunged into the brightly-lit bunker, deeper and deeper, until he felt he might never resurface. Antennas probed the skies and picked utterances voiced into the receiver of every possible communications device in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon like ripe fruit. Tamir likened them in his mind to giant mouths, perennially hungry, extending long tongues into the heavens, hunting bits of speech like flies, as they race their way from some communications device in a pickup-truck near Nabatieh to another device in the Chouf Mountains, gobbling them up ravenously and absorbing them into their bustling bellies, down their intricate web of digestion pipes and tubes, finally discharging them in producers’ stations where they are processed and compressed, tumbling from one desk to another, tossed into the digestive system of headquarters to be compacted into shapeless material, their cellulose excreted into carboard toilets and eventually shipped to the shredder, with whatever juices left being recycled into the bloodstream of the intelligence system for research evaluation and annual reviews.

  But occasionally, something landed on Tamir’s desk that seemed interesting or relevant, in which case it underwent a different metabolic process: regurgitation. The raw materials were excavated from the stations, the transcribers restored them in their entirety, and the translators toiled over them until they were revived and sent up as an offering to the ever-curious, ever-hungry system, perpetually craving information— but not before he himself labored over them, edited them and annotated them to explain who is speaking to whom, deciphering encrypted place names and code words. He learned this craft from Harel, and by reading manuals drafted in headquarters about the different organizations, as well as by going over hundreds and thousands of previously-processed communications. But mainly, he learned through on-the-job training, by processing new communications sent in by producers.

  That was how Tamir spent his time, managing the ‘daily’— the endless stream of conversations and radio checks— first under the supervision of Harel, and then by himself. In the off time, when he wasn’t working on the daily, he immersed himself with instruction material. He learned a whole new field he knew almost nothing about before, one that was hardly ever mentioned in his training course: the Palestinian and Shi‘ite organizations in Lebanon, along with a few more bodies like the Lebanese Army, Druze military units in Lebanon, Sunni parties, Christian militias, and more. To understand how they all communicated, he had to have a command of those bodies, as Harel would say, down to the level of the cook’s driver.

  Tamir took his job seriously and devoted himself to studying the different organizations as in depth as he could. He even managed to develop a keen interest in some rather tiresome matters, such as their communications routine. It was completely different to anything he learned about the Syrian army: Palestinian radio procedures were disorderly, and the communications networks of organizations like the Shi‘ite Amal Movement or Hezbollah were nothing short of chaotic. All of that necessitated a deep familiarity with individual actors— that is, the people behind the radio— their habits, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies. Tamir became familiarized with the radio operator of the Democratic Front at the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp who was always late for his shifts; the Amal spotter in the Merkava sector nicknamed Hamudi who sung poignant love songs over the radio; the representative of Force 17 of the PLO in Sidon with his easily-recognizable hoarse voice; and the Hezbollah gunner who roamed around Nabatieh in his pickup-truck, reciting the Qur’an alongside juicy swear words in Lebanese dialect.

  There was something enticing about the intimacy of getting to know individual people’s routine and conduct without their knowledge. Tamir also had long dialogues placed on his desk, obtained from an array of communications media, further deepening his sense of voyeurism. He was surprised to discover that he strangely enjoyed it; it was something akin to the excitement he had derived from porno magazines in his youth, especially ones that depicted credible scenes, that is, resembling how sex between people actually looked. Perusing them filled Tamir with a mixture of awkwardness and strange excitement. Sometimes, he actually preferred the outlandish, over-the-top depictions of sex which resembled actors performing for a crowd, where everyone in the room knows it’s just an act, and that knowledge regulates the experience of both the performers and the audience— toying with a sense of truth, but only within the limits of consensual simulation. Tamir felt comfortable in that conceptual framework. In contrast, when the sexual scene depicted emulated the intimacy of the act people engage in when they believe they are shielded from the prurient curiosity of outsiders, he would writhe awkwardly in his bed, embarrassed and excited, reserved and ravenous. So was the case now, in front of transcripts of conversations between low-level functionaries and operatives— their bickering, quarrels, and inner-organizational power struggles, their politics, smoking habits, and secret lovers. He read it all, at first embarrassed and excited, reserved and ravenous, but over time increasingly less embarrassed, less excited, less reserved, and less ravenous. Like pornography, this was starting to become routine.

  Life outside the bunker rapidly became an insignificant afterthought. On a regular day, Tamir would go down to the bunker around 9 a.m., leave it once or twice to get a bite to eat in the mess hall or the living quarters, before hastily making his way back and remaining there until 1 or 2 a.m. But in fact, there weren’t many regular days. Every ‘Turkish Knight’6, or even just an unusual volume of communications regarding the activity of one of the organizations, resulted in Tamir staying in the bunker until things were back to normal. The producers, the transcribers, and the translators worked their regular shifts; work was quite regular for the Syrian intelligence analysts as well, notwithstanding occasional large-scale exercises, like a brigade-level, division-level, or corps-level exercises— but even those took place on fairly regular intervals, at which time analysts on reserve duty would be brought in to share the load. Only the HTA intelligence analysts worked around the clock in a kind of perennial state of emergency. The organizations they were tracking were unpredictable and lacked any structured military regimentation; they would launch almost nightly attacks on South Lebanon Army or Israel Defense Force outposts in the South Lebanon security strip. There was one more HTA intelligence analyst working alongside Tamir and Harel; the three overlapped at times, but for the
most part, they each manned the desk by themselves. Tamir would stay at the base for twenty days, and then go home for ten days’ leave. At the base, Tamir got very little sleep, and felt his eyes were gradually burning out. When he got home, he would spend the first few days mostly sleeping, and the rest of his time wandering around restless and lost among the winding, shaded paths of the kibbutz.

  The other HTA intelligence analyst was Joseph Arbeiter, but everyone called him Jonny. He was an amicable, easy-going fellow who didn’t take anything or anyone seriously. Tamir felt that everything was trifling and inconsequential to Jonny. Because he was so unassuming and lacked any trace of conceit, he was liked by more or less everybody, even the producers. They were standoffish towards Tamir, but they were chummy with Jonny. Tamir didn’t know what it was about himself that the producers found off-putting. He realized that the fact he had just recently arrived and was already giving them instructions did little to endear him to them, but that’s simply how it worked— as an intelligence analyst, he had to tell them what was important, what to pay careful attention to, which operatives in which organization are of particular interest at the moment. These were things that he knew and they didn’t. At the start, they did know the operatives and their habits better than him, and he did his best to demonstrate that he values and appreciates their knowledge; but his wooing attempts were repeatedly rebuffed— they simply nodded in irritation and returned to their screens.

  The busiest network at the time was that of Amal, but the Hezbollah networks were steadily increasing their activity. At that time, Hezbollah was a relatively new organization, in the process of tightening its grip over South Lebanon at the expense of the well-established and senior Amal Movement, as well as developing its military capabilities at an impressive rate. Their communications activity was a mixture of chaotic disorder— often baffling the operatives themselves who struggled to make sense of who was speaking on the network, to which body he belonged, and what he wanted— and regimented coded speech implemented by the organization’s Iranian instructors, members of a Revolutionary Guard force stationed in the Lebanon Valley. Since the Intelligence Corps’ coverage of the Iranians was sparse and ineffectual at that time, Harel admitted to Tamir that no one really knew how to contend with the Iranian methods.

  And so, every evening, the air became thick with radio dispatches on the Hezbollah networks; even among the bits that were deciphered and clearly regarded operational activity, HTA intelligence analysts still couldn’t ascertain which outpost they were targeting, when they were going to strike, and how— whether by routine mortar fire or by rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons, or, in the worst case scenario, a combined mortar and anti-tank weapons attack, followed by an infantry invasion intended to conquer the outposts. There were several such attacks, some of which were successful. The routine was that Hezbollah forces would conquer an outpost and hoist the Hezbollah flag, then flee the outpost before reinforcements could arrive to engage them. The outpost would then be remanned by South Lebanon Army combatants, and the cycle would start over. Attempts to pinpoint the speakers over the radio generally proved futile: all too often, the only thing analysts following an unfolding event could do was provide a general warning to all outposts in the sector, as pinpoint information about which outpost was being targeted would only become available after the attack had begun. It was frustrating, but not entirely fruitless, since it was possible in retrospect to draw some conclusions about which operatives operated in which sectors, albeit tentatively, since some operatives were mobile and moved across sectors in pickup-trucks.

  Tamir spent many sleepless nights struggling to keep up with Hezbollah’s skilled, nimble operatives. He spent a large portion of his time in the reception rooms themselves, listening together with the radio operatives to the impenetrable hodgepodge of Lebanese radio communications. He learned to distinguish not only the subtleties of the Lebanese dialect and the little idiosyncrasies of the different operatives, but also the tendency of some producers to cut corners and take shortcuts. Most of them did their best to deal with the dense Lebanese speech, even though they had been trained to listen to Syrian rather than Lebanese dialects. They often couldn’t fully make out what they were hearing— and even if they thought they had understood, their summaries often made little sense— but when Tamir sent the summaries back to be reworked and corrected, the producers mostly made a genuine effort to listen again and correct it as well as they could. However, there were some who thought that if they simply manufactured a more elegant summary, without ellipsis marks to indicate an unintelligible passage, they could then save themselves the trouble of having to rework it later. When Tamir confronted them about it, it created tension and hostility.

  One of the first things Jonny told Tamir when he first arrived was that it’s important to stay on good terms with the producers, otherwise it screws up the job. Tamir noticed that when Jonny would make any kind of remark about a producer’s work or send a summary back to be reworked, he would always do it in a fraternizing manner, including all sorts of pats on the back and phrasings that Tamir felt were phony. He could never speak that way. In fact, when he would send back summaries to be corrected, even he himself thought that he sounded like an uptight schoolteacher. He hated himself for that, but never managed to find a different way to express himself. After one particularly exhausting night in which Tamir felt that he was fighting both Hezbollah and the producers at the same time, a night which ended with three casualties for the South Lebanon Army and a sense of failure and general sullenness in the bunker, Zaguri approached Tamir and said in a threatening voice: Listen, get off their cases, they’re working hard enough as it is. Tamir opened his mouth to respond, but Zaguri muttered angrily, don’t test me, and left the room. Tamir left as well, dragging himself back to his room at 4:30 in the morning. He collapsed on his bed and fell asleep, sinking into a dense abyss— an impenetrable black canvas of electromagnetic flickering and Lebanese grunts.

  It was 2 p.m. when he finally awoke. Tamir vaguely recalled that it was Friday. He ambled his way to the barracks bathroom, took a quick shower, scarfed down three chocolate-chip cookies his mother had packed him, and made his way to the bunker. Harel and Jonny were on leave and he was the only one there, but he assumed that since no one came to wake him, nothing important must have happened. The other, rather disconcerting possibility was that something had happened, but nobody realized it was going on. Whenever he overslept, he would feel burdened by an anxiety that he had let some terrorist attack slip under his fingers, and that all he would be able to say to the inquiry committee was that he simply slept through it. As he walked into the bunker, Tamir briefly greeted the Syrian IAO with a nod of his head, and similarly acknowledged the intelligence analyst and the translator who was sat hunched over a conversation she must have found amusing, judging by the broad smile on her face. He quickly fixed himself a coffee, and slumped into his chair at his desk.

  There was a hefty pile of summaries waiting for Tamir on his desk. He started going over them. To his relief, they were mainly concerned with administrative matters. The Amal network confirmed that a delivery of mattresses had made it to Nabatiyeh. The Democratic Front’s network reported of a new quartermaster who had been stationed in their base in the Lebanon Valley. The al-Sa‘iqa network, which usually communicated nothing but radio checks, discussed a need for heavy coats ahead of winter. He continued going through the material until one particular summary, intercepted from a networked which the computer that assigns names for networks named Sironit, caught his attention. The network belonged to Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, summarily referred to as Front/Jibril. Tamir’s eyes followed the abbreviations jotted down by the producer in rather sloppy Arabic:

  From: A/U, BB

  To: al-Mazra‘a

  Regarding: Provisions

  Your last shipment lacked the following items: camouflage swea
ters (10), wool hats (ditto), Kalashnikov ammunition (at least 10 ammunition crates), daily-use hygiene products, including one female set. Regarding the latter, requesting permission to purchase myself in town and charge the bill.

  Salutations,

  Nasser al-Hindi

  Tamir knew that A/F stood for the Front’s airborne unit, based out of Baalbek in the Lebanon Valley. Everything about that unit was interesting, even though the intelligence community was more interested in the Front’s naval unit, concerned that the organization might launch a seaborne attack, either storming the beach or trying to strike Israeli Navy ships and/or strategic facilities and ports. They were instructed to be particularly minded of that possibility. The Front had recently attracted a lot of attention, since unlike most Palestinian organizations, it collaborated with Hezbollah in staging operations and seemed to be supported and instructed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. This collaboration worried the ‘consumers,’ as Harel called the security-forces personnel to whom Tamir’s annotated work was directed.

  Tamir reread the summary and scratched his head. He looked at the producer’s signature and saw that it was Ophira. That was a name he wasn’t going to forget any time soon. He checked when the summary was produced. Not a long time ago. She might still be here. He got up from his seat, walked over to the reception room and was relieved to see Zaguri wasn’t there. Of course, he always goes home over the weekend and doesn’t come back before Monday, even Tuesday. The current shift manager seemed pretty laid back. Tamir greeted him with a slight nod, quickly scanned the room with his eyes, and located Ophira. There didn’t seem to be any activity in her station. He approached her. She raised her brown saucer eyes up, which once again reminded Tamir of warm, thick, mellifluous muddy earth. He presented her with the summary, and asked to listen himself to the part about daily-use hygiene products, including one female set. She looked at him in wonder, and asked: You’re interested in female hygiene now?