Read The Volunteer for Free Online Page B

number Ari had given me, and I was granted another interview. I had thought a lot about the opportunity the Mossad was presenting me and my family and, to be frank, didn’t see myself growing cotton on a kibbutz for the rest of my days. I’d converted and made Israel my home for a higher purpose—and the Mossad seemed the perfect vehicle to put my ideals to the test.
    The address they gave me this time was different, and when I arrived I noticed that many of the recruiters were new. I later found out that had I waited another week or so, the phone number on the card would also have been changed—all part of the Mossad’s normal security procedures. The opportunity might have been gone, and I’d still be working the cotton fields.
    In 2006, years after I’d left the Mossad and was trying my hand at writing, I had the good fortune to meet the renowned Canadian writer and iconoclast George Jonas—author, most famously, of Vengeance , upon which Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film Munich was based. During lunch in Toronto, George told me a story about Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo ignited the First World War. On the fateful day in June 1914, his vehicle had made a wrong turn. But his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, had also been diverted. Somehow, they both turned up at the same street corner. Within four and a half years, fifteen million people would be dead on the battlefields of Europe.
    George made the point that when something is fated to be—for good or ill—nothing will stand in its way.
    My recruitment was a drawn-out affair. I understand that the process is more streamlined these days, but in my time, it involved months of waiting and uncertainty.
    I first underwent casual interviews with people who identified themselves only by their first names. They asked me about my ambitions, what I thought about the situation in the Middle East, and how I felt about being separated from my family.
    No one ever admitted that they belonged to something called the Mossad. In fact, the word Mossad was never used until the first day of my training course—and the only place it appeared was in one of my training manuals. Instead, we always used the expression hamisrad , which means “office,” even later when I was a veteran working in HQ. (Similarly, CIA agents have traditionally called their outfit “The Company.”) Running around calling ourselves “Mossad agents” seemed silly and made us feel self-conscious. To this day, I am uncomfortable using the actual name of the organization that once employed me.
    Along with the interviews, there was a medical exam that measured just about every aspect of my physical health. Then came a battery of psychological and psychometric exams. These were real—nothing like the bogus honesty tests Ari had put me through a couple of years earlier. They lasted an entire day, and were conducted by an austere psychologist straight out of the movies. (He even had the requisite German accent.)
    I had to make the two-hour commute from my kibbutz to Tel Aviv for each stage of my testing and interviewing. I must have made ten such trips. It was grueling and tedious. And unlike my army experience—during which I at least could rely on camaraderie to buoy my spirits—I had to go through the process on my own. If they were testing other candidates at the same time, I never met them. As I would learn years later, it was just a taste of the loneliness that awaited me.
    As a twenty-seven-year-old who’d spent much of his adult life in the Canadian and Israeli armies, my personal history was hardly mysterious. But my background was complicated by the fact that, unlike just about every other Mossad agent, I wasn’t born Jewish, and therefore had no pedigree that could be easily checked. The Mossad is an exclusively Jewish outfit: no matter if you have Israeli citizenship and serve faithfully