The Marsh Angel, Hagai Dagan [free e reader .TXT] 📗

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