Excerpt from Chapter 4
Sara Cohen had recently turned thirty. She was not very tall and had long, brown hair. She was a beautiful woman, proportional and with elegant mannerisms. She had been a special agent for ISA, the Israeli Security Services, for almost ten years. She’d served in Spain and Germany and had been transferred to Rome two years ago. Her kind eyes and gentle ways did not betray anything about her past or her job. Sara had lost her family at a young age. The first to go had been her maternal aunt, Rachel, a very famous agent with Shin Bet, one of the three main orga nizations of the Israel Intelligence Community (IIC) along with Military Intelligence and Mossad. In the early 1980s, Rachel had gone undercover with the Syrian state, where she was stationed for several years, passing on important information on security and anti-terrorism operations. But she was discovered and sentenced to death. The hanging had been aired live on Syrian TV.
Sara’s mother had been very close with Rachel, and despite knowing the risks her sister ran every day, she had never overcome the shock of her death. Sara’s father, a career military man, had been a colonel in the Israeli Army when, in 1996, he died during the famous attack on the Dizengoff mall in Tel Aviv, where he’d gone to buy his daughter a birth day present. Sara turned sixteen two days later, on March 6. Her mother couldn’t tolerate that second blow. Seized by a strong nervous breakdown, she quickly deteriorated and died a little over a year later.
Sara had no brothers or sisters. When her mother died, she was attending the Handasaim Herzalin high school in Tel Aviv. The father of one of her best friends, Judith Berman, invited her to come live with them, and soon after, the family initiated the adoption process. Judith’s father, Captain Isaac Berman, was a close collaborator of Admiral Ami Ayalon, who’d recently been appointed director of Shin Bet.
Sara had been very young when her aunt Rachel died. But her parents had often spoken about her and her risky job. “Israel survives thanks to people like her,” her father often said. “We only do the last part of the job,” he would add, referring to soldiers like him. Sara knew that that wasn’t true. Her father had risked his life on numerous dangerous missions, but her parents had instilled in her great respect and admiration for that woman she’d only seen a few times.
Not long before her father died, she’d started looking into Shin Bet, or Shabak, which literally means, “invisible shield.” She’d read up on its history, missions, and criticisms of it, including in Israel.
When Sara moved in with the Bermans, Shin Bet was going through a difficult time. A year before, it had failed to protect Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a radical Israeli. The director, Carmi Gillon, resigned, and the thankless task of piecing the organization back together fell to Admiral Ami Ayalon, a highly skilled outsider who relied on highly trusted colleagues, including Isaac Berman. In 1996, he was successfully restoring morale within Shin Bet and its reputation in Israel.
After a few weeks with the family, Sara started bringing up the matter of Shin Bet with Judith’s father. The captain was reluctant to talk about his work at home, for obvious reasons. But given Sara’s insistence, and knowing her family history, one evening after dinner he invited her into his studio, where they talked for more than two hours, interrupted only once in a while by Lenny, the captain’s wife, who walked in a few times to bring them some hot tea.
No one really knows what they spoke of during that lengthy meeting. But less than a month later, Sara dropped out of Handasaim Herzalin and began training courses at the military school for future Shin Bet agents. In just a few weeks, she displayed great physical and intellectual abilities, turning out to be one of the best students in information gathering methods and anti-terrorism practices. She also had an extraordinary predisposition for languages. She was only twenty years old when she was given a security mission at the Israeli embassy in Madrid, and soon after, in Berlin. Right after that, she was given management responsibilities for a difficult mission in Italy, and she became Shin Bet’s youngest officer ever.
