Operation Red Falcon

He was one of the greatest spies the Mossad had ever seen. Then he brought his own country to the brink of war.

By Ronen Bergman

One

Early on the morning of September 1, 1996, the Israeli military began moving troops to the Syrian border in preparation for a war they were convinced was imminent. The military’s actions were based on top-secret intelligence—that Syria was about to launch a surprise attack—passed on by an informant, a general at the center of Syria’s Supreme Military Council, code-named Red Falcon. Red Falcon’s information had caused panic at the highest reaches of the Israeli Defense Forces, and senior military officials and Mossad officers were urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to issue an order to the IDF to launch its own offensive before the Syrians could launch theirs.

The attack never materialized, and the people of Syria and Israel never knew how close their countries had come to a devastating war. More than a year after that tense alert, in November 1997, I met in secret with a senior member of the Israeli intelligence community, who told me a story I found nearly impossible to believe at the time. It would soon become one of the most infamous spy stories in modern history. A legendary Mossad operative, he said, had been arrested on suspicion of fabricating the intelligence that had brought Israel to the brink of war.

The operative, Yehuda Gil, had been widely celebrated within the Israeli intelligence community for years. In the aftermath of the massacre at the Munich Olympics, in 1972, Gil had been among the operatives who’d hunted down and executed members of the terrorist group Black September. He had collected operational intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear facility, which was later destroyed by Israel’s Air Force. He had laid the foundation for intelligence networks in Sudan and had played a key role in a covert operation, known publicly as Operation Moses and within the Mossad by the code name Brothers, that brought 7,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

And it was Gil who had recruited and handled Red Falcon, who for over two decades was Israel’s most valuable agent in the Arab world.

On March 24, 1999, Yehuda Gil was found guilty of espionage and theft in a secret trial—though he was released not long after, in December 2000, when his term was reduced for good behavior. For the next ten years, Gil refused to tell his story.

During that period, I spoke with many others in the Israeli intelligence community about why such a revered operative would so profoundly endanger his own country. Their theories varied. According to some, Gil was a sociopathic “evil genius.” Others suspected he had been undercover for too long and confused the good guys with the bad. Still others said he was driven by an inexplicable, egomaniacal desire to turn his unique gift—the ability to lie to and manipulate others—against his own side.

But no one could be sure why Gil had committed the crimes he’d committed. Or even what, exactly, those crimes were, though their consequences were severe. He had profoundly damaged the international credibility of the Mossad, whose false information—going back how long, no one was quite sure—had been shared with the major intelligence agencies of the Western world. He had put Israeli lives at terrible risk. He had even endangered his own family. One of Gil’s colleagues told me that Gil’s son was a paratrooper stationed at the Syrian front on that September day when the Israeli military prepared for war. “What kind of person is he,” the man said, “that he would risk the life of his own child?”

It’s impossible to appreciate the enormity of the Yehuda Gil affair without first understanding the mythic place that the Mossad occupies in the collective Israeli consciousness. As with the CIA, the agency functions opaquely and is protected by a number of draconian laws; but the adulation it receives in Israel, the way in which the country’s survival is, in the minds of many Israeli citizens and leaders, due to and forever dependent upon the heroic and secretive operations of the Mossad, is unlike the experience of any other foreign intelligence agency in the world. For every operative who joins its ranks, there are a thousand turned away. And so for one of them—not just an agent, but one whose exploits were as legendary as Gil’s were—to deceive his own country was nearly impossible for Israelis to comprehend (as it was for me when I first heard about it).

Like many other reporters, I tried for years to arrange an interview with Gil. I spoke several times with his wife, Noa, but she was unable or unwilling to persuade him to meet with me. After Gil was released, he and Noa withdrew to their home in Gedera, a community 20 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, where they lived a very private life.

I tried other leads, none of which worked out. And then, in the course of working on another investigation, I met a man named Pierre Lavi, who had served in Israeli intelligence in Lebanon and was still in touch with Gil. Gil trusted him, Lavi told me, and he agreed to pass on my request. After two weeks, Lavi called to say Gil was willing to meet and that I should go on the appointed day to a busy café near a Trappist monastery on Highway 1, the main road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Gil and Lavi arrived first. It was crowded and noisy, and the two of them sat in a far corner, facing the door. Gil had a heavy gray mustache that stood out across the room. He was noticeably uncomfortable when I sat down. Just before I arrived, they told me, Gil had seen two ex-colleagues and feared that either he or I was being tailed. I found the possibility far-fetched and tried to reassure him.

He was confrontational from the start, trying to control the conversation by saying, “So here’s the journalist who thinks he knows everything about the Mossad.” I appealed to the various motivations he might have to tell his story—to clear his reputation in the eyes of his family and friends and country, and to go on the record regarding the injustice he claimed Danny Yatom, the chief of the Mossad, had perpetrated against him. Yatom had just published a memoir that contained a searing attack on Gil, including an allegation that Gil had never recruited Red Falcon at all, that the whole thing—the agent, all the intelligence passed on over 23 years—was an elaborate lie.

“For the first time, someone who is supposed to know everything has spoken,” Gil said bitterly. “He knows how this operation fit in with the big picture, what it contributed and what it didn’t contribute. This man comes and says in the bluntest possible way, unequivocally, that Yehuda Gil never handled this source. That blows my fuses.” He didn’t know why Yatom would write what he did, he said, whether it was out of “arrogance, or a desire to harm me, or simply ignoring the facts.”

Eventually, Gil agreed to let me interview him in his home. I was joined by a young woman who was familiar with the world of Israeli espionage and who, I hoped, would help Gil feel less defensive and contentious than he might if he was speaking only to me. The two of us met five times with Gil and his wife in their modest single-story home. The walls were lined with books; objects from their former lives in Africa and Europe sat on the shelves. On the walls were framed certificates and shields that Gil had been awarded in recognition of the high-level training courses he had conducted for various intelligence units. He pointed out that some of them had been presented to him after his trial and his time in prison, as evidence that the public story being told by the Mossad was not the real one. “I was released from prison on the 20th of December 2000,” he said. “Three weeks later, I was training classified IDF units. Tell me that’s not peculiar.”

Our meetings generally began in the early afternoon and continued until 7 p.m., when Noa would serve an evening meal, during which we agreed that all talk of espionage would stop. After dinner, the interviews carried on late into the night. Taken together, our conversations yielded a transcript nearly 60,000 words long; in the months since those initial meetings, we have met again on several occasions and spoken by phone many times. In all these conversations, Gil has maintained that he is innocent of deceiving his country and that he is a victim of the agency to which he dedicated his life.

According to a senior Mossad member who investigated the Gil affair and has access to the agency’s personnel files, Gil was born in June 1934 in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, to Jewish parents of Italian and Greek origin. His grandfather was the chief rabbi of the Jewish community there. At home he spoke Spanish, Italian, and French; in the street he learned Arabic. Early in our conversations, Gil recounted his most formative experience as a young child, witnessing a pogrom against Libyan Jews carried out by his Muslim neighbors. “When you see with your own eyes how a pregnant woman is cut open and her baby is tossed onto a bonfire,” he said, “you don’t forget it.” 

When he was 12, his father taught him how to use a handgun and told him that it was better to commit suicide than to give himself up to the mercy of the Arabs. This background may explain his decision, years later, to join the radical (now defunct) nationalist Moledet movement, which advocated the “voluntary transfer” of Israel’s Arab citizens. “I have seen what bastards they are, what scum,” Gil said of Arabs. “A goy can’t be trusted, even after he’s been buried for forty years.” We sat in silence, listening to his tirade. I have heard these opinions many times, in many places, of course; there are plenty of Israelis, especially those who emigrated from Arab lands, who hold extreme hawkish views. It shouldn’t have surprised me that even a man as erudite as Gil is could be so unnuanced in his opinions. Still, I found myself wanting him to demonstrate the charm that others had said he was so famous for. As if he, too, was aware that he’d gone too far, Gil finally said, “I don’t hate Arabs. I truly do not hate Arabs. But I’m explaining to you that I am not capable of trusting them.” 

In September 1948, in the midst of Israel’s War of Independence, 14-year-old Yehuda immigrated with his family to Israel. They were welcomed in the new country by Gil’s uncle, a former member of Etzel, the extremist guerrilla militia that fought against the British Mandate and the Arabs before the State of Israel was established. New immigrants were being given homes abandoned by the Arabs who had fled or were expelled from areas conquered by Israeli forces. Gil’s family was allocated a house in Jaffa, but not long after moving in he left for a kibbutz, where he stayed until he was conscripted into the army at age 18.

In 1964, the IDF sent Gil to train military forces in Chad and Cameroon. The training of African military and intelligence forces was part of a strategy known as the periphery doctrine, instituted by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. The idea was to foster alliances with the countries just beyond the hostile Arab states encircling Israel. In exchange for weaponry and military and intelligence training, Israel received permission to use those countries as covert bases to act against the Arabs. 

When a Mossad operative working in Chad learned that Gil spoke several languages, he suggested that Gil apply to join the organization when he returned to Israel. “We got back in July 1970,” Gil said. “I called and began the screening process.” Gil takes pains to present a dignified, unemotional front when discussing his career, but it was clear how meaningful an invitation from the Mossad must have been to him at that point in his life. Recruitment into the organization, especially for someone with Gil’s background, meant not only getting a respected job and the chance to do exciting work, but also that he, an immigrant from Libya, had penetrated the very heart of the Israeli establishment. “To be in the Mossad,” Gil said, “was to give expression to the ability of a Jew not to be a willing slave, not to be a second- or third-rate citizen, but rather a person with the ability and the right to live free.”

After six months of security vetting and physical and psychological testing, Gil entered the agency’s cadets course, held in an academy named after Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who was caught and hanged in Syria. The course prepares a core, elite group of Mossad operatives. They are not expert assassins. They can’t fly planes or captain submarines. They are more George Smiley than James Bond. Their main weapon is not a silenced handgun but, in most cases, something far more necessary and effective—the ability to take on a false identity and to manipulate others.

The recruitment and handling of foreign agents is carried out by the Mossad’s Tsomet division. Tsomet, Hebrew for “junction,” is a code name given to the section in the 1960s. Today, the Mossad uses a different code name in its internal correspondence, but its employees still refer to the division as Tsomet. It is the largest department within the Mossad, employing many hundreds of personnel who populate a large part of the hexagonal building in Tel Aviv that is Mossad headquarters. Most of those who work in this wing are staff officers, either at the headquarters or in the Mossad’s secret stations across the globe. Those in Tsomet who are responsible for recruiting and controlling agents are known as katsa, a Hebrew acronym for “collection officer,” or case officer.

Regarded as the elite of the elite, case officers are experts in the types of deceit necessary to exploit a target’s weak points—whether greed, pride, or loneliness. They are able to live under assumed identities for extended periods, fully inhabiting the roles they take on in order to extract information without raising alarms in the minds of their agents. Within the Mossad, case officers are granted nearly complete operational autonomy and are often the sole conduit through which information flows from a target back to the agency and to the highest members of the Israeli military and government. 

Until the Gil affair, the Mossad’s faith in its case officers was absolute. As a former head of Tsomet put it to me, “You can’t work unless you trust them 100 percent.” 

It was clear early on that Gil had a remarkable aptitude for recruiting, running, and debriefing foreign agents. Several people who served with him described Gil as a man who possessed unique, preternatural skills and whose talent was matched only by his arrogance. One former commander, who ran a course for senior officers in the intelligence community, told me, “He complained all the time that we didn’t appreciate him enough, and he asked provocatively if I knew what operations he had executed. In the end, he was the only participant who appealed against the grade and evaluation we gave him.”

During one of our early conversations, Gil said of himself, “I passed every course the Mossad offered within a couple of days. I would begin a course, and two days later the instructor would say, ‘I have nothing to teach you.’” He claimed that in his 27 years with the Mossad, he never had a single operational mishap, even though most of that time was spent acting undercover as a foreign citizen. “Not because I am a genius,” he said. “Because I am a coward. Before I executed anything, I checked it out from all angles and I prepared. They used to laugh at me, ‘Why do you immerse yourself so deeply in your cover?’”

Recruiting agents is a complex, all-encompassing craft. The Mossad divides the process into three discrete stages, each one performed by a different member. The first stage, “spotting,” is when the initial contact is made with a target. It is a casual contact, an acquaintanceship, and its purpose is to provide a pretext for the spotter to introduce the target to the case officer who will carry out the next stage. The “attack” is when the case officer attempts over time to deepen the relationship in such a way that the source feels sufficient trust to begin to reveal valuable information. The last phase is the “handling” of a subject who has agreed, for any number of possible reasons, to give over state secrets—to extend and nurture the relationship for as long as possible.

From the beginning of his career, Gil was assigned as an attacking case officer. In each mission, it was up to him to decide how and where to approach a target, what cover to use, and how to induce the target—be it a Libyan diplomat, a Syrian officer, a PLO functionary, or an Iraqi nuclear scientist—to want to meet again. Retired general Danny Yatom, the Mossad chief who ultimately ordered the investigation against Gil, described him to me in the kinds of terms one would use to talk about an artist. Gil was “a charismatic, colorful, astute man, with an almost hypnotic presence and a phenomenal ability to improvise and change identities. He was called ‘the man with a thousand faces,’” Yatom said. “He could persuade anyone to do almost anything. We used to say Gil could get a telephone pole to talk.”

Gil nurtured his legendary status within the organization. In the courses he taught in the Mossad’s training academy, he made a point of leaving a dramatic, lasting impression on his young trainees. He once faked a heart attack in the classroom, leading his horrified students to call an ambulance. Another time he drew a pistol on a trainee, who burst into tears, fearing that Gil had lost his mind and was about to pull the trigger.

In 1984, according to Gil, the future director of the Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, summoned him to his office to review Gil’s cover story before he left on a mission to Sudan. Gil was planning to pose as a thoroughly corrupt businessman, “a real slave trader,” in his words, engaged in human trafficking—a cover story that made sense in this case because the “slaves” were Ethiopian Jews purportedly being transported to Europe via Israel.

Halevy was from the Tevel (or “world”) division—the part of the Mossad that serves as a liaison with foreign intelligence agencies. “This man who has never worked undercover is examining me?” Gil said, recounting the event. “What does he know about cover stories?”

As Gil described it, Halevy arrives at his office half an hour before their meeting to find a phone-company technician in overalls working on the wires. In a “peculiar” accent, the technician explains that he is there to check out a complaint that the office’s phones had been tapped. Halevy begins to panic and tries to shield the top-secret papers on his desk, all the while shouting for his secretary to call the Mossad’s chief security officer. As the secretary runs into the room and tries to calm Halevy, the technician mutters to himself and goes back to work. Then, after a few minutes have passed, the technician stands up straight, drops the accent, and says, “So, do you think I’m ready to go on my mission, Ephraim?”

When I contacted Halevy, who was the director of the Mossad from 1998 until 2002, I asked him about Gil’s story. His reply: “As a rule, I do not respond to such requests. However, in this case, I have decided to answer. The episode concerning Mr. Gil’s entry into my office in the disguise of a telephone technician is a figment of his imagination—it never happened. The comments concerning my operational career indicate to me that Mr. Gil knows nothing about it, and that is the way it should be.”

Gil served for prolonged periods in European countries where most of the Mossad’s operations take place, involving potential marks from enemy states traveling outside the Arab world. But he was also among the select few operatives who went undercover in “target countries”—hostile Arab and Muslim nations where the risk of torture, imprisonment, or execution was high if he was to be exposed.

“There were some case officers who wriggled out of such assignments,” Gil said. “When they were looking for someone to go to certain Arab countries, there were two men who agreed: Yehuda and Gil”—meaning only himself. “I was then a department head, with a nice armchair,” he went on, “with future promotion possibilities, air-conditioned rooms, and so forth. They would come to me and say, ‘We need someone to go to a certain country and do a certain job. Is there anyone?’ And I would say, ‘Why are you messing around? You’ve got the man. I’m right here.’ Within 24 hours I was being briefed, and within two weeks I was where I had to be.”

He paused and looked at Noa. “I didn’t even ask her. I came home and said, ‘Listen, in two weeks I’ll be going away for some time.’”

“You didn’t ask because the answer was self-evident.” Noa replied. “When you have to do a job, you do it.”

After the Munich massacre in 1972, Gil was among the team of operatives chosen to eliminate the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the attacks. Their first target was Adel Wael Zuaiter, whom the Mossad learned was working part-time as an interpreter for the Libyan embassy in Rome. Undercover as an Italian businessman, Gil managed to befriend an acquaintance of Zuaiter’s, who over time supplied Gil with many details about Zuaiter—his home phone number, his work hours, even descriptions of his personal habits and how he spent his free time. Gil took painstaking notes of these details and then transmitted them to Tsomet headquarters.

Once Gil had gathered sufficient intelligence, the Mossad’s special-operations division, known as the Caesarea, went into action. An assassination unit arrived in Rome and, using information supplied by Gil, shadowed Zuaiter for several days. On September 16, they followed him from the Libyan embassy to a nearby café, then to the city bus that took him home. When Zuaiter got off at his stop, the operatives who’d followed him signaled to a waiting team—two Caesarea members hiding in a dark stairwell—that the target was approaching. As Zuaiter called the elevator, the two men stepped out, drew their Beretta pistols with silencers, and shot him 11 times. Within hours all the team members had left Italy and were on their way back to Israel.

At the end of 1973, Gil was ordered to report to Paris for a new mission. “I didn’t see what could be more important than killing Palestinian terrorists,” he said. “But you don’t argue with orders. That night I headed for Paris.”

His new target was a general in the Syrian military who the Israelis had discovered was stationed for several months in Europe. The presence of a Syrian officer of that rank in a location so accessible to Mossad operatives was a rare opportunity. The general was given the code name Red Falcon.

There was no reason to believe Red Falcon would be sympathetic to Israel, quite the opposite. The general had fought in the Golan Heights in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and his fierce hatred of Israel was well-known to the Israeli Defense Forces. On November 23, 1973, the Israeli government received a secret report stating that 42 Israeli soldiers who had been captured by the Syrians were murdered before reaching prison, where two others were also killed. According to intelligence information gathered by the IDF, some of those soldiers were killed in a zone where Red Falcon was commanding Syrian troops. The murder of the POWs was perpetrated, at the least, with his knowledge, and quite possibly on his orders. Other Israeli soldiers who’d been taken prisoner but spared during the monthlong war came home after their negotiated release and described torture sessions that Red Falcon had taken part in.

The surprise attack by Syria and Egypt that launched the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 was catastrophic for the Israeli intelligence community. Israeli Military Intelligence (AMAN) had failed to correctly evaluate the intentions of Syria and Egypt as the two countries amassed troops on the Golan Heights and the West Bank of the Suez Canal, believing they were engaged in war games and not planning an invasion. When those troops attacked, the IDF was caught completely unawares, and its losses were crushing. October 1973 is AMAN’s deepest scar. To prevent such an attack from happening again, the Mossad was put under intense pressure to recruit agents who not only could supply secret information, but would also have access to what those in the agency referred to as the ”intent echelon”—the high-ranking inner circle who were involved in making strategic plans.

“There was a doleful atmosphere in the Mossad,” Gil said, recalling the effect that war had throughout the agency. He told the story of a young case officer who had worked with him in the Rome station and left to fight with his army unit when the war broke out. “He predicted that he wouldn’t come back, and he was killed on the Suez Canal. Many of the case officers, and that includes me, had a powerful need for revenge, a desire to do something out of the ordinary.”

I asked him if he distinguished at all between the Egyptians and the Syrians. For whom did he feel more rage? “There’s a proverb in Italian,” he said. “‘They’re all the same breed—kill them all.’ What difference is it to me if he’s a Syrian or an Egyptian? It doesn’t matter. I don’t like them. I don’t hate them, but I don’t like them. It’s because I know their mission is the exact opposite of mine.”

Prior to Gil’s arrival in Paris, a female Arab spotter working for the Mossad had made initial contact with the general in Paris. “The orders she got were to develop a superficial relationship with him,” Gil explained. “He invites you to dinner, make eyes at him and so on. The aim is that at a certain stage he’ll accept your invitation to a party, and there he’ll meet someone who will execute the operational moves. That’s all she was supposed to do, but she went further and gave him sexual favors.” Despite her efforts, Red Falcon refused to meet any of the spotter’s acquaintances, and a second operative (to protect his identity, I will refer to him as Gabriel) was brought in to befriend him. That relationship also failed to develop as hoped, and so with three months left before the general was scheduled to return to Syria, Gil was called in.

As soon as he arrived in Paris, Gil joined the surveillance team already in place and began closely observing his target. Red Falcon came from an affluent family in Syria, but in Paris he lived frugally in a cheap hotel. Gil noted that he took great pains to put on a smart front—his suits were impeccably pressed, his shoes always freshly shined—but he usually caught the Metro or walked to his destination rather than spend money on a taxi. There were three possible “hooks,” Gil said, in the recruitment of agents—money, emotion, or sex—and based on his surveillance (and the failure of the female spotter to manipulate her mark), it appeared that money would be the key to convincing Red Falcon to betray his country.

Gil determined that the best way to approach his target would be through Gabriel, whose friendship with the general seemed to be taking hold. And so a plan was developed: Gabriel would invite the general to join him at an upcoming international convention on construction and development, and there they would meet Gil, working undercover as a prosperous and influential Italian businessman. For a few days prior to their visit, Gil attended the convention alone, deliberately cultivating ties to the staff and attendees. Within two days, exhibitors and waiters assumed that he was one of the event’s organizers, addressing him as Monsieur le directeur. “Everyone was coming up to ask me, ‘Mr. Director, we have a problem here and a problem there,’ and I would solve the problems for them,” Gil recalled. “I would scold some of them if it seemed to me they weren’t carrying out their duties.”

When Gabriel arrived with Red Falcon, he introduced Gil as an old friend of his father’s. Gil distractedly greeted Gabriel and his friend, making it clear that he was very busy. As Gil recalled the moment: “[Red Falcon] says, ‘Why’s he brushing us off like this?’ And Gabriel says, ‘Listen, he’s an important man. You see, everyone calls him le directeur.’ So the impression we created was that I was powerful. He sees everyone running around with name tags, and I haven’t got a tag or anything, but I’m telling them what to do.”

He quickly seized an opportunity to demonstrate his influence to Red Falcon, Gil said, by stopping a young woman walking past with a stack of brochures. “So I say, ‘Mademoiselle, what’s this? Show me.’ I open a brochure. ‘OK. It’s nice. What I asked for. Give a couple to these gentlemen here’—and I point at Gabriel and Red Falcon. She’s certain that it’s my job. Nobody knows who’s who at these meetings. You just have to know how to play the game.”

Gil took Red Falcon to a three-star restaurant that evening, and the next day escorted him to several presentations that he claimed to be overseeing. Throughout these meetings, and for all the years that they knew each other, Gil kept the fact that he spoke fluent Arabic a secret from the general, so that he could eavesdrop on the man’s conversations.

As is typical of the Mossad’s recruitment operations, the female spotter, Gabriel, and Gil all went undercover as Europeans, in what is known as a “false flag” operation. The reason for this is obvious: like most Arabs, Red Falcon could hardly be expected to cooperate directly with the Zionist enemy. The hope, though, was that if there was enough in it for him, he might be open to the possibility of working with an influential Westerner.

Gabriel urged Red Falcon to get to know Gil, suggesting that they might be able to do business together. He shared his friend’s life story with the Syrian: Gil was from an Italian Fascist family that supported the Nazis, Gabriel said. After the war ended, his father, who backed the Italian Christian Democratic Party, had collaborated with the Americans to undermine local Communist sympathizers. “And then the game begins,” Gil said. “That same day, [Red Falcon] tells me he is a military man, that he has a lot of land and his family is very rich, and that he’s a prince—all kinds of stories. Of course, in order to show how important he is, he too embellishes reality.”

The next stage was to set up a direct connection between Gil and Red Falcon, without Gabriel as the mediator. They told the Syrian that Gil knew Gabriel’s father when Gabriel was still a young roughneck and that Gil had promised to take care of him. “That way,” Gil said, “the officer and I suddenly became serious types, and he, Gabriel, was a little scamp we could boss around.”

To deepen the impression that Gil was a wealthy and powerful businessman, Gabriel showed up at one meeting with a sheaf of documents that were supposedly from a deal Gil was about to close. “We sat there for about an hour,” Gil said, “with papers that I had prepared and given Gabriel in advance. In the end I tell Gabriel, ‘Drop it. At most you’ll make half a million a year. Is it worth putting so much effort into this for half a million bucks?’ Red Falcon heard us tossing these sums around and, you know, his ears began perking up like an elephant in the savanna who catches a whiff of some female in heat.”

When the convention was over, Gil arranged to meet the Syrian alone. “Before we parted he said to me, ‘Tell me, do you think that in a country like ours it would be possible to do this kind of business?”’ It was then, Gil said, that he knew Red Falcon had swallowed the bait. Or, as he put it: “The elephant had lost his sense of direction and was charging after the female.”

Gil’s initial meetings with Red Falcon were conducted under Mossad surveillance. Two of the agency’s operatives had recently been shot—one fatally—by double agents from the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Mossad had instituted a number of precautionary measures that are still in use today. It was determined that targets should always be followed on their way to meetings with case officers and that these meetings never be held at the predetermined venue; instead, the foreign agents should always be “jumped” to a different location, to prevent the possibility of the case officer being ambushed.

As he became more acquainted with Red Falcon, Gil said, he grew more disdainful of him. He described the general as “a peasant, a respectable peasant from a respectable family. But he looked at everything in terms of respect—the external image.” The general drank a lot of alcohol, Gil said, and the Mossad had proof that he was an adulterer, but in conversation he was offended by open talk about sex and found Western-style advertising, with its half-naked models, distasteful. He despised the rampant nepotism in Syrian society and, despite his high military rank, felt that some of his colleagues looked down on him.

In the course of their first lengthy conversation, Red Falcon told Gil that he hated Israel but was in awe of its military capabilities. He told him, too, about his treatment of Israeli POWs. “I encouraged him,” Gil said. “I said, ‘That’s what you need to do to those shitty Jews’ and so on and so forth. It’s not easy. It’s not easy.”

Despite the general’s criticism of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and his cronies, Gil said, “he believed that with a leader like Assad and an army like the IDF, any objective could be met. To his great regret, the Syrian army was significantly inferior to the Israeli army.” In the first reports Gil submitted on Red Falcon, he noted that the general hoped to see Syria become an integral part of the West—allied with Europe and the U.S. and the developed world—rather than being part of a united Arab front or a nation that cooperated with the Soviet Bloc.

Gil focused during that first meeting on forming a more personal bond with his target, proving that he was sympathetic to the general’s anxieties and desires and could possibly help him. In response to Red Falcon’s financial concerns, Gil suggested that there were business opportunities for the Syrian and that he could introduce him to the kind of people who were working in very lucrative areas.

Over months’ worth of conversations, Gil emphasized the ways in which he could provide connections that would bring Red Falcon economic security and searched for reasons that would justify Red Falcon’s frequent trips to Europe in the eyes of his superiors. The general told Gil that he hoped to send his eldest daughter to study in Europe but didn’t know how to raise the money necessary to afford it. “He could have applied to the French Foreign Ministry, and they would have arranged it,” Gil said. “But he didn’t know this, and I wasn’t about to tell him.” Gil explained to Red Falcon that he had an excellent solution, one that would not require filling out forms or dealing with government bureaucracy: “I told him that I’d found a company that was ready to finance talented and promising students in exchange for their signing on to work for the company for a few years.” When Red Falcon expressed interest, Gil and his colleagues in the Mossad hastily created a “scholarship” for the girl.

Before he left for Syria, Red Falcon had one final request: He wanted to return home with the ultimate Western status symbols—a large refrigerator and a washing machine manufactured in America. Gil immediately contacted Mossad colleagues stationed in Washington, who purchased Westinghouse appliances and shipped them to Paris. When they arrived, Gil recalled, the Syrian “gave me a strange look. ‘What’s going on?’ he says. And I see what’s going through his mind at that moment. He’s thinking, ‘What happened here? All of a sudden, the world is opening up before me. I want an education for my daughter, and bingo! I want an American refrigerator, and it’s all arranged.’ He says to me, ‘I don’t get it. Do you have friends everywhere?”’

This was the opening Gil had been waiting for, the most crucial point in the attack phase, when the relationship morphs from the sharing of opinions and common interests to the handing over of sensitive, secret information. The main problem Gil faced was how to deftly prepare Red Falcon for the questions and requests for information that he was about to start presenting. To make it all sound logical, even inevitable, he told Red Falcon more about his father’s intelligence work for Italy’s National Fascist Party and the relationships he’d formed with influential Americans working in Europe who were bent on rooting out Communists. According to Gil, Red Falcon said, “‘Your father was wise. Look what he made of you.’ I saw that I was on the right track and that I could press on. I explained that from time to time I was sent by Western intelligence services to all sorts of places in the world to look into sensitive matters, to speak to people, to do deals of one kind or another.” Global business and global intelligence went hand in hand, Gil suggested, and great opportunities existed for the few savvy people who understood that the truly rich and powerful were not overly constrained by national interests or ideology, who know how to move in these shadowy international networks and take advantage of them.

Red Falcon asked him how much money he made doing this work.

“A lot,” Gil said. “Working for this intelligence service gives me access to certain business opportunities. For example, when one of the countries in Western Europe renews its emergency stockpiles, which it does every three years, I get first opportunity to buy up the old stock cheap and resell it. Buy low, sell high to Third World countries, and make millions along the way.”

Gil swore Red Falcon to secrecy, expounding on the importance of loyalty among friends. This was meant to condition the Syrian to the security procedures he would soon be implementing with him, Gil said. It was important to teach him “what secrecy is, how secrets are kept, how loyalty is maintained, and how to avoid indicating to anyone that you are in touch with foreigners. Things like, if you ever have a lot of money, don’t start squandering it. Or if, for example, you are asked how your daughter has an apartment in Europe, you have to be ready with an answer.”

Gil saw Red Falcon off on his trip back to Damascus, then immediately headed to an office in a Parisian apartment operated by the Mossad. He wrote up his report and handed it to a waiting courier, who delivered it to headquarters in Tel Aviv. His superiors were elated, Gil said, but Red Falcon’s initial agreement to cooperate wasn’t enough. In countless other cases, a fresh recruit might have been happy about the money and gifts he received, but would then return to his own country and cut off the relationship.

Gil and his superiors waited tensely to see what would happen in the weeks following Red Falcon’s return to Damascus. Then the signal came in. The first letter from Red Falcon arrived at an address Gil had given him. A summary, written by Gil and filed with the letter, stated: “The letter contains a mention of and a demand for the sums that we promised him. He reiterates his agreement to cooperate.”

The Mossad began transferring money to a Middle Eastern bank account that it had opened in Red Falcon’s name. It was only a few thousand dollars, not a huge amount in Western eyes, but a great deal for a Syrian. A few weeks later another letter arrived, which Gil summarized: “[Red Falcon] claims he has important information to convey to me and he expresses his readiness to supply whatever I ask for.”

A month later, Red Falcon returned to Europe with his daughter, who was about to begin her studies, thanks to a Mossad contact within a prestigious French academy. “We introduced Red Falcon to a local collaborator,” Gil said. The collaborator posed as the chairman of a society “dedicated to encouraging promising youngsters from French-speaking countries.” The Mossad’s network in Paris provided an apartment for the girl and paid all her bills. Once the details of his daughter’s “scholarship” and living arrangements were finalized, Red Falcon returned to his high-level post in Syria.

According to Gil’s reports to the Mossad’s chiefs, Red Falcon began sharing documents and military secrets with his Italian benefactor out of gratitude for the favors being heaped on him. In 1976, after two years of groundwork, the general handed over information of such high value that the heads of Israel’s intelligence community refused to believe it was true. “At first the Research Division of Military Intelligence laughed at me and at my source,” Gil said. “When it turned out that he was right, they had to eat their hats.”

The Research Division of AMAN is responsible for analyzing and evaluating all the information collected by the entire Israeli intelligence community—the Mossad, Military Intelligence, and the Shin Bet, as well as the intelligence branch of the Israeli police and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hundreds of experts serve in the division, sifting through vast amounts of data and intelligence of various sorts to compile Israel’s National Intelligence Estimates, which serve as the bible for the assessment of threats and determination of military policy. The Mossad is engaged in the collection of information, mostly through human intelligence sources, but it is the analytical experts in the Research Division of AMAN who evaluate the information and decide upon its credibility. The intelligence community has far greater influence in Israel than the Foreign Ministry, and AMAN research has a critical influence not only on questions of war, but also on diplomatic decisions with hostile countries and all of Israel’s foreign policy.

Various members within the Mossad and the IDF whom I spoke with—and who were familiar with the affair—agreed that at this point the information Gil was providing was reliable and was coming directly from Red Falcon. It’s likely that the general wasn’t aware that he was betraying his country, they said, because Gil, a master at managing the questions and misgivings of his targets, was able to assuage any doubts Red Falcon may have expressed by assuring him that the secrets he was passing on would never be used against Syria.

With each new benefit, too, the general was less likely to question or end the arrangement. Aside from his daughter’s apartment and tuition, and the regular “bonuses” he was now receiving from “European intelligence employers,” Red Falcon was treated to seductive tastes of Western privilege. After he revealed to Gil that he dreamed of traveling around Europe, Gil took him on a grand European tour, covertly accompanied by a team of security and logistics personnel.

I spoke with a Mossad operative who acted as one of the unseen escorts on this trip. “I was young and not yet really sure of myself,” he told me. “When the trip was over, I learned that Gil had complained that Red Falcon had pointed me out and said, ‘That man looks like an Israeli commando.’ My boss said he wasn’t firing me only because Gil requested leniency on my behalf. Looking back, I realize how unlikely that story was. I come from a European background and don’t look at all like an Israeli. In the investigation following his arrest, it came to light that Gil used this tactic with lots of young guys, in order to make them indebted to him, as if it was thanks to him we weren’t kicked out of the Mossad.”

Everyone who served in the highest reaches of Military Intelligence between the mid-’70s and the late ’90s knew of Red Falcon (only by code name, not his real identity), and it was widely understood that the information he provided was precious. There are a very limited number of sources—the cardinal sources, as they are called—who are deemed to be so strategically significant that the raw material from meetings with them is sent directly to the prime minister and the Research Division is intimately involved in their handling. With these sources, the division’s experts are in direct contact with Mossad case officers, and analysts accompany Mossad handlers to the foreign cities where their meetings take place. They brief the handlers before the meetings and immediately debrief them afterward. Red Falcon was considered a cardinal source from early on—and, over time, was assumed to be Israel’s most important cardinal source.

Gil said that he held his first meetings “in the presence of members of AMAN Research” as early as 1976. “Amos Gilboa”—then head of the Syria desk and later commander of the Research Division—“came to Paris. In AMAN’s eyes, everything that [Red Falcon] said was not only serious but the word of God. They were agog [at what Red Falcon was saying]. The agent not only supplied them with information, but also described for them the strategic doctrines of the Syrian military.”

To suggest that Red Falcon outlined these things “for them”—meaning the AMAN members—is not entirely accurate, however. In each of his meetings, Gil refused to allow direct contact between anyone else on the team and his source, claiming that Red Falcon would be scared off. At most he would allow the AMAN analysts to sit in the same café in which he was meeting with his source or to watch from a distance as they took a morning stroll down the Champs-Elysées. This refusal to let anyone other than himself interact with Red Falcon was later used against Gil in his trial, but at the time, AMAN members went along. “I do not know how to work undercover,” Gilboa told me. “Gil’s refusal to allow me to meet the source seemed absolutely reasonable. We sat in the café and watched him meeting with the source, who we knew from photographs. Everything seemed logical to me. I didn’t suspect a thing. We were grateful to Gil for this amazing recruitment.”

The one aspect of his handling of Red Falcon that caused him the most concern, Gil said, was that the general’s daughter seemed to sense something. “She was very suspicious,” Gil said. “She knew there was something she couldn’t explain.” The question was, would she be able to convince her father that she was right.

On the one hand, the Syrian treated her harshly. “Once, I was dining at their home,” Gil said. “My fork fell, and I began to bend down to pick it up. When she, the daughter, didn’t hurry to bring me a clean fork, he slapped her, just like that, in the face.” But he also knew that the daughter loved her father and worried over him. She was suspicious of Gil’s motives and would often warn her father—in Arabic, which she didn’t realize Gil understood—that he was speaking too freely in the presence of his friend. “One time the girl told her mother: ‘Speak to father. Why is he telling him these things? These aren’t things you tell just anyone.’ The mother told her, ‘But he isn’t just anyone. He’s one of us. He’s family. Have you forgotten what he did for you?’”

Despite such warnings, Gil said, by this point in their relationship, Red Falcon was openly discussing military and political topics. “He believed that I was reporting on our conversations to NATO intelligence,” Gil said, “and that he was serving as a NATO adviser, through me, and getting paid for it.”

The intelligence coming in from Red Falcon was staggering. Gil reported back on the operations and training exercises of Syrian commandos, on structural changes within the Syrian army, on the purchase and allocation of new arms and electronic-warfare systems, and on redeployments along Syria’s borders. He was also learning about Syria’s internal politics, he said, including the news that President Assad intended to change Syrian law to enable him to continue in power despite his advanced age.

In March 1984, now over a decade into his handling of Red Falcon, Gil reported back information on a top-secret Syrian storage facility for chemical weapons. As the years passed, he expanded on this subject, filling his reports with more refined details. Each time Red Falcon indicated that he could meet Gil in Europe, a vast operation, involving dozens or sometimes hundreds of people, was set in motion. AMAN analysts exhaustively briefed Gil in advance of his meetings, prepping him on what questions to ask and what to follow up with after the Syrian’s replies. The Mossad planned all operational aspects of the meetings: security, logistics, safe houses, escape and surveillance routes, accommodations for everyone involved, transfer of funds to be paid directly to Red Falcon, along with depositing money in another account to satisfy his family’s various domestic needs.

“We used to hold meetings day and night, arguing about what questions Gil should ask Red Falcon about which topics during their limited time together,” an AMAN officer who served during those years told me. “These became real fights, with every individual sure that his question was more important and more vital to the security of the state.”

One top Mossad official put it this way: “There was no other handling of a human source that occupied us more than Red Falcon during those decades.”

In the spring of 1981, tensions mounted between Israel and Syria after the Syrians attacked Israeli allies, the Christian Falangists, in Lebanon. In response, Israeli warplanes downed Syrian helicopters ferrying troops in that country and flew warning flights over Beirut and Damascus. Syria countered by sending large numbers of forces and anti-aircraft missiles into Lebanon, far greater than had been stationed there before.

The Israelis were desperate to know what the Syrians were planning, and Gil called Red Falcon, who was once again visiting Paris. “I bought some wonderful grouper in the market today,” Gil said—using the code for “I need an urgent meeting.”

Danny Yatom told me that after that meeting, “Gil reported that the Syrian army’s moves were the first steps toward an offensive against Israel.”

The Mossad director at the time was Yitzhak Hofi, who had been a top IDF commander on the northern front during the surprise Syrian attack in October 1973. Like other senior commanders at that time, Hofi bore the psychic scars of the attack, and he immediately conveyed Gil’s report to the military’s high command and to Israel’s political leadership, where it was greeted with equal alarm. For the chief of the general staff, Rafael “Raful” Eitan, and the northern region commander, Avigdor “Yanosh” Ben-Gal, the Yom Kippur War also remained an open wound. Both had fought on the front lines, had lost comrades, and had nearly been killed themselves—and each was now eager to act on Gil’s intelligence.

The head of AMAN’s Syria desk at the time, Eli Halahmi, told me, “Raful and Yanosh wanted to call up all the reserves. I said that’s absurd. If we mobilize, the Syrians will see we’re mobilizing and think we’re going to attack them. Very quickly the situation will get out of control.” Halahmi said that he was suspicious of the information in Gil’s report but that the Mossad gave Gil its full backing. “Red Falcon was their flagship,” he said. “Everyone was pushing to call up the reserves. I moved into my office. For three months I slept there, so I would be the first to see new information, because I knew it was the only way to prevent war. The Mossad called me a traitor, an enemy of the state. It was a very difficult time.”

I asked Amos Gilboa why there weren’t others who shared Halahmi’s skepticism of Gil—and why he didn’t suspect Gil at the time. “Are you insane?” he replied. “Suspect one of our own? Would you suspect your own mother?”

Ultimately, Halahmi’s predictions were borne out. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin accepted the chief of staff’s recommendation and approved a call-up of military reserves. The Syrians noted the developments, feared an Israeli offensive, and began preparing for a preemptive attack.

According to various sources, Israel kept the United States informed of the crisis as it developed. Fearing further escalation, President Reagan sent Robert Ames, the CIA’s Middle East expert, to mediate the situation. Ames traveled between Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, urgently seeking and providing assurances on all sides that no one was planning an attack. Eventually, it was Ames’s information gathering and diplomacy that convinced both Syria and Israel to back down. (Three years later, Ames would be killed in a suicide bombing in Beirut.)

“It turned out that Syria had no intention at all of attacking,” Danny Yatom said. “That call-up not only cost the country a fortune, but also nearly brought about a military confrontation.”

When I raised Yatom’s claims with Gil, he flatly denied that he had suggested that a Syrian attempt to recapture the Golan Heights was imminent. It was one of the first moments of direct confrontation in our conversations. I knew the history, and I had spoken to several people who were close to the events. I pointed out to Gil that, from what I understood, he had said the Syrians were going to launch an offensive immediately.

He erupted in anger. “That is not true,” he said. He claimed there was nothing in his reports that gave a specific window for the attack. He said that I should try to get the actual reports, originally written in Italian as he took notes from his source, and investigate the question myself. “If you are capable of it,” he said. “If you have the strength to make [the Mossad] relinquish the dictations.”

“You know I can’t make them do that,” I said.

“So I’m telling you, word for word, what was written in Italian. There was no date.”

According to Gil, what Red Falcon had told him, and what he conveyed, was that Syria was engaged in “strategic thinking, training. He described down to the last detail how the maneuvers would take place, where the blocking forces would be deployed, where the chopper-borne commando raids would be, and so on and so forth. But he didn’t say they were doing it today and he didn’t say it would be tomorrow.”

A year after the 1981 scare, Israel invaded Lebanon, with the stated purpose of destroying PLO bases in that country. In fact, the assault also served as a pretext for striking at Syrian forces there, another attempt to bring closure to the lasting trauma of the Yom Kippur War. The Syrian forces in Lebanon were devastated in the attack, and in its wake the prevailing opinion in Israeli intelligence was that Syria, having just suffered from the overwhelming force of the IDF, would now be very unlikely to engage in another conflict with Israel.

According to Gil’s reports, however, Red Falcon was saying the opposite. The intelligence Gil passed on was that Assad was preparing a secret plan to regain the Golan Heights territory that Israel had occupied since 1967. A source who served in the Mossad’s Research Division at the time told me that Red Falcon “began reporting on something that he called the ‘limited-attack theory.’” The thinking went like this, he said: “[The Syrians] wanted to do to Israel the same thing the Egyptians had succeeded so well at in October 1973—a limited ground attack to conquer a narrow strip inside Israeli-held territory, where they would enjoy the protection of their anti-aircraft missiles and artillery. Special forces would then be flown in by choppers and take Mount Hermon. The intention,” he said, “was to shock Israel and the world and to force Israel, this time in an inferior position, to begin negotiating the return of the Golan Heights to Syria.”

Red Falcon had not given a date for the offensive, but the limited-attack theory gradually acquired supporters in the intelligence community, and the pressure on Gil to get as much intelligence as possible from his source intensified. In order to facilitate that, Mossad directors allowed Gil to forgo a whole host of procedures normally employed to assure the veracity of intelligence, including recording conversations with his source, introducing a second case officer into the relationship, and facilitating face-to-face debriefings of the source with agency experts.

When the Mossad directorate ordered Gil to take another case officer along with him, he told them that Red Falcon refused to talk to him. Attempts to send in a female case officer posing as Gil’s wife also failed. And when his bosses insisted that Gil record his meetings, the machine didn’t work properly.

In 1989, Red Falcon retired from his position in the Syrian army. Around the same time, Gil was passed over for a promotion. It’s unclear exactly why. Some people who served in the Mossad at the time told me that while Gil was regarded as one of the greatest case officers the Mossad had ever known, he was less esteemed as a commander. He had run a small station in Europe, and held intermediate command positions in Israel, but there was a sense that he wasn’t cut out for the teamwork and communication necessary to lead large groups of people.

Gil briefly left the Mossad to go into private business, but both his and Red Falcon’s retirements were mere formalities. Red Falcon remained involved in Syrian military affairs and participated in secret military discussions. And Gil continued to serve as an instructor within the intelligence community and was occasionally called up by the Mossad for various missions.

Gil’s brief life as a businessman was significantly less glorious than his life as a spy had been. A relative of his, who worked in the Israeli defense establishment and had tried to help Gil enter the business world after his retirement, told me: “I witnessed him in action posing as a rich businessman, and he was great. Ordered everyone around, managing a ‘successful import-export business.’ It was obvious to anyone that he was a major tycoon. In real business, in the real world, he wasn’t that good, and he was really disappointed. It’s almost as if he thought that acting as a businessman should be the same as being one.”

Gil’s lack of success in the civilian world was the opposite of the status he still commanded within the agency. He continued to meet frequently with Red Falcon, and the general remained the focus of Israel’s intelligence activity concerning Syria. “Gil had a tremendous talent for putting himself at the center of the action,” a former Mossad colleague told me. “When the big bosses come to us, or an AMAN representative, they listened to all of us politely, but it was clear whose words they were waiting for.”

It was during this period, though, that doubts about the credibility of Gil’s source began to spread. When a group of intelligence experts within the Mossad decided to take a closer look at Red Falcon’s voluminous file, they came upon the caustic comments Eli Halahmi had written during the scare with Syria back in 1981. “What we suspected,” one of the experts told me, “was not that Gil was fabricating, but that this was a classic case of over-identification between a handler and a source. And that the handler, in order to boost both his source and himself, was cutting corners a little in his reports.”

At the same time, Yehiam Mart, who was then head of Mossad’s Paris station, also began to have concerns. After a series of meetings between Gil and Red Falcon in July 1990, Mart ran a number of side operations to investigate some of the information Gil was reporting. He then sent a for-your-eyes-only memo to the agency’s director, Shabtai Shavit, saying that he believed there were problems with the Red Falcon operation. Shavit immediately summoned him to Israel for a meeting with the Mossad’s top officials. Mart was not the first to raise suspicions about Red Falcon, but he was the first to say the problem lay not with the source but with the handler. In his opinion, Gil was taking material from AMAN research experts, modifying it slightly to make it seem credible, then reporting it as intelligence he had obtained from his source. It was even possible, Mart said, that the entire Red Falcon operation was no more than a sophisticated disinformation project by Syrian intelligence, that it was the general who had recruited Gil and not the other way around.

A source who was present at that meeting recalled Mart’s words striking the high-ranking members who were gathered there like a thunderbolt. “It had never happened before that someone cast this kind of doubt on one of us,” the source said. “And not just any one of us but a legend who had recruited our most important agent.”

Mart’s plan for ferreting out the truth was something the Mossad had never done before. He proposed that they plant a false item, one that purportedly came from another source in Syria, within the information conveyed by the Mossad to AMAN’s Research Division. This item, about a new kind of weapon that Syria was receiving from Russia, would be sufficiently significant that AMAN’s Syria experts would pass it on to Gil before his next round of meetings with Red Falcon.

 One of the participants in the meeting suggested that they go straight to the AMAN analysts and tell them of the plan. “Why lie to them, too?” he said.

“Because Yehuda would spot a trick like that,” Mart replied. “He’s a million times smarter than they are, and he’d sense they were hiding something. They’d break in a moment.”

Shavit, who had long been offended by Gil’s arrogance, was in favor of the proposal, and a decision was made to inform only the head of AMAN’s Research Division, Brigadier General Yaakov Amidror, that the item was part of a plot to deceive Gil. At the last moment, however, Shavit gave in to heavy pressure exerted on him from high-ranking members of Tsomet, the division of the Mossad that oversees the case officers. “This is no more than a circumstantial theory,” a source inside the meeting told me one of them said. “There’s no real evidence against Gil, and if it comes out that we’ve played a trick on one of our own men, it will bring down the whole structure of mutual confidence in the organization.”

Shavit gave in, and Gil’s meetings with Red Falcon continued.

Shortly thereafter, however, Gil himself made the case that the Red Falcon operation should be terminated. “His access to material has become very restricted,” Gil wrote at the time. His request was granted, and for a year and a half—from early 1994 until the middle of 1995—no meetings were held with the source. According to information obtained by other intelligence units, though, it was apparent that Red Falcon still had access to highly placed members of the military and government, including excellent ties with Syria’s deputy chief of staff, Ali Aslan.

Why, then, had Gil suddenly tried to belittle his value? Some sources in the Mossad theorized that while Red Falcon may still have been closely connected to the so-called intent echelon, the burden of lies that Gil had peddled over the years was becoming too heavy for him to bear.

Whatever the explanation, the break did not last long. By mid-1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was engaged in intensive negotiations with the Syrians, under American mediation, and had guaranteed Secretary of State Warren Christopher that Israel would be prepared to withdraw from the Golan in exchange for a full peace accord with Syria. In the midst of these negotiations, Israel was desperate to ascertain whether the Syrians were sincere in their commitment to sign such a historic agreement. Amidror, the chief of the AMAN Research Division, exerted tremendous pressure on the Mossad to keep the Red Falcon operation alive. He took this demand to Rabin, who ordered Shavit to reactivate Red Falcon. “They told me to go back to him on all fours,” Gil said. “Just get him to agree.”

Gil once again met Red Falcon in Europe, where he was joined by the AMAN officer in charge of Syria at the time, who due to secrecy concerns I will refer to as Noam. Gil would meet Red Falcon in cafés or in a suite rented by the Mossad, then Noam would debrief him immediately afterward.

Lieutenant Colonel Udi Dekel of AMAN’s Research Division was also present at some of these meetings. He was amazed, Dekel told me, when he received from Gil information that was identical to intelligence assessments he had written himself several months before. “Verification like this, when a high-ranking human source confirms what you’ve deduced from other sources, ” he said, “is nothing short of orgasmic for an intelligence officer. Only later, when it all blew up, did I learn that Yehuda used to read our memoranda and files before he went for a round of meetings with Red Falcon. It never occurred to me to suspect him. They told us he was the greatest of all.”

In a précis sent back to the Research Division, Noam wrote, “The Syrian military has gone back to busying itself with the idea of a limited offensive. The aim of the offensive is to extricate the political process from deadlock, if and when it reaches a dead end. ‘Limited’ means limited in time to no more than 48 hours, to occupy as much territory as possible within this time frame.… This will be a surprise offensive.… The attacking forces will leave their training grounds and permanent bases while an inspection is under way to serve as cover for the plan.

 “There is no date for implementation.… The Syrian army needs two months to complete preparations for the war.”

In other words, as long as there was a political process and hope that Israel would retreat peacefully from the Golan Heights, there would be no Syrian action. If the peace process broke down, the Syrians would consider launching the limited offensive.

A dispute broke out within AMAN in reaction to this information. Northern Command intelligence argued that they saw no signs that supported Red Falcon’s claim that the Syrians were engaged in military preparations. Syria experts in AMAN’s Tel Aviv headquarters insisted that Red Falcon’s intelligence supported their sense of “hubs of activity in the Syrian army” and suggested that Assad was indeed preparing for war.

On November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli ultranationalist named Yigal Amir, who was virulently opposed, as many on the Israeli right were, to the ongoing peace process and any discussion of ceding territory. Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, continued negotiations with Syria.

Amid this intense tumult, Gil traveled again to Paris to meet with Red Falcon. It was at this meeting that Gil claimed to have received a detailed report on the preparations for war: “The limited-offensive plan is the only plan that the Syrian military has today,” Noam reported. “The breakthrough will be at dawn, carried out by two armored brigades, one from each division, while special forces, some landed by helicopters in the rear and the others on foot, will attack Mt. Hermon. All the preparations … will be implemented on the eve of the attack—ammunition, engineering equipment, and spare parts will be brought up to the front the day before the attack.”

This information was conveyed directly to the new prime minister. But Peres, who was determined to reach an agreement with Syria before the approaching election, minimized the information. According to other intelligence, the Syrians were convinced that they would soon get the Golan back and there would be no need for a military assault.

With a comfortable lead in the polls over his right-wing opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, Peres called for an election in May 1996. In the intervening months, however, a wave of suicide attacks in Israel by Hamas extremists caused a spike in support for a more hardline government. On May 29, Netanyahu stunned the world when he was elected prime minister. He quickly appointed a number of former generals and outspoken hawks, all veterans of the 1973 war, to his government and made it clear that he was not bound by any of the guarantees Rabin had given to Secretary of State Christopher.

The Syrians sensed that their hope for the return of the Golan was disappearing, and it is within this context that Gil’s reports from his most recent meetings with Red Falcon were considered. “Syria will soon have the technical ability to carry out a surprise attack against Israel,” an AMAN report based on Gil’s intelligence stated. The Syrians are likely to launch an offensive, it suggested, “if [they are] disappointed with the political process.” And a Syrian attack would receive “Arab political backing and … meet with less international opposition … if Israel is blamed for the collapse in the talks.”

On August 14, 1996, AMAN received a dramatic report from one of its sources that Syria’s 14th Commando Division, based inside Lebanon for many years, was preparing to move from the Beirut-Damascus highway to the area of Katana in Syria, at the foot of Mount Hermon. It appeared to many that Red Falcon’s warnings were beginning to materialize, and a fierce argument erupted over how Israel should respond.

According to one of the experts who briefed Netanyahu on the movements, the prevailing feeling was, “It cannot be that all of the events and steps, mainly the recent significant move of the 14th Division, are coincidental. There must be a guiding hand behind it all.”

Under intense pressure, Gil reached out to Red Falcon, using a previously agreed-upon code that meant “come to Paris immediately.” He returned in a matter of days with information that the Syrian military’s movements were indeed a cover for Assad’s plan to retake part of the Golan Heights. A senior source in Military Intelligence recalled the morning that Gil’s intelligence was circulated: “Panic took hold. It seemed as though the nightmare scenario of October 1973 was about to recur. The nation was on high alert, and military forces were moved to the forward lines on the border, which caused an immediate increase in the Syrians’ state of alert.”

At the same time, other intelligence was coming in that appeared to support the sense that Syria was preparing for battle. Another division deployed along the border with Israel began to conduct war-games exercises, and Syrian reserves were mobilized in response to tension with Turkey in the north. The Israelis even learned that the Syrian military had refreshed the atropine syringes its troops carried as protection against chemical weapons.

Shortly after Gil’s information was received, someone leaked to the Israeli media that Syrian forces were massing and there were fears of an attack on the Golan. Panic swept through the populace.

As these events were unfolding, Amos Gilad was preparing to assume his new role as head of AMAN’s Research Division. Gilad, who currently serves as head of the Ministry of Defense’s security cabinet, has been at the center of some of the most tumultuous events in the Middle East for the past three decades. His reputation for focusing purely on the work and for bluntly standing his ground in times of intense disagreement is known throughout the Israeli intelligence community.

“I had never taken leave,” Gilad told me as we sat in his office in the Defense Ministry. “I was due to get my first month’s leave, before taking up my post as head of the Research Division. But then Yehuda Gil’s reports began coming in, and I realized, there goes my leave.”

Gil filed “beautiful reports in superb Hebrew,” Gilad said, “which included not only a warning of war, but also the diplomatic rationale behind it: Syria would attack on the Golan Heights just before the American elections. The attack would cause a shock, following which Israel would have to launch a diplomatic move [to avoid all-out war], all this before the American president could seriously settle into his next term.”

Something about the logic in Gil’s report struck Gilad as wrong. “This was Western reasoning,” he said, “which is the exact opposite of Assad’s. Anyone familiar with Assad knew that it could not be so. He would never launch a military operation to get a diplomatic process moving, especially when it depended upon political developments in the United States.”

Gilad’s interpretation met with scorn. “I was in a pretty miserable position here,” he said. “The officers under me thought that Gil was right and I was wrong. There were officers who told me, ‘Amos, you’re nuts. There’s going to be a war. We have to deploy forces, we have to mobilize reserves.’ Those were very difficult days for me.”

Even now, nearly 20 years later, Gilad’s temper flared as he discussed the way events unfolded over those few days. “Our supreme test as intelligence officers is to save blood,” he said. “And that works in two directions. After all, the easiest thing for me would have been to say Gil’s right and issue a war alert. And then we would have mobilized reserves, and the Syrians, whose intelligence is very weak and who have no sources inside Israel, would have seen that we were mobilizing, interpreted it as preparation for a surprise attack, and issued their own war alert. Someone would have fired the first shot, thousands would have died, Yehuda Gil would have come out of it a national hero, and I would have been seen as a saboteur and traitor.”

Gilad’s opinion was in direct conflict with that of his superior, AMAN chief Moshe Ya’alon (who today is Israel’s minister of defense). On the morning of August 30, Ya’alon did what none of his predecessors had ever done: sent an urgent, top-secret message to the prime minister, the defense minister, the chief of staff, and the head of the Mossad, under the heading “Warning of war with Syria.” The warning read:

As I and my personnel stated in evaluations that we voiced this week, I find it necessary to emphasize that the likelihood of an offensive Syrian move is increasing as it becomes clear to the Syrian president that his prospects for regaining the Golan by agreement are decreasing. As of mid-September 1996, the likelihood of such a move will increase, in the light of the steps the Syrians intend to take in the course of the next two weeks to improve their readiness. Even though I cannot yet point at a concrete time for an offensive Syrian move, it is clear to me that the likelihood of such a move is increasing and I shall recommend drawing all conclusions and preparing for a new situation.

Upon reading this message, Netanyahu summoned Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin Shahak and ordered him to prepare for war. Shahak, who agreed with Gilad that Syria was not on the verge of attacking, tried but failed to persuade Netanyahu to reconsider. Acting on firm orders from the prime minister, he began preparing the army for combat.

At an urgent cabinet meeting on the morning of September 1, many of the ministers demanded that elite army forces be deployed in the north, that a division of reserves be mobilized, and that the IDF prepare for a preemptive strike against Syria.

Yitzhak Mordechai, then the newly appointed Israeli defense minister, found himself in a predicament: “When I was head of Northern Command,” Mordechai told me recently, “the whole limited-warfare theory that came from Red Falcon seemed strange to me, because I didn’t see any actual preparations on the ground. And now he was reporting on an imminent war, and the head of AMAN takes his information as the living word of God. I said in the cabinet that, in my opinion, the information is groundless. The Syrians are far from being ready to open fire. Moreover, I have studied President Assad well. He is not an adventurer. A move like this is simply not his style. True, he did it in the Yom Kippur War, but then the situation was completely different. Then they were ready to go to war.”

Mordechai met with stiff opposition in the cabinet, especially from his former army colleagues Ariel Sharon and Raful Eitan. “They had been my superior officers,” Mordechai said. “They were saying that I don’t get it. Sharon was saying, ‘War will break out soon and we have to get ready.’ Raful, who saw with his own eyes how Mount Hermon fell in the Yom Kippur War, thundered at me that I didn’t realize the price we would pay in blood to drive the Syrians out if we allowed them to invade now. The two of them pointed their fingers at me and said, ‘Know that you’re responsible! The blame will all be yours!’”

We were sitting in his apartment in north Tel Aviv, overlooking the sea, as Mordechai recalled the meeting. “I’m not bragging,” he said, “but in emergency situations like these, I turn into a block of ice. One should not let pressure decide for him.”

Mordechai is a tough, unemotional man, but when I said that it was difficult to imagine anyone not being affected by the strain of that situation, he softened. “Don’t think it was easy,” he said. “I went through ten days without sleeping. I realized I was taking enormous responsibility on myself.”

Ilan Mizrahi, who was the head of the Mossad’s Tsomet division at the time, told me: “If it had not been for Yitzhak Mordechai, who stood his ground in the cabinet, there would have been an outbreak of war. He saved Israel.”

With Mordechai refusing to budge, a compromise was reached: Steps would be taken to reinforce the border and quietly prepare for the mobilization of reserves. All female personnel would be evacuated from the border area, to prevent them from being taken captive during an invasion. At the same time, Netanyahu, who remained of the opinion that war was imminent, would convey the gravity of the situation to President Clinton and ask him to intervene immediately with Assad.

On September 7, Netanyahu flew to Washington, accompanied by his diplomatic adviser, Dore Gold, and the head of Mossad’s research division, Uzzi Arad. Dennis Ross, who was Clinton’s special coordinator in the Middle East, traveled with the Israelis, who briefed him en route about the gravity of the situation with Syria.

Immediately upon landing, the party headed for a meeting at a CIA facility near the Pentagon. John Deutsch, then director of the CIA, arrived with members of his staff, and Arad briefed them on the latest intelligence. “Deutsch and his experts listened to us attentively but said the CIA had no information to support the idea that Syria intended to go to war,” Arad told me.

In meetings with Deutsch, as well as at the Pentagon and the White House, Netanyahu made his plea that the Americans intervene urgently with the Syrians.

Clinton issued an order that a letter from him to Assad be drawn up, and it was formulated in a lengthy meeting at the State Department attended by Gold and Arad. The letter read in part:

The United States is committed to the achievement of peace.… In order to do this, the two sides are obliged to refrain from actions that place a question mark over their commitment to peace, or worse, that attest to their readiness to resort to the use of force. On this occasion we wish to raise with Syria the matter of its military force movements.… Some of these movements are unprecedented and cause instability in the region.… It is incumbent upon us to clarify that neither side will derive benefit from any military measure or from the negotiations that will begin in its wake.… Such an act will have the gravest repercussions on relations with the United States.… I implore you to take steps to reduce the tension.…

[Signed] William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States of America

Clinton’s letter was delivered to Assad by Christopher Ross, the American ambassador in Damascus. After his meeting with Assad, Ross immediately sent a memo to Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, who conveyed the message to Dore Gold. According to the minutes of the Assad meeting sent by Ross (which have been translated here back to English from the Hebrew translation received by the Israelis), the following exchange occurred.

Assad read the message in Arabic.… He replied thus: Will you have a problem if Israel is the party that initiates military action?

Ross: The message is addressed to you. We do not want any action or any initiative from either side.

Assad: Our movements are not meant to start a war. They are technical and similar to movements that every army executes.… What the forces are doing is routine.… This state of alert and readiness at which they are at now are different from those required in war. We have moved them to the places where they were in the past. Israel is used to this, just as we are used to the IDF’s exercises on the Golan Heights. We also keep on training, like the American army. This is our reply to President Clinton’s message: We have no plans for war. The Israelis should know this. Netanyahu certainly gets intelligence reports from his intelligence services. He should know that our movements are not hostile.… But we do not see Israel making progress in this direction. I wonder if Netanyahu is really honest when he expresses his fears or, what seems more reasonable, that he is preparing justification for carrying out a military action himself.

Beyond the stark warnings about the Syrian military’s movements, the notes from Yehuda Gil’s meetings with Red Falcon in September 1996 contained another bombshell. According to Gil, Red Falcon had told him that Syria had placed a mole at the highest levels of the Israeli military. The general had access to the intelligence the mole was providing, and although he could not name who it was, Gil said he had supplied him with a number of clues that could help Israel identify the spy.

This news, too, was immediately conveyed all the way up to Netanyahu, who ordered Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, to set up a special squad whose mission was to root out the traitor. After intense investigation, a number of senior officers, including two generals, were found to fit the profile Gil had provided. For weeks their every move was carefully observed and documented, and highly invasive probes of their private lives were carried out, but nothing conclusive was discovered.

In the aftermath of the tense scare with Syria—and as the Shin Bet investigation came to its inconclusive end—suspicions that Gil was fabricating intelligence were now impossible to explain away. Danny Yatom, who by that point was serving as director of the Mossad, told me that the newly appointed head of Tsomet, Ilan Mizrahi, came to him with his concerns. “‘Vigorous steps must be taken to find out if the suspicions against Yehuda are correct,’” Yatom recalled Mizrahi telling him. Mizrahi said that the agency needed to begin a secret surveillance of one of its own. “If it turns out that I’m wrong,” Mizrahi told him, “I’ll immediately hand you my resignation. I won’t be able to continue after breaking the Mossad’s code of trust like this. Will you go all the way with me on this? If no, then better not to begin.”

When Gil next left for Europe, in March 1997, Yatom went to the head of the Shin Bet and asked that a team be sent to follow him. He could not use Mossad personnel, Yatom reasoned, because of the possibility that someone would leak the plan to Gil. A Shin Bet team followed Gil to Paris and was able to confirm that he did indeed meet with his source, but because the meeting took place in a crowded Parisian café, it was impossible to record the conversation. Gil would report that this meeting with Red Falcon lasted seven hours; in my interviews with Yatom, he said that the Shin Bet team observed that Gil met him for only 40 minutes.

In October 1997, Mizrahi told Gil that he would not be going to the next round of meetings with Red Falcon and that another case officer would be replacing him. Gil protested but could no longer convince his bosses that he alone must handle the source. The replacement operative went to Paris and, after meeting with Red Falcon, reported back news that was stunning even in light of Mizrahi’s and Yatom’s already grave suspicions. According to Gil’s replacement, the Syrian general had never been recruited by Gil to be an informant; he had never provided intelligence regarding the workings of the Syrian military or government. All of it, all 23 years, was a lie. Red Falcon was invested in the relationship, the case officer said, because he enjoyed his Italian friend’s generosity.

Yatom immediately took the case to Israel’s state prosecutor. Mizrahi asked for a chance to persuade Gil to confess and to handle the problem internally, in part because of his undeniable contributions to the Mossad, and in part to avoid the tremendous damage he knew would be done to the agency’s image. Mizrahi summoned Gil to a meeting at Mossad headquarters, which took place in a room in which the Shin Bet and the Israeli police had installed hidden cameras and microphones.

According to Gil and to others who’d observed the meeting on a monitor in an adjacent room, Mizrahi greeted Gil with a stern face as he entered and asked him to sit down. He talked to Gil about all that they’d done together, the good that they’d accomplished for the state of Israel, and then Mizrahi said, “But I have grounds to believe that your handling of Red Falcon was not in accordance with accepted norms.”

Gill said he had no idea what Mizrahi was talking about.

“We know everything,” Mizrahi said. “Yehuda, do me a favor, do all of us a favor—the Mossad and yourself—tell us everything.”

“I really don’t know what’s going on here,” Gil said again.

“If you do not cooperate with me,” Mizrahi said, “I will have no other choice but to have the matter investigated.”

Gil remained implacable. Mizrahi clapped his hands together in sorrow and left the room. Moments later two men entered, one a police officer and the other the head of the Shin Bet’s interrogation unit, a man nicknamed Sheriff.

The men carried three cardboard boxes each. “Here’s the proof that you lied,” they said. “Here’s the proof that you stole.” (In the course of investigating whether Gil had fabricated intelligence, suspicions were also raised that he was stealing money that had been earmarked for Red Falcon.)

“Gil kept a poker face,” Danny Yatom told me. “With a stoical tranquility he replied, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’”

At one point in the interrogation, Sheriff compared Gil to an Arab terrorist. Gil’s voice trembled as he described that moment. “I wondered if I should get up, knock him down, and kill him,” he said. “We were alone in the room, and I am, after all, an expert at hand-to-hand combat. I know what I am capable of. Later on I said to myself, I can’t sink any lower. If a schmuck like this talks to me like that and I don’t respond, what have I come to? But cold calculation told me not to get up.”

Devorah Chen was the director of the Department of Security Matters and Special Affairs at the time. She was assigned to the case and was also present in the adjacent room full of Mossad chiefs watching the interrogation. “One must realize that the strength of the evidence they had before the interrogation was very weak indeed,” Chen told me. “I told them that if this was all they had, we couldn’t indict him.”

 As the interrogation continued, though, “Sheriff broke him,” Chen recalled. “He repeated the same question over and over again. He mentioned details that Gil had faked in his bio. That’s how he undermined his stability. Gil knows that it was there that he lost his cool, and that’s why he hates Sheriff so much.”

Gil maintains to this day that he did not, in fact, confess to anything, and that he never believed there would be a trial because he didn’t commit any crimes. “I was sure it would be over in a day or two,” he said. “I never imagined that a story like this, this hell, would explode in my face.”

When I pressed him to talk more about the interrogation, he said dismissively that it was he who was controlling the outcome, not Sheriff. “They did not break me or anything like that,” he insisted. “I said, ‘Ask me whatever you like, and I’ll answer you.’”

Gil allowed during the interrogation that “at certain stages there were things that I didn’t handle exactly as I should. But by no means, in no event, did I invent things that [Red Falcon] did not say.” Then, and in my conversations with him all these years later, he placed the blame instead at the feet of the AMAN researchers with whom he worked for so many years. On every trip, he said, he was accompanied by a number of experts, and each night they would intensely debrief him on what he’d learned. He blames any inaccuracies in his reports on the way these debriefings were handled.

“Their mania for getting real-time reporting did not allow me to sit down and write up my notes,” he said. “I said, ‘Guys, I can’t do it. I sit with you from five or six in the evening until nine or eleven at night, going over and translating from Italian the notes I took during the meeting. If after that I have to write them up, I won’t be able to get up in the morning.’ So they said, ‘You know what? You tell us, we’ll write the articles in your name.’” (“Articles” is Mossad jargon for the written reports submitted after meetings with agents.) Would it really have been possible to fool so many experts for so many years, Gil said, under such intense pressure?

When the interrogation was over, investigators from the Shin Bet and the Israeli police escorted him from Mossad headquarters to his home in Gedera. They searched his home and discovered a large amount of cash—$39,000, which Gil had reported he’d handed over to Red Falcon, kept in an envelope labeled “Office Money.” (“Office” is the term Mossad employees use when talking about the organization.)

A Mossad official who was involved in the affair told me, “It’s clear to us that Gil was prepared for the possibility of an investigation and had therefore written ‘Office Money’ on the envelope. Why else would he write this on an envelope that only he and his wife had access to, and that in any case he should have handed over to the agent? On the other hand,” he conceded, “Gil could have stolen a lot more money from us. He was very modest in this.”

Gil contended that keeping money at home was standard procedure in the Mossad and that he wasn’t using it for anything other than the mission. Danny Yatom disputes this. “Gil was a man of the world who knew a thing or two about the good life,” Yatom said. “That’s why he arranged all his meetings in Paris.”

To this Gil responded, “That’s absolute nonsense. The meetings were arranged where they could be held without arousing the suspicions of Syrian internal security.” As soon as the search was completed, Gil was taken to a secret Shin Bet holding facility south of Tel Aviv. He spent a week there before being allowed to go home and explain what he was being accused of to his wife and children. When he arrived home, he gathered his family around him. “If you think what they are saying about me is true,” he said to them, “you can leave me alone without any qualms. You do not have to back me up if you don’t believe that I’m innocent.”

His wife, Noa, told me that the repercussions have been hardest on her children, one of whom is a senior officer in the IDF. “They have suffered a great deal,” she said. “I don’t want to tell you what happened after that night, how each one of them fell to pieces.” I asked her how the accusations have affected her, and she said only, “I was born under the sign of Leo. I protect him like a lioness.”

The trial, which was held in secret, ended with Gil being convicted of espionage and theft by a panel of three judges and sentenced to five years in prison.

When the charges were read out, Gil recalled, “I heard the word ‘espionage,’ and it was the most humiliating moment of my life. To be accused of spying against the State of Israel.” 

Over the dozens of hours we spent talking about his career, Gil rarely appeared fragile or vulnerable. He is an intensely proud man, and occasionally bombastic, and secure, it seems, in the rightness of his actions. But now it was possible to glimpse something else beneath the guise of righteous indignation. “I erred,” he said. “Perhaps I embellished a little. Perhaps I rounded off corners. But I never willfully fabricated anything. I acted only on behalf of the security of the state.” After the ruling, Gil appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court, but to no avail. In their rejection of the appeal, the court’s justices wrote: 

By virtue of his training and his occupation and because of the special information that he possessed, the appellant knew that conveying false information was liable to harm the State’s security. The Syrian source to whom the appellant attributed the information was of high rank.… The information that [Gil] delivered was distributed even in raw form to the Chief of Staff, the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister. It was written up in a convincing manner. Some of it arrived at a time when there was tension in relations between Israel and Syria and as such it was liable to have grave consequences. The appellant was aware of this danger.

The court also refused to reduce Gil’s sentence, although it acknowledged that “for long years he served in a responsible and important position; sometimes he found himself in grave situations and risked his life. He controlled dozens of agents in different countries and in so doing brought great benefit to the security of Israel. Even after retiring he took upon himself the execution of important missions, before he stumbled and committed the crimes he is accused of.” 

I asked several of the roughly 60 sources I spoke to for this story why, in their estimation, someone as skilled and revered as Gil would do the things that he was found guilty of doing. What could his motive possibly be? 

 “That is a question for psychologists,” Devorah Chen, the state prosecutor, told me. “I think that his motive had to do more with his ego than with financial gain. This was the pinnacle of his work with the Mossad, and I think he was obsessed with feeling that he was still a key factor in the organization.” 

Many people, including Danny Yatom, agreed. “Part of the makeup of his personality is expressed in the bottomless need to be the center of attention,” Yatom told me. “Always to feel that he is needed.”

Others spoke of him as a man who, through relentless devotion to his work, had sacrificed his own identity. I met one day with Gad Shomron, a former Mossad operative who testified on Gil’s behalf at his trial. Shomron seemed pained, even now, talking about the affair. “This is a very sad story,” Shomron said. “Gil did great things for the sake of Israel’s security, but it may be that he never quite came back from there, from the land of illusions and lies in which he lived on behalf of us all.” He contemplated for a moment the pressure that Gil must have been under during all those years when Israel’s security seemed to hinge on his handling of an informant. “For a while he soared along with Red Falcon,” he said. “But for reasons many of us can understand, he simply forgot to come back to earth.”

Another Mossad operative, a man who was among those tasked with gathering evidence against Gil when suspicions inside the agency became too great to deny, was far less sympathetic. He suggested that there was a kind of intense sociopathology at work in Gil, one that found perfect expression in a job that required deceit and manipulation. When I first spoke with him, early in my relationship with Gil, the officer warned me, “Beware of him. He’ll recruit you and run you, and you won’t be aware of it.” I responded somewhat arrogantly that in this case I thought the opposite had happened, that I had been able to get him to open up. “Really?” he asked. “Tell me what he told you.” I briefly recounted some of what Gil had said in those initial interviews, including his description of his childhood in Libya, his Italian father, his military service.

The man chuckled. “That’s what he told the organization when he was recruited,” he said. “The details were seriously checked only when suspicions against him arose in 1996.” As far as he was concerned, nothing about Gil’s story could be trusted—where he was from, the prominence of his family, that his grandfather was a rabbi and his father was Italian. He questioned all of it, even details of Gil’s military career. “Because of his feelings of inferiority,” this man suggested, “Gil built a whole dream life and simply turned it into his cover story. It happens sometimes, that we introduce our fantasies or things that we lack into our cover stories. My wife, for example, will never forgive me for the time my cover story called for me to pass as a widower.”

I doubted his theory, but he waved me off. “These are the less important details,” he said. “Gil played you for a fool, just as he did all of us. The Mossad has clear–cut, indubitable evidence that he fabricated the information almost right from the start.”

I’ve since heard the same from others, that the lies go all the way back, that nothing Gil reported from Red Falcon was true. And I’ve heard the opposite, and not just from Gil, that he reported information that was accurate. It’s impossible to know, of course. This is the hazard of reporting on an agency that in its obsessive search for secrets is so protective of its own. This man, after all, is a longtime recruiter and handler of agents, whose name is also connected to legendary intelligence feats. You can never fully know what personal or institutional arrogance, what image management, is at work. 

Shortly before this story was to be published, I met one more time with Gil at his home. Netanyahu had recently been elected again. There was a feeling that for all the drama and turbulence, little in Israel ever changes. All the old narratives and enmities insist on themselves. I had often wondered to myself if Gil could ever see that he and Red Falcon were driven, in some way, by the same raw, tribal grievances. He had spoken often of Red Falcon’s primitive anti-Semitism, and yet he had all but acknowledged his own searing hatred, even if he was unequivocal that it was necessary for survival. 

At one point in our conversations he offered that he had, over time, developed a kind of fondness for Red Falcon, or kinship maybe. “I feel sorry for the guy, for Red Falcon.” He was a decent man, Gil said, “in his own conception. He was not deceptive.” The investigation had certainly exposed him, Gil said. “They did him a terrible injustice, because the consequences could not have been pleasant. I sat in prison for three years, but I’m sure he lost much more, he and his family. The quarrels between the Jews shouldn’t have caused him damage. It doesn’t matter that I’d been prepared, if need be, to shoot a bullet between his eyes. It wouldn’t bother me. But the one thing has nothing to do with the other. The respect that he deserves, he should receive.”

On the last day I visited him, Gil looked older to me than when I’d seen him last. He and Noa were about to leave the country, he said. They were on their way to southern Italy, to the town he and his family had gone to when they left Libya, before coming to Israel in 1948. He seemed eager to go there, to this formative place of his youth, where his father had come from.

Love For My Enemies

A story of friendship and forgiveness in Rwanda.

By Lukas Augustin and Niklas Schenck

WITH SUPPORT FROM THE PULITZER CENTER ON CRISIS REPORTING

When the Rwandan genocide began, Innocent Gakwerere was living in Kigali. A 24-year-old member of the Tutsi ethnic group, Innocent had grown up in a small village not far from the capital, but his father had left the family when he was a teenager, and Innocent moved to the city in hopes of making a living there. He worked as a milk seller and was taking driving lessons to qualify for odd jobs as a driver.

Then, on April 6, 1994, Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, a member of Rwanda’s ethnic Hutu majority, was killed when his airplane was shot down as it approached Kigali. To this day, it is not clear who was responsible, but Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsi.

Rwanda’s ethnic divisions are largely a relic of the country’s colonial past. In precolonial Rwanda, the terms Hutu and Tutsi had referred to farmers and herdsmen, respectively, but the boundary was a porous one. It was Belgian colonists who turned them into fixed categories, instituting ethnic identity cards and treating the Tutsi as a preferred elite. The Hutu majority chafed at the Tutsi’s privileged status. A Hutu-led revolution in 1959 sent thousands of Tutsi into exile in neighboring countries, where some of them began plotting insurgencies against the new Hutu-led republican government.

Habyarimana was the Republic of Rwanda’s third president and had been in power since 1973. In the early nineties, with a Tutsi insurgency under way across the border in Uganda, he turned to radio propaganda to stir up Hutu anger toward the Tutsi. It has long been suspected that Hutu extremists, in fact, were responsible for shooting down his plane, creating a pretext for a wave of revenge killings that had been plotted in advance. (Lists of Hutu opposition members and moderates had been drawn up before Habyarimana’s death, and many of the people on them were murdered in the early days of the genocide—including prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, herself a Hutu.)

Within hours of Habyarimana’s death, Hutu mobs roamed the streets of Kigali with retribution on their minds. The next day, fearing for his life, Innocent Gakwerere fled the city, walking some 25 miles back to his home village of Mugina.

Mugina is a string of hamlets stretched along one of Rwanda’s countless forested ridges. Hillside plots of sorghum, beans, and corn descend toward the streams in the valleys below; patches of bright green banana groves dot the earth. The mayor of Mugina was a Hutu, but he had promised that Tutsi would be safe in the village’s Catholic church, on the road leading to Mugina’s main market. As the violence escalated, the church rapidly became a destination for refugees fleeing the killing elsewhere—and, soon, in Mugina itself.

When Innocent arrived on the night of April 7, his family had already abandoned their house and, he later learned, sought refuge in the church. He spent one night in the house, then fled into the banana groves. That was where a mob of local Hutu found him nine days later.

The man who tipped them off to his whereabouts was a Hutu named Wellars Uwihoreye. He was Innocent’s childhood friend.

Badly wounded by the mob that Wellars had sent after him, Innocent dragged himself to the church. Tens of thousands of Tutsi had already crowded into and around the building, including many of Innocent’s friends and family.

Then, on April 20, two weeks after the beginning of the genocide, members of the Hutu Interahamwe, a paramilitary group, killed Mugina’s mayor. The militiamen swiftly moved on to the church, and what had been a refuge suddenly became a deathtrap. Over the course of several waves of assaults with guns, grenades, and machetes, at least 20,000 Tutsi—and possibly as many as 45,000—were murdered.

Innocent was one of only a few survivors. During the attack, he was again hacked with machetes, and grenade shrapnel tore into his legs. He passed out between mounds of corpses in the church courtyard.

The Rwandan genocide lasted just over three months and left 800,000 Rwandans dead. At the peak of the bloodshed, nearly six people were killed every minute, often by their neighbors. In the aftermath, in cities like Kigali, victims and offenders could avoid facing one another, but in villages like Mugina they met every day: at the well, in the fields, in the market, at the church. People who had just tried to kill one another had to learn how to live as neighbors again.

Wellars Uwihoreye was born in Mugina in 1966. He left school after third grade, when he was 12, to become a metalworker. He quickly excelled, forging engine parts, ploughs, axes, and knives.

The first inkling Wellars heard of the genocide came from friends who talked about Hutu propaganda they had encountered on the radio. “I heard that some Tutsi were buying cisterns to throw us Hutu into boiling oil to fry us alive,” he says. “I remember the Tutsi suddenly appeared like hypocrites to me, that although they seemed to be friends, they didn’t tell me any of this.” Still, when his Hutu neighbors started torching houses in Mugina, Wellars was so afraid that he considered fleeing to the church grounds along with the Tutsi. “Then someone told me, ‘Watch carefully! Don’t you see that not all houses are in flames? Only the first, the third, then the fifth house. Those are Tutsi houses being burned. Please, there is no reason to flee.’”

So Wellars stayed.

After the genocide, everywhere Innocent went he saw perpetrators. “They had fields and land and cattle,” he says, “and I had nothing. When we didn’t have soap in the house I got angry, because I knew that before, I had been able to work and earn money. I wanted thunder to come down and strike them dead.”

Wellars, meanwhile, spent 13 years in prison before he appeared before a village court, where he admitted to his role in the killings and was sentenced to time served and released; the government, overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of perpetrators, had eventually opted for a policy of forgiveness. Many Tutsi were appalled by this, including Innocent. “If they had asked us to kill the perpetrators,” he says, “we would have done so immediately.” But when he saw how hard it was for Wellars to confess in court, he didn’t know what to say.

One day after Wellars’s release, Innocent spotted him among a group of men working on a construction site. Although he had seen Wellars in court, he was unaware that he had been among the Hutu who had chased him through the banana grove. He approached him to chat.

“I could not speak to him,” Wellars says. After leaving prison, Wellars had returned to Mugina but lived in fear of his neighbors. “I came thinking the Tutsi will immediately kill me,” he says. But one day in 2011, he got up the courage to go to Innocent’s house and confess what he had done.

Weeks later, Innocent invited Wellars to join him in a program run by a man named Christophe Mbonyingabo. Christophe was a Rwandan and a Tutsi, but he had grown up across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; his family had fled Rwanda before he was born because of Hutu persecution. Still, Christophe had never made much of his ethnic identity until, in the waning days of the genocide, Hutu militias were driven out of Rwanda and into his village, where they threatened him and his family. “I felt so much pain and hatred that I wanted to join a rebel movement,” Christophe says. “But later I wondered where all this hatred had come from.” And most of all, he wondered if it would ever go away.

Later, Christophe moved to Kigali to study sociology. By then, the UN—whose blue-helmeted troops had stood by and even withdrawn during the genocide—had convened an international court in Arusha, Tanzania, to try the genocide’s perpetrators. The idea struck Christophe as futile, even infuriating. The UN troops, he says, “should have been the first to answer to these courts. They had all the means to stop the genocide, and they didn’t. It was hard for Rwandans to listen to their advice. You left us to die and now you want to teach us?”

Unless Rwandans themselves came to terms with the genocide, Christophe believed, the slaughter could start again at any time. So in 2002, he founded Christian Action for Reconciliation and Social Assistance (CARSA), a nonprofit organization that would bring together victims and perpetrators of the genocide. In workshops, village meetings, and other carefully arranged encounters, they would ask each other for forgiveness.

When Wellars again asked Innocent to forgive him, in front of the group at Christophe’s workshop, Innocent gave him a hug and told him, “Let’s go to the bar and have a drink.” Step by step, Innocent had lost his anger toward Wellars. He had learned that Wellars had not planned the killings and had given back the land he stole during the genocide. He had also helped Innocent discover the identity of the man who had killed one of his brothers.

Over time, something deeper evolved: The two men became friends again. When Innocent’s wife fell ill, Wellars bought her medicine. When Wellars moved houses, Innocent helped him. When one has money, he buys Fanta—or, at night, beers—for both. “Before the genocide, our friendship was about childhood,” Innocent says. “Now it is more focused, it is stronger. I can call upon him when I am in trouble.”

In late 2011, CARSA gave Innocent and Wellars a cow to care for together, as part of the organization’s reconciliation program. Cattle are an important indicator of wealth in Rwanda, and before the genocide they were a source of tension between the Hutu and Tutsi: Tutsi had traditionally owned cattle, while the Hutu had not. During the genocide, Hutu propaganda used this disparity to incite would-be killers: Kill the Tutsi, the Hutu were told, and you will get their cows. Some Tutsi say they escaped being killed only because the perpetrators were so focused on catching their cattle.

After the April 1994 massacre at the church in Mugina, as Innocent was drifting in and out of consciousness, he remembers waking up at one point and seeing a woman creeping toward him on her knees. She, too, had survived the attack, but the Hutu militiamen had cut her Achilles tendons, and she could no longer walk. Her name was Claudine Murebwayire, and as she and Innocent spent time together in the hospital recovering from their injuries, they became friends.

Claudine had a husband and a baby, and two of her brothers had sought refuge in the church with her. At one point her baby began crying, and the militiamen hacked the child to death in her arms. Claudine passed out. Her brothers, who had managed to hide during the killings, found her alive that night amid the thousands of dead bodies in the church. They found her husband, who took her to a hospital. She and her husband were soon separated, however, and he was killed soon after.

The brothers who had saved Claudine at the church would be killed, too, on one of the last days of the genocide. They were caught by a group of local Hutu, who beat them and then buried them alive in a banana grove; they died, three days later, of suffocation. Among the Hutu who buried them and then watched them to make sure they didn’t escape was a man named Ananias Ndahayo.

Altogether, Ananias Ndahayo committed or was an accomplice to eight murders during the genocide. But it was the death of Claudine’s brothers, he says, that led him to set down his machete and walk away from the killing. “When I saw the blood,” he says, “it looked like mine.”

Ananias lives near Claudine in Mugina. Although they had seen each other around the village for nearly two decades, when Christophe and CARSA first approached Claudine about meeting Ananias, she angrily refused. Months later, in September 2013, she finally agreed to talk to him, for the first time since her brothers were murdered.

One morning five months later, in February, Innocent went to pick up Claudine from her house. Together they walked to the place where they had first met: the church where the massacre had taken place. Innocent hoped he might be able to help Claudine find peace.

Four months after the last reporting trip for this story, Claudine and Ananias took part in a CARSA workshop. Although it had seemed that the history they shared was too much to overcome, Christophe Mbonyingabo had arranged another meeting. Afterward, he sent out a message including a photo of the two of them smiling.

Claudine had told Ananias that she forgave him. That was the first step; their path toward reconciliation has only just started.

Love and Ruin

An exhilarating and heartbreaking tale of lives lived to the fullest in one of the world’s most fascinating and forbidding places.

By James Verini

Winner of the 2015 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing

Prologue

It has no official number in the archaeological record, nor an agreed-upon name. Some curators at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, where it resides, have called it the Limestone Head. Others call it the Carved Pebble. Still others call it simply the Head, and while there is no question that the artifact they’re talking about depicts a head, the answer to the question of just whose head it depicts—which person or deity its unyielding eyes and screwed mouth reflect—is lost, like so much else in Afghanistan is lost, to some insolently mute vault of time.

The Head is carved into a limestone pebble two and a half inches high by one and a quarter inches wide. It dates from around 10,000 B.C.E., placing it in the Upper Paleolithic and making it one of the oldest pieces of sculpture ever found on the Asian continent. We know that it turned up in a gorge near the village of Aq Kupruk, in the northern foothills of the Hindu Kush. Beyond that we know nothing. The best that the most thorough scholarly paper written about the Head—published by the American Philosophical Society in 1972, seven years after it was discovered—can say for its subject is that it is “apparently humanoid.” Was it devotional, decorative, whimsical? “Was the head made for a onetime limited use or was it intended for long-term retention and repeated use? … Since it will not stand, was it intended to be carried about?” The Head won’t say.

But its dumbness beckons. The Head’s sculptor was far cleverer than an artist living 12,000 years ago had any call to be. The eyes are not crude circles (all you’d really need in the Upper Paleolithic, you’d think), but composed of a series of subtle line strokes, as though they are contemplating us wearily. The nose, the American Philosophical Society paper observes, “begins with a wide angular cleft rather like that of the nose cavity in a skull and seems almost to be intentionally ‘unrealistic,’” while the “deeply engraved line of the mouth itself apparently arcs upward in what seems to be a smile.” The paper concludes that the Head does not come from an “individual or cultural ‘infantilism.’” Yet the overall effect, millennia later, is a kind of infancy. It’s somehow fetal looking, the Head. Some observers see on its face a smile, others a frown, and still others that inscrutable expression, neither frown nor smile, that a wise child makes when he peers into you.

The archaeologist who unearthed the Head, who might have had the most questions about it, had the fewest. Louis Dupree was certain it depicted a woman—and, furthermore, that it had been carved by one. “What else?” Dupree said to a New York Times reporter, rather tauntingly, in 1968, when he brought the relic to the American Museum of Natural History. “Women ruled the hearth and the world then. The men were away hunting.” Of course it was a woman.

That was how Louis Dupree talked—to Times writers, to fellow archeologists, presidents, statesmen, interrogators, spies. He even talked that way to his wife, Nancy, who, when asked whether it was true her husband swore like sailor (and a sailor he had been before becoming an archaeologist), would sometimes sigh longingly and reply, “Worse.”

Dupree’s personal correspondence is full of letters from nervous museum administrators asking after unaccounted-for expenses and unpaid salaries. In the field he worked casually. In 1962, he carried out the first major excavation at Aq Kupruk, an immensely important site, essentially by himself. For the follow-up dig, three years later, when he discovered the Head, he splurged and brought along as diggers and assistants a pair of graduate students, a pair of precocious high schoolers, and his cook.

“We were very, very careful with it,” Charles Kolb, one of the graduate students, recalled of the Head. Except for Dupree, that is. Although it was very possibly the most important find of his career, he never properly catalogued it (thus its lack of a single name or record number). Then, in Kabul, he took it home with him, where Nancy, a writer of guidebooks and an amateur scholar, came to adore it as much as he did. Dupree’s daughter took a shine to it, too, and called it Daddy’s Head. The name stuck.

The Afghan official who granted Dupree permission to take Daddy’s Head to New York told him, “If you lose it, you’ll owe us half a million dollars.” The careful procedure Dupree employed to transport it overseas involved putting it in his jacket pocket, folding the jacket, and stuffing the jacket into the overhead shelf on the plane. Nancy spent the flight looking up nervously at the bundle.

Upon its return from the United States, Daddy’s Head was installed at the National Museum in Kabul. Between their excavations, research trips, lecture tours, and teaching stints abroad, Louis and Nancy would visit it there. They’d stare at it for what seemed like hours, talking about the history it must have witnessed. One photograph of the couple shows them sitting at a table, gazing at the artifact as Louis holds it in his fingers (gingerly, but on equal terms). They appear mesmerized, as though Daddy’s Head is almost physically drawing them back in time. The photo was taken in 1971, as they were falling more deeply in love with one another, and, together, with Afghanistan. They peered into the country’s wondrous, terrible, unknowable past. Daddy’s Head, they liked to think, was opening its vault of secrets.

In 1978, a communist cabal seized power in Afghanistan. Louis was imprisoned and deported. The next year the Soviet Union invaded. Its troops pulverized the country, reducing much of its history—the unearthed chapters and those still buried—to rubble. Louis helped the Afghan resistance while Nancy worked with refugees. The struggle against the Soviets gave way to civil war, and their beloved National Museum was in the crossfire.

Nancy and others tried to save the artifacts in the collection. But she didn’t find Daddy’s Head. The Taliban ended the civil war, but followed that by closing schools, ransacking libraries, and destroying much of what was left of the collection. She wondered if all of the work she and Louis had done to preserve Afghan culture had been in vain. She assumed she would never see Daddy’s Head again.

I first encountered Nancy Dupree in a ghostly sort of a way. On a Tuesday night in 2003, while soldiers my age were in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, I was sitting in a theater in Los Angeles, watching a production of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul. The play’s first scene is given over entirely to a monologue spoken by a Mrs. Dalloway–type character. Why she is addressing us, and from where, she leaves unspoken, as she does her identity—she does not name herself and is known in the program only as the Homebody—but we’re aware from the Homebody’s first words that the central fact about this woman is that she is deeply taken by, even lost to, Afghanistan. She speaks about the country with passionate eloquence, yet it seems her knowledge of the place has left her understanding less about it, not more. In the convolutions of her speech and mind, the Homebody is wise and helpless, composed and scattered, ancient and infantile. “Our story begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3,000 B.C.,” she begins, as the lights come up, but interrupts herself at once to explain, “I am reading from an outdated guidebook about the city of Kabul.”

The Homebody’s monologue is brilliant but tortuous, almost infuriatingly so. She departs the narrative of Afghan history for jags about party etiquette and antidepressants, uses words no audience member could be expected to know and then apologizes for them. She is, in other words, very human. So much so, it’s clear—or anyway was to me that night—that she must be based on a real woman.

Curious, I eventually contacted Kushner and learned her backstory. In the 1990s, he was browsing the stacks at the New York University library, looking for material about Afghanistan, when he stumbled across a volume titled An Historical Guide to Kabul. He opened the book and didn’t close it until he’d read to the end; the Homebody and the play had emerged. The guidebook’s author’s name was Nancy Hatch Dupree.

I started asking around about her.

“If the Afghans ever go back to deities, she’ll be one,” the former American ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker told me of Dupree. “They all know what she’s gone through with them and on their behalf.” 

Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan intellectual and presidential candidate, described her as “a grandmother figure and mother figure in Afghanistan. Somebody who’s given us our cultural heritage. Someone who’s played a living witness to our history.”

Kushner, who since writing the play has become friends with Dupree and serves on the advisory council of her foundation, called her a woman of “dazzling erudition.” (Nancy has never seen Homebody/Kabul. “I hear it’s good,” she tells people.)

The Grandmother of Afghanistan—that is not original to Ghani. It is what Afghans call Dupree, aware that she is technically American. In fact, if she could be said to have any single vocation, this may be it: She is a self-appointed but also widely acknowledged guardian of Afghan culture, the country’s bluffest and most beloved expatriate busybody. Among other things, she is the author of dozens of books and scholarly articles on Afghanistan’s history, architecture, politics, music, literature, and art; a founder of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage; the creator of a library extension service that distributes books to schools and government bodies around the country; the creator of the most extensive digital archive of Afghan historical materials; an occasional adviser to ministers and generals; and an advocate for Afghan women’s and children’s rights.

Natives and foreigners alike have been trading stories and legends of her ever since she first arrived in Afghanistan over a half-century ago. There was the episode in the 1960s, for instance, when Nancy saved Bagh-e-Bala, the onetime summer palace of the emirs, from destruction, partly out of scholarly devotion to the building and partly so she could host her wedding there. In the 1980s, a young Saudi man approached her, looking for help bringing in equipment to dig tunnels where mujahideen fighters could hide between attacks on Soviet troops. Dupree was not an official, he was aware, but he had heard that she knew everyone of importance in Afghanistan, and that she had the rind to get what she wanted from any one of them. Nancy was too busy to help him, but she recalls the man, who went by the name Osama bin Laden, being “very shy and polite.”

More recently, while ordering lumber for a construction project, Nancy ran up against a moratorium on logging that Hamid Karzai had instated. After she called him and made her frustrations known, Karzai ordered the moratorium lifted temporarily. “He was just a little nobody when I first met him,” she told me of the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Karzai had other reasons to be helpful. The lumber was for a library Dupree was building at Kabul University, for which he’d already helped raise $2.5 million. The project that could most properly be called her life’s work, she has been planning the library and collecting its contents for thirty years. Those contents represent one of the most comprehensive, if not the most comprehensive, archives of post-1979 Afghan historical documents and scholarship anywhere. The library is the more impressive because it is a repository of knowledge about a time during which knowledge was concertedly destroyed in Afghanistan—a memory bank for a generation of Afghans whose clearest personal memories are of exile. She sees it as her greatest gift to her adopted home, as well as her last attempt to save Afghanistan’s past, as it were, from itself.

Like other Americans, in the years after 9/11 I read and thought a lot about Afghanistan, that country—in the Homebody’s words—“so at the heart of the world the world has forgotten it.” After learning of Dupree’s collection, I found myself thinking a lot about it, too. I tried to picture its old books and photographs. I wondered what they had to say about this place that has so changed the course of my own country’s history, this place where so many Americans have gone to die, but about which America still knows so little. In the fall of 2012, I heard that Dupree’s library was, after so many years in the making, finally scheduled to open. I also heard that her health was failing. I called her and told her I wanted to come to Afghanistan. She wasn’t overly excited at the prospect, but neither did she exactly object. I booked a ticket for Kabul. 

On a hot September morning, I stepped from one of Kabul’s loud, dusty streets to the Kabul University gate. The guard refused to let me in. “I’m here to see Nancy Dupree,” I told him, reckoning the Grandmother of Afghanistan must be known to all. His expression underwent no change. “The Afghanistan Center at Kabul University?” Nothing. Finally, losing interest, he waved me through.

Dark episodes in recent Afghan history originated on the university campus. It was here that Communists and Islamists first did battle in the ideological skirmishes that led up to the Soviet invasion, here that the warlords who would destroy the country—and who still run much of it—first rubbed shoulders. Ashraf Ghani told me that when he came to the university, “people were literally killing each other there. There were warring student gangs.” One of his first acts as chancellor was to remove 43 tons of scrap metal from the school, he said, most of it pieces of blown-up tanks. The tanks have been replaced by a lot of healthy-looking trees, and fewer, less-healthy-looking buildings. Today the campus has a liberal vibe that contrasts with the rest of the country. Female students wear cursory headscarves or none at all; they and their male classmates look at and sometimes even talk to each other.

Twenty feet from the gate I got lost. Dupree had anticipated this, apparently: Soon a silver sedan pulled alongside me. The silhouette of what might have been a child appeared in a back window. I’d never met Dupree, only spoken with her on the phone. Her avian voice hadn’t prepared me for the diminutive woman I found. A collapsing robin’s nest of gray hair didn’t quite get her to five feet, and she couldn’t have weighed more in pounds than her age in years, 86 at the time. Her eyes were sunken, her face a topography of wrinkles. (I was reminded of the Homebody’s description of an Afghan whose “skin is broken by webs of lines inscribed by hardships, siroccos, and strife.”) But her cheeks were girlish and full, her mouth small and coy. 

Hidden inside a light blue salwar kameez and a long scarf, Dupree seemed already to be in mid-conversation when I settled next to her in the backseat. That morning had produced a dustup over fabrics that she wanted for the library, she was saying, and “people just do not realize you don’t accomplish things overnight here. They come from somewhere else and expect everything to fall into place. But it takes so much bloody time.” Looking out the window, she added, “That’s why everything here is kind of… half-assed.”

We drove to her temporary office, which she’d been working out of for years, in a converted garage. With a cough, she eased into a chair behind the old dining room table that serves as her desk. Her staff, at small desks around the room, greeted her as Nancy Jan. (Jan is a Dari diminutive that means, roughly, “dear.”) They were all Afghan, all in their twenties or thirties, and all, I noticed, men.

“Oh, I’m notorious,” she said when I asked her to square this with her advocacy for Afghan women. “In Peshawar, I tried to have women, and I discovered that they’re not reliable. In this society, you get somebody trained and then the father says, ‘We’re moving from Peshawar to Islamabad,’ and off they go. Or they get married. Or they’ve got children and, you know, they don’t turn up because their child’s got diarrhea.”

A cook brought out plates of rice pilau from the kitchen (a closet with a hot plate) as the library’s designers arrived to discuss the fabric situation. Dupree had been informed there was not enough of the red pattern she’d ordered long before for all the upholstery and curtains in the library and now was, she announced, “really browned off. We could have done this six months ago!”

“Two years ago,” said Dupree’s executive director, Waheed Wafa, a tall, warm-voiced man whose face exuded beleaguerment. Like many educated Kabulis, Wafa grew up with the Duprees’ books. Also like many educated Kabulis, he was beaten by the Taliban. When the U.S.–led coalition invaded, in 2001, he became a fixer for The New York Times, then a reporter. Dupree hired him in 2011.

Wafa produced a fan of swatches, potential replacements, and held up a reddish one. “That’s dullsville,” Dupree said, waving a hand dismissively. She jumped to the issue of acoustics. Without enough good fabric to absorb sound, the library would be too loud.

“What about urns?” Waheed suggested. Knowing Dupree’s mood could be improved by a story of Afghan ingenuity, he told one: During the Taliban years, he said, his friends in the Kabul underground used to hold meetings in a room they thought was secure. But one day they realized Talibs were listening outside. So they lined the walls of the room with large urns, to muffle their voices.

“Oh yes, yes!” Dupree said, getting into the story, and smiling for the first time since I’d met her. A cordial South African designer stepped into the office and joined the conversation. “See how everything in Afghanistan has to be negotiated?” he whispered to me.

After some gentle cajoling from Wafa and the others, Dupree agreed on potential vendors. “OK, that’s done. Decision made. Bang!” she said, slapping her hand on the table. Her staff looked up from their desks hopefully. A date was set to go to the market, and the group left. “He’s writing a book,” Dupree said of the South African designer once he had gone. “Everybody’s writing a book.” I asked if she ever thought of writing another book. “No. I don’t know enough. I don’t care enough.”

Later, Wafa told me the new library was still months from completion. Since Dupree was relying on the Afghan government to pay for much of it, she was also relying on the government to pay the workers who were supposed to be finishing it. It hadn’t been, and they weren’t. I asked him when it might open. “God knows,” Waheed said, dragging on a Marlboro. He’d recently upped from a half-pack to a whole pack per day, he confided. 

A few days later, Dupree and a thickset, bearded man in his mid-thirties named Mashall, who manages her box-library program, drove to Charikar, a town about 40 miles north of Kabul, to check in on a provincial council and a few schools. As we were departing, I asked if it was safe in Charikar. “We don’t ask questions like that,” she said. “If you think about that you’ll go nowhere. And that’s why the Americans don’t go anywhere.” Not just Americans but foreigners generally are seen by Afghans mostly as they make their way in chauffeured cars between fortified homes, fortified offices, fortified hotels, and fortified restaurants. Dupree is known for going anywhere she likes and for despising fortification.

On Kabul’s outskirts, we drove past mile after mile of new cinderblock homes and roadside shops fashioned from steel shipping containers. “What you’re going through now, this place used to be desert, complete desert, just ten years ago,” she said. “It just shows that when Afghans decide to do something, they’re not slackers, they get at it and they do!” Then she pondered. Her mood turned. “But it’s not organized. It’s all… personal. I suppose they tax all this, but do they pay the taxes? Who knows. It’s higgledy-piggledy.”

“It’s not sketched, Nancy Jan,” Mashall said.

Like many Afghans, Mashall has come to know Afghanistan only in adulthood. Before that he lived in Pakistan, where he’d moved as a child after his village was bombed in the Soviet war. He grew up in Peshawar, where he met Dupree in 1999. “When people see Nancy on the TV,” he said, “they say, ‘She’s still working, she’s still here.’ We say to our women, ‘Look at Nancy Dupree, she’s 80 and still working.’”

Dupree waved a hand. “When people see me they say, ‘Good God, that woman is still alive?’”

She looked from the window onto a magnificent view. In the distance were the “skirts of the mountains,” as a Persian poet once called the foothills of the Hindu Kush, and before them the Shomali Plain, a mine-ridden flatland once alive with vegetables and grapevines. We passed a cinderblock sprawl that had been a meadow, the site of a cavalry battle in the First Anglo-Afghan war, in the early 1840s. Dupree recounted how she and a friend used to ride horses there and reenact the fighting. “I swear there must be people in that village who tell stories about these two crazy women who rode around charging at each other.”

We passed Bagh-e-Bala, the domed hilltop palace that the emir Abdur Rahman built to escape the heat of the Kabul Valley at the end of the 19th century. “That’s where Louis and I were married,” she said.

Nancy Hatch was born in Cooperstown, New York, in 1926, and raised in Travancore, a small feudal kingdom on the southern tip of India, during the last gasps of the Raj. Her mother, a onetime stage actress, studied traditional Indian theater and wrote a guidebook to Travancore. Her father, who’d fought in the First World War with the British, worked on education projects for UNESCO around Asia. “He taught me a tremendous amount,” Dupree said. “One thing was, if you hold on to something too long, it fails.”

Living in India in the 1930s and ’40s, she told me, “was like growing up on a movie set. The Maharaja was very fond of my father. I was the same age as the Maharaja’s brother. Every time there was a new birth of leopards or tigers at the zoo, they’d bring the cubs to the palace, and I’d go to the palace with my little white gloves and big hat.” She left to study at Barnard College and after graduating performed as a harpist. She gave that up to enroll in the Chinese and Japanese Studies Department at Columbia University, and then returned to Asia, following her father into UNESCO, where she worked as an adviser to the governments of India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

At Columbia, she met an aspiring diplomat named Alan Wolfe, a suave and capable product of Manhattan wealth. They married in Ceylon. The match was not ideal, according to some friends. Wolfe was “definitely not Nancy’s type,” said one of them, Mary MacMakin. “Though the fact that he was in the Foreign Service was such a draw for her. I think that’s why she married him.” According to MacMakin, Nancy was “a party girl” but “a brain, too.”

Wolfe joined the Foreign Service after the war. He was posted to Iraq, where Nancy edited a news bulletin for American embassy staff, and then transferred to Pakistan. One day they were gazing toward the Khyber Pass, the entrance to the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan, and she suggested a trip there. “He couldn’t think of anything worse,” she told me. But, to her delight, Wolfe was assigned to the Kabul embassy in 1962. “He wasn’t happy. I was very happy.” Though on paper Wolfe was a cultural attaché, in truth Afghan culture was of only secondary interest to him. That was because, off the books, he was the Central Intelligence Agency’s new chief of station in Kabul.

A rising star in the agency, Wolfe was, if not the best-liked operative in the Clandestine Services, surely among its most ambitious. An underling once described him to a journalist as “the kind of guy who only speaks to Cabots, Lodges, and God.” Duane Clarridge, a former CIA agent who worked under Wolfe, writes in his memoir that Wolfe “constantly measured [his superior’s] chair for size” and had “a low threshold for the dim-witted.” Another former agent who worked under him described to me his first meeting with Wolfe. “Wolfe was dressed in a very good suit, Brooks Brothers I’m sure,” he said. He walked around the room, making a point to look at his pocket watch every few minutes. “I’m expecting a call from Kissinger,” Wolfe kept saying.

Soon after they moved to Kabul, Alan and Nancy met Louis Dupree. Born in 1925 to descendants of French Huguenots on the family tobacco farm at Dupree’s Crossroads, North Carolina, as a boy Dupree thought he would become a Presbyterian preacher. He also believed in integration, and the two were immiscible in the Jim Crow South. As a youth leader in the church, said Nancy—with the air of hagiography that characterizes much of her recollection of Louis—he invited a black boy to a service, and “when the church elders told him he couldn’t do that, he said, ‘Fuck you.’

“This was way before Martin Luther King,” she added.

With the outbreak of World War II, Dupree dropped out of school to attend the Coast Guard Academy, then joined the Merchant Marine. At sea he read everything he could. In 1944, he joined the Army, trained as a paratrooper, and was dispatched to the Pacific, where his most challenging mission, according to stories he would later tell, found him dropping behind enemy lines in the Philippines to recruit Bontoc Igorot natives to fight the Japanese. The Bontoc, renowned headhunters, didn’t require much training. “Louis would tell us how they’d come back from raids with bags, sometimes, of Japanese heads,” Charles Kolb, the archaeologist who worked with Dupree at Aq Kupruk, recalled. Dupree was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

After the war, he won a scholarship contest for veterans and, with no high school diploma, was admitted to Harvard, where in eight years he completed bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in anthropology. The Harvard archaeologist Carleton Coon took Dupree under his wing. One of the last great American academic generalists, Coon was, like Dupree, interested primarily in prehistoric Asian archaeology, but he convinced his pupil that to really understand the world, he must be versed not only in archaeology, but also history, geography, biology, linguistics, ethnomusicology, political science, and whatever else he had time for. Dupree agreed. His dissertation, on Paleolithic tools, took up two volumes.

Early on, he displayed a knack for portentous finds. At an excavation in Iran, he and Coon discovered skeletal remains that helped debunk the theory, dominant in archaeology at the time, that humanity’s origins lay in the Far East. On an expedition in France, he unearthed a stone carved with animal images dating from 25,000 B.C.E., at the time the oldest piece of moveable sculpture ever found. Then Dupree—the church youth leader had grown into a master schmoozer—convinced the French government to let his team take it back to Harvard.

In the summer of 1949, he and a friend were sent by the Museum of Natural History to carry out the first American dig in Afghanistan. French and German archaeologists had long been active in the country, but their interest was in its Buddhist past. The remnants of prehistory lay mostly untouched. Within a few months, Dupree and a colleague had found the medieval city of Peshawarun, long thought vanished, in Afghanistan’s southwestern desert. They stumbled upon it while searching for a drink of water, they explained. Later Dupree found the oldest human remains ever discovered in Afghanistan, dated to 30,000 B.C.E., and the oldest tools, dated to 100,000 B.C.E.

Dupree and his colleagues were regularly written up in newspapers, but they were anachronisms; the swashbuckling era of archaeology was ending. Coon’s generation had relied on their vast stores of personal knowledge to arrive at grand theories. Dupree’s contemporaries, by contrast, were scientific specialists who employed new technologies and meticulous record keeping—all of which bored Dupree no end. “He wasn’t really up on the Paleolithic literature or the most recent anthropological theories,” said Rick Davis, an archaeologist who worked for Dupree. “He kind of painted with a broad brush.” Charles Kolb said the handling of the Aq Kupruk artifacts was shambolic: When it came time to divide the excavation’s yield—including Daddy’s Head—among the Afghan and American partners, they simply laid out the thousands of pieces they’d found and commenced haggling.

What Dupree lacked in punctiliousness, however, he compensated for with toil, good cheer, and a leonine confidence. He had the aura of a bygone age about him, at once domineering and gracious. “He was a real commander [and] was very direct,” said Davis. “He facilitated and encouraged so many people who came to Afghanistan, even people with the most slender credentials. He’d introduce these wayfaring scholars to these local people.” He added: “He worked very hard and liked to have a drink after six o’clock.”

Ashraf Ghani was one of many young Afghan scholars whom Dupree helped and encouraged. “He was an incredibly gracious man,” Ghani said. “It was the openness of his mind. He exemplified a tolerance for critique, for ideas.”

Dupree signed off letters with the Latinism “Summum Bonum.” Originally an Aristotelian notion translated as “the highest good,” he meant it more as Cicero had, as something like “happiness is to be found in the highest pursuits.” Depending on the day, he embodied this ideal, or its opposite, or both simultaneously.

He was “a very profane character,” the American ambassador to Afghanistan in the mid-1970s, Ted Eliot, said. The first time Eliot’s wife dined at Dupree’s home in Kabul, a high-ranking Afghan official was also present. Eliot’s wife privately expressed her worry to Dupree that the Afghan regime was spoiling for a war with Pakistan. Dupree, well into his cups, brought the official over to Mrs. Eliot. “So what about it?” Dupree asked him. “Are you going to start a fucking war with Pakistan?”

“That was typical,” Eliot said.

In the list of Dupree’s published works for 1967—this is on his official résumé—one finds an entry for an article entitled “The Relationship of Religious Ritual to Orgasm Frequency among the Tribal Women of Fungoolistan: A Humping and Gathering Society.”

Such impieties aside, by the 1960s Dupree was, by general consent, the leading Western expert on Afghanistan’s history. Some said the leading expert. His “knowledge of the country was extraordinary,” Kolb said. “He understood it from the prehistoric era through the current political situation.” 

Abdur Rahman, the builder of Bagh-e-Bala, liked to call his country Yaghistan: Land of Insolence. And, indeed, while there was much about Afghanistan to attract the polymath bon vivant Dupree, its chief appeal to his rebellious nature may have been precisely that. “The insolence of the Afghan, however, is not the frustrated insolence of urbanized, dehumanized man in western society,” Dupree would write in the introduction to his most important book, Afghanistan. “But insolence without arrogance, the insolence of harsh freedoms set against a backdrop of rough mountains and deserts, the insolence of equality felt and practiced (with an occasional touch of superiority), the insolence of bravery past and bravery anticipated.”

Afghans like to claim that Cain and Abel founded Kabul, and that Cain is buried there. If so, he was only the first of many murderous dynasty builders to arrive. He was followed by the Aryans, the Kushans, the Persians, Alexander the Great and the Greeks, the White Huns, the Arabs, Tamurlane and the Mongols, the Ghaznavids, and yet more Persians. Afghanistan emerged as a loose coalition of territories under a monarchy only in the mid-1700s, and its boundaries were not formally delineated until the 1880s, when they were decided on by British and Russian cartographers. Seeing the country as a mutually beneficial stretch of insulation between the Raj and the Tsar, they gave little thought to the myriad cultures and faiths that unwittingly found themselves inside the new borders: Pashtuns, Turkmen, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Baluchis, who variously practiced Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Islam, Buddhism, and even some Zoroastrianism, along with expert grudge-holding and famously bloody battles over succession. The colonially minded American historian Theophilus Rodenbough, writing in 1885, observed that “the love of war is felt much more among Afghans then by other eastern peoples.” Commenting on local dress, he noted, “Weapons are borne by all.”

Britain and Russia spent much of the 19th century vying for control of Central and South Asia in the sadistic enterprise known as the Great Game. Rodenbough proudly related that during the First Anglo-Afghan War, “Kabul and other towns were leveled with the ground; [Afghan] troops were blown from guns, and the people were collected together and destroyed like worms.” However, the Afghans had one elusive advantage over their would-be occupiers: Unlike the Britons and the Russians, they were not, had never been, a feudal people. Afghan political life was arranged around complex authority-sharing conclaves known as jirgas and shuras. When trouble arose, elders, chiefs, and religious leaders would act together to protect their territories. In this way, they had rebuffed one attempted conquest after another. Uninterested in cohering in peacetime, in war Afghans were something to watch; the British may have blown their enemy from cannons, but eventually they left in humiliation.

In the 1930s, Afghanistan—for as long as anyone could remember, a byword for exotic isolation—began opening up to the world. On the eve of World War II, King Mohammed Zahir Shah aligned Afghanistan with the Axis powers and then, seeing which way the wind was blowing, switched to the Allies, thus avoiding being drawn into actual conflict by either. The Dari term for this is bi-tarafi, or “without sides.” Some observers called it self-preservation, others a way of playing world powers off each other, still others plain deceit. The Westerners, like Dupree, who understood Afghanistan best understood that bi-tarafi is all those things. Dupree admired the Afghans’ ability to stay out of fights just as much as their willingness to get into them. He liked to call his adopted home the Switzerland of Asia, where “spies swapped lies and information and played cat-and-mouse with counter-agents and counter-counter-agents.”

By the time Dupree settled in Kabul, in the 1950s, its upper classes were dressing in Savile Row suits and sending their sons to Oxford. In 1958, the prime minister, Mohammed Daoud, became the first Afghan leader to visit Washington, and the next year Dwight Eisenhower returned the favor, the first American president to venture to the Afghan capital. Embassies opened. Diplomats, academics, archaeologists, and explorers arrived. Kabul University expanded. The Peace Corps set up shop. Kabul became a spur on the Hippie Trail, the path of enlightenment and drug tourism that snaked from Europe to India.

Dupree was in the middle of it all. When not out on a dig, he taught courses and lectured about Afghanistan, compiled reports, advised governments and corporations, filmed documentaries, and wrote or edited scholarly articles and books (some 218 of the former and 22 of the latter by the end of his career). In between he socialized endlessly. “He knew everybody, whether they were Americans, Afghans, French, Russians, East Germans, West Germans, civilians, military,” Kolb said. “You name them, he seemed to know them.”

More than any other foreigner, Dupree knew Afghans, all kinds of Afghans; he was as charmed by goatherds as he was by the royal family. They all had something to teach him, he felt. He assumed that Afghans found him charming, too, and indeed many did. What Dupree failed to see—what other Americans who knew and loved the country less did see—was that while Afghans liked him, that didn’t mean they trusted him. “Afghans were very cautious with Americans,” Ted Eliot, the former ambassador, said. “Their long history with foreigners taught them that you never knew who would be in charge next.”

Louis Dupree and Alan Wolfe were the only Americans in Kabul who could match one another cocktail for cocktail and tale for tale, and by the mid-1960s they had become good friends. “He was very smooth,” Mary MacMakin said of Wolfe. “A good talker, a good dancer, a good drinker—drinking especially.” And Dupree, who had a connection at customs and brought in liquor by the crate, seemed “impervious to alcohol.” Wolfe relished drinking martinis with Dupree and listening to stories of the Bontoc headhunters.

To much of the rest of the world, as to the country’s more cosmopolitan citizens, the opening of Afghanistan was an encouragement, proof that the Cold War could be avoided in certain corners of the globe. Dupree’s social calendar seemed proof of this: On a given night, he might be found dining in the company of the American ambassador or the Russian one. But to Wolfe—a gentleman spy in the classical mold who spoke seven languages and thought a great deal about meaning in history—Afghanistan wasn’t just another front in the Cold War; it was a deceptively important one, and one to which Washington wasn’t paying sufficient attention, he believed.

And, to a degree, he was right. Russia’s preoccupation with Afghanistan had persisted through the fall of the Romanovs and the October Revolution. “The road to Paris and London might lead through Kabul,” Leon Trotsky remarked, to the agreement of his boss, V. I. Lenin, who said, “The East will help us to conquer the West. Let us turn our faces toward Asia.” For a time, the Afghan royal family was receptive to the Kremlin’s overtures, particularly after Lenin wrote the king a pandering letter in which he expressed his conviction that Afghanistan had been chosen by history for a “great and historic task,” namely to “unite all the enslaved Muslim peoples.” Afghanistan was the first country to recognize Soviet Russia, in 1917, and two years later the USSR was the first nation to recognize an independent Afghanistan.

But the Afghans perceived, rightly, that the atheist Moscow regime was out to topple Islam along with all other religions. They also suspected that the Bolsheviks’ intentions for Afghanistan weren’t all that different from what the old regime’s had been: where the Tsars saw Afghanistan as the passageway to a larger empire, the Bolsheviks saw it as the means to further revolution. Neither much appealed. This suspicion was confirmed when Lenin backed a plan to recruit an army of disaffected Muslims and use Afghanistan as a staging ground to attack British India. Relations soured further in the 1930s, when Stalin ordered the Muslim leadership in Soviet Central Asia decimated and instituted forced collectivization, sending hordes of refugees into Afghanistan.

The Afghan government wanted help in modernizing, however, and during the Cold War help came from one of two places. Finding American requests to sign mutual security pacts and contain “Communist aggression” too demanding, Kabul turned to Moscow. Beginning in the 1950s, Soviet arms, advisers, and economic aid came rushing in. Afghans traveled to the USSR for academic and military training. Washington countered with projects and weapons of its own but it never caught up.

Wolfe was acutely aware of all this. How much he privately told Dupree about his work was known only to the two friends. Publicly, they were at the center of Kabul’s international social scene. This being the 1960s, that scene was characterized not only by heavy boozing but by adultery. Afghan officials bedded foreign diplomats’ wives; foreign diplomats bedded Afghan officials’ wives; wives bedded wives. Nancy and Annie Dupree, Louis’s wife, rebuffed any number of offers. In the midst of it the two women, who were very different—Nancy was childless and famously flirtatious, Annie more traditional and shy, with three children—bonded. It was with Annie that Nancy reenacted the battles on horseback in the meadow.

Soon after arriving in Afghanistan, Nancy accompanied the American ambassador to see the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan. Appointed to act as an unofficial historian for the trip, she attempted to read up on the statues, but was appalled to find that no guidebooks to Bamiyan existed. At a cocktail party upon their return, she cornered the Afghan minister for tourism, Abdul Tarzi. She recalled the encounter this way: “Now, instead of being a diplomat’s wife, I said, ‘Mr. Tarzi, it’s a scandal. That is one of the wonders of the world and you don’t have a proper guide, you don’t have anything.’ And in typical Afghan style, this Mr. Tarzi drew himself up, and he said, ‘You’re quite right, why don’t you do something about it?’ A French archaeologist who was part of the discussion said, ‘Madam, do you like ladies’ coffee parties?’ I said, ‘Not really.’ He said, ‘Do you play bridge, Madam?’ I said, ‘That’s a waste of time.’ ‘Then,’ he says, ‘I suggest you take up this challenge of Mr. Tarzi’s.’”

She did. Tarzi liked the manuscript for The Valley of Bamiyan so much, he had the tourism ministry publish it. She went on to write guides to Balkh, Herat, and the National Museum. The books were increasingly handsome; Afghanistan was becoming a tourist destination, and, as Nancy put it to me, “They needed to be printed in some kind of form that these rich bitches would take notice of.” An Historical Guide to Kabul, the book that 30 years later would possess Tony Kushner, was published in 1965. Annie proofread it. In the acknowledgements, Nancy wrote, “I owe her for more than these labors, for her understanding of and sympathy for the city has been a constant guide since my arrival.”

What happened next is still obscured by mystery and rumor. No two people tell the story the same way. Finally, the one fact that can be verified is the only essential one: At some point, the couples switched partners. 

Some friends of the Duprees and Wolfes believe Annie and Alan fell in love first, leaving Louis and Nancy to do the same. Others maintain that it was the reverse. Charles Kolb had long suspected that Louis and Nancy were having an affair. She visited the camp at Aq Kupruk for no apparent practical reason. Kolb recalls flying into Kabul in 1966 to resume work at Aq Kupruk. Louis picked him up at the airport and, with his customary bluntness, announced, “I’ve divorced Annie and married Nancy.”

“That’s all he said about it,” Kolb told me. “I said, ‘OK.’”

When I asked Nancy about it, she did what she usually did when she didn’t want to discuss something—she recalled the most famous and most anodyne episode from the affair and then abruptly ended the conversation. When she finished writing The Valley of Bamiyan, she told me, she sent the manuscript to Dupree for fact-checking. For some time she heard nothing back. Finally, he summoned her. When she arrived at his home, he was sitting behind a large desk in a room full of plants that had been moved inside for winter storage. He handed her the manuscript without looking at her. At the top of the first page he’d written, “Adequate, but nothing original.”

“After a curt riposte, I turned on my heel and stomped off,” she recalled. “I got to the door and he said, ‘Come back here.’ So I went back. And I never left.”

They were married in the winter of 1966, in a blizzard. Minister Tarzi stood in for her father during the negotiation of the bride price, which Louis set at 10,000 sheep. “Even in a situation like that,” she told me, “he was a joker.”

Alan and Annie Wolfe left Kabul, and Louis and Nancy Dupree became its expat nucleus. They lived in a compound in the modern Shar-e-Nau district. Nancy worked in the main house, Louis in a building in the courtyard. So many visitors stopped by that they had to instruct their guards not to admit anyone who hadn’t made an appointment. In the evenings, they hosted a recurring cocktail party known as the Five O’clock Follies. “An amazing troupe of people would come by: Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Afghans,” the archaeologist Rick Davis remembered. “He and Nancy were terrific, they were inseparable.” Everybody, he said, “wanted to be around them.”

Otherwise, the Duprees could be found traveling Afghanistan’s rough mountains and deserts in Louis’s red Land Rover. “He was always looking for new caves. And I was always happy to go along because I might see something. And if there was something I needed for the guidebooks he was always happy to go along, because he might find another cave,” Nancy said. “Every time one of us would finish an article, he’d open a bottle of champagne. It was real companionship.” Together they fell in thrall to a country where, in the Homebody’s words, “one might seek in submission the unanswered need.”

“I was happy then,” Nancy told me. “Going around and learning everything new with Louis Jan. So enthusiastic, like a teenager.”

In 1973, Louis published his magnum opus, Afghanistan, the culmination of a quarter-century of work and travel. It’s still the definitive survey text on the country. For all his lack of sentimentality and his admiration of Afghan insolence, Dupree was an optimist, and the book’s keynote is one of hope for the country’s future. Bi-tarafi had allowed the Afghans not only to stay neutral in the Cold War, Dupree argued, but also to coax mortal enemies into cooperating. In their efforts to use Afghanistan as a proxy battlefield, the United States and the Soviet Union had ended up helping it. “The Soviets assisted the Afghans in building roads from the north, the U.S. from the south,” he wrote. “The Soviets helped construct the landing strips and buildings for the new International Airport at Kabul; the Americans installed the electrical and communications equipment.”

“But since the West and the Soviet Union are both interested in winning, the question of ‘Who’s winning, the Americans or the Russians?’ should be considered,” he went on. “In all honesty, one must answer ‘Neither—the Afghans are winning.’”

Nancy likes to deny what everyone knows, which is that she was essential to the research and composition of Afghanistan. She claims she merely transcribed it. “You’ve seen his book?” she asked me one day. I said yes, I’d read it. “Alright, and it’s a thick one. I typed that dumb thing three times over—on a manual typewriter! Three times, and I was happy to do it.”

The false modesty of this claim was demonstrated when her An Historical Guide to Afghanistan was published. Where Afghanistan is a monument to fact, her book is an exercise in style and wit, and it’s still an indispensable guide for diehard Afghanophiles, who—like Kushner—don’t read it so much for the information as for her voice. (“We were totally committed to her guidebooks as we traveled around the country,” Ted Eliot, the former ambassador, told me.) In the acknowledgements she wrote, “From my husband, Louis Dupree, I draw a constant charge of excitement and enthusiasm for this land and its people. Together we find new depths and new values. I shall be well pleased if this book succeeds in conveying our continuing affection for Afghanistan.”

After the two hour-long drive north, Nancy, Mashall, and I arrived in Charikar in the late morning. From Western news coverage one can get the idea that, 12 years after the American invasion, the Taliban is still confined to Afghanistan’s peripheries. This isn’t the case. The Taliban controls much of the countryside, it’s true, but it also wields influence and fear in just about every city and major town, including Kabul. Nancy’s first stop was at the offices of the provincial council in Charikar, which had been attacked recently. They sit behind blast-shielding berms and a pair of guards whose faces suggest they don’t expect to be much help when the next bomb explodes.

For years, Dupree has been sending books, thousands of them, to provincial councils—on history, administration, farming science, public health, and anything else she can have printed—in the hopes that local officials will use them to better govern. “Mr. Karzai and the government, they don’t like it, because it takes away from their own power,” she says. “But until the people get a voice, Afghanistan’s not going anywhere.” After three and a half decades of war, however, the country is still mostly run by small groups of old men, many of them illiterate.

She and Mashall were led into a narrow, dark room lined with overstuffed green felt chairs and coffee tables. A policeman with a limp put out bowls of pistachios and poured tea as provincial officials, all of them old and hirsute—reesh safeda, or whitebeards, they’re called—shuffled in. Without greeting Nancy, they sank into chairs. She has forgotten most of her Dari, so she asked them questions through an interpreter.

“Is Kabul listening to you?”

Murmurs.

“Are you getting the money for the projects you want to do?”

Fewer murmurs.

“Do you listen to the women and get them money?”

Silence.

The whitebeards knew who she was, perhaps they even appreciated her help, but they couldn’t have been less interested in her presence. Dupree elicited somewhat more adamant murmuring when she asked about the recent murder of a local woman. An official spoke to the interpreter, who turned to Dupree and said, “They are totally against the things which are bad.” Dupree frowned. The official was now talking into his phone. The meeting was over.

As the officials shuffled out, a younger man introduced himself as the secretary. In precise English, he explained that the council valued her books. They had tried to set up a public library, as she’d requested, but people borrowed the books and neglected to return them. So he’d moved them into a locked office. Now officials neglected to return them.

As he and Dupree talked, he unburdened himself. “The problem in Afghanistan is everything is based on theory,” he told her. The council had no money. He hadn’t been paid a salary in a year and half. A local merchant had donated the big green chairs. Dupree listened intently, made suggestions. She said she wanted him to connect the council to her organization online, so she could distribute the newsletter he wrote and send him materials. He looked at the floor. “We don’t have Internet.”

“This is so typical,” she said to Mashall as they left. “He’s got the spirit. He wants to do something, not for himself, but for other people. But he can’t break out.”

“It’s true, Nancy Jan.”

Some days later, Nancy and Mashall visited a boys’ school in an impoverished village on Kabul’s fringe. Its mud-brick homes were not old, but the Afghan summers and winters and dust had left them looking like ruins. In the school’s drab courtyard, makeshift classrooms were set up under plastic tarps. A geography teacher led them around. Nancy asked him what he could use. “Maps,” he said. He taught geography, but there were no maps.

The teacher brought them to the library, a disheartening sight. It was doing double-duty as a storeroom for an old generator and for laboratory equipment that some foreign government had donated, which might have been useful if the school had a laboratory. “They don’t have a card catalog, they don’t have a computer. How do they know what’s here?” she asked Mashall between coughs. He pointed to a handwritten list of books taped to the side of a cabinet.

An English teacher who spoke very little English brought me to his classroom. Boys sat on windowsills, on top of one another. There were no books, no paper, no pencils. “Most students don’t know what books are here,” he told me. But they were unbelievably disciplined and, their eyes suggested, dying to learn something, anything. I asked if they liked to read.

“Yes!” they shouted in unison. I asked what they liked to read.

“Histories!” one boy said.

His name was Saddiq, and he obviously took school quite seriously. Though he looked no more than 13, he was wearing a pink dress shirt and a frayed brown blazer. Saddiq loved Dupree’s library, the teacher said. He was borrowing books all the time. I asked Saddiq what period of Afghan history he liked to read about. “The Ghaznavids,” he said, referring to the Turkic dynasty that ruled much of what would become Afghanistan in the tenth through twelfth centuries. Many Afghans regard the period as the high point of their history. When I asked whether he didn’t want to learn about more recent events, about the time in which he lived, he considered the question. “No,” Saddiq said. “It’s all war.”

In the car on the way back to Kabul, Dupree looked out the window silently and sank lower and lower into her seat. A friend of hers had told me that, left to herself, her thoughts always drifted back to Louis. “If you just watch her body language,” he’d said, “it’s very distressing.” He was right. As we drove by a hillside blooming with redbud, she muttered, “Redbud… I wanted redbud for Louis’s memorial service, but I couldn’t get it. Protected species.”

In 1973, in Afghanistan, Louis had expressed great hope for the country’s future—too much, as it turned out. He didn’t mention that radical Communism and radical Islamism were on the rise, nor that the halting attempts at modernization and religious and social reforms undertaken by Mohammed Daoud—who’d been removed from the prime ministership by his cousin, King Zahir Shah, nearly a decade earlier—hadn’t made it out of the cities. The gaps between the increasingly secular urban elite and the poor, illiterate, and devout peasantry were more glaring than ever. In 1972, when the country was overcome by famine and hundreds of thousands died, an official remarked, “If the peasants eat grass, it’s hardly grave. They’re beasts. They’re used to it.” The next year, after Dupree had completed his book, Daoud staged a palace coup and took back control of the government.

Louis knew the autocratic but generous-spirited Daoud as well as any foreigner did. “You must understand one thing in the beginning: Afghanistan is a backward country,” he’d once told Dupree during an interview. “We accept this. We know that we must do something about it or die as a nation.” Daoud wanted America to support Afghanistan, he said, but not at the price of its independence. “We first turned to the Unites States for aid, because we believe in the American ideology. The idea of freedom for all is the idea that we have for Afghanistan… but any aid which any country gives to us must be with no strings attached.”

Daoud delivered the same message, with less tact, to Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. By the late 1970s, Moscow was largely keeping Daoud’s government afloat, but still he liked to “light Soviet cigarettes with American matches,” as one KGB officer put it. “We will never allow you to dictate to us how to run our country,” Daoud reportedly told Brezhnev, dispensing with the subtleties of bi-tarafi, after the Kremlin had instructed him to expel workers from NATO countries. “Afghanistan shall remain poor, if necessary, but free in its acts and decisions.”

In 1978, Afghan Marxists murdered Daoud and his family. Mayhem of the sort not seen since the Anglo-Afghan wars ensued. Officials, academics, businessmen, landowners, journalists, religious leaders, and anyone else deemed a threat to the socialist revolution were rounded up, tortured, and executed.

Louis, of course, knew the Marxist cabal well, including the new president, Nur Mohammed Taraki, a sadistic KGB provocateur of long standing. Taraki, a firm believer in terror, liked to say, “Lenin taught us to be merciless towards the enemies of the revolution.” Despite this, Dupree was at first sanguine about his intentions—or startlingly naive, depending on whom one asked. A month after the coup, Dupree wrote a letter to The New York Times emphasizing the nationalist character of Taraki’s regime. “One may deplore the bloodshed which accompanied the revolution and feel remorse for the dead, but an enlightened press should avoid the loose use of the term ‘Communist,’” he wrote. Ted Eliot recalled Dupree telling him, “These Communists are friends from way back.” Eliot was amazed. “I said, ‘Louis, this is different. It’s the Soviet Communists.’”

Dupree’s delusional attitude derived in part from experience, one suspects, and in part from pride, but more than either from his love of the Afghans. He similarly assumed he wouldn’t be targeted, regardless of the persistent rumors about him, because so many Afghans loved him. “Louis’s conviction was that every Afghan knew he was a friend of Afghanistan and they wouldn’t hurt him,” Eliot said.

One day in November 1978, Louis and Nancy went to the National Museum to pay a visit to Daddy’ Head. That afternoon, after Louis had returned to the hotel suite where they were staying at the time, secret policemen knocked on the door. An Afghan translator Dupree worked with had been arrested and, after being tortured, had identified Dupree as a spy. Others followed suit—maybe to save their skins, maybe because they knew something.

In Kabul, it had long been suspected that Dupree’s relationship with Alan Wolfe extended beyond friendship and the eventual exchange of spouses. During the Cold War, it was common for American scholars to gather information for the CIA, and Dupree was a perfect candidate for recruitment: three Harvard degrees, military experience, unparalleled knowledge of the country. He’d been surrounded by spies of one type or another for much of his life. (Carleton Coon, his mentor at Harvard, had been an agent in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor.) And Dupree never really left military service. He always considered himself a soldier at heart. Before moving to Kabul, he’d worked as a researcher in troop behavior for the Air Force, writing field manuals and course curricula, and later taught at West Point. He didn’t officially retire from the Army until 1967.

It would have surprised no one, in other words, if Dupree had worked with the CIA. He always denied the rumors—adamantly, sometimes angrily. According to some people who knew him well, however, that may have been a front.

As Kabul station chief, Wolfe had been tasked with providing the CIA with intelligence on the Russian-made hardware being used by the Afghan military. Most of it was in the north of the country, as is Aq Kupruk. The archaeologist Charles Kolb said that on their way to and from the excavation site, Dupree and he took detailed notes on the Russian equipment they saw. Dupree photographed it with a high-speed camera. Kolb believes he was doing this for Wolfe and that Wolfe or the CIA may have funded Dupree’s work in some capacity. “We were always looking for military installations,” Kolb told me. “He was working with Alan and providing information to Alan directly.” He also believes Dupree’s popular parties were a means for the pair to gather intelligence. His “soirees were very eye-opening, because you got people together who were theoretically political enemies, but in that environment they would talk. It was very good for Louis to learn what was going on and for Alan Wolfe to get what he needed.”

“Dupree, the biggest CIA agent!” the interrogator called out when the police brought the archaeologist to a seized government building. On a desk, while Dupree was questioned, sat a Kalashnikov, its barrel pointed at him. He was moved to another building, where a man took calls, calmly tabulating political assassinations, as two guards smiled at Dupree and drew their fingers across their necks.

The next day he was interrogated for nine hours. He was instructed to make a list of all the Afghan intellectuals he knew. Suspecting it would be used as a kill list, he refused, telling his captors, “I know practically everyone.” He was told instead to make a list of all the Kabulis he knew. He consented, and the first name he wrote down was that of Nur Mohammed Taraki, the new president and possibly the man who’d ordered him arrested. No more lists were requested. Asked what he would say if someone accused him of working for the CIA, Dupree replied, “If you want to accuse me of working for the CIA, don’t go through this God damn nonsense,” according to an account of his incarceration that he later dictated to Nancy. “Just go ahead and accuse me.”

The translator who fingered him was brought in. The man was shaking, and according to Dupree “his face was not his face, it had about a month or more of growth of beard. It was totally misshapen, his eyes were not his own, his lips were swollen and almost dropping down to his lower jaw, he could hardly talk.”

An interrogator questioned the translator in front of Dupree.

“Is Dupree CIA?” he demanded.

“Yes, everybody knows Dupree is CIA,” the translator whimpered.

Uninvited, Dupree jumped in.

“Did I ever tell you I was CIA?” he asked. The translator said no. “Did I ever try to recruit you for CIA?” No again.

The next night, Dupree was made to watch as a cellmate was beaten by a guard. “He just picked him up with one hand and started slapping the bejesus out of him,” he told Nancy. “One kicked him in the balls and the other one hit him in the stomach.” Then a guard brought in an electrical device with wires hanging out of it, “wiggling like the tentacles of a Medusa trying to escape.” The cellmate “just went to pieces.”

Through it all, Dupree managed to keep his sense of humor. “I made friends with the cop who brought the food around,” he recounted. He found he liked the jail bread. “I always insisted on the end piece, being an old Southern boy, I love the end piece of bread and it’s much better to make spoons out of.” His attempts to go to sleep were thwarted by “some noises of human beings in distress that occasionally came through the walls and naturally this did not improve my frame of mind at the time.” And “little buggies,” he went on, “were busy chewing my ass off all the night.” The next morning: “No one brought me bed tea; highly pissed off.” At one point in the transcript of Dupree’s account is the following aside: “Interruption now, because it is 5 o’clock and time for delicious martinis.”

After five days, Dupree was brought to the Ministry of Interior. Women demanding to know where their husbands and sons had been taken were being thrown around by their burkas. An official recognized Dupree and, forgetting himself for a moment, shook his hand. Then he stiffened and handed Dupree a statement to sign. “You are hereby informed that you are ordered out of the country never to return,” it read. “If you ever do return to Afghanistan, you will be responsible for the consequences.” Dupree signed it, but not before appending a statement of his own in the margin: “I would like to add that I have great love and affection for the people of Afghanistan and I hope that eventually a true experiment in socialism will succeed in Afghanistan for the benefit of all the people.” 

He found Nancy, who’d somehow kept it together during his incarceration. They drove in the red Land Rover to the border. There they were officially expelled from Afghanistan.

To this day, she maintains that none of the rumors about Louis had any basis in fact—that he’d never been connected with the CIA in any way. The translator and others named him, she said, because he was a gossiped-about American and because they didn’t want to die. “Some of these characters, I’ve run into them,” she said. “It takes them a long time, but eventually they’ll get me into a room all by ourselves, and they’ll let it all spill out. They feel so guilty because they turned him in. But it was life or death for them. They were killing people all over the place.”

Louis and Nancy drove over the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, where other expatriate and Afghan friends who’d made it out were gathering. They moved into Dean’s, a Victorian hotel, a hangout for people with information about what was happening in Afghanistan. Their rooms came to be known as the Dupree Suite. They tried to approximate their old life, confident that soon enough everything would calm down and they’d return.

But the Afghanistan they’d known was disappearing. In February 1979, the American ambassador was kidnapped by Islamic extremists and later killed in a shootout. Washington began supplying anti-Communist rebels. In September, Taraki’s prime minister had him strangled in his bed and took power. The next month Afghans went into open revolt against the Moscow-backed regime and its heavy-handed religious and social reforms. Officials, Soviet advisers, and their families were tortured and murdered, their bodies paraded on pikes in the streets. On Christmas Day, the Soviets invaded.

From its start, the invasion’s brutality was matched by its clumsiness. (A Soviet general staff officer remarked that “no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan.”) The Kremlin promised a months-long operation; a ten-year occupation followed. In that time, over 600,000 Russian troops would be sent to Afghanistan. Fourteen thousand of them would be killed, according to official estimates (unofficial estimates go as high as 75,000) and 400,000 injured or taken ill. Roughly a million and a half Afghans—most of them civilians—would die, and numberless villages and towns would be leveled.

All of it was in vain. It was not long before Russians were referring to the war in Af-gavni-stan: Afshitstan. The Afghans simply would not submit. Calling on the old traditions of the jirgas and the shuras, they created an endlessly brave and hugely effective network of resistance, joined by deserters from the Afghan army and fighters from around the Muslim world. At first they fought with 19th-century muskets and WWII-era Lee Enfield rifles and made bullets by hand from spent shell casings. One Afghan attempted a suicide attack by setting himself on fire and rushing at a Russian tank. Eventually, a disorderly coalition of world powers and adversaries that included the U.S., China, Pakistan, Israel, Britain, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia provided the mujahideen, as they called themselves—warriors of God—with serious weaponry. Decades worth of grudges against the USSR were avenged on television screens around the world as grainy footage of shoulder-launched rockets turning Russian helicopters into fireballs emerged from the Hindu Kush.

American support for the resistance was run out of CIA headquarters. Among its choreographers there was Alan Wolfe, who had moved to Washington with Annie. By now he was the chief of the Near East Division, known as its Grand Old Man. Shortly after the 1978 coup, Wolfe flew to Islamabad to confer with agents. He told them a story. “I came home the other day, and my wife and I were having our evening martini, and The Washington Post was on the coffee table,” Wolfe said. “The photo on the front page was of the new Afghan flag being raised in Kabul. I picked it up and showed it to my wife. ‘They’re fucking with our country, dear!’ I can’t have that. I am going to change that fucking government, toss those commie bastards out on their asses.”

“I sat there looking at Wolfe as he spoke,” the agent who worked under him told me. “It was clear to me that this was one of those moments that you hear about but rarely are lucky enough to witness.” Years later he bumped into Wolfe, and they reminisced about the meeting. “I reminded him that he had indeed started the process that removed the Communist regime. He looked at me like I was from outer space. ‘Of course I did. Did you think that I wouldn’t succeed?’”

On the ground, the Afghan resistance was run by Pakistani intelligence from Peshawar, where armies of refugees, many eager to fight, were massing. Nancy worked in the overflowing refugee camps, while back at Dean’s, rebel leaders conferred with Louis, whose understanding of guerilla warfare and connections with influential leaders across Afghanistan were invaluable. He no longer harbored any illusions about the communists. Word spread. One day someone walked into the hotel with a copy of the Los Angeles Times. In it was an op-ed, by a Russian political commentator, entitled “CIA Perfidy Necessitated Rescue by Soviet Union.” It read: “In May, 1979, the American intelligence men in Pakistan who were engaged in training Afghan rebels were led by the well-known CIA operative Louis Dupree.”

There is no evidence Dupree led a rebel army, much as he probably would have liked to, but he did much else to assist the mujahideen. He had known most of its field commanders since they were young men. He snuck into Afghanistan to advise and fight with them. “Actually,” claims Nancy, “it was Louis who taught them how to make a Molotov cocktail.”

When he wasn’t with the rebels or in Peshawar, Dupree traveled to American universities and think tanks to lecture about the war and urge people to get involved; cofounded groups to support the fighters and refugees; and wrote reports and op-eds. He always stressed that this was not a proxy fight between capitalism and communism, that Afghanistan was not a “client” of the West—a position offered with increasing bluster as the mujahideen became celebrities in Georgetown sitting rooms. Afghanistan was its own country fighting for its own future, Dupree reminded his audiences.

In 1981, he was in a near fatal car accident. In the hospital for a year, he underwent two brain surgeries. Still partially paralyzed after being discharged, he went to Washington to urge lawmakers to send the rebels more weapons. Testifying before the Senate, he said, “This is, in my opinion, the most important political and moral issue that faces us at this time and is probably the most important since the Second World War.”

In Dupree’s personal papers, one finds dozens of letters he sent—to politicians, employers, deans—on behalf of Afghan exiles. More poignant, however, are the letters written to him by the exiles themselves. “Since the year that the Russian took over Afghanistan, many people have been died and many were slaughtered by Russians army,” wrote a student turned fighter named Hafizullah who’d fled to Iran. “I was charged for the crime that [I] worked for and with Americans in Kabul. Now I am in Tehran have no passport and I am eager to come over to USA for my further studies or if not possible to take refugee there at that part of the world.”

Life got worse for the Duprees, too. Still suspected of being a spy, Louis was expelled from Pakistan in 1979. “I have been followed, harassed and hounded by various elements in the Pakistani government,” he wrote in a letter of complaint to (who else?) Pakistani president Muhammed Zia-ul-Haq. “Somewhere in the bowels of the Pakistani bureaucracy exists a hard-core belief that I am a CIA agent.” Eventually, he was readmitted.

Although Louis had taken up a professorship at Duke University, he and Nancy never entertained the thought of moving permanently to North Carolina.  When I asked her why, she said, “These people were in trouble. Refugees were coming in. It never occurred to me leave. They had given us so much.” She choked up. “How could you turn your back on them at that time?”

By 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, two things were obvious. The first was that the USSR had lost the war in Afghanistan. Though the conflict wouldn’t officially end for another four years, withdrawal talks were already under way. The second was that Afghanistan was, in a more profound sense, lost. Five and a half million people—one-third of the population—would flee the country by the end of the decade, and another two million would be displaced internally. Louis called it a “migratory genocide.”

If the human toll wasn’t enough, there was the cost to Afghan history. As the White Hun and Mongol invaders had tried to do centuries earlier, the Soviets seemed to want to punish Afghanistan for its resistance by trying to make the world forget there had ever been indigenous culture there. The policy was known, with the Russian flair for bloody-minded understatement, as “rubblization.” Whole swaths of the country were laid waste; mosques, libraries, schools, museums, and archaeological sites were razed. It was as though some horrible wind had swept in from the north and erased epochs.

As the crisis worsened, so did Louis. Still disabled from the car accident, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He remained the final authority on Afghan history, however, so when a consortium of charity organizations dealing with the preservation of Afghan culture needed to assemble a bibliography of scholarship on the country, he was the obvious choice. No sooner had he submitted the bibliography, however, than he convinced the consortium it wasn’t what they wanted. What they wanted, he said, was the stuff produced during the war: the underground newspapers, the home footage of fighting, the testimonies of Russian defectors, and so on—the documents that would tell a generation living in exile what their country was like while they were gone. “In the camps around Peshawar, they had an unprecedented phenomenon—Afghans from all over the country, populations that had never interacted with each other, gathering in one place,” Nancy said. “The possibilities to create a legacy of learning for when they repatriated were enormous.” She and Louis began collecting. It was the start of her library.

Louis was always sure the refugees would repatriate and reclaim their country from the Soviets. “He had every faith,” said Nancy. “He said, ‘The Afghans will throw them out.’” In January of 1989, as he lay dying in Durham, North Carolina, the last Soviet tanks rolled out of Afghanistan. The mujahideen had captured everything except Kabul.

“Well, darling, you were right,” she told him.

Louis looked up at her. “The problems are just beginning.”

People traveled from around the world to attend the memorial service at Duke. Dupree’s eulogy, read by the director of its Islamic and Arabian Development Studies Department, Ralph Braibanti, was entitled “Tribute to a Mujahid.” Louis and Nancy, he told the mourners, had “appeared in a moment in history when the culture they so admired was in crisis. It was this transmigration of their spiritual being that enabled each of them to preserve some part of the national character which now became part of their persona.”

In the service program was printed a photograph of Louis taken a few years before, during a mission with the mujahideen. He’s wearing large, professorial eyeglasses, an Afghan vest, and a traditional pakol cap, gray hair flowing from its brim. He looks haggard but highly pissed off. Aged but eager. A boyish mischievousness dances across his face, halfway between a smile and a frown. “I know a lot,” his unyielding eyes and pursed mouth seem to say, “but I’m not going to tell you a fucking thing.”

After Louis died, Nancy wound up his affairs, taught his classes through the end of the term, and broke down. She considered “joining Louis”—i.e., killing herself. It didn’t help that there were Afghan exiles living in America who could help her mourn. “The Afghans have a terrible habit,” she told me. “I mean, it’s a lovely habit, but it’s awful. When somebody loses a husband or a wife, they come and they sit and they tell you all about how wonderful they were. You say thank you and you cry and you cry and you cry. That’s the whole point I suppose.”

But she didn’t just miss Louis; she missed Afghanistan. They had been her two greatest loves. So when she was invited to return to Peshawar to head an Afghan cultural organization, she thought it might be an opportunity to carry on his work, and she accepted before she could refuse.

Civil war persisted for seven years after the Soviet departure. Kabul, which had made it out of the occupation mostly unscathed, was torn apart. The rebel leaders Louis had helped were now warlords. They battled block by block for control of the city while the last Soviet-backed president, Muhammed Najibullah, tried in vain to hold on to power. Rockets slammed into the National Museum, and soldiers and militiamen looted the collection. In 1993, Nancy traveled to Kabul to assess the damage for the United Nations. “Artifacts [were] strewn among the rubble, and filing cabinets of museum records and catalogs indiscriminately dumped,” she later recounted in an article. “Hasps had been unscrewed and locks ripped off steel storage boxes, and drawers and crates had been methodically emptied onto the floor.” It was rumored that thieves were using her guidebook to the museum to value stolen pieces. Seventy percent of the collection, she estimated, was gone. Among the missing pieces, it appeared, was Daddy’s Head.

In 1996, the warlords were swept from Kabul by the Taliban, which at first was more respectful than anyone had dared hope. The Taliban leader, Muhammad Omar, appointed a cultural minister and decreed the smuggling of relics illegal. He allowed the UN to repair part of the museum. But in 2001 he changed course, ordering the Bamiyan Buddhas—the subject of Nancy’s first guidebook—destroyed. When footage of Talibs blowing up the statues was broadcast around the world, it became clear that hardliners loyal to the polite Saudi she’d met years before, Osama bin Laden, had taken control. Next, Omar ordered what remained of the museum’s collection destroyed. Heavies from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice arrived, hammers in hand.

When Dupree went to the museum afterward, “there were pieces no bigger than this,” she told me, holding up her thumb and index finger close to each other. “And the rest was all dust. I stood there watching the museum staff collecting these pieces, including the dust. They were sweeping it up, putting it in bags, and I thought, God, you know, what do you think the Taliban is going to do to us?”

Later that year, however, the United States invaded. In 2004, the museum reopened. The curators returned to work. They took the salvaged artifacts from their hiding places and began the slow process of re-cataloging them. Nancy, who had been splitting her time between Peshawar and North Carolina, began the process of moving back to Kabul the same year. One day, she received an email from a curator who had “found a remarkable little bundle wrapped in brown paper,” Dupree said, recounting the message. “She tore off the paper only to come to another layer of paper, newspaper. She continued peeling the bundle, and under the newspaper she found toilet paper and then tissue paper.”

Inside the tissue paper was a small, very old rock. There were markings carved into it. The features were faint.

“Daddy’s Head,” Dupree said to herself.

After Louis died, one of the things Nancy did to keep her mind off him was continue the collection they’d started during the war. She scoured bazaars and antiques stores and book stalls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She visited old mujahideen and exiles and aid workers to see what they had. She hired unemployed men to help her. She stored the old books, reports, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines, tracts, treatises, photos, film reels and slides she gathered in Peshawar. “If it had Afghanistan in the title, it wasn’t safe around me,” she said.

Of course, it didn’t work. In every new find, there was something to remind her of Louis. “Louis would have liked this,” she would say to herself, handling a book, or, reading an account of a particular battle, “Louis would have disagreed with that.” Finally, she admitted to herself that the collection was her way not of moving on from Louis, but of remembering him. More than that, of memorializing him, and his love of Afghanistan.

While her new library awaited completion in late 2012, her collection sat in Kabul University’s main library, a sad affair in the middle of campus. Most of the materials were stored in locked, fragrant cedar cabinets. In the back of the building was the small, stuffy archiving room. On the days I visited, young male archivists (and one woman) could be found studying and scanning, copying and uploading, unbinding and rebinding. One day I looked over the shoulder of an archivist as he paged through a Taliban propaganda newspaper from 1996 whose headline read “Congratulations to the People of Afghanistan About the Capture of Kabul by the Taliban.” Another archivist was at a computer, going through scans of photographs taken by an aid worker. “When people die and their estates don’t know what to do with their God damn things,” Nancy said, “they call us.”

Operations were overseen by Rahim, a dour, wiry man whom Dupree hired in Peshawar. He and a group of helpers smuggled the collection into Afghanistan. They stuffed about 30,000 items into sacks and loaded them onto the backs of horses and men for the trek over the Khyber Pass. It took six months. Rahim said it was worth it. “We learn many things from Nancy,” he told me. “Many information about Afghanistan we get from Nancy.” Now they have about 90,000 items.

In 2005, when he was university chancellor, Ashraf Ghani donated a plot of land on the campus to Dupree to house the collection. When I asked him why, he told me the collection “represents the proposition that to overcome the past we need to understand it. The past is haunting Afghanistan. We have too much history—history that has not become historical. History that lives. Our perceptions of history are clouding our future. We’ve done horrible things to each other, and those things need to be put to rest, and this collection is part of that.”

Browsing the cabinets one day, I found myself thinking of a line from the Homebody’s monologue:

My research is moth-like. Impassioned, fluttery, doomed. A subject strikes my fancy: Kabul, you will see why, that’s the tale I’m telling—but then, I can’t help myself, it’s almost perverse, in libraries, in secondhand bookshops, I invariably seek out not the source but all that which was dropped by the wayside on the way to the source…. Old magazines, hysterical political treatises written by an advocate of some long-since defeated or abandoned or transmuted cause; and I find these irrelevant and irresistible, ghostly, dreamy, the knowing what was known before the more that has since become known overwhelms.

One day in the archiving room, I overheard Nancy speaking with a young Englishman who’d been volunteering his time. He had just told her that he would have to come in less.

“So you’re leaving us?” she said to him in a plaintive voice.

“No, Nancy,” he said, trying to be as gentle as possible. “I’m not leaving. I’ll just be able to come in less than I have.”

“You’ll leave, I suppose,” she said. “Everybody leaves eventually.”

Maybe sensing he’d stay if she offered him some compensation, she added, “You know, we’re out of money. We’re broke, completely.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. It had been obvious enough to me, watching it at work, that her organization was inefficient. Her staff was well intentioned but poorly trained and overly worshipful of her. Nancy herself was Homebody-like, unable to focus on any single task or line of thought for very long. Just how inefficient I learned on my last days in Kabul. Wafa, her executive director, admitted to me that the organization was, indeed, broke. Nancy had blown through a $3 million grant from the State Department a year ahead of schedule. The Norwegian government had stepped in with a bridge loan, but now that was nearly gone, too.

An auditor hired by the grant administrator to assess Dupree’s organization told me she “is completely exhausted and wants to let go, and she’s trying to hand it over, but her board can’t be bothered.” The whole thing was being held together, barely, on the strength of her legend, he believed. “The American government has spent $3 million supporting the cult of an old lady.” An employee of hers told me the organization “will collapse when Nancy is gone,” a contention with which the auditor agreed. Indeed, many of the people around her seemed to believe this.  

Penury nagged at her. Grasping deans at the university were making noises about commandeering her new library. She worried that Karzai, having paid for some of it, might use it for his own purposes. After trips such as the one to Charikar, she suspected that Afghans were indifferent to her projects. She seemed to become sicker and more impatient by the day. Her coughing fits grew deeper and longer, her outbursts more plangent and scattershot; it was as though everyone reminded her of how little time she had left, and thus everyone was a waste of time. Americans took the worst of it. Around them she became annoyed before they’d had a chance to open their mouths. It wasn’t long before she was blowing up at me when I walked into her office each morning. She would lapse into the first person plural, as though she were yelling at herself, too. “You don’t seem to be interested in the things we are doing!” she said one day. “What are we doing here? Why?! What’s our purpose?” 

For weeks I had been bothering Dupree to take me to the National Museum. I wanted to see Daddy’s Head with her. Finally, she relented, and I could see as soon as we arrived why she hadn’t wanted to come. The museum still pains her. Everything in it reminds her of Afghanistan’s past, of her past, of Louis.

At the entranceway stands a second-century marble relief of the Kushan king Kinishka that is particularly close to her heart. She likes to call Kinishka, a scholar and arts patron, her hero. The statue’s head is gone, smashed by a Talib. “This poor little fella,” she said as we walked by him. Inside we passed a damaged Buddha. “I, ah—” she said, then turned away, on the brink of tears.

Upstairs, after looking at a display of gold coins (“I kept telling Louis to find me some gold,” she joked), we emerged from the gallery to find burly military contractors with assault rifles taking up positions on the staircase. They looked as though they expected the statues to come to life. Nancy didn’t flinch. Nor did she betray interest when their charge—an official, clearly American, in a baggy suit, moustache, bad haircut—bounded up the stairs. He introduced himself as a deputy ambassador of something.

“Another ambassador?” she said.

“There are so many of us,” he replied gamely.

The ambassador’s wife introduced herself with an eagerness that made it clear she’d wanted to meet Dupree for some time. “Yes, yes,” Nancy said, waving a hand and pushing past.

As I was about to ask about Daddy’s Head, the museum director, Omara Massoudi, approached. Old friends, he and Dupree used to comb the bazaars in Peshawar together, looking for stolen artifacts. In the Taliban years, he sold potatoes on the street.

“Nancy Jan, will you have a cup of tea with me?” Massoudi asked. 

“You’re very kind,” she said. “Do you really want me to?” The ambassador and his wife and their aides joined them in Massoudi’s large, barren office. After business cards had been exchanged, she asked the ambassador, “But anyway, how do you find our poor museum?”

“It’s mixed emotions,” he said. “It’s so impressive and so gorgeous what you see, and heartbreaking to think of what was lost. But I think it is a tribute to—”

“You have to have been here,” she said, cutting him off. “Mr. Massoudi and I, we’ve gone through a lot. You see, he’s such a gentleman. Impeccably dressed. Can you imagine him with a beard down to here?” she said, gesturing at her knees. Everyone laughed, and she was off. “And he used to turn up in Peshawar and—those were hard times. But! It was even harder times for the museum, because a rocket had hit the roof and flames all over the place. The roof had fallen onto these precious Islamic bronzes, and they were all melted together. There was no electricity, no water, no nothing. No heat. And the walls were all covered with soot and grime and dust. We went like that for many, many months. So I cannot believe it when I come here, to see this sparkling, beautiful building. It’s a miracle.

“I’m building a very small building, but it’s taken a long time,” she went on. “You must come and see my center.”

“I’d love to,” the ambassador said. He attempted to make his farewells, but Dupree kept talking. More about the museum, musings on the promise of Afghan youth; then her monologue became moth-like, impassioned, fluttery, doomed. I was sitting next to the Homebody.

“The other day I went to a music concert,” she told the ambassador. “Modern classical music. John Cage and all that. You know John Cage?”

“Yeah,” the ambassador said, almost hiding his confusion.

“Ping, bonk, henk, hah, all that?”

“Yeah.”

“Well he used to be my neighbor. And I didn’t think much of his music then. And so these people were doing a fantastic job with the cello and the saxophone and the—but all modern. I thought it was quite pleasant. Then they played one with John Cage’s concept that there is music in everything. All noise has music. Got it? So these three or four people on the stage, they each had a radio. And one by one they each turned the radio to static. Chek-wawa-kchaea. This is supposed to be music? I’m sorry. It didn’t catch me then and it doesn’t catch me now.

“I went out after that,” she continued, “and I saw the cellist. She had been overworked, and I gave her a big hug and I said, ‘Beautifully done, except that last thing left me cold.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we did that because it’s his 100th anniversary.’ My neighbor? Hundredth anniversary? And they were all so embarrassed because I’m nearly a hundred. They didn’t mean it that way, but it came out that way.”

Nervous laughter.

“Well,” the ambassador said, getting up, his moustache hairs seeming to bristle with alarm, or maybe pity. “Anyway the, the—I want to thank you all for the opportunity to visit this museum. It’s a real privilege and honor to do it. And I feel much, ah, richer for the experience.”

Afterward, I asked Nancy what she thought of him. “He’s an ambassador,” she said. By this I took her to mean: My patience for my countrymen, and their preposterous exertions in this doomed place that I love so much, is at an end. And it was a position for which I could hardly blame her. On the contrary, the ignorance and futility—there is no other term for it: the abject failure—of the American adventure in Afghanistan is obvious as soon as one sets foot in the country. Our attempts to rebuild institutions and infrastructure have come to little; hugely expensive projects sit skeletal and looted, the countryside poor and benighted; Karzai’s ministers live like pashas in Kabul. This is to say nothing of a reinvigorated Taliban or of the daily bombings, maimings, beheadings. All of it at the expense of the American taxpayer, America’s reputation, and, worst of all, everyday Afghans, the people whom Dupree has been trying to help for most of her adult life. 

“We have really destroyed this very sensitive characteristic of the Afghan character, which is self-sufficiency,” she told me one day. “They used to be proud of the fact that they did things for themselves. But now they’ve had so much money thrown at them, they’ve had so many advisers telling them what to do, that from the village on up, these young people don’t want to think for themselves. Let the foreigners do it.”

Dupree feels this failure deeply, and as an American adopted by Afghans, it takes a double toll on her, embarrassing and infuriating her in equal measure. She knows that she is part of this failure; that, as the quintessential expat do-gooder in Kabul, she somehow embodies it. On her good days, she also remembers that she is separate from it, that Afghans love her, perhaps even need her. She remembers that, if the glories of Afghanistan’s past can only be imagined, she can imagine them better than anyone, and help others in the imagining. But on her bad days, she carries this failure on her face, in her bones, like a walking broken promise. She worries that one or the other of her homelands might blithely do away with her legacy. Her library finally opened in March of last year, several months after my visit. But even as the building’s completion approached, she spoke of it as a tenuous thing. “It would only take one mullah with a match or one American daisy cutter,” she told me, “and it would be finished.”

Dupree had reluctantly agreed to speak with me one last time. Shortly after I got to her office, however, so did a young Afghan-American woman, two hours late for an appointment. Dupree had been yelling about her—“Where the hell is this person? God damn it, damn it, damn it!”—but when the woman finally arrived, apologizing profusely, Dupree issued a contrition-banishing wave of the hand and invited her to sit down.

It was her first time in Kabul, the woman explained, and she’d gotten lost. She was a graduate student, about to begin research near Kandahar. She had nothing pressing to ask of Dupree, nothing to offer her, but Dupree put aside what she was doing—and me—to speak with her, about nothing much. Soon they were trading stories and laughing. She took the woman out to tour the campus. When I returned to the office, three hours later, they were having lunch. Dupree was talking about Louis. It was the happiest I’d seen her. I left quietly.

On my way off campus, I stopped at the new library, recalling something the auditor had said about it. “She wanted to make sense of what her legacy would be,” he’d said, “so she’s become obsessed with the building.” He was probably right—and the obsession had paid off. It was a beautiful building. Its granite walls and stolid wooden beams and flagstone portico were somehow already perfectly weathered. Inside, there was no furniture, no curtains, no books. It felt new and old at the same time. It knew a lot but would say nothing. Students were already walking by it as though it had been there forever, and soon enough, none will remember its provenance. Though it is Nancy’s monument to Louis, to their love of Afghanistan, she has refused to put their name on it. It is called, simply, the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.

I walked into the interior courtyard. A solitary worker was cleaning a new windowpane. Nearby his young son was sitting with a neat pile of tattered textbooks. The school year had started, and he wanted them to last through the long winter ahead. He was carefully wrapping each cover in brown paper.