"The Other Side of Deception"

By: Victor Ostrovsky

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CHAPTER 1

Three days earlier I had arrived in Cairo on an Aer Lingus flight from New York. I was whisked away from the airport terminal by two burly men in short-sleeve, gray safari suits. One of my seemingly friendly gorilla escorts spoke English. He said they had been sent to take me to a safe place. They held firmly on to my arms and ushered me to a small white car parked at the curb outside the main doors.

"Welcome to Egypt," said the English-speaker, who shared the back seat with me as the car took off. That was all he said until we cleared the airport complex. Then he handed me a blindfold and asked me to put it on.

Those who spent any time in the espionage world you come to expect these things. For the next thirty minutes I sat in the dark. I assumed we were on our way to meet the brass of the Egyptian intelligence and security service. The sole purpose of my visit to Egypt was to sell out my former employer, the Mossad, Israel's famous intelligence agency.

It wasn't every day that a Mossad case officer appears on their doorstep, ready to deal. I had expected the proverbial red carpet treatment, and this was not it. With my hearing unimpaired by the blindfold, I could hear the hustle-bustle of a large Middle Eastern city loud and clear. The noisy blend of honking cars and merchants announcing their wares sounded familiar to me. The sounds commingled with the smell of charcoal stoves and camel dung. I was reminded of Jaffa or East Jerusalem.

After a while, the sounds faded and there was only that of the scorching air rushing by the open window. At one point I could swear I heard the revving sounds of a diesel engine and the squeaking of tank tracks. I had spent enough time in the military to know we had entered a military base.

When my blindfolds were finally removed, I saw we were parked in the inner yard of what looked like an old British-style compound. The large square yard was surrounded by a dilapidated five-story building.

I was taken up a dark staircase to the third floor. Two uniformed guards armed with sub-machine-guns greeted us and led the way through a long dim corridor to a green metal door. I expected we would enter an office, where I would be meeting my hosts. Instead, I found myself in a ten-by-twelve cell. The heavy metal door slammed behind me. Then came the hollow sound of the key turning in the lock and the footsteps of my escorts as they walked away.

I assumed at first that this was a temporary holding room. There was a stench in the air of old urine and human excrement. All I could see from the small barred window was the inner yard. The big iron bed that filled most of the cell was not a good sign; there was something alarmingly permanent about it. Panic started to set in. At that instant I realized I was a captive and no one on the outside knew where I was.

I walked through an uneven opening knocked through the thick wall into what seemed like a crypt. I found a shower stall closed off by a stained plastic curtain. Facing the shower there was a sloping floor with a hole in the center, known in the army as a shit hole, a primitive toilet. I leaped out of there once I realized that the hole, which was the source of the stench, was swarming with cockroaches.

A minute later, I heard the key turning in the lock. That's it, I thought, they are here to get me out and apologize. I decided to accept their apology and brush it off as just one of those things.

An old man wearing a white galabiyya walked in, carrying a tray of fruit and a large glass pitcher of cold lemonade, and a single glass. Clearly I wasn't expecting company. He smiled and put the tray on the end table by the bed. A uniformed guard stood at the door watching. The old man entered the tiny, crypt-like shower, and hung up the towel he had slung over his hand. I tried to speak to him, but he would only smile and nod his head.

Several hours later he returned with more food and fresh pitcher of lemonade. By nightfall on the first day I had evaluated my situation and the prognosis was not good. There was no logical reason for the way I was being treated, unless they knew something they shouldn't have and were now playing some sordid game. What were they up to? I was in total isolation and nothing made any sense.

From the window I could see a uniformed guard seated on a wooden chair by the large gate. Occasionally he would open a small side door in the gate and talk to someone.

The big gate opened noisily every morning at nine, letting a white car, similar to the one that had brought me here, enter the compound. I would get dressed and wait for someone to come and talk to me. But no one did. At six p.m. the car would leave. I shouted and banged on the bars with the metal tray, but no one seemed to care.

The heat didn't let up, even after dark. I put the rattling little fan on the end table and directed it toward me. I then lay on my back in my underwear, wetting my face and chest with a damp towel. My head rested on a hard pillow as I tried to sleep.

After the first day I didn't notice the stench anymore. The swarming cockroaches didn't bother me either, as long as they stayed in the shit hole and away from my food. At night a multitude of thoughts would run through my head, keeping me awake.

One question kept torturing me. How the hell did I end up in this ten-by-twelve hell somewhere outside Cairo? I couldn't shake the terrifying thought that this was where I'd spend the rest of my life, that my wife and children back in Canada would never know I hadn't run away, that I was trapped.

I couldn't tell where or when all this was going to end, but I could almost pinpoint the time, if not the precise moment, it had all started.

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