An Absence of Light

After this Raviv was asked not to return to Marseille, but to drop out of sight He was instructed to go to London, get a job, and not contact the Mossad in any way. A year later, in December of 1970, he was contacted and told to go to Paris. There another three months passed before he was joined by a Mossad commander from Tel Aviv who spent a month with him. He had been chosen for a special kind of mission that was to become a trademark of his career.

It was a busy time for the Mossad in France. The 1970s would become the decade of terrorist revolutionary groups, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigade, the Basque ETA in Spain, the Action Directe in France, and five different Palestinian organizations. Sooner or later all of them found it necessary to pass through France and stay for various periods of time.

Raviv’s languages expertise and his preference for working alone were considered indispensable under these circumstances. He had been made a “single,” a rare katsa even by the standards of the innovative Mossad. He ran no agents and operated entirely alone, his existence unknown to other Mossad operatives anywhere. Even though the Mossad had three kidon units-small operational cells within the Metsada department that conducted assassinations and kidnappings everywhere in the world-there was a special need at this time for “veiled” hits, assassinations that appeared to be natural deaths. The targets were three men and a woman in the diplomatic corps of four different embassies who had significant clandestine connections to terrorist organizations. A traditional assassination-even if the Israelis were never linked to the deaths-would cause an uproar and create blowback that could only damage Israeli interests.

It took Raviv nineteen months to complete his assignment, a duration his superiors considered ideal. His hits were never detected.

In 1975 Yosef Raviv returned to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. As one of Mossad’s chief experts on terrorism, he spent the next year at the Institute teaching katsas in training and updating Mossad’s training in operational techniques for their European stations. In late 1976 Raviv dropped out of sight.

In May of 1978 Raviv surfaced in Buenos Aires as Victor Soria, a wealthy Catalonian from Barcelona. Even though Argentina had a long and open history as Nazi sympathizers, both during and after the war, in the latter half of the 1970s the Mossad provided training to the Argentine military’s secret police and shared intelligence with their counterinsurgency operations at various times during Argentina’s “dirty war.” They provided arms as well, and by the opening years of the 1980s Israeli arms sales represented seventeen percent of Argentina’s total arms imports.

Israel’s Realpoltik, however, had a face it never revealed, and it had a private memory as well as a public one. Although South America is well known as a haven for Nazi war criminals, when most people think of these men they think of prominent Germans like Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, and Dr. Josef Mengele. But there were others too, scores of nameless lower-ranked German officers as well as those men of the occupation who carried out the Nazi’s atrocious directives, Croatian Ustashi, Romanian Legionnaires, Ukrainian nationalists. These men as well as the Nazis fled to South America to escape the retribution for their crimes, and more of them made new lives in Argentina than in any other country.

From 1978 through 1981 Victor Soria lived in Argentina and worked with the Argentine secret police. But this was not his sole mission. He lived alone among the eleven million people of Buenos Aires, but he also traveled extensively, sometimes renting a boat and heading up the Parana, stopping at Rosario or Goya or Corrientes and traveling inland. He traveled to remote ranches in the central Pampas, south to the dusty and barren oil fields of Patagonia, and north into the swamps of the Gran Chaco. Sometimes he crossed the Pilcomayo into General Strossner’s Paraguay, and at other times he crossed the Rio de la Plata to Montevideo, Uruguay. No intelligence agency outside the Mossad has ever been able to obtain the statitics for Soria’s work in Argentina, but by the time Raviv returned to Israel in 1981 he had become a legend in the intelligence world.

During the rest of 1981 he again taught at the Mossad Institute, but this time he taught methodologies in veiled assassinations to kidon operatives.

In 1982 Yosef Raviv spent a year at the Mossad station in Mexico City and then, once again, dropped out of sight.

In early 1984 Yosef Raviv returned to Tel Aviv and resigned from the Mossad. He was fifty years old and had been a Mossad operative for nineteen years.