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stories, and I came to understand one of the reasons I’d felt uncomfortable at times: my stories were overly complex. It always sounded as if I was trying too hard to justify myself. As if reading my thoughts, Oren provided me with a simple rule of thumb that I never forgot.
    â€œRick, if you are crossing the street and someone asks you why, you only have to say you are going to the grocery store,” he told me. “You don’t have to tell him what you’re going to buy there, or how you plan to cook it.” He continued, “Better yet, say nothing. If you’re going to walk to the beach at dawn and you’re worried about the cops checking you out, buy a cheap fishing rod and throw it over your shoulder. You don’t even have to speak to them because the fishing rod has already answered their questions.”
    I gave him the reports I had spent all day typing on that museum piece of a typewriter. He tucked the documents under an arm without glancing at them.
    â€œAren’t you going to read them?” I asked, perplexed and a little annoyed.
    â€œMaybe, but the exercise wasn’t about the doctor. It was about you. It was about how you felt about being undercover. The rest was just to keep you busy.”
    During this phase of my training, I learned that I was being groomed to be the ultimate operational weapon in the Mossad’s arsenal: a combatant in the division known simply as “the unit.” The unit has many names, but its most widely known cryptonym is “Caesarea.” It is legendary in the intelligence world, not least because of its oft- celebrated (and decried) mission to bring justice to the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack in 1972.
    Originally, Caesarea was a unit of the Israel Defense Forces charged with intelligence missions in neighboring Arab countries, but in 1953, after it met with a number of disasters that killed some of its members, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion transferred it to the nascent Mossad. Caesarea now operates as a completely compartmentalized “Mossad within the Mossad,” and its combatants do not enter or interact with Mossad HQ except through their controlling intermediaries. Their identities are kept secret, and they are told only what they need to know. (Think CIA agent Jason Bourne, of The Bourne Identity .) If a combatant is captured, you don’t want him to be able to reel off the Mossad’s personnel database to his interrogators. (Everyone talks when tortured. It’s only in the movies that they don’t.)
    Eventually, I moved on to more advanced training, and was outfitted with a foreign passport for lengthy exercises that more realistically simulated deployment in a foreign country. During this phase, I operated as if in hostile territory, with all the associated constraints and difficulties—maintaining strict communications protocols and hewing carefully to status cover. While on exercises, I was not permitted access to the apartment either.
    As in a computer game, each series of exercises contained a number of separate missions that I had to complete before advancing a level. Unbeknownst to me, I often was being observed by Mossad personnel. In many cases, they tried to trip me up through seemingly accidental mishaps, just to see how I’d react. In the most dramatic episode, a motorist insisted I’d hit his car with my rental and delayed me while I was en route to a tightly scheduled rendezvous.
    Throughout it all, my family back on the kibbutz might as well have been a million miles away. Both my wife and I suffered emotionally for my absence. Yet we knew that this was nothing compared with the far longer periods of separation that awaited us. I missed my son, too, and I hated the fact that he was growing up fast without me. When I dwelt on this aspect of the experience, I felt like quitting. But I also remembered the commitment I’d made to Benny. He’d warned me