40 years ago today, I was in Jerusalem. We were preparing for our morning tour, and Mr. Vivian had a meeting with me and the four girls about the need for protection. The girls weren't pleased about the fact that I would have to go with them everywhere, and I wasn't too pleased that I couldn't go where I wanted, but it was now the rule. I had a brown belt in karate, and I carried a small pen knife in my pocket, so that would have to do. Just a curious side note here: we went through some of the heaviest security at airports in the world, especially Tel Aviv, and no one ever questioned my knife. They questioned a lot of other stuff like toothpaste and vitamins.
As we were leaving the hotel, there was a camel parked on the sidewalk across the street. He wasn't for us. A boy was using him for a taxi. The tour today took us outside of Jerusalem into the countryside. We saw a building where the guide said was the Inn of the Good Samaritan. We saw many things that one had to take on faith. We then went to the ancient city of Jericho and saw the ruins there. Back in 1966, my father visited the same place, and he brought a piece of the wall back for me. We couldn't do the same in 1973. We then went on to see the Mount of Temptation, and then to the Dead Sea. By the time we got there, the air temperature had risen to 127 degrees. All one had to do was get off of the bus, and you would get an instant sunburn. It was incredibly hot. Some wanted to float in the water, but we didn't, as it was just too hot. There was an ice machine there that literally burned up when the motor overheated. We also visited Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
The afternoon was free to do what we wanted. The girls and I went back to the Jordan Bazaar to hang out with Sam, Omar and Sam. They told us all about their lives in Israel, and the hardships they had. They also wanted to find out about America, and we were happy to tell them. We struck up a great friendship.
That night, at supper, we had a visitor at dinner. He identified himself as the political attaché at the US Consulate. For those of you not hip to this language, he worked for the Company. Or, let's be frank--the Central Intelligence Agency. I don't know how he knew, but he said that he knew that we had been hanging out with Sam, Omar and Sam, and we were to stop associating with them. He explained that those three boys were enemies of the United States. He said that Henry Kissinger was in town trying to broker a peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and our relationship with Sam, Omar and Sam could jeopardize his negotiations. Considering the time frame of July 1973, there was a war that broke out between the Syrians and the Israelis in October 1973, which Israel won. The man then said that Sam, Omar and Sam were terrorists.
This news was rather shocking. They seemed like nice guys. Our picture of terrorists came from the 1972 Munich Olympics slaughter. These three guys seemed nothing like those in Munich. So, I told the guy that these three boys had become our friends, and I thought it would look very suspicious if we suddenly stopped seeing them. The man thought for a minute and then said to us to keep up our friendship with them and find out everything we could about them, and then he would be back to visit us at dinner for the rest of the nights we would be in Jerusalem, and we would tell him what we had found out. This sounded like spying to us, so we asked him what if we refused. He told us that the United States government would revoke our passports and send us home. This guy was not kidding. What could we do? How would we explain it to our parents that our trip had been cut short halfway through the tour? After all, the trip had been paid for already. No money would be refunded. And then, what about our college credit for the trip? Would we lose that too? The girls and I had a meeting and decided to do what the man said. We would be spies for America. Years later, there was a hearing in Congress about the CIA using civilians for intelligence gathering, and they flatly denied it. I had to laugh, because we were unpaid agents for our government in Jerusalem in July 1973.
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