MARAJ, Lebanon
For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both
sides of the bitterest divide running through this
region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest
supporter of the Palestinian
cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as
an administrator at a nearby school.
To Israel,
he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports
and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups
and Hezbollah since 1983.
Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell,
accused by the authorities of betraying his country to
an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his friends and
former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of
his deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad,
the unexplained cash, the secret second wife.
Lebanese investigators say he has
confessed to a career of espionage spectacular in its
scope and longevity, a real-life
John le Carrι novel. Many intelligence agents are
said to operate in the civil chaos of Lebanon, but Mr.
Jarrah's arrest has shed a rare light onto a world of
spying and subversion that usually persists in secret.
Mr. Jarrah's first wife maintains that
he was tortured, and is innocent; requests to interview
him were denied.
From his home in this Bekaa Valley
village, Mr. Jarrah, 50, traveled often to Syria and to
south Lebanon, where he photographed roads and convoys
that might have been used to transport weapons to
Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, investigators say.
He spoke with his handlers by satellite phone, receiving
"dead drops" of money, cameras and listening devices.
Occasionally, on the pretext of a business trip, he
traveled to Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli
passport, and flew to Israel, where he was debriefed at
length, investigators say.
At the start of the 2006 war between
Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called Mr.
Jarrah to reassure him that his village would be spared
and that he should stay at home, investigators said.
He was finally arrested last July by
Hezbollah, which now has perhaps the most powerful
intelligence apparatus in this country. It handed him to
the Lebanese military along with his brother Yusuf,
who is accused of helping him spy and he awaits trial
by a military court.
Several current and former military
officials agreed to provide details about his case on
condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized
to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts
tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah's relatives
and former colleagues.
It is not the family's first brush
with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah's cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah,
was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years
apart in age and do not appear to have known each other
well.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel's
prime minister, Ehud Olmert,
declined to discuss Mr. Jarrah's situation, saying, "It
is not our practice to publicly talk about any such
allegations in this case or in any case."
Villagers here seemed incredulous that
a man they knew all their lives could have taken money
to spy for a country that they regard with unmixed
hatred and disgust.
Many maintained his innocence. But
Raja Mosleh, the Palestinian doctor who was his partner
for years in a school and health clinic near here, did
not.
"I never suspected him before," Dr.
Mosleh said. "But now, after linking all the incidents
together, I feel he's 100 percent guilty."
"He used to talk about the Palestinian
cause all the time, how he supported the cause, he
supported the people, he liked everybody this son of a
dog," Dr. Mosleh added, his voice thick with contempt.
Mr. Jarrah would often borrow money to
buy cigarettes, apparently posing as a man of limited
means. Investigators say he received more than $300,000
for his work from Israel.
Only recently did he begin to spend in
ways that raised questions. About six years ago,
neighbors said, he built a three-story villa with a
terra-cotta roof that is by far the grandest house in
this modest village of low concrete dwellings. Outside
is a small roofed archway and a heavy iron gate, and on
a recent day a German shepherd stood guard.
Dr. Mosleh asked him where he got the
money, and Mr. Jarrah said he got help from a daughter
living in Brazil. It is a natural excuse in Lebanon,
where a large portion of the population receives
remittances from relatives abroad.
Mr. Jarrah also had a secret second
wife, according to investigators and his former
colleagues. Unlike his first wife, Maryam Shmouri al-Jarrah,
who lived in relative grandeur with their five children
in Maraj, the second wife lived in a cheap apartment in
the town of Masnaa, near the Syrian border. This
apparently allowed Mr. Jarrah to travel near the border
in the unremarkable guise of a local working-class man.
Mr. Jarrah has said he was recruited
in 1983 a year after Israel began a major invasion of
Lebanon by Israeli officers who had imprisoned him,
according to investigators. He was offered regular
payments in exchange for information about Palestinian
militants and Syrian troop movements, they said.
After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in
2000, thousands of Lebanese from the occupied zone in
the south were tried and sentenced mostly to light
prison terms for collaborating with Israel.
Far from the border, a different class
of collaborators, rooted in their communities,
persisted. A few have been caught and sentenced.
Mr. Jarrah's motives remain a mystery.
He said he tried to stop, but the Israelis would not let
him, investigators said.
It all came to an end last summer. He
went on a trip to Syria in July, and when he returned he
said he had been briefly detained by the Syrian police,
his first wife said. He seemed very uneasy, not his
usual self, she said.
He left the house that night, saying
he was going to Beirut, and never returned, Mrs. Jarrah
said. Only three months later did she get a call from
the Lebanese Army saying it had taken custody of him.
A few weeks ago, Mrs. Jarrah said, she
was allowed to see him. He looked terrible, exhausted,
she said.
Lebanese security forces released a
photograph of Mr. Jarrah, taken before his arrest. In
it, he appears against a blue and white backdrop,
dressed in a formal dark shirt, wearing an enigmatic
smile.
