James Bond Israelita
J.Rocha
Nima Zamar, a trained killer for Mossad, believed that she was eliminating ‘real
filth’. And that is exactly what she writes in her book, although Israel would like
to call her a fantasist. CHARLES BREMNER reports
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A POWERFUL handshake is probably standard for professional killers who dispatch
victims with their bare hands.
Yet the vigorous grip is a surprise when you meet Nima Zamar, a 33-year-old French
woman who has just gone public with an account of life as an agent with a licence to
kill for the Israeli secret service, Mossad.
Though tall and muscular, Zamar has soft eyes, a quiet voice and trim black hair. She
laughs easily, but has a fragile air about her. She could almost be any fit young
French woman as she chats in a Left Bank room with her 18-month-old daughter playing
nearby.
However, average Parisiennes do not usually tell you about strangling, knifing and
shooting people or how they cope with torture. "Even when you have no barrier of
conscience because you are defending yourself or killing real filth" she says "you
notice that the moment that every human being dies, they have an instant of
realisation, a sort of childlike flash.
"At that moment you understand that life is beautiful. Something very precious. But
that doesn’t stop you trying to save your own life."
The tale of Zamar -- which is not her real name -- is the stuff of nightmares or the
darkest of thrillers. To exorcise demons, she has just recounted her life in a book,
Je Devais Aussi Tuer (I Also Had to Kill). The work is making a splash in Paris, but
it is so grim that some media are calling it fiction.
Others are taking her at her word, as well as that of Albin Michel, her highly
respectable publishers. Thierry Pfister, her editor and a prominent figure on the
literary scene, is vouching for the truth of her account. He has known Zamar, whose
family were Romanian-Jewish immigrants, since she was a small child.
Zamar claims that after emigrating to Israel at 22 with a computing degree, she
volunteered for military service. She was coerced by a branch of Mossad into two
years of training which included Arabic, killing techniques and conditioning for life
under cover and torture. She then spent six years in the guise of a Swiss-reared
Palestinian deep in the dirty war in the ranks of the the terrorist organisation
Hezbollah.
On undercover missions to bug Syrian military computers in Lebanon, she was often
called upon to kill, in self defence and sometimes in cold blood.
She committed her first murder at a Hezbollah camp in Libya. She was ordered by the
officers to kill Yasmina, a fellow trainee with whom she had sympathised.
This was a standard test to forge obedience and dehumanise recruits. She kills
Yasmina without compunction, telling herself that every dead terrorist meant Israeli
lives saved. "Slowly, I move behind her, hit her in the throat with a violent blow of
the forearm and then strangle her. She lies dead in my arms. I put her on the
ground," she writes.
What does it take for a woman to put another so calmly to death, one wonders. "They
had prepared me intensely and warned me that there would be this kind of test," she
says quietly. "I did what I had to do. It was always a case of life and death and
saving my skin. It’s like war must have been 1,000 years ago.
There’s someone opposite you and there will only be one winner, the one who kills."
In the book, she describes her many other victims in similar terms, noting details
such as cleaning the flesh off a "useful" foldable knife after the murder of a
terrorist official.
Women are, she says are perhaps better killers than men because they are less
dominated by ego and more willing to serve humbly in the shadows without glory or
recognition. They may also withstand pain better. She gives blood- curdling accounts
of torture during several spells of captivity at the hands of the Syrians and of a
Russian officer who uses agonising chemical methods.
Her daredevil escapes are the most unlikely episodes. "In absolute extremity, you
find the energy," she says when challenged."For me it was a sort of chutzpah. I
survived. And the Arabs are not very efficient."
Disillusioned by the rigid and over-demanding methods of Mossad, Zamar says that she
left for France in early 2001, escaping a murder attempt with a syringe by a fellow
agent at Istanbul airport. He does not survive.
Her book, she says, is a way to bear witness and leave an account for her daughter,
whose father was a comrade killed on a mission in Iran. She renounces none of her
acts nor her love of Israel. "What I wanted to show is the workings of a creaking,
archaic system and how someone with determination could extract themselves from it,
both mentally and physically without giving up their ideals or their values," she
says.
Zamar, who masks her face for photographs and television, says that her former
masters have let her go. They initially approved the idea of her book but sent back a
censored version of the manuscript, reduced to a bare outline. "They were fine as
long as I didn’t talk about training or missions and that I was a bit more positive
about Israel," she said. She published anyway, although with many details
"sterilised".
Israel is now trying to discredit her by depicting her as a fantasy- land Mata Hari.
How could she have emerged so apparently unscathed from such brutality? "Who says
unscathed?" she says, talking of her continuing headaches, damaged body and the post-
traumatic stress syndrome that was not averted despite the post-mission work with
psychiatrists.
The violence has not dehumanised her, as it does for terrorists, she says, because
she was helped by the psychiatrists and the knowledge that her cause was just. "I did
correctly what I did like a trusty soldier. It’s their (terrorists’) code of
barbarity that I had to follow. It’s taken two years. You sometimes think you’ll
never get out of it. But I had a little girl and that helps. Sometimes your head is
too full of painful memories."
Zamar says that she is lonely in Paris with no family or boyfriends. She is unable to
adapt to an office job and her main outlet is working to become a teacher of Krav
Maga, the Israeli self- defence art which has been her salvation.
Men are frightened of her, she laughs. "Having lived like that makes it difficult to
have a normal relationship with a man. It’s a great solitude."
An afternoon with Zamar leaves one wanting to believe this woman who exudes both
girlish vulnerability and a military bearing. There are also the scars that are
visible on her left arm, below the short- sleeved sports shirt that she is wearing.
However, such an extraordinary, and unprovable, story leaves many with a strong
suspicion that it may all be fiction.
-- The Times, London.