pendence, he enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, and after demobi-
lization, with the rank of major, he established a small spring manu-
facturing plant.
In 1951 Frank was dispatched to Iraq, where he was supposed to
take command of a network of agents. Frank knew that he could not
use his U.S. passport so he suggested creating the cover of a Cana-
dian businessman. He had lived in Canada and was fluent in English.
On meeting his contact in Tehran, Frank asked him whom he was
supposed to be working for—Aliyah Beth? Boris Guriel’s Political
Department? Binyamin Gibli’s Military Intelligence(MI)? The con-
tact replied that he did not know and that he was groping in the dark.
After about two months in Tehran, Frank was provided with a forged
passport of the principality of Bahrain, which was under British con-
trol. Frank relates that at that time he was consumed with anger be-
cause in addition to the fact that he had not received the promised
briefings, he had European, not Arab, features and no mastery what-
soever of Arabic, making his Bahraini passport suspect. He toyed with
the notion of returning to Israel, but the sense of mission within him
prevented him from abandoning his task.
On 20 April 1951 he slipped across the border into Iraq and
reached a Jewish house in Baghdad. Frank had been assured that a
message announcing that he was due to appear would be sent to the
household, but after the members of the family admitted him, with
great suspicion, he realized that no such message had been conveyed.
Among the members of that household was Mordechai Ben-Porat,
the representative of Aliyah Beth in Baghdad. Frank managed to con-
vince the people in the house of his actual identity and his mission,
but he was surprised when Ben-Porat, whom Frank had been sent to
replace, told him that he refused to comply with the instruction.
Overcoming his exasperation, Frank went to lodge in a Baghdad ho-
tel and then returned to Israel via Lebanon and Turkey. Years later
Frank described his mission and the behavior of the system unflat-
teringly: “They operated amateurishly and irresponsibly, such that it
almost cost me my life; the right hand had no idea what the left hand
was doing. Disorder reigned everywhere. My luck was that the Iraqis
were worse than us.”
After this debacle and another of the uncovering of the Aliyah Beth
network in Iraq and the execution of many of its agents, ReuvenFRANK, YA’ACOV•9306-102 (02) A-G.qxd 3/24/06 7:23 AM Page 93