Fox Bio, Chapter 1: Before First Contact
Birth and WWII
The Agent currently in charge of Division One is Director Fox. Fox was born in the early years of the 20th century in Europe as Franz Aharon Levy. His hometown was in the Jewish ghetto of Leipzig, Germany, but his family was attempting to flee Nazi Germany and were captured in Poland when Levy was 11 years old.
Levy survived WWII as a child in the Majdanek concentration camp. He was the only surviving member of his family, who were among the first interns of the camp in late 1941. He was freed in July 1944 when the Soviet Army captured Majdanek. He was then 14.
Recognizing that the Soviet regime was unlikely to be much more beneficent than the Nazis, he used the skills he had learned in order to survive in the concentration camp to slip past the Soviets, and thus made his way into Western Europe before the war ended. There he spent the next three years living hand to mouth as a street urchin refugee, moving from town to town as necessity dictated, finding shelter wherever he could.
Aaliyah
As soon as the United Nations partitioned off the new, modern nation of Israel, Levy promptly stowed away on a ship bound for Tel Aviv from the French Mediterranean port town of Villefranche-sur-Mer, making aliyah in Israel twelve days after his 17th birthday.
He was welcomed with open arms by his fellow Jews, but the lone boy quickly found himself falling between the cracks as the new nation was flooded with immigrants, many of which were extended family groups. As war loomed on all horizons, the young nation began preparing for war, and Levy found his calling.
Enlisting in the Israeli Defense Forces, which not only gave him a sense of purpose but a means of living, Levy quickly moved through the various levels of military training and found himself a military field intelligence agent during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. There, his street urchin skills stood him in good stead, as did the fourth- level black belt in what eventually became known as Krav Maga, which he obtained in the course of his military training. He successfully executed several missions, bringing back important intelligence information for the IDF Command each time. For this, he was awarded the War of Independence ribbon and the Haganah ribbon. He was also ‘posthumously’ awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service (this award was not instituted by the Israeli Knesset until 1970).
Having thus distinguished himself during the war, he continued as an IDF intelligence officer, emerging from the War of Independence at the rank of First Sergeant, and later being promoted rapidly through the ranks until achieving First Lieutenant.
The Mossad
He was recruited by the HaMossad leModi’in uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim (Hebrew for ‘The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations,’ aka the Mossad) upon its founding in 1949, where he again served well and honorably, through the Sinai War and other, lesser skirmishes and missions, until the events of the Six- Day War.
By that time, he was 37, and becoming somewhat long in the tooth to execute the job of a field intelligence agent, especially given the hardships of his youth, the deprivations of which were beginning to catch up to him in the form of an increasing number of chronic medical problems, some severe—the Mossad physicians gave him only a few more years before multiplying health issues would force his retirement.
Two weeks before the war’s outbreak, Levy was notified that he had Stage Four lung cancer, presumed at the time to be as a result of long- term exposure to dilute levels of Zyklon B in the air of the concentration camp where he had spent a significant part of his youth. (In point of fact, the cause of the lung cancer was never truly determined, but the long- term cyanide exposure likely did cause quite a few of his other medical problems.) Regardless of cause, the cancer was well advanced, had already metastasized past the lungs, was inoperable, and too widespread for successful radiation or chemotherapy. Doctors gave him less than a year to live.