The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  Though the level of anti-Zionist and anti-semitic paranoia in the Centre dropped sharply after Stalin’s death in March 1953, it did not disappear. None of the Jews sacked from the MGB at the height of the anti-semitic witch-hunt was reinstated. Over forty years later, at the beginning of the Gorbachev era, Jews were still excluded (along with a number of other minorities) from the KGB. The only exceptions were a handful of recruits with Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers, registered as members of other ethnic groups. Even the Central Committee was less rigid than the KGB about rejecting applicants of Jewish origin.

  Despite the anti-semitic paranoia of Stalin’s final years, the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, suspected that Mapam was passing classified material to the Soviet Union and placed a bugging device with a battery-operated radio transmitter beneath the desk of the Party’s general secretary. In January 1953 two Shin Bet officers were caught red-handed breaking into the Mapam headquarters to change the radio batteries.8 Shin Bet’s suspicions were, however, fully justified. The files of the Soviet Foreign Ministry show that two leading Mapam politicians in the Knesset were providing the Soviet embassy with classified material. Yaakov Riftin, who served on the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee and was described by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion as ‘a preacher from the Cominform’, regularly supplied the embassy with Committee documents, including those from sessions held in camera. Moshe Sneh provided a probably smaller amount of intelligence on Israeli foreign policy. The material furnished by Riftin and Sneh served to reinforce Soviet suspicion of Israel’s special relationship with the United States. In August 1952, for example, the Tel Aviv legation reported to Moscow that, according to Sneh, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett had declared ‘that Israel’s situation was such that it must follow the US without any preliminary conditions or reservations’.9

  By the mid-1950s, if not earlier, the KGB had an agent group inside Mapam, codenamed TREST (one of the most prestigious codenames in KGB history, originally used in the 1920s for a highly successful deception operation against White Russian émigrés and Western intelligence services10). In 1956 a courier codenamed BOKER was recruited to maintain contact with the group. The fact that he had three successive controllers over the years which followed indicates that the operation was considered of some importance. 11 Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not identify the members of the agent group, they probably included Aharon Cohen, Mapam’s main expert on Arab affairs. Cohen’s contacts with the Tel Aviv residency were discovered after a car with diplomatic number plates, registered in the name of a known KGB operations officer, Viktor Sokolov, was spotted by a policeman outside the main gate of Cohen’s kibbutz near Haifa in April 1958. Shin Bet surveillance of further meetings between Cohen and KGB officers led to his arrest. Though Cohen claimed that his dealings with the Russians were limited to academic discussions, he was sentenced to five years in jail for unauthorized contacts with a foreign agent; he was released after serving seventeen months. Isser Harel, the head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad, declared dramatically that Mapam had been ‘born with a malignant growth in its belly - the Soviet Dybbuk [evil spirit]’.12

  Mossad itself, however, suffered one serious Soviet penetration in the mid-1950s. Potentially the most important KGB agent during Israel’s first decade was Ze’ev Avni, born Wolf Goldstein, a multilingual economist and ardent Communist who had spent the Second World War in Switzerland where in 1943 he had been recruited by the GRU. Avni was a committed ideological agent. ‘There was no doubt in my mind’, he wrote later, ‘that I belonged not only to the vanguard of the revolution, but to its very élite.’ In 1948 he emigrated to Israel, joined a kibbutz and contacted the Soviet embassy to try to renew his links with the GRU. He was disappointed to receive a lukewarm, non-committal welcome - possibly because of his lack of security at the kibbutz, where he had made no secret of his Communist convictions and told a senior Mapam member that he would be happy to help the Party establish ‘a direct link to Moscow’. In 1950 Avni entered the Israeli Foreign Ministry, where he behaved with much greater discretion. A later security enquiry ‘had no difficulty finding people who had known Avni as a militant Communist’ at his kibbutz but found ‘practically universal admiration’ for him among his fellow diplomats, who were entirely unaware that his real loyalty was to the Soviet Union.

  In 1952 Avni had his first foreign posting as Israeli commercial attaché in Brussels, where he was also appointed security officer and given the keys to the legation’s only safe, in which classified documents were kept. Having successfully renewed contact with the GRU, he began photographing the contents of the safe. After his arrest four years later, he admitted to his interrogator, ‘I gave them everything I had.’ Remarkably, Avni’s enthusiasm for the Soviet Union survived even the paranoia of the ‘Jewish doctors’ plot’. He later told his interrogator that Stalin had been a ‘genius’ and initially refused to believe that Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956 denouncing Stalin was genuine.13

  While in Brussels, Avni also began to be employed by Mossad, using his fluent German to pose as a German businessman and make contact with former Nazis. Late in 1953, Avni was offered both a full-time position in Mossad and the post of commercial attaché in Belgrade and Athens. It was agreed that during his next posting he would combine espionage for Mossad with work as commercial attaché, based chiefly in Belgrade, and thereafter move to a permanent position in Mossad. Once in Belgrade, Avni was assigned a new controller operating under diplomatic cover as first secretary at the Soviet embassy.14 Though he believed himself still to be working for the GRU, he had - without his knowledge - been transferred to the KGB with the codename CHEKH. His KGB file identifies him, while in Belgrade, as acting head of Mossad operations in West Germany and Greece.15 Among the operations which he personally conducted for Mossad, using his cover as a German businessman, was to penetrate the ranks of the former Wehrmacht officers employed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, after his 1954 coup, as military advisers in Egypt.16 In 1955-56 Avni supplied the KGB residency in Belgrade with the ciphers used by Mossad for communications with its Belgrade and Athens stations (probably enabling them to be decrypted), as well as details of Mossad personnel (probably both officers and agents) in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.17 As in Brussels, he gave his controller ‘everything I had’.

  Avni was caught early in 1956 and sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. When he finally came to terms with the fact that Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin was not - as he initially believed - a fabrication, he lost the uncompromising Communist faith which had inspired him since the age of fifteen. His experience, he recalls, closely resembled that memorably described by Arthur Koestler: ‘I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.’18

  Probably at about the time of Avni’s arrest, the KGB made initial contact with Yisrael Beer, Professor of Military History at Tel Aviv University as well as a well-known military commentator and lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) reserves, who was subsequently recruited as a Soviet agent. Beer had arrived in Palestine from Austria on the eve of the Anschluss in 1938, claiming to have been a member of the Schutzbund, the paramilitary defence organization of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, and to have taken part in the 1934 Viennese workers’ rising against the pro-Nazi Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss. In 1936 the Party had, allegedly, sent him to fight in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, where he had taken the pseudonym José Gregorio and risen to the rank of colonel, subsequently receiving further military training in Moscow at the Frunze Military Academy. Beer claimed that early in 1938 he had picked up by chance a biography of the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl: ‘I read it the whole night without stopping, and in the morning I . . . decided to go to Palestine.’ After his arrest in 1961, Beer’s account o
f his early career turned out to be wholly fraudulent. He had never been a member of the Schutzbund, fought in the Spanish Civil War or enrolled at the Frunze Military Academy. In reality, before leaving for Palestine in 1938 he had been only a clerk in the Austrian Zionist Federation.19 During Beer’s interrogation by Shin Bet, the British embassy in Tel Aviv reported to London that there was ‘some doubt about whether Beer really is a Jew, since he is uncircumcised, a feature uncommon even in assimilated Jewish circles in Austria’ .20

  There has since been speculation that Beer’s bogus autobiography was a ‘legend’ fabricated for him by Soviet intelligence. It is inconceivable, however, that the KGB or its predecessors would have devised a cover story which could be so easily disproved. Beer’s fantasy career in the Schutzbund and the International Brigades was his own, rather than Moscow’s, invention. The fact that Beer’s claims went unchallenged during the twenty-three years between his arrival in Palestine in 1938 and his arrest in 1961 reflected, as the British embassy told the Foreign Office, ‘the perpetual problem of security which Israel by its very nature is bound to face’: ‘It is a country of immigrants about whose origins and past in many cases nothing is known except for what they themselves reveal. It has been pointed out that hundreds of people in responsible positions in theory offer the same kind of risk as Beer.’21

  On his arrival in Palestine in 1938, Beer had succeeded in joining the Jewish settlement police. Soon afterwards he became a member of the Planning Bureau of the Haganah (the forerunner under the British mandate of the IDF), distinguishing himself in the first Arab- Israeli War and becoming a founder member of Mapam.22 The British military attaché later reported that Beer had become ‘a fairly close friend of Shimon Peres’, the ambitious young Deputy Minister of Defence.23 Among the most important intelligence provided by Beer early in his career as a KGB agent was information on Peres’s secret attempts in 1957 to obtain military assistance from West Germany and buy reconditioned German submarines. When the news was leaked to the press, possibly by Beer, there was such a public outcry that the Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, with whom Beer had also established a close relationship, threatened to resign. Shin Bet burgled Beer’s Tel Aviv apartment but failed to find incriminating evidence.

  It has been plausibly suggested that Shin Bet was slow to follow up its suspicions about Beer after 1957 because of his links with the Prime Minister. Early in 1961, however, a surveillance team took up residence opposite Beer’s apartment. On 30 March he was observed apparently handing over a briefcase to Viktor Sokolov, previously identified as one of Aharon Cohen’s case officers. By the time a warrant had been obtained and Beer had been arrested in the early hours of the following morning, the briefcase was back in his possession. Inside, doubtless photographed by the Tel Aviv residency, were a classified military report and extracts from Ben-Gurion’s diary. It was later discovered that the Prime Minister’s diary for the period January to July 1956 was missing. The probability is that this had been among the first documents supplied by Beer to the KGB.24 The British embassy informed the Foreign Office that, ‘Not only was Beer closely concerned with the Ministry of Defence but he was also a friend of many people in high positions in the Government. The Police have already interviewed over one hundred persons and many of them have admitted that they have spoken to him more freely than they should have done.’25 Beer was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment in 1962 and died in jail four years later.

  None of the Israeli agents recruited in the mid-1960s whose files were noted by Mitrokhin appears to have compared in importance with either Avni or Beer.26 The best indication of the KGB’s lack of high-level Israeli sources was its complete surprise at the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967. Before the war, the Soviet embassy had been contemptuous of Israel’s capacity to take on its Arab neighbours. In May one of the embassy’s leading informants, Moshe Sneh, formerly a Mapam politician but now leader of the Israeli Communist Party, told the Soviet ambassador, Dmitri Chubakhin, that if there was another Arab-Israeli war, Israel would win. Chubakhin replied scornfully, ‘Who will fight [for Israel]? The espresso boys and the pimps on Dizengoff [Tel Aviv’s main] Street?’27 The Centre first discovered the Israeli surprise attacks on Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian targets early on 5 June not from the Tel Aviv residency but from intercepted news reports by Associated Press.28 In the immediate aftermath of the stunning Israeli victory, the residency itself seemed stunned. According to a Shin Bet officer responsible for the surveillance of residency personnel:

  They were like scared mice. They didn’t understand what was going on, had no idea how this attack had fallen on them from out of the clear blue sky, or who was up against whom. They made a few attempts to leave the embassy to meet with their agents and ascertain what Israel’s goals were. They didn’t get a thing. This was the position until they were pulled out.29

  Moscow’s decision (which it later regretted) to break off diplomatic relations with Israel and thus to close the legal residency in the legation caused further disruption to KGB operations. Since 1964 the Centre had had plans to base a group of operations officers at the Russian Orthodox Church mission in Jerusalem.30 After the closure of the Soviet embassy, Shin Bet quickly realized that the KGB residency had moved to the mission.31 But the mission offered a much smaller and less secure base for KGB operations than the legation. The fact that its budget was only a fraction of those of the major Middle Eastern residencies is testimony to the decline of intelligence operations inside Israel after 1967.32 The KGB lost contact with a number of the agents it had recruited before the Six-Day War.33

  In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Markus Wolf, the head of the East German HVA, found the KGB, despite the decline in its operations inside Israel, ‘fixated on Israel as an enemy’.34 The Centre, like the Politburo, was particularly alarmed by the effect of the war on Jewish communities in the Soviet Union. One Russian Jew, Anatoli Dekatov, later wrote in an article which he dared to send for publication in the Jerusalem Post:

  The victory of the tiny Israeli state over the hosts of the Arab enemies sent a thrill through the hearts of the Jews in Russia, as it did, I suppose, for Jews all over the world. The feeling of deep anxiety for the fate of Israel with which Soviet Jewry followed the events was succeeded by boundless joy and an overpowering pride in our people. Many, and especially the young, realized their Jewish identity for the first time . . . The anti-Israel campaign in the Soviet mass media served only to spread further Zionist feeling among the Jews.35

  Immediately following the Six-Day War, Moscow banned all emigration to Israel. A year later, however, irritated by Western denunciations of the ban as a breach of Jewish human rights, Andropov and Gromyko jointly proposed to the Politburo a limited resumption of emigration ‘in order to contain the slanderous assertions of Western propaganda concerning discrimination against the Jews in the Soviet Union’. The KGB, they added, would continue to use this emigration ‘for operational goals’ - in other words to infiltrate agents into Israel.36 In 1969 a record number of almost 3,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate. Though the number fell to little more than 1,000 in 1970, it rose sharply to 13,000 in 1971 - more than in the whole of the previous decade. In both 1972 and 1973 over 30,000 Jews were allowed to leave for Israel.37

  The sharp rise in exit visas, however, fell far short of keeping pace with demand. The unprecedented surge in Jewish applications for permits to emigrate to Israel was confronted with bureaucratic obstructionism and official persecution. All applicants from technical professions, even those employed as clerks, were dismissed from their jobs. Students whose families applied for exit visas were expelled from their universities and required to perform three years’ military service, after which they could not apply for visas for another five years. The KGB reviewed every application and was usually responsible for deciding the outcome. In the case of individuals well known either in the Soviet Union or in the West, the decision taken always carried Andropov’s personal signature.
In August 1972 a ‘diploma tax’ was introduced, obliging all those emigrants who had received higher education to refund the cost. All applicants for exit visas were branded in effect as enemies of the Soviet Union.38

  During the early 1970s the ‘refuseniks’, those who had been denied exit visas, formed themselves into groups, contacted Western journalists and organized a series of protests ranging from demonstrations to hunger strikes. The KGB sent a stream of reports, often signed personally by Andropov, to the Politburo and the Central Committee, reporting the resolute action taken to ‘neutralize’ even the most minor protests. Every protest was interpreted as part of an international Zionist conspiracy against the Soviet Union: