In 1949, three brothers from a Jewish family in Bulgaria arrived in Haifa. The oldest, Alexander Israel, had just graduated from the engineering school in Sofia. He enlisted in the army, was given the rank of captain, and was posted to the Israeli Navy. Captain Israel was a handsome and extremely charming young man. He was valued by his superiors and was assigned to top-secret research in electronic warfare and development of new weapons. Given a high security clearance, he had access to some of the most sensitive material. He changed his first name to the Hebrew Avner and in 1953 he married Matilda Arditi, a pretty, young woman of Turkish origin. The young couple settled in Haifa, close to Israel’s major naval base. Matilda was very much in love with her charismatic husband, but unaware of the less delightful aspects of his personality.
She didn’t know that he had a long and colorful police record. Avner Israel had been accused of simultaneously leasing the same apartment to more than one renter; of posing as a refrigerator company representative who collected down payments for refrigerators that were not delivered; and of other such dealings. One case came to court, and he was summoned to report for trial on November 8, 1954.
Matilda, heavy with child, knew nothing of her husband’s fraud, nor of his affair with a pretty clerk at the Italian consulate in Haifa. Avner even proposed, and the Italian girl agreed on one condition: he must first convert to Catholicism.
For young Avner this posed no great problem. He already had converted once before, in Bulgaria, when he was forced to marry another Christian girl whom he had seduced. Her furious family had demanded—almost at gunpoint—that he convert and marry the young woman. Right after the wedding he fled from Sofia, his wife committed suicide, and then he returned to Sofia and to Judaism. Now he did it again. He traveled to Jerusalem with his paramour, was baptized in the Terra Santa convent, and changed his name to Ivor. Using documents provided by the Church, the charming captain registered with the Ministry of Interior and was issued a passport in his new name, Alexander Ivor.
He and his Italian girlfriend set November 7, 1954, as the date for their wedding. The trial in Haifa was set for November 8. Avner Israel, aka Alexander Ivor, had no intention of honoring any of those commitments. The time had come for him to vanish.
At the end of October, Captain Israel went on a two-week leave. He had no exit visa—but Alexander Ivor had one, and a full set of documents, some authentic, others fake. He bought a plane ticket to Rome, and on November 4 he left. Neither his wife nor his “fiancée” knew about his departure. Her fiancé gone, the Italian woman started an anxious search. Finally she turned to the Haifa police; with their help she discovered his address, where she was shocked to meet Mrs. Matilda Israel, in her seventh month of pregnancy.
In Rome Avner Israel vanished, but not for long. The Mossad resident agent there had good sources in the Arab diplomatic community in Italy. On November 17 an urgent cable reached Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv: “An Israeli officer, Alexander Ivor or Ivon or Ivy is here, and is trying to sell military information to the Egyptian military attaché.”
The ramsad and the new head of Shabak, Amos Manor, joined forces to find out who this was. In a few days they discovered his identity, and were dismayed to learn that he was an Israeli naval officer. Another telegram from Rome was even more troubling: the Mossad agent reported that Israel had sold the Egyptians the detailed plans of a large IDF base in Israel, and had been paid $1,500, which he had deposited in the Credit Suisse Bank. He was said to have promised the Egyptians more information, and agreed to fly to Egypt, to be debriefed there.
A few days later, another cable: “The Egyptian embassy has ordered two tickets to Cairo for the end of November, at the TWA agency. Apparently the two passengers will be the Egyptian military attaché and the Israeli officer.”
Alarm bells rang at Mossad headquarters. To Isser, there was a huge difference between a debriefing of an informant by a military attaché in a foreign country—and the transfer of that same informant to Egypt’s capital, where he would be interrogated by experts, who would obtain even more detailed and dangerous information from him. Isser was determined to prevent—at all costs—the flight of Avner Israel to Cairo.
He decided to dispatch his operational team to Rome. At these early days, the Mossad didn’t have an operations department yet and used the operational unit of the Shabak. Its commander, one of the best agents Israel had, was a legend to his men—Rafi Eitan. Born on a kibbutz, he was a stubby, bespectacled, jolly little fellow but also daring, creative, and ruthless. A Palmach fighter in the years preceding independence, he had been deeply involved in Aliya Beth, the secret organization that smuggled Jews to Palestine despite the British restrictions. They had to escape from Europe on ramshackle boats, evade British warships cruising the shores of Palestine, land at deserted beaches, and then blend into the local Jewish population. Rafi’s most famous exploit had been to blow up the British radar installation on Mount Carmel, near Haifa, which detected the approach of Aliya Beth vessels. To reach the radar, Rafi had crawled through repulsive sewers and got himself named “Rafi the Smelly.” His future activities during the War of Independence confirmed his bravery and his wily intelligence. When Isser assembled his operational team, he recruited people with varying backgrounds: Holocaust survivors, Palmach and Haganah veterans, former members of the Irgun and the Stern group—right-wing militants whom he had hunted during the pre-state struggle. (One of the Mossad recruits was Yitzhak Shamir, a former leader of the Stern group and a future prime minister.)
Rafi was appointed head of the operational team.
He took off for Rome, together with agents Raphael Medan and Emmanuel (Emma) Talmor. Other agents joined them soon after. They immediately set up an ambush at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. At the last briefing before their departure, Isser had ordered them to stop Avner Israel at the airport. “He must never get on that plane. Fake a brawl, overpower him, and wound him if need be. And if all other moves fail—shoot and kill him!”
That was the first time ever that a license to kill was given to Israeli agents.
But the airport attack didn’t happen. The information about the trip to Egypt appeared erroneous; Israel stayed on in Rome awhile, and then, suddenly, left and started traveling across Europe, with Eitan’s team on his heels. As if trying to shake those who were chasing him, he went to Zurich, Geneva, Genoa, Paris, Vienna . . .
And then, all of a sudden, Captain Israel vanished. The Mossad agents looked for him everywhere, but failed. But then, Rafi Eitan’s usual luck came through. In Vienna there was an Israeli envoy of a secret organization, Nativ, whose mission was to expedite the flight of Jews from Russia and the Eastern Bloc—and bring them to Israel. The Nativ man maintained close ties with the Mossad. One day in December, his Bulgarian-born wife had a surprise for him.
“You won’t believe this,” she said, beaming. “This morning I was walking on the street, and I bumped into a friend of mine from Sofia. I hadn’t seen him for years. We went to school together, in the same class! What a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Really? What’s his name?” the husband asked.
“Alexander Israel. We’re meeting tomorrow for lunch.”
The Nativ envoy knew of Eitan’s search for a man who corresponded to his wife’s description and alerted him right away. The following day two Mossad agents went for lunch to the same restaurant, and sat not far from where Alexander Israel and his childhood friend were reminiscing. When Israel left the Nativ man’s wife, they clung to him like shadows.
A few days later, “Alexander Ivor” boarded an Austrian Airlines plane to Paris. In the seat next to his was a young and attractive woman. Ivor, a consummate womanizer, started a conversation with her, and she pleasantly responded. They decided to meet again in Paris for a night on the town. Just before landing, she turned to the officer: “Some friends of mine are meeting me at the airport. Would you like to join us? I’m sure there’ll be room in the car.”
Ivor
was delighted. At the airport, two well-dressed gentlemen were waiting for the lady. The four of them got into a car and headed for Paris. Ivor sat beside the driver. Night had fallen; the driver noticed a man standing by a poorly illuminated crossroad and waving, as if trying to hitch a ride. “Let’s take him,” he said. He stopped the car, and suddenly the “hitchhiker” and a few other men, emerging from the darkness, converged on the vehicle, while another automobile stopped behind them.
“We are being abducted!” Ivor shouted. Suddenly the man behind him grabbed him by the throat. Ivor struggled frantically against the grip of his attacker. The car door opened and the man standing outside jumped on Ivor and overpowered him. He drew a gun and shouted in Hebrew: “Another move—and you’re dead!”
Ivor froze. A hand, holding a chloroform-soaked pad, was slapped on his face, and Ivor sank into deep sleep.
He was surreptitiously brought to a safe house in Paris, where Rafi Eitan and his men interrogated him. He admitted that he had sold top-secret documents to the Egyptians, and that he had done it for the money. From Israel, Isser telegraphed an order to bring him back. Even the basest traitor, he believed, should stand trial, and his legal rights be respected. Eitan and his men drugged Avner, put him in a large crate, and loaded him on an Israeli Air Force Dakota cargo aircraft that used to fly once a week from Paris to Tel Aviv.
The road home was long and strenuous. The plane had to refuel in Rome and Athens. A well-known doctor—an anesthetist by the name of Yona Elian—flew with the group. Before each landing and takeoff, the doctor would inject their passenger with a soporific drug. After the Athens takeoff, however, disaster struck. Avner Israel, unconscious, suddenly started breathing heavily; his pulse accelerated and his heartbeat became irregular. Dr. Elian made feverish efforts to stabilize him and bring his fit under control, including trying to revive the convulsing man with artificial respiration, but to no avail. Long before the plane landed in Israel, the prisoner died.
Immediately after the landing, the Mossad agents called Isser and informed him of Israel’s death. The ramsad ordered them to leave the body on the plane and told the pilot to take off again. Far from Israel’s coast, the body was thrown from the aircraft.
This unexpected mishap led to a commotion at Mossad headquarters. Isser hurried to Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s office, and asked him to appoint a board of inquiry to investigate the officer’s death. Sharett appointed a two-man board, which cleared the Mossad agents from all wrongdoing. All they had done, the board ruled, was to bring the man to trial; they were not to blame for his death. The main reason for the death, they concluded, was apparently an overdose of the soporific that the doctor had injected. When asked years later, the doctor maintained that the death had been caused by abrupt changes in air pressure within the aircraft. (In 1960 he participated, once again as anesthetist, in Eichmann’s capture in Argentina.)
Isser’s men checked Avner Israel’s papers and discovered affidavits and letters of recommendation from the Catholic Church in Jerusalem; after selling his secrets to the Egyptians, he had planned to escape to South America. In his bags the agents found a ship ticket to Brazil.
The next problem Isser had to face was with Israel’s family. He should have invited Matilda to come in and tell her the whole truth. But the Mossad heads, embarrassed by the sorry end of the affair, preferred to bury the story and got the full support of Prime Minister Sharett. The Mossad leaked fabricated stories about Captain Avner Israel to the newspapers. They hinted that he had escaped from Israel after becoming entangled in personal debts and romantic affairs. These stories made fat headlines in the papers.
For many years, Matilda, her husband’s brothers, and her son, Moshe Israel-Ivor, didn’t know what had happened. They believed he was still living somewhere, maybe South America. That lie was unforgivable.
The first failure of this mission was the way they treated Israel, even though he was a traitor; the second was their conspiracy of silence, the expunging of Israel’s name from military records, the Mossad’s misleading of his wife and brothers. Rafi Eitan and several Mossad officers strongly objected to the ramsad’s decision to throw the body in the sea and deceive the family, but their hands were tied. “Little Isser was Mr. Security those days,” Eitan told us. “He was the absolute ruler of the secret services, and the intelligence community never disputed his decisions.”
The publication of this story, years later, demonstrates how difficult it is to obliterate the existence of a person. Even after they’re dead, they sometimes talk to us from beyond the grave.
Chapter Five
“Oh, That? It’s Khrushchev’s Speech . . .”
It all started with a love affair.
In the spring of 1956, Lucia Baranovski was head over heels in love with a handsome journalist, Victor Grayevski. Her marriage to the deputy prime minister of Communist Poland was on the rocks, and they hardly saw each other anymore. Lucia worked as a secretary to Edward Ochab, secretary general of the Polish Communist Party. The members of his staff had grown accustomed to charming Victor’s frequent visits to his lovely girlfriend. There were no secrets about Lucia’s feelings for this dashing young man.
Victor was a senior editor at the Polish News Agency (PAP), in charge of Soviet and Eastern European affairs. He was actually Jewish, and his real name was Victor Shpilman. But years ago, when he had joined the Communist Party, his friends had let him know that with a name like Shpilman he wouldn’t get far. So he changed it to Grayevski, which sounded Polish.
When the German Army invaded Poland in World War II, he was a child. His family had managed to cross into Russia and narrowly escaped the Holocaust. After the war, they came back to Poland. In 1949, Victor’s parents and younger sister emigrated to Israel. But he, a staunch and ardent Communist, stayed behind; Stalin’s admirer, he longed to help create a workers’ paradise.
But neither his friends and colleagues, nor even his beloved, knew that disenchantment had started gnawing at the young Communist’s heart. In 1955 he visited his family in Israel, and saw another world—free, progressive, a Jewish democratic nation, a dream of sorts, utterly different from the Communist propaganda he had been exposed to. Back in Poland, thirty-year-old Victor began to consider emigrating to Israel.
That morning in early April 1956, Victor came, as usual, to visit his sweetheart at the party secretary’s office. On a corner of her desk, he saw a brochure bound in a red cover, numbered, and stamped with the inscription TOP SECRET.
“What is this?” he asked her.
“Oh, that’s just Khrushchev’s speech,” she answered casually.
Victor froze. He had heard about Khrushchev’s speech, but had never met anybody who had heard or read a single sentence from it. It was one of the best-kept secrets of the Communist bloc.
Victor did know that Nikita Khrushchev, the almighty secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party, had delivered the speech at the party’s Twentieth Congress that had taken place the previous February at the Kremlin. On February 25, shortly before midnight, all foreign guests and heads of foreign Communist parties were asked to leave the hall. At midnight, Khrushchev took the podium and spoke to the fourteen hundred Soviet delegates. His speech was said to be a surprise and a terrible shock for everyone present.
But what had he said? According to an American journalist who dispatched a first report to the West, the speech had lasted for four hours, and Khrushchev had described in detail the terrible crimes of the man worshipped by millions of Communists all over the world—Stalin. Khrushchev, rumor had it, had accused Stalin of the massacre of millions. Some whispered that while listening to the speech many delegates cried and pulled out their hair in despair; some fainted or suffered heart attacks; at least two committed suicide after that night.
But not a word about Khrushchev’s revelations was published by the Soviet media. Rumors wafted about Moscow, and some passages of the speech were read in closed sessions of the party’s supreme bodies.
But the full text of the speech was guarded, as if it were a state secret. Foreign reporters had told Victor that the Western secret services were mounting an all-out effort to obtain the text. The CIA had even offered a $1 million award. It was estimated that the publication of the text, at the height of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc, could generate a political earthquake in the Communist countries and trigger an unprecedented crisis. Hundreds of millions of Communists, inside and outside Russia, blindly worshipped Stalin. The exposure of his crimes could destroy their faith and perhaps even cause the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But all the efforts to get the speech failed. It remained an enigma.
Lately Victor had learned that Khrushchev had decided to send a few numbered copies to Communist Party leaders in Eastern Europe, which was how that brochure, bound in red, had reached Lucia’s desk.
When Victor Grayevski spotted it, he had a crazy idea. He asked Lucia to lend it to him for a couple of hours, so he could read it at home, without all the hustle-bustle in this office. To his surprise, she agreed. She was happy to please him . . . “You can take it,” she said, “but you must bring it back before four P.M., I have to lock it in the safe.”
At home, Victor read the speech. It was indeed stunning. Khrushchev had shattered, boldly and mercilessly, the myth of Yosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Khrushchev had revealed that Stalin, during his years in power, had committed monstrous crimes and ordered the murder of millions. He’d reminded his audience that Lenin, the father of the Bolshevik Revolution, had warned the party against Stalin. Khrushchev condemned the cult of personality of the man who’d been hailed as the “Sun of the Nations.” He told of the forced relocation of entire ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, which led to countless deaths; of the “great purges” (1936–1937), when 1.5 million Communists were arrested and 680,000 of them executed. Out of 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Congress of the party, on Stalin’s orders 848 were executed, as well as 98 out of 138 candidates to the Central Committee. Khrushchev also spoke of the Doctors’ Plot, the fabricated accusations against some Jewish doctors who allegedly had conspired to murder Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Khrushchev’s words revealed Stalin as a mass murderer, who had massacred millions of Russians and other nationals, many of them loyal Communists. In four hours, the messiah had metamorphosed into a monster.
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