Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  The Israelis, despite being treated as inferiors, were sending the CIA what they billed as hot material—even if it was slightly warmed-up leftovers. The Americans displayed “great enthusiasm” at what they received, Manor recalled, “and they asked us to gather more and more material for them.”

  “Sometimes I didn’t understand why they needed us,” he continued. “They asked for Romanian cash, telephone directories, maps of cities, and even the price of bread in the Eastern bloc countries.” Manor and his liaison team were determined, though, never to give the Americans names of Israelis.

  What the CIA did not realize was how easily the Israelis got their information. They conducted “friendly interrogations” of new immigrants, without needing to run expensive undercover operations or plant agents behind enemy lines.

  It may have been easy, but the program—code-named Operation Balsam—put Israel in the position of a short-order cook serving up every dish that the CIA ordered. Furthermore, Balsam was compartmentalized. Other parts of the Israeli intelligence community did not know about the program.

  The CIA’s Angleton came to Israel in April 1952 to see the faces who were feeding him so much information. “I greeted him at the airport, together with Reuven Shiloah,” Manor said half a century later. “Jim stayed at the Sharon Hotel in Herzliya, which at the time was the only five-star hotel, but he spent most of the time in my little two-room apartment on Pinsker Street in Tel Aviv.

  “Out of seven days, he spent four with me. He would arrive at 11 p.m. and stay until 4 a.m., and then I would drive him back to his hotel. My wife was in the next room, and from time to time she served coffee. He brought a bottle of whiskey with him and drank all the time, but he never got drunk. I didn’t understand how a person could drink so much without getting drunk. I myself didn’t drink, and he came to terms with that.”

  Angleton seemed to be a fanatic about everything, including his suspicions about Manor.

  “Eventually, after maybe 30 years, he told me why he had really come to Israel,” Manor said. “He had heard that I, a new immigrant from Romania, was conducting Operation Balsam, and that terrified him. He actually came to examine me. That was the reason why he, the chief of counterintelligence, was in charge of the liaison. They suspected us. But at the end of the visit, I felt that he had a positive impression, and he told Shiloah that he was pleased to have me in charge of the operation.”

  Manor asked Angleton if he could arrange some training for Israel’s counterintelligence officers, and the American agreed. Six Shin Bet men flew to Washington in October 1952, but they did not like the course and complained that it was all “theory.”

  One might consider it absurd that young Israelis who had never before traveled to America, given the chance to do some tourism and rub shoulders with the mighty CIA, were so grumpy.

  To quell their discontent, Manor recalled, “Jim sent me two plane tickets for myself and my wife, so I went to Washington and reassured the guys. “Jim tried to ensure that I had a pleasant stay,” Manor continued. “I met with him a few times at my hotel. He also showed me a new device called a lie detector. I asked him to let one of the students, Zvi Aharoni, into a lie detector course.”

  Aharoni got together with the inventor in Chicago and returned with a gift arranged by Angleton: the first polygraph in Israel. A decade later, Aharoni would be part of the team that captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.

  Weak in technology, Manor asked Uncle Sam—specifically Uncle Jim—for more gifts. “So they gave us microphones, wiretapping equipment for telephones, and cameras,” Manor recalled.

  But at this stage, the relationship was still not fully one of trust. Israeli intelligence did not ask the CIA for any raw intelligence, though the Mossad could have used some. Manor said: “We were afraid that they would ask us, in return, for information about the Arab world.”

  That became an Israeli espionage trait for many years: a reluctance to share material with liaison partners, even the apparently closest allies. The Israelis believed they had the best data in the world and had doubts about where it would go if they shared such gold. America, after all, also made deals with Arab security services and tried to cultivate them with favors.

  CIA and other U.S. intelligence officials keenly felt that Israel was not giving as much as it could, and from an American point of view the mindset seemed to change only half a century later—after the terrorism of 9/11 triggered a greater sense of all being in the same boat. Yet senior Mossad operatives felt that they were sharing “almost everything,” as one put it, “unless it endangered our sources or some ongoing operations.”

  Angleton asked the Israelis in 1954 to step up cooperation sharply, and not just pass along tidbits from conversations with new immigrants in Israel. Now the American wanted something a lot more ambitious. He suggested that Israeli intelligence open secret stations in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

  “With considerable hesitation, we agreed,” Manor said. “I personally recruited and briefed a number of people and sent them to be our representatives in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia. But I didn’t agree to send people to Moscow, because I was afraid they would be caught there.”

  The intelligence officers were assigned as diplomats and operated in Israel’s embassies under that cover. Manor said: “My instructions to my people were: ‘Don’t endanger yourselves, look for connections you can make as diplomats, and try to get people to give you political information.’ I didn’t even dream of military information.”

  In a way, they were acting as surrogates for the Americans, who knew that intelligence officers at U.S. embassies would be under surveillance and suspicion a lot more than would Israelis. This was a wonderful convenience for America that ended after the 1967 war, when the Communist nations broke their relations with the Jewish state.

  The Manor-Angleton connection explains why it fell to Shin Bet—and not, more naturally, to the foreign espionage experts at the Mossad—to run the official liaison with America and even to send operatives abroad. It was all personal. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who did not care a whit for bureaucratic titles, saw that Manor was the man forging a relationship with the CIA.

  It would be more than 10 years before the Mossad would assert its primacy in friendly foreign ties. Agency chief Meir Amit, after 1963, would insist on a restructuring of the intelligence community—including professional titles.

  The separate agency Nativ, which conducted secret ties with Jewish communities in the Soviet-bloc nations and arranged transportation for Jews to Israel, also posted officers at embassies in Eastern Europe under diplomatic cover. Nativ did not avoid the Soviet Union and indeed could not. Israel looked at the millions of Soviet Jews as a reservoir for the future growth of the Jewish state. The pools of immigration from Arab lands were drying up, yet eventually, a huge number of Jews would move to Israel from Russia, Romania, and other ex-Communist countries.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, some of those Nativ representatives were arrested and expelled by the host governments, mainly the Soviet regime in Moscow, for what were termed hostile and undiplomatic activities.

  When Manor began expanding his personal and professional networking with Angleton, the Israeli was still only the head of the counterespionage department within Shin Bet. Manor was summoned by Harel, who had taken over the Mossad and was the overall “Memuneh” in charge of the entire intelligence community.

  Harel surprised Manor by offering him the directorship of Shin Bet in mid-1952. The Memuneh was apparently dissatisfied with the incumbent, his former assistant, Isidore Roth, who had Hebraized his name to the homonym Izzy Dorot.

  Dorot moved over to the Mossad and worked with Harel for another 11 years as his right-hand man for special missions. After his retirement, however, Dorot was completely forgotten for four decades. There was no mention of his having been the second director of Shin Bet. Only in the 21st century was his role reinstated, when Shin Bet became
slightly more open and featured a brief history of itself on an official website.

  As for Manor, he still thought of himself as a new immigrant and thus had never dared to hope that Ben-Gurion would make him one of the chiefs of intelligence. “I was unknown and not a member of Mapai, the ruling party,” he recalled. “But I was invited to a meeting with Ben-Gurion, and he quizzed me for three hours and then gave me the job.”

  Now, with a Harel-Manor team helming a secret relationship with American intelligence, the Israelis consciously reached out to the Western world to prove that they were valuable allies. The CIA and other Western agencies valued Israel’s strategic contributions but harbored reservations about the capability of a tiny country. The Jewish state also seemed to be struggling still with its economic and political identity: Was it socialist or capitalist?

  Israel’s breakthrough into the top echelon of Western intelligence came with a coup scored in the heart of Communism. Manor, Harel, and their boys managed to outrun the CIA’s Angleton, the British MI6, the French SDECE, West Germany’s BND and all the others who were scurrying around Eastern Europe in search of a speech: a sheaf of papers deemed as valuable as gold.

  Chapter Four

  From Warsaw With Love

  “I acted on impulse,” said Viktor Grayevsky, the man who boosted the prestige of Israeli intelligence to a new level by handing it one of its most significant successes. That occurred in April 1956, when Grayevsky unknowingly cemented the friendship between Amos Manor and the CIA’s James Angleton, giving great pleasure to both and to the governments they served.

  In retrospect, what Grayevsky did—a succession of coincidences and lucky breaks upon which espionage agencies capitalize—launched the covert side of a relationship that has continued to bind the United States and Israel in dire, often unexpected circumstances. His place in history also demonstrated the value of well-placed Jews, many of whom have aided Israeli intelligence.

  “In hindsight, I know that I was young and foolish,” Grayevsky said decades later, a retired man in his 80s, sitting in his small apartment in a suburb south of Tel Aviv. He could barely believe what he had done. “Had the Russians and Poles discovered me, we wouldn’t be speaking today. I don’t know whether they would have killed me, but I certainly would have sat in prison for many years.”

  Born in 1925 in Krakow, a once palatial city that was the seat of Poland’s kings, his original name was Victor Spielman. As a teenager, he escaped with his family to the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II. In 1946 he returned to Poland, joined the Communist Party, studied journalism at a government academy, worked for the official Polish news agency, and made sure to shed his Jewish-sounding name.

  The newly minted Viktor Grayevsky rose to the post of senior editor, responsible for the department that covered the Soviet Union and other socialist partner nations.

  “It was a position that opened the doors to the party and the government for me,” he recalled. In 1949, his parents and his sister emigrated to Israel—part of the efforts coordinated by the secret agency to be later known as Nativ. Grayevsky decided to remain in Poland.

  In December 1955, his father contracted a serious illness, and Grayevsky felt he needed to visit him in Israel. To organize the trip and obtain a visa, he met with Yaakov Barmor, ostensibly the first secretary in the Israeli embassy in Warsaw but in fact one of the Shin Bet officers sent abroad by Manor.

  “I didn’t know he was from intelligence,” said Grayevsky. “I thought he was just a diplomat.”

  The visit to Israel rocked his world view. Grayevsky became a Zionist. He kept that fact to himself, of course, but after returning to Poland he decided to move to Israel. Before potentially ruining his career by filing the necessary application to leave, he kept on working and socializing.

  He did not lack for girlfriends in Warsaw, but one in particular had an interesting Jewish background. Lucia Baranowsky had fled from the ghetto in Lvov and joined the anti-Nazi partisans during the war. That was a respectable background for Communists, and she rubbed shoulders with many senior party officials. Her husband was a deputy prime minister, and she worked for the Communist Party’s general secretary, Edward Ochab—the leader of Poland.

  She was 35 years old, with one son, but her family life was in shambles. Baranowsky and her husband lived in the same apartment, but separately.

  “Her marriage was not a success, and she was my girlfriend in every sense,” Grayevsky recalled with an old man’s pride. At the time of the affair, he was 30.

  It was the second week of April 1956, four months after his return from Israel, and he was meeting Lucia for coffee. She was especially busy, so he hung around her desk in the headquarters of the party’s Central Committee.

  “Everyone knew me. To the guards and the office workers, I was almost a member of the family there. While I was talking with Lucia, I noticed a thick booklet with a red binding, with the words: ‘The 20th Party Congress, the speech of Comrade Khrushchev.’ In the corner it said: ‘Top Secret’.”

  That was one of the few copies sent by order of the Soviet Politburo to leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries.

  “Like other people, I had heard rumors about the speech,” Grayevsky added. “We heard that the United States had offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who could obtain the speech. We also knew that all the intelligence services, all the diplomats, and all the journalists in the world wanted to get their hands on the speech.

  “Thus, when I saw the red booklet, I immediately understood its importance. It mainly aroused my curiosity as a journalist. I told Lucia: ‘I’ll take the booklet, go home for an hour or two, and read it.’

  “She said, ‘Fine, but I go home at 4 p.m., so return it by then, because we have to put it in the safe.’”

  Here was Grayevsky, holding the world’s most sought- after document, which detailed the crimes of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. It had just been handed to the Polish journalist as casually as a shopping list.

  “I put the booklet under my coat and left the building, without anyone being suspicious or examining me. After all, they all knew me. At home, when I read the speech I was shocked. Such crimes. Stalin, a murderer!”

  The document was the text of a speech delivered by the new leader of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, to a party congress in Moscow, where he exposed—for the first time—the realities of Stalin’s three decades of iron-fisted rule: mass arrests, the torture and killing of political prisoners, people disappearing to the prison camps known as the Gulag, the transfer of entire national populations, forced labor, and megalomaniacal agricultural and industrial projects. These were hidden atrocities that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.

  The speech was not only a history lesson, but a message that the new leader in Moscow would be embarking on a new course.

  Khrushchev ordered that a limited number of copies be translated and printed, for distribution to the party leaders in each satellite country dominated by the Russians. He did not want the contents known to the rest of the world.

  “I felt that I was holding an atom bomb, and since I knew that the entire world was looking for the speech, I understood that if I threw the bomb it would explode,” said Grayevsky, explaining his initial decision to do nothing with the text.

  “I was going back to return the booklet to Lucia, but on the way I thought about it a lot. Then I decided to go to the embassy, to Yaakov Barmor. Poland hadn’t done anything bad to me, but my heart was with Israel, and I wanted to help.

  “I went to the embassy and rang the bell. The building was surrounded by Polish soldiers and policemen, and there were cameras all around, checking everyone who entered. I went to Barmor’s office and told him: ‘Look what I have.’”

  As Grayevsky remembered it, the Israeli diplomat literally turned white, and then red—the colors of Poland’s flag, as it happened. “Then he changed colors again. He asked to take the booklet for a minute, and he returned to me an hour and
a half later. I knew he was photographing it. He came back, gave me the booklet, and said, ‘Thank you very much.’”

  The senior Polish journalist did his best to remain calm as he walked the speech back to Lucia. She would die in Poland 15 years later. By then, Grayevsky had moved to Israel. “We never spoke about what happened with the speech,” he said.

  He emphasized that he neither requested nor received any payment or other reward. “I acted out of an impulse that stemmed from my connection to Israel. It was a bouquet from an intended future immigrant to the State of Israel.”

  A very few days after Grayevsky’s visit to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, Zelig Katz entered the office of Amos Manor at Shin Bet headquarters in Jaffa. It was a Friday afternoon, April 13, 1956.

  Before ending his work week and heading home, Manor asked Katz—his principal office assistant—whether anything had arrived from Eastern Europe. He was not expecting anything special—just routine reports from his station chiefs.

  “Yes,” Katz replied. “Material has arrived from Warsaw.”

  “Anything interesting?” Manor muttered.

  “There’s some speech by Khrushchev from the congress,” said Katz, clearly having no idea of the weight of his words.

  Manor practically burst out of his chair. “What!?” he shouted. “Where’s the material?”

  “In my room,” said Katz.

  “Well, then, bring it immediately!” his boss thundered.

  Katz rushed to his room and returned with 70 photographed pages in Polish. Manor later recalled: “I said to him, ‘You’re an idiot. You are now holding in your hand one of the most important secrets in the world.’”