by Dan Raviv
Levi flew several times to France, ostensibly to visit relatives. He always carried a small Minox camera with him and would keep taking photographs left and right. He would ask his colleagues to pose for photos, and he even took pictures near the entrance of Shin Bet headquarters in the Jaffa flea market.
The others in the unit thought he was eccentric, but it never occurred to them that it was anything more than that. Not a single warning light flashed in their heads. They were all busy with their work: shadowing foreign diplomats, breaking into their embassies and homes, and planting microphones that were provided by the CIA.
However, in 1957 a large wave of immigration swept in from Poland, and Levi’s jig was up. Among the new arrivals debriefed by Shin Bet—as part of Operation Balsam for the CIA—was Jefim Gildiner, who confessed that he had been a captain in Poland’s security service. Gildiner also revealed that he was the case officer for a Polish spy inside Israel: Levi Levi.
“We were shocked,” Amos Manor recalled. Levi was put under surveillance, but he was very cautious; no evidence that would stand up in court was found.
Still, he was called to the government’s manpower office and fired. Astonishingly, Shin Bet allowed him to travel to France—once again to see his “family.” Later, it would be learned that he met in Paris with Polish intelligence officers, who debriefed him and ordered him to return to Israel: right back into the Biblically suggestive lion’s den.
Polish chutzpa reached a new zenith when Levi flew back to Tel Aviv, met with the chief of the manpower bureau, and demanded that he be reinstated in Shin Bet—or he would sue his employer in court.
Shin Bet decided to go back to shadowing him. This time, Levi was spotted making contact with an intelligence controller in Poland’s embassy.
Manor finally had Levi arrested, but he still refused to admit that he was a spy. “We were desperate,” the Shin Bet chief recalled. “We knew we had no serious evidence against him, and we were preparing to release him when a miracle happened!” That occurred courtesy of Israel’s intelligence liaison with French secret services.
A Polish intelligence colonel, Wladyslav Mroz, had just defected to France. In his debriefings, he revealed some details about a spy from Poland inside Israel’s intelligence community.
Manor himself flew to Paris and was handed a dossier by French domestic security, which helped solve the mystery.
Finally, during another round of interrogations supervised by Manor, Levi broke down and confessed. He was tried in secret and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He served seven years, and when freed for good behavior he was put onto a ship out of the country, his eventual fate unknown. It is believed that Levi died in Australia, where he actually did have relatives.
Another bad apple in the clandestine bunch was Mordecai (Motke) Kedar. He had been a petty criminal before being recruited by military intelligence, but he is remembered for the most severe crime committed by an Israeli operative while on an assignment: murdering a Jewish businessman in Argentina who was a sayan (a “helper”) for the Mossad.
Sayanim, as revealed by a former Mossad cadet, are foreigners who, for personal reasons, are willing to help by making a lot of arrangements that make things easier for Israeli “visitors.” The helpers are usually Jewish—but not always—and are not to be told anything about the mission itself, largely for their own safety. Israel has never admitted using Jews as sayanim, and doing so could carry a danger of endangering local Jewish communities.
Born in Poland as Mordecai Kravitzki, Kedar was undergoing a total transformation. He was going to be planted inside Egypt by Aman’s Unit 131, the military’s plainclothes operations department. For months in Argentina, he was supposed to be developing a “legend,” a complete cover story.
The reasons for stabbing his sayan 80 times in 1957 were never clear, and all details were concealed when Kedar was secretly put on trial in Israel and then jailed under a false name.
Within Ramle Prison, he was known only as “X4.” In the neighboring cell was Avri El-Ad, the former Unit 131 case officer who was suspected of betraying his colleagues in Egypt. El-Ad wrote later that they played chess, mentally, by tapping out their moves by Morse code on a wall between the cells.
“Don’t let them drag you down!” Kedar once tapped. “If you let them demoralize you, you’re a broken man.”
Kedar refused to confess to any crimes. In prison, he maintained his physical fitness and became a disciple of Ayn Rand. After 17 years in prison—including seven years without a cellmate—this tough guy was released in 1974 and demanded a new hearing. His request was rejected.
When the Aman commander who hired Kedar—Yehoshafat Harkabi, who later would become famous as a professor and peace campaigner—was asked about the obviously horrible personnel choice, he did not rend his clothing in regret. “People who are recruited for these operations are not uncomplicated people,” Harkabi said. “There is always some type of story.”
After serving his prison term, Kedar left Israel and lived a vagabond life—eventually making his way to Los Angeles, as a yacht operator between the United States and Latin America. Nearly 50 years after his conviction in the secret trial, he told a few reporters that he was innocent, that he had been framed by Harel, and that he would write his memoirs and reveal the whole truth. He never did.
Isser Harel, who arranged Kedar’s recall and imprisonment, disclosed that serious consideration had been given simply to killing him so as to cover up the crime. There would then have been less chance of a diplomatic clash with Argentina or any embarrassment to the intelligence community. “I was insistent from the beginning that we cannot take the law into our own hands,” Harel wrote. “For this, there are judges and courts.”
Harel proudly added: “During my tenure as Memuneh, no traitor was ever executed.”
This was narrowly true, although some recalled Avner Israel as nearly an exception. He was the operative who was kidnapped by Harel’s snatch squad in 1954 and died during a flight—because of an overdose of sedative—with his corpse unceremoniously dumped into the Mediterranean.
From Harel’s viewpoint, the Kedar case supplied further proof for his old argument that running secret agents was too serious to be left to Aman. Harel claimed that the Mossad was the most qualified agency to send Israelis on ultra-sensitive missions abroad.
A deal was struck. Military intelligence retained responsibility for operations inside Arab countries—especially the planting of spies under deep cover. But the Mossad would build up its own core of undercover officers, who would be tasked with missions all around the world. Harel’s tiny operations department could now be stretched to global proportions.
The Memuneh got right to the new challenge with his typical, uncompromising vigor. As he had authority over both the Mossad and Shin Bet, he insisted that the new unit be available to both agencies and that it utilize the best human resources of both. It would be bureaucratically based within Shin Bet. Years later, Harel said it was like the “birth” of something new and exciting.
Shin Bet scored a success in 1958 when it spotted Aharon Cohen, an expert on the Middle East for the left-wing Mapam party, having regular meetings with a Soviet diplomat in Tel Aviv who was known to be a spy. Cohen was arrested, but party leaders accused Harel of framing him. They pointed out that Harel had planted microphones in their offices five years earlier. Still, Cohen was convicted and sentenced to five years; Israel’s supreme court later cut the prison term in half.
The success in detecting Cohen’s cloaked foreign relations was partly due to a new surveillance method honed by the Shin Bet operations unit. The team had undergone a major shake-up after the failure to notice Levi Levi’s disloyalty, and among the new tools was a clever trick called “the Comb.” It was a method for catching spies by making them come to you.
“We were a small unit,” said Yair Racheli, one of Shin Bet’s first operatives, joining the agency in the early 1950s. “With our limited resources—dozen
s of men, just a few cars and insufficient radio communications—we found it hard to shadow the spies of two dozen Soviet-bloc countries. They were professionals and knew how to spot us, how to evade us, and they shook us off.”
So Zvi (Peter) Malkin devised new techniques. Instead of following all the Russian, Polish, Czech, and other presumed spies operating under diplomatic cover wherever they might go, Shin Bet’s men divvied up Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and some other key cities. When targets of foreign espionage were identified, the Israelis anticipated where the spies were going and waited for them there.
In a basketball sense, this was zone defense rather than man-to-man. Israel in the 1950s and ’60s was so small, with fewer than three million people, that it really could be sliced into zones.
“Instead of following them, we were waiting for them at the zone where we believed they were heading,” Racheli explained. “A lot was based on improvisation and intuition. Sometimes we were wrong, and they went to another zone. But in the end, the system of combing the cities proved itself and paid off.”
The Comb struck gold for a second time in Haifa on a cold evening in March 1960. A Shin Bet operations team was on a training exercise, practicing Malkin’s surveillance pattern, when one of its members spotted a car and recognized its license plate as belonging to Czechoslovakia’s embassy in Tel Aviv.
The diplomat inside was known to be the station chief of the STB, his nation’s intelligence service. He was also known for his clumsiness, carelessness, and laziness—truly the triumvirate of terrible behavior for a spy. The adrenaline started flowing among the Israelis in Haifa, as the unit leader improvised immediately and changed the exercise into a genuine operation.
The diplomat was soon discovered in a nearby restaurant, in the company of an unidentified man.
Shin Bet shadowing teams now focused on the unknown. He left the eatery and strolled to his parked car, which had Swiss license plates from the canton of Zurich. He drove away, and three Shin Bet cars followed him home. The man was readily identified as Professor Kurt Sitta, a scientist from Czechoslovakia who was teaching at the newly established physics department of the Technion—the university in Haifa that was rapidly becoming an Israeli equivalent of MIT.
Sitta was one of the first Soviet-bloc spies to penetrate Israel’s scientific community. He had previously taught at Syracuse University and in Brazil, and in 1955 the Technion invited him to lecture there. Sitta found that he liked the school, the country, and the people. Or so he said, as he gladly accepted the post of chairman of the physics department.
Sitta’s rare success, as a non-Jewish foreigner in Israel, provided a golden opportunity for the Czechs and their Soviet masters. The intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in Tel Aviv met frequently with the professor between 1955 and 1960, collecting a mountain of material. It took nearly five years, but with the lucky stroke of a Comb, Shin Bet did finally detect the espionage operation.
The surveillance lasted for three months, from March to June 1960. In addition to meetings with his Czech controller, Sitta proved to be an impressive womanizer. Shin Bet men soon developed a favorite assignment: following and photographing Sitta in the beautiful woods of Mount Carmel overlooking the harbor and the Mediterranean. Once or twice a week, during his lunch break, he would drive his American-made Swiss-numbered car—a rare luxury in then-austere Israeli society—the short distance from his office to the forest with a female student or faculty member. The Israeli surveillance teams were treated to the real-life equivalent of pornography.
On the night of June 16, 1960, two men knocked on the door of Sitta’s villa in an exclusive Haifa suburb with a San Francisco-style view of the sea from high above. One of the men was a Shin Bet operative, and the other was in the Special Branch of Israel’s national police. They drove Sitta away for arraignment on charges of spying.
At his trial, it emerged that he had been spying on Israel’s atomic energy commission. By coincidence or not, Sitta was arrested just two days before Israel’s experimental nuclear reactor at Nahal Sorek became operational. Israeli analysts compared his activities with those of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States and Klaus Fuchs in Britain, who betrayed those countries’ atomic secrets to the Soviet bloc.
Sitta was sentenced to five years in prison, but Israel—to head off any embarrassment—quickly paroled him to start a new academic life in West Germany. Senior Israelis said the Czech was only a small fish who dabbled in spying, and Harel insisted that Israel was not badly damaged.
The Comb paid off yet again, in March 1961, when agents spotted Viktor Sokolov, a senior Soviet spy operating under diplomatic cover in Tel Aviv, meeting with an Israeli they thought they recognized. It turned out to be Israel Be’er, a close advisor to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion.
Harel said that he had long suspected Be’er, who was a member of the left-wing Mapam party. Harel found it odd that Be’er kept trying to strike up a friendship with West Germany’s BND and its chief, General Reinhard Gehlen.
Gehlen—a consistent friend of Israeli intelligence—stood at the center of the East-versus-West struggle for Europe. The German general had run spies in the Soviet Union during World War II, and now he was reactivating his espionage network in Russia. The Soviets were desperate to find out what Gehlen knew and what he was doing. Be’er—a senior Israeli who could gain the German’s trust—might have had a chance of finding out for his true masters in the KGB.
Be’er denied everything stubbornly for days, but Shin Bet interrogators caught him in the kind of little lie that unravels whole cloths of untruth. Be’er claimed that the night he was spotted with the Russian intelligence agent Sokolov, he was actually out purchasing Cinzano, an imported drink he was crazy about, at one of Israel’s first supermarkets. Investigators confronted him with the fact that Cinzano was not sold in that store at all. Tripped up by a tiny detail, Be’er broke down.
In the interrogation and in court, Be’er admitted that he had invented his past. He had never received a doctorate in history, as he boasted, nor had he fought in the Spanish civil war. Confusion over who he really was deepened when, in prison, he renounced his courtroom confession and claimed his original autobiography was true.
Even without knowing his real name and background, the Israeli judges found the evidence against Be’er to be incontrovertible, and the Tel Aviv court had ample reason to sentence him to 15 years in prison for espionage. Until his dying day in prison in 1966, he insisted that he was no spy but a genuine patriot seeking only to make Israel non-aligned rather than pro-Western.
The Soviet espionage machine was gargantuan and persistent—forcing Harel to juggle a variety of counterespionage challenges—and these distractions may help explain why Harel ignored an important tip about a top Nazi war criminal. But the case he neglected, for over two years, was that of Adolf Eichmann, and capturing him would become one of the hallmark achievements in the history of Israeli intelligence.
In late 1957 Fritz Bauer, a Jewish lawyer who was the attorney general of the state of Hesse in West Germany, sent a letter to his Israeli counterpart that said Eichmann had been located—living in Argentina. Bauer later was able to supply Eichmann’s false name, Ricardo Klement.
Harel sent an agent to Buenos Aires to see the poor suburb where Eichmann was supposedly living, but no definite evidence could be found. The Memuneh and his new operations team could have done a lot more if he really wanted to, but the efforts were only half-hearted.
Chasing Nazis was not a high priority for Harel. Still, every Israeli felt that his nation had a historic responsibility to seek justice for the six million Jews who had been murdered by Nazi Germany. Two of the biggest names on an informal “most wanted list” for Israel were Eichmann, considered the architect of Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” for the “Jewish problem”; and Josef Mengele, the German physician who tortured concentration camp prisoners in the name of ghastly experimentation.
Bauer, the German pr
osecutor, certainly felt motivated to stay on Eichmann’s trail. He flew to Israel and complained to the Ministry of Justice that no one was acting on his information. Bauer provided the name of his source, and Harel sent another Israeli operative to follow up.
The tipster turned out to be a half-Jewish blind man, who had fled Germany to Argentina in 1938. His daughter was dating Nicholas Eichmann, who kept spouting anti-Semitic opinions and remained vague about his parents and his home address. Could young Eichmann be the notorious mass murderer’s son?
Yes, indeed. The blind man saw things more clearly than the Mossad, which had not bothered to check fully the lead to the Eichmann family’s front door.
Simon Wiesenthal, who would gain fame as a solitary, obsessive Nazi-hunter, also sent Israel many tips about Eichmann’s whereabouts. Only in 2010, five years after Wiesenthal’s death at age 96, was it revealed that he had been working for the Mossad for many decades—as something between a sayan and a paid agent. Assigned the code name Theocrat, Wiesenthal received a small monthly retainer from the Mossad, which helped him set up his research center in Vienna.
Harel did not like Wiesenthal, however, so at times Mossad operatives would be in touch with the Nazi-hunter without telling their boss.
Information about Eichmann was beginning to feel compelling, and, under pressure from Israel’s attorney general around the beginning of 1960, Harel decided to move. He sent more men, this time, to Argentina, and they found the German calling himself Klement. He did, indeed, resemble the elusive Eichmann.
Harel informed Ben-Gurion, who had returned to the post of prime minister, and the Old Man immediately gave approval to kidnap Eichmann so he could be put on trial. He was to be brought to Israel—dead or alive, but very preferably alive. Ben-Gurion said it would be a lesson for the world.
Sixty-seven men and women, from both the Mossad and Shin Bet, were chosen for the kidnap team, including support and surveillance roles. No one would be compelled to take part; all would have to volunteer, and they all did. Almost all had lost relatives in the Holocaust and hated Eichmann. Harel cautioned them to control their emotions.