by Dan Raviv
Grayevsky moved to Israel from Poland in January 1957. The head of Shin Bet, Amos Manor, helped arrange a rental apartment and a job for him. In fact, two employers welcomed the new arrival: the Eastern Europe department of the Foreign Ministry, and the Polish-language broadcasts of Kol Israel—the Voice of Israel shortwave radio station.
He was also sent to a Hebrew language class, and that is where he got to know two of his classmates who were both Soviet diplomats. When they learned that Grayevsky worked at the Foreign Ministry, their interest grew and they invited him out to a lavish meal with plenty of vodka.
Grayevsky did not mind the eating and drinking, and he loyally reported all this to Manor. The Shin Bet chief recognized an opportunity, and he instructed Grayevsky to continue meeting with his Soviet friends. Manor assigned an experienced case officer to back up Grayevsky, who got to consume a lot of alcohol in the line of duty.
As is standard in such approaches, the two Soviets told Grayevsky that they were going abroad on vacation but would like to introduce him to a man who would be filling in.
Following the guidance of his Shin Bet handlers, Grayevsky readily agreed. The replacement was Viktor Kaloyev, ostensibly an administrator of the Russian Orthodox Church, who lived on the church grounds in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound. In reality, Kaloyev was another Soviet intelligence officer.
For over a decade, ending in 1971, Grayevsky held hundreds of meetings with KGB officers. The Russians gave him a hundred dollars, sometimes more, at each meeting. Grayevsky dutifully passed on the money to Shin Bet, so, unknowingly, Soviet spies were financing Israeli intelligence.
Every few years his Soviet handlers changed, and four decades after it all stopped he could not remember all of their names. What he did remember is how the vodka flowed like water at these meetings. As a proud ex-Pole, Grayevsky was far from troubled by that. “I never got drunk. I outdrank them,” he declared with a smile.
Most of the meetings took place in a Russian Compound apartment. Priests also attended these meetings, as “diplomats,” for they were all espionage agents for the Soviet Union. Israel was never naïve about any of this, but here was a golden opportunity to have Grayevsky feed false information to the Soviets—knowing that some of it, at least, would reach Arab governments.
“The information was prepared and tailored by all three branches of our intelligence community,” Amit revealed years later. “Shin Bet, we at the Mossad, and most importantly Aman were all involved. This was aimed at deceiving the Arabs about our war plans, and the order of battle if war should break out.”
Grayevsky’s most important meeting with the Russians took place in May 1967. Nasser had just moved his army into the Sinai, subsequently closing the Straits of Tiran so as to paralyze all the shipping at Israel’s southern port Eilat.
Israel found itself in the crisis that led to the Six-Day War. But the Jewish state was trying to prevent the war.
Israeli intelligence chiefs instructed Grayevsky to activate, for the first time, an emergency contact signal that the Russians had given him. He met them the next day on a small road in the hills near Jerusalem. This time, his task was to feed genuine information to the Soviets.
Grayevsky recalled: “A guy I never met before came to this rendezvous. He seemed to be around my age, in his 40s. He held a briefcase and looked like a clerk from a government office. But he was a very sharp fellow. I told him that Israel wouldn’t be able to just sit by and ignore the closure of the Straits, and that it would go to war against Nasser. He asked me how I knew this. Using the story that Shin Bet had concocted for me, I told him that as a journalist and radio broadcaster, I’d been invited to the prime minister’s office and I’d heard a briefing there to this effect from a senior IDF officer.”
Grayevsky heard differing accounts regarding the information that he provided, on what turned out to be the eve of war. One version said the KGB never told the top Soviet leadership that Israel was chillingly serious about using force to break Nasser’s sea siege. Another version, endorsed by some historians, said the information reached the Kremlin but, for various reasons, was not conveyed to Nasser.
Although the Soviet Union and its Communist allies broke diplomatic relations with Israel just after the Six-Day War, the spy-priests remained in the Red Church compound in Jerusalem, and Grayevsky continued to meet with them for another four years. During a final conversation, his KGB handler told him that he had done a terrific job and was being awarded the Order of Lenin. The Soviets said they would hold the medal in Moscow for him.
In fact, Grayevsky was fervently loyal to Israel.
An extremely important double agent was known by his Israeli handlers as Yated, the Hebrew word for stake or peg. He was an Egyptian intelligence operative who was doubled—turned—by the Israelis, and his story was a truly remarkable deception.
Egypt’s spy services, never ranked among the world’s best, did what they could to penetrate Israeli society. They hired a few of Israel’s Arab citizens—a far from ideal choice, as they were naturally under suspicion by Israeli authorities—and occasionally would send agents into the Jewish state posing as tourists.
The man who would become Yated was recruited by the Egyptians for something far more ambitious. In fact, the mission was a mirror image of the Mossad’s modus operandi. An Egyptian would attempt to learn precisely how to pose as a Jew and would move to Israel as an immigrant, unnoticed in a multitude of new and welcomed Jewish arrivals.
The man with that plan was Rifaat al-Gamal, a petty criminal who was recruited by Egypt’s intelligence services in 1954 by making him an offer he could hardly refuse: avoid going to prison by becoming a spy. Al-Gamal agreed, underwent training, and then was furnished with a false identity—as an Egyptian Jew named Jacques Biton. Now he immersed himself in Jewish life and even made contacts with the community by spending time at Egyptian synagogues.
In early 1955, Gamal/Biton sailed from Alexandria to Italy. He remained in Italy for quite a while and even worked there, hoping to make his cover story more credible. He eventually approached the Jewish Agency, and with its assistance he joined the wave of aliyah, or immigration to the Holy Land. According to the ambitious scenario his handlers in Cairo drew up, he was to get himself fully integrated into Israeli society. For that, he was given a respectable sum of money that he invested in a partnership with an Israeli. Together they opened a travel agency in Tel Aviv.
Gamal/Biton did not know that the partner, Dr. Imre Fried, was actually working for Israeli intelligence. It turned out that Shin Bet was quietly but seriously suspicious of the new immigrant from Egypt and Italy.
Espionage can make strange bedfellows, but consider these circumstances: Biton’s half of the investment came from Cairo, while Fried’s cash was from Shin Bet.
Biton was placed under surveillance, and with the help of a Mossad team his movements were also monitored abroad, where he was seen meeting with his Egyptian handler.
Upon his return to Israel from one such trip, he was arrested by Shin Bet and given two options: either sit in jail for decades for espionage, or agree to serve as a double agent whose ultimate loyalty would be to Israel.
The choice between prison and espionage was familiar to Gamal/Biton by now, and he chose the latter option.
The Israeli who most closely handled Biton, now codenamed Yated, was David Ronen. He eventually rose to the post of Shin Bet deputy director. In the 1990s, he wrote a novel in Hebrew called The Sting of the Wasp (The Story of a Double Agent), and that was loosely based on Operation Yated.
To maintain his credibility with his Egyptian handlers, Biton photographed—but only under Ronen’s close supervision—Israel Defense Forces bases, soldiers at hitchhiking posts, and army unit tags. The Egyptians considered Gamal/Biton one of their top spies.
He married a German woman, and they had a son in Israel—even celebrating his bar mitzvah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem after it was captured from Jordan in the Six-Day War. For Eg
yptian intelligence, this all seemed like a fantastic coup.
From an Israeli point of view, Operation Yated’s crowning achievement was the transfer of false information to Egypt in the spring of 1967, on the eve of the war. Biton told the Egyptians that according to the war plan he had obtained from his sources, Israel would begin with ground operations. That was a deception of the highest order. It could even be likened to Operation Mincemeat, wherein British intelligence during World War II brilliantly fooled the Germans regarding the site of the Allied landing in northern France in June 1944.
Biton’s misleading information was one of the reasons the Egyptians were so relaxed and careless in leaving their fighter planes out in the open. Israeli pilots had an easy time swooping in and destroying the aircraft on the ground. Thus, the Six-Day War was truly won in the opening three hours.
“He spared us a great deal of blood, and using him was equal to the strength of a division,” Shin Bet veteran Avraham Ahituv said about Biton.
After the war, Israel had no more need for Biton. He had grown increasingly stressed by the daily tensions of his clandestine double life. In light of his mounting complaints to Ronen and growing demands for monetary compensation, Shin Bet decided to let him go—but first to rehabilitate him for a normal life somewhere.
People in the Defense Ministry arranged business opportunities for Biton, including an oil-related partnership with an Italian businessman. But that was not enough for the ex-double agent. He demanded millions of dollars to compensate for his 12 years of service to Israel. Senior Shin Bet officers no longer liked him at all.
Biton had the misfortune of being diagnosed with cancer. He could not shake the fear that Shin Bet would try to poison him in a hospital room, so he demanded to be transferred to Europe for treatment. Israel paid for all that, but it did not last long. He was hospitalized in Germany, and he died there in 1982.
A lingering mystery is why he was buried in Egypt. A few years after he died, an author in Cairo published a long story about a daring and talented Egyptian spy who had penetrated the heart of the “Zionist enemy.” He did not publish the spy’s real name. The story was then adapted for television and became a popular series viewed all around the Arab world. The protagonist was called Rif’at al-Haggan.
Eventually, al-Gamal’s real name was published in Egypt, and a city square in Cairo was named after him. Egypt clearly enjoyed hailing heroes. Harel, the Memuneh who guided Israeli intelligence during much of the Yated operation, shrugged dismissively when asked about the Egyptian claim that Gamal/Biton was definitely their guy.
“If it makes them happy,” said the retired Harel, “let them continue to believe their tall tale.”
The literally smashing air blitz that marked the beginning of combat, on the morning of June 5, 1967, was much discussed beforehand by top Israeli leaders who felt they had to consider how the United States and the Soviet Union would react.
The man who took Washington, DC’s temperature, reporting to official Jerusalem that President Lyndon Johnson would not be opposed to a preemptive strike by Israel, was Amit. Eshkol sent the Mossad chief to deliver a three-part message to CIA headquarters: that war was inevitable, that Nasser started it by trying to strangle Israel, and that Israel was so outnumbered that it would have to launch the first attack—or the Jewish state might not survive.
The CIA director, Richard Helms, listened to Amit. So did President Johnson. They did not explicitly endorse going to war, but they did not object to the notion of a preemptive attack by Israel.
The understanding shown by Johnson and by Helms could be considered a kind of reciprocation for the giant favors that Israeli intelligence had done for the United States: procuring an advanced Soviet MiG fighter by persuading a pilot to defect from Iraq, and obtaining the Khrushchev speech. Amit’s international intelligence links were paying off. The air force and the army had to do the rest, and they made quick work of it. Unfortunately there was no serious planning for the day after the war.
Chapter Nine
Meet the Neighbors
The bed was still warm, the sheets and blankets lay strewn all over the floor, the water boiled over in the kettle, and the tea in the cups was still hot, but the man known as Abu Ammar was not to be found. A few seconds before Israeli troops and security men broke into the three-story house in Ramallah, on the West Bank, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization—who would become world-famous as Yasser Arafat—had fled.
From his second-floor hiding place, Arafat—with amazing instincts honed by danger—heard the voices of the Israelis as they surrounded the villa. Arafat leaped from a window and hid in a car parked nearby. When the men who were after his scalp had left, he hurried eastward and crossed the Jordan River. For the next quarter of a century he did not set foot in the West Bank.
Time and again, the Israelis would try to catch him by land, air, and sea, and still Arafat eluded them. For the Israeli security services, he became their Phantom of the Opera—elusive, unpredictable, and lucky.
After the failed raid in Ramallah, Shin Bet agents took some of Arafat’s personal belongings—even that once-warm bed—to their Jerusalem District Headquarters as souvenirs and as a reminder of their unfinished job.
This was in mid-December 1967, six months after Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
The six-day victory over Arab enemies on three sides was perhaps the biggest event in Israel’s history. Foreigners marveled at a small country’s ability to wage and win a war cleverly and quickly. Seen nearly half a century later, however, the triumph could be considered pyrrhic.
Having given themselves the burden of ruling over their Palestinian Arab neighbors, the IDF and the security agencies were forced into learning more than they ever knew about the people who insistently pursued their own claim on the same historic Holy Land. Eventually, over the decades that unfolded, Israelis would try to make peace with the Palestinians but would then find the efforts frustrating.
The so-called peace process, launched a quarter of a century after the Six-Day War, would go on to a kind of paralysis; and it would not seem nearly as urgent as crises involving Iran and its Shi’ite Muslim allies in Lebanon.
At the very least, from the start, the victory in 1967 presented new challenges in the area of internal and external security—and thus an entirely new era for Shin Bet. Yosef Harmelin, a veteran Shin Bet operative, had replaced Amos Manor as director upon the latter’s retirement in 1964.
No one had a better poker face than Harmelin. He was an impressively tall man, but the ability to maintain an expressionless countenance was his most memorable quality and an excellent attribute for an intelligence operative. He was probably born with the talent when he entered the world in Vienna in 1923.
After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Harmelin’s parents escaped the approaching Holocaust by moving to Mexico. The teenaged Yosef, more Zionist than his parents, moved to Palestine instead. Like Harel and Amit, Harmelin moved onto a kibbutz before enlisting in the British army in World War II. After the war, he joined the Haganah, where he met Harel; and a few years after Israel’s independence, Harmelin was recruited by Shin Bet. He gradually worked his way up to the top.
Harmelin inherited an agency that was small and self-contained, working in virtually total anonymity. The public hardly ever heard of Shin Bet by name, details of its operations were censored out of the press, and it was illegal to identify any of its personnel. The entire force numbered around 500 people, and the atmosphere within was that of a close family in which everyone knew everyone else. Family secrets were never divulged to outsiders.
It was also, however, a lackluster agency that had always been overshadowed by the Mossad and by Aman. Only rarely were a few crumbs of excitement tossed to Shin Bet by the operations department, which it shared with the Mossad. Shin Bet’s main task was the usually unglamorous business of watching
vigilantly for foreign spies and domestic subversives. Naturally, the Arab minority in Israel had always constituted the main pool of suspects.
The Arab citizens of the Jewish state—in the 1960s making up around 15 percent of Israel’s population—enjoyed the right to vote for Knesset members, but they had not been governed by the same civilian systems as Jewish-dominated areas. There had been military governors for the Arab-populated sectors, mainly the Galilee and Wadi Ara regions in northern Israel, and the residents had been closely watched also by Shin Bet.
Immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel, the Shin Bet and the army assigned “case officers” or “military governors” to each Arab village and community. They were part of a large system that aimed to control every daily routine of the Israeli Arabs. The system was not something of which to be proud in a free country, but the reason was the suspicion that Israeli Arabs might be a “fifth column”: Their true loyalty might be with their Arab brethren in countries that had declared themselves enemies of Israel.
The case officers were usually Jews from Arab nations who spoke Arabic and understood Arab and Muslim cultures. They were trained to run networks of local informers, collaborators, and agents who fed data of all sorts to Shin Bet. As with most intelligence collection, some of the information was vital and some of it banal.
Four years after independence, distrust had grown to the point that this system sought a deeper penetration into the Arab psyche. In 1952, Shin Bet formed a highly secret unit of young Jews who were trained to behave as Arabs and live in Arab towns and neighborhoods in Israel.
They were given fake identities and planted in such places as Nazareth and Jaffa to be the eyes and ears of the Shin Bet. Their bosses called them “mista’arvim,” coining a new word by combining mistavim (Hebrew for “masqueraders”) and Aravim (the word for “Arabs”).