by Dan Raviv
Aliyah B agents formed direct relationships with political leaders, often in nominally hostile nations: not only Iraqi prime ministers, but also Hungarian, Bulgarian, Polish and Romanian politicians. Contacts at the highest levels were tapped to explore routes for the safe passage of Jews to Israel.
Some of the airplanes became the first El Al airliners. Aliyah B refugee boats helped form the core of Israel’s national shipping company, Zim. The experience acquired by operatives worldwide helped Israel’s new navy. Aliyah B also had some of Israel’s finest forgers and field agents, whom the Mossad would later put to good use.
The masterpiece was torn to bits, as part of modernizing Israel’s intelligence structure. Aliyah B was disbanded in March 1952, and its missions were divided into two. One part was given to a newly established intelligence unit, Nativ (“Path”), which stood outside the major agencies. The other assignments were tasked to a unit—given the name Bitzur (“Fortification”)—inside the newly established Mossad.
Successive prime ministers and policymakers understood that immigration was contributing to the Jewish state’s strength and national security. So, while intelligence structures and units altered their names and changed management through the years, this covert work—unique to Israel—continued apace.
Israeli secret agents, under diplomatic cover or posing as foreigners, were sent to nations where Jews lived in difficult circumstances. They set up dummy corporations, opened bank accounts, recruited corrupt or sympathetic local officials, befriended border-crossing guards and airport and seaport managers, and bribed key government figures.
As with Aliya B, these missions were supplemented by financial assistance from Jewish philanthropists and strong support from many community organizations. Towering above them all was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the JDC, often called “the Joint”), a ubiquitous and often secretive welfare organization.
When needed, Nativ and Bitzur—with the Joint’s assistance—mobilized international public opinion to apply pressure on Arab governments, the Soviet Union, and Russian-controlled regimes in Eastern Europe to allow Jews to emigrate. They rallied the support of Western governments, labor unions, human rights organizations, and the media. Gaining enthusiastic backing from American Jewish organizations, it became fashionable to chant slogans on behalf of freedom for Soviet Jewry.
The division of labor was clear. Bitzur, acting from within the Mossad, was tasked with bringing Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, as well as organizing defensive tactics against anti-Semitic violence—even providing self-protection plans to Jews in Europe and South America.
Nativ’s territory was the Communist bloc, and it occupied itself only with immigration issues and gathering intelligence that could help sneak Jews out. The issue of self-defense in these countries, with their authoritarian regimes, was considered too risky.
Nativ’s director was Shaul Avigur, the longtime head of the former Aliyah B. He began by sending operatives into the Soviet Union, which had the world’s second-largest Jewish community: three million strong, second only to the six million of the United States. Elie Wiesel, the educator and activist, called his brethren in Russia “The Jews of Silence,” making that the title of his book on the issue.
Avigur’s first aim was to establish contact with the key Jewish communities spread all over the vast republics of the Soviet Union. Nativ would then try to awaken Jewish culture and religion—hoping later to turn the wave from simple Judaism to Zionism—the desire to migrate to Israel. Nativ’s diplomats’ and agents’ work included slipping pocket-sized Jewish calendars and Hebrew-Russian dictionaries into the jackets of Jews in synagogues. They also distributed prayer books, Bibles, newspapers, and books in Hebrew, even though they knew that the Soviet authorities considered these to be “anti-state propaganda.”
Avigur chose his envoys carefully. They had to be volunteers who demonstrated “high Zionist motivation.” And they had to know Jewish traditions and customs.
It would be best, he felt, if they were young married couples with children. Youthful strength would help them tolerate long and uncomfortable train rides across Russia. Single men were not preferred, because Soviet authorities might try to ensnare them in sexual temptation and blackmail—the classic “honey trap” of intelligence agencies.
There was a major change just after the Six-Day War of 1967. After the Soviet clients, Egypt and Syria, were soundly defeated, Moscow showed its anger at Israel by cutting diplomatic relations. They were not reestablished until the dissolution of the Soviet Union 23 years later.
One Communist country in Europe continued to have full diplomatic and trade relations with Israel, and that was Romania. Its leader was a megalomaniac, Nicolae Ceausescu, but Israeli intelligence knew how to play him like a virtuoso’s violin.
Most important for Nativ was that he agreed to allow several thousand Romanian Jews to leave for Israel each year. But Israel had to pay a kind of head tax for each and every Jew. The price per capita varied, depending on education, location, and the person’s importance to the authorities. The payments were disguised as “compensation” to Romania for the investment the nation had made in these citizens. It was truly a simple trade: people, in exchange for ransom.
Ceausescu played an interesting double game when it came to Palestinian terrorist groups. He offered shelter to the notorious Abu Nidal and his murderous gang, even providing training and light weapons. At the same time, Romania spied on them and collected valuable information about the radicals’ travels and plans.
The Nativ operative entrusted with “the Ceausescu account” was Yeshayahu (Shaike) Trachtenberg-Dan, a former Aliyah B man whose first covert work was for the British army, parachuting behind Nazi lines in Europe. Born back in 1910 and remembered as “Shaike Dan,” this white-haired peripatetic immigration spy in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s went to Bucharest, Romania’s capital, twice a year with a suitcase full of cash. On the way, he would stop in Vienna and hand a substantial sum to a Romanian diplomat who happened to be one of Ceausescu’s relatives. Only then would Dan receive a visa to proceed.
In Bucharest, he would meet with Romanian officials and give them the rest of the money. The corruption was barely hidden, and for Nativ it was a fact of life rather than cause to be offended. Americans who worked for the Joint often helped to set up Dan’s meetings with the right people.
In this way, nearly all of the 200,000 Jews of Romania emigrated to Israel from the mid-1960s until the collapse of Ceausescu and his regime in late 1989. Israel paid around $400 million, half of it to the dictator, his family, and cronies. That worked out to $2,000 per Jew, and Israeli intelligence had no regrets about it.
In the Soviet Union, the end of formal diplomatic ties made Nativ’s work more difficult. There were no more cover jobs in an Israeli embassy in Moscow, and no diplomatic immunity should an Israeli operative get into trouble.
On the other hand, there was a dramatic increase in the religious and Zionist consciousness of Soviet Jews: an awakening prompted by Israel’s exciting six-day victory over the Arabs. Many more Jews started defying the law by listening to news and commentary, in Russian, from Kol Israel (the Voice of Israel) on their shortwave radios.
Nativ saw an opportunity for success in towns where nothing good had been happening for many years. Unable to send in many Israelis, Nativ helped arrange visits to the Soviet Union by Zionist youth activists from North America and Western Europe. They entered as tourists, but in their suitcases were Hebrew dictionaries and Jewish prayer books.
No one epitomized the sea change more than a young Russian student who was a proud Jew—not something safe or wise to be in the decades of Communist rule—and practically shouted that fact to the skies.
His courageous tale began in mid-February 1967, when he dared to approach the front gates of the Israeli embassy in Moscow. A Soviet policeman tried to block his path, but the young man told him to shut up and rushed into the Israeli compound.
One of the diplomats invited him into the building, all the while suspecting that the entire incident might be a provocation by the KGB. He asked the student what he wanted.
“To go to Israel,” he replied.
“Who are you?” the diplomat asked.
“My name is Yasha Kazakov, and I am a 19-year-old Jewish student at the Moscow Transportation Institute.”
Kazakov, who eventually would move to Israel and change his name to Yaakov Kedmi, recalled: “They at the embassy clearly did not know how to behave toward me. The diplomat said, ‘If you’re serious, come back in a week.’ ”
When Kazakov left the embassy, KGB officers were waiting for him. “They asked what I was looking for in the embassy, and I invented the excuse that I was looking for information about my grandfather, who had disappeared during the war.”
Four months later, when the Soviet Union announced that it was severing relations with Israel, Kazakov walked to the United States embassy and—using his already tested technique—rushed inside. “It was a little more difficult,” he recalled, “because security was tighter and it was a longer run.”
The American consul agreed to see him. “I told him my story and gave him a letter of protest to pass on to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. When I left, a large contingent of KGB men was waiting, and I was taken away for interrogation.
“They stripped me and threatened they would break my bones. I answered them with a chutzpah that came from faith: ‘Try, we’ll see who’ll break whose bones.’ I wanted to make them angry, but I knew that as long as they were interrogating me and talking to me, they wouldn’t beat me up. That went on for a few hours. They threatened to send me to prison for disturbing the peace. I explained that I went into the embassy just to ask who was representing Israel.
“They didn’t know what to make of me, and because of the Soviet bureaucracy—and this is the best thing I can say about it—no one wanted to take responsibility.”
Before long, however, the KGB decided to discipline Kazakov by having him drafted into the Soviet army. “I threw the draft notice in the garbage,” he recounted. “During another KGB interrogation and a talk with the Soviet youth organization of which I was a member, I told them that Israel was my homeland—and if I served in any army, it would only be the Israel Defense Forces.”
Luckily for this particular non-conformist, the Red Army did not pursue the conscription of young Kazakov. He thought that it could be because the Soviet military was distracted by its invasion of Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, to quell a pro-freedom movement.
He was even more fortunate to be told, in February 1969, that he could leave the Soviet Union—in fact, that he had to leave within two weeks. He took a train to Vienna and then flew to Israel.
Taking on his new, Hebrew name of Kedmi, he was instantly invited for a talk with the heads of Nativ.
“They were in shock,” he said. “Here I was, a bachelor with no family in Israel and who didn’t speak Yiddish, allowed to come to Israel. It couldn’t be! ‘Something was wrong,’ they thought. They warned me not to speak to reporters, so as not to anger Soviet authorities.”
Years later, Kedmi realized that Nativ used military censorship to prevent the publication of articles that Israeli journalists were writing about him. The conspiracy of silence did not last. Some Knesset members from opposition parties publicly hailed his arrival, and that plainly annoyed Prime Minister Meir. The right-wing Likud took him under its wing, and he quickly became a darling of the media.
To the chagrin of Nativ’s managers, Kedmi was invited to lecture in Jewish communities in the United States. In New York in 1970, he joined another recent emigré in a nine-day hunger strike in front of United Nations headquarters, demanding that their parents be allowed to move from Russia to Israel.
Public reaction compelled Golda Meir to agree that Nativ’s campaign could go public. The Israeli agency, although still not publicly using its name, helped sponsor hundreds of events at which crowds were encouraged to echo the Biblical exodus from Egypt by chanting, “Let my people go!”
After Likud came to power in 1977, Prime Minister Begin himself invited Kedmi to join Nativ, and by the late 1990s Kedmi was in charge of it.
In 1991, he happened to be accompanying Nahum Admoni, who had been director of the Mossad during most of the 1980s, on a private tour of Moscow. Kedmi arranged a visit to Vladimir Kryuchkov, who had been the last director of the KGB before the Soviet Union was dissolved.
During the chat between the two former adversaries, Admoni told his host: “I want to share a little secret with you. We in the Mossad never spied against you.”
Admoni’s small talk was technically accurate. Israel obtained its information on Soviet life mainly by debriefing immigrants from there, and that work had been done by Amos Manor’s Shin Bet. Admoni was also evading the fact that there had been espionage activity in Russia and the other republics—not by his famous Mossad, but by Nativ agents.
The KGB, not concerned about Israeli bureaucratic labels, considered Nativ personnel to be spies, put them under surveillance, and tried to make their lives extremely difficult.
Israel, without doubt, achieved its goal. One million Jews left the Soviet Union, and most of them moved to the Jewish state. Similar to previous waves of immigration, this was a fresh injection of blood into Israeli economic, cultural, and security veins. The principal reasons were the historic changes that shattered a Communist empire, but Nativ must be credited with being in the right place at the right moment to guide those Jews to their growing homeland.
By the year 2000, it became clear that Nativ was no longer needed. The agency was stripped of its status as a member of the intelligence community, but then Israel’s typically chaotic bureaucracy—rather than making a decision about Nativ—let it die by depriving it of funding and gradually firing its employees.
On the other battlefield of clandestine immigration, the Arab lands of the Middle East, Israeli operatives had equally difficult challenges that demanded unique solutions. Morocco became an extremely difficult field of play when French colonial rule ended in March 1956. The French had allowed Moroccan Jews to come and go, but the new government under King Mohammed V stopped the outflow. The king believed, as did other Arab rulers, that anyone who moved to Israel would become a soldier and strengthen the Jewish state.
The Mossad organized a team of Israelis, all able to speak Arabic and French, to devise ways of extracting the remaining 100,000 Jews in Morocco. The Bitzur unit organized self-defense for them—part of an operation called Misgeret (Framework), designed by longtime operative Shmuel Toledano.
Misgeret arranged taxis and trucks to take Jews out of Morocco, with the Israelis making sure to pay bribes to all manner of uniformed officers along the route. A favorite route out was through Tangier, at the time an international city, and from that port on to Israel.
Later, two towns in Spain were used as bases for the project, which had the full cooperation of Generalissimo Francisco Franco—acting, so the Mossad believed, out of guilt feelings over his ties with Hitler and even over the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492.
The Mossad also purchased a former army camp along the southern coast of Spain, actually located inside the British colony of Gibraltar. The grounds and barracks were converted into a transfer facility for Jews exiting from Morocco.
Tragedy struck on January 10, 1961. A fishing boat named Pisces, packed with clandestine Jewish refugees, capsized in a storm between the Moroccan coast and Gibraltar. Forty-two men, women, and children, together with a Mossad radio operator, drowned. The disaster aroused some sympathy abroad, but it also triggered a sharp response from the Moroccan authorities. They uncovered the underground network, arrested scores of Zionist activists, and jeopardized the entire operation.
Luckily for Israel, in March of that year there was a change in tone at the highest level in Morocco. Mohammed V died a somewhat mysterious death at age 51, and his son Ha
ssan II succeeded to the throne. He was highly interested in gaining Western support, and being kind to the Jewish minority was excellent for his image. He let them leave, if they wished to do so; he found that many Jews whose ancestors had long been important advisors to royalty decided to stay.
France was remarkably cooperative at the time, and French warships transported around a thousand Jews out of another North African country, Tunisia.
Shmuel Toledano—the head of the Mossad operation in Morocco, credited with bringing 80,000 Jews to Israel—was given a new assignment. Isser Harel was sending him to South America.
There was a crisis for the half-million Jews in Argentina, largely as backlash after Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann there in 1960. Harel felt somewhat responsible for a new wave of anti-Semitic attacks organized by a fascist group that had support from military and police officers.
In July 1962, fascists abducted a Jewish student and tatooed a Nazi swastika on her breast. Argentine Jews were terrified, and Israeli newspapers published editorials urging their government to send assistance to “our Jewish brethren” in South America. Harel hardly needed any encouragement.
He instructed Toledano and the Mossad’s Bitzur unit to construct another Misgeret (Framework), inspired by the work done in North Africa. Jews would be trained to defend themselves.
In Argentina, a highly willing volunteer quickly made himself known: a self-described gaucho judio, a “Jewish cowboy,” named Leo Gleser. Telling his tale almost half a century later in Israel—his tall, solidly built frame clothed in jeans, a denim shirt, and custom-made leather boots—Gleser recalled his exciting endeavors as a young socialist-Zionist. He was born in Argentina in 1949, keenly aware that his Jewish grandparents had fled Russia after a pogrom in 1903. They made their new home on farmland owned by a Jewish foundation.