[mikaelluioy]

Clandestine meeting

In May 1951, Prime Minister Ben Gurion went on an unofficial trip to the U.S., at the invitation of Jewish organizations. He used the visit for a clandestine meeting with General Walter Bedell-Smith, the head of the CIA. Until then, the Americans had rejected every Israeli request to establish a clandestine liaison between the two countries, for fear that its discovery would harm their ties with the Arab world. Another reason for the American reservations was the fear that Israel - because of the kibbutzim, the immigration from Eastern Europe and the socialist parties - was a branch of the Soviet Union, and permeated with its agents.

"Ben-Gurion very much wanted a liaison with the CIA, but Bedell-Smith was hesitant," says Manor. "In the end he agreed, on condition that it would be super-secret. Ben-Gurion promised to maintain the secrecy." After Manor succeeded in exposing false reports by a Mossad agent in Vienna, Mossad chief Reuven Shiloah suggested that Manor transfer to the Mossad and be responsible for the secret liaison that had just been established with the CIA.

"Isser Harel objected," says Manor. "And Isser was very stubborn." But Shiloah did not give in, and presented the problem to Ben-Gurion. The prime minister decided that Manor would remain in the Shin Bet, but would hold the intelligence community's American portfolio.

How was the connection maintained?

"They told me that I had to gather information about the Soviet bloc and transmit it to them. I didn't know exactly what to do, until I had the idea of giving them the material we had gathered about a year earlier, about the efforts of the Eastern bloc to use Israel to bypass the American embargo. We edited the material, made the necessary erasures, and informed them that they should never ask us to identify sources. We also made a rule, that we would never give them names of Israelis. The report was sent to Washington, and the reaction was unanticipated - great enthusiasm. They asked us to gather more and more material for them."

What did they ask for?

"Anything we could get about Eastern Europe. Sometimes I didn't understand why they needed us. They asked for Romanian money, telephone directories and maps of cities, and even the price of bread in the Eastern bloc countries."

And how did you manage to get the information?

"We conducted friendly interrogation of new immigrants who arrived in the country. And to our surprise, we discovered that they had interesting material. One had been a party activist, and another had worked in an industrial or military plant. Of course we mainly tried to get military information, from the construction of ships in the Romanian port of Constanza, to Soviet weapons that reached the Romanian or Polish army. Everything was conducted in absolute secrecy, and even in the Shin Bet they didn't know about it. There were perhaps four people who were in on the secret of the operation: I, my secretary Zelig Katz, Isser and Zvi Aharoni, who carried out the interrogations."

What was the code name of the liaison operation?

"Balsam. I think that either my secretary Zelig or Isser gave it that name."

Who worked with you on behalf of the CIA?

"At first I didn't know. Until early in 1952, when Shiloah and Teddy (Kollek) told me that Jim Angleton was in charge of the liaison with Israel. But they didn't know exactly what his job was at the CIA. And then one day in April 1952 he came to Israel. I greeted him at the airport in Lod, together with Reuven Shiloah. He 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.

"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 the 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."

What was your impression of him?

"That he was fanatic about everything. He had a tendency toward mystification. Eventually, after maybe 30 years, he told me why he had really come to Israel. He had understood from Teddy that I, a new immigrant from Romania, was conducting Operation Balsam, and that terrified him."

He suspected that you were a Communist agent?

"Yes. 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 Teddy and Shiloah that he was pleased to have me in charge of the operation."

And what happened afterward?

"I asked Angleton, and he agreed to organize an in-service intelligence course for some of our guys. In October 1952, six of our people went to take the course, but they weren't satisfied, because they were taught theory. To calm things down, Jim sent me two plane tickets, for myself and my wife, so I would come to Washington. I came and reassured the guys.

"Jim tried to ensure that I had a pleasant stay, I met with him a few times in the hotel. He also showed me a new device called a lie detector. I asked him to let one of the students in the course, Zvi Aharoni (a few years later, a member of the group that captured Adolf Eichmann), travel to Chicago to study with the inventor. Jim agreed. Zvi traveled to Chicago and returned with a polygraph machine, which he had received as a gift from Jim. That was the first such device in Israel."

Did you get other gifts from the CIA?

"I told Jim that we were weak on technology, so they gave us microphones, wiretapping equipment for telephones, cameras. But aside from that, we didn't ask for anything in return. We didn't ask them for information, because we were afraid that they would ask us for information about the Arab world.

"In 1954 Jim invited me for another visit, and asked me to expand the information-gathering activity, going beyond the interrogation of new immigrants in Israel, to Eastern Europe itself. With considerable hesitation, we agreed. I personally recruited and briefed a number of people and sent them to be our representatives in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest. But I didn't agree to send people to Moscow, because I was afraid they would be caught. That's how I recruited Yaakov Barmor, who was working at the time at the tax bureau of the Histadrut labor federation, and was sent to Warsaw. My instructions to the people were: 'Don't endanger yourselves, look for ties that you can maintain as diplomats, and try to get people to give you political information.' I didn't even dream of military information."


This expansion of Operation Balsam took place after Harel was appointed head of the Mossad and appointed his bureau chief and assistant, Isidore Roth, who had Hebraized his name to Izzy Dorot, to head the Shin Bet. Manor: "In September or October of 1953 Isser called me in and told me: 'Listen, I think we have to let Izzy go, and I'm proposing you for the job.' I asked him, 'Do you think there's a chance Ben-Gurion will agree?'"

Why did you have doubts?

"Because I was a new immigrant, unknown and not a party member. I was different from the Mossad of that time. I was invited to a meeting with Ben-Gurion, who interrogated me for three hours. Two days later I was informed that the 'Old Man' had appointed me to the job."

How did you get along with Isser Harel for 10 years, until your retirement in 1963?

"People didn't stop asking how two such different people worked together. I was born in a wealthy home and did not experience anti-Semitism; Isser came from a small town and arrived in Israel as a halutz (pioneer). I'm tall and he's short. I was an active athlete, I played soccer, tennis, volleyball, I fenced, swam, ice-skated. I liked jazz, Isser didn't even know what it was. He was a party member, I wasn't. I read Haaretz, he read Davar [a now defunct left-wing daily]."

What kind of relationship did you have with him?

"He was the chief of the Mossad and of the committee of the heads of the security services, and I was the head of the Shin Bet. But I accepted him as first among equals. My relationship with Harel was very harmonious until 1960. Even if there were differences of opinion between us, that had no influence on operations. But in 1960 I began to notice a change in his behavior. He began to speak critically about Ben-Gurion. Slowly but surely I understood that he had been hurt by the fact that Ben-Gurion had promoted the young people - Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan and Abba Eban - and appointed them ministers, but had skipped over him.

"Our relationship also soured because of the affair of the German scientists. He began to operate contrary to Ben-Gurion's policy, because the Old Man did not accept his crazy theories. Isser claimed that Chancellor Adenauer was playing a double game with Israel, and was presumably helping Nasser to develop atomic weapons. I thought that Adenauer was making every effort to restore Germany to the community of normal nations, and therefore there was no possibility that he would help Nasser attain atomic weapons.

"I saw that Isser had lost all sense of proportion. I told him: 'Ben-Gurion doesn't understand you, and I don't understand you, either.' Although relations between us remained correct, some of the friendliness was lost."

Did you order people killed as part of your job?

"We didn't kill and we didn't torture and we didn't do anything illegal, neither to Jews nor to Arabs, aside from the issue of clandestine infiltrations."

Are there additional secrets from your period that have not been told?

"There is only more particularly sensitive thing that we did, which I'm not willing to discuss even today."


A brief encounter with history

"I acted on impulse," says Viktor Grayevsky, the man who voluntarily handed the Shin Bet one of the greatest successes in its history. "Today in hindsight I know that I was young and foolish. Had they 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."

Grayevsky, 81, is retired from the Israel Broadcasting Authority. He immigrated to Israel from Poland in 1957. At the recommendation of Amos Manor, he joined the Foreign Ministry, worked on the international broadcasts of the Voice of Zion to the Diaspora, established the Russian-language broadcasting department, and later became director of the station.

During his first 15 years in Israel he continued to maintain a connection with the Shin Bet and was used for clandestine operations involving the Soviet Union. But he refuses to talk about it, offering only the following words: "I confronted the Soviet Union three times in my life - with the Khrushchev document, with the broadcasts, and with another affair that it's still too early to talk about. Most of my life I fought the Soviet Union."

Born in 1925 in Krakow, his name was Viktor Spielman. Together with his family, he escaped to the Soviet Union with the outbreak of World War II, and thus his life was saved. In 1946 he returned to Poland, joined the Communist Party, studied journalism at the Academy of Political Science and joined the Polish news agency. "When I joined the party they told me that with a name like Spielman I wouldn't go far, so I changed it to a Polish name - Grayevsky," which has a similar meaning, "to play an instrument," or "to act."

He began work as a junior reporter, and advanced to the rank of senior editor, responsible for the department handling the Soviet Union and the people's democracies in Eastern Europe. "It was a position that opened the doors to the party and the government for me." In 1949, his parents and his sister immigrated to Israel. Grayevsky decided to remain in Poland. In December 1955 his father contracted a serious illness, and Grayevsky came to visit him. To organize the visit, he met with Yaakov Barmor, ostensibly the first secretary in the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, in fact a Shin Bet representative. "No, I didn't know he was from intelligence. I thought he was a diplomat," he says.

The visit to Israel shook up his world view. Grayevsky became a Zionist. He returned to Poland, but he had made the decision to immigrate to Israel. About four months after his return from Israel he came, as usual, to the workplace of his girlfriend, Lucia Baranowski, to meet her for coffee. Baranowski, who was also Jewish, had fled during the war from the Lvov ghetto and joined the partisans, where she met her future husband. In the mid-1950s, she served for a short time as a junior secretary - actually a worker on loan - in the office of the first secretary of the Communist Party, Edward Ochab.

She was 35 years old, with one son. Her husband was the deputy prime minister of Poland. The couple lived in the same apartment, but separately. "Her marriage was not a success, and she was my girlfriend in every sense," says Grayevsky, then a 30-year-old bachelor. That same day, at 11 A.M., Baranowski was very busy and was unable to go out to the cafe. "Ochab's office was in the headquarters of the party?s Central Committee," he says. "Everyone knew me, the guards, the office workers, I was almost a member of the family there. While I was talking to 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 others, I had also heard rumors about the speech," says Grayevsky. "We knew 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. 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.'

"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. 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. I decided to go back and return the booklet to Lucia, but on the way I thought about it a lot, and 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, which checked everyone who entered. I went to Barmor's office and told him: 'Look what I have.' He turned white and then red, and changed colors again. He asked to take the booklet for a minute, and he returned to me an hour and a half later."

Did you understand what he was doing?

"Of course. I knew he was photographing. After an hour and a half he returned, gave me the booklet and said 'Thank you very much.' I left the embassy and went to Lucia. I arrived between 2:30 and 3, and returned it to her."

Grayevsky immigrated to Israel in January 1957. When he submitted the request to immigrate, he was fired from his job. Lucia Baranowski died in Poland of a serious illness 15 years later. "We never spoke about what had happened," he emphasizes.

And what about compensation? He says that it didn't enter his mind to ask for anything. "What are you talking about? I acted out of an impulse that stemmed from my connection to Israel. It was a bouquet from a new immigrant to the State of Israel. No professional spy could have managed to get what I got. I was lucky."

Do you consider yourself a hero?

"No. I'm not a hero. I didn't make history. The person who made history was Khrushchev. I met up with history for a few hours, and our ways parted."