Spies Against Armageddon (37 page)

Preparations immediately began on the Israeli side, to muster either a sniper to the scene quickly or an aircraft that could fire a missile. As with almost all assassinations, a go-ahead would be needed from the prime minister.

In this instance, Barak did not give the okay. To the chagrin of some intelligence officers, Barak decided that shooting at Mughniyeh would be considered a violation of the withdrawal agreement. This showed that, while prime ministers sometimes made cold-blooded decisions, they frequently felt constrained by considerations of international implications. Many governments would have been angry at Israel for breaking a deal that had been so hard to arrange.

Yet America’s FBI and the European Union had Mughniyeh on their “most wanted” lists, offering millions of dollars of bounty on his head. U.S. counterterrorism agencies found him to be extremely slippery, but they came close to capturing him once. The National Security Agency intercepted his travel plans, learning that he would be flying—with a close Hezbollah colleague—from Tehran to Damascus, by way of Kuwait. The CIA asked Kuwaiti authorities to come up with a pretext to hold that airliner on the runway, until U.S. Navy SEAL commandos could get to the scene. The SEALs would arrest Mughniyeh.

The Kuwaitis delayed the plane for about an hour, but then—as Americans involved recalled later—lost their nerve. Fearing that Hezbollah would take revenge against them, the Kuwaitis let Mughniyeh leave. Considering that this was only a few years after America saved Kuwait’s rulers and restored them to their throne, by ejecting Iraq’s invaders in 1991, some U.S. officials complained bitterly about ingratitude.

As for the Israelis, they would wait until 2008 for another shot at Mughniyeh, while continuing to be on the receiving end of his bloody plots.

When the mighty Israeli army rolled into Lebanon in 1982, one might have predicted that it could soon declare victory and leave. The official cause was irritation stemming from a PLO mini-state, and the effect was its dissolution. A huge sense of triumph might have been expected.

However, the normal relationship between cause and effect was broken in Lebanon by the bloody and unusual nature of a conflict that took many lives—with no progress to show for it, for anyone.

Chapter Sixteen

Biological Penetration

An old man, leaning on his cane, shuffled slowly along Rue Mouffetard—a famous pedestrians-only thoroughfare frequented by tourists on the vivacious Left Bank of Paris. Drifting out of one of the many restaurants, as if on cinematic cue, came the voice of Yves Montand singing the immortal “Autumn Leaves.”

It was a classic scene in the 5th arrondissement of the City of Light, and Professor Marcus Klingberg was slowly heading to his favorite café to read his favorite newspaper, the Communist Party daily
L’Humanité.

It was April 2005. Klingberg was in his late 80s and appeared fragile. Yet, his daily strolls could be seen as a real-life incarnation of what the prophet Ezekiel envisioned in the Bible: the resurrection of the dead from the Valley of Dry Bones. For decades one of Israel’s leading scientists—with a job about which he was supposed to say nothing—Dr. Klingberg had been in the valley of the vanished, and now he was back from the dead.

His family and its lawyers had persuaded Israeli judges that Klingberg’s days were numbered and death would come soon, and thus he should be released from prison. Yet to anyone watching him walk, and hearing him talk, on Rue Mouffetard and in his nearby apartment, it was clear that predictions of his imminent passing were premature. But the deed was done. Klingberg was now a free man in Paris.

In scientific circles, he had been known as a brilliant epidemiologist. Within Israel’s intelligence community, he was considered the most effective spy the Soviet Union ever planted in the Jewish state. His name became synonymous with treason. But, speaking soon after his release, he did not consider himself a traitor.

Later in the day, Klingberg planned to meet his daughter, Sylvia. He hoped that she would arrive with his grandson, a rising star in the French Communist Party. With pride, the aged scientist and spy declared: “We are three generations. Me, my daughter, and my grandson. Ideologues. Believers in Communism.”

Then he would return to his small apartment and would surf the internet, hoping that Israeli news websites might carry something negative about the man he hated above all: Yehiel Horev. For two decades, Horev had pursued and even persecuted leakers and alleged threats to the airtight secrecy of sensitive projects in Israel.

Admirers of Victor Hugo novels and Broadway musicals might think that if Dr. Klingberg or any other Israeli under suspicion was Jean Valjean, then Yehiel Horev was the unyielding, obsessive Inspector Javert.

Horev was the much-feared head of Malmab: an acronym for
Memuneh al-haBitachon b’Ma’arechet haBitachon
(the One in Charge of Security in the Defense Ministry). Malmab was the field security unit of the ministry, and it developed in parallel with the nuclear smuggling and security “Science Liaison Bureau” founded by Binyamin Blumberg—and led later by the longtime Shin Bet kidnapping expert Rafi Eitan.

Dr. Klingberg vanished into the Israeli prison system in 1983. He was gone for 20 years, including very strict house arrest for the last five years of that time. Israel’s military censor prevented any news media from mentioning his name, his disappearance, or his conviction on charges of aggravated espionage.

The truth, which Klingberg did not deny, was that he provided secret Israeli defense and scientific information to Soviet intelligence officers over a very long period. Israeli security officials identify Klingberg as the spy who caused the worst damage to the nation’s most sensitive defense systems. As well as transferring hidden data on everything he knew—including, according to reports, non-conventional weapons produced and held by Israel—he demonstrated how negligent his nation’s counter-intelligence efforts could be.

Klingberg should have been caught back in the early 1960s. He worked, after all, in one of the most secretive and guarded places in the country: the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), where he served as deputy director.

The high-walled Institute contains laboratories where Israel has manufactured an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Many commentators would say that using them would almost as unthinkable as using nuclear bombs.

Reports about the existence of non-conventional weapons was never acknowledged by Israel’s government. The sophisticated work at Nes Tziona included the development of countermeasures to protect Israelis, in case Arabs or Iranians might attack with chemical or biological arms.

Klingberg’s life is an intriguing story: an extreme exemplar of Jewish destiny enveloped in Holocaust survival, Communist ideology, scientific achievements, access to top secrets, and above all living in denial.

Avraham Mordecai-Marcus Klingberg was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1918. World War I was just ending, but momentous events continued to swirl all around Europe. Russia was caught in civil war after its Bolshevik Revolution, and Poland had strangely redrawn borders and a vigorous campaign for self-determination.

Klingberg’s parents were rich and religious, and one of his grandfathers was a renowned rabbi. Despite his Orthodox roots, the young man had a secular, liberal education. When he matriculated at the medical school at Warsaw University in 1935, he rubbed shoulders with students more radical than he. Klingberg was captivated by Marxist ideas and the need for the working class to rise up in a “proletarian revolution.”

His grandfather did not like the young Klingberg’s inclinations, but the old man displayed a sense of humor about it: “Well, Mordecai, you won’t be a rabbi in
Eretz Yisrael
(the Land of Israel), but it is consolation, perhaps, that you’ll be a rabbi in the Communist Party.”

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Klingberg was about half-way through medical school. Poland was conquered within the month and was divided between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as part of a pre-war conspiracy. The 21-year-old student saved himself by finding shelter in the Soviet Union. He left behind his entire family, and they were all murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

In his own old age, Klingberg sounded regretful and even guilt-ridden as he insisted that he had acted on the orders of his sick father: “I left Poland because of the Germans, at Father’s request. Mother was against it. But Father said, ‘You have to leave. At least one member of the family has to stay alive, and you should go.’”

The emotional parting from his parents was a scar that never healed, though he covered that pain as just one of the many masks he wore. His parents’ deaths would haunt Klingberg all his life.

He continued his medical studies in the Soviet system at the University of Minsk, only to suffer another interruption. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union—as Adolf Hitler double-crossed Josef Stalin—and Klingberg boasted, more than 60 years later: “At 10 a.m. on the morning after the invasion, I volunteered for the Red Army, and I am proud of that to this day.”

He served at the front for four months and suffered light leg wounds from shrapnel. After recovery, he was transferred to another unit, where he was allowed to practice the profession for which he had been studying: epidemiology, the study of how diseases spread. “The Russians called me Mark,” he said. “In Poland, I was Marek.”

In 1943, he took an advanced course in Moscow and was part of a team that dealt with an epidemic that left thousands of people dead in the Ural Mountains. “When the disease broke out, no one knew the cause,” he related. “But we were able to stop it and prevent its spread.” The cause of the epidemic was a fungus, which developed in wheat that rotted under the snow and emitted a toxin. Another contribution he made was in researching typhoid fever.

The war years further strengthened Klingberg’s belief in Communism and in the unique, positive, global role of the Soviet Union.

Klingberg was discharged at the end of the war with the rank of captain. Like many Jews who had found shelter in Soviet territory, he returned to his homeland. Of the Jews who came back to Poland, quite a few quickly emigrated to Palestine. Klingberg was a staunch believer in Communism, so he decided to stay in Poland and contribute to the creation of a socialist society there under Stalin’s tutelage.

He married Wanda Yashinskaya, who was a microbiologist and a Warsaw Ghetto survivor. Wanda was made of tough stuff. She was determined, confident, and opinionated. When Wanda decided that they should not live in a Poland where the soil was tainted with the blood of millions of Jews, her husband caved in.

The couple left in 1946, first for Sweden but with the hope of continuing on to what generations of Yiddish-speakers called the
goldene medina
(golden country): the United States of America.

Paperwork and finances left them stuck in Sweden, where Wanda gave birth to their only child, Sylvia, in 1948. The winter was rough, and the Klingbergs were split on whether to remain in Scandinavia.

According to him, “Wanda wanted to stay in Sweden. But I was offered a chance to volunteer and help Israel in its War of Independence. I wasn’t a Zionist, but since I didn’t like Sweden, I decided to take the offer. She loathed the idea of going to Israel, but she and the baby joined me.”

For young Dr. Klingberg, the decision was justified by one more fact: “I did it also because, at that time, the Soviet Union supported Israel.”

Four days after Klingberg arrived in Israel, he was drafted into the medical corps of the nascent Israeli army. He joined a department that was dealing with the prevention of diseases, and between the battle zones and the arrival of Jewish immigrants in various states of health, there was plenty to do.

In light of his military experience and his medical degree, Klingberg was quickly promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He and his family were given an apartment in Jaffa, a previously Arab port city that pre-dated its new Jewish neighbor, Tel Aviv.

The Israel Defense Forces did not ask any questions about his background or his motivations. No security scanning was required. The IDF needed professionals, and it was taken for granted—or accepted merely on his say-so—that Dr. Klingberg truly was a qualified doctor and skillful epidemiologist. Before long, his wife also found a job as a microbiologist with the medical corps.

Klingberg monitored the IDF’s hygiene and vaccinated servicemen against malaria and other sicknesses. The Israeli army, as a mirror image of the society at large, was a tight-knit, intimate community. It was rather easy for this prestigious Polish immigrant to meet, rub shoulders with, and befriend the top echelon: from the chief of staff, General Dayan, to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion.

In 1953, after clashes with his immediate superior in the medical corps, Klingberg resigned as head of the disease prevention department but remained in uniform with another medical unit.

That was the year when, “for the first time since my childhood, I cried like a baby,” he reminisced. “I didn’t cry when I said farewell to my parents and my brother during the war, and not even when I was informed that they were murdered in a concentration camp.” What prompted him and Wanda to weep was the news they heard over the radio on March 5, 1953: that Stalin had just died. “The tears shed by my strong-willed wife further emphasized for me the depth of the tragedy.”

In 1957, a budget crunch forced the closure of the medical unit in which Klingberg had been serving. He was officially discharged from the IDF, but he was not unemployed for even a single day. He gladly accepted a senior post at the IIBR. His wife already worked there, and she eventually completed her Ph.D.

The Institute’s locale, Nes Tziona, had a noteworthy role in Israel’s creation. It was one of the first Jewish agricultural villages, established in Turkish-ruled Palestine in 1883 with the help of the French Jewish philanthropist Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Young Jewish immigrants from Europe settled there, a quarter-century before Tel Aviv was built on sand dunes 15 miles to the northwest. The settlers—in what would become the heartland of the State of Israel—battled malaria, Arab gangs, and other crises to establish a Zionist foothold in the Promised Land of the Bible where Jews had a kingdom long ago.

All around the Institute and its imposing walls, set atop a hill, are orchards: grapefruits and oranges dotting the trees with color, the beauty of citrus blossoms in the spring, as well as the sight and scent of strawberry fields.

The Institute’s original buildings were much older than the secretive laboratories. Decorated by glorious arches and other features of classic Arabesque architecture, these houses had been home to a wealthy Palestinian Arab landowner. As part of the fog of the 1948-1949 war, the Arabs either left or were forced out, and the Israeli government became the landowner.

Over the years, modern buildings were built, some as tall as five stories with glass, steel, some traditional Middle Eastern motifs, and modern anti-intrusion systems. Expensive world-class labs were added for “applied research” in biology, microbiology, chemistry, and pharmacology.

Administratively, the Institute belongs to the Prime Minister’s Office, but responsibility for its security and for guarding its secrets lies with Malmab—the tough-as-nails security agency within the Defense Ministry.

The biological institute, after all, does not exist for the purpose of publishing treatises or winning Nobel Prizes. Its very existence stems from Israel’s perceived need for self-protection of the highest order. Ben-Gurion was obsessed with having a significant technological advantage over his country’s Arab neighbors. Many parts of his vision became classified programs, although it was no secret that the IDF had the
Heyl Mada
—the Science Corps, known by the Hebrew acronym Hemed, led by Munia Mardor and Professor David Ernst Bergman.

Mardor would become the head of Rafael, the state-owned Armaments Development Authority. In 2002, it would morph into Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., owned by shareholders but doing vast quantities of secret work, including the weaponization of many scientific innovations. Professor Bergman, of course, had become the one-man Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s.