Spies Against Armageddon by Dan Raviv Page B

never dared to hope that Ben-Gurion would make him one of the chiefs of intelligence. “I was unknown and not a member of Mapai, the ruling party,” he recalled. “But I was invited to a meeting with Ben-Gurion, and he quizzed me for three hours and then gave me the job.”
    Now, with a Harel-Manor team helming a secret relationship with American intelligence, the Israelis consciously reached out to the Western world to prove that they were valuable allies. The CIA and other Western agencies valued Israel’s strategic contributions but harbored reservations about the capability of a tiny country. The Jewish state also seemed to be struggling still with its economic and political identity: Was it socialist or capitalist?
    Israel’s breakthrough into the top echelon of Western intelligence came with a coup scored in the heart of Communism. Manor, Harel, and their boys managed to outrun the CIA’s Angleton, the British MI6, the French SDECE, West Germany’s BND and all the others who were scurrying around Eastern Europe in search of a speech: a sheaf of papers deemed as valuable as gold.

Chapter Four
    From Warsaw With Love
    “I acted on impulse,” said Viktor Grayevsky, the man who boosted the prestige of Israeli intelligence to a new level by handing it one of its most significant successes. That occurred in April 1956, when Grayevsky unknowingly cemented the friendship between Amos Manor and the CIA’s James Angleton, giving great pleasure to both and to the governments they served.
    In retrospect, what Grayevsky did—a succession of coincidences and lucky breaks upon which espionage agencies capitalize—launched the covert side of a relationship that has continued to bind the United States and Israel in dire, often unexpected circumstances. His place in history also demonstrated the value of well-placed Jews, many of whom have aided Israeli intelligence.
    “In hindsight, I know that I was young and foolish,” Grayevsky said decades later, a retired man in his 80s, sitting in his small apartment in a suburb south of Tel Aviv. He could barely believe what he had done. “Had the Russians and Poles 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.”
    Born in 1925 in Krakow, a once palatial city that was the seat of Poland’s kings, his original name was Victor Spielman. As a teenager, he escaped with his family to the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II. In 1946 he returned to Poland, joined the Communist Party, studied journalism at a government academy, worked for the official Polish news agency, and made sure to shed his Jewish-sounding name.
    The newly minted Viktor Grayevsky rose to the post of senior editor, responsible for the department that covered the Soviet Union and other socialist partner nations.
    “It was a position that opened the doors to the party and the government for me,” he recalled. In 1949, his parents and his sister emigrated to Israel—part of the efforts coordinated by the secret agency to be later known as Nativ. Grayevsky decided to remain in Poland.
    In December 1955, his father contracted a serious illness, and Grayevsky felt he needed to visit him in Israel. To organize the trip and obtain a visa, he met with Yaakov Barmor, ostensibly the first secretary in the Israeli embassy in Warsaw but in fact one of the Shin Bet officers sent abroad by Manor.
    “I didn’t know he was from intelligence,” said Grayevsky. “I thought he was just a diplomat.”
    The visit to Israel rocked his world view. Grayevsky became a Zionist. He kept that fact to himself, of course, but after returning to Poland he decided to move to Israel. Before potentially ruining his career by filing the necessary application to leave, he kept on working and socializing.
    He did not lack for girlfriends in Warsaw, but one in particular had an interesting Jewish background. Lucia Baranowsky had fled