Marcus Klingberg, who is believed to be the highest-ranking Soviet spy ever caught in Israel, and whose arrest in 1983 prompted one of the largest espionage scandals in the Jewish state’s history, has died in Paris. Born Avraham Marek Klingberg in 1918, Klingberg left his native Poland following the joint German-Soviet invasion of 1939. Fearing persecution by the Germans due to his Jewish background, and being a committed communist, he joined the Soviet Red Army and served in the eastern front until 1941, when he was injured. He then received a degree in epidemiology from the Belarusian State University in Minsk, before returning to Poland at the end of World War II, where he met and married Adjia Eisman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Together they moved to Sweden, from where they emigrated to Israeli in 1948. It is believed that Klingberg was recruited by the Soviet KGB while in Sweden, and that he moved to Israel after being asked to do so by his Soviet handlers –though he himself always denied it.
Soon after arriving to Israel, Klingberg
joined the Israel Defense Force, where he advanced to the rank of
Lieutenant Colonel. In 1957, he joined the Israel Institute for
Biological Research (IIBR), a government outfit that conducted
classified research for Israel’s biological and chemical weapons
program. Klingberg worked at Ness Ziona, a top-secret government
facility that conducted research on some of the most advanced chemical
and biological weapons in the world. Eventually, he rose to the position
deputy scientific director at IIBR, a post that he held until 1972.
Additionally, Klingberg enhanced his international profile as a leading
epidemiologist and conducted research in universities in Europe and the
United States. Throughout that time, he was regularly passing classified
information to the KGB at meetings with his handlers in Europe.
The Soviets had painstakingly trained
Klingberg in espionage tradecraft, a set of skills that came in handy in
the early 1960s, when the Shin Bet, Israel’s counterintelligence
agency, began suspecting him of spying for a foreign intelligence
service. The Shin Bet began systematically monitoring Klingberg. After
failing to get results, the agency gave Klingberg a lie detector test,
which he passed on the first try. Meanwhile, the Soviet government
secretly awarded Klingberg the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, in
recognition of the quality of the information he had passed on to the
KGB. In 1982, a Soviet defector to Israel confirmed that Klingberg was
indeed a KGB spy. Shortly afterwards, the Shin Bet approached Klingberg
and asked him to accompany a top-secret team of Israeli technical
experts to Malaysia, where a chemical plant had exploded. But instead of
taking the scientist to the airport en route to Malaysia, the
government car that picked him up from his house drove him to a Shin Bet
safe house. After being interrogated there for nearly two weeks,
Klingberg confessed to being a Soviet spy, saying he had decided to join
the KGB for ideological reasons. However, in a 2014 interview with British newspaper The Observer, Klingberg claimed that he felt morally indebted to the USSR “for saving the world from the Nazis”.
Klingberg was tried in secret and
sentenced to 20 years in prison. He then disappeared inside Israel’s
prison system, having been given a false name and occupation by the
Israeli authorities. He spent the first 10 years of his prison sentence
in solitary confinement. In 1998, following pressure from human-rights
groups, the Israeli government agreed to place Klingberg under house
arrest, providing he was able to cover the financial cost of his
detention. In 2003, having served his 20-year sentence, Klingberg was
allowed to leave Israel and settle in France, where his daughter and
son-in-law were living. He spent the last years of his life in Paris,
where he died on November 30. He was 97.
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