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Our Man in the KGB

[Ha'aretz] Yossi Melman - In late May 1967, about 10 days before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, two men met in the center of Ramle, got in a car and drove off to a forest next to Kibbutz Tzuba in the Jerusalem hills. The two were a diplomat in the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv - who was actually an agent of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service - and Viktor Grayevsky, an Israeli journalist and radio broadcaster. Once swallowed up among the trees, the driver gave his passenger the message that was the whole point of this excursion. "From the information in my possession," he said, "I understand that Israel plans to go to war and attack Nasser." Published here for the first time are details of Grayevsky's 14-year career as a double agent. Grayevsky, now 81, says, "I worked for the Shin Bet." His assignment? To feed Soviet intelligence officers disinformation or partly accurate information on Israel that his handlers had prepared for him. Grayevsky has already entered the pantheon of Israeli intelligence thanks to one particularly bold and heroic action. When he was a journalist in Poland, acting at great risk, he relayed to the Shin Bet a copy of the secret speech of Nikita Krushchev, then the secretary-general of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, in which Krushchev denounced Joseph Stalin's regime of terror.
2006-10-06 01:00:00
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