None of the Israeli agents recruited in the mid-1960s whose files were noted by Mitrokhin appears to have compared in importance with either Avni or Beer.
26
The best indication of the KGB’s lack of high-level Israeli sources was its complete surprise at the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967. Before the war, the Soviet embassy had been contemptuous of Israel’s capacity to take on its Arab neighbours. In May one of the embassy’s leading informants, Moshe Sneh, formerly a Mapam politician but now leader of the Israeli Communist Party, told the Soviet ambassador, Dmitri Chubakhin, that if there was another Arab-Israeli war, Israel would win. Chubakhin replied scornfully, ‘Who will fight [for Israel]? The espresso boys and the pimps on Dizengoff [Tel Aviv’s main] Street?’
27
The Centre first discovered the Israeli surprise attacks on Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian targets early on 5 June not from the Tel Aviv residency but from intercepted news reports by Associated Press.
28
In the immediate aftermath of the stunning Israeli victory, the residency itself seemed stunned. According to a Shin Bet officer responsible for the surveillance of residency personnel:
They were like scared mice. They didn’t understand what was going on, had no idea how this attack had fallen on them from out of the clear blue sky, or who was up against whom. They made a few attempts to leave the embassy to meet with their agents and ascertain what Israel’s goals were. They didn’t get a thing. This was the position until they were pulled out.
29
Moscow’s decision (which it later regretted) to break off diplomatic relations with Israel and thus to close the legal residency in the legation caused further disruption to KGB operations. Since 1964 the Centre had had plans to base a group of operations officers at the Russian Orthodox Church mission in Jerusalem.
30
After the closure of the Soviet embassy, Shin Bet quickly realized that the KGB residency had moved to the mission.
31
But the mission offered a much smaller and less secure base for KGB operations than the legation. The fact that its budget was only a fraction of those of the major Middle Eastern residencies is testimony to the decline of intelligence operations inside Israel after 1967.
32
The KGB lost contact with a number of the agents it had recruited before the Six-Day War.
33
In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Markus Wolf, the head of the East German HVA, found the KGB, despite the decline in its operations inside Israel, ‘fixated on Israel as an enemy’.
34
The Centre, like the Politburo, was particularly alarmed by the effect of the war on Jewish communities in the Soviet Union. One Russian Jew, Anatoli Dekatov, later wrote in an article which he dared to send for publication in the
Jerusalem Post
:
The victory of the tiny Israeli state over the hosts of the Arab enemies sent a thrill through the hearts of the Jews in Russia, as it did, I suppose, for Jews all over the world. The feeling of deep anxiety for the fate of Israel with which Soviet Jewry followed the events was succeeded by boundless joy and an overpowering pride in our people. Many, and especially the young, realized their Jewish identity for the first time . . . The anti-Israel campaign in the Soviet mass media served only to spread further Zionist feeling among the Jews.
35
Immediately following the Six-Day War, Moscow banned all emigration to Israel. A year later, however, irritated by Western denunciations of the ban as a breach of Jewish human rights, Andropov and Gromyko jointly proposed to the Politburo a limited resumption of emigration ‘in order to contain the slanderous assertions of Western propaganda concerning discrimination against the Jews in the Soviet Union’. The KGB, they added, would continue to use this emigration ‘for operational goals’ - in other words to infiltrate agents into Israel.
36
In 1969 a record number of almost 3,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate. Though the number fell to little more than 1,000 in 1970, it rose sharply to 13,000 in 1971 - more than in the whole of the previous decade. In both 1972 and 1973 over 30,000 Jews were allowed to leave for Israel.
37
The sharp rise in exit visas, however, fell far short of keeping pace with demand. The unprecedented surge in Jewish applications for permits to emigrate to Israel was confronted with bureaucratic obstructionism and official persecution. All applicants from technical professions, even those employed as clerks, were dismissed from their jobs. Students whose families applied for exit visas were expelled from their universities and required to perform three years’ military service, after which they could not apply for visas for another five years. The KGB reviewed every application and was usually responsible for deciding the outcome. In the case of individuals well known either in the Soviet Union or in the West, the decision taken always carried Andropov’s personal signature. In August 1972 a ‘diploma tax’ was introduced, obliging all those emigrants who had received higher education to refund the cost. All applicants for exit visas were branded in effect as enemies of the Soviet Union.
38
During the early 1970s the ‘refuseniks’, those who had been denied exit visas, formed themselves into groups, contacted Western journalists and organized a series of protests ranging from demonstrations to hunger strikes. The KGB sent a stream of reports, often signed personally by Andropov, to the Politburo and the Central Committee, reporting the resolute action taken to ‘neutralize’ even the most minor protests. Every protest was interpreted as part of an international Zionist conspiracy against the Soviet Union:
With the growing aggressiveness of international imperialism, the data received indicate that subversive activity by foreign Zionist centres against the socialist countries has substantially increased. At the present time, there are more than 600 Zionist centres and organizations in the capitalist states, possessing significant propaganda resources. Since Israel’s aggression against the Arab countries in June 1967, it has begun a campaign of widespread and open provocation against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.
Zionist circles, in trying to deflect the attention of world public opinion away from the aggressive actions of the US in Indochina and of Israel in the Middle East, and toward the non-existent ‘problem’ of the Jews in the USSR, have unleashed on our country a broad campaign of slander, and to this end are organizing abroad anti-Soviet meetings, assemblies, conferences, marches and other hostile acts.
. . . Along with the cultivation of anti-Soviet world opinion, the Zionists are striving to exert ideological influence on the Jewish population of the Soviet Union, in order to provoke negative manifestations and create a nationalist underground in our country.
. . . The KGB organs have been focusing on operations for curtailing hostile and specially organized activity of Jewish nationalists, in particular methods of dismantling, separating and dividing groups, compromising their spiritual leaders and isolating deluded individuals from them.
39
Soviet policy oscillated between the desire to deter Jewish emigration to Israel and intermittent anxiety at the impact on foreign opinion of the persecution of the refuseniks. Brezhnev was in a particularly nervous mood for several months before his visit to Washington in June 1973. He told the Politburo in March, ‘In the last few months, hysteria has been whipped up around the so-called education tax on individuals emigrating abroad. I have thought a lot about what to do.’ Unusually he criticized Andropov by name for failing to implement his instructions to end collection of the tax. ‘It was my fault that we delayed implementing your instructions for six days,’ Andropov confessed. ‘It was simply the unwieldiness of our apparatus.’ As Brezhnev carried on complaining, his tone became increasingly self-pitying. ‘On Saturday and Sunday I didn’t even go outside’, he told the Politburo, ‘and now I will have to devote even more time to these questions.’ He concluded the discussion with a bizarre, rambling monologue which epitomized the broader confusion of Soviet policy:
Why not give [the Jews] some little theatre with 500 seats for a Jewish variety show that will work under our censorship with a repertoire under our supervision? Let Auntie Sonya sing Jewish wedding songs there. I’m not proposing this, I’m just talking . . . I’m speaking freely because I still have not raised my hand for anything I’m saying. For now, I’m simply keeping my hands at my sides and thinking things over, this is the point . . . Zionism is making us stupid, and we [even] take money from an old lady who has received an education.
40
The outbreak of the Yom Kippur War enabled Andropov to recoup some of his personal prestige within the Politburo. The simultaneous attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces on 6 October 1973 caught Israel and the United States, but not the KGB, off guard. Still conscious of having been caught out by the beginning of the Six-Day War six years earlier, the KGB was able to provide advance warning to the Politburo before Yom Kippur - probably as a result of intelligence from its penetrations of the Egyptian armed forces and intelligence community.
41
The KGB appears to have achieved no similar penetration of the Israeli Defence Force and intelligence agencies, despite the inclusion of large numbers of agents among those allowed to emigrate to Israel. According to Oleg Kalugin, head of FCD Counter Intelligence:
Many promised to work for us abroad, but almost invariably forgot their pledges as soon as they crossed the Soviet border. A few did help us, keeping the KGB informed about the plans and activities of Jewish émigré and refusenik groups. Our ultimate goal was to place these Jewish émigrés, many of whom were scientists, into sensitive positions in Western government, science or the military-industrial complex. But we enjoyed little success, and by the time I stepped down as head of Foreign Counter-Intelligence in 1980 I didn’t know of a single valuable [Jewish émigré] mole in the West for the KGB .
42
Other Soviet-bloc intelligence services were probably no more successful than the KGB. Markus Wolf later acknowledged that during his thirty-three years as head of the East German HVA, ‘We never managed to penetrate Israeli intelligence.’
43
The KGB found it far easier to infiltrate agents into Israel than to control them once they were there. The small residency in the Russian Orthodox Church mission in Jerusalem, which was kept under close surveillance by Shin Bet, could not cope with the demands made of it by the Centre. In October 1970 the Centre approved a plan to expand intelligence operations in Israel by sending a series of illegals on short-term missions as well as preparing the establishment of a permanent illegal residency.
44
Among the illegals despatched to Israel in 1971-72 both to contact existing agents and to cultivate potential new recruits were KARSKY, PATRIYA, RUN and YORIS, posing as - respectively - Canadian, Spanish, Mexican and Finnish nationals.
45
In 1972 an illegal residency in Israel also began operating, run by the thirty-four-year-old Yuri Fyodorovich Linov (codenamed KRAVCHENKO), posing as the Austrian Karl-Bernd Motl. Plans were made to give Linov control of a network of five agents:
46
LEON, a medical researcher with Israeli intelligence contacts who had been recruited in 1966 while on a visit to the Soviet Union;
47
KIM, a bogus Jewish refugee sent to Israel in 1970, where he enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to penetrate organizations such as the Prisoners of Zion Association which campaigned for the release of Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union;
48
PETRESKU, another KGB Jewish agent who arrived in Israel in 1970;
49
GERDA, an employee of the German embassy;
50
and RON, a foreign ambassador in Israel.
51
Linov’s new illegal residency, however, survived for only a year. The first danger signal, the significance of which was apparently not appreciated by the Centre, was KIM’s sudden unauthorized appearance in West Berlin in February 1973, where he complained to the KGB that Shin Bet was showing an interest in him.
52
A month later Linov was arrested while in the middle of an intelligence operation. The Centre concluded that he had been betrayed by LEON, who may well have been a double agent controlled by Shin Bet.
53
PETRESKU was also suspected of having been turned by Israeli intelligence.
54
Though contact with RON (and probably GERDA) continued, the Centre noted that RON was ‘inclined to be extortionate’ in his financial demands.
55
Following Linov’s arrest, the Centre shelved plans for an illegal residency and cancelled all visits by illegals to Israel.
56
Plans by the Hungarian AVH to send their illegal YASAI to Israel posing as a French-born Jew were also shelved after he refused to be circumcised.
57
Two FCD officers, V. N. Okhulov and I. F. Khokhlov, took part in protracted secret negotiations with Israeli intelligence officers to secure Linov’s release. Throughout the negotiations he was referred to by his Austrian alias ‘Motl’. The Israelis requested in exchange the release of Heinrich Speter, a Bulgarian Jew sentenced to death on a probably spurious charge of espionage, and of sixteen Soviet Jews imprisoned for an alleged attempt to hijack a Soviet aircraft. The KGB insisted at first on a straight swap of Linov for Speter, claiming that both men had been found guilty on similar charges of espionage. In the end, however, the Centre also agreed to free Silva Zalmonson, one of the alleged hijackers, and to allow two of her companions to emigrate to Israel at the end of their prison sentences. As a condition of the exchange, the Israeli negotiators insisted that no mention be made in public of the release of ‘Motl’ - probably to avoid the impression that Israel was willing to exchange captured Soviet spies for persecuted Jews in the Soviet bloc.