Marcus Klingberg, highest-ranking Soviet spy ever caught in Israel, dies
December 3, 2015 5 Comments
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.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 3 October 2015 | Permalink
A 28-year-old criminal investigator of the Dutch National Crime Squad was arrested by Dutch police on September 29 over allegations of corruption, neglect of duty, and money laundering. The man, named as Mark M., applied for a job at the Dutch police in 2009. According to an online résumé, M. dropped out of professional college in journalism after several years of being self-employed as a freelance reporter covering crime issues.
The president of the United States and his delegation will be housed at a different hotel during a United Nations General Assembly meeting later this month, allegedly due to concerns over Chinese espionage activity. Since the late 1940s, the American president and his diplomatic entourage have resided at the Waldorf Astoria for several days in September, while attending the annual UN General Assembly in New York. The luxury hotel, which is located on Park Avenue on the island of Manhattan, has also served since 1947 as the residence of the US ambassador to the UN. That is also why the American delegation is usually hosted there, courtesy of the ambassador. This year, however, President Barack Obama and his sizeable delegation will be staying at the New York Palace Hotel, located at the corner of Manhattan’s 50th Street and Madison Avenue. The announcement was made last week by the White House and the US Department of State.
A resident of Texas, who is accused by United States authorities of setting up a front company in order to illegally acquire American technology on behalf of Russia’s intelligence services, has pleaded guilty to espionage charges. Alexander Fishenko, 49, was one of 11 people 
The German and Dutch governments allegedly joined forces to investigate a Russian supercomputer specialist, who studied in Germany and Holland, suspecting him of passing technical information to Russian intelligence. German weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which published the report in its current issue, identified the physicist only as “Ivan A.” and said that the 28-year-old man was a member of a physics laboratory affiliated with the Max Planck Institute in the western German city of Bonn. 
The final piece of sealed testimony in one of the most important espionage cases of the Cold War has been released, 64 years after it was given. The case led to the execution in 1953 of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an American couple who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs were arrested in 1950 for being members of a larger Soviet-handled spy ring, which included Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass. Greenglass agreed to testify for the US government in order to save his life, as well as the life of his wife, Ruth, who was also involved in the spy ring. He subsequently fingered Julius Rosenberg as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets, and Ethel as the person who retyped the content of classified documents before they were surrendered to their handlers. That piece of testimony from Greenglass the primary evidence used to convict and execute the Rosenbergs.
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Russia claims arrest of alleged CIA-trained spy
April 1, 2016 by Joseph Fitsanakis 1 Comment
The FSB statement identified the Ukrainian man as Lieutenant Colonel Yuriy Ivanchenko, but did not release further information about his background and identity, nor did it specify the details of his activities in Russia. According to the Russians, Ivanchenko allegedly entered the country in recent weeks, ostensibly in order to visit family members who live in Russia. But his real goal, according to the FSB, was to make contact with Russian intelligence and infiltrate the country’s security structure. Moscow says that Ivanchenko had planned to pose as a willing spy, namely an employee of Ukrainian intelligence who was offering to provide information to Russia. He was not a genuine spy, however, but rather a ‘dangle’ —namely someone posing as a genuine spy, but who is in fact attempting to deceive a rival intelligence agency by knowingly giving it misleading or inaccurate information.
Moreover, the Russians claim that Ivanchenko was being jointly run by the SBU and the CIA, and that the American intelligence agency had trained him to pose as a ‘dangle’ in order to collect information about FSB activities in Ukraine. The goal of the CIA, said Moscow, was to “lure an FSB employee and capture him with incriminating information”. However, the FSB statement said that Ivanchenko’s SBU connection and CIA affiliation were known to Russia prior to his arrival in the country, as he had previously tried to offer his services to Moscow. He was therefore arrested and will be deported in the coming days with a persona non grata (unwelcome person) designation. The CIA and SBU have not commented on Russia’s allegations.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 01 April 2016 | Permalink
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