Spies Against Armageddon (33 page)

The American consul agreed to see him. “I told him my story and gave him a letter of protest to pass on to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. When I left, a large contingent of KGB men was waiting, and I was taken away for interrogation.

“They stripped me and threatened they would break my bones. I answered them with a chutzpah that came from faith: ‘Try, we’ll see who’ll break whose bones.’ I wanted to make them angry, but I knew that as long as they were interrogating me and talking to me, they wouldn’t beat me up. That went on for a few hours. They threatened to send me to prison for disturbing the peace. I explained that I went into the embassy just to ask who was representing Israel.

“They didn’t know what to make of me, and because of the Soviet bureaucracy—and this is the best thing I can say about it—no one wanted to take responsibility.”

Before long, however, the KGB decided to discipline Kazakov by having him drafted into the Soviet army. “I threw the draft notice in the garbage,” he recounted. “During another KGB interrogation and a talk with the Soviet youth organization of which I was a member, I told them that Israel was my homeland—and if I served in any army, it would only be the Israel Defense Forces.”

Luckily for this particular non-conformist, the Red Army did not pursue the conscription of young Kazakov. He thought that it could be because the Soviet military was distracted by its invasion of Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, to quell a pro-freedom movement.

He was even more fortunate to be told, in February 1969, that he could leave the Soviet Union—in fact, that he
had
to leave within two weeks. He took a train to Vienna and then flew to Israel.

Taking on his new, Hebrew name of Kedmi, he was instantly invited for a talk with the heads of Nativ.

“They were in shock,” he said. “Here I was, a bachelor with no family in Israel and who didn’t speak Yiddish, allowed to come to Israel. It couldn’t be! ‘Something was wrong,’ they thought. They warned me not to speak to reporters, so as not to anger Soviet authorities.”

Years later, Kedmi realized that Nativ used military censorship to prevent the publication of articles that Israeli journalists were writing about him. The conspiracy of silence did not last. Some Knesset members from opposition parties publicly hailed his arrival, and that plainly annoyed Prime Minister Meir. The right-wing Likud took him under its wing, and he quickly became a darling of the media.

To the chagrin of Nativ’s managers, Kedmi was invited to lecture in Jewish communities in the United States. In New York in 1970, he joined another recent emigré in a nine-day hunger strike in front of United Nations headquarters, demanding that their parents be allowed to move from Russia to Israel.

Public reaction compelled Golda Meir to agree that Nativ’s campaign could go public. The Israeli agency, although still not publicly using its name, helped sponsor hundreds of events at which crowds were encouraged to echo the Biblical exodus from Egypt by chanting, “Let my people go!”

After Likud came to power in 1977, Prime Minister Begin himself invited Kedmi to join Nativ, and by the late 1990s Kedmi was in charge of it.

In 1991, he happened to be accompanying Nahum Admoni, who had been director of the Mossad during most of the 1980s, on a private tour of Moscow. Kedmi arranged a visit to Vladimir Kryuchkov, who had been the last director of the KGB before the Soviet Union was dissolved.

During the chat between the two former adversaries, Admoni told his host: “I want to share a little secret with you. We in the Mossad never spied against you.”

Admoni’s small talk was technically accurate. Israel obtained its information on Soviet life mainly by debriefing immigrants from there, and that work had been done by Amos Manor’s Shin Bet. Admoni was also evading the fact that there had been espionage activity in Russia and the other republics—not by his famous Mossad, but by Nativ agents.

The KGB, not concerned about Israeli bureaucratic labels, considered Nativ personnel to be spies, put them under surveillance, and tried to make their lives extremely difficult.

Israel, without doubt, achieved its goal. One million Jews left the Soviet Union, and most of them moved to the Jewish state. Similar to previous waves of immigration, this was a fresh injection of blood into Israeli economic, cultural, and security veins. The principal reasons were the historic changes that shattered a Communist empire, but Nativ must be credited with being in the right place at the right moment to guide those Jews to their growing homeland.

By the year 2000, it became clear that Nativ was no longer needed. The agency was stripped of its status as a member of the intelligence community, but then Israel’s typically chaotic bureaucracy—rather than making a decision about Nativ—let it die by depriving it of funding and gradually firing its employees.

On the other battlefield of clandestine immigration, the Arab lands of the Middle East, Israeli operatives had equally difficult challenges that demanded unique solutions. Morocco became an extremely difficult field of play when French colonial rule ended in March 1956. The French had allowed Moroccan Jews to come and go, but the new government under King Mohammed V stopped the outflow. The king believed, as did other Arab rulers, that anyone who moved to Israel would become a soldier and strengthen the Jewish state.

The Mossad organized a team of Israelis, all able to speak Arabic and French, to devise ways of extracting the remaining 100,000 Jews in Morocco. The Bitzur unit organized self-defense for them—part of an operation called
Misgeret
(Framework), designed by longtime operative Shmuel Toledano.

Misgeret arranged taxis and trucks to take Jews out of Morocco, with the Israelis making sure to pay bribes to all manner of uniformed officers along the route. A favorite route out was through Tangier, at the time an international city, and from that port on to Israel.

Later, two towns in Spain were used as bases for the project, which had the full cooperation of Generalissimo Francisco Franco—acting, so the Mossad believed, out of guilt feelings over his ties with Hitler and even over the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492.

The Mossad also purchased a former army camp along the southern coast of Spain, actually located inside the British colony of Gibraltar. The grounds and barracks were converted into a transfer facility for Jews exiting from Morocco.

Tragedy struck on January 10, 1961. A fishing boat named
Pisces
, packed with clandestine Jewish refugees, capsized in a storm between the Moroccan coast and Gibraltar. Forty-two men, women, and children, together with a Mossad radio operator, drowned. The disaster aroused some sympathy abroad, but it also triggered a sharp response from the Moroccan authorities. They uncovered the underground network, arrested scores of Zionist activists, and jeopardized the entire operation.

Luckily for Israel, in March of that year there was a change in tone at the highest level in Morocco. Mohammed V died a somewhat mysterious death at age 51, and his son Hassan II succeeded to the throne. He was highly interested in gaining Western support, and being kind to the Jewish minority was excellent for his image. He let them leave, if they wished to do so; he found that many Jews whose ancestors had long been important advisors to royalty decided to stay.

France was remarkably cooperative at the time, and French warships transported around a thousand Jews out of another North African country, Tunisia.

Shmuel Toledano—the head of the Mossad operation in Morocco, credited with bringing 80,000 Jews to Israel—was given a new assignment. Isser Harel was sending him to South America.

There was a crisis for the half-million Jews in Argentina, largely as backlash after Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann there in 1960. Harel felt somewhat responsible for a new wave of anti-Semitic attacks organized by a fascist group that had support from military and police officers.

In July 1962, fascists abducted a Jewish student and tatooed a Nazi swastika on her breast. Argentine Jews were terrified, and Israeli newspapers published editorials urging their government to send assistance to “our Jewish brethren” in South America. Harel hardly needed any encouragement.

He instructed Toledano and the Mossad’s Bitzur unit to construct another Misgeret (Framework), inspired by the work done in North Africa. Jews would be trained to defend themselves.

In Argentina, a highly willing volunteer quickly made himself known: a self-described
gaucho judio
, a “Jewish cowboy,” named Leo Gleser. Telling his tale almost half a century later in Israel—his tall, solidly built frame clothed in jeans, a denim shirt, and custom-made leather boots—Gleser recalled his exciting endeavors as a young socialist-Zionist. He was born in Argentina in 1949, keenly aware that his Jewish grandparents had fled Russia after a pogrom in 1903. They made their new home on farmland owned by a Jewish foundation.

“I was a strong, blond boy, very impressive,” Gleser reminisced. “There wasn’t a tree I couldn’t climb. I was like a cat. I fished in the river and hunted animals. I specialized in hunting iguanas. I would lie in ambush for them for hours by a hole in the ground, and when the lizard emerged from the opening, I would hit it with a stick and kill it.”

When Gleser was nine, his father ran off with a younger woman. Leo’s mother took him to a new home in Buenos Aires.

Life in the capital city changed him. The wild nature boy became an urban street fighter, molded by the militancy of a left-wing Jewish youth movement,
Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza’ir
(The Young Guard). “In Buenos Aires, I encountered anti-Semitism that was not just religious. It had economic, social, and political dimensions.”

When Mossad personnel and Israeli soldiers in civilian garb flew in and offered training to Gleser and his pals, “everything smelled of secrecy in the style of a French thriller,.” he said. There was also a paradox. Isser Harel, who did not trust the left within Israel, was relying heavily on young idealistic leftists in Argentina to be the protectors of the community.

The Israelis ran a camp where they taught martial arts, intelligence-gathering surveillance, navigation, and other skills. The fact that Gleser had known, from his youth, how to shoot a hunting rifle made him one of the top campers. Once they were trained, the volunteers were assigned various security tasks.

“We guarded Jewish buildings, and after meetings we would escort the boys and girls home, so that they would not be attacked in the street,” Gleser recalled.

Another former Framework member gave a more aggressive description, saying members of this Argentine underground “initiated deterrence operations, beat up local anti-Jewish hooligans, destroyed places where they met, and sabotaged printing presses where anti-Semitic material was produced.”

Gleser’s Zionist organization sent him to Israel in 1967 for more elaborate training at a kibbutz—but not yet for aliyah (immigration). He got to witness the patriotic fervor of a victorious Israel, as the stunning Six-Day War changed the Jewish state forever.

Returning to Argentina in 1968, Gleser was given a leadership role in the self-defense movement. “The studies and training in Israel gave me tremendous strength and confidence,” he recalled. “I was a kid of 19 without commitments to a family, and without any sentiments. Now I became a proud Jew fighting for his people. I felt I was the representative of a small, powerful nation.”

A few months later, however, Gleser was arrested just after one of his operations. He and his team had set fire to a printing plant that was producing anti-Jewish literature. A few days in jail were bad enough, and Gleser left Argentina for good. He spent a little time in the United States, then sailed to Israel. He settled there and became a successful consultant on private security.

Ambitious, secret missions to protect Jewish communities worldwide continued in the decades that followed. Immigration projects relied still on the partnership of the Mossad’s Bitzur unit with the New York-based Joint, often with the help of sympathetic Western governments.

In this way, in the 1970s, the remnants of the ancient community in Iraq—around 3,000 Jews—were extracted with the help of Kurdish rebels and the Shah of Iran. Israeli operatives said, years later, that some of the cash they and the Joint brought along for bribery went to an Iraqi deputy prime minister named Saddam Hussein.

Around the same time, Jews were also smuggled out of Syria, the Arab country most hostile to Israel. Bitzur men and some Jewish sayanim (helpers) from various nations engaged with the small Jewish communities in Syria and coordinated an exit plan with them. In small groups they were driven to Lebanon. Then, like Israeli secret agents in the past, they headed for the Mediterranean shore, where small boats ferried them out to Israeli navy ships.

Seeing the Syrian Jews sail into the port of Haifa was what triggered Mossad chief Zamir to remark that no espionage mission could possibly be so exciting and satisfying. As a bonus, the sayanim were able to smuggle out some old, precious Torah scrolls that no one in Syria would ever have read again.

In the 1990s, the few Jews who remained in Yemen were able to leave for Israel. This was similar to the Iraq mission, with Bitzur, the Joint, and lavish bribes working together to perfection.

The Mossad also had to operate inside Iran, which was exceedingly difficult after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, to help Jews escape—often leaving vast properties behind—through a variety of routes that Israel insisted on keeping secret.

The most significant Bitzur operation took place, in several stages, in the Horn of Africa. Israelis had always known that some of the black inhabitants of Ethiopia claimed to be Jewish. Their story was ignored by successive governments in Jerusalem, but Prime Minister Begin believed them—not deterred in any way by the color of their skin, unlike many of his countrymen. Begin ordered the Mossad chief, Hofi, to find a way to bring the black Jews “home” to Israel.

Bitzur operatives infiltrated Ethiopia, which was beset and distracted by civil war and famine, in the late 1970s. They made contact with the “Beta Israel” (House of Israel) communities, helped them with food, medicine, and enticing conversations about life in the actual State of Israel. The Mossad people spread the message that the Jews should move to neighboring Sudan.