UPDATE: By a strange happenstance of fate, Marcus Klingberg died this morning, almost at the same time I originally posted this. He was 97 years old. In the Jewish tradition we say: “May his memory be for a blessing” and his family comforted by the life he led.
חשיפה: הלוביסט הישראלי רב-ההשפעה בוריס קרסני הוא הסוכן הכפול שעבד בשנות ה-70 וה-80 עבור הקג”ב והשב”כ, והביא לחשיפתו ומעצרו של המרגל הסובייטי פרופ’ מרקוס קלינגברג
A confidential Israeli source has identified an Israeli double agent originally recruited by the Soviet KGB. This news comes on the heels of this 2008 Ynet report that connects the double agent to the exposure of the Soviet Union’s most successful spy in Israel, Markus Klingberg. A few days ago, MK Mickey Rosenthal exposed the name of the double agent, despite the fact that the censor has prohibited this for years. In response to a question from Yediot about why he did so, he responded:
“I don’t know why the censor decided to prohibit publication, but I did this in order to expose how problematic this prohibition is.”
Klingberg survived the Holocaust survivor by fleeing from Poland to the Soviet Union just before the war broke out. The rest of his family perished in Treblinka. He emigrated to Sweden after the war. There it’s claimed he was recruited by the KGB. After marrying, he moved to Israel and became a leading microbiologist. Eventually, he became the deputy director of Israel’s Nes Ziona biological weapons laboratory. All the while, he provided the Soviets with the results of Israel’s chemical and biological weapons experiments as an agent code-named “Rok.”
In 1983, the Shabak kidnapped him, torturing and interrogating him for ten days. At the end of that period, he signed a confession. He was secretly arrested, tried, convicted, receiving a 20-year sentence. Like Ben Zygier and Mordechai Vanunu, he was placed in solitary confinement for ten years. Foreign journalists who sought him out were told by Israeli officials that he had had a mental breakdown and was in a European asylum. Only his wife knew what had really happened, but she was sworn to secrecy.
Much like Zygier, Klingberg was held in prison under a false name and profession. After suffering several strokes, Amnesty International appealed for his release on humanitarian grounds. 39 Knesset members even appealed for his release. But the intelligence apparatus objected, saying that “his mind might contain secrets even he might not be aware of.” As the Guardian put it: how does a detainee defend himself against a charge that he knows things he doesn’t know? This is the same perverse argument used to punish Mordechai Vanunu and prevent his emigration from Israel.
Israel released him to house arrest in 1998, but forced him to pay for surveillance cameras and guards who monitored his movements. In doing so, he was forced to sell his apartment. Finally, in 2003 his sentence was complete and he left to live with his daughter in Paris.
Klingberg’s attorney, Michael Sfard published the his story, The Last Spy, in Israel and it has been published in a number of foreign languages, but unfortunately not yet in English. It would make an amazing thriller.
The double agent is Boris Krasny, now one of Israel’s most successful business lobbyists. In fact, he was the first and established the entire industry. He is a favorite of prime ministers, oligarchs and CEOs. They include Israel’s major defense contractors and all its cellphone companies–some 90 in all. He’s lobbied for some of the worst, most anti-consumer legislation in the Knesset. He opposed a bill that would’ve forced Israel’s largest grocery chain to list prices on all products. He fought a law which would’ve limited bank fees for his client, Bank Hapoalim.
He’s also defended some of Israel’s most corrupt politicians as a political consultant, including Shas’ Aryeh Deri before the latter went to prison. He’s pals with Sheldon Adelson and Idan Ofer, one of Israel’s richest oligarchs.
And he set his sights even higher. Proctor & Gamble and Goldman Sachs are among his clients who summon him for meetings around the world. He lobbied on behalf of Philip Morris in order continue cigarette advertising. Krasny’s influence is felt in international business circles, one of the few in the Israeli lobbying community to have so many clients and interests around the world.
He’s known Bill Clinton for years. He loves the good life, smokes $1,000 cigars and orders multi-thousand dollar bottles of wine in the finest restaurants. Among the assets he exploits along with his personal charm are secrets, cigars and lots of wine. He’s also not above comparing himself to the “greatest of Russian actors.” On a 1984 grand tour of the U.S. with other young Israeli political activists, he promised “I’ll get rich yet from politics.” And so he has.
He got his start in Kiev in the early 1970s, where he was a prominent Jewish activist. When the Soviet Union opened its doors to Russian Jewish emigration, Krasny was among those released. But he had already been recruited as a Soviet spy.
The Israeli Shabak extensively interviewed Soviet emigres attempting to detect “plants” like Krasny. When they interviewed him, he admitted he’d been sent to burrow into the highest levels of Israeli society. But instead of prosecuting and imprisoning him, they already knew they had another Soviet agent in their midst who they couldn’t find. So they “turned” him and set him loose as a double agent, whose codename was “Shomroni.” He exploited the trust the Russians placed in him, parlaying this into eventually fingering Klingberg.
In 1977, the Israeli scientist had broken off all contact with his Soviet handlers. They were mystified and sought to establish contact with him through alternate means. In the early 1980s, they tasked two former Jewish dissidents Krasny and Shabbtai Kalminovich with reaching out to Klingberg via secret codes left in his Tel Aviv mail box. Kalminovich attempted and failed to make contact. He later was imprisoned by the Israelis for his espionage activities. Though it’s not known precisely what happened between Krasny and Klingberg, somehow the former was able to provide further evidence of Klingberg’s role as a master spy.
When the Soviet Union fell in the early 1990s, Krasny ceased his relationship with his Soviet paymasters (all the funds the Soviets gave him he transferred to the Shabak).
Because of this singular achievement, Israel’s intelligence apparatus has protected his identity until now. But my source has definitely identified him. In 2010, I reported the existence of the double agent based on a report published in News1. We had a blacked out partial image of him, whose uncensored original I failed to find. Nor did we know his name.
Krasny is also known to be a close friend of Avigdor Lieberman, himself a focus of suspicion regarding his own corrupt business dealings. In addition, Lieberman is widely suspected within Israeli intelligence circles of being a Russian asset within Israel’s political élite.
SCOOP! the story was brought םמ TV by Amnon Levi in 2012
http://panim.nana10.co.il/Article/?ArticleID=944025
and Yossi Milman who you are probably familiar with wrote about it in 2008.
@ Gal: Yes, the story in various parts has been covered and I have linked to that coverage in this post. But until now no one has identified Boris Krasny by name. That was the “scoop” to which I referred.
Klinberg just died in Paris at age 97.
מרקוס קלינברג, הישראלי שריגל לטובת ברה”מ, נפטר בגיל 97
מי שנחשב למרגל החשוב ביותר שהיה לברית המועצות בישראל, הלך לעולמו בביתו שבפריז, אליה עבר ב-2003, לאחר מחלה שבעקבותיה הדרדר מצבו. הוא הורשע ונידון ל-20 שנות מאסר ושוחרר אחרי 15 שנה בתנאים מגבילים
יוסי מלמן / 30/11/2015 19:43
תגיות: ריגול רוסיה
@ Reb Gilead: Thanks for this news.
In his father’s footsteps, meet son Guy Krasny @Policy and @Roboteam.
Father and son serve in the leadership team of Crossroads VC.
On your Twitter account you blessed Klinberg memory.
Isn’t it a bit unamerican to bless the memory of a Soviet spy who harmed Israel and possibly the US security?
He didn’t ‘hope for a better world’ but was forced (so it seems) to work for them.
@ Arik: Klingberg was never forced to work for anyone. He chose to work for the Soviet Union because they were Hitler’s strongest enemy and did the most damage to his regime during WWII. You forget that his entire family was wiped out in Treblinka. I know dolts like you don’t give a crap for the suffering that motivates some Jews to do what they do. But Klingberg wanted revenge on Hitler and chose the one who wreaked the most vengeance on the Nazis.
It’s not a decision I would make today. But hindsight is always 20/20. And btw, many, many Jewish survivors made precisely the same decision in supporting the Soviet Union. Or did you forget that inconvenient part of European Jewish history?
Wow, blessing the memory of someone who worked on behalf of one of the most murderous regimes in history? How low can you sink?
@ Nachum: That’s rich coming from someone who defends a regime that can be quite murderous when it comes to Palestinians.
@Richard
” May his memory be for a blessing and his family comforted by the life of principle he led.”
Klingberg helped develop chemicals to poison Israel’s enemies, like Khaled Mashal.
He committed treason in order to help the Soviets, and you think he was ‘principled’?
Strange.
Simple answer: Judaism. Even for war criminals.
@ Mr Phlegm:
Really? You know this how? From inside knowledge? First-hand experience? No, you don’t. You’re just bluffing as usual.
So many, many errors here to correct. Now, student–sit still and teacher will offer you a lesson:
Mashal was poisoned in 1997. Klingberg was arrested in 1983. So no, he had no involvement in Mashal’s poisoning. Since Mashal was poisoned with a chemical and not a biological agent, Klingberg also had no direct or indirect connection with this crime. Finally, though scientists are certainly responsible for what they invent or develop, those who actually make the decision to unleash these weapons on the world are the ones who are most guilty.
He did nothing to “help the Soviets.” He believed that if Israel or the western powers had a monopoly on any particular WMD they would be more likely to use it on the Russians. His goal was to prevent such a catastrophe. I may disagree with his thinking & even some of his actions. But I honor his motive.
I hope you’ve resolved your ‘gender confusion.’ If not, I might recommend several good therapists for you to see to help you clarify your situation. (for those of you who don’t know “Ida” as he calls himself, this is meant as a joke)
Richard said, “Now, student–sit still and teacher will offer you a lesson: ”
Ida replies, “Housed there [Nes Tziona] are the biochemists and genetic scientists with their bottle agents of death: toxins that can create cripping food poisoning and lead to death; the even more virulent Venezuelan eqine encephalomyetis and anthrax.
In other laboratories…scientists work with a variety of nerve agents: choking agents, blood agents,….”
–Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, by Gordon Thomas.
Richard said, ” Since Mashal was poisoned with a chemical and not a biological agent, Klingberg also had no direct or indirect connection ”
According to former Mossadnik, Viktor Ostrovsky, “The plant, [Nes Tziona] manufactures not only chemical and biological weapons for use in bombs, but more unusual arms as well. It supplied the poison for last year’s assassination attempt by the Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA, on the life of Khaled Meshal, a Hamas Party leader in Jordan. ”
http://www.wrmea.org/1998-december/crash-of-cargo-plane-in-holland-revealed-existence-of-israeli-chemical-and-biological-weapons-plant.html
Lady Phlegm: Gordon Thomas is a jackass (and this isn’t just my opinion, it’s the opinion of a respected Israeli security correspondent I consulted). Thomas wouldn’t know the Mossad from the Three Stooges. His book reads like a James Bond movie set in Tel Aviv. He too has mixed up chemical with biological agents. I assure you the professionals who work there don’t.
As for Ostrovsky, he didn’t say what you imply. He did not say the poison was a biological agent. It was a chemical agent. Poisons are generally chemical in nature. You don’t seem to grasp that chemical & biological agents are not the same and scientists who work on one don’t generally work on the other except in very unusual circumstances.
You’re done in this thread. Stop beating a dead horse.
[comment deleted: that was a low blow Lady Phlegm. You’re now moderated. Your next attempt at snark will see you banned entirely.]
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Soviet Union was a terror state before the war and after the war became an openly antisemitic terror state. Your “hero” knew this perfectly well, yet he kept betraying his country and his people to make this antisemitic terror state that much stronger. The man who exposed him deserves all the riches he could get, and the only sorrow I have is that Klingberg was allowed to die peacefully in his bed – his Soviet masters would not be so kind.
@ Haim: You forgot your Jewish history haboob. Who saved European Jews? Roosevelt, CHurchill, even Ben Gurion? No, Stalin did. If you lived in Poland, saw your family wiped out & also saw how many hundreds of thousands of Jews Stalin saved you would’ve adopted Klingberg’s views as well.
Of course, after 1954 it became much harder to see the Soviet Union as benign. But if you were a Holocaust survivor you should be permitted holding such illusions given the horror you suffered.
Apparently, you come from the school of ahistory which denies that traumatic historical events should have any impact on Holocaust-era Jews. The rest of us feel otherwise.
As for Krasny, if you wish to embrace a corrupt, venal, oligarch ass-licker be my guest. It tells us quite a bit about the caliber of human being you are.
“It tells us quite a bit about the caliber of human being you are.”
Your personal hateful attacks on people that don’t hold your twisted views and your censoring of anybody that proves your views are twisted, actually tells us exactly what caliber of human being you yourself are.
If there is anything you can call yourself “teacher”of, it’s censorship. You embody it.
@ Eyal: You’ve just violated the comment rules. If you visit someone’s home (or website) and call them “twisted” you’re no longer welcome. Our time was so short. We’d hardly gotten to know each other. It seems sad to let you go. But alas we must.
Next time, try to be housebroken before you defecate on your host’s floor.