Chapter Four
A Soviet Mole and a Body at Sea

Ze’ev Avni yearned to become a Mossad agent.

As he arrived, one rainy day in April 1956, at Mossad headquarters, he was wishing with all his heart to come out of there as an employee of the Mossad. For years he had been trying to become one of the selected few, and this had been his most important goal in life.

Born Wolf Goldstein in Riga, Latvia, he had grown up in Switzerland, served in the Swiss Army during World War II, and immigrated to Israel in 1948. He had changed his name to the Hebrew Ze’ev Avni, and after a couple of years of living and working at kibbutz Hazorea, he had joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was posted in Brussels. Personable, well-read, fluent in several languages, he had charmed his superiors with his manners and diligence as well as with his willingness to volunteer for any chore, especially those connected with the Mossad. Whenever a diplomat was needed for a secret courier job, for an urgent trip to another city, for delivering classified documents to a Mossad undercover unit anywhere in Europe—Avni was the first to volunteer. His frequent cooperation with the Mossad informally made him one of their guys in Europe; and that collaboration became more intense when he was transferred to Israel’s embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In several letters to the ramsad, Isser Harel, Avni suggested establishing a Mossad station in Belgrade. Harel refused: the Mossad had no need for a station in Yugoslavia—but Avni didn’t give up. In April 1956, he came back to Israel on a private visit and asked to see the ramsad. His demand was granted, and that day he was to meet Isser Harel for the first time.

Tense and nervous, he entered Harel’s office in an old house in the former German colony in Tel Aviv. Harel had been appointed ramsad less than four years earlier, but was already a legend. People admired and feared this short, enigmatic man; true and false stories about him wafted through the dim Mossad corridors. Avni had heard bits and pieces about Harel, who had been nicknamed “Little Isser”—to tell him apart from the notorious “Big Isser.” Avni feared this encounter, given the rumors about Little Isser’s stubbornness, his brusque manners, and fantastic intuition.

But the short, lean, and balding man in khakis and a short-sleeved shirt who received Avni in his monastic office was soft-spoken and kind. He admitted to being impressed by Avni’s demeanor and political savvy. He asked Avni for the reason of his visit to Israel right now, and Avni explained that his daughter from his first marriage had demanded that he come to see her.

“How old is your daughter?” Isser asked, smiling.

“Eight.”

“Eight?” Isser looked surprised. He seemed to find it odd that a diplomat would rush home from abroad just because his little daughter had summoned him. Avni then went into a detailed explanation about his complex relationship with his first wife, his child, and his current wife. Isser grew impatient, cut him short, and told him that there would be no Mossad station in Belgrade. As for Avni’s future, he said, “We’ll see after you complete your tour of duty in Yugoslavia.” Avni felt crushed.

However, before he left, Isser offered to meet with him again, in a couple of days, “but not in this building, too many people come in and out. You’ll meet me in my secret downtown office, my driver will take you there.”

There was still hope, Avni thought. If not—why would Isser want to see him again?

A few days later, Avni walked into a nondescript apartment in central Tel Aviv. He had no reason to fear Isser anymore; after all, he had been friendly at their first meeting.

Isser was waiting for him and led him into a big room: bare walls, a desk, a couple of chairs, shuttered windows. Avni sat down and Isser suddenly metamorphosed into a raging bull. His face contorted; he banged his fists on the desk and roared: “You are a Soviet agent! Confess! Confess!” And again: “Confess!” He kept hammering his clenched fists on his desk, and shouting: “I know the Soviets sent you! I know you’re a spy! Confess!”

Avni, thunderstruck, froze. He felt unable to say a word.

“Confess! If you cooperate with me, I’ll try to help you, but if not . . .”

Avni’s heart pounded madly in his chest. He was covered in cold sweat and his tongue felt like lead. He was certain that his last moment had come and Isser would have him killed.

He finally gathered up the strength to utter a few words.

“I confess,” he mumbled, “I work for the Russians.”

Isser opened a concealed door, and in walked two of his best agents and a police officer. The officer arrested Avni, and he was taken away, to an interrogation facility. Then, step by step, he revealed his identity and his true aim. A fervent Communist since his teens, he had been recruited by the Soviet GRU (the Red Army espionage service) while still living in Switzerland, and had spied for the Soviet Union during World War II. Shortly after, he had been advised to immigrate to Israel and wait. He was to become a long-term mole. For many years, he had expected a message from Moscow, but the Russian master spies had waited to contact him only when he had been posted to Brussels. There, he delivered to them important information about Israel’s deals with the F.N. arms industry in Belgium, had supplied them with the Israeli foreign ministry codes, and even revealed to them the names of two German ex-Nazis who were spying for Israel in Egypt. To the surprise of their handlers, the two Germans had been hastily expelled from Egypt. But that had not been enough for Avni’s Russian case officers. They wanted their man to infiltrate the Mossad. And that’s what Avni tried so hard to do, until the moment when Isser shouted: “Confess!”

And when he confessed, he didn’t know what was most shocking: he could have walked out of Isser’s trap a free man! The ramsad hadn’t the slightest shred of evidence against him, only suspicions, not even a hint of proof that Avni was a spy. True, long ago, somebody had mentioned to Isser that Avni had been expelled from his kibbutz because of his Communist views. But a Soviet spy?

Isser had acted on intuition alone. Avni’s relentless efforts to join the Mossad; the seemingly strange visit to his daughter; his attempts to convince Isser to establish a Mossad station in Belgrade . . . All these minor occurrences merged in Isser’s sharp mind and led him to an unlikely conclusion: a mole, a traitor, had almost penetrated Israel’s sanctum sanctorum.

At his trial, Avni made a full confession and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was paroled after nine, became a model citizen and a psychologist. Isser told his biographer that Avni was the most dangerous spy ever caught in Israel but also “the most charming,” and spoke warmly of him as “the gentleman spy.”

Avni himself told us that over the years some of the high-ranking police officers and Shabak (rough equivalent of the American FBI) interrogators had become his good friends.

Operation Pygmalion, as the Avni affair was called, for many years was one of the closest-guarded secrets of the Mossad. But for the few who were in the know, it was one more proof of Isser’s amazing instincts.

But who was Little Isser? Taciturn, shy, stubborn as a mule, he purportedly had been born in the ancient fortress town of Dvinsk, in Imperial Russia; it was said that when he immigrated to Israel at eighteen, he was carrying in his knapsack a loaf of bread, inside of which he had baked a revolver. Little Isser first settled in kibbutz Shefayim, where he married a joyful horsewoman, Rivka. Tough, stubborn, and assertive, he left the kibbutz for unknown reasons with a wife, a child, and only the shirt on his back. During World War II, he joined the Haganah and soon became head of the Shai’s Jewish Department, which tracked traitors and dissidents. The “dissidents” were members of the Irgun and the Stern group—two clandestine right-wing organizations that contested the authority and the politics of David Ben-Gurion and of the organized Jewish community. After the demise of “Big Isser,” Little Isser became head of the Internal Security Service, the Shabak.

The Mossad had barely started functioning when Ben-Gurion, in a sudden move, accepted Reuven Shiloah’s resignation and appointed Isser head of the Mossad. The official reason for the change was a traffic accident that was said to have incapacitated Shiloah, but the Mossad gossip was that Isser had bullied Shiloah out, after convincing Ben-Gurion that the ramsad was erudite and a nice guy but unable to lead tough agents and carry out secret operations.

Under Isser, the intelligence community acquired what became its definitive shape. It was composed of five services: the Mossad, the Shabak, the Aman (military intelligence), the special branch of the police, and the research division of the foreign ministry. Of these, only Mossad, Aman, and Shabak were important; the other two were not as highly regarded. The directors of the five services and their deputies formed the “Heads of Services Committee.” Isser was appointed its chairman. Ben-Gurion also created a special title for him: memunneh—chief executive in charge of the security services. When he first appointed Little Isser to this new position, Ben-Gurion remarked: “Of course you’ll continue to direct the Shabak, even though you now have Mossad.” Isser selected a new Shabak director, though the overall control of both Mossad and Shabak remained in his hands.

Thus, Little Isser became Israel’s intelligence tsar.

The Pygmalion affair was but one of several key operations Isser directed in the first years of Israel’s existence, mostly against Soviet spies, many of whom were captured, jailed, or expelled.

But not all spies worked for the Soviets—and not every spy story had a happy ending.

 

One afternoon in early December 1954, a lone cargo aircraft kept circling over the Eastern Mediterranean. When its pilots had made sure there were no seagoing vessels in the area, one of the aircraft doors opened and a big object was dropped into the sea—a body.

The plane turned back and, an hour later, landed in Israel, marking the end of Operation Engineer (not its real name), an operation that remained ultra-confidential for more than fifty years.

In 1949, three brothers from a Jewish family in Bulgaria arrived in Haifa. The oldest, Alexander Israel, had just graduated from the engineering school in Sofia. He enlisted in the army, was given the rank of captain, and was posted to the Israeli Navy. Captain Israel was a handsome and extremely charming young man. He was valued by his superiors and was assigned to top-secret research in electronic warfare and development of new weapons. Given a high security clearance, he had access to some of the most sensitive material. He changed his first name to the Hebrew Avner and in 1953 he married Matilda Arditi, a pretty, young woman of Turkish origin. The young couple settled in Haifa, close to Israel’s major naval base. Matilda was very much in love with her charismatic husband, but unaware of the less delightful aspects of his personality.

She didn’t know that he had a long and colorful police record. Avner Israel had been accused of simultaneously leasing the same apartment to more than one renter; of posing as a refrigerator company representative who collected down payments for refrigerators that were not delivered; and of other such dealings. One case came to court, and he was summoned to report for trial on November 8, 1954.

Matilda, heavy with child, knew nothing of her husband’s fraud, nor of his affair with a pretty clerk at the Italian consulate in Haifa. Avner even proposed, and the Italian girl agreed on one condition: he must first convert to Catholicism.

For young Avner this posed no great problem. He already had converted once before, in Bulgaria, when he was forced to marry another Christian girl whom he had seduced. Her furious family had demanded—almost at gunpoint—that he convert and marry the young woman. Right after the wedding he fled from Sofia, his wife committed suicide, and then he returned to Sofia and to Judaism. Now he did it again. He traveled to Jerusalem with his paramour, was baptized in the Terra Santa convent, and changed his name to Ivor. Using documents provided by the Church, the charming captain registered with the Ministry of Interior and was issued a passport in his new name, Alexander Ivor.

He and his Italian girlfriend set November 7, 1954, as the date for their wedding. The trial in Haifa was set for November 8. Avner Israel, aka Alexander Ivor, had no intention of honoring any of those commitments. The time had come for him to vanish.

At the end of October, Captain Israel went on a two-week leave. He had no exit visa—but Alexander Ivor had one, and a full set of documents, some authentic, others fake. He bought a plane ticket to Rome, and on November 4 he left. Neither his wife nor his “fiancée” knew about his departure. Her fiancé gone, the Italian woman started an anxious search. Finally she turned to the Haifa police; with their help she discovered his address, where she was shocked to meet Mrs. Matilda Israel, in her seventh month of pregnancy.

In Rome Avner Israel vanished, but not for long. The Mossad resident agent there had good sources in the Arab diplomatic community in Italy. On November 17 an urgent cable reached Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv: “An Israeli officer, Alexander Ivor or Ivon or Ivy is here, and is trying to sell military information to the Egyptian military attaché.”

The ramsad and the new head of Shabak, Amos Manor, joined forces to find out who this was. In a few days they discovered his identity, and were dismayed to learn that he was an Israeli naval officer. Another telegram from Rome was even more troubling: the Mossad agent reported that Israel had sold the Egyptians the detailed plans of a large IDF base in Israel, and had been paid $1,500, which he had deposited in the Credit Suisse Bank. He was said to have promised the Egyptians more information, and agreed to fly to Egypt, to be debriefed there.

A few days later, another cable: “The Egyptian embassy has ordered two tickets to Cairo for the end of November, at the TWA agency. Apparently the two passengers will be the Egyptian military attaché and the Israeli officer.”

Alarm bells rang at Mossad headquarters. To Isser, there was a huge difference between a debriefing of an informant by a military attaché in a foreign country—and the transfer of that same informant to Egypt’s capital, where he would be interrogated by experts, who would obtain even more detailed and dangerous information from him. Isser was determined to prevent—at all costs—the flight of Avner Israel to Cairo.

He decided to dispatch his operational team to Rome. At these early days, the Mossad didn’t have an operations department yet and used the operational unit of the Shabak. Its commander, one of the best agents Israel had, was a legend to his men—Rafi Eitan. Born on a kibbutz, he was a stubby, bespectacled, jolly little fellow but also daring, creative, and ruthless. A Palmach fighter in the years preceding independence, he had been deeply involved in Aliya Beth, the secret organization that smuggled Jews to Palestine despite the British restrictions. They had to escape from Europe on ramshackle boats, evade British warships cruising the shores of Palestine, land at deserted beaches, and then blend into the local Jewish population. Rafi’s most famous exploit had been to blow up the British radar installation on Mount Carmel, near Haifa, which detected the approach of Aliya Beth vessels. To reach the radar, Rafi had crawled through repulsive sewers and got himself named “Rafi the Smelly.” His future activities during the War of Independence confirmed his bravery and his wily intelligence. When Isser assembled his operational team, he recruited people with varying backgrounds: Holocaust survivors, Palmach and Haganah veterans, former members of the Irgun and the Stern group—right-wing militants whom he had hunted during the pre-state struggle. (One of the Mossad recruits was Yitzhak Shamir, a former leader of the Stern group and a future prime minister.)

Rafi was appointed head of the operational team.

He took off for Rome, together with agents Raphael Medan and Emmanuel (Emma) Talmor. Other agents joined them soon after. They immediately set up an ambush at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. At the last briefing before their departure, Isser had ordered them to stop Avner Israel at the airport. “He must never get on that plane. Fake a brawl, overpower him, and wound him if need be. And if all other moves fail—shoot and kill him!”

That was the first time ever that a license to kill was given to Israeli agents.

But the airport attack didn’t happen. The information about the trip to Egypt appeared erroneous; Israel stayed on in Rome awhile, and then, suddenly, left and started traveling across Europe, with Eitan’s team on his heels. As if trying to shake those who were chasing him, he went to Zurich, Geneva, Genoa, Paris, Vienna . . .

And then, all of a sudden, Captain Israel vanished. The Mossad agents looked for him everywhere, but failed. But then, Rafi Eitan’s usual luck came through. In Vienna there was an Israeli envoy of a secret organization, Nativ, whose mission was to expedite the flight of Jews from Russia and the Eastern Bloc—and bring them to Israel. The Nativ man maintained close ties with the Mossad. One day in December, his Bulgarian-born wife had a surprise for him.

“You won’t believe this,” she said, beaming. “This morning I was walking on the street, and I bumped into a friend of mine from Sofia. I hadn’t seen him for years. We went to school together, in the same class! What a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Really? What’s his name?” the husband asked.

“Alexander Israel. We’re meeting tomorrow for lunch.”

The Nativ envoy knew of Eitan’s search for a man who corresponded to his wife’s description and alerted him right away. The following day two Mossad agents went for lunch to the same restaurant, and sat not far from where Alexander Israel and his childhood friend were reminiscing. When Israel left the Nativ man’s wife, they clung to him like shadows.

A few days later, “Alexander Ivor” boarded an Austrian Airlines plane to Paris. In the seat next to his was a young and attractive woman. Ivor, a consummate womanizer, started a conversation with her, and she pleasantly responded. They decided to meet again in Paris for a night on the town. Just before landing, she turned to the officer: “Some friends of mine are meeting me at the airport. Would you like to join us? I’m sure there’ll be room in the car.”

Ivor was delighted. At the airport, two well-dressed gentlemen were waiting for the lady. The four of them got into a car and headed for Paris. Ivor sat beside the driver. Night had fallen; the driver noticed a man standing by a poorly illuminated crossroad and waving, as if trying to hitch a ride. “Let’s take him,” he said. He stopped the car, and suddenly the “hitchhiker” and a few other men, emerging from the darkness, converged on the vehicle, while another automobile stopped behind them.

“We are being abducted!” Ivor shouted. Suddenly the man behind him grabbed him by the throat. Ivor struggled frantically against the grip of his attacker. The car door opened and the man standing outside jumped on Ivor and overpowered him. He drew a gun and shouted in Hebrew: “Another move—and you’re dead!”

Ivor froze. A hand, holding a chloroform-soaked pad, was slapped on his face, and Ivor sank into deep sleep.

He was surreptitiously brought to a safe house in Paris, where Rafi Eitan and his men interrogated him. He admitted that he had sold top-secret documents to the Egyptians, and that he had done it for the money. From Israel, Isser telegraphed an order to bring him back. Even the basest traitor, he believed, should stand trial, and his legal rights be respected. Eitan and his men drugged Avner, put him in a large crate, and loaded him on an Israeli Air Force Dakota cargo aircraft that used to fly once a week from Paris to Tel Aviv.

The road home was long and strenuous. The plane had to refuel in Rome and Athens. A well-known doctor—an anesthetist by the name of Yona Elian—flew with the group. Before each landing and takeoff, the doctor would inject their passenger with a soporific drug. After the Athens takeoff, however, disaster struck. Avner Israel, unconscious, suddenly started breathing heavily; his pulse accelerated and his heartbeat became irregular. Dr. Elian made feverish efforts to stabilize him and bring his fit under control, including trying to revive the convulsing man with artificial respiration, but to no avail. Long before the plane landed in Israel, the prisoner died.

Immediately after the landing, the Mossad agents called Isser and informed him of Israel’s death. The ramsad ordered them to leave the body on the plane and told the pilot to take off again. Far from Israel’s coast, the body was thrown from the aircraft.

 

This unexpected mishap led to a commotion at Mossad headquarters. Isser hurried to Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s office, and asked him to appoint a board of inquiry to investigate the officer’s death. Sharett appointed a two-man board, which cleared the Mossad agents from all wrongdoing. All they had done, the board ruled, was to bring the man to trial; they were not to blame for his death. The main reason for the death, they concluded, was apparently an overdose of the soporific that the doctor had injected. When asked years later, the doctor maintained that the death had been caused by abrupt changes in air pressure within the aircraft. (In 1960 he participated, once again as anesthetist, in Eichmann’s capture in Argentina.)

Isser’s men checked Avner Israel’s papers and discovered affidavits and letters of recommendation from the Catholic Church in Jerusalem; after selling his secrets to the Egyptians, he had planned to escape to South America. In his bags the agents found a ship ticket to Brazil.

The next problem Isser had to face was with Israel’s family. He should have invited Matilda to come in and tell her the whole truth. But the Mossad heads, embarrassed by the sorry end of the affair, preferred to bury the story and got the full support of Prime Minister Sharett. The Mossad leaked fabricated stories about Captain Avner Israel to the newspapers. They hinted that he had escaped from Israel after becoming entangled in personal debts and romantic affairs. These stories made fat headlines in the papers.

For many years, Matilda, her husband’s brothers, and her son, Moshe Israel-Ivor, didn’t know what had happened. They believed he was still living somewhere, maybe South America. That lie was unforgivable.

The first failure of this mission was the way they treated Israel, even though he was a traitor; the second was their conspiracy of silence, the expunging of Israel’s name from military records, the Mossad’s misleading of his wife and brothers. Rafi Eitan and several Mossad officers strongly objected to the ramsad’s decision to throw the body in the sea and deceive the family, but their hands were tied. “Little Isser was Mr. Security those days,” Eitan told us. “He was the absolute ruler of the secret services, and the intelligence community never disputed his decisions.”

The publication of this story, years later, demonstrates how difficult it is to obliterate the existence of a person. Even after they’re dead, they sometimes talk to us from beyond the grave.