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The Journalist's Connections: How

Israel Got Russia's Biggest Pre‐glasnost
Secret
a b
Yossi Melman & Dan Raviv
a
Nieman Fellow, Harvard University,
b
CBS News,
Version of record first published: 09 Jan 2008.

To cite this article: Yossi Melman & Dan Raviv (1990): The Journalist's Connections: How
Israel Got Russia's Biggest Pre‐glasnost Secret, International Journal of Intelligence and
CounterIntelligence, 4:2, 219-225

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 YOSSI MELMAN AND DAN RAVIV
The Journalist's Connections:
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How Israel Got Russia's

Biggest Pre-glasnost Secret

Back in the days before Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost, secret agents of many
nations risked their lives in the Soviet Union merely to get a copy of a particular
speech. Israel won that international espionage race by obtaining 20,000 printed
words in April 1956, a victory that propelled Mossad le Aliyah Beth — the
nation's foreign espionage agency — into a world-class intelligence organization.
The Israelis got their hands on something that every Western spy desperately
wanted: the speech by the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in which he
ended the Josef Stalin era by officially detailing its horrors for the first time; the
gulag prison camps, the theatrical trials, the killings.
The surprise, now revealed for the first time, is that the Mossad did not obtain
the speech. The coup was actually achieved by the less flashy, far less praised
Shin Bet — Israel's domestic security agency. Shin Bet agents got Khrushchev's
secret speech out of the Soviet bloc. And, belatedly, some of them now wish to
claim credit.

COMPETITIVE SCRAMBLING
After the new Kremlin leader had spoken to a party congress in Moscow in
February 1956, every intelligence service in the West launched an all-out search
for the text. Khrushchev, who had emerged from a collective leadership to be

Yossi Melman, an Israeli defense and diplomatic commentator is now at Harvard

University as a Nieman Fellow. Dan Raviv is a CBS News correspondent based
in London. They are authors of T h e Imperfect Spies: The History of Israeli
Intelligence and Behind the Uprising: Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians.

219

INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE VOLUME 4, NUMBER 2

 220 YOSSIMELMAN AND DAN RAVIV

new Soviet dictator, had to be better understood; the specific damage done to the
Soviet Union by Stalin had to be catalogued. Khrushchev's words could be used
by Western propagandists to weaken the East's faith in Stalinism and
Communism.
Western agents tried to bribe Communists from the Soviet-bloc "satellite"
states who had attended the Moscow congress. Most foreign guests, however, had
been locked out of the 23 February session at which Khrushchev made his
dramatic denunciation of Stalin. Each delegation from abroad was permitted to
send only its leader into the hall, and these were top Communists so fiercely loyal
to the Kremlin that they would never help Western intelligence.
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No wonder, then, that Allen Dulles would later remember 17 April as the date
of one of the greatest achievements in his career as CIA director. On that date
Dulles received a printed copy of the Russian speech from his counterintelligence
chief, James Jesus Angleton, who reported that the mammoth text had been
provided by "the Israelis." The CIA and the Mossad had signed a cooperation
agreement five years earlier. Now it had paid off. And the Mossad's reputation, in
a flash, was made forever.

CONFIRMATION
The man who personifies the Mossad, Isser Harel, became in 1989 the first Israeli
official — former or present — to confirm, on the record, that young and tiny
Israel had managed to do the CIA such a huge favor. In Security and Democracy,
the latest volume of his memoirs, Harel wrote: "We provided to our American
counterparts a document that is considered one of the biggest achievements in the
history of intelligence: the full, secret speech of the First Secretary of the Soviet
Communist Party."
Harel was head of Shin Bet for its first four years after the founding of the
State of Israel in 1948, and then director of the Mossad from 1952 to 1963. While
confirming Israel's role in obtaining the Khrushchev speech for the West and
calling it a "giant success," Harel still did not reveal who precisely got his or her
hands on the speech — or how.
Shockingly, Harel may simply not know. Despite trying in his many books and
articles to be the spokesman and chief interpreter of all that occurred during his
years of active service, Harel now appears to have had almost no role in
obtaining the Khrushchev text and deciding to share it with the CIA.
The trail is difficult to follow, more than three decades after the event, but
there are indications that it led through Poland to a Communist named Stefan
Staszewski, the party chief in Warsaw in the 1950s. Recently, in his published
memoirs, he surprisingly revealed that he personally lifted the veil of secrecy
from Khrushchev's startling speech.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
 THE JOURNALIST'S CONNECTIONS 221

According to Staszewski, the Soviet party hierarchy sent texts of the speech to
a few selected Communists in the Eastern European satellite countries. A single
copy, running fifty-eight pages in Russian, was brought by courier to Eduard
Ochab, the first secretary of Poland's ruling party, who died in 1989. Ochab, who
had not attended the Moscow congress, was shocked by what he read.
Khrushchev was absolutely confirming all the worst allegations that had been
made about Stalin. It was like trying to persuade a devout Christian to no longer
believe in Jesus.
Ochab, cautiously and surreptitiously, shared the blasphemy — the new
gospel, in fact — from Moscow with a few senior Polish Communists. At first,
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they had to read the single copy locked in his safe. After ordering that it be
translated into Polish, limited, numbered copies were sent to municipal party
chiefs, including Staszewski.
In his memoirs, Staszewski shamelessly declares that he decided the speech
ought to be more widely read and thus ordered that thousands of copies be made
and distributed. He says he gave the text to three Western news correspondents,
among them a newspaperman named Philip Ben.

THE JOURNALIST
A Polish Jew born in Lodz in 1913 as Norbert Niszewski, Ben became a
journalist in his teenage years but a soldier when Hitler's army invaded Poland in
1939. Niszewski served in the Polish Free Army, fleeing to refuge in the Soviet
Union and later to the Middle East. By 1943, after his Jewish identity asserted
itself, he abandoned plans to join the British forces. He settled in Palestine
instead, writing for Hebrew newspapers and abandoning his Polish name in favor
of one that fit in better with the newborn Israeli culture. Ben means "son," and
Philip was his father's first name.
Through Israel's independence in 1948 and the exciting years that followed,
Ben wrote more about the outside world than he did about the Middle East and
crises nearer home. His columns on international affairs showed flashes of
brilliance. The famed French newspaper Le Monde hired this intelligent Israeli in
1952; Eastern Europe was his special beat.
As Ben built up an extensive network of sources, his reputation grew larger
than that of the average newsman. Moshe Avidan, Israel's ambassador to Poland
in the 1950s, recalls that other diplomats in Warsaw used to approach the
embassy for information because "your Israeli journalist knows everything."
Ben's reports on the workers' strike in Poznan in October 1956, in Le Monde
and in Israel's Ma'ariv, caused such a sensation that the Polish authorities
expelled him from the country. There was an additional reason: his love affair
with a young and attractive Polish woman named Franka Toroncik. Ben, who

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 222 YOSSIMELMAN AND DAN RAV1V

was then married, smuggled his mistress out of Poland. When they declared Ben
persona non grata, the Poles also labeled him "an agent of Israeli and American
intelligence." His sister Hanna Tikicinski, who lives in Tel Aviv, says: "He was
always a man of mystery."
"That's right," agrees Franka Toroncik, who has remained in Israel after
sharing the rest of Ben's life with him. "It is correct that he knew how to keep
secrets, and he wouldn't even tell me everything." After reporting for many years
from the United Nations in New York, Ben died in 1978. Even though he wrote
many thousands of words for public consumption, countless untold stories were
buried with him.
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One of the stories locked away by Ben, according to the former Warsaw
communist boss Staszewski, was his role in unearthing Khrushchev's secret
speech. A longtime colleague of Ben's at Ma'ariv says it is "not impossible" that
Ben helped Israeli intelligence with information from the various cities he visited.
If Staszewski did give the Khrushchev text to Ben, it may well have gone to the
Mossad — and then on to the CIA — rather than to Ma'ariv. Staszewski still
insists that he personally gave a copy of the Khrushchev text to Philip Ben.
However, Staszewski claims in his memoirs that he also gave the text to New
York Times journalists Flora Lewis and Sidney Gruson. Thinking back to 1956
with her excellent memory, Lewis says she and Gruson, her husband at the time,
had heard rumors of an important Khrushchev speech but, despite their best
efforts, could not obtain its contents.

THE SOURCE
Was Ben the person who provided the speech to Israel, thus elevating the Mossad
into the big leagues of international intelligence? Only one man now knows the
whole truth. He is Amos Manor, a veteran Israeli spymaster who has managed to
remain all but invisible throughout his life.
After rising through the ranks of Israeli security, Manor served as head of Shin
Bet — the domestic intelligence agency equivalent to the FBI and Britain's MI5
— for eleven years, until his retirement from the secret world in 1964. Now a
businessman and member of various corporate boards, Manor told us: "I have
never discussed my work and I will not now deviate from my habit."
Manor is, above all, a survivor. As a young Jew in Hungary named Artur
Mendelevitz, he managed to avoid extermination in the Holocaust. In 1946, he
prepared to move to Israel — to carry out what Jews call aliyah, literally "going
up" to their B iblical homeland.
When he contacted Jewish Agency immigration officials, however, they
referred his case to the clandestine Mossad le-Aliyah Bet, the "Institute" for
"Aliyah-B" — the alternative to the tiny legal immigration permitted by the

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
 THE JOURNALISTS CONNECTIONS 223

British rulers of Palestine. Aliyah Bet operatives took one look at the wily 28-
year-old and decided to recruit him as a secret agent rather than transport him to
the Land of Israel.
Mendelevitz worked as an Aliyah Bet man for three years, smuggling out East
European Jews through his base in Bucharest, Romania. In June 1949 the
communist government decided to crack down on Jewish emigration, and
Mendelevitz and his wife used forged passports to smuggle themselves out to
Israel.
Within days, he chose the Hebrew name Amos Manor and resigned from
Aliyah Bet. The agency recommended that he join the new domestic security
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service, Shin Bet, and Isser Harel gladly hired him. Manor rapidly worked his
way up the career ladder by excelling at Shin Bet's main business at the time:
rooting out communist subversion in Israel. Manor quickly concluded that
Soviet-bloc intelligence agencies posed much more of a threat to Israel than did
the weak and disorganized Arab secret services. Under Harel's enthusiastic
direction, Manor headed counterintelligence teams in around-the-clock
surveillance of Soviet diplomats in Tel Aviv, the embassies of other communist
states, and of business and cultural establishments linked to Eastern Europe.
In September 1952, Harel was appointed head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign
intelligence agency (not to be confused with Aliyah B), replacing its founder
Reuven Shiloah. The little known Isador Root was chosen as the new Shin Bet
director and Manor became deputy director. Root also changed his name to the
more Hebrew-sounding Izzy Dorot. A pleasant man, he is remembered as an
excellent conversationalist but a poor manager of the secret agency. Within a
year, Root resigned from Shin Bet and lived in total obscurity until his death in
the late 1970s. The name of the agency director is never publicly confirmed, but
even within Shin Bet there are few who remember Izzy Dorot.
Manor got the top job in October 1953, quite amazing considering that he was
only 35 and had been in Israel for barely four years. Compared with other
intelligence chiefs he stood out like a sore thumb, for Manor had not served in the
pre-state Haganah underground or its Palmach strike force, had not been in the
ranks of the British army or its famed Jewish Legion, and had not fought in
Israel's own war of independence in 1948-1949.
Manor's position as chief of one of the main security agencies was additionally
undermined because of a predecessor. Isser Harel had been Shin Bet chief since
Israel's day of birth and had not given up his authority even after moving to the
Mossad. Harel was chairman of the top-secret Varash, a Hebrew acronym for the
"Committee of Heads of the Services," which included the directors of Shin Bet,
the Aman military intelligence corps, and the Isareli police's special branch. The
head of the Mossad has always been chairman.

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 224 YOSSIMELMAN AND DAN RAVIV

Hard was unique, however, in being granted a title invented by Prime Minister
Ben-Gurion: He was to be the Memuneh, "the One in Charge" of the security
services. The title had no legal force and was never formally bestowed or
officially defined. Because Harel was to be in charge of the entire intelligence
community Manor was overshadowed from the start.

ONE BIG MOVE

His one act of greatness, it can now be revealed, was obtaining the secret
Khrushchev speech. It may come as a shock to intelligence analysts that Shin Bet
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— supposedly the domestic security agency — accomplished this feat, rather

than the famed Mossad with its worldwide network of spies. But Manor had
excellent sources in Eastern Europe, and apparently in the Soviet Union itself,
who reported to Shin Bet rather than to the Mossad because their main task was
to trace Soviet-bloc attempts to infiltrate agents into Israel.
One of Manor's agents in the Soviet bloc sent the Khrushchev speech in its
original Russian to Shin Bet headquarters in the Jaffa neighborhood of Tel Aviv
during the second week of April 1956.
Not knowing Russian, Manor asked a senior aide, who had made aliyah from
Russia, to translate the 58 pages into Hebrew. Manor also assigned Shin Bet's top
experts on the Soviet Union to read the text and judge its authenticity. The KGB
already had earned a solid reputation for disinformation through the fabricating
of documents.
On Friday, 13 April, at the end of the usual pre-Sabbath half-day in the office,
the Shin Bet chief sat at this desk in Jaffa and read the Hebrew version of the
Khrushchev speech. He had been hearing for weeks that it was important, a prize
sought by the CIA and others. The strong speech revealed much about the Soviet
Union's seemingly impenetrable politics.
When he finished reading the text, Manor put it into his briefcase — alongside
the consensus opinion of his Soviet-affairs analysts who declared it was genuine.
He drove directly to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's home in Tel Aviv and gave
him the Hebrew translation and the Shin Bet analysis.
Manor and Ben-Gurion met again on Saturday, and when the prime minister
was fully convinced that the Khrushchev speech was authentic he directed that it
be passed immediately to the Americans. Only then did Manor drive to Isser
Harel's house, to tell him for the first time about the text and to show it to the
Memuneh — without naming the source, however.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
 THE JOURNALISTS CONNECTIONS 225

THE U.S. LINK

Although the Mossad and the CIA had signed a cooperation agreement in May
1951, there had always been shadows over the relationship. The highly
suspicious counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton was among those who saw
socialist Israel as a potential security risk, especially with all the newly-arrived
Jews who could easily include communist spies.
The Israelis replied that they were careful about screening the immigrants, and
in any event pointed out that the Jews pouring into Israel could be useful to the
West. Interviewed in detail, they could provide valuable information on the inner
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workings of the Soviet-bloc economy, industry, scientific institutions,

educational system, and all the other areas where the new immigrants used to
work. Angleton never forgot that the first tip he received that Harold (Kim)
Philby, British intelligence liaison in Washington, was a communist spy had
come from Israeli diplomat Teddy Kollek, a former secret agent who is now the
veteran mayor of Jerusalem. Kollek's tip had been correct, but Philby defected to
Moscow before anyone did anything about it.
Israel was always anxious to impress the Americans, and so it was that a mere
two days after Ben-Gurion's personal decision to share the Khrushchev speech an
Israeli intelligence courier was flying the text to Washington. It was delivered to
Angleton himself, who from then on — despite his department's being the
agency's counterintelligence unit — would take personal charge of the CIA's
entire liaison relationship with Israel.
The Khrushchev speech was not merely read with great interest at CIA
headquarters. The Americans leaked it to The New York Times and then had the
entire text broadcast in all the languages of the communist countries over Radio
Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Printed texts were even tied to balloons and
flown over the Iron Curtain into the communist nations. In this way, thousands of
copies made their way into Poland. Perhaps this was the massive distribution of
the Khrushchev speech as recalled by former Warsaw party boss Staszewski.
Philip Ben proved to be an interesting story, but apparently a false lead.
Amos Manor is now in his seventies but has no intention of ever revealing the
name of the hero at the other end of the information pipeline. Manor is known to
be annoyed that Harel, the ex-Memuneh, has tried to claim credit on behalf of the
Mossad. Shin Bet, not Mossad, had gotten the secret Kremlin speech, but who
had sent it to Shin Bet? In the world of espionage, answers always lead to more
questions.

INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE VOLUME 4, NUMBER 2