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There's this speech by Khrushchev on my desk…
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By Yossi Melman
On the afternoon of Friday, April 13, 1956, Zelig Katz entered the office of Amos Manor, which was located in an Arab building opposite the flea market in Jaffa. Manor was the head of the Shin Bet security service. Zelig Katz, who had Hebraized his name (as was usual at that time) to Ziv Carmi, was his assistant and bureau chief. In an exclusive interview with Haaretz, Manor recollects the exchange of words that took place some 50 years ago.
Manor: Has the material arrived from Eastern Europe?
Carmi: Yes. Material has arrived from Warsaw.
Manor: Is there anything interesting?
Carmi: There's some speech by Khrushchev from the congress.
Manor (shouting): What? Where's the material?
Carmi: In my room.
Manor: Bring it immediately.
Carmi rushed to his room and returned with 70 photographed pages in Polish. "I said to him, you're an idiot," says Manor. "You are now holding in your hand one of the most important secrets in the world." Manor's astonishment and anger further increased when he discovered that the speech had been sent from the Shin Bet representative in Warsaw with a Foreign Ministry courier, three days earlier. "I said to Zelig, call Duvid and tell him to come here at once."
Duvid was David Schweitzer, a soccer player for Hapoel Tel Aviv who years later became the coach of the Israel national team; he was then in charge of the Shin Bet photo lab. Manor asked Carmi to translate the text for him. "The further he progressed in the translation, the more I cursed," he says. "Good grief, I said to myself."
Within a short time Schweitzer arrived. "I told him to photograph one copy and develop it as fast as possible - I have to bring it to Ben-Gurion." The photo and development took about two hours. While he was waiting for it, his wife Tzipora called. She was used to unconventional work hours and to her husband's absence, and she asked when he was coming home.
At 6 P.M., twilight, Manor got into his Vauxhall and immediately drove to the home of the prime minister on Keren Kayemet (today Ben-Gurion) Boulevard in Tel Aviv. "I came to Ben-Gurion and told him, we have Krushchev's speech from the 20th Party Conference. I don't know whether it's authentic. We got the speech from one of our sources in Warsaw, who got it from a woman who worked for [Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw] Gomulka."
But as we know, the secretary, the friend of journalist Viktor Grayevsky, who obtained the speech, was the secretary of [Polish prime minister] Edward Ochab, rather than Gomulka.
Manor smiles. "I thought at the time that it was Gomulka. I also told Ben-Gurion that I didn't know whether the source was a double agent who had leaked the speech as disinformation, or whether the speech was original, but had been deliberately leaked to us, so that it would reach the West. 'Judging by what was translated for me, I have the impression that it's authentic, but I suggest that you read it yourself.' Ben-Gurion knew Polish. I remember that he asked me three times what disinformation meant, and three times I explained to him. I left him a copy and departed."
Manor returned from there to his house in north Tel Aviv. The next morning the phone rang and he was asked to return to the house on Keren Kayemet. "Ben-Gurion said: 'If it's authentic, it's an historic document, and 30 years from now there will be a liberal regime in Moscow.' He returned the material to me without telling me what to do with it."
On Sunday, April 15, when he returned to his office, Amos Manor told the head of the Mossad, Isser Harel, about the document. "I told him, if it's authentic, it's an atomic bomb. I told him about the conversation with Ben-Gurion, and that I had decided to send the copy immediately to the CIA, but to maintain the utmost secrecy, I preferred that it be flown to Izzy Dorot, our representative in Washington, rather than being handed over to the CIA representative in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. I enclosed a letter with the document, in which I asked Izzy to give the material personally to Jim Angleton, and to emphasize repeatedly that I was not certain about the authenticity of the material, and that they should examine it carefully."
That same day, the document was sent to Washington via Foreign Ministry courier. Two days later, on April 17, the document landed on the desk of CIA chief Allen Dulles, who quickly informed President Dwight Eisenhower. That same day, Angleton called Amos Manor. James Jesus Angleton was the CIA's head of counterintelligence, and in charge of the clandestine liaison with Israeli intelligence. "He told me it was of utmost importance, and asked me to identify the source who had provided the speech. I replied: 'Jim, we have an agreement between us that we do not reveal sources of information, and the agreement applies to this case as well,'" Manor says.
Years later, Angleton told Manor that the CIA had enlisted its top experts, as well as leading Sovietologists from the academic world, to examine the speech and determine whether it was an original document or a fake. For that purpose, they even sent a copy of the speech to be perused by the U.S. ambassador in Moscow.
Shock and disbelief
The secret speech was delivered on February 25, 1956, in the evening. The 1,400 delegates at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were suddenly invited to a final, closed session, in the Central Committee building in Moscow. The representatives of the foreign delegations were not allowed to enter the hall. When Nikita Khrushchev, the party's first secretary, began to speak, the delegates could hardly believe their ears. Some of them fainted from shock. Without any prior preparation, Khrushchev began a sharp and unprecedented attack on his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, who had died three years earlier.
During the four hours of his speech - 26,000 words - Khrushchev described Stalin as a "despot," condemned the "cult of personality," and accused him of "crimes that caused cruel violence." He criticized Stalin for "most cruel repression," for inventing the concept of "an enemy of the people," and determined that he "had severely distorted the principles of the party."
Immediately after the speech, the delegates scattered, without any discussion taking place. But word of the secret speech spread quickly. Officials cited from it at party meetings, and it began to engineer a process of reforms. First hints of a secret, historic speech delivered at the Soviet Communist Party congress reached the West a few days later. The U.S. administration, as well as the governments of Britain, West Germany, France and others, were eager to learn the contents of the speech. The assignment, naturally, was given to the intelligence organizations. But the Israeli Shin Bet beat out all the others.
Two weeks after the Americans received the speech from Israel, Angleton once again contacted Manor and informed him that the experts had come to the conclusion that it was an original and authentic document. "Jim was in seventh heaven," says Manor. "He asked my permission to publish the material. I went again to Ben-Gurion and asked for his opinion. Ben-Gurion told me that he understood the Americans, because this was a document of historic importance, and gave his consent. I informed Jim of the decision, but asked him not to mention us as the source. We didn't want to be involved."
The relations between Israel and the Soviet Union were already very poor, because of Soviet support for Egypt, and the Israeli leadership was afraid of a Soviet reaction that was liable to harm not only Israel, but the Jews of the Soviet Union as well. After a few weeks' hesitation, the CIA leaked the speech to The New York Times in early June; the newspaper published it in full. The publication caused a worldwide sensation, and the speech became a central propaganda tool in American foreign policy. It was broadcast in many languages on Radio Free Europe, whose broadcasts from Germany were beamed to the Soviet Union and its satellites. Tens of thousands of copies of the speech, in many languages, including Georgian, were distributed from hot-air balloons that were sent eastward from Germany and Austria. In the opinion of CIA experts, the uprising in Hungary in October 1956 was a direct result of the dissemination of the speech.
Allen Dulles, in his 1963 book "The Craft of Intelligence," wrote that he considered obtaining the speech one of the most important intelligence coups during his term in office. Manor has a copy of the book, with a personal dedication from the author, who describes him as a "true professional."
For years, many people - journalists, secret agents, diplomats, officials - tried to take the credit. Even Isser Harel, the first chief of the Shin Bet and the head of the Mossad during the period in question, tried by implication to take credit for the achievement. "During that period we provided our American colleagues with an important document, which is considered one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of intelligence," he wrote in his book, "Security and Democracy" (Hebrew, 1989).
The Shin Bet and the Mossad secretly made sure that Israel would get the credit for the success. In October 1956, about nine months after the 20th Congress, British intelligence had not yet succeeded in getting their hands on an original copy of the speech. On the eve of the Sinai Campaign, Manor met with Nicholas Elliot, the MI6 representative in Israel. Manor: "He asked me, 'Can you get a copy of the speech for me, too?' I asked him, 'How do you know we have it?' He said, 'At first we thought that the Yugoslavs had leaked the speech, but later on we came to the conclusion that it was you.' I said to him, 'Don't ask me about my relations with the other services,' and I refused."
But while many people knew or guessed that the speech had been obtained by the Israeli intelligence community, the identity of Viktor Grayevsky, the agent who had obtained the speech while putting himself in danger, remained a secret (see box). Only in the early 1990s was this fact published separately by the present writer and by journalist Shlomo Nakdimon in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth.
Obtaining the speech and transmitting it to the Americans was one of the high points of Operation Balsam - the secret cooperation with the CIA, which had begun several years earlier. "To this day," Manor believes, "it remains the greatest intelligence-gathering achievement for the Israeli intelligence community. In terms of politics, it was an historic document. It put us on the map of the world intelligence community."
From the hell of Auschwitz
The career of Amos Manor is no less amazing than this achievement. At the age of 35, eight years after being rescued from the hell of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, weighing 40 kilograms, the new immigrant was appointed to head the Shin Bet. But Manor hates superlatives. His condition for giving this interview was that his picture would not appear on the cover of the magazine, and he asked that the interview not be "schmaltz and kitsch." According to his own testimony, this is his first full interview in the media, after he was interviewed 12 years ago for Yarin Kimor's film on Israel Television's Channel One. Today, at the age of 88, he continues to be active in business (among other things, he is a partner in a hotel management firm) and in meetings of Shin Bet veterans, and he has a phenomenal memory for all the details.
He was born Artur Mandelvici in the town of Sighet, Transylvania in October 1918, about a month before the end of the First World War. His well-to-do family provided him with a fine education. At the age of 16, he was among the founders of the Zionist Habonim movement in Transylvania. Afterward he studied engineering in the city of Limoges, France.
In 1940, the region where he lived was transferred from Romania to Hungary, and he was drafted into the Hungarian army, where Jews served without uniform, and were in effect employed in forced labor to build ditches and fortifications. In May 1944, Manor was sent together with his entire family on the first transport of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. His parents, his two brothers and his sister were murdered. He survived 360 days, during which he was transferred from Auschwitz to the Mauthausen camp in Austria.
Upon his return to Romania, he joined the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet (the Institute for Illegal Immigration), which organized illegal immigration to Palestine. In 1949, after the founding of the state, he immigrated to Israel and considered joining a kibbutz, but his commander in Aliyah Bet, Moshe Carmel and the head of the organization, Shaul Avigur, introduced him to Isser Harel, the head of the Shin Bet. "Isser made a strange impression on me," says Manor. "He was very secretive. He gave me a phone number, but he didn't tell me where his office was." When they met, Harel told him, "I was impressed by you," and suggested that he head the department for Soviet bloc activity.
What about you impressed him, in your opinion?
"I was young, I had a university education, I spoke seven languages (Romanian, Hungarian, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, French and German), I looked athletic and European."
Two days after the first meeting with Harel, he was taken to Shin Bet headquarters in the Jaffa flea market. There, on the second floor, he met with the members of his department.
We were dilettantes
Department was an exaggeration. Manor found one worker, a secretary and two female soldiers. "We began to work, but everything was compartmentalized, and I wasn't familiar with other parts of the service. One day, Isser introduced me to Ezra Lavi of Hadera, who was the director of the Communist section. He wanted me to learn from him."
Lavi was in charge of the surveillance and monitoring of the Israel Communist Party (Maki). The Shin Bet was divided into departments at the time. Lavi worked in one department, which was responsible for internal matters, mainly political spying against parties, organizations and people whom Harel considered hostile or dangerous elements to the young Israeli democracy - and Harel was suspicious of many people. Manor worked in Department 2, which eventually turned into the department for preventing espionage and subversion, which today is better known as the "Jewish Department." Ten months later, Harel promoted Manor to head of the department - in charge of preventing espionage.
What did you actually do?
"They didn't teach me what to do. Gradually I taught myself. We observed and surveilled diplomats from the Communist bloc. We tried to understand who was really a diplomat and who was an intelligence agent. Of course we lacked experience, whereas opposite us were people who had taken courses and had tremendous operational experience."
How was that reflected?
"They knew how to identify the surveillance and to evade it. It was a kind of game of amateurs vs. professionals. We were also very poor. We had no money. Only a few cars were available to the small operations unit, so how could we even work? In all, they made us a laughingstock. But what worked in our favor was the fact that we were dilettantes, and we were eager to succeed and to improve. Slowly but surely, we learned how to identify intelligence people. We followed them, we also carried out covert infiltration, and we began to achieve results.
What was the most important achievement during those years?
"When I was department head, we assumed that the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc were helping Maki financially, and we decided to discover how it was done. By chance we discovered an attempt by Eastern Europe to purchase in Israel merchandise whose sale had been embargoed by the United States - copper, various metals, electrolytes et al. We discovered that Israeli merchants of Polish, Romanian or Czech origin tried to buy forbidden merchandise in the West, and to bring it to the Soviet Union and to Eastern Europe via Israel."
How did you discover that?
"By undercover penetration of those companies and businessmen. And with the help of censorship of letters that entered and left the country. We opened the letters, we read and photographed them. That's how information accumulated. And then we called on the merchants, I personally met with several of them, and convinced them that for the sake of Israel, they had to stop. They obeyed and cooperated."
Trade secrets
There's some speech by Khrushchev…
By Yossi Melman
On the afternoon of Friday, April 13, 1956, Zelig Katz entered the office of Amos Manor, which was located in an Arab building opposite the flea market in Jaffa. Manor was the head of the Shin Bet security service. Zelig Katz, who had Hebraized his name (as was usual at that time) to Ziv Carmi, was his assistant and bureau chief. In an exclusive interview with Haaretz, Manor recollects the exchange of words that took place some 50 years ago.
Manor: Has the material arrived from Eastern Europe?
Carmi: Yes. Material has arrived from Warsaw.
Manor: Is there anything interesting?
Carmi: There's some speech by Khrushchev from the congress.
Manor (shouting): What? Where's the material?
Carmi: In my room.
Manor: Bring it immediately.
Carmi rushed to his room and returned with 70 photographed pages in Polish. "I said to him, you're an idiot," says Manor. "You are now holding in your hand one of the most important secrets in the world." Manor's astonishment and anger further increased when he discovered that the speech had been sent from the Shin Bet representative in Warsaw with a Foreign Ministry courier, three days earlier. "I said to Zelig, call Duvid and tell him to come here at once."
Duvid was David Schweitzer, a soccer player for Hapoel Tel Aviv who years later became the coach of the Israel national team; he was then in charge of the Shin Bet photo lab. Manor asked Carmi to translate the text for him. "The further he progressed in the translation, the more I cursed," he says. "Good grief, I said to myself."
Within a short time Schweitzer arrived. "I told him to photograph one copy and develop it as fast as possible - I have to bring it to Ben-Gurion." The photo and development took about two hours. While he was waiting for it, his wife Tzipora called. She was used to unconventional work hours and to her husband's absence, and she asked when he was coming home.
At 6 P.M., twilight, Manor got into his Vauxhall and immediately drove to the home of the prime minister on Keren Kayemet (today Ben-Gurion) Boulevard in Tel Aviv. "I came to Ben-Gurion and told him, we have Krushchev's speech from the 20th Party Conference. I don't know whether it's authentic. We got the speech from one of our sources in Warsaw, who got it from a woman who worked for [Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw] Gomulka."
But as we know, the secretary, the friend of journalist Viktor Grayevsky, who obtained the speech, was the secretary of [Polish prime minister] Edward Ochab, rather than Gomulka.
Manor smiles. "I thought at the time that it was Gomulka. I also told Ben-Gurion that I didn't know whether the source was a double agent who had leaked the speech as disinformation, or whether the speech was original, but had been deliberately leaked to us, so that it would reach the West. 'Judging by what was translated for me, I have the impression that it's authentic, but I suggest that you read it yourself.' Ben-Gurion knew Polish. I remember that he asked me three times what disinformation meant, and three times I explained to him. I left him a copy and departed."
Manor returned from there to his house in north Tel Aviv. The next morning the phone rang and he was asked to return to the house on Keren Kayemet. "Ben-Gurion said: 'If it's authentic, it's an historic document, and 30 years from now there will be a liberal regime in Moscow.' He returned the material to me without telling me what to do with it."
On Sunday, April 15, when he returned to his office, Amos Manor told the head of the Mossad, Isser Harel, about the document. "I told him, if it's authentic, it's an atomic bomb. I told him about the conversation with Ben-Gurion, and that I had decided to send the copy immediately to the CIA, but to maintain the utmost secrecy, I preferred that it be flown to Izzy Dorot, our representative in Washington, rather than being handed over to the CIA representative in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. I enclosed a letter with the document, in which I asked Izzy to give the material personally to Jim Angleton, and to emphasize repeatedly that I was not certain about the authenticity of the material, and that they should examine it carefully."
That same day, the document was sent to Washington via Foreign Ministry courier. Two days later, on April 17, the document landed on the desk of CIA chief Allen Dulles, who quickly informed President Dwight Eisenhower. That same day, Angleton called Amos Manor. James Jesus Angleton was the CIA's head of counterintelligence, and in charge of the clandestine liaison with Israeli intelligence. "He told me it was of utmost importance, and asked me to identify the source who had provided the speech. I replied: 'Jim, we have an agreement between us that we do not reveal sources of information, and the agreement applies to this case as well,'" Manor says.
Years later, Angleton told Manor that the CIA had enlisted its top experts, as well as leading Sovietologists from the academic world, to examine the speech and determine whether it was an original document or a fake. For that purpose, they even sent a copy of the speech to be perused by the U.S. ambassador in Moscow.
Shock and disbelief
The secret speech was delivered on February 25, 1956, in the evening. The 1,400 delegates at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were suddenly invited to a final, closed session, in the Central Committee building in Moscow. The representatives of the foreign delegations were not allowed to enter the hall. When Nikita Khrushchev, the party's first secretary, began to speak, the delegates could hardly believe their ears. Some of them fainted from shock. Without any prior preparation, Khrushchev began a sharp and unprecedented attack on his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, who had died three years earlier.
During the four hours of his speech - 26,000 words - Khrushchev described Stalin as a "despot," condemned the "cult of personality," and accused him of "crimes that caused cruel violence." He criticized Stalin for "most cruel repression," for inventing the concept of "an enemy of the people," and determined that he "had severely distorted the principles of the party."
Immediately after the speech, the delegates scattered, without any discussion taking place. But word of the secret speech spread quickly. Officials cited from it at party meetings, and it began to engineer a process of reforms. First hints of a secret, historic speech delivered at the Soviet Communist Party congress reached the West a few days later. The U.S. administration, as well as the governments of Britain, West Germany, France and others, were eager to learn the contents of the speech. The assignment, naturally, was given to the intelligence organizations. But the Israeli Shin Bet beat out all the others.
Two weeks after the Americans received the speech from Israel, Angleton once again contacted Manor and informed him that the experts had come to the conclusion that it was an original and authentic document. "Jim was in seventh heaven," says Manor. "He asked my permission to publish the material. I went again to Ben-Gurion and asked for his opinion. Ben-Gurion told me that he understood the Americans, because this was a document of historic importance, and gave his consent. I informed Jim of the decision, but asked him not to mention us as the source. We didn't want to be involved."
The relations between Israel and the Soviet Union were already very poor, because of Soviet support for Egypt, and the Israeli leadership was afraid of a Soviet reaction that was liable to harm not only Israel, but the Jews of the Soviet Union as well. After a few weeks' hesitation, the CIA leaked the speech to The New York Times in early June; the newspaper published it in full. The publication caused a worldwide sensation, and the speech became a central propaganda tool in American foreign policy. It was broadcast in many languages on Radio Free Europe, whose broadcasts from Germany were beamed to the Soviet Union and its satellites. Tens of thousands of copies of the speech, in many languages, including Georgian, were distributed from hot-air balloons that were sent eastward from Germany and Austria. In the opinion of CIA experts, the uprising in Hungary in October 1956 was a direct result of the dissemination of the speech.
Allen Dulles, in his 1963 book "The Craft of Intelligence," wrote that he considered obtaining the speech one of the most important intelligence coups during his term in office. Manor has a copy of the book, with a personal dedication from the author, who describes him as a "true professional."
For years, many people - journalists, secret agents, diplomats, officials - tried to take the credit. Even Isser Harel, the first chief of the Shin Bet and the head of the Mossad during the period in question, tried by implication to take credit for the achievement. "During that period we provided our American colleagues with an important document, which is considered one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of intelligence," he wrote in his book, "Security and Democracy" (Hebrew, 1989).
The Shin Bet and the Mossad secretly made sure that Israel would get the credit for the success. In October 1956, about nine months after the 20th Congress, British intelligence had not yet succeeded in getting their hands on an original copy of the speech. On the eve of the Sinai Campaign, Manor met with Nicholas Elliot, the MI6 representative in Israel. Manor: "He asked me, 'Can you get a copy of the speech for me, too?' I asked him, 'How do you know we have it?' He said, 'At first we thought that the Yugoslavs had leaked the speech, but later on we came to the conclusion that it was you.' I said to him, 'Don't ask me about my relations with the other services,' and I refused."
But while many people knew or guessed that the speech had been obtained by the Israeli intelligence community, the identity of Viktor Grayevsky, the agent who had obtained the speech while putting himself in danger, remained a secret (see box). Only in the early 1990s was this fact published separately by the present writer and by journalist Shlomo Nakdimon in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth.
Obtaining the speech and transmitting it to the Americans was one of the high points of Operation Balsam - the secret cooperation with the CIA, which had begun several years earlier. "To this day," Manor believes, "it remains the greatest intelligence-gathering achievement for the Israeli intelligence community. In terms of politics, it was an historic document. It put us on the map of the world intelligence community."
From the hell of Auschwitz
The career of Amos Manor is no less amazing than this achievement. At the age of 35, eight years after being rescued from the hell of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, weighing 40 kilograms, the new immigrant was appointed to head the Shin Bet. But Manor hates superlatives. His condition for giving this interview was that his picture would not appear on the cover of the magazine, and he asked that the interview not be "schmaltz and kitsch." According to his own testimony, this is his first full interview in the media, after he was interviewed 12 years ago for Yarin Kimor's film on Israel Television's Channel One. Today, at the age of 88, he continues to be active in business (among other things, he is a partner in a hotel management firm) and in meetings of Shin Bet veterans, and he has a phenomenal memory for all the details.
He was born Artur Mandelvici in the town of Sighet, Transylvania in October 1918, about a month before the end of the First World War. His well-to-do family provided him with a fine education. At the age of 16, he was among the founders of the Zionist Habonim movement in Transylvania. Afterward he studied engineering in the city of Limoges, France.
In 1940, the region where he lived was transferred from Romania to Hungary, and he was drafted into the Hungarian army, where Jews served without uniform, and were in effect employed in forced labor to build ditches and fortifications. In May 1944, Manor was sent together with his entire family on the first transport of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. His parents, his two brothers and his sister were murdered. He survived 360 days, during which he was transferred from Auschwitz to the Mauthausen camp in Austria.
Upon his return to Romania, he joined the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet (the Institute for Illegal Immigration), which organized illegal immigration to Palestine. In 1949, after the founding of the state, he immigrated to Israel and considered joining a kibbutz, but his commander in Aliyah Bet, Moshe Carmel and the head of the organization, Shaul Avigur, introduced him to Isser Harel, the head of the Shin Bet. "Isser made a strange impression on me," says Manor. "He was very secretive. He gave me a phone number, but he didn't tell me where his office was." When they met, Harel told him, "I was impressed by you," and suggested that he head the department for Soviet bloc activity.
What about you impressed him, in your opinion?
"I was young, I had a university education, I spoke seven languages (Romanian, Hungarian, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, French and German), I looked athletic and European."
Two days after the first meeting with Harel, he was taken to Shin Bet headquarters in the Jaffa flea market. There, on the second floor, he met with the members of his department.
We were dilettantes
Department was an exaggeration. Manor found one worker, a secretary and two female soldiers. "We began to work, but everything was compartmentalized, and I wasn't familiar with other parts of the service. One day, Isser introduced me to Ezra Lavi of Hadera, who was the director of the Communist section. He wanted me to learn from him."
Lavi was in charge of the surveillance and monitoring of the Israel Communist Party (Maki). The Shin Bet was divided into departments at the time. Lavi worked in one department, which was responsible for internal matters, mainly political spying against parties, organizations and people whom Harel considered hostile or dangerous elements to the young Israeli democracy - and Harel was suspicious of many people. Manor worked in Department 2, which eventually turned into the department for preventing espionage and subversion, which today is better known as the "Jewish Department." Ten months later, Harel promoted Manor to head of the department - in charge of preventing espionage.
What did you actually do?
"They didn't teach me what to do. Gradually I taught myself. We observed and surveilled diplomats from the Communist bloc. We tried to understand who was really a diplomat and who was an intelligence agent. Of course we lacked experience, whereas opposite us were people who had taken courses and had tremendous operational experience."
How was that reflected?
"They knew how to identify the surveillance and to evade it. It was a kind of game of amateurs vs. professionals. We were also very poor. We had no money. Only a few cars were available to the small operations unit, so how could we even work? In all, they made us a laughingstock. But what worked in our favor was the fact that we were dilettantes, and we were eager to succeed and to improve. Slowly but surely, we learned how to identify intelligence people. We followed them, we also carried out covert infiltration, and we began to achieve results.
What was the most important achievement during those years?
"When I was department head, we assumed that the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc were helping Maki financially, and we decided to discover how it was done. By chance we discovered an attempt by Eastern Europe to purchase in Israel merchandise whose sale had been embargoed by the United States - copper, various metals, electrolytes et al. We discovered that Israeli merchants of Polish, Romanian or Czech origin tried to buy forbidden merchandise in the West, and to bring it to the Soviet Union and to Eastern Europe via Israel."
How did you discover that?
"By undercover penetration of those companies and businessmen. And with the help of censorship of letters that entered and left the country. We opened the letters, we read and photographed them. That's how information accumulated. And then we called on the merchants, I personally met with several of them, and convinced them that for the sake of Israel, they had to stop. They obeyed and cooperated."
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