Spies Against Armageddon (20 page)

Only in 2007 did Oded Gur-Arie, an entrepreneur and a professor of business administration who lives in the United States, agree to speak publicly about his suffering and about how his father betrayed him and his mother.

The younger Gur-Arie distinctly remembered the morning of February 27, 1965. He left his home on Pierre Guerin Street in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris. As he did every Saturday, he walked to the local kiosk to buy the
International Herald Tribune
. “I took the paper and started to walk home,” Gur-Arie recalled, “and, as always, I glanced at the main headline.”

That was the shock of his life. The front page said that six West Germans had disappeared in Egypt, among them Wolfgang Lotz and his wife, Waltraud. The headline knocked him for a double loop. First, “because I knew Dad was a spy and it was obvious to me that he hadn’t ‘disappeared,’ but had been caught by the Egyptians. I was sure they would discover that he was an Israeli. That would be the end of the story. They would kill him.”

The second shock came, he said, “when I asked myself who this Waltraud was. His wife? My mother was his wife! How could he have another wife? And what was I going to tell my mother in a few minutes? I understood that the story was getting complicated.”

He went upstairs and into the family apartment. “I told my mother that Dad had disappeared in Cairo. She grabbed the paper and read the report quickly. She remained unruffled and went to the phone. She called our liaison in the Mossad.

“Apparently because it was Shabbat [the Jewish Sabbath], the Mossad people hadn’t woken up that morning,” he remarked caustically. “At that moment they didn’t know that Dad had been arrested. I imagine that within minutes all the Mossad agents in Europe rushed out to buy the
Herald Tribune
in order to be updated. The fact that the Mossad didn’t know that Dad had been caught and that they heard it from my mother, who heard it from me after I had read about it in the paper, was another breaking point for me.

“Until then, I was certain that the Mossad was omnipotent, that they had resources and that they always knew everything. As a youngster, the reality came as a great disappointment to me.”

On several levels, the Mossad suffered a harsh blow when Lotz was arrested—with the German wife—by Egyptian secret police who burst into their Cairo apartment on February 22. To this day, the Mossad does not know with certainty how “Shimshon” was discovered.

One theory for what occurred—which Yariv did not rule out—held that Lotz was caught by accident: pure, dumb luck for the Egyptians. The prevailing explanation, however, is that a Soviet counterespionage team, training the locals on how to tighten their security, detected Lotz’s radio transmitter. That would be similar to the process that doomed Eli Cohen in Syria.

There were clear differences between the Lotz and Cohen cases, however. Whereas torture forced Cohen to admit he was an Israeli spy and he was hanged, Lotz tenaciously clung to the contention that he was a non-Jewish German who had helped Israel just to earn some money.

Immediately upon Lotz’s arrest, Amit contacted West Germany’s General Gehlen and told him about the arrest of the Israeli operative. Gehlen agreed to Amit’s request that he take the Israeli spy under his wing and present him to the Egyptian authorities as Germany’s spy in Cairo. To prevent the possibility that someone in Israel would recognize Lotz and blab about it, the Mossad obtained equipment to jam the reception of Egyptian television broadcasts in Israel during the trial.

The Egyptians, too, preferred to portray Lotz as a German spy. That would not be nearly so embarrassing as being penetrated by a Zionist agent.

Wolfgang and Waltraud were convicted by an Egyptian court. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, and she was to serve three years. Both were freed after three years, part of an Israeli-Egyptian prisoner swap seven months after the Six-Day War.

Lotz/Gur-Arie and his wife were flown to Germany and then to Israel. The Mossad helped Lotz rehabilitate himself, a process that included his running a horse ranch near Tel Aviv. Rivka divorced him, but that only strengthened his image as a
bon vivant
and a national hero.

The former spy, having just gotten out of a bad prison cell, was invited to showy receptions and fabulous parties. He was back on the champagne circuit, and he tried to maintain a far higher standard of living than was possible on his Mossad pension. Lotz’s equine business collapsed, and his condition deteriorated even further after the premature death of Waltraud in 1971, as a result of torture she underwent in the Cairo prison.

Her death, Oded said, utterly broke his father’s heart. Later he would marry for a third time, divorce, and marry yet again. He moved to California to pursue his dream of producing a movie about his own life. That never led anywhere, and with great frustration he left for Germany. He lived there until his death in 1993 at age 73. This is a sad story, with a lesson: Old spies are rarely happy.

Israel was fortunate to have a few more warning agents planted in Egypt by the Mossad. Decades later, officials refused to allow details to be published, just in case similar methods would have to be used again—perhaps even in the same locations, in some unforeseeable future.

Another key to the success of Israeli intelligence, in the run-up to the 1967 war, was an evolving and well practiced expertise in the use of double agents.

Handling agents is at the heart of espionage work. The handler must often behave like father and mother to his agent. He must be a social worker and a psychologist. He must groom his agent, but remain wary of him. Massage his ego, encourage him, reward him, be a shoulder to lean on and a good listener, but also be prepared to scold.

When the person being manipulated is a
double
agent, the challenges are multiplied. The art of espionage requires many delicate tasks—from shaking surveillance pursuers, to planting bombs—but none is more sensitive than the craft of “doubling” an enemy operative so that he will work for your side.

“You can never fully know and trust such an agent,” Amit explained. “You cannot be sure to whom his final loyalty is given.”

The double agent moves in a twilight zone between the two sides, crossing lines back and forth. He must be very cautious and sly, lest his actions and true status be exposed. He assumes and discards identities. He presents a false façade of loyalty to one side—or is it false to both sides?—and he must guilefully gain the trust of each.

Two important double agents, run by the Mossad during the Amit era, fed disinformation aimed at deceiving Egypt. One was Victor Grayevsky, who already had done so much for Israel by supplying Shin Bet with a copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956.

Grayevsky moved to Israel from Poland in January 1957. The head of Shin Bet, Amos Manor, helped arrange a rental apartment and a job for him. In fact, two employers welcomed the new arrival: the Eastern Europe department of the Foreign Ministry, and the Polish-language broadcasts of Kol Israel—the Voice of Israel shortwave radio station.

He was also sent to a Hebrew language class, and that is where he got to know two of his classmates who were both Soviet diplomats. When they learned that Grayevsky worked at the Foreign Ministry, their interest grew and they invited him out to a lavish meal with plenty of vodka.

Grayevsky did not mind the eating and drinking, and he loyally reported all this to Manor. The Shin Bet chief recognized an opportunity, and he instructed Grayevsky to continue meeting with his Soviet friends. Manor assigned an experienced case officer to back up Grayevsky, who got to consume a lot of alcohol in the line of duty.

As is standard in such approaches, the two Soviets told Grayevsky that they were going abroad on vacation but would like to introduce him to a man who would be filling in.

Following the guidance of his Shin Bet handlers, Grayevsky readily agreed. The replacement was Viktor Kaloyev, ostensibly an administrator of the Russian Orthodox Church, who lived on the church grounds in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound. In reality, Kaloyev was another Soviet intelligence officer.

For over a decade, ending in 1971, Grayevsky held hundreds of meetings with KGB officers. The Russians gave him a hundred dollars, sometimes more, at each meeting. Grayevsky dutifully passed on the money to Shin Bet, so, unknowingly, Soviet spies were financing Israeli intelligence.

Every few years his Soviet handlers changed, and four decades after it all stopped he could not remember all of their names. What he did remember is how the vodka flowed like water at these meetings. As a proud ex-Pole, Grayevsky was far from troubled by that. “I never got drunk. I outdrank them,” he declared with a smile.

Most of the meetings took place in a Russian Compound apartment. Priests also attended these meetings, as “diplomats,” for they were all espionage agents for the Soviet Union. Israel was never naïve about any of this, but here was a golden opportunity to have Grayevsky feed false information to the Soviets—knowing that some of it, at least, would reach Arab governments.

“The information was prepared and tailored by all three branches of our intelligence community,” Amit revealed years later. “Shin Bet, we at the Mossad, and most importantly Aman were all involved. This was aimed at deceiving the Arabs about our war plans, and the order of battle if war should break out.”

Grayevsky’s most important meeting with the Russians took place in May 1967. Nasser had just moved his army into the Sinai, subsequently closing the Straits of Tiran so as to paralyze all the shipping at Israel’s southern port Eilat.

Israel found itself in the crisis that led to the Six-Day War. But the Jewish state was trying to prevent the war.

Israeli intelligence chiefs instructed Grayevsky to activate, for the first time, an emergency contact signal that the Russians had given him. He met them the next day on a small road in the hills near Jerusalem. This time, his task was to feed genuine information to the Soviets.

Grayevsky recalled: “A guy I never met before came to this rendezvous. He seemed to be around my age, in his 40s. He held a briefcase and looked like a clerk from a government office. But he was a very sharp fellow. I told him that Israel wouldn’t be able to just sit by and ignore the closure of the Straits, and that it would go to war against Nasser. He asked me how I knew this. Using the story that Shin Bet had concocted for me, I told him that as a journalist and radio broadcaster, I’d been invited to the prime minister’s office and I’d heard a briefing there to this effect from a senior IDF officer.”

Grayevsky heard differing accounts regarding the information that he provided, on what turned out to be the eve of war. One version said the KGB never told the top Soviet leadership that Israel was chillingly serious about using force to break Nasser’s sea siege. Another version, endorsed by some historians, said the information reached the Kremlin but, for various reasons, was not conveyed to Nasser.

Although the Soviet Union and its Communist allies broke diplomatic relations with Israel just after the Six-Day War, the spy-priests remained in the Red Church compound in Jerusalem, and Grayevsky continued to meet with them for another four years. During a final conversation, his KGB handler told him that he had done a terrific job and was being awarded the Order of Lenin. The Soviets said they would hold the medal in Moscow for him.

In fact, Grayevsky was fervently loyal to Israel.

An extremely important double agent was known by his Israeli handlers as Yated, the Hebrew word for stake or peg. He was an Egyptian intelligence operative who was doubled—turned—by the Israelis, and his story was a truly remarkable deception.

Egypt’s spy services, never ranked among the world’s best, did what they could to penetrate Israeli society. They hired a few of Israel’s Arab citizens—a far from ideal choice, as they were naturally under suspicion by Israeli authorities—and occasionally would send agents into the Jewish state posing as tourists.

The man who would become Yated was recruited by the Egyptians for something far more ambitious. In fact, the mission was a mirror image of the Mossad’s modus operandi. An Egyptian would attempt to learn precisely how to pose as a Jew and would move to Israel as an immigrant, unnoticed in a multitude of new and welcomed Jewish arrivals.

The man with that plan was Rifaat al-Gamal, a petty criminal who was recruited by Egypt’s intelligence services in 1954 by making him an offer he could hardly refuse: avoid going to prison by becoming a spy. Al-Gamal agreed, underwent training, and then was furnished with a false identity—as an Egyptian Jew named Jacques Biton. Now he immersed himself in Jewish life and even made contacts with the community by spending time at Egyptian synagogues.

In early 1955, Gamal/Biton sailed from Alexandria to Italy. He remained in Italy for quite a while and even worked there, hoping to make his cover story more credible. He eventually approached the Jewish Agency, and with its assistance he joined the wave of
aliyah
, or immigration to the Holy Land. According to the ambitious scenario his handlers in Cairo drew up, he was to get himself fully integrated into Israeli society. For that, he was given a respectable sum of money that he invested in a partnership with an Israeli. Together they opened a travel agency in Tel Aviv.

Gamal/Biton did not know that the partner, Dr. Imre Fried, was actually working for Israeli intelligence. It turned out that Shin Bet was quietly but seriously suspicious of the new immigrant from Egypt and Italy.

Espionage can make strange bedfellows, but consider these circumstances: Biton’s half of the investment came from Cairo, while Fried’s cash was from Shin Bet.

Biton was placed under surveillance, and with the help of a Mossad team his movements were also monitored abroad, where he was seen meeting with his Egyptian handler.

Upon his return to Israel from one such trip, he was arrested by Shin Bet and given two options: either sit in jail for decades for espionage, or agree to serve as a double agent whose ultimate loyalty would be to Israel.