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Avraham Marcus KlingbergAvraham Marcus Klingberg was born in 1920 and is the highest ranking Soviet spy ever caught in Israel. Together with Mordechai Vanunu, the case of Klingberg is regarded as the most destructive spy scandal of the history of the State of Israel. At the beginning of World War II, fearing the Nazis and the war, Klingberg escaped from Poland to the USSR. There, he studied medicine. In 1948 he immigrated to Israel. According to Israeli media, at that time Klingsberg was already an officer in the KGB (Soviet spy agency). He served in the Israeli army as a doctor. After the army, for a few years he lectured medicine in the University of Tel Aviv. He slowly rose to the top of one of Israel's most sensitive institutions: the Top-secret Biological Institute in Nes Tsiona (south of Tel Aviv). Within the years of 1957-1975, he took the post of vice-president. Klingberg contacted the USSR for the first time in 1957, and soon after that he started his espionage activity. Israel's foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, Mossad and Shin Beth, started suspecting Klingberg of espionage, but shadowing brought no results. At one point, the scientist also successfully passed the lie detector test. In January 1983 when Klingberg was a deputy director of the Biological Institute in Nes Tsiona, Shin Beth officers informed Klingberg they wanted to send him to Malaysia where a chemical plant blew up. In several days, the man left home with a suitcase, but he was delivered not to an airport but to some apartment for interrogations that lasted for several days. Within ten days, Shin Beth investigators browbeat Klingberg and finally wrung a confession from him, in which he told about his relations with the USSR in detail. In his words, he was not paid for the information he provided. He was arrested and charged with passing secrets to the Soviet Union. He was given a sentence of 20 years in prison. Information about his arrest and conviction was kept secret for a decade. In 1989, Israeli attorney Amnon Zichroni representing Marcus Klingberg, received permission to negotiate an agreement in which East Germany and the Soviet Union would exchange Soviet spies Klingberg and Kalmanovitch for hard information regarding Ron Arad (an Israeli soldier believed to be captured by Arabs and still alive at the time). The deal falls through with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. During the Jonathan Pollard investigation, a Soviet defector in US hands revealed that in addition to the two Soviet spies serving prison terms in Israel (Shabtai Kalmanovitch and Marcus Klingberg), there was a third who had not been caught. He was well placed in the Defense Ministry, and still "active." In 1997, Amnesty International wrote a "Medical letter writing action" asking the Israeli government to either release or transfer Klingberg to a less stressful environment. Because of his failing health (he suffered from several cerebral hemorrhages), he was released to house arrest in 1998. A camera was installed in his apartment, which was hooked up to the Malmab offices in Kirya, Tel Aviv. His telephones were wiretapped, with his knowledge. Klingberg also signed a commitment not to speak about his work. After his release in 2003 he traveled to Paris, where his daughter Sylvia and grandaughter live. Books External Links Klingberg, Avraham Marcus
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