Marcus Klingberg

Marcus Klingberg
מרקוס קלינגברג
Marcus Klingberg, 2006
Born	(1918-10-07)7 October 1918 Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland
Died	30 November 2015(2015-11-30) (aged 97) Paris, France
Nationality	Poland (1918–1948) Israel (1948–2015)
Occupation(s)	Epidemiologist, spy
Spouse	Wanda Jasinska (Adjia Eisman)
Children	Sylvia Klingberg (daughter)
Relatives	Ian Brossat (grandson)
Awards	Order of the Red Banner of Labour
Military career
Allegiance	Soviet Union (1941–1945)  Israel (1948–1957)
Rank	Captain (Red Army) Lieutenant colonel (IDF)

Avraham Marek Klingberg (7 October 1918 – 30 November 2015), known as Marcus Klingberg (Hebrew: מרקוס קלינגברג), was a Polish-born, Israeli epidemiologist and the highest ranking Soviet spy ever uncovered in Israel. Klingberg made major contributions in the fields of infectious and noninfectious disease epidemiology and military medicine, but he is most widely known for passing intelligence to the Soviet Union regarding Israel's biological and chemical warfare capacities. Klingberg's espionage is reported to be regarded by Israeli intelligence services as the most damaging ever to the country's national security interests.^[1][2]

Originally from a family of well-known rabbis, Klingberg chose a secular education in high school. Entering medical school in 1935 his studies were cut short by the German invasion of Poland in 1939. At the urging of his father he fled Poland for the Soviet Union, completing his medical degree in Minsk and joining the Red Army in 1941 at the start of the war with Nazi Germany. Injured on the front lines, he was reassinged to a military unit dealing with disease outbreaks. In 1943, he would serve as Chief Epidemiologist of the Byelorussian Republic. Repatriated to Poland following the end of the war, he became Acting Chief Epidemiologist at the Polish Ministry of Health.

Having lost his entire family but for a single cousin in the Holocaust, Klingberg migrated to Israel. First serving in the Israel Defence Force from 1948 to 1953, in 1957 he joined the clandestine Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), responsible for the country's biological and chemical weapons, as Deputy Scientific Director. By his own admission, he was motivated by ideological reasons and began passing information to the Soviet Union in 1950, although Israeli intelligence claims his spying began earlier. Despite coming under suspicion by counter-intelligence, he avoided discovery until 1983, when he was arrested and convicted of espionage in secret. Sentenced to 20 years in prison, he was held in solitary confinement for 10 years, with his circumstances only publicly revealed in Israel in 1993. Paroled to home detention in 1998 due to ill health, he was permitted to move to Paris in 2003 to live with his daughter on the condition that he never speak of his work at the IIBR. He spent the remaining years of his life re-engaged in scientific work and completing his memoirs.

Klingberg was born in Warsaw, Poland, on 7 October 1918, to a Hasidic Jewish family of rabbinical lineage. In his youth, he lived for a time with his grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Klingberg. His parents sent him to a cheder, a religious primary school. As a teenager, he abandoned religion and attended a secular high school.^[3][4]

In 1935, Klingberg began studying medicine at the University of Warsaw. In 1939, with the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II, Klingberg was urged by his father to flee to the Soviet Union. There, he completed his medical studies in Minsk in 1941.^[5][6]

His parents and younger brother, who remained in Poland, were murdered in 1942 in the Treblinka extermination camp. Other than a single cousin, his entire family also perished.^[3][5]

On 22 June 1941, the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he volunteered for the Red Army, and served as a medical officer on the front lines until October 1941, when he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel. Upon recovery he was assigned to Perm in the Urals as leader of an anti-epidemic unit.^[7][3]

In 1943, he undertook postgraduate studies in epidemiology in Moscow at the Central Institute for Advanced Medical Training under Lev Gromashevsky [ru], the "so called master of Soviet epidemiology".^[6][7] That same year, he was part of a team that stopped an epidemic in the Urals. He also contributed to research on typhoid fever. Toward the end of December 1943, the first parts of Byelorussia were retaken by the Red Army and Klingberg became Chief Epidemiologist of the Byelorussian Republic.^[8]

At the end of the war, Klingberg was discharged from the Red Army with the rank of captain, and returned to Poland. In Warsaw he served as Acting Chief Epidemiologist at the Polish Ministry of Health.^[8][3]

In November 1948, Klingberg immigrated with his wife and daughter to the newly formed state of Israel, which was in the closing stages of its War of Independence. Israeli journalist Yossi Melman reported Shin Bet claims that the immigration was prompted by Soviet intelligence, but Klingberg has strongly denied this, indicating that his desire to move to Israel was motivated by the loss of his family in Poland during the Holocaust.^[3][9]

Upon arrival in Israel, he was drafted into the military, serving in the Medical Corps. In March 1950, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel (Sgan Aluf). He served as Head of the Department of Preventive Medicine, Office of the Surgeon General, and afterward founded and directed the Central Research Laboratories for Military Medicine.^[3][9] His work included some of the first research into West Nile fever.^[5][9]

In 1957, he was one of the founders^[10] of the top-secret Israel Institute for Biological Research in Ness Ziona (south of Tel Aviv), where he served as Deputy Scientific Director (until 1972). In 1969, Klingberg joined the Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, and was Professor of Epidemiology and Head of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine from 1978 to 1983.^[8]

Klingberg's academic career and research papers earned him an international reputation in his field, and he was invited to take part in conferences by the World Health Organization.^[3] He was president of the European Teratology Society (1980–1982); and a co-founder and chairman (1979–1981) of the International Clearinghouse for Birth Defects Monitoring Systems (ICBDMS). In 1976, he was elected chair of an international scientific advisory committee established by the Italian government to advise on the effects of the Seveso Accident.^[11][12] In 1981, he was elected to the council of the International Epidemiological Association for the 1981–1984 term.^[13]

Klingberg conducted sabbaticals at the Henry Phipps Institute, University of Pennsylvania, from 1962 to 1964; at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (1972); at the Department of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1973); at the Department of Social and Community Medicine, University of Oxford and became a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford (1978).^[6][14]

According to Klingberg's indictment, which was based on his confession, he began spying in 1957, although in his memoirs he indicates the date was actually 1950. From then to 1976, Klingberg passed information on Israel's chemical and biological weapons research.^[3][16] In the 1950s, Klingberg was secretly awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, at the time the Soviet Union's second highest honour, in recognition of his services.^[5] Klingberg has also indicated that sometime around the mid-1950s he considered ceasing to pass information to the Soviets, but drew the conclusion that the relationship would become coercive if he did so, and that he preferred to "maintain voluntary relations."^[17]

Israeli journalists Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez have suggested that Klingberg's intelligence on Israeli offensive capabilities led the Soviet Union to provide Egypt with chemical and biological defensive capabilities in the lead up to the Six-Day War in 1967.^[18] Martin McCauley, a specialist in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, indicates Klingberg's information would have been passed from the Soviets to multiple Arab countries.^[19]

Israel's foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, Mossad and Shin Bet, began to suspect Klingberg of espionage in the 1960s, but shadowing brought no results. While at the Institute for Biological Research, he was twice summoned by the authorities due to suspicions of him being a foreign agent. Klingberg refuted these claims, and in 1965 he passed a polygraph test, reportedly due to the fact that his interrogators simply asked the wrong questions, as they suspected he was spying for Polish rather than Soviet intelligence.^[20][21]

In 1976, Klingberg retired from the Israel Institute for Biological Research and contact with Soviet intelligence lapsed.^[22]

In 1972, a newly arrived Jewish migrant from the Soviet Union admitted to working for the KGB during Shin Bet screening. The agency was able to turn him as a double agent and in 1982, when the KGB instructed this agent to reestablish contact with Klingberg, Shin Bet acquired strong circumstantial evidence of Klingberg's links to Soviet intelligence. Despite this, the evidence was not considered strong enough to secure a conviction of espionage in court, and an operation, codenamed "Reef", was planned to obtain a confession.^[23][22]

In January 1983, Shin Bet officers informed Klingberg they wanted to send him to South-East Asia where a chemical plant had allegedly blown up. After leaving home with his suitcase, he was taken to an apartment in an undisclosed location and detained. Initially denying any wrongdoing, he was interrogated harshly and, by his own account, he attempted suicide three times. After ten days, Klingberg admitted to passing intelligence to the Soviets and signed a confession indicating he had been blackmailed into spying. He told his interrogators that he had not completed his medical studies and lacked a diploma, and that the KGB had threatened to expose this.^[24][25]

Klingberg was tried in secret and sentenced to 20 years in prison. For the first 10 years of his sentence he was held in solitary confinement, in a high security prison in Ashkelon under the false name of Abraham Grinberg and the fabricated profession of a publisher.^[26] After he was removed from solitary confinement, his cellmate was Shimon Levinson, another Israeli who spied for the Soviet Union. Due to the investigations of British journalist Peter Pringle, Israeli authorities acknowledged Klingberg's conviction and imprisonment in 1988, although reporting of his circumstances inside Israel remained prohibited.^[27][28]

In 1988–89, East Germany and the Soviet Union began negotiations with Israel, where a proposal was tentatively agreed to release Klingberg, along with Shabtai Kalmanovich, in exchange for the Soviet Union providing information on the location of Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator believed to be held in Lebanon. With the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe, the deal fell apart.^[29][18]

In 1997, Amnesty International appealed to the Israeli government to release Klingberg on medical grounds (he had several strokes). During his application for early release, former Shin Bet director, Yaakov Peri, acted as a character witness. In September 1998, he was approved to leave prison but subject to house arrest.^[30][20][31]

At his expense, a camera connected to the offices of MALMAB (military security) in Kirya (central Tel Aviv), was installed in his apartment. His telephone was tapped, with his knowledge. Guards from MALMAB were assigned to him, and Klingberg had to pay their salaries. Klingberg also signed a commitment not to speak about his work. In 1999, a court ordered him to cease speaking Yiddish and Russian at home as the guards could not understand those languages and therefore could not monitor his conversations. In order to pay the guards and for the camera, Klingberg took loans, and eventually had to sell his apartment to repay them.^[3][32]

Interviewed in 2008, Klingberg maintained that he had spied out of ideological reasons, but had lied to his interrogators as he believed claiming to have been blackmailed would result in lighter treatment than admitting to having spied for ideological reasons.^[3][16] When asked why he spied for the Soviet Union, Klingberg stated, "I felt it was the right thing to do ... Because of the Cold War. I wanted the two blocs in the Cold War to be the same thing, out of a desire for a more balanced world."^[3] In an interview in 2014 Klingberg also noted he felt he owed the Soviet Union a debt for saving the world from the Nazis. He said he had always been a communist, and had recruited his wife Wanda and two friends.^[28]

While living in post-war Poland, Klingberg met Adjia Eisman, who went by the name Wanda Jasinska, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. Similarly to Klingberg, her parents and siblings were murdered in the Holocaust.^[31] Klingberg and Jasinka married in 1946 and decided to emigrate. They moved to Sweden, where their daughter, Sylvia, was born in 1947.^[16][21] In Israel, Klingberg confided in Jasinska his espionage activities, and she actively collaborated with him in passing intelligence to the Soviets, including personally handling what Klingberg terms a "particularly virulent strain of bacteria." Interrogated following her husband's arrest in 1983, Jasinska never admitted any involvement in spying.^[3][15]

Sylvia emigrated to France in the 1970s and upon learning of her father's imprisonment in the 1980s, privately campaigned to have his prison conditions improved. She enlisted the support of lawyer Antoine Comte in Paris, who engaged Wolfgang Vogel, in East Berlin, in an unsuccessful attempt to have Klingberg released via support from East Germany and the Soviet Union. On his release from house arrest in 2003, Sylvia cared for him after his arrival in France.^[31][28]

Klingberg's spying and imprisonment affected the political career of his grandson, Ian Brossat (born 1980), a member of the French Senate since September 2023, representing the Communist Party.^[33] During his early childhood he did not understand Klingberg was in gaol, believing him to be in hospital, and later was never allowed to speak of his grandfather's imprisonment.^[34] Upon election to the Paris City Council in 2008,^[35] Brossat noted how his political opponents attempted to tarnish him by association with Klingberg. Klingberg, towards the end of his life, commented on his pride in his grandson.^[36][37]

In January 2003, Klingberg was released from house arrest and he immediately left Israel for Paris to be with his daughter Sylvia and grandson Ian.^[38][39]

Klingberg lived in a one-room apartment in Paris, but did not take French citizenship. He frequently lectured on medicine at universities. He helped establish the Ludwik Fleck Center of the Collegium Helveticum – a university center in Zürich, and delivered the opening lecture. He received an officer's pension from the Israeli government, which in France amounted to around €2,000 a month. Klingberg continued to have medical problems after his release, and was frequently hospitalized.^[3]

Klingberg's memoirs, HaMeragel Ha'akharon ("The Last Spy"), written with his lawyer, Michael Sfard, were published in 2007.^[40] The book was received harshly in Israel, with reviewers from Haaretz and Ynet making personal attacks, calling him, respectively, "a childish and pitiful person" and "a scoundrel".^[28]

Klingberg died in Paris on 30 November 2015, aged 97.^[38] He was cremated and his ashes interred in Père Lachaise Cemetery next to those of his wife, Jasinska, who had died of cancer in 1990.^[41][3]

At the time of his death, Yaakov Peri named Klingberg as, "one of the top Soviet spies in Israel – if not the greatest one ever.”^[42][22]

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