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-Caveat Lector- See: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/releases/2006/march/intro.htm
MI5 Archives Reveal Link Between Israeli PM and Soviet Inteligence
MosNews, 31.03.2006
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/03/31/israelipm.shtml
British MI5 counter-espionage archives reveal a link between Soviet intelligence and the sixth prime Minister of Israel Menahem Begin, the Axis Information and Analysis agency reported Friday.
The archives reveal that back in 1947 MI5 analysts suspected that Begin was receiving or asking the Soviet secret services for financial help for his Zionist organization.
Soviet intelligence archives confirm the fears of British counter-espionage, the agency adds.
Menahem Begin, Israeli PM from 1977 to 1983, first joined the ranks of Beitar — a right-wing Zionist youth organization — in Poland in 1929. He eventually became its head. He was arrested for staging mass demonstrations near the embassy of Great Britain in Warsaw, protesting against limits set on Jewish immigration, then released as the German army approached. Begin fled to Lithuania, and when in 1940 Lithuania became part of the Soviet Union, he was arrested again on political grounds, and banished for 8 years to Siberia. However, after the German attack on the USSR, he was unexpectedly released in the winter of 1941, ostensibly as part of an initiative to form a “new Polish army”, a formation that was initially under the control of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). In the ranks of one of its units Begin arrived in Palestine.
Begin served in the army until 1943, then moved to the radical grouping “Irgun Tzvai Leumi” (National Military Organization — ETZEL). He took over the running of Beitar in all of Palestine. Then Begin with his wife and children went underground until 1947, frequently changing his appearance and using false documents. The authorities of the British Mandate of Palestine offered a reward of $30,000 for his life. Following an ETZEL attack on the British headquarters in Jerusalem, Begin allegedly underwent plastic surgery.
During the period prior to the creation of Israel, secret services of the USSR conducted vigorous activity in Palestine and had a well-established agent network there.
In his memoirs, head of Soviet intelligence in the Middle East in 1929 Georgy Agabekov noted that the main task regarding Palestine consisted at that time in “careful studying of all class and mutual national relations and finding-out on whom the Soviets could stake in case of war with Great Britain — on the Jews or on the Arabs. Moscow saw a big strategic significance in Palestine”.
At first the Soviet secret service network in Palestine was formed of Jews, ex-citizens of the former Russian empire. In their activity in the Mandate of Palestine the USSR’s secret services used activists of the local Communist Party (established on the Kremlin’s initiative in 1929), and members of Zionist organizations, including right-wing radicals. However, if the communists did not hide their connections with Moscow, Zionists tried to avoid publicity regarding such contacts.
At the end of 1923 an illegal Soviet intelligence headquarters began to operate in Palestine. According to Russian sources, Soviet intelligence had agents in the ranks of the Zionist right-wing radical organization ETZEL since 1937.----------------
Jewish plot to kill Bevin in London
Begin, whom MI6 believed was backed by the Soviet Union, planned to send five terrorist cells to Britain to carry out bombings and assassinations that would “beat the dog in his own kennel”.
The Jewish insurgents aimed to force British occupying forces out of Palestine, enabling the founding of the Jewish state. Details of the plot are included in MI5 files released at the National Archives in Kew, London.
Lord Bethell, author of The Palestine Triangle and an expert on Soviet intelligence, said Bevin was detested by Zionist groups. He added, however: “Zionists would be very angry if you compared these people with terrorists now. You have to remember that Irgun were the grandfathers of today’s ruling politicians.
“They would say they were at war with the British and behaved well, fighting under Marquess of Queensberry rules. They would say that they didn’t target civilians.”
Before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Britain governed the whole of Palestine under a mandate from the United Nations. Agitation among the Jewish population for a separate state escalated immediately after the second world war as refugees flooded in from Europe.
It reached its most intense point in July 1946, when the British headquarters at the King David hotel in Jerusalem was bombed by Jewish fighters dressed as Arabs with explosives contained in milk churns. Ninety-one people, 28 of them British, were killed.
The MI5 files contain a report suggesting that Irgun carried out the attack after drawing lots with two other militant groups, Stern and Hagana. Stern drew the lot to attack British ships in the Mediterranean while Hagana were chosen to attack army camps.
In August 1946, the month after the King David attack, Major James Robertson, head of MI5’s Middle East section, warned London that both Begin’s group and Stern were sending five terrorist cells to the capital to mirror IRA tactics of bombing and assassination.
Roberston added: “In recent months it has been reported that they have been training selected members for the purpose of assassinating a prominent British personality. Special reference has been several times made to Mr Bevin.”
Bevin, the Labour foreign secretary, was an opponent of the creation of a Jewish state and had recommended that Jewish refugees in Europe should be forcibly prevented from emigrating to Palestine.
The planned terrorist campaign ended up being restricted largely to letter bombs. In 1947, 20 were sent to leading figures in Britain including Bevin and Anthony Eden, his Tory predecessor.
After the establishment of Israel, Begin, who died in 1992, dissolved Irgun and turned to politics. He became prime minister in the 1970s and was awarded the Nobel prize in 1978 jointly with Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, for signing the Camp David peace accords.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SPECIAL TASKS: THE MEMOIRS OF AN UNWANTED WITNESS -- A SOVIET SPYMASTER
by Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov
with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter
Foreword by Robert Conquest
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY London 1994.
<excerpts>
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/sudoplat.html
{p. 3} My name is Pavel Anatolievich Sudoplatov, but I do not expect you to recognize it, because for fifty-eight years it was one of the best-kept secrets in the Soviet Union. You may think you know me by other names: the Center, the Director, or the head of SMERSH ... My "Administration for Special Tasks" was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping, and assassination of our enemies beyond the country's borders. It was a special department working in the Soviet security service. I was responsible for Trotsky's assassination and, during World War II, I was in charge of guerrilla warfare and disinformation in Germany and German-occupied territories.
After the war I continued to run illegal networks abroad whose purpose was to sabotage American and NATO installations in the event hostilities broke out. I was also in charge of the Soviet espionage effort to obtain the secrets of the atomic bomb from America and Great Britain. I set up a network of illegals who convinced Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Bruno Pontecorvo, Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, and other scientists in America and Great Britain to share atomic secrets with us.
www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.<snip>
... After the war, Stalin preferred to play another game, which was to penetrate the Zionist movement. Until 1948 Great Britain held a mandate from the League of Nations to administer the territory of Palestine. Stalin and Molotov hoped to assuage the fears of the British that they would be pushed out of Palestine by the founding of a Jewish state there; part of the impetus for [Stalin's proposal for] a Jewish homeland in the Crimea was to help our British allies. It was held out as a diversion for world Jewish leaders, to confuse the focus on Palestine as a solution to the Jewish problem. When it became clear at the end of 1945 that Stalin was not going to fulfill his [promise] of a Jewish republic in the Crimea, the British and Americans set up the Anglo-American Committee in Palestine, leaving out the Soviet Union. This was contrary to a previous understanding that there would be joint consultation of the three wartime allies.
Thus in April 1946, Dekanozov, deputy minister of foreign affairs, and Vyshinsky, also a deputy minister, wrote a memorandum to Stalin and Molotov stressing that the Soviet Union had been snubbed. The Palestinian issue would be settled without the Soviet Union. They suggested that the leadership formulate a public policy of looking favorably on a Jewish state in Palestine. Under an alias, with the consent of Molotov, Vyshinsky published an article in the magazine Novoye Vremya, affirming the necessity of creating a democratic Jewish state in the territory of the British mandate. Clearly the intention was to strengthen the Soviet stand in the Middle East and to undermine British influence among Arab states, who objected to the Jewish state, by showing their inability to stop the Jews.
Concurrent with this political move, I was ordered to send agents to Palestine through Romania in 1946. They were to set up an illegal network that might participate in combat and sabotage operations against the British. I assigned three officers, Josef Garbuz, Aleksandr Semyonov (real name Taubman; he was Grigulevich's assistant in the Lithuanian underground and had helped liquidate Rudolf Klement in Paris in 1938), and Julius Kolesnikov. Garbuz and Kolesnikov had experience in guerrilla warfare in the Ukraine and in Byelorussia, where they had carried out sabotage operations against the Germans.
Semyonov and Kolesnikov settled down in Haifa and built two networks, but they did not participate in any active sabotage operations against the British. Kolesnikov arranged for the shipment to Palestine of small arms and antitank grenades seized from the Germans. Semyonov attempted to renew contacts with an agent of Serebryansky, who had been planted in the Stern organization, an anti-British terrorist group, in 1937. Garbuz remained in Romania, gathering candidates for settlement in the future Israel.
When the order came to plant agents in Palestine and provide ammunition to the Jewish guerrilla organizations, it became clear to me that, while we were ostensibly helping the Jews, the real purpose of our efforts was to set up our own network within the Zionist political and military structure. The Jews were seeking independence and were deeply involved with America. They would not be subject to our influence to the degree that Eastern Europe was, but we felt it important to plant our presence there. Kheifetz told me that as early as 1943 Litvinov, in a message to Molotov from Washington, stressed that Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state would become a major issue in the postwar international order.
It was in the second half of 1946, when Stalin had become disenchanted with Jewish alliances abroad and Jewish demands at home and was feeling isolated by the British-American joint stand in Palestine,
[Could the Baruch-Lilienthal Plan for World Government have been a factor? The Lilienthal report of March 16, 1946, updated as the Baruch Plan of June 14, 1946, were put to Stalin, on behalf of the American Government; both authors were Jewish: baruch-plan.html}
that he began to stimulate an anti-Semitic campaign, which culminated in a purge of Jews from the party machinery, diplomatic service, military apparatus, and intelligence services. It developed into the infamous Doctors' Plot and "Zionist conspiracy" charges, in which every Jewish doctor was suspect. The anti-Semitic campaign was a repeat of the purges of the 1930s, another maneuver by Stalin to sweep out all established power centers in the bureaucracy in order to replace them with weaker men and women who would not threaten his supreme hold on the country's leadership.
In October 1946, for the first time, the specter of Jewish bourgeois nationalism as a threat to Communist ideology was raised, in a letter from Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, newly appointed minister of state security, to Stalin. In the letter he accused leaders of the Jewish Antifascist Committee of engaging in nationalist propaganda, meaning they were putting Jewish concerns above Soviet interests. This was a heavy warning sign. Kheifetz, who had performed so brilliantly in obtaining atomic information for us and establishing high-level contacts in the American Jewish community, was suddenly out of favor. He continued to serve the Jewish Antifascist Committee as its secretary for foreign affairs, but he was forced to sever contacts with the American Jewish community.
...
The situation deteriorated in 1947. I remember the oral instruction from A. Obruchnikov, the deputy minister of state security in charge of personnel, not to enlist Jews as officers in the organs of state security. I could not imagine that this direct anti-Semitic order came from Stalin. I thought it must be Abakumov's initiative. It became clear to me that the grand plan of using our Jewish intellectuals for international cooperation with the world Jewish community had been abandoned. Eitingon, who kept complaining about an anti-Semitic campaign against his relatives in the university and medical services, was convinced that anti-Semitism was an essential element of the government's policy. In hindsight I realize that he understood the situation better than I did.
Beria and Kobulov frequently told me that Stalin enjoyed anti-Muslim and anti-Azerbaijani jokes and anecdotes told to him in the presence of Bagirov, the first secretary of the Azerbaijani Communist party, who was disheartened by Kobulov's imitation of Azerbaijani pronunciation of Russian words. This makes me believe that humor directed at any nationalist group was pleasing to Stalin, and that he was neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Muslim, only opposed to any nationalist enclave of power.
Stalin and his close aides were interested in the Jewish issue mainly to exploit it politically, either for use in a power struggle or for consolidating their power. That's how the flirtation with anti-Semitism started in high party echelons. [But] after Stalin opened an "anticosmopolitan" drive in 1946 and 1947, middle-level personnel and rank-and-file party bureaucracy took anti-Semitism for granted as the official party line. "Rootless cosmopolitans" became synonymous with Jews; it meant that Soviets of Jewish origin shared cultural values with Western Jews and therefore were less than completely loyal to the Soviet Union.
This anticosmopolitan drive coincided with a shift in the power balance around Stalin. Malenkov was demoted and Beria stripped of his position to supervise any activities in the sphere of state security. Rumors began to spread that he and Molotov surrounded themselves with Jews. Stalin's efforts after the war were focused on extending Soviet hegemony, first over the countries of Eastern Europe bordering the Soviet Union, and then everywhere he was in competition with British interests. He foresaw that the Arab states would turn to the Soviet Union when they were frustrated by British and American support for Israel. The Arabs would appreciate the anti-Zionist trends in Soviet foreign policy.
I was told by Vetrov, Molotov's assistant, later ambassador to Denmark, what Stalin said: "Let's agree to the establishment of Israel. This will be a pain in the ass for the Arab states and will make them turn their backs on the British. In the long run it will totally undermine British influence in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Iraq."
The Cold War began in earnest in 1946 and 1947, when the illusion of postwar cooperation with the West ended. The wartime policy of treating Britain and America as allies turned into confrontation. The civil war in China was intensifying and tensions were rising in Italy and France because of the political struggle by the Communists to come to power. With the onset of the Cold War, our hopes for obtaining Western Jewish money faded. It became clear to the leadership that it could not rely on the support of the Jewish business community to invest in the reconstruction of the Soviet Union.
The first victim was Mikhoels, who had been at the heart of the discussions to establish a Jewish Crimean republic. Stalin feared that Mikhoels would unleash forces that could not be controlled and would lead to unpredictable political consequences. Stalin feared a truly independent Jewish homeland. Mikhoels had the stature of a leader with world recognition, and Stalin could not risk his developing his own power base.
Mikhoels was murdered in January 1948, under the direct order of Stalin. Probably because Emma was Jewish, the assignment, fortunately, was not given to me. The assassination was carried out by Colonel Lebedev under the operational control of the minister of state security of Byelorussia, Lavrenti Tsanava, and Sergei Ogoltsov, Abakumov's deputy, first deputy minister of state security. Mikhoels was lured to Tsanava's dacha on the outskirts of Minsk, ostensibly to meet leading Byelorussian dramatic artists. There Mikhoels, together with his secretary, V. Golubov, was jabbed with a poisoned needle. Golubov, unknown to Mikhoels, was an MGB informer who had become an unwanted witness because he had brought Mikhoels to the dacha. The two were thrown under the wheels of a truck to make it appear they had been killed on the street in a hit-and-run accident.
When I first heard of Mikhoels's death, I kept my suspicions to myself. I never imagined that Ogoltsov would personally go to Minsk to supervise arrangements for Mikhoels's assassination. I thought that probably Mikhoels was killed by an anti-Semitic gangster who had been told in advance where to find such a notorious defender of the Jewish cause. I could not imagine that such an act, using such poor intelligence tradecraft, could be committed by trained officers. Such a crude execution did not seem to be the work of professionals. (I learned the details only after Stalin's death, when I was appointed by Beria to an MVD commission assigned to investigate the Doctors' Plot and the mysterious death of Mikhoels.)
During most of 1948 I was preoccupied with the Berlin crisis and establishing a Kurdish guerrilla network in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey with the goal of overthrowing the government of Nuri Said and Faisal in Iraq. This was the period when we were consolidating a Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, and I flew to Prague with Zubov to meet Benes, to neutralize his opposition to transferring power to Klement Gottwald.
...
I was stunned when Gregory Kheifetz was arrested in 1948 or 1949, but neither I nor Eitingon could intervene. We attributed his arrest to Abakumov's anti-Semitic campaign. Almost all the members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee and leading Jewish intellectuals were arrested and tried for the conspiracy to separate the [proposed "Jewish Homeland" of] Crimea from the USSR.
{Might the creation of Israel, an an external magnet for Jewish loyalties, have been a factor? Given the prominence of Jews in creating the USSR, the state of Israel was potentially not just an external homeland, but a rival centre of international power.}
An internal power struggle from 1948 to 1952 developed into the public anti-Semitic campaign known as the Doctors' Plot. Although it was known as an anti-Semitic campaign, the Doctors' Plot was not restricted to Jews. Rather it was part of a struggle to settle old scores in the leadership. On one side Stalin, with the help of Malenkov and Khrushchev, was trying to purge his own old guard and Beria. The scapegoats in the alleged Jewish "conspiracy" were to be Molotov, Voroshilov, and Mikoyan, the last of Stalin's Politburo old guard. The truth about the initiation of the Doctors' Plot has never been revealed, even during Gorbachev's glasnost, because it was a vicious power struggle in the Kremlin on the eve of Stalin's death that drew in the entire leadership.
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