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	Workers Vanguard No. 1082	29 January 2016

Marcus Klingberg

1918—2015

Soviet Spy Remembered

Courageous Soviet spy and accomplished epidemiologist Marcus Klingberg died in Paris on November 30 at the age of 97. Klingberg, a Polish Jew who worked for many years as a high-ranking scientist in Israel, passed critical information to the Soviet Union about the Israeli state’s stockpile of lethal chemical and bacterial weapons. He provided this information out of a deep loyalty to the Soviet Union for giving him the opportunity to fight the Nazis, who massacred his entire family during World War II. The Israeli government, which considered him to be “the most damaging spy in Israel’s history,” secretly tried and imprisoned Klingberg in 1983. He languished in prison for almost 16 years.

The obituaries of Klingberg in the bourgeois press paint a picture of a cold, calculating spy straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. But in his memoirs, Hameragel Ha’akharon (The Last Spy), published in Hebrew in 2007, Klingberg reveals the true nature of the man whom we honor for his service to humanity:

“I still believe in communism: It will likely not happen in my lifetime but in 10, 20, 50 years—I’m almost certain—the people will return to communism. It will happen when people are disappointed by unbridled capitalism, which strives to destroy the rights of workers everywhere.... Socialism will win in the end!”

Avraham Mordechai Klingberg, known as Marcus or Marek, was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in October 1918 in Warsaw, Poland. He studied medicine at the University of Warsaw and became an anti-fascist activist on the eve of World War II. At this time, he was also first exposed to Marxist ideas. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Klingberg heeded his father’s insistence that “at least one of us has to survive” and fled to Minsk in the Soviet Republic of Byelorussia (now Belarus), where he was able to complete his studies. In his memoirs, Klingberg notes that what convinced his father to encourage him to leave was a conversation with an officer in the German army who warned him that all Jews in Poland were going to be exterminated.

On the very day that Germany invaded the USSR, 22 June 1941, Klingberg volunteered for the Soviet Red Army in order to fight the fascists. In the conflict between imperialist powers—primarily the U.S. and Britain against Germany and Japan—World War II was a reactionary struggle on all sides to seize new arenas of exploitation and defend existing ones. Workers had no stake in that interimperialist conflict. However, it was the duty of the international proletariat to defend the USSR—the homeland of the Russian Revolution—against imperialist attack. The Soviet Union, then a degenerated workers state, carried out the overwhelming brunt of the fighting against Hitler’s Germany, and it was the Red Army that defeated the Nazi scourge, at the cost of 27 million Soviet lives.

The Soviet Union’s military might, even under bureaucratic Stalinist rule, was a testament to the power of a planned, collectivized economy, which catapulted Russia, a backward peasant country, into becoming a modern industrial and military powerhouse. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was the first time in history that the working class took and held power. The establishment of the Soviet workers state, tied to the spread of revolution internationally, offered the prospect of development toward a socialist society of genuine equality and abundance for all. However, the defeat of revolutionary opportunities, most importantly in Germany, left the Soviet workers state isolated. Amid conditions of material scarcity, exacerbated by imperialist invasion and civil war, a conservative bureaucratic caste centered on Stalin usurped political power in the Soviet Union starting in 1923-24. The Stalinist bureaucracy renounced the struggle for international workers revolution in the name of “building socialism in one country” and seeking “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. The gains won by the 1917 Revolution were endangered by Stalinist rule and were ultimately overthrown through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, a catastrophic defeat for the working class worldwide.

During WWII, Klingberg worked as a medical officer on the front lines until wounded in the leg by shrapnel. After this injury, he continued to serve in the Red Army, leading an anti-epidemic unit in Molotov (now Perm) near the Urals. One of his many accomplishments was stopping the spread of a typhus outbreak that would have infected untold numbers of Soviet soldiers; he rose to the rank of captain by the end of the war. When Klingberg returned to Poland in 1944, he learned that his parents and only brother had perished in the Treblinka extermination camp.

Klingberg never forgot his debt to the Soviet Union, a country that allowed him to not only survive but also become a world-class scientist. In his memoirs, Klingberg writes: “When I arrived in the Soviet Union, I was a penniless Polish Jewish refugee who had not completed his medical studies. When I left in December 1944, I was the chief epidemiologist of Byelorussia...and an ardent communist.”

In 1948, Klingberg emigrated to Israel with his daughter and wife, Wanda, who was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and a fellow scientist. For years, he moved comfortably in elite Zionist intellectual and political circles, despite his leftist and openly pro-Soviet views. From his memoirs, it is clear that Klingberg was always very critical of the Zionist government’s treatment of Palestinians and other Arabs.

Klingberg rapidly climbed the ladder of the Israeli medical establishment and later became deputy scientific director of the top-secret Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona, where research was conducted on chemical and biological weapons. The IIBR stockpiled at least 43 types of unconventional weaponry, from viruses to poison derived from mushrooms. These could certainly have been used against neighboring Arab states and against Palestinians in the occupied territories. Klingberg also believed that the Zionists shared this information with imperialist powers like the U.S. and Britain.

Klingberg’s service in providing information to the Soviets about experimental weapons research earned him the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, the Soviet Union’s second-highest honor. In the preface to his memoirs, Klingberg notes, “I had nothing to do with nuclear secrets, but I am still convinced today that the information I handed to the Soviet Union prevented the U.S. from employing certain weapons during the Cold War.”

Klingberg was not alone in exposing Israel’s arsenal of death. In prison, his cell was next to that of Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu. In 1986, Vanunu exposed that the Zionist rulers had produced enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems not only to incinerate every Arab capital but also to bomb major cities in the Soviet Union. Vanunu was finally released from prison in 2004. However, he is still forbidden from leaving Israel, where he is under strict surveillance. Just last year, he was detained and put under house arrest simply for giving a TV interview. We continue to defend Mordechai Vanunu and call for Israel to allow him to leave immediately!

While the Israelis suspected Klingberg of being a spy for years, it was not until the early 1980s, when the CIA passed on a tip to Shin Bet (Israeli secret police) from a Soviet defector, that they acted against him. Around that time, Klingberg also happened to be quite vocal about his research debunking U.S. claims that Laos and Vietnam had used a Soviet-supplied biological weapon against counterrevolutionary forces. Klingberg had correctly concluded that the so-called “yellow rain” was, in fact, nothing more than naturally occurring bee feces.

On 19 January 1983, Shin Bet kidnapped Klingberg and interrogated him for days. To explain his disappearance, the Israeli government circulated rumors that Klingberg had entered an insane asylum in Switzerland or possibly abandoned his wife and daughter and fled to the Soviet Union. After his arrest, Klingberg was tried in secret by a military tribunal, convicted of espionage and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Klingberg’s jailers assigned him a false name and he spent ten years in solitary confinement. During his incarceration, he had several strokes and suffered from a number of other ailments. Wanda Klingberg, who had also spied for the Soviets but avoided imprisonment, did not live to see her husband’s release.

After nearly 16 years in prison, Marcus Klingberg was moved to house arrest in Israel until 2003, when he was finally able to leave the country. He was allowed to emigrate to Paris to be with his family on the condition that he would never speak of his work at Ness Ziona.

In a review of Klingberg’s memoirs, the Haaretz journalist Yossi Melman was scandalized that Klingberg does not express “one iota of regret for his deeds.” Damn right. In a 2010 article, Klingberg reaffirmed that he never regretted passing weapons secrets to the Soviets: “My feelings about this remain with me despite the fall of the Soviet Union—a country to which not only I owe my life, as well as my career in epidemiology and my most useful work; but, above all, the opportunity to fight fascism.”