Friday, November 09, 2007

I Love the Smell of Espionage in the Morning.

If you're an espionage fiend like me, you'll be licking your chops in anticipation of this man's memoirs getting published. Here's a snippet of his life to whet the appetite:

...he was the person who obtained the advance text of Khrushchev’s Secret
Speech, the one delivered in February, 1956, the one that laid out the crimes of
Stalin for the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party. That text was a turning
point in the Cold War. Grayevsky gave it to the Israeli Embassy, where it was
copied and sent to Israel. The Shin Bet intelligence service delivered it by
courier to James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence (and the
CIA’s liaison with the Israelis), who gave it to CIA chief Allen Dulles, who
gave it to President Eisenhower.

In keeping with the general rule that the
most important information about the Soviet Union invariably came from
“walk-ins,” and not from “agents” recruited by CIA, Grayevsky performed his
world-changing act solely out of personal conviction.

It was only after his move to Israel shortly thereafter that Victor Grayevsky become involved in the world of espionage. The KGB recruited him, and for decades thereafter he pretended to be their man in Tel Aviv, while actually working as an Israeli double agent. He did his work so effectively that the Soviets awarded him the Lenin Medal.