SOVIET SPY
Born Abraham Marek Klingberg in Warsaw, he was always known as ‘Marcus’.
Marcus attended a Jewish school but when he became an adult he rejected his religion.
He went to Warsaw University to train as a doctor, but his studies were cut short by the invasion of the Nazis.
Marcus fled to the Soviet Union, completing his medical training at the University of Minsk.

Marcus volunteered for the Red Army when the Nazis subsequently invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. He served on the front line.
He was wounded in August 1941 and was released from the Red Army.
He then went to Moscow University to do his postgraduate studies, training as an epidemiologist.
Marcus became high-profile when he managed to trace the cause of an outbreak of food poisoning which had killed thousands of Russians. He discovered that the wheat being used to make bread had been infected with a poisonous chemical.
Marcus was rewarded by being made Chief Epidemiologist of the Bylorussian Republic. He was also re-instated to the Red Army, being given the rank of Captain.
At the end of the Second World War, Marcus went back to Poland. There, he found that his parents and only sibling had died in Treblinka Concentration Camp.
Marcus was distraught but chose to stay in Poland and became Chief Epidemiologist at the Polish Ministry of Health.
On a business trip to Sweden, it is believed (without proof) that Soviet Intelligence made their initial contact with him.
In 1948, Marcus’ application to emigrate to the USA was rejected, so he moved to the newly-created state of Israel.
There, he married Wanda Yashinskaya, a microbiologist and survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. They had one daughter called Sylvia.
Marcus was recruited to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and served in the Medical Corps for a while. Soon, he was promoted to become Head of the Department of Preventative Medicine. More significantly, he was the founder, and Chair of the Central Research Laboratories for Military Medicine.

This led to Marcus being one of the creators (and Deputy Director) of the top-secret Israel Institute of Biological Research (IIBR), which produced biological and chemical weapons. It was based in Ness Ziona, ten miles south of Tel Aviv.
Unbeknown to the Israeli authorities, Klingberg was passing all their secrets to the Soviet Union.
During a business trip to Europe, the KGB taught him all of the state-of-the-art spying techniques – such as the use of invisible ink, secret cameras, micro-photographs and the use of mail drops. Nobody suspected that he had been ‘turned’.
His KGB code name was ‘Rok’, which is Russian for fate. His handler was known as ‘Viktor’. They met once every three months, often in the Russian Orthodox Church in Tel Aviv. The signal for a required meeting was that one of them would chalk something on a neglected, falling down wall in the city.

In 1963, the Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet, began to suspect that Marcus was a spy. He was arrested and interrogated – but released after he successfully passed a lie-detector test.
In 1967, the Soviet Union supported the Arab countries during the Six Day War. Soviet diplomats were expelled from Israel, meaning contact with Viktor became much harder. Klingberg increasingly travelled to international conventions, many of them in Switzerland, which gave him the opportunity to pass on secret information, often in bars or restaurants. Much of this was given to Israel’s Arab enemies, by the USSR.
In 1969, Marcus became Professor of Epidemiology at Tel Aviv University. Promotions kept coming – and earlier suspicions about him were clearly forgotten.
Marcus headed up the Department of Preventative and Social Medicine and did extensive work on birth defects.
He was recruited to head an international steering group on a chemical accident that had occurred in Seveso in Italy in 1976. His international reputation was sky-high.
He took sabbatical years in London and Oxford. During the latter posting, he became visiting fellow of Wolfson College.

But then, the bubble burst. It was 1983.
A Soviet spy had defected to the West and he disclosed that Klingberg was one of the USSR’s most prized agents.
The Israeli Supreme Court immediately gave the Secret Service (Mossad) unprecedented powers to arrest and hold Marcus for thirty days, in order to interrogate him.

Marcus was approached by a Mossad agent, who told him there had been a chemical explosion in Malaysia which was being kept under wraps. Israel had no diplomatic links with Malaysia, but the government of the latter had specifically asked for his expert help. “The trip must be kept secret. Not even your wife must know where you’re going to.”
Marcus fell for the ruse.
He packed his bags and said goodbye to his family. Instead of being taken to Tel Aviv airport, he was driven to a Mossad safe house.
There, he was accused of being a Soviet spy and selling Israeli secrets to the enemy. It took six days of questioning before he broke down and confessed. Marcus claimed his motive was a debt of gratitude to the Soviet Union for saving the world from the Nazis.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for espionage – but his arrest and imprisonment were kept secret from the Israeli public.
The first 10 years of his sentence were spent in solitary confinement. Marcus was held in Israel’s highest security prison under a false name, with a false profession – as the editor of a science journal.
Whilst Marcus was in prison, his wife Wanda, died.
After 14 years, Amnesty International took up his case – and soon Marcus was released on medical grounds, on the condition he remained under house arrest.
The Mossad employed two agents as his housekeepers, who reported everything he said and did. There were cameras everywhere. So, Marcus started speaking Russian and Yiddish.
A court order was issued forbidding him from speaking either language – or to talk about anything scientific.
In 2003, Marcus was finally released from house arrest and immediately flew to Paris to rejoin his daughter Sylvia. He lived in a one-bedroom flat in the French city.
Whilst in prison, the Soviet Union had awarded him the ‘Red Banner of Lenin’, the country’s second highest award.

Marcus published his autobiography in 2007, entitled ‘The Last Spy’.

The Israeli Secret Service still consider him the spy that caused the most damage to their national security.
Marcus died in Paris.
Shortly after his death, his daughter Sylvia died as well.
It was revealed that not only her father was a spy, but her former husband, Udi Adiv, was one as well – having sold Israeli secrets to Syria.
RIP – Russian Intelligence Player