Marcus Klingberg: the spy who knew too much

The Paris address I had been given was on the Left Bank of the Seine, a fashionable 19th courtyard of balconies and a grey tiled roof. An elegant hideaway for a Cold War spy, I thought, as I stepped out of my taxi. I pressed the bell marked Klingberg. "Floor three," said a woman's voice on the intercom. Inside his one-room apartment, Marcus Klingberg, the 95-year-old KGB master spy, was waiting for me.

I recognised him from newspaper photos. Barely 5ft tall, with a bald, outsized head on a slender frame, he had finely rimmed spectacles, a trace of a goatee, and was wearing a pale blue shirt and grey trousers. He smiled as he greeted me with outstretched arms. "So pleased to meet you after all these years," he said. Twenty-eight years to be precise.

The last time I had tried to interview Klingberg was in Israel in 1985. I was a foreign correspondent for the Observer based in Washington DC. The Cold War raged. In a superpower confrontation, the Americans had accused the Soviets of violating arms-control treaties by using a new chemical weapon known as yellow rain. Samples of the weapon from the battlefields of southeast Asia and Afghanistan were said to contain a deadly toxin, a poisonous chemical produced by the common fungus Fusarium. The Soviets had vigorously denied the charge.

Government scientists in Britain, America's closest ally, discovered pollen in the samples and independent scientists in America discovered, bizarrely, that the yellow spots they had found were indistinguishable from pollen-laden bee faeces. The bewildering question was whether the US could have mistaken bee droppings for a new chemical weapon.

Klingberg was an expert in the effects of Fusarium toxin. A Polish Jew, he had fled, at his father's urging, to Russia at the start of the Second World War and served as a doctor in the Red Army. His family perished in Treblinka in 1943. Klingberg, by then an epidemiologist, had successfully traced an outbreak of food poisoning that killed thousands of Russians to the consumption of mouldy wheat infested with the Fusarium poison.

After the war, Klingberg emigrated to Israel where he became a high-ranking military officer, and a deputy scientific director of Israel's top-secret chemical and biological weapons laboratories at Ness Ziona, 12 miles from Tel Aviv. I had gone to Israel to interview him, hoping he could shed some light on the yellow rain affair. But instead of meeting Klingberg, I unwittingly became part of an east-west espionage drama.

Israeli officials told me Klingberg had "disappeared". They said he had suffered a mental breakdown and was in a clinic somewhere in Europe. But his colleagues at Ness Ziona and at Tel Aviv University, where he was also a professor of epidemiology, did not believe the official story. Knowing his admiration for the Red Army during the war, some of them wondered if he might have defected to Russia, taking with him western military secrets about chemical and biological weapons.

I interviewed Klingberg's wife, Wanda, who was still living in the couple's Tel Aviv apartment. Mysteriously, she said she knew where her husband was, but couldn't tell me. Immediately after the interview, someone smashed the rear window of my rental car and stole my passport and a satchel with my notebook and papers on Klingberg. My story for the Observer, published on 8 September 1985, suggested Klingberg's "disappearance" might have had something to do with his secret work at Ness Ziona, and also mentioned that his colleagues thought he might have defected to the Soviet Union.

The story was the first to link Klingberg to his secret weapons work, but the Israeli government censor prevented local journalists from following it up. For the next five years, only his wife and a handful of family members knew what had really happened, and the government swore them to secrecy.

Klingberg had not disappeared. In 1983, he was secretly arrested on charges of espionage – the highest-ranking Soviet spy caught in Israel. Then aged 64, Klingberg was sentenced to the maximum penalty of 20 years in jail. He served the first 10 years in solitary confinement and was given a false name, Abraham Grinberg, and a false profession – editor of a social-science journal.

In 1993, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Israeli government finally admitted Klingberg was in jail – and had another 10 years to serve. He had health problems and 39 members of the Israeli Knesset and Amnesty International, taking pity on him, launched separate appeals for his early release. But Israel's secret services claimed Klingberg still posed a security risk. In 2003, he was finally allowed to leave Israel for exile in Paris – on condition he never spoke about his secret work at Ness Ziona.

That is where the story might have ended, but, in 2007, Klingberg and his Israeli lawyer, Michael Sfard, published a book in Hebrew about his life and how he became a spy. Israeli censors vetted the book before publication to protect Ness Ziona's secrets.

In a world before the internet and cyberspace, Klingberg described in gripping detail how he had "slipped into" a Le Carré world of espionage shortly after he arrived in Israel in 1948. He met his KGB contact every three months by drawing coded signs in chalk on a concrete wall in a street in Tel Aviv.

In the back room of a Russian Orthodox church, "Moscow Centre" provided vodka and caviar. His code name was "Rok" (fate or destiny in Russian). His KGB control was "Viktor". His Soviet minders offered him a variety of spy gadgets, including invisible ink and miniature cameras, although he never used them.

It is reasonable to assume that, at Ness Ziona, Klingberg had access to secrets the Soviets sought. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union lagged behind the US, Britain and France in the development of chemical and biological weapons. It is well known that Ness Ziona was one of the leading experimental weapons laboratories in the west. Ness Ziona scientists have published papers over the years revealing research into nerve gases, such as tabun, sarin and VX, and incapacitating agents and psychotropic drugs, such as LSD. Researchers also studied how insects could transmit plague, typhus and rabies – all diseases that became part of the US, and in some cases also the British, arsenals before the US unilaterally renounced the production of biological and toxin weapons in 1969. The ban became an international arms-control treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, but Israel has never signed it.

"I also knew about the [Israeli] co-operation with foreign institutes in the western world – the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom," wrote Klingberg. "They presented themselves as acting only for developing protective measures against chemical and biological warfare. Were they really limited to defence research? Blessed be the believers."

Moscow Centre showed its appreciation for such access. In one of his clandestine meetings, Klingberg was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, the Soviet Union's second-rank decoration after the Order of Lenin. But why did he become a spy?

In his book he wrote that, like some of the physicists who worked on the American atom bomb, he believed the secrets of weapons of mass destruction should be shared. Both sides in the Cold War would be less likely to use them and more likely to ban them. But he also had his personal reason, he told me. He felt he owed the Russians a debt for saving the world from the Nazis.

"I am and always was a communist," he said. His espionage had been entirely voluntary. Moscow Centre never paid him a penny, he said. He became a master spy, recruiting his wife Wanda, and two friends, one of whom would become a famous scientist.

The Israeli reviewers of his book were derisive. The newspaper Haaretz portrayed Klingberg as a self-deceiving actor in the "theatre real" of the espionage world and, in the end, as a "petty clerk, and mainly as a childish and pitiful person". Israel's Ynet, a news website, said Klingberg simply fooled himself. "An Israeli who supported the Russians at the beginning of the 1950s was naive. An Israeli who supplied them with secrets in the 60s and 70s was a scoundrel."

In Paris, Klingberg gave perfunctory interviews to the media and then went to ground, refusing to meet even academics writing Cold War histories, though he undoubtedly had much to contribute. But he made an exception for me, he said, because he had a special story to tell me about my attempts to find him in 1983.

Over a cup of tea, I sat down with Klingberg and his daughter Sylvia (now 66 and the person who had let me into his Paris apartment). In the small room there was a bed, a desk, a bookcase, an armchair and a few paintings – remnants of a long, intense, tragic life covering a wide swath of a violent century: from the Second World War through several Israeli-Arab wars, the Cold War, the build-up of the superpower arsenals of weapons of mass destruction and the fall of the Soviet Union. It is a wonder, frankly, that this frail-looking 95-year-old survived to tell his personal story at all. But he seemed to thrive on it and, remarkably, remembered it in detail.

"Your Observer article forced the Israelis to admit I was in jail," he said, his still-bright blue eyes glinting at the prospect of imparting yet another Cold War secret. "Here is the evidence," he said, holding up a photocopy of my story from the files of the East German Stasi secret police. By amusing coincidence, the file number on an accompanying explanation in Russian was 000007.

Klingberg said that the Israeli secret services had undoubtedly monitored my visit to his wife Wanda in 1985; they must have wondered why this foreign journalist was so interested in their secretly convicted spy. And the theft from my car does not seem to have been the work of a common thief. Several months after my visit to Israel, my satchel, minus key papers and my passport, was returned anonymously to the Observer offices in London.

Sylvia fearlessly used the newspaper article to organise an elaborate east-west spy swap that included her father. Growing up in Israel, Sylvia had always been politically active on the left, becoming a member of Matzpen, a group that united dozens of left-wing anti-Zionists. By the 1960s she was a Trotskyist, joining French students at the barricades in Paris in 1968. She married Alain Brossat, a French philosophy professor. Their son, Ian, is now a member of the French Communist Party and an elected member of the Council of Paris – the city's governing body.

In Israel, Sylvia had always suspected her father was working on chemical and biological weapons – despite his denials – and she told him how strongly she disapproved. But after she learned of his arrest, she objected even more strongly to his secret trial and imprisonment – the Israeli practice of creating an anonymous "Prisoner X" in the name of state security. Knowing she would be banned from visiting him in jail, Sylvia launched a campaign for his release.

In 1986, she contacted Antoine Comte, a well-known human rights lawyer in Paris. "We didn't know where to start," Comte told me in a separate interview. "We were so naive. We went to see the cultural attaché at the Russian embassy and he threw up his hands in horror at being involved in anything to do with spies."

Comte then contacted Wolfgang Vogel, the flamboyant East German lawyer famous for brokering spy swaps – including the much-publicised 1962 exchange in Berlin of the downed American U-2 pilot Gary Powers for the Soviet intelligence agent, Rudolf Abel, who had been caught and convicted in the US in 1957.

Comte flew to East Berlin and told Vogel about Klingberg's story, showing him a copy of my Observer article as evidence – the evidence that would make its way into the Stasi files. Vogel was astonished he had never heard of Klingberg's imprisonment. "A man who worked for the KGB in the west has been arrested and I know nothing of it?" he exclaimed. "Impossible. Maybe Professor Klingberg went crazy and gave himself up." He promised to investigate the matter.

Several months later, Comte received word from Vogel that Moscow Centre needed to verify Klingberg's story. Sylvia should go alone to Leningrad, where she would be contacted. She went during Christmas 1986. Shortly after checking into her hotel she received a phone call from a man who introduced himself as "Peter". He was staying in the same hotel. "You should come to my room," he told her.

"He was a tall, very handsome man of about 65 or 70," Sylvia recalled. They met twice for about four hours. Peter showed her photos and documents, astonishing Sylvia with how much he knew of her private life. He asked her to identify the author of a handwritten letter. It was from her mother.

Peter apologised for the interrogation, saying it was necessary to make sure there were "no contradictions" in her story. He even offered to help Sylvia pay for her legal expenses, but she declined, sternly reminding him why she had come.

"My father did a lot for you. Now, it's your turn. Get him out of prison."

"We will do all we can," Peter promised.

For two years, Sylvia and Comte heard nothing. In early 1988, as Mikhail Gorbachev was introducing his glasnost reforms in the Soviet Union, Vogel called for a meeting in Paris with a lawyer representing the Israeli government, Comte and Sylvia.

Vogel's initial proposal was to swap Klingberg for unnamed "American spies" in Russia. But the Israeli lawyer insisted Israel had to get "our flesh" – an Israeli. He wanted Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator who was forced to bail out of his crippled F-4 Phantom jet on a bombing mission during Israel's 1986 invasion of Lebanon, and was now in the hands of Hezbollah. If Israel let Klingberg go to Moscow, Israel wanted Moscow to negotiate Arad's release.

Vogel suggested extending the swap to include Jonathan Pollard, the US Navy intelligence officer who was convicted in 1986 for passing military secrets to Israel and sentenced to life in prison. Pollard never faced trial – at the request of both the US and the Israeli governments he entered a plea and the details of his case remain unknown. All appeals for his early release have been rejected, but are apparently being considered again by Washington as part of the Middle East peace talks. Then the Israeli lawyer made a new demand: for the remains of two Israeli soldiers who had been killed during the Lebanon invasion. Vogel said he could arrange this – apparently through Soviet contacts with Hezbollah.

In his jail cell, Klingberg found out about the secret negotiations from his Israeli interrogator, who turned up one day in a furious temper. "Your daughter consulted a French lawyer without our authorisation," he shouted. "She violated the ban on family members talking about your arrest with an unauthorised person."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Klingberg protested – which was true.

"You won't be released. You won't be transferred to Russia," the interrogator raged. "And if Sylvia arrives in Israel, she'll be arrested." Israel eventually approved the swap, but Klingberg told his jailers he wasn't interested. "Not interested," they shot back. "You'll be a hero of the Soviet Union… You will have an apartment in Moscow and a dacha in the countryside, and when you die, they'll bury you next to Philby." (Kim Philby was the British double agent who fled to Moscow in 1963).

In the end, Hezbollah backed out of the deal. On 28 July 1989, Israeli commandos kidnapped the Lebanese Shia leader, Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid, from his home village of Jibchit in southern Lebanon, and the sheikh would spend the next 15 years in an Israeli jail. Klingberg remained in jail, Pollard continued to serve his life sentence in the US and Arad died in Lebanon, either executed by his captors or killed while trying to escape.

"But you see," said Klingberg holding up a copy of the Stasi file that included a 1988 leaked story of the proposed swap in the German newspaper, Die Welt, "Your Observer story forced the Israelis to admit, five years after I had 'disappeared', that I was in jail." He beamed at the thought. "Now you can ask me about yellow rain." He knew no secrets, he said, but he had opinions, and he proceeded to introduce a tantalising new clue to the lingering Cold War mystery.

Israel's security services had objected vigorously to Klingberg's release. He spent the last four years of his prison term – from the end of 1998 to 2003 – under house arrest but, sadly, without his wife, Wanda, who had died of heart failure in 1990. Even as he became eligible for full release, Israel's defence security service, Malmab, demanded that Klingberg be kept under close scrutiny. In a submission to the court, Malmab claimed Klingberg's "mind contains information he is not aware of". Klingberg's lawyers were stumped: there was no defence against charges about things he did not know that he knew.

Malmab eventually relented and Klingberg was allowed to leave for exile in Paris as long as he did not talk about his secret work at Ness Ziona. Haaretz said Malmab's objection "was, of course, an absurd and baseless claim". But was it? This is where the Klingberg story intriguingly intersects with yellow rain. Three decades later, the US stands by its accusation against the Soviets, and the Russians continue to dismiss the charge. The CIA has written up its official history of yellow rain, but refuses to declassify it, a move the New York Times called "preposterous" after so long. The agency apparently still has something to hide.

Asked whether the fungal poisons had ever been on Moscow's shopping lists presented by his KGB minders in Israel, Klingberg answered definitively: "Never." Had Moscow Centre ever expressed the slightest interest in the military application of fungal poisons? "Never."

Using Fusarium toxins as a biological weapon had never been discussed when he was in the Soviet Union, he said, and, like the sceptical independent scientists in America and Britain, he could not see the point of putting a fungal toxin into a mix of pollen grains for spraying on a battlefield. He had always assumed yellow rain was American disinformation.

In 1985, had I been able to interview Klingberg he would have added an authoritative voice to the growing number of yellow-rain sceptics. Since then, former Soviet officials, familiar with the Soviet chemical and biological programme through the 70s and 80s, have reported they never knew of any effort to turn Fusarium toxins into a weapon. In the 90s, the new Russian government said that in the opinion of its military experts fungal toxins "have no military significance".

Before his arrest, Klingberg had been interrogated twice on suspicion of spying for Moscow: once in 1965 and again in 1976. He was released each time. In 1981, a month after the US yellow-rain charges, Klingberg told me he suddenly felt the Israeli security noose "tightening around my neck". Israeli agents, he learned, had moved into an apartment opposite in Tel Aviv, and his phone made strange clicking noises. The surveillance continued through 1982.

In 1983, Klingberg was due to go on sabbatical to Europe. He planned to lecture at universities, quite openly, on his special subject of epidemiology of congenital malformations. However, given his expertise in Fusarium poisoning in the USSR and the European interest in America's yellow-rain charges, Klingberg was bound to be asked his opinion about the alleged weapon. And he would have concluded publicly that yellow rain seemed like it might be, well, bee faeces, thus adding to the growing embarrassment over the US charge. Washington must have been relieved when Klingberg, instead of going on sabbatical, simply disappeared.

He was arrested on 19 January 1983. He never found out why the Israelis chose that date. And today, he is no closer to unravelling Malmab's security riddle of the things he does not know that he knows.

During one of my visits in Paris, Klingberg celebrated his 95th birthday with a dinner given by Sylvia. Two dozen people turned up to the small Left Bank restaurant: family members and academic friends from Britain and Europe, the lawyer, Antoine Comte, and Klingberg's Israeli lawyer during his release from prison, Avigdor Feldman. After a birthday cake and a chorus of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow", Feldman leaned his formidable frame across the dinner table like a prosecutor, pressing Klingberg: "Come on Marek [his preferred Polish version of Marcus], what is it you know that you don't know that you know? Tell us.'' Klingberg smiled and shook his head. "I am just very happy all of you are here today and I thank you for coming," he said. And then, as bright as ever, he chatted with his guests until almost midnight and walked the two blocks home.

Might the things he is supposed to have known be connected to his knowledge of Fusarium and, therefore, to the yellow-rain mystery? I asked. "It's possible," he said, again smiling at the thought. "I simply don't know what I'm supposed to know that I don't know."

Peter Pringle was a foreign correspondent for the Observer from 1981 to 1985. He is currently writing a book about the yellow-rain affair