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lationship with the nation's first Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion, for whom he became a sort of general factotum. Among other duties, he was put in charge of keeping Ben Gurion's diary, a job that exposed him to an astonishing range of secrets that the Prime Minister committed to paper, intending to use at least some of them as the basis for his eventual memoirs.

Ben-Gurion trusted Beer totally, but Isser Harel, one of the key officials in Israel's nascent intelligence service, did not. He had one of his "feelings" about Beer. Nothing specific, but as he told his men, there was something that did not "ring right" about Beer; Harel resolved to keep an eye on him.

Since Beer was close with the powerful Ben-Gurion, Harel had to move very carefully. In 1952, when Harel was named head of the new intelligence agency called Mossad, he got some con- firmation of his suspicions when Beer suddenly resigned his army commission and went into politics, joining the Mapam, Israel's most leftist political party. Less than a year later, he was ousted for "leftist deviationism." Beer recanted his political views, and became head of the party's information department. This sort of expediency hardened Harel's suspicions. He successfully blocked Beer's attempt to rejoin the army on the grounds of "security risk," but Beer, drawing on his friendship with Ben-Gurion, got a job in the Defense Ministry to prepare an official history of the 1948 war and to work on strategic studies.

Harel was alarmed, for Beer now had wide access to clas- sified material. He was convinced Beer was a KGB mole, but without the proverbial smoking gun, was reduced to warning Ben-Gurion about his suspicions. Ben-Gurion, unimpressed, de- manded proof. The first real proof did not come until 1959, when Mikhail Goleniewski, the Polish UB agent and KGB asset, began revealing to the CIA information on KGB assets around the world. The CIA passed onto Harel one especially alarming reve- lation from Goleniewski: the KGB had a mole, code-named COM- RADE KURT, "somewhere in the upper levels" of the Israeli De- fense Ministry. Goleniewski did not know the mole's specific identity, but provided enough clues that pointed to Israel Beer.

Several months later, Harel received another clue. The West German BND told him that Beer, on a visit to West Germany for a lecture to German military officials, had slipped across the bor- der to East Germany, and returned after several hours. Beer had told no one about this trip, nor had he noted it in his report on the trip. Why would an Israeli colonel take a secret trip to East

46 THE MOLES

Germany? Then came the information from the American busi- nessman, and Harel was positive: Beer was a mole. Armed with the new information, he was able to convince Ben-Gurion to au- thorize a full-scale surveillance of Beer (something the Prime Minster had refused to sanction up to that point).

One evening in March 1961, Mossad surveillance teams tracked Beer, carrying an attache case, to a nearly-deserted res- taurant in Tel Aviv. He sat there for a while, then was joined by a man carrying the same kind of attache case as Beer. The team immediately identified him as a Soviet diplomat who was in fact a senior KGB officer. Beer and the Russian conversed for a short period, then got up, each reaching for the other's case, a classic espionage exchange. The team pounced: inside the case Beer had handed to the Russian was a stack of classified documents. Some months later, Beer was convicted of espionage and sen- tenced to 10 years in prison.

That would appear to have been the end of it, but Mossad discovered the mystery of Israel Beer was just beginning.

Beer refused to cooperate in any way with his captors, so Mossad was required to work backwards. Their first unsettling dis- covery was that they had arrested a ghost: the man calling himself Israel Beer did not exist. Detailed checking revealed that nearly everything known about Beer's background was a lie. The man sitting in an Israeli jail cell, although he spoke fluent German, was not from Austria. He had not been a member of the Austrian Socialists. He had been in Spain during the civil war, but had not served in the International Brigade. He was not Jewish. He had not emigrated to Palestine to escape Nazi persecution.

Who, then, was he? Mossad never did find out. Beer, who remained mute, died in 1966 of heart failure. Eventually, Mossad was to conclude that the man who called himself Israel Beer rep- resented a classic KGB mole operation; he had been planted in Palestine before World War II with the specific purpose of infil- trating the Zionist underground. The unexpected bonus came when that underground ultimately became the government of the new nation of Israel.

Eventually, Mossad was to conclude that the entire operation involved two men. One was the real Israel Beer. He in fact had been an activist in the Austrian Socialist movement, and later fought in Spain. But, Mossad was convinced, the real Israel Beer had never left Spain alive; as was common KGB practice during the Spanish Civil War, it appropriated the passports and other

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papers of men righting in the International Brigade. When one