SCARCELY reported by the media, the death in Paris last month of Marcus Klingberg was nevertheless a major event, given the fact that at the prime of his career he had remained the enigmatic spy who willingly went out into the cold for reasons of his own.

Klingberg’s exploits were singular in the sense that he was neither ordered by his superiors in the typical James Bond tradition, nor was he someone who made a fortune by selling state secrets to an enemy country.

Born in the Polish capital Warsaw, Klingberg abandoned the Jewish religion and became a diehard Marxist-Leninist in his early youth. At the outbreak of the Second World War he would move to the Soviet Union to complete his medical studies and later join the Red Army as a voluntary soldier.

Following the war, after a brief return to Poland where his entire family had perished in Nazi concentration camps, Klingberg shifted to Israel. “Not because I was born Jewish”, he would later explain in his autobiography, “but because my Russian friends encouraged me to make a career in the newly created country they were backing.”

First as an army officer, then from 1957 onwards as an analyst at the Israeli Institute of Biological Research, Klingberg lived a busy but unspectacular life in his adopted homeland. It was only in the late 1970s that the Israeli secret services would first report his contacts with the KGB during his frequent trips to foreign countries, including Russia, to attend international biological research conferences.

During one such conference, a Shin Bet agent even followed Klingberg in St Petersburg where he was often seen leaving the well-warmed meeting hall to walk long distances in freezing sub-zero temperatures. But no tangible proof could ever be gathered against him.

Back in Tel Aviv, he was sometimes noticed entering the Russian orthodox church where he supposedly met Soviet secret agents.

But Klingberg’s guile and dexterity always saved him. Then, in January 1983, two Russian-speaking undercover men posing as KGB agents eventually convinced him to meet them at a certain secret address in order to receive instructions from Moscow.

Klingberg fell into the trap and the underground rendezvous spot turned out to be a Shin Bet interrogation chamber where he was held captive and questioned for about two weeks.

In his autobiography The Last Spy that was published in 2007 Klingberg makes no mention of any kind of physical torture but probably owing to intense psychological stress he finally signed a confession admitting he had been passing on Israeli state secrets to Moscow for a number of years.

What were these secrets? Did they have anything to do with the highly confidential laboratory tests on which Klingberg was working? Did they include details of weapons for possible chemical warfare? Tel Aviv never made the facts public. Even his imprisonment and then house arrest were registered under the fictitious name of ‘Abraham Greenberg’.

Klingberg would remain a prisoner in Israel for 20 years, only to be released in Jan 2003 following a guarantee by his daughter who has French citizenship.

For the next 12 years he lived alone in a single-room flat in the Latin Quarter area of Paris where he read books, worked on his autobiography, received friends and journalists and, on brighter, sunny days was often seen sipping his favourite thé à la menthe on the terrace of a café overlooking the Notre Dame cathedral.

Talking once to a journalist in 2006 he said: “I have a strong conviction the Nazis could never have been defeated without the support of the Soviet people and the Red Army. I have always been conscious of a deep moral debt towards the Russians.”

Klingberg died in Paris at age 97 on Nov 30, 2015.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2015