The meeting between the two men in the center of Ramle was wholly routine and innocent, on the face of it. They strolled toward the small Prinz 4 car that was parked nearby, got in and drove off. The man in the passenger seat tried to act naturally and, to mask his wariness, casually opened the glove compartment and adjusted the sun visor. During the ride, the two engaged in small talk. After a bumpy drive of about a half hour, the car reached a forest next to Kibbutz Tzuba, in the Jerusalem hills. The driver parked the car on the side of the road. The two men were soon swallowed up among the trees. Only then did the driver give his passenger the message that was the whole point of this excursion. "From the information in my possession," he said, "I understand that Israel plans to go to war and attack Nasser."

This meeting took place in late May 1967, about 10 days before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, at the height of what subsequently came to be known as "the waiting period." The two participants were a diplomat in the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv - who was actually an agent of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service - and Viktor Grayevsky, a journalist and radio broadcaster.

This meeting was one of the high points in Grayevsky's 14-year career as a covert agent. To be precise, he was a double agent.

Its details are being published here for the first time. "It's a secret that I've carried with me since then," he explains. "And only now did I decide to tell it. I worked for the Shin Bet." His assignment? To feed Soviet intelligence officers disinformation or partly accurate information on Israel that his handlers in the Shin Bet security service had prepared for him.

Viktor Grayevsky, now 81, has already entered the pantheon of Israeli intelligence thanks to one particularly bold and heroic action. When he was a journalist in Poland, acting at great risk, he relayed to the Shin Bet a copy of the secret speech of Nikita Krushchev, then the secretary-general of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. In the speech, Kruschev denounced Joseph Stalin's regime of terror.

Still-held secret

The story of Grayevsky and the speech was revealed in the early 1990s, when it was described in a series of articles in Haaretz and elsewhere, and depicted in a television movie. He took this action voluntarily, out of Zionist motivation, without receiving any reward and without being an agent or intelligence officer. But even after it brought him fame and public esteem, Grayevsky continued to keep his other secret, which he is revealing only now: Namely, that for years, after coming to Israel, he served as an agent or "helper" of the Shin Bet, posing as someone who worked for Soviet intelligence. In this way, Israel fed the Soviets disinformation. Another advantage was the possibility of diverting the energies and logistics of Soviet intelligence personnel to false missions and to activities that were essentially a waste of time.

The planted information relayed via Grayevsky in hundreds of meetings with KGB case officers in Israel dealt primarily with matters of politics and society in the country. The disinformation was very carefully put together by Shin Bet analysts and, if necessary, with the aid of the Israel Defense Forces and Military Intelligence. Obviously, it had no real intelligence, security or political value and did not harm Israel. But it had to be presented to the Soviets as being of great import. Grayevsky's Soviet handlers were KGB officers, who worked under diplomatic cover of their embassy in Ramat Gan, or posed as administrators and clergy from the so-called Russian Orthodox Red Church in Israel.

The meetings took place in Russian churches and monasteries in Jerusalem and Tiberias, in Ramle, in the forests around Jerusalem, and at receptions and dinners held in restaurants. "It was like the movies," recalls Grayevsky, who is currently at work on a book of memoirs, to be published in France.

On the other side, there were his Shin Bet handlers, who issued instructions to him before each meeting and debriefed him afterward. They included Reuven Merhav and Reuven Hazak, among others.

"Grayevsky was a highly successful double agent," says Hazak, who later became deputy chief of the Shin Bet and is today a businessman. "He was a nice guy. He carried out his orders. In my entire career, I maybe had 10 like him. He was one of the most important."

Says Merhav: "I have the greatest respect for Grayevsky for his commitment, his nobility, his deep understanding and his reliability. As far as I know, everyone who had anything to do with him in this feels the same way."

What grade would you give the Soviet Union's intelligence activity in Israel?

Merhav: "In Israel there was a deep fear of the seemingly unlimited ability of Soviet intelligence and its extensions. However, apart from a few successes, only some of which were truly impressive, Soviet intelligence failed in its understanding of the political system, both in Israel and the Arab countries. This is typical of totalitarian states, whose intelligence people cannot think independently. Instead they supply information and adapt information beforehand to suit the taste and desire of the government."

Do you believe that Soviet intelligence also failed on the eve of the Six-Day War?

"Yes. It failed completely to understand Israel's fighting spirit and to estimate Israel's strength. And perhaps it also played a significant part in fanning the Arab desire to go to war against Israel. Looking back now, 40 years later, I'd say that the Soviets' efforts to penetrate the Middle East were an abject failure."

A complicated art

Handling agents is the heart of intelligence work. The handler must act and behave like father and mother to his agent. He must be a social worker and a psychologist. He must "groom" his agent, but remain wary of him. Massage his ego, encourage him, reward him, be a shoulder to lean on and a good listener, but also be prepared to scold. Handling a double agent is an even harder assignment. It may be the most complicated art in all of espionage work. The double agent moves in the twilight zone between the two sides. He crosses lines back and forth. He must be very sly and cautious, lest his actions and true status be exposed. He assumes and discards identities. He presents a false facade of loyalty to one side when, in truth, his loyalty is with the other side. He must guilefully gain the trust of both sides.

Grayevsky's story is a fascinating tale of a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, a communist who grew disillusioned with Marxist ideology, became a Zionist and immigrated to Israel. Now it turns out that in addition to his normal work and daily routine, he also worked secretly as a spy - ostensibly in the service of the Soviet Union, but actually on behalf of the State of Israel.

He was born in 1925 in Krakow, under the name Viktor Spielman. When World War II broke out, he fled along with his family to the Soviet Union, and thus survived. In 1946 he returned to Poland. He joined the Communist Party, studied at the Academy of Political Science, joined the Polish news agency PAP, and changed his surname to the Polish name Grayevsky. In 1949, his parents and sister immigrated to Israel. Grayevsky decided to remain in Poland. He subsequently married, had a daughter and got divorced. In December 1955 his father fell seriously ill and Grayevsky came to visit him in Israel. The visit here shook his communist faith and turned him into a Zionist. He returned to Poland, but had already made up his mind to move to Israel.

After he conveyed the copy of Khrushchev's secret speech to a Shin Bet representative in Warsaw in April of 1956, there was concern for Grayevsky's fate. "We did everything we could to help him move to Israel," says Amos Manor, the head of the Shin Bet at the time. Thanks to the achievement that Grayevsky brought Manor and the Shin Bet, Israeli intelligence's status was raised, particularly in the eyes of the CIA in the United States, which received a copy of the speech from the Shin Bet.

Grayevsky moved to Israel in January 1957. Manor helped arrange a rental apartment for him on Harlap Street in Jerusalem, as well as two types of employment: a job in the Eastern Europe division of the Foreign Ministry, and a position as director of Polish-language broadcasting for immigrants on Israel Radio. For a new immigrant from a communist country to be employed by the Foreign Ministry was an exceptional case. Especially in light of the fact that a short time earlier, a Soviet spy had been discovered in the Foreign Ministry: Ze'ev Avni, who had immigrated to Israel about eight years before. Hence, Grayevsky's stationing at the Foreign Ministry amounted to a real expression of trust in him by the Shin Bet.

A shot of vodka

Grayevsky left the Foreign Ministry in 1961 and was appointed director of Russian-language radio broadcasts. In 1965, he was promoted to the position of director of Israel Radio's overseas broadcasting department (Kol Zion Lagola - "The Voice of Zion to the Diaspora"), with responsibility for all languages. He served in this post until 1990. At that point, he was appointed ombudsman for the Israel Broadcasting Authority. He retired in 2000. Fifty years of living in Israel have not erased his heavy Polish accent.

Right after arriving in Israel, Grayevsky was sent to the Borochov ulpan in Givatayim to learn Hebrew. Several diplomats and their wives from the Soviet embassy were studying Hebrew there, too. "I became friendly with them and I helped them with studying because I knew Russian," he says. One of them was Valery Usachy. Grayevsky didn't know it at the time, but Usachy was a junior KGB officer, who was well-known to the Shin Bet. In May, Grayevsky began working at the Foreign Ministry, and there, one day, in one of the corridors, he ran into Usachy.

"I wasn't surprised to see him. Russian diplomats came to the ministry from time to time. But he was surprised. Maybe he didn't understand how a new immigrant could have been hired there. 'What are you doing here?' he asked me. 'I work here,' I said. 'So let's go celebrate with a toast,' he said. 'Gladly,' I said. We arranged to meet in two weeks, at a small modest restaurant on Jaffa Street that doesn't exist anymore."

Did you suspect that he wished to recruit you to become a Soviet agent?

Grayevsky: "I didn't suspect. But I also knew that I would report to my superiors. An hour or two later I went to Yaakov Lanir, the ministry's security officer, and told him about my exchange with Usachy. The next day, I was summoned to Lanir's office and several people were waiting for me there. I realized that they were from the Shin Bet. They asked me about my background and said to me: 'Meet with him and report to us.' That's how it started."

The meeting in the restaurant was seemingly innocent. "Usachy came alone. We talked, we ate, we drank vodka. There wasn't anything conspiratorial. At the end, we arranged to meet again two weeks later. This time he asked me to come to a public telephone booth on Keren Kayemet Street. I reported to the Shin Bet. And they told me there was no problem. We met by the telephone booth and walked to the same restaurant. Again we drank vodka and ate. But this time Usachy was more focused. He talked with me about peace and we agreed that we'd continue to keep in touch since we both wanted peace. Everything was in hints, but it was clear to me."

What was clear?

"That I was in the game."

Grayevsky met with Usachy three more times. And then, at their last meeting - as is standard in the recruitment of an agent in most intelligence services - the Soviet diplomat informed Grayevsky that he was going away on vacation and asked Grayevsky to meet with a friend of his. Following the guidance of his Shin Bet handlers, Grayevsky readily agreed. The replacement was Viktor Kaloyev, ostensibly an administrator of the Russian Church, who lived in an apartment on the church grounds in Jerusalem's Russian Compound. In reality, Kaloyev was another Soviet intelligence officer.

'I wasn't afraid'

From that time until 1971 Grayevsky held hundreds of meetings with KGB officers. Every few years, his Soviet handlers changed. He doesn't remember all of their names anymore. What he does remember is how the vodka flowed like water at these meetings. Grayevsky had no problem with that; indeed today, too, he still enjoys sipping a glass of vodka whenever the opportunity arises.

Most of the meetings took place in the apartment in the Russian Compound. Priests - some of whom were espionage agents - also attended these meetings, as did "diplomats," who were actually KGB intelligence-gathering officers and handlers who worked out of the embassy in Ramat Gan. A few of these meetings were attended by the Archimandrite Yuvenali, head of the Russian Church in the Holy Land. Grayevsky sometimes brought along his wife, Anna, to the meetings, which more often than not featured a lavish meal.

At one of their first meetings, Kaloyev the handler told his agent: "I'm new in Israel and not so familiar with Israeli politics. Could you write a survey for me of the political parties in Israel - their structure, ideology, objectives?" Grayevsky willingly complied. This kind of request is another familiar ploy in the intelligence game. The quality of the material presented is not that important. The main purpose is to test the agent's commitment and to provide headquarters with proof that the handler has recruited a reliable source.

"I wrote a survey in Russian," Grayevsky relates. "and I gave it my contact in the Shin Bet, I think his name was Shlomo, who was in contact with me then. I remember that the Shin Bet people read it, deleted one word and approved it. At the next meeting, I gave Kolayev the survey. At the meeting after that he pulled out something like 200 liras, which was a lot of money as my salary was only 600 liras, and he said, 'Take it, you deserve it for the work.' He only asked that I sign for it."

And did you sign?

"Of course. I wanted the Russians to think that I'm an easy person to work with and to do whatever they tell me."

What did you do with the money?

"I gave it to the handler from the Shin Bet."

Did the Shin Bet people monitor your meetings?

"I don't know. Maybe. I didn't notice anything."

Did the Shin Bet supply you with a tape recorder?

"There was no need. After each meeting I reported in and received new instructions."

How were things arranged between you and the Russian handlers?

"It was very simple. At the end of each meeting we set the time and place for the next one. Usually it was every two weeks, give or take. They also gave me a code to use for emergencies. In case of emergency, they told me to call a certain Tel Aviv phone number, I don't know whose. Probably my handler's home number. They told me to call at seven in the morning, let it ring twice and hang up. To wait a minute and do the same thing again. And only on the third time would they answer the phone."

That doesn't sound very sophisticated.

"Maybe not, but that's what it was."

Did you have a nickname? A code name?

"I don't know if they had a nickname for me. When we met they called me Viktor Abramovich [son of Abraham, which was his father's name]."

Grayevsky's meetings with his Shin Bet handlers always took place in secret apartments used by the organization in Jerusalem.

Were you afraid to go to these meetings?

"No, I wasn't afraid. I was a little excited. The adrenaline flowed before, during and after each meeting. It was flattering to me. I was a new immigrant who had been given a job in radio and at the Foreign Ministry and now was also involved in counter-espionage, and I felt that they put their trust in me. It flattered me."

And did you have any second thoughts? Were there times when you wanted to stop?

"Yes, there were a few times like that. It wasn't easy to lead a double life. My wife, who took part in some of the meals with the Russians, knew that I had a connection with them; my daughters, who were in their teens then, also knew that something was going on. I had a few moments of crisis. It was hard for me to lead a normal life, on the one hand, while also leading a life in the shadows. I thought of quitting. But I always overcame my weakness and kept on."

KGB funding

Out of the hundreds of encounters he was involved in, Grayevsky recalls several that seem more significant than the rest. One time in the mid-1960s - he doesn't recollect the exact date - he was supposed to meet someone next to Nahshon, near Latrun. To give the encounter a random, innocuous appearance, the Soviet espionage officer said he would wait for him with his car hood raised, as if he had had a breakdown. Grayevsky arrived in his car and parked on the side of the narrow road. He went over to the other car as if to offer the driver assistance, but actually passed him a document.

This was a transcript of a meeting that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had held with Soviet generals. Grayevsky had received the transcript from his Shin Bet handlers. The decision to pass it to the Soviets was made after much discussion and scrutiny to ensure that it contained nothing that would expose Israeli intelligence's methods and sources. The aim was to raise Grayevsky's stature in the eyes of the Soviets, to give them the impression that they were handling an agent who had access to important classified information.

When the KGB officer asked him how he had managed to get his hands on the document, Grayevsky answered, using the cover story constructed for him by the Shin Bet: "I have friends in the prime minister's office."

Another meeting took place in a church in Jerusalem's Ein Karem neighborhood, with the church's driver. "We looked out the window," recounts Grayevsky, "and we saw excavations and a big construction site for gas storage tanks. The driver said to me: We think the construction is really meant for storage of your atomic weapon. Check it out for us." In retrospect, Grayevsky realized that the driver was apparently an officer from Soviet military intelligence, the GRU.

Soviet intelligence had two agencies active in Israel, the KGB and the GRU. They worked separately, and sometimes there was jealousy and competition between them. The objects of their interest and intelligence gathering were different, though they did overlap at times.

The KGB dealt mainly with political espionage and the recruitment of new immigrants. The GRU primarily monitored developments in the IDF, with a special interest in the air force, and observed Israel's scientific and technological capabilities, in general, and its nuclear capacity, in particular. The driver's interest in the "atomic weapon," which the Russians believed that Israel possessed, seemed to end there and the matter was not brought up again.

Another meeting that Grayevsky vividly recalls took place in a church in Tiberias. They sat in a side room and a nun served them lunch. On that occasion, the Russian handler handed Grayevsky $1,000.

"On previous occasions they had asked me about my family and I told them that I had a daughter in the United States," Grayevsky remembers. "'Why don't you go visit her?' they asked. I explained that it wasn't so easy and so on. And then in Tiberias he pulled out $1,000 and said, 'Take the money, Viktor Abramovich, and go visit your daughter in America.' As always, I signed and took the money."

At the end of the meeting, after receiving instructions from Reuven Hazak, Grayevsky went to a fish restaurant, ate to his heart's content and only got back into his little Prinz car about two hours later. At the Poriya junction, he met with Hazak. "Reuven got in the car and we drove to Jerusalem. On the way he questioned me about the meeting and when I gave him the money, he nearly fainted. It was a lot of money."

There were dozens of other instances in which Grayevsky received money. Usually, it was portrayed as "reimbursement for gasoline expenses." "I was very proud and happy that KGB money was funding the Shin Bet," comments Grayevsky.

Unrelayed message

Grayevsky's most important meeting with the Russian agents took place in May 1967. Nasser had moved his army into the Sinai Peninsula, in violation of a UN decision, and subsequently closed the Straits of Tiran and imposed a siege on the movement of ships to the Eilat port, precipitating the crisis that led to the outbreak of the Six-Day War. Following an order given by someone in the Shin Bet, Grayevsky was asked to activate the emergency procedure for the first time and to phone his Soviet handler. They met in Ramle and drove from there to the forest near Kibbutz Tzuba.

Grayevsky: "He looked to be about my age, in his forties. He wore a cap, held a briefcase and looked like a clerk from a government office. But he was a very sharp fellow. I told him that Israel wouldn't be able to just sit by and ignore the closure of the Straits, and that it would go to war against Nasser. He asked me how I knew this. Using the story that the Shin Bet had concocted for me, I told him that as a journalist and radio broadcaster I'd been invited to the prime minister's office and I'd heard a briefing there to this effect from a senior IDF officer."

This time the information was correct, accurate, not false. Although Grayevsky does not know precisely what the reasoning was that guided his Shin Bet handlers, he presumes the following (a plausible theory that is also backed up by conversations with Shin Bet personnel, IDF officers and historians of the period): Then prime minister Levi Eshkol and his government, who had been surprised by Nasser's moves, wished to prevent a war. To this end, they sought to send Nasser a clear message: that he must restore the status quo. In Israel, the hope was that information to this effect obtained by Soviet intelligence from an important "agent" would make the Soviets believe in its authenticity and spur them to rein in Nasser. But this didn't happen.

Grayevsky later heard differing accounts regarding the information that he passed on. These accounts more or less coincide with the theories of experts and historians who have studied the Soviet Union's conduct on the eve of the war. One version has it that KGB headquarters in Moscow did not relay the information to the Politburo. Another version says the information reached the Politburo but, for various reasons, was not conveyed to Nasser.

Grayevsky has a newspaper clipping from the daily Maariv of June 2, 2004. The item quotes from historian Michael B. Oren's book "Six Days of War." Oren cites a KGB general named Vadim Kirpichenko, chief of the Middle East and Africa department, who claimed: "We had an agent planted in the Israeli government who exposed the war plans." At the time of the report's publication, experts were highly skeptical of the idea that one of the government's ministers was a Soviet agent. Grayevsky wonders: "Maybe the government agent he was talking about was me?"

Promised souvenir

When the war broke out, the Soviet Union announced that it was cutting off diplomatic relations with Israel. Shortly before the Soviet diplomats left the country, Grayevsky was summoned to a meeting with his handler.

"I received an urgent call and we arranged to meet in the same place at Tzuba. He was very serious and sad. 'Viktor Abramovich,' he said to me. 'You've done a great thing for the Soviet Union. You told us that you were going to war. And this was true information. Therefore, we have decided to award you the Lenin Medal of Excellence. For obvious reasons, we cannot give it to you now, but it will be kept for you in Moscow.'"

Grayevsky: "It would have been nice if I'd gotten the medal to keep as a souvenir. Even now."

Though the severing of diplomatic ties made things more difficult for Soviet espionage in Israel, its activity did not cease completely. From then on, the brunt of the task fell on the "station" that operated through the russian church. Grayevsky had several more meetings with the administrator of the church, with the driver and the priests, until these, too, came to an end in 1971.

At the end of our conversation, Grayevsky stresses that he does not wish to be known from now on as a double agent or as a spy.

If you weren't a spy, then how would you define your work?

"I was given an assignment to maintain contacts with the KGB and I carried it out. It helped the State of Israel become familiar with and decipher Soviet espionage methods in Israel. There were other agents, too. I fought the Soviet Union and communism three times: when I obtained the copy of Krushchev's speech, doing the assignments for the Shin Bet, and in the Israel Radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union. I was a small cog - though still an important one, I think - in a big game."