araucaria
28th April 2014, 10:03
Why would an Israeli scientist, Marcus Klingberg, disappear over a US/Soviet superpower confrontation?
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.
Full story here.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/27/marcus-klingberg-soviet-spy-kgb
As a Soviet spy, what did Marcus Klingberg know that Moscow so wanted to hear? On the question of yellow rain, precisely nothing.
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.
Marcus Klingberg served his full 20-year term for knowing nothing when there was nothing to know. But he was one of those people Donald Rumsfeld was talking about when he said “there are things we know that we don’t know and there are things we don’t know that we know”.
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.
(…)
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".
(…)
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."
Well, we know this much: it is highly displeasing to Israel that any idea should get out that American belligerency might be based on American disinformation rather than on Russia misbehaving. Especially if it comes from someone who knows exactly what they are talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_rain
We also know the sad truth that honeybees can cause epidemics. We also know that bees can be hybridized, selecting for more aggressive behaviour – such as the Africanized so-called killer bee. Perhaps they can be selected to act as a vector for disease? Be that as it may, like Russia, bees are being given a bad press, which might explain why they are now coming under chemical attack themselves.
And finally, we know that, whenever there is trouble being stirred, Israel is usually operating behind the scenes in surreptitious ways that even the East German Stasi could not always keep up with:
Comte [a lawyer for Klinsberg’s daughter] 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.
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.
Full story here.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/27/marcus-klingberg-soviet-spy-kgb
As a Soviet spy, what did Marcus Klingberg know that Moscow so wanted to hear? On the question of yellow rain, precisely nothing.
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.
Marcus Klingberg served his full 20-year term for knowing nothing when there was nothing to know. But he was one of those people Donald Rumsfeld was talking about when he said “there are things we know that we don’t know and there are things we don’t know that we know”.
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.
(…)
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".
(…)
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."
Well, we know this much: it is highly displeasing to Israel that any idea should get out that American belligerency might be based on American disinformation rather than on Russia misbehaving. Especially if it comes from someone who knows exactly what they are talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_rain
We also know the sad truth that honeybees can cause epidemics. We also know that bees can be hybridized, selecting for more aggressive behaviour – such as the Africanized so-called killer bee. Perhaps they can be selected to act as a vector for disease? Be that as it may, like Russia, bees are being given a bad press, which might explain why they are now coming under chemical attack themselves.
And finally, we know that, whenever there is trouble being stirred, Israel is usually operating behind the scenes in surreptitious ways that even the East German Stasi could not always keep up with:
Comte [a lawyer for Klinsberg’s daughter] 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.