Marcus Klingberg

Avraham Mordechai Klingberg (7 October 1918 – 30 November 2015), known as Marek or Marcus Klingberg (Hebrew: מרקוס קלינגברג), was a Polish-born Israeli epidemiologist and the highest ranking Soviet spy ever uncovered in Israel. Klingberg made major contributions in the fields of infectious and noninfectious disease epidemiology and military medicine, while simultaneously passing intelligence to the Soviet Union regarding Israel's biological and chemical warfare capacities. Declared the "most important Soviet spy in Israel" by the Jerusalem Post, Klingberg is regarded as causing the greatest damage ever to the country's national security interests. Originally from a family of rabbis, Klingberg chose a secular education in high school. Entering medical school in Warsaw in 1935, his studies were cut short by the German invasion in 1939. He fled Poland for the Soviet Union, completing his medical degree in Minsk and enlisting in the Red Army in 1941. Injured on the front lines, he was reassigned to a military unit dealing with disease outbreaks. In 1943, he served as Chief Epidemiologist of the Byelorussian Republic. Repatriated to Poland following the end of the war, he became Acting Chief Epidemiologist at the Polish Ministry of Health. Having lost his entire family but a single cousin in the Holocaust, Klingberg migrated to Israel. He served in the Israel Defence Force between 1948 and 1953. In 1957 he was appointed Deputy Scientific Director of the clandestine Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), responsible for the country's biological and chemical weapons. By his own admission, he began passing information to the Soviet Union due to ideological reasons. Despite coming under suspicion by counter-intelligence, his activities were not discovered until 1983, seven years after his retirement from the IIBR. Arrested and convicted of espionage in secret, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, being held in solitary confinement for the first decade. While the circumstances of his detention were revealed internationally in 1988, domestic reporting on Klingberg was suppressed for a further five years. Paroled to home detention in 1998 due to ill health, he was permitted to move to Paris in 2003 to live with his daughter on the condition that he never speak of his work in the areas of biological and chemical weapons. The remaining years of his life were spent re-engaged in academic work and completing his memoirs.

Early life Klingberg was born in Warsaw, Poland, on 7 October 1918, to a Hasidic Jewish family of rabbinical lineage. In his youth, he lived for a time with his grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Klingberg. His parents sent him to a cheder, a religious primary school. As a teenager, he abandoned religion and attended a secular high school. In 1935, Klingberg began studying medicine at the University of Warsaw. In 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, Klingberg fled to the Soviet Union at the urging of his father, completing his medical studies in Minsk in 1941. His parents and younger brother, who remained in Poland, were murdered in 1942 in the Treblinka extermination camp. Other than a single cousin, his entire family perished.

World War II On 22 June 1941, the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Klingberg volunteered for the Red Army. He served as a medical officer on the front lines until October 1941, when he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel. Upon recovery, he was assigned to Perm in the Urals as leader of an anti-epidemic unit. In 1943, he undertook postgraduate studies in epidemiology at the Central Institute for Advanced Medical Training in Moscow under Lev Gromashevsky, considered the leading Soviet epidemiologist. The same year, he was part of a team that stopped an epidemic in the Urals. He also contributed to research on typhoid fever. In late December 1943, the first parts of Byelorussia were retaken by the Red Army and Klingberg became Chief Epidemiologist of the Byelorussian Republic. At the end of the war, Klingberg was discharged from the Red Army with the rank of captain and returned to Poland. In Warsaw, he served as Acting Chief Epidemiologist at the Polish Ministry of Health. While living in post-war Poland, Klingberg met Adjia Eisman, who went by the name Wanda Jasinska, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. Similarly to Klingberg, her parents and siblings were murdered in the Holocaust. Klingberg and Jasinska married in 1946 and moved to Sweden, where their daughter, Sylvia, was born in 1947.

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