Marcus Klingberg

Avraham Marek Klingberg (7 October 1918 – 30 November 2015), known as 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 joining the Red Army in 1941. Injured on the front lines, he was reassinged 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 activies 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. He spent the remaining years of his life re-engaged in academic work and completing his memoirs.