Haaretz
Tevet 12, 5767
Former Jerusalem mayor
Teddy Kollek, who died on Tuesday at 95, was one of the founders of the
Israeli intelligence community, and the man responsible for the alliance
and cooperation between the CIA and Israel, one of the pillars of Israel's
alliance with the United States.
Kollek forged the connection
between the CIA and Israel as a result of his time spent as a
representative of the Haganah and the pre-state Jewish community of
Palestine, and in his capacity as intelligence liaison to the British
intelligence services during World War II.
In that role, Kollek
met James Engleton, who was working during WWII in Italy as a high-ranking
officer in the OSS, predecessor of the CIA. After the founding of the CIA,
Engleton become one of the highest ranking officers in the organization,
responsible for overseeing counter-espionage operations against Soviet
intelligence.
The second founding incident took place when Kollek
was a representative of the Haganah and worked in the U.S. in procuring
materiel.
Networking from his hotel in New York City, Kollek
established connections which allowed Israel to acquire weapons from the
United States and Central America. Kollek and his partner in these
operations, Eliyahu Saharov, were assisted in acquiring arms by trade
union officials and heads of the Mafia.
Kollek later served as an
Israeli policy representative in Washington, all the while strengthening
the intelligence connections he had made during World War II. At the same
time, Kollek began to work with the CIA and the Mossad, and was one of the
founders of the formal arrangements between the two intelligence
operations, which was put into effect by Kollek's friend Reuven Shiloach
in 1951.
Even when he was not serving as an official intelligence
or diplomatic envoy, Kollek continued to work to strengthen intelligence
ties between the U.S. and Israel, and the connections he made with
Engleton.
Kollek stated in an interview that Israel's contribution
to the strengthening of of these ties was based on the sharing of
intelligence acquired by Israel from new immigrants who arrived to Israel
from the Soviet Union and other satellite countries affiliated with the
USSR.
The biggest intelligence coup these operations yielded was
the speech given by then-head of the Politburo Nikita Khruschev during the
20th meeting of the Communist Party in February 1956, where Khruschev
leveled harsh criticisms of the crimes carried out by Stalin during his
reign.
The speech was exposed by Polish journalist Victor
Grayevsky, who turned the information over to then Shin Bet Chief Amos
Manor. Teddy Kollek and David Ben-Gurion decided to pass the content of
the speech to the CIA, which had gone to great lengths to acquire it.