Last update - 02:06 21/10/2007
Man who revealed Stalin's secret speech to be buried in Jerusalem
By Yossi Melman
Polish-born Wiktor Grajewski, who relayed to Israel in April 1956 the text of Nikita Krushchev's secret speech denouncing Joseph Stalin's crimes, will be laid to rest today in Jerusalem's Har Hamenuhot Cemetery.
For years the head of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service at the time, Amos Manor, considered Grajewski's feat Israel's most significant intelligence coup.
Manor, with then prime minister David Ben-Gurion's approval, sent the speech to the CIA, instantly upgrading the relationship between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities and improving Israel's image as a reliable intelligence source with connections in the Soviet bloc. Manor himself died this summer.
Grajewski, who was born in Poland in 1925, fled to the Soviet Union when World War II broke out. When he returned after the war, he joined the Communist Party and became a journalist. Part of his family immigrated to Israel, and after visiting them he began believing in Zionism and decided to immigrate himself at the first opportunity.
As a result of his friendship with the secretary of the head of Poland's Communist Party, he managed to obtain one of the few copies of Krushchev's secret speech. He hid it inside his coat, and at great personal risk brought it to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, where a Shin Bet official photographed it.
After immigrating to Israel in 1957, Grajewski worked briefly at the Foreign Ministry, where he became acquainted with Soviet diplomats from the embassy in Tel Aviv, who were in his Hebrew studies ulpan. He reported to the Shin Bet their efforts to recruit him and was instructed to pretend to cooperate with them. For 14 years he gave misleading information to the Soviet Union from his Shin Bet handlers, first Reuven Merhav and later Reuven Hazak.
His espionage work ended in 1971. Grajewski went on to a career in Israel Radio. In August he was awarded a certificate thanking him for his contribution to the State of Israel, in a ceremony attended by Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin as well as Grajewski's family and friends.