Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

28 AMIR WEINER AND AIGI RAHI-TAMM
How were such individuals managed? One telling case was the
infiltration into various Zionist organizations whose campaign for outmigration
of Jews to pre-state Israel elevated them to the status of “fascist
collaborationist tools of American imperialist, terrorist organizations.” In
the course of investigating Zionist activities in March 1947, the Second
Department of the Lithuanian MGB recruited Bentsion Aronas, a 32-yearold
engineer with solid Zionist credentials. Aronas soon emerged as
a model agent. The department’s profile of Aronas referred to him as a
disciplined agent who tended to take the initiative with wide contacts and
respect among fellow Zionists. Aronas solidified his standing in the MGB
by offering information that led to the arrest and sentencing of several
other activists in Lithuania and Belorussia and helped recruit the secretary
of Drew Middleton, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow. His
impeccable record led the MGB to appoint Aronas the chief agent of a
decoy underground group whose task was to attract immigration activists
in Lithuania, Poland, and Germany. The same people that Aronas recruited
were instructed to keep an eye on him, making the organization look like a
tangled web of compromised characters informing simultaneously on their
brethren and on one another. Recruitment was done by straightforward
blackmail.
Semen Gordon, the other key figure in the fake cell, was recruited on
the basis of his criminal conviction in 1944. Fluent in several languages and
in contact with family members in pre-state Israel and Norway, Gordon was
sent on a five-month stint in West Germany under the guise of a German
repatriate, a cruel irony for Jew at the time, with instructions to track down
immigration activists and routes. To protect Gordon from unwarranted
Western temptations and guarantee his return to the motherland, the
MGB kept his family in the Soviet Union. Gordon’s instructions included
ways to conduct himself if interviewed by Western intelligence services and
the specific information he should convey on the economic and political
situation in Soviet Lithuania. 77 Whatever the successes of the operation
intelligence-wise, it was also a brutal demonstration of the efficacy of the
surveillance system in tearing apart the social fabric, setting members of
certain communities against one another, and cultivating suspicion and
intimidation across the board.
77 On the NKGB typologies of Jewish organizations and recommended methods for recruiting
informants, see LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 177, l. 2; and LYA f. V-15, ap. 7, b. 542, ll. 1–8. The case
of the decoy cell is in LYA f. K-1, ap. 2, b. 9, ll. 2–19, 25–42, 53–54, 61–88, 94–98, 103–6,
114–15, 118–19, 135–36, 143–45.