Secret Speech
Harel was also responsible for the intelligence coup that cemented the Mossad's reputation with Western intelligence agencies. In March 1956, three years after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's "cult of personality" and brutal paranoia in a seminal speech before a closed session of the Communist Party's 20th Congress. Word spread of this event, but U.S. intelligence agencies were unable to get their hands on the text of the so-called "Secret Speech".
The Soviet politburo delivered copies of the speech to a few Eastern-bloc countries; in Poland, a journalist named Viktor Grayevsky borrowed a copy from his girlfriend, who worked in the office of the First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party. Grayevsky, who was Jewish, had recently visited Israel and had decided to emigrate; he gave the speech to security officers at the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, and they in turn sent photographed copies to Harel in Tel Aviv.
Harel shared the speech with his counterparts in other Western intelligence offices, most notably counterintelligence spymaster James Jesus Angleton of the American C.I.A.
Read more about this topic: Isser Harel
Famous quotes containing the words secret and/or speech:
“For believe me!—the secret to harvesting the greatest abundance and the greatest enjoyment from existence is this—living dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, so long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you knowing ones! The time will soon be past when you could be content to live hidden in the forests like timid deer.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)