The man who stole Khrushchev's speech

            On February 25, 1956, Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev gave a four-hour speech to the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party. Before the speech, he kicked out all reporters and foreign diplomats for security reasons. Western countries were more than curious to find out what he said during that secret speech. They knew that he denounced many of Joseph Stalin’s actions as barbarism. The West knew that if they could get the contents of the speech, they could let the world know the truth about communism. At that point in time, many people, including high-ranking Americans, tried to rationalize communism saying it was humanistic. They needed the speech badly, but the problem was that it remained a top-secret document, so the CIA put out a huge reward for a copy.

            The one security lapse in the Russian plan was that they had delivered copies of the speech to Eastern Bloc countries. Poland’s communist party leader, Edward Ochab, had his copy on the desk of his secretary, Lucia Baranowski, who was waiting to the end of the day to file the speech. Lucia’s boyfriend, Victor Grayevsky, came into to visit her, but she was too busy to leave. As he was about to leave he saw the red-bound speech marked with top-secret on her desk. He asked her if he could borrow it for an hour. She said fine and to be sure to return it at the end of the day.

            Before continuing, it is important to know about Victor Grayevsky’s background. He was born Victor Spielman in Krakow in 1925 and because he was journalist for the communist party he changed his name to Grayevsky so that he wouldn’t arouse suspicion because he was Jewish. His family had moved to Israel in 1949 and in 1955, he went there to visit his sick father. He was planning to move to Israel as soon as his visa was approved. Even though he had no formal spy training, he had Zionist sympathies and would do anything to help his future country.

            On the way back to his apartment, Grayevsky read the document and was shocked to read about all the atrocities that Stalin carried out. On the way back to return it, he stopped at the Israeli embassy to see his friend Yaakov Barmor, who was also a member of the Shin-Bet. Grayevsky later said that Barmor “ went pale, he went red, he went black, because he knew better than I what it was…that everyone throughout the world was looking for this speech.” Barmor asked to borrow it and within an hour and a half had copied the speech and Grayevsky was sent back to Lucia’s office.

            Barmor immediately flew to Vienna, Austria and handed the speech to Amos Manor who was the head of Shin-Bet. Manor than flew to Israel and showed it to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion who told Manor to give it to Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA. Within a few weeks, the speech was “leaked” to the New York Times and the world finally learned of the horrors done by the early communists.

            Grayevsky moved to Jerusalem in early 1957 and had a low paying job in the foreign ministry when the KGB recruited him to spy on Israel. After all, he was a communist living in enemy territory and was employed by the host government, so he seemed the perfect spy. He gave them sensitive information and other secrets and was even awarded a medal for his heroism to the motherland.

            He was so good that the Russians never suspected that they were being duped. In reality, Grayevsky was a double agent (a spy for one country but has allegiances to another) and as soon as the KGB recruited him, he went to the Shin-Bet and they gave him falsified information to pass on to the Russians.

            One of his major successes while working for Shin-Bet was when he passed on a copy of a meeting between Russian generals and Egyptian President Gamal Nasser. Many of his meetings with his KGB handler (the middle agent who would get the information from the spy and pass it on to the higher authorities) took place on the lawn of the Russian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. There were many spies posing as priests and with Grayevsky’s information, Shin-Bet raided the church and arrested many KGB spies.

            The KGB handlers would sometimes give him money for his and Grayevsky would immediately turn it over to Shin-Bet. He said, “I was very proud and happy that KGB money was funding the Shin-Bet.” As for the medal that he was awarded, they told him that it was waiting for him in Moscow. Needless to say, he never picked it up.

            After 14 years working as a double agent, Grayevsky stopped working for Shin-Bet in 1971 to work full-time in radio broadcasting. Retiring in 2000, he wrote down his memoirs in a book but because he was unheard of (no one had reported that he was the one who had stolen Khrushchev’s speech) it went unpublished. He had assumed that many copies of the speech were sent to the CIA and Shin-Bet and only after he retired was he told of the impact his copy and it was the only one that they had received.  It was only after his death in 2007 at the age of 82 did some newspapers pick up the incredible story of how the Jewish journalist from Poland stole Khrushchev’s speech.