1. Avraham Marek Klingberg, known as Marcus Klingberg, was a Polish-born Israeli epidemiologist and the highest ranking Soviet spy ever uncovered in Israel.
38 Facts About Marcus Klingberg
1. 2.
Originally from a family of rabbis, Marcus Klingberg chose a secular education in high school.
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Marcus Klingberg fled Poland for the Soviet Union, completing his medical degree in Minsk and joining the Red Army in 1941.
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Marcus Klingberg served in the Israel Defence Force from 1948 to 1953.
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Marcus Klingberg spent the remaining years of his life re-engaged in academic work and completing his memoirs.
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Marcus Klingberg was born in Warsaw, Poland, on 7 October 1918, to a Hasidic Jewish family of rabbinical lineage.
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Marcus Klingberg's parents sent him to a cheder, a religious primary school.
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In 1935, Marcus Klingberg began studying medicine at the University of Warsaw.
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In 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, Marcus Klingberg's father urged him to flee to the Soviet Union, completing his medical studies in Minsk in 1941.
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On 22 June 1941, the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Marcus Klingberg volunteered for the Red Army.
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Marcus Klingberg served as a medical officer on the front lines until October 1941, when he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel.
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In late December 1943, the first parts of Byelorussia were retaken by the Red Army and Marcus Klingberg became Chief Epidemiologist of the Byelorussian Republic.
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Marcus Klingberg and Jasinska married in 1946 and moved to Sweden, where their daughter, Sylvia, was born in 1947.
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In November 1948, Marcus Klingberg immigrated with his wife and daughter to Israel, during the closing stages of the War of Independence.
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Some sections of Shin Bet believed the immigration to have been prompted by Soviet intelligence, but Marcus Klingberg strongly denied this, saying he was motivated by the loss of his family in Poland during the Holocaust.
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Marcus Klingberg served as Head of the Department of Preventive Medicine, Office of the Surgeon General, and afterward founded and directed the Central Research Laboratories for Military Medicine.
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Marcus Klingberg's work included some of the first research into West Nile fever.
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In 1969, Marcus Klingberg joined the Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, where he was Professor of Epidemiology and Head of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine from 1978 to 1983.
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Marcus Klingberg was president of the European Teratology Society and a co-founder and chairman of the International Clearinghouse for Birth Defects Monitoring Systems.
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Marcus Klingberg conducted sabbaticals at the Henry Phipps Institute, University of Pennsylvania ; at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health ; at the Department of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine ; and at the Department of Social and Community Medicine, University of Oxford.
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Marcus Klingberg became a Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford in 1978.
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Marcus Klingberg passed information on Israel's chemical and biological weapons research, frequently using the Russian Orthodox Church in Abu Kabir as his contact point with the KGB.
23.
Marcus Klingberg retired from the Israel Institute for Biological Research in 1976, and contact with Soviet intelligence lapsed.
24.
In January 1983, Shin Bet officers informed Marcus Klingberg they wanted to send him to Southeast Asia, where a chemical plant had allegedly exploded.
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Marcus Klingberg told his interrogators that he had not completed his medical studies and lacked a diploma, and that the KGB had threatened to expose this.
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Marcus Klingberg was tried in secret and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
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Marcus Klingberg's daughter emigrated to France in the 1970s and, upon learning of her father's imprisonment, privately campaigned to have his prison conditions improved.
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Marcus Klingberg enlisted the support of French lawyer Antoine Comte in Paris, who engaged Wolfgang Vogel in East Berlin in an attempt to have Klingberg released via support from East Germany and the Soviet Union.
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Guards from MALMAB were assigned to him, and Marcus Klingberg had to pay their salaries.
30.
Marcus Klingberg signed a commitment not to speak about his work.
31.
Marcus Klingberg said he had always been a communist and had recruited his wife and two friends.
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In January 2003, Marcus Klingberg was released from house arrest and immediately left Israel for Paris to be with his daughter Sylvia and grandson Ian Brossat.
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Marcus Klingberg moved to a one-room apartment in Paris but did not take French citizenship.
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Marcus Klingberg helped establish the Ludwik Fleck Center of the Collegium Helveticum, a university center in Zurich, and delivered the opening lecture.
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Marcus Klingberg continued to have medical problems and was frequently hospitalized.
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Marcus Klingberg's spying and imprisonment affected the life of his grandson, Ian Brossat, a politician elected to the French Senate in September 2023.
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Marcus Klingberg died in Paris on 30 November 2015, aged 97, with his death covered in many of the world's newspapers of record.
38.
Marcus Klingberg was cremated and his ashes interred in Pere Lachaise Cemetery next to those of his wife, who had died of heart failure in 1990.