by Michael Ledeen
He was a Polish Jew, born Victor Spielman, which he changed to Victor Grayevsky after he found that “Spielman” was just too Jewish for an ambitious young Pole. He went to school in Kazakhstan, then returned to Poland at the end of the war, where he joined the Communist Party and made a bit of a name for himself as a journalist. In the mid-fifties he followed his parents and sister to Israel, where he ran a lot of the broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
He was a Polish Jew, born Victor Spielman, which he changed to Victor Grayevsky after he found that “Spielman” was just too Jewish for an ambitious young Pole. He went to school in Kazakhstan, then returned to Poland at the end of the war, where he joined the Communist Party and made a bit of a name for himself as a journalist. In the mid-fifties he followed his parents and sister to Israel, where he ran a lot of the broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.And so? And so, he was arguably one of the most important men of the twentieth century, for he was the person who obtained the advance text of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the one delivered in February, 1956, the one that laid out the crimes of Stalin for the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party. That text was a turning point in the Cold War. Grayevsky gave it to the Israeli Embassy, where it was copied and sent to Israel. The Shin Bet intelligence service delivered it by courier to James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence (and the CIA’s liaison with the Israelis), who gave it to CIA chief Allen Dulles, who gave it to President Eisenhower.
Read the rest of the story at Michael Ledeen's blog.
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