The CIA's mole in the Likud

This is the bizarre story of Andrei Kilchinski.
    He says he was a spy. Some say he's a nut. He's had a strange and eventful life, but it's impossible to sort out fact from fantasy because his tale is difficult to corroborate: the CIA and GSS don't exactly provide journalists access to information.
    In a series of interviews two years ago with my colleague Hillel Kuttler in Washington DC, Kilchinski blew the whistle on his alleged espionage career.
    He claimed he was recruited by the CIA to spy on the Likud, and provided a wealth of inside information on the party from 1985 to 1992. He fled the country, returning to his native Poland, out of fear the GSS was about to arrest him.
    Three years later, he went to the US -- to sue the CIA, claiming it had cheated him.
    "I remember him, from the newspapers, from what people said, as someone strange," MK Binyamin Begin told Kuttler. "I don't know much about him. I'd take what he said with caution."
    Kilchinski said he was paid handsomely to report on key Likud people. "I was responsible for 500 names: ministers, MKs, Central Committee members. Shamir, Sharon, Levy, Arens, Katsav, Milo, Moda’i and their circles.
    "The US was very interested in where the money for settlements was coming from. I found out. I found out about the Iraqi missiles." Yehoshua Saguy, formerly head of military intelligence, supposedly told him Iraqi missiles were not capable of carrying chemical or poison warheads, and that there was no need for panic. Kilchinski said he passed that on to the US -- along with a revelation that the gas masks given to Arabs during the Gulf war were faulty.
    Kilchinski, code-named Joseph Barak by the CIA, was partnered by a Hebrew speaking agent code-named Benny Rubin, who was replaced by another Benny Rubin, who spoke Polish.
    "I gave them hundreds of documents," he said in one interview. "The most important thing I gave them was orientation for everything that was going to happen in Israel -- in 'live time' - including what ministers thought.
    "I also helped recruit people in Israel. They asked for someone in mid-level army or politics, so I gave names to them. Whether they were recruited or not, I don't know." He added that "there are people in Israel who are spying for the US -- much higher than me. I can't say who."
    Details of his modus operandi sound like they came out of the most formulaic spy novel. "If there was a blue chalk-mark by the Metzudat Zeev building [Likud HQ in Tel Aviv], it meant I would have to meet at Wolfson Park in Givatayim at a certain time with Rubin or someone else. If he showed up with a red key-ring, I knew I could speak freely.
    "The funniest thing is, in all those years, I was head of security for the Likud at Metzudat Zeev."
    Why did he do it?
    Because, he said, the money was very good; he was promised American citizenship; and he was disillusioned with the Likud.
    "I was uncomfortable with what was happening in Israel ... with the Likud government. And there was the matter of Sabra and Shatilla -- I was in Sharon's office when it was said 'Give weapons to them both.'
    "I wasn't happy with all of the Likud's policies [regarding occupied people], Arabs and Oriental Jews. I knew Likudniks and saw how dirty it was. People without backbone, corruption, people addicted to their pockets."
    He said he also regarded spying as a way to be loyal to his adopted country -- the US.
    "And I want to do something to help the Jews. I was born a Jew -- through my mother -- and I want to be buried a Jew."
    Kilchinski maintained that he was recruited by an American at a reception at the German ambassador's home. "We spoke about the situation in Israel and that I wasn't happy with the politics of the Likud. The next day he brought me Remy Martin cognac; I knew this is not something American diplomats do.
    "The first few times we met publicly. Four times, once at Apropos restaurant in Tel Aviv. After a few meetings we began to meet secretly outside of Tel Aviv -- on Mount Carmel, in Tiberias, and with his wife, who also worked at the American embassy. We had about 20 meetings in Israel.”
His formal recruitment took place in Frankfurt, a few days after his daughter married actor Assi Dayan in the US. "It was June 26, 1985 -- I got a visa for five years to the US. This was the day I was recruited. I didn't get outright citizenship because it would have been suspicious."
    He was given an emergency phone number -- 301-951-0646 -- which he could only call from outside Israel.
    He said that before Jonathan Pollard's arrest, he used to meet his handlers in Israel, but then the CIA began to worry Kilchinski, too, would fall.
    "I met all over Europe with the CIA, and also in the US. I would then go to Poland after a meeting, as if I had business there.
    "I had connections with the Polish secret service. Israeli papers reported it, but made light of it."
     After some time, things began to go sour for Kilchinski.
    "The CIA was worried about the Likud and the Jewish lobby in the US. It was explicitly said to me in about 1988, by Benny Rubin, that the CIA is trying to neutralize the American-Jewish lobby in the US, in Congress, in the Senate. I was shocked -- until then I thought the CIA wasn't set up to deal with the internal American situation, but to support it. I thought this was criminal."
    In 1992, he said the CIA became aware of his medical problems -- diabetes, high blood pressure and two heart attacks -- and eased him out of service. That same year, he began to feel the GSS was closing in on him. Just before the '92 elections, he fled for Poland.
    It was not what you'd call a retreat into anonymity: a book was written about him, and he was arrested on illegal-weapons charges. He said he was held for 27 days without being charged, and was tortured.
    He then went to the US to pursue his lawsuit. His demands were for a passport, $300,000, plus $3,000 per month as a pension, and his salary since 1992, $36,000 annually plus expenses; and he wanted the CIA to recognize that he's ill.
    "They simply haven't fulfilled their promises to me. My lawyer made contact with them [the CIA] and they admit there was a contract."
    "He was cut off rather abruptly [by the CIA]," his lawyer, Richard Gardiner, told Kuttler at the time. "There were agreements made about his future and they weren't kept."
    "We talked about it [suing the CIA,]" Gardiner told me, at the end of April this year, but nothing came of it and Gardiner hasn't heard from Kilchinski in the past year.
    Kilchinski claimed to have been a member of the Likud since the early '70s -- and very active: he was, he said, on the party's interior, justice and foreign & defense committees, and on the Herut party caucus. 
    However, a recent check of the computers at Likud HQ shows that Andrei Kilchinski was never even a nominal party member. There is a file on him, but aside from his name, it’s blank.
    Does the spy lie, or was the computer info finagled?
    Kilchinski's bio is about as colorful as you can imagine. He was born 60 years ago to a mixed marriage. His Christian father, a Partisan, saved several Jews during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, among them Kilchinski's mother and her two children.
    According to a report in The Jerusalem Post in 1985, Kilchinski -- an artist who at the time was tabbed for the post of cultural attache in Warsaw -- was born a Christian and converted to Judaism in 1958, when he made aliya.
    He became widely known as an anti-German agitator, once occupying part of the West German Embassy in Warsaw, ending his sit-in by throwing a phosphorous