Zeev Avni

BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR


Title: False Flag: Description:
Nigel West's introduction makes clear just how important Avni's network of German ex-Nazis spying on their Egyptian employers was. Avni tricked old enemies into spying for Mossad and spied on Mossad for the Russians. He started working for the Russians as a young man exiled from Germany to Switzerland--Russia was the best hope in the defeat of Hitler, and that made it very simple. By the time he was a commercial attache for Israel in Yugoslavia and feeding back to Mossad analyses of Yugoslav attitudes, to Kruschev's Russia useful information which might make a compromise with Tito possible, his position had become more complicated, his sense of his own bad faith ever more pervasive. Arrest was almost a release--and then Kruschev's revelation of Stalin's crimes broke his faith and his heart, made him spill every story he had to his other masters ...This is a powerful apologia for Stalinist idealism by a man who found himself deceived--it is a book that talks less about spying and more about what you do when idealism fails you; a memoir of a life rebuilt in prison. He retrained himself as a psychotherapist and his first and most successful therapy was on himself. --Roz Kaveney