Farmer Spy Redux
"He drove a tractor, managed his kibbutz, and generally lived the happy purposeful life of a man conquering what he believed was his historic land."
I rewrote and improved part of Chapter One — the part about a guy who in the 1950s helped set up Israel’s Liaison Bureau, a secret outfit that ran perhaps the least known but most consequential Israeli covert operation, an operation that seeded Jewish nationalism among Jews in the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and whose ultimate aim was to get Jews out of the Soviet Union and into Israel. The op — obviously and in hindsight — was a total success. In this segment I begin to tell its story — a story almost no one knows.
Check it out…and the rest of The Soviet Jew as well.
—Yasha
The Farmer Spy
Why were these Mossad types even interested in Soviet Jews? It wasn't just about a national-altruistic drive to reunite all Jews, although that was a part of it. The main reason was strategic — it was about securing their newly created state.
Israel’s founders had long coveted the vast pool of Jews living in the U.S.S.R...