The Great Impersonation

For Israelis, the arrest of the eminent Dr. Israel Beer as a Communist spy just when they were trying to focus everyone's attention on the Eichmann trial was bad enough. But last week they learned that Dr. Beer was not the man they thought he was, and, furthermore, never had been.

Nearly every statement Beer had made about himself during the 23 years he had spent in Palestine and Israel was found to be untrue. He claimed to have been born in Vienna and to be one of the few Jews ever to graduate from Austria's respected Wiener Neustadt military academy. Security agents could not find a single Viennese Jew in Israel who had ever known Beer back in Austria. An Austrian Defense Ministry official said that Beer's name does not appear on the roster of former students at Wiener Neustadt. Beer's vaunted military heroism also faded: veterans of the Socialist Schutzbund (militia), who had defended their Vienna homes for a bloody four days in 1934 against Dollfuss' semi-fascist regime, denied that Beer had fought beside them, nor could any record be found to support his claim that he commanded a Loyalist battalion during the Spanish Civil War. Beer's cultural past vanished as quickly. He had not worked as assistant stage manager at Vienna's elegant Burg Theater--even his alleged doctorate in philosophy from Vienna University is now in doubt. The Jerusalem Post ran a baffled headline: WHO is BEER?

In the Archives. All that seems certain is his arrival in Palestine in 1938. Posing as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, he was eagerly welcomed into the ranks of Haganah, the Jewish underground army. Beer served in the 1948 war against the Arab states, but was kicked out of the Israeli army in 1950 by Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin, who recalls today that Beer "could do a brilliant job of military planning, but you always had to suspect his motives." Despite a sneering, officious manner, Beer rose swiftly in government circles. In 1954, he dropped out of the Marxist Mapam Party and joined Premier David Ben-Gurion's ruling Mapai Party. Soon he was back in the Defense Ministry to write a history of the 1948 war.

Beer not only browsed through the state archives but had access to Ben-Gurion's personal diaries. The Premier took an interest in the tall, bucktoothed expert and arranged his appointment as head of the military history faculty at Tel Aviv University. Beer often traveled abroad as an officially approved Israeli military authority; at home, he played, host to visiting VIPs and briefed them on Israel's defense setup.

60 Lbs. of Paper. The first security doubts about Beer date back to 1959, when he separated from his wife Rebecca, a biologist, and fell madly in love with a girl with expensive tastes named Ora Zahavi. To keep Ora happy, Beer went heavily into debt and borrowed from everyone in sight. Two of his front teeth were knocked out in a fist fight with Ora's divorced husband, a taxi driver. Beer's increasingly eccentric behavior worried the secret police, and their shadowing of him paid off when Beer met privately with a known Communist agent. A search of his home turned up 60 Ibs. of documents and correspondence. On hearing of Beer's arrest, Premier Ben-Gurion groaned: "I am surrounded by treachery!"

Beer is known to have had advance information about the Sinai campaign and, presumably, the coordinated Franco-British attack on Suez, which he allegedly passed on to the Soviet Union. The Russians, clearly, did not inform the Egyptians. They seem to have used their foreknowledge to behave with brutal swiftness in crushing the Hungarian rebellion, confident that the Suez attack would be certain to divert world public opinion.

By week's end Israel's mystery man became even more mysterious: it was discovered that he had never been circumcised. Stunned Israelis could only wonder if it were possible that the man known as Dr. Israel Beer was not even a Jew.

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