Security forces arrested 17 more suspected members of a Syrian-directed Arab-Jewish spy ring in simultaneous pre-dawn raids today on the Arab sections of Haifa and Nazareth and several Arab villages. Police said further arrests were expected. Twenty suspects were arrested last week and three were released. The latest suspects are all non-Jewish and include a Druze from the Golan Heights. One of the four Israeli Jews arrested last week in the spyring dragnet had contact with Egyptian intelligence agents as well as Syrians, it was reported here today. The newspaper Maariv said that 26-year-old Ehud Adiv (identified as Aviv in earlier dispatches) travelled from Israel to Athens where he contacted a Syrian intelligence officer who accompanied him to Cairo. Adiv and another member of the ring also reportedly visited Damascus, and a third member was said to have gone to Budapest to contact Syrian agents.
According to another report that emerged from the continuing investigation of the spying, its members were planning to kidnap Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and to attack other Israeli leaders considered to be “chauvinists.” Police Minister Shlomo Hillel told a group of visiting American-Jewish journalists in Jerusalem today that the case was especially serious because of the participation of Jews in the ring which included sabotage and terror among its activities as well as espionage.
KIBBUTZ MOVEMENT UNDER CLOUD
Adiv, a former paratrooper who was born and raised at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, was described as the “most dangerous member” of the ring. Israelis were stunned to learn last week that he and three other Jews were working against their own country under the direction of the ring-leader, Daoud Osman Turki, an Israeli Christian Arab.
The fact that Adiv was a sabra from a Mapam kibbutz cast a shadow over the entire kibbutz movement and especially the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair. Newspapers, however, stressed that the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim were always in the forefront of Israel’s struggle for survival. They recalled that another member of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, Uri Han, who was captured by the Syrians 17 years ago, took his own life to avoid revealing secrets under torture.
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