As we drove into Tel Aviv along the Ayalon highway, Mikhail Milstein and I passed the LaGuardia exit. “Fiorello LaGuardia?” he asked. “Why does he have a street named after him in Tel Aviv?” I wasn’t surprised by the question. Why should a lieutenant general from Moscow know about LaGuardia? “He was mayor of New York back in the 1930s and ’40s,” I replied, “half-Jewish and a Zionist.” “I knew him,” Milstein said matter-of-factly. “I was in New York in the ’30s, posing as a Latin American student at Columbia University. One of my missions was to get to know...