Spies Against Armageddon (14 page)

The judicial proceedings began nearly a year later, on April 11, 1961, with the fullest international press and television coverage that the world of that time could muster. The defendant—dubbed “the man in the glass booth”—listened to witnesses who heartrendingly described his crimes and those of the entire Nazi killing machine. Eichmann claimed he was only following orders as a patriotic German, but he was convicted of crimes against humanity.

He was hanged in Ramle Prison on May 31, 1962—the only defendant put to death by Israel’s judicial system.

Eichmann’s abduction and the massive public acclaim enjoyed by Israel’s intelligence community were surely Harel’s finest hour. Until his death in 2003, he had the pleasure of being hailed as “the man who captured Eichmann.” The Memuneh’s boldest operation was also a pure example of
humint
—the human intelligence skills at which Israel excelled, in this case without any technological gadgets beyond a rotating car license plate.

Harel would later be criticized for grabbing the glory for himself, notably in his best-selling book,
The House on Garibaldi Street
. The critics included some members of the kidnap squad, above all Zvi Aharoni—who later wrote his own book,
Operation Eichmann
, and claimed that Harel had to be pushed into ordering the mission.

Every person involved in the caper seemed to have his own unique memory of who had the good ideas, who had the bad ones, who actually tackled the Nazi, and who got him to confess.

Zvi Malkin, later a New York-based painter and writer, also put his version in a book,
Eichmann in My Hands
, which mentioned a tragicomedy of errors in the months and years before the Nazi was caught.

The Mossad’s leading kidnap artist, Rafi Eitan, after he became a garrulous member of parliament in Israel, enjoyed retelling how he had jumped on the war criminal.

Yehudit Nessyahu, the leading female on the team, was among the very few who adhered to their pledge of lifelong secrecy.

Only with the passage of decades did the mixed Mossad-Shin Bet squad tell how close it may have come to capturing an even more notorious Nazi—the death camp doctor Josef Mengele. Malkin wrote that he pressed Eichmann for information by demanding, “Tell us where your friend Mengele is. You must know where he lives.” But Eichmann insisted that he did not know. Malkin had to tell Harel, “I tried everything. I believe that he has no idea where Mengele is, or that he is not willing to say a thing.”

According to Harel, the medical war criminal moved to Paraguay and later to Brazil.

Some Mossad veterans, however, would complain later that Harel had not taken all the Mengele-related clues seriously. Yet, the attempts to capture him continued. When the Brazilian authorities reported in 1985, after years of rumors, that the Nazi doctor had drowned, the Mossad secretly sent a pathologist to examine the skeleton and confirm that the target atop the manhunt list could be crossed off once and for all.

The list contained the names of 10 notorious Nazis. Among others, the Israelis searched for Hitler’s senior aide, Martin Bormann, and for Gestapo chief Heinrich
Müller.

Also on the list was Léon Degrelle. A Belgian, Degrelle became an officer in the Waffen SS—the Nazi Party’s military unit fighting on the Russian front.

Degrelle, after the war, was a fairly prominent neo-Nazi given shelter by Spain’s Fascist government of Francisco Franco. A former Shin Bet man, Zwy (Zvi) Aldouby—hoping for both glory and money—hatched his own plot to capture Degrelle. Aldouby hired a few French mercenaries and approached Yigal Mossinson, a famous Israeli novelist and playwright—giving him the impression that a kidnap mission similar to the Eichmann operation had been authorized by the government.

Hoping eventually to sell the tale as a film script—and having received an advance payment from a major magazine—the oddly concocted team went into action in Spain. They followed Degrelle to his villa near Seville and started to plan his abduction.

After several reconnaissance trips, Aldouby, one French partner, and Mossinson were arrested while crossing from France into Spain on July 14, 1961, for the actual kidnap.

Aldouby and the Frenchman were locked up by the Spanish police, who tortured them and sentenced them to seven years in prison. Mossinson was far luckier—released after just a few hours. Years later, he would be told that because Ben-Gurion liked his writing, The Old Man had phoned Generalissimo Franco and urged him, “Don’t touch Mossinson. Please release him.”

The next big manhunt after Eichmann was actually a ridiculous boyhunt. Israeli intelligence scoured the globe for a 10-year-old nicknamed Yossele. In late 1959, Yosef Schumacher had been abducted from Israel by his own grandfather, an ultra-Orthodox Jew who feared that the boy’s parents were giving him a secular education.

Newspaper editorials were making fun of Ben-Gurion for failing to get the boy back to his mother, and Harel—out of loyalty to the prime minister—vowed to track down the child.

Senior operatives were ordered to drop their other projects, and the entire Shin Bet-Mossad operations team tracked the boy to an apartment in Brooklyn in July 1962.

Word was flashed to the FBI, and Yossele was returned triumphantly to his parents in Israel. It may seem silly, but the secret services were warmly thanked again, and Israel’s clandestine defenders basked in the praise.

Harel, however, was developing fresh obsessions, aimed at anti-Semites and anyone who might seek to destroy the Jewish state. The Memuneh specifically began to focus, in the early 1960s, on the ominous arrival of German rocket scientists in Egypt.

President Nasser was hiring the Germans to help him develop ground-to-ground missiles that could be used in a future war against Israel. Harel genuinely saw this as Germans again making a major effort to exterminate Jews.

The Memuneh ordered the start of what he termed Operation Damocles, which would effectively place a sword over the head of every German scientist working for the Egyptians.

Harel’s operatives sent booby-trapped letters to the German scientists involved in Nasser’s missile project and to their families. Envelopes rigged with explosives were mailed by Israeli agents who were undercover in Egypt on completely separate missions. Harel was willing to put them at risk.

These attacks were coordinated by Yitzhak Yezernitzki, who—before independence in 1948—had been head of the violent and ultra-nationalistic Lehi, or Stern Gang. He later changed his name to Yitzhak Shamir, and in the mid-1980s he would become Israel’s prime minister. Short, stocky, and mustached, Shamir operated from Paris, under diplomatic cover, running the Mossad’s European operations department.

Back in 1955, Harel had persuaded Ben-Gurion to recruit the most talented members of the former Lehi underground—despite a history of enmity between the right-wingers and the prime minister.

It was a clever move. The former Stern Gangsters needed no basic training. They knew how to set bombs and how to kill. It was no coincidence, however, that they were employed by the Mossad—and not Shin Bet. Despite his newfound openness, Harel still did not trust them fully; he preferred to see them stationed abroad, shadowing or killing the state’s enemies far away without wielding weapons and power within Israel.

One exception was Yehoshua Cohen, who in 1948 had been involved in the Stern Gang’s murder of a Swedish mediator for the United Nations, Folke Bernadotte. Cohen was assigned to be Ben-Gurion’s bodyguard, apparently in the belief that an assassin would know how to outwit assassins—and VIP protection was a Shin Bet function.

German scientists toiling for Egypt’s Nasser were often targeted in Europe, where it was generally easier to get to them. This campaign in the early 1960s would set a strong precedent, and not only for spilling blood to affect the behavior of enemies and third parties. These attacks also cemented the Mossad’s image as a daring, ruthless, and vindictive spy agency with no parallel.

Certainly more than other Western intelligence operatives, Israel’s secret agents were willing to pursue and assassinate targets almost anywhere—if the mission was deemed to be achievable and Israel’s political leaders decided that the target deserved the death penalty.

The world, in the decades that followed, would read mostly unconfirmable reports of similar operations: against Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s, Iraqi nuclear technicians in the 1980s, and Iranian nuclear scientists at the volatile dawn of the 21st century.

A high-priority example in 1963 was Hans Kleinwachter, a German electronics expert who had worked on Hitler’s V2 rockets and now was employed by Egypt. Two Mossad assassins waited for Kleinwachter’s car near his house in a small German village on a freezing February night. They opened fire with at least one silencer-equipped pistol, but the bullet failed to penetrate the scientist’s windshield. A more powerful submachine gun hidden under a blanket jammed.

The two luckless Israelis quickly drove away, together with Isser Harel himself. The Memuneh took such a personal interest in the campaign against these Germans that he was on the scene of several attacks.

The sum total of the Israeli violence was a few injuries and much intimidation. The injured, however, included some of Harel’s operatives: One Mossad man lost his vision when a bomb he was preparing exploded.

Harel felt his campaign could succeed, but his relations with Ben-Gurion became extremely strained because the prime minister kept urging him not to annoy the West German government. In effect, Ben-Gurion was saying, “Hands off the Germans.”

Harel, keeping up his efforts to compel the scientists to leave Egypt, managed to recruit one. Otto Joklik, who was actually Austrian, was a rocket scientist with big ideas and a huge appetite for money. He persuaded Egypt to pay him for advice on building a high-energy cobalt bomb, although he barely did any work on it during his time in Cairo. And then he sold his services to the Mossad.

Joklik was Harel’s man on the inside, and after leaving Egypt he flew to Israel to deliver a complete briefing on the clandestine missile project. Joklik warned that the Egyptians were making progress toward the highly dangerous goal of an “ABC” strike force. The initials stood for atomic-biological-chemical, and such weapons of mass destruction could be in warheads atop German-designed missiles. The Austrian’s tale dovetailed neatly with Harel’s fears.

Largely because of his habit of compartmentalization, laudable among intelligence professionals, Harel told no one else in the defense and security establishment about Joklik’s presence in Israel. Still, the deputy defense minister, Shimon Peres, found out from his sources that Harel was secretly holding a man dubbed “the Austrian scientist.” Peres insisted on meeting Joklik so that his ministry’s top men could question him.

Harel refused. Peres then complained to Ben-Gurion and threatened to resign. The Old Man, as prime minister, ordered Harel to make Joklik available to the defense ministry.

In his other role, as defense minister, Ben-Gurion assigned the interrogation task to Binyamin Blumberg, chief of Lakam. Because his staff included scientists, Blumberg would be in a position to judge Harel’s contention that Egypt was close to an ABC-weapons capability that imperiled the existence of Israel. The sense that he had to be judged only made Harel resent Blumberg and Peres more than ever.

Blumberg’s analysts rejected Joklik’s information on the alleged dangers of the Egyptian missile project. They concluded that the Austrian’s scientific credentials were doubtful.

Harel, however, still felt certain that Nasser was plotting the destruction of Israel, and the Memuneh still believed in Joklik. In fact, Harel sent the Austrian—now employed as a Mossad agent—on a mission to Switzerland. He was teamed with an Israeli calling himself Yosef Ben-Gal, whose real name was Baruch Presher, and their goal was intimidation. They approached the daughter of Paul Goercke, one of the German scientists still working in Egypt on Nasser’s missile project, and warned of dire consequences if her father did not leave Cairo at once.

Heidi Goercke’s reaction took the overconfident Israelis by surprise. She informed the Swiss police of the threats she had just received, and they arrested the two Mossad agents outside a hotel in Basel on March 15, 1963.

Just a few weeks earlier, two Israeli agents had been arrested in Germany, near the home of another of the rocket scientists. The Mossad had been lucky that its warm relations with the BND prompted West German intelligence to arrange the quiet release of the Israelis.

Joklik and Ben-Gal/Presher were not so fortunate in Switzerland. Joklik did, at least, get to testify in open court that he knew of Egypt’s plans to develop weapons of mass destruction. In addition, one of the prosecutors spoke with empathy about Ben-Gal’s desire to protect his own country from Nasser’s dastardly intentions. Still, the defendants were convicted and sent to prison. They served only two months, but the entire incident cast Israel in an embarrassing light.

Harel, clearly a man who never gave up, also launched a campaign in the press. Mossad operatives gave briefings to some foreign reporters. Harel also, for the first and probably only time, used Israeli journalists as agents by sending them to Europe to find out whatever they could about the German scientists.

The articles that appeared caused panic among the Israeli public about the ballistic missile danger from Egypt. Ben-Gurion was furious. He rebuked Harel for leaking to newspapers, and for spoiling good relations with West Germany.

The prime minister demanded that Harel’s unauthorized crusade come to an end. Harel refused, and he sought backing from other members of the ruling Mapai party, including Foreign Minister Golda Meir and Finance Minister Levi Eshkol. At the time, the political disputes over the Lavon Affair—cover-ups concerning the sloppy sabotage missions in Egypt—were at their peak of ferocity.

For the first time since 1948, Harel was standing with Ben-Gurion’s opponents. He was still hoping to bypass his mentor’s veto, so he could renew his holy war against the Nazi scientists. In Ben-Gurion’s eyes, however, that was tantamount to treason.