The Odessa File

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘So what do the rest of us do? Keep running scared?’

  Hoffmann jerked his cigar out of his mouth.

  ‘I don’t have to take that from you, Miller,’ he said, his eyes snapping. ‘I hated the bastards then and I hate them now. But I know my readers. And they don’t want to know about Eduard Roschmann.’

  ‘All right. I’m sorry. But I’m still going to cover it.’

  ‘You know, Miller, if I didn’t know you, I’d think there was something personal behind it. Never let journalism get personal. It’s bad for reporting and it’s bad for the reporter. Anyway, how are you going to finance yourself?’

  ‘I’ve got some savings.’ Miller rose to go.

  ‘Best of luck,’ said Hoffmann, rising and coming round the desk. ‘I tell you what I’ll do. The day Roschmann is arrested and imprisoned by the West German police, I’ll commission you to cover the story. That’s straight news, so it’s public property. If I decide not to print, I’ll buy it out of my pocket. That’s as far as I’ll go. But while you’re digging for him you’re not carrying the letterhead of my magazine around as your authority.’

  Miller nodded.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.

  Chapter Five

  THAT SAME WEDNESDAY morning was also the time of the week when the heads of the five branches of the Israeli intelligence apparat met for their informal weekly discussion.

  In most countries the rivalry between the various separate intelligence services is legendary. In Russia the KGB hates the guts of the GRU; in America the FBI will not cooperate with the CIA. The British Security Service regards Scotland Yard’s Special Branch as a crowd of flat-footed coppers, and there are so many crooks in the French SDECE that experts wonder whether the French intelligence service is part of the government or the underworld.

  But Israel is fortunate. Once a week the chiefs of the five branches meet for a friendly chat without inter-departmental friction. It is one of the dividends of being a nation surrounded by enemies. At these meetings coffee and soft drinks are passed round, those present use first-name terms to each other, the atmosphere is relaxed and more work gets done than could be effected by a torrent of written memoranda.

  It was to this meeting that the controller of the Mossad, head of the joint five services of Israeli intelligence, General Meir Amit, was travelling on the morning of 4th December. Beyond the windows of his long, black chauffeur-driven limousine a fine dawn was beaming down on the white-washed sprawl of Tel Aviv. But the general’s mood failed to match it. He was a deeply worried man.

  The cause of his worry was a piece of information that had reached him in the small hours of the morning. A small fragment of knowledge to be added to the immense file in the archives, but vital, for the file into which that despatch from one of his agents in Cairo would be added was the file on the rockets of Helwan.

  The forty-two-year-old general’s poker face betrayed nothing of his feelings as the car swung round the Zina Circus and headed towards the northern suburbs of the capital. He leaned back in the upholstery of his seat and considered the long history of those rockets being built north of Cairo, which had already cost several men their lives and had cost his predecessor, General Isser Harel, his job …

  During the course of 1961, long before Nasser’s two rockets went on public display in the streets of Cairo, the Israeli Mossad had learned of their existence. From the moment the first despatch came through from Egypt, they had kept Factory 333 under constant surveillance.

  They were perfectly well aware of the large-scale recruitment by the Egyptians, through the good offices of the Odessa, of German scientists to work on the rockets of Helwan. It was a serious matter then; it became infinitely more serious in the spring of 1962.

  In May that year Heinz Krug, the German recruiter of the scientists, made approaches to the Austrian physicist, Dr Otto Yoklek, in Vienna. Instead of allowing himself to be recruited, the Austrian professor made contact with the Israelis. What he had to say electrified Tel Aviv. He told the agent of the Mossad who was sent to interview him that the Egyptians intended to arm their rockets with warheads containing irradiated nuclear waste and cultures of bubonic plague.

  So important was the news that the Controller of the Mossad, General Isser Harel, the man who had personally escorted the kidnapped Adolf Eichmann back from Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv, flew to Vienna to talk to Yoklek himself. He was convinced the professor was right, a conviction corroborated by the news that the Cairo government had just purchased through a firm in Zürich a quantity of radio-active cobalt equivalent to twenty-five times their possible requirement for medical purposes.

  On his return from Vienna, Isser Harel went to see Premier David Ben-Gurion and urged that he be allowed to begin a campaign of reprisals against the German scientists who were either working in Egypt or about to go there. The old premier was in a quandary. On the one hand he realised the hideous danger the new rockets and their genocidal warheads presented to his people; on the other he recognised the value of the German tanks and guns due to arrive at any moment. Israeli reprisals on the streets of Germany might just be enough to persuade Chancellor Adenauer to listen to his Foreign Ministry faction and shut off the arms deal.

  Inside the Tel Aviv cabinet there was a split developing similar to the split inside the Bonn cabinet over the arms sales. Isser Harel and the Foreign Minister, Madame Golda Meir, were in favour of a tough policy against the German scientists; Shimon Peres and the army were terrified by the thought they might lose their precious German tanks. Ben-Gurion was torn between the two.

  He hit on a compromise: he authorised Harel to undertake a muted, discreet campaign to discourage German scientists from going to Cairo to help Nasser build his rockets. But Harel, with his burning gut-hatred of Germany and all things German, went beyond his brief.

  On September 11th, 1962, Heinz Krug disappeared. He had dined the previous evening with Dr Kleinwachter, the rocket-propulsion expert he was trying to recruit, and an unidentified Egyptian. On the morning of the 11th Krug’s car was found abandoned close to his home in a suburb of Munich. His wife immediately claimed he had been kidnapped by Israeli agents, but the Munich police found not a trace, either of Krug or of evidence as to his kidnappers. In fact, he had been abducted by a group of men led by a shadowy figure called Leon, and his body dumped in the Starnberg lake, assisted to the weed-bed by a corset of heavy-link chain.

  The campaign then turned against the Germans in Egypt already. On November 27th a registered package, posted in Hamburg and addressed to Professor Wolfgang Pilz, the rocket scientist who had worked for the French, arrived in Cairo. It was opened by his secretary, Miss Hannelore Wenda. In the ensuing explosion the girl was maimed and blinded for life.

  On November 28th another package, also posted in Hamburg, arrived at Factory 333. By this time the Egyptians had set up a security screen for arriving parcels. It was an Egyptian official in the mail-room who cut the cord. Five dead and ten wounded. On the 29th a third package was defused without an explosion.

  By February 20th, 1963, Harel’s agents had turned their attention once again to Germany. Dr Kleinwachter, still undecided whether to go to Cairo or not, was driving back home from his laboratory at Loerrach, near the Swiss frontier, when a black Mercedes barred his route. He threw himself to the floor as a man emptied his automatic through the windscreen. Police subsequently discovered the black Mercedes abandoned. It had been stolen earlier in the day. In the glove compartment was an identity card, in the name of Colonel Ali Samir. Inquiries revealed this was the name of the chief of the Egyptian Secret Service. Isser Harel’s agents had got their message across – with a touch of black humour for good measure.

  By now the reprisal campaign was making headlines in Germany. It became a scandal with the Ben Gal affair. On March 2nd the young Heidi Goerke, daughter of Professor Paul Goerke, pioneer of Nasser’s rockets, received a telephone call at her home in Freiburg, Germany. A voice suggested she meet the c
aller at the Three Kings Hotel in Basel, Switzerland, just over the border.

  Heidi informed the German police, who tipped off the Swiss. They planted a bugging device in the room that had been booked for the meeting. During the meeting two men in dark glasses warned Heidi Goerke and her young brother to persuade their father to get out of Egypt if he valued his life. Tailed to Zürich and arrested the same night, the two men went on trial at Basel on June 10th, 1963. It was an international scandal. The chief of the two agents was Yossef Ben Gal, Israeli citizen.

  The trial went well. Professor Yoklek testified as to the warheads of plague and radio-active waste, and the judges were scandalised. Making the best of a bad job, the Israeli government used the trial to expose the Egyptian intent to commit genocide. Shocked, the judges acquitted the two accused.

  But back in Israel there was a reckoning. Although the German Chancellor Adenauer had personally promised Ben-Gurion he would try to stop German scientists taking part in the Helwan rocket-building, Ben-Gurion was humiliated by the scandal. In a rage he rebuked General Isser Harel for the lengths to which he had gone in his campaign of intimidation. Harel riposted with vigour, and handed in his resignation. To his surprise Ben-Gurion accepted it, proving the point that no one in Israel is indispensable, not even the Controller of Intelligence.

  That night, June 20th, 1963, Isser Harel had a long talk with his close friend, General Meir Amit, then the head of military intelligence. General Amit could remember the conversation clearly, the taut angry face of the Russian-born fighter, nicknamed Isser the Terrible.

  ‘I have to inform you, my dear Meir, that as from now Israel is no longer in the retribution business. The politicians have taken over. I have tendered my resignation and it has been accepted. I have asked that you be named my successor, and I believe they will agree.’

  The ministerial committee that presides in Israel over the activities of the intelligence networks agreed. At the end of June, General Meir Amit became Controller of Intelligence.

  The knell had also sounded, however, for Ben-Gurion. The hawks of his cabinet, headed by Levi Eshkol and his own Foreign Minister, Golda Meir, forced his resignation, and on June 26th, 1963, Levi Eshkol was named Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion, shaking his snowy head in anger, went down to his kibbutz in the Negev in disgust. But he stayed on as a member of the Knesset.

  Although the new government had ousted David Ben-Gurion, it did not reinstate Isser Harel. Perhaps it felt that Meir Amit was a general more likely to obey orders than the choleric Harel, who had become a legend in his own lifetime among the Israeli people, and relished it.

  Nor were Ben-Gurion’s last orders rescinded. General Amit’s instructions remained the same, to avoid any more scandals in Germany over the rocket scientists. With no alternative, he turned the terror campaign against the scientists already inside Egypt.

  These Germans lived in the suburb of Meadi, seven miles south of Cairo on the northern bank of the Nile. A pleasant suburb, except that it was ringed by Egyptian security troops, and its German inhabitants were almost prisoners in a gilded cage. To get at them Meir Amit used his top agent inside Egypt, the riding-school owner Wolfgang Lutz, who found himself from September 1963 onwards forced to take suicidal risks, which sixteen months later would lead to his undoing.

  For the German scientists, already shaken badly by the series of bomb parcels sent from Germany, autumn 1963 became a nightmare. In the heart of Meadi, ringed by Egyptian security guards, they began to get letters threatening their lives, posted from inside Cairo.

  Dr Josef Eisig received one which described his wife, his two children and the type of work he was engaged on with remarkable precision, then told him to get out of Egypt and go back to Germany. All the other scientists got the same kind of letter. On September 27th a letter blew up in the face of Dr Kirmayer. For some of the scientists this was the last straw. At the end of September Dr Pilz left Cairo for Germany, taking the unfortunate Fräulein Wenda with him.

  Others followed, and the furious Egyptians were unable to stop them, for they could not protect them from the threatening letters.

  The man in the back of the limousine that bright winter morning in 1964 knew that his own agent, the supposedly pro-Nazi German, Lutz, was the writer of the letters and the sender of the explosives.

  But he also knew the rocket programme was not being halted. The information he had just received proved it. He flicked his eye over the decoded message once again. It confirmed simply that a virulent strain of bubonic bacillus had been isolated in the contagious diseases laboratory of Cairo Medical Institute, and that the budget of the department involved had been increased tenfold. The information left no doubt that despite the adverse publicity Egypt had received over the Ben Gal trial in Basel the previous summer, they were going ahead with the genocide programme.

  Had Hoffmann been watching he would have been forced to give Miller full marks for cheek. Leaving the penthouse office he took the lift down to the fifth floor and dropped in to see Max Dorn, the magazine’s legal affairs correspondent.

  ‘I’ve just been up to see Herr Hoffmann,’ he said dropping into a chair in front of Dorn’s desk. ‘Now I need some background. Mind if I pick your brains?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Dorn, assuming Miller had been commissioned to do a story for Komet.

  ‘Who investigates war crimes in Germany?’

  The question took Dorn aback.

  ‘War crimes?’

  ‘Yes. War crimes. Which authorities are responsible for investigating what happened in all the various countries we overran during the war and finding and prosecuting the individuals guilty of mass-murder?’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Well, basically it’s the various Attorney Generals’ offices of the provinces of West Germany.’

  ‘You mean, they all do it?’

  Dorn leaned back in his chair, at home in his own field of expertise.

  ‘There are sixteen provinces in West Germany. Each has a state capital and a State Attorney General. Inside each SAG’s office there is a department responsible for investigation into what are called “crimes of violence committed during the Nazi era”. Each state capital is allocated an area of the former Reich or of the occupied territories as its special responsibility.’

  ‘Such as?’ asked Miller.

  ‘Well, for example, all crimes committed by the Nazis and the SS in Italy, Greece and Polish Galicia are investigated by Stuttgart. The biggest extermination camp of all, Auschwitz, comes under Frankfurt. You may have heard there’s a big trial coming up in Frankfurt next May of twenty-two former guards from Auschwitz. Then the extermination camps of Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor and Maidanek are investigated by Dusseldorf/Cologne. Munich is responsible for Belzec, Dachau, Buchenwald and Flossenburg. Most crimes in the Soviet Ukraine and the Lodz area of former Poland come under Hanover. And so on.’

  Miller noted the information, nodding.

  ‘Who is supposed to investigate what happened in the three Baltic states?’ he asked.

  ‘Hamburg,’ said Dorn promptly, ‘along with crimes in the areas of Danzig and the Warsaw sector of Poland.’

  ‘Hamburg?’ said Miller. ‘You mean it’s right here in Hamburg?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s Riga I’m interested in.’

  Dorn made a moue.

  ‘Oh, I see. The German Jews. Well, that’s the pigeon of the SAG’s office right here.’

  ‘If there had ever been a trial, or even an arrest, of anyone who had been guilty of crimes in Riga, it would have been here in Hamburg?’

  ‘The trial would have been,’ said Dorn. ‘The arrest could have been made anywhere.’

  ‘What’s the procedure with arrests?’

  ‘Well, there’s a book called the Wanted Book. In it is the name of every wanted war criminal with surname, first names and date of birth. Usually the SAG’s office covering the area where the man committed the crimes spend years preparing the case against h
im before arrest. Then when they are ready they request the police of the State in which the man is living to arrest him. A couple of detectives go there and bring him back. If a very much wanted man is discovered, he can be arrested wherever he’s discovered, and the appropriate SAG’s office informed that he’s being held. Then they go and bring him back. The trouble is, most of the big SS men are not living under their own names.’

  ‘Right,’ said Miller. ‘Has there ever been a trial in Hamburg of anyone guilty of crimes committed in Riga?’

  ‘Not that I remember,’ said Dorn.

  ‘Would it be in the cuttings library?’

  ‘Sure. If it happened since 1950 when we started the cuttings library, it’ll be there.’

  ‘Mind if we look?’ asked Miller.

  ‘No problem.’

  The library was in the basement, tended by five archivists in grey smocks. It was almost half an acre in size, filled by row upon row of grey shelves on which reposed reference books of every kind and description. Round the walls, from floor to ceiling, were steel filing-cabinets, the doors of each drawer indicating the contents of the files within.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Dorn as the chief librarian approached.

  ‘Roschmann, Eduard,’ said Miller.

  ‘Personal index section, this way,’ said the librarian and led the way along one wall. He opened a cabinet door labelled ROA - ROZ, and flicked through it.

  ‘Nothing on Roschmann, Eduard,’ he said. Miller thought.

  ‘Do you have anything on war crimes?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said the librarian. ‘War-crimes and war-trials section, this way.’

  They went along another hundred yards of cabinets.

  ‘Look under Riga,’ said Miller.

  The librarian mounted a step-ladder and foraged. He came back with a red folder. It bore the label ‘Riga – War Crimes Trial’. Miller opened it. Two pieces of newsprint the size of large postage stamps fluttered out. Miller picked them up. Both were from the summer of 1950. One recorded that three SS privates were on trial for brutalities committed at Riga between 1941 and 1944. The other recorded they had all three been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. Not long enough, they would all be free by late 1963.