Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  But Harel wouldn’t listen. On January 21, he dismissed the Birds and called in Mifratz, the Mossad targeted killing unit commanded by Yitzhak Shamir, in order to have Kleinwächter done away with. What Harel didn’t know was that Vallentin had grasped that Kleinwächter would be the Mossad’s next target. He gave him a series of briefings, made sure he was constantly accompanied by an escort, and gave him an Egyptian military pistol.

  On February 20, a Mossad lookout saw Kleinwächter setting out alone on the road from Lorch to Basel. They decided to make the hit when he got back. Shamir, who, together with Harel, commanded the operation in the field, assigned the job of firing the shots to a trained former Irgun assassin by the name of Akiva Cohen. Harel sent the German-speaking Zvi Aharoni along with him. They waited for the target to get back in the evening. But he didn’t show up, and it was decided to call the operation off. Then everything went wrong. Kleinwächter finally did appear, and the cancellation order was suddenly reversed, but the execution of the entire action was hasty and amateurish. The Mifratz operatives’ car blocked Kleinwächter’s, but the way both vehicles had stopped on the narrow road prevented the Mossad men from getting away after the operation.

  Aharoni got out of the car and went up to Kleinwächter, as if to ask him for directions. The idea was to get him to open the window. He began doing so. Cohen, who approached Aharoni from behind, drew his gun, tried to aim it through the open window, and fired. But the bullet hit the glass and shattered it, and then hit Kleinwächter’s scarf, but it missed his body. For some unknown reason, the pistol didn’t fire again. One theory is that the spring snapped, another is that the bullet was a dud, and yet another is that the magazine got loose and fell out. Aharoni saw that the plan had failed and yelled at everyone to make a run for it. They couldn’t use their car, so they ran off in different directions to try to get to waiting escape vehicles. Kleinwächter drew his pistol and began firing at the fleeing Israelis. He didn’t hit anyone, but the entire operation was an embarrassing failure.

  Harel then launched a number of actions aimed at intimidating the scientists and their families, including anonymous letters threatening their lives and containing much information about them, as well as actual visits in the middle of the night to give similar warnings.

  These operations also failed dismally when the Swiss police arrested a Mossad operative by the name of Joseph Ben-Gal after he threatened Professor Goercke’s daughter Heidi. He was extradited to Germany, convicted, and sentenced to a short term in prison. Mossad agents following the trial had the disagreeable experience of watching as the missile project’s security officer, the hulky Hermann Vallentin, appeared at the proceedings with a smug smile, not even pretending to hide his pistol.

  By the spring of 1963, Harel’s Mossad hadn’t slowed, let alone ended, the Egyptians’ progress toward rockets that could annihilate Israel. So Harel then took to political subterfuge. He began leaking stories to the press—some true, some embellished, some outright lies (that the Germans were helping Egypt produce atom bombs and deadly lasers)—about Nazis building weapons for Arabs to kill Jews. Harel was totally convinced that the German scientists were Nazis still determined to complete the Final Solution, and that the German authorities were aware of their activities but were doing nothing to stop them. The truth was that they were people who had become accustomed to the good life under the Third Reich, had become unemployed when it fell, and now were simply trying to make some easy money off the Egyptians. But Harel dragged the entire organization, and in fact the whole country, behind this obsession of his.

  In order to prove his claims, Harel presented information gathered in Cairo about a Dr. Hans Eisele, the Butcher of Buchenwald, who’d been involved in appalling experiments on Jewish inmates. He was designated a war criminal but escaped trial and found a comfortable refuge in Egypt, where he became the physician of the German scientists. Harel also fingered a number of other Nazis in Cairo, though none of them belonged to the group of missile scientists.

  His goal was to publicly vilify Germany, with which Israel had a complicated relationship, a subject of much dispute internally. Relative moderates such as Ben-Gurion and his chief aide, Shimon Peres, maintained that, at a time when the United States was reluctant to provide Israel with all the military and economic aid it asked for, Israel could not afford to turn down assistance from the West German government, which came in the form of a reparations-and-compensation agreement and the sale of military equipment at a fraction of its real cost. Hardliners such as Golda Meir and Harel himself, on the other hand, rejected the notion that the Federal Republic of Germany was a “new” or “different” Germany. History, to their minds, had left a permanent stain.

  Harel also called in the Editors Committee, that unique Israeli institution, then composed of the top editors of the print and electronic media, who self-censored items in their publications at the request of the government. Harel asked the Editors Committee to provide him with three journalists, whom he subsequently recruited into the Mossad. They were sent to Europe, at the Mossad’s expense, to gather intelligence about the front companies that were buying equipment for the Egyptian project. Harel claimed he needed the journalists for operational reasons, but the truth was that he wanted to use their involvement and the materials they collected to launder information he already possessed; as such, it could be disseminated to the foreign and Israeli media for the purpose of manufacturing newspaper reports that would create a climate suited to his purposes.

  Harel’s stories generated a media frenzy and a growing sense of panic in Israel. Ben-Gurion tried to calm Harel down, to no avail. “He was not, in my opinion, quite sane,” said Amos Manor, the Shin Bet chief at the time. “It was something much more profound than an obsession. You couldn’t have a rational conversation about it with him.”

  It ended, as most obsessions do, in Harel’s own destruction. His publicity campaign, the frenzied newspaper stories he’d planted of Hitler’s minions rising again, badly wounded Ben-Gurion. The prime minister was attacked for not having done enough to end the threat posed by the German scientists working in Egypt—a threat Israeli citizens saw as a clear and present danger to their very existence—and for leading his country into a conciliation with West Germany, which now seemed to be at least indirectly responsible for a new version of the Final Solution.

  On March 25, 1963, Ben-Gurion summoned Harel to his office and demanded an explanation for a number of actions Harel had carried out vis-à-vis the local and international media without Ben-Gurion’s approval. The conversation degenerated into a bitter debate over the Israeli government’s policy toward Germany. The prime minister reminded Harel that he was supposed to implement government policy, not set it. Offended by the rebuke, Harel offered his resignation, confident the Old Man couldn’t manage without him and would beg him to stay.

  Ben-Gurion thought otherwise. He accepted the resignation on the spot. Isser Harel’s once brilliant career ended in a failed bluff and utter defeat. He was immediately replaced by Meir Amit, the chief of AMAN.

  —

  BUT IT WAS TOO late for Ben-Gurion, too. Harel’s campaign against the scientists had played into the hands of opposition leader Begin, who never let up his attacks on Ben-Gurion. Even inside his own party, Mapai, things had reached a boiling point. Ben-Gurion squabbled ceaselessly with Golda Meir, Harel’s main supporter.

  Less than two months after replacing Harel, Ben-Gurion, convinced he’d lost the support of even his own party, resigned. He was replaced by Levi Eshkol.

  Meanwhile, Egypt was still tinkering with the guidance systems for the missiles that could have caused grave harm to Israel.

  Meir Amit, one of the IDF’s brilliant young commanders—a planner of the 1956 Sinai Campaign who was responsible for advancing the Military Intelligence Directorate by several generations—took over a Mossad in disarray.

  The agency was deeply de
moralized. In the nine months since Egypt had announced its four missile tests, the Israelis had learned precious little about the program, and everything the Mossad and AMAN had tried thus far had failed to even slow the project, let alone dismantle it. Pressuring Germany—whether through Harel’s self-immolating press campaign or Foreign Minister Golda Meir’s fiery speeches to the Knesset—had made no difference. Later that summer, a strongly worded missive from Eshkol to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, demanding immediate action to get the scientists back from Egypt, also failed to spur the Germans. As Israeli diplomats reported to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, they could only assume that “Adenauer and the leadership are preoccupied with more important problems,” such as “managing the Cold War in the post–Cuban missile crisis period.”

  Amit set about rebuilding the organization, reinforcing it with the best personnel he knew from AMAN. As soon as he took over, he ordered a halt to any matters that he considered extraneous, and a drastic reduction of the resources being devoted to the hunt for Nazi criminals, explaining that it was “a matter of priorities. Before all else, we have to produce information about the enemies of the State of Israel nowadays.”

  Amit knew he needed a tactical reset, and that the Mossad had to rethink its approach to the problem of Egyptian missiles. His first order, then, was for a shift away from targeted killing operations, and for the vast majority of his resources to be focused instead on trying to understand what precisely was going on inside the missile project.

  Secretly, however, with most of the top officials of the organization out of the loop, he prepared a targeted killing project of his own against the scientists. Operations personnel were trying to find ways to send parcel bombs from inside Egypt, thereby significantly shortening the time between the sending and opening of the package. They tried out the method on a relatively easy target, the physician Hans Eisele. On September 25, there was a blast in the post office in the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Maadi, when a letter bomb that had been addressed to Dr. Carl Debouche, the false name Eisele was using, exploded and blinded a postal worker.

  The failure of this operation convinced Amit that targeted killings should only be used very sparingly—if not as a last resort, then at the very least only after meticulous planning that would prevent embarrassing failures. Nevertheless, he ordered the Mossad to prepare plans to shoot, blow up, or poison the scientists, in the event that the effort to solve the matter peacefully didn’t work.

  Amit ordered that break-ins to all the offices connected to the missile project in Germany and Switzerland be stepped up, and as many documents as possible photographed. These operations were enormously complex. The sites were well guarded—both by Egyptian intelligence and by Hermann Vallentin’s men—in the hearts of crowded European cities, in countries where the law was strictly enforced.

  Mossad operatives burglarized the Egyptian embassies, the Egyptian purchasing mission in Cologne, and the Intra office in Munich. They broke into the EgyptAir office in Frankfurt no fewer than fifty-six times between August 1964 and December 1966.

  The information obtained in the break-ins (some thirty thousand documents were photographed up to the end of 1964 alone) was important, but far from sufficient. The Mossad had to recruit someone on the inside of the missile project. This critical task was assigned to a division called Junction (Tsomet in Hebrew), which would become the Mossad’s most important branch, responsible for bringing in the bulk of the organization’s intelligence.

  Unlike in Hollywood movies and pulp fiction, most of this information is not collected directly by Mossad employees darting about in the shadows. Rather, it is gleaned from foreign nationals in their home countries. The Mossad case officers responsible for recruiting and operating these sources are called “collection officers”—katsa, in the Hebrew acronym—and they are expert psychologists. They know how to persuade a person to betray everything and everyone he believes in: his friends and family, his organization, his nation.

  Unfortunately, though, none of them had been able to work their psychology on anyone close to the Egyptian program. Recruiting agents in Arab countries became a long-term strategic priority, but in the short run, with the clock ticking, Junction would have to look elsewhere.

  —

  IN APRIL 1964, AMIT sent Rafi Eitan to Paris, which served as the European nerve center of Israeli intelligence, to run Junction’s operations on the Continent. Up to this point, all of Junction’s efforts to enlist one of the scientists had come to naught, mostly because of the rigid security precautions instituted by Vallentin. From day to day, he was becoming more of a problem.

  The need to deal with Vallentin would lead to the netting of a much bigger fish. Avraham Ahituv, Junction coordinator in Bonn, had an idea, and he presented it to Eitan in Paris in May 1964. He’d identified a dubious character who’d sold arms and intelligence to the Nasser regime and who also was close to the German scientists. “There is just one small problem,” Ahituv said. “The man’s name is Otto Skorzeny, and he was a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer, Hitler’s special-operations commander, and a favorite of the Führer.”

  “And you want to recruit this Otto?” Eitan asked sarcastically. “Wonderful.”

  “There’s one more small matter,” Ahituv added. “He was a devoted Nazi and a member of the SS.”

  In 1960, Ahituv told Eitan, Harel had ordered Amal, the unit that handled the hunt for Nazi war criminals, to gather as much information as possible about Skorzeny, with the goal of bringing him to justice or killing him. His file said he was an enthusiastic member of the Austrian Nazi Party at the age of twenty-three, had enlisted in 1935 to a secret SS unit in Austria, and had taken part in the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria) and in Kristallnacht. He rose rapidly in rank in the Waffen-SS, becoming head of its special-operations units.

  Sturmbannführer Skorzeny parachuted into Iran and trained local tribes to blow up oil pipelines serving the Allied armies, and he plotted to murder the Big Three—Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. He also had a plan for abducting and killing General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was forced to spend Christmas 1944 surrounded by a heavy guard. Most famously, Skorzeny was selected personally by Hitler to lead the Gran Sasso raid, which successfully extricated the Führer’s friend and ally, the former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, from the Alpine villa where he was being held prisoner by the Italian government.

  Allied intelligence called Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.” He was not, however, convicted of war crimes. He was acquitted by one tribunal, and after he was rearrested on other charges, he escaped with the help of his SS friends. He took refuge in Franco’s Spain, from where he established profitable commercial relations with fascist regimes around the world and also maintained contact with the German scientists in Egypt.

  Skorzeny’s acquaintance with the scientists in Egypt and the fact that he’d been a superior officer to Hermann Vallentin during the war were enough, in Eitan’s view, to justify trying to recruit him, despite his Nazi past. Eitan was not a Holocaust survivor, and he dealt with the matter, as was his wont, without emotional involvement. If it helped Israel, he thought, that would make it worth forgiveness. “And we could offer him in exchange something that no one else could,” he told his colleagues. “Life without fear.”

  Through a number of intermediaries the Mossad established contact with Countess Ilse von Finckenstein—Skorzeny’s wife. She would serve as the Mossad’s entrée. The Mossad file on the countess says that she was “a member of the aristocracy. She is a cousin of the German [prewar] Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht….She is 45, a fairly attractive woman, brimming over with energy.”

  “She was involved in everything,” said Raphael (Raphi) Medan, the German-born Mossad operative who was assigned to the mission. “She sold titles of nobility, had ties with Vatican intelligence, and sold arms as well.” She and her husband also had liberal ideas abo
ut their relationship. “They didn’t have children,” Medan said, “and they maintained an open marriage. Ilse always looked stunning. Every two years she underwent hormonal treatment in Switzerland in order to preserve her youth.”

  Medan “had had a reputation, because of his European good looks, for being able to influence women,” according to the Mossad report on the affair. A meeting was set in late July 1964, in Dublin, Ireland. Medan introduced himself as an Israeli Defense Ministry employee on leave and looking for an opening in international tourism. He might be interested in taking part in the Bahamas development project that the countess was involved in, he said. The countess liked Medan, and their relationship warmed up. When their business talk was over, she invited him to a party at her farm. This was the start of a series of meetings, including some wild visits nightclubbing all over Europe.

  According to a Mossad rumor that circulated for many years, and was gently hinted at in the reports but not explicitly stated, Medan “sacrificed” himself for his country—and took advantage of the German couple’s open marriage—by wooing the countess and eventually taking her to bed. (Medan commented on this by saying, “There are things that gentlemen do not speak about,” and described their encounter, with a smile, as “good and even gratifying.”)

  In Madrid, on the night of September 7, Medan told her that a friend of his from the Israeli Defense Ministry wanted to meet her husband “about a very important matter.” The friend was already in Europe and waiting for a reply.

  Convincing von Finckenstein to cooperate was not difficult. Only four years before, Israel had found, grabbed, tried, and executed Adolf Eichmann. There were powerful forces in the Jewish world, including Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, engaged in worldwide campaigns to find and prosecute Nazis like Skorzeny. Medan, therefore, was able to offer the countess—and, by extension, her husband—that “life without fear.”