Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  In the morning, when they were still groggy from the alcohol and smoke in the clubs, von Finckenstein informed Medan happily that her husband was ready to meet his friend—that night, if possible.

  Medan called Ahituv to Madrid. He set up a meeting in a hotel lobby that evening. The countess came first, glamorously accoutred. Fifteen minutes later, the colonel appeared. Medan introduced them to Ahituv. Then he took von Finckenstein aside, for a “business talk.” Skorzeny stayed with Ahituv.

  The Mossad’s internal final report on the affair, though written in dry professional language, could not overlook the intensity of the meeting: “It is difficult to overstate Avraham Ahituv’s emotional reluctance over this operation. Avraham is a scion of a religiously observant family, a native of Germany educated in a religious Jewish school. For him, the contact with a Nazi monster was a shocking emotional experience that went beyond the demands of the profession.”

  In the detailed report Ahituv himself submitted, on September 14, 1964, he described the talks he had that week with Skorzeny:

  Skorzeny was a giant. A hulk of a man. He was obviously remarkably strong physically. On his left cheek was the well known scar from his pictures, reaching his ear. He was partly deaf in that ear and asked me to sit on his right. Well dressed.

  Two moments gave me a shock. Skorzeny was looking for a number in his phone book to give me. All of a sudden, he took a monocle out of his pocket and stuck it into his right eye socket. His appearance then, what with his bodily dimensions, the scar, and his aggressive gaze, made him look like the complete Nazi.

  The second incident happened after our meeting, when we were dining together in a restaurant near his office. Suddenly someone came up to us, clicked his heels together loudly, and greeted him in German as “My General.” Skorzeny told me that this was the owner of the restaurant and he used to be one of the top Nazis in those parts…

  I have no illusions about his original opinions. Even his wife didn’t try to clear him. She only stressed that he played no part in the Holocaust….Most of the conversation at the first meeting centered on political issues, on World War II and the Holocaust, East-West relations, and the Middle East situation.

  Ahituv brought up the issue of Skorzeny’s participation in the Kristallnacht pogroms. He pulled out a long list of people who had taken part in the attacks and presented it to Skorzeny. Skorzeny was familiar with the document, which had been stored in Yad Vashem, because the accusation had been raised and discussed during the war crimes trial from which he had managed to escape.

  He pointed to an X inked next to his name. “That’s proof that I did not participate,” he said, though Nazi hunter Wiesenthal interpreted the mark as proof of just the opposite. Skorzeny complained that Wiesenthal was hunting him, and that more than once he had found himself in a situation where he “feared for his life.” Ahituv decided not to stretch the point too far and did not argue.

  At a certain stage, Skorzeny got tired of talking about the war. “He stopped me and asked me what my business was. It was clear that there was no point in playing hide-and-seek. I told him I was in the Israeli [intelligence] service. [Skorzeny said that] he wasn’t surprised we had gotten to him. At different times, he had been linked to different countries, and with some of them he still maintained excellent relations. He was definitely prepared for an exchange of views with us as well.”

  “An exchange of views” was Skorzeny’s delicate way of saying that he agreed to full and comprehensive cooperation with Israel. Skorzeny demanded a price for his help. He wanted a valid Austrian passport issued in his real name, a writ of lifetime immunity from prosecution, signed by Prime Minister Eshkol, and his immediate removal from Wiesenthal’s list of wanted Nazis, as well as some money.

  Skorzeny’s conditions sparked a sharp argument in the Mossad. Ahituv and Eitan saw in them “an operational constraint and a requirement for the success of the operation.” Other senior officials argued that they were “an attempt by a Nazi criminal to cleanse his name,” and they demanded a new look at Skorzeny’s past. This new investigation revealed further details about the role he played on Kristallnacht, “as the leader of one of the mobs that burned synagogues in Vienna,” and that “until recently, he was an active supporter of neo-Nazi organizations.”

  Meir Amit, practical and unemotional as always, thought that Eitan and Ahituv were right, but he needed the moral support of the prime minister. Levi Eshkol listened to Amit and consulted some of the high-ranking Mossad members who were Holocaust survivors (unlike Amit, Eitan, and Ahituv, who were not), hearing their vehement objections. Nevertheless, he finally approved giving Skorzeny money, a passport, and immunity.

  The prime minister also approved the request concerning Wiesenthal, but that wasn’t his decision to make, nor the Mossad’s. Wiesenthal was an opinionated and obstinate man, and although he had close links with the State of Israel and even the Mossad, which financed some of his operations, he wasn’t an Israeli citizen, and he worked out of Vienna, outside of Israel’s jurisdiction.

  In October 1964, Raphi Medan met with Wiesenthal to discuss, without elaborating the details of the operation, why Skorzeny had to be removed from Wiesenthal’s blacklist of Nazi criminals to be hunted down and prosecuted.

  “To my astonishment,” Medan recalled, “Wiesenthal said, ‘Herr Medan, there is not a chance. This is a Nazi and a war criminal and we will never strike him from our list.’ No matter what I said or how I tried, he simply refused categorically.”

  When told he would remain on Wiesenthal’s list, Skorzeny was disappointed but agreed to the deal anyhow. Thus did the unbelievable come to pass—the Führer’s favorite, wanted all over the world as a Nazi war criminal who had apparently burned synagogues and taken part in SS operations, became a key agent in the most important operation waged by Israeli intelligence at the time.

  Skorzeny’s first step was to send word to his friends among the scientists in Egypt that he was reviving a network of SS and Wehrmacht veterans “to build a new Germany”—in other words, to establish a Fourth Reich. To prepare the ground, he would tell them, his organization would have to gather information in secret. The German scientists working for Nasser would thus be required, under their Wehrmacht oaths, to provide Skorzeny’s phantom organization with the details of their missile research so it could be used by the new German military force in the making.

  At the same time, Skorzeny and Ahituv also masterminded a plan to get information out of the formidable security officer Hermann Vallentin, who knew everything about the Egyptian missile project. Unlike with the recruitment of the sophisticated and experienced Skorzeny, who was aware he was dealing with a Mossad man, and whom Ahituv never tried to mislead, the two decided to use some subterfuge on Vallentin.

  Skorzeny played his part perfectly. He summoned Hermann Vallentin to Madrid under the pretense that he was hosting a special gathering for his subordinates from the “glorious war.” He put Vallentin up, at Mossad expense, in a luxurious hotel and presented him with his phony plan for reviving the Reich. Then he revealed that this was not his only reason for the invitation to Madrid, and that he wanted him to meet “a close friend,” an officer of the British MI6 secret service. The British, he said, were interested in what was going on in Egypt, and he asked Vallentin to help his friend.

  Vallentin was suspicious. “Are you sure the Israelis aren’t involved?” he asked.

  “Stand to attention when you’re spoken to, and apologize!” Skorzeny fired back. “How dare you say something like that to your superior officer!”

  Vallentin duly apologized, but he wasn’t convinced. And he was, in fact, completely right. Skorzeny’s “friend” was no Brit, but an Australian-born case officer in the Mossad by the name of Harry Barak.

  Vallentin agreed to meet him, but not to cooperate, and the meeting between the two led nowhere.

  The resourc
eful Skorzeny immediately came up with a solution. At his next meeting with Vallentin, he told him that his friend from MI6 had reminded him that a cable Skorzeny had sent close to the end of the war, in which he notified the general staff that he was promoting Vallentin, had not reached the general staff or Vallentin.

  Vallentin’s eyes lit up. Though this retroactive promotion was now purely symbolic, it clearly meant a lot to him. He stood up and gave the Heil Hitler salute and thanked Skorzeny profusely.

  Skorzeny told Vallentin that he was ready to give him a written document confirming that he had been promoted. Vallentin was grateful to his new friend from British intelligence for the information he had provided, and agreed to help him as much as he wanted.

  In time, Skorzeny invited other former Wehrmacht officers involved in the missile project to Madrid. They attended lavish parties at his home, billed as gatherings of Waffen-SS special forces veterans. His guests ate, drank, and enjoyed themselves late into the night, never knowing that the Israeli government was paying for their food and drinks and bugging their conversations.

  The information provided by Skorzeny, Vallentin, and the scientists who came to Madrid solved most of the Mossad’s information problem regarding Egypt’s missile program. It identified precisely who was involved in the project and exactly what the current status of each component was.

  Thanks to the new wealth of information from this operation, Meir Amit’s Mossad managed to crumble Egypt’s missile project from the inside, using a number of methods in parallel. One was the dispatch of threatening letters to many of the German scientists. They were very cleverly worded, based on top-grade intelligence provided by Vallentin, and included intimate details about the recipients.

  “Remember that even if you are not to blame for the crimes of the German nation in the past, you will not be able to deny your responsibility for your deeds today. You had better consider very seriously the contents of this letter, for the sake of your future and the future of your young family.” “The Gideons” was the name of the unknown organization that signed the letters.

  Meanwhile, thanks to new intelligence from its sources, primarily Vallentin, the Mossad was able to identify a secret Egyptian plan to recruit scores of workers from the Hellige aircraft-and-rocket factory in Freiburg who were about to be dismissed. Amit decided to take advantage of the momentum to carry out a quick move aimed at preventing their departure for Egypt.

  On the morning of December 9, Shimon Peres, then deputy defense minister, and Raphi Medan carried a locked case containing a number of documents in English that had been prepared by the Mossad director’s office based on material supplied by Skorzeny, Vallentin, and the scientists who came to Madrid, and flew off for a hurriedly arranged meeting with one of West Germany’s senior politicians, former defense minister Franz Josef Strauss. Peres and Strauss were architects of the restitution agreement between West Germany and Israel. Strauss rose from his seat to greet the two Israelis, and he and Peres embraced warmly.

  “We sat for six hours,” Peres said. “God, that man could drink. Wines from all over the world, and beer. I can also drink, but quantities like that? Six hours and we didn’t stop drinking.”

  The information Peres presented to Strauss was far more detailed, cross-checked, authentic, and grave than anything that had been presented to the Germans previously. “It is inconceivable that German scientists would help our worst enemy in such a manner, while you stand idly by,” Peres told Strauss, who must have grasped what the leakage of this material to the international press would have meant.

  Strauss looked at the documents, and agreed to intervene. He called Ludwig Bölkow, a powerful figure in the German aerospace industry, and asked for his help. Bölkow sent his representatives to offer the Hellige scientists and engineers jobs under good conditions at his plants, as long as they’d promise not to help the Egyptians.

  The plan worked. Most of the new group never went to Egypt, where the missile program urgently needed their assistance with the balky guidance systems—a development that fatally crippled the project.

  The final blow came when a representative of Bölkow’s arrived in Egypt to persuade the scientists already working there to come home. One by one they deserted the program, and by July 1965 even Pilz was gone, having returned to Germany to head one of Bölkow’s airplane component divisions.

  The German scientists affair was the first time the Mossad mobilized all of its forces to stop what it perceived as an existential threat from an adversary, and the first time Israel allowed itself to target civilians from countries with which it had diplomatic relations. Given the newly raised stakes, a 1982 top-secret internal report was written, analyzing whether it would have been possible to resolve the affair using “soft” methods—generous offers of money from the government of Germany to the scientists—without “the mysterious disappearance of Krug, or the bomb that maimed Hannelore Wende, or the other letter bombs and the intimidation.”

  The report concluded that it would not have been possible: The Mossad believed that, without the threat of violence directed at them, the German scientists would not have been willing to accept the money and give up on the project.

  AFTER THE GERMAN SCIENTISTS affair, the Mossad was on a roll. Meir Amit brought in more professionals from the military, introduced new technologies, and strengthened links with intelligence services abroad. He also continued to set in motion numerous organizational reforms.

  Amit wanted to establish a single operations division in the Mossad, which would bring all of the units dealing with sabotage, targeted killings, and espionage in the Arab countries under one umbrella. In order to do this, Amit did what Harel had tried to do for years and he, Amit, had opposed: He transferred Unit 188 from AMAN to the Mossad and merged it with Shamir’s Mifratz. Yosef Yariv was appointed head of the division, with Shamir as his deputy.

  The Mossad chief named the division Caesarea, after the Roman city on the Mediterranean coast, another example of the Israeli intelligence community’s penchant for code names taken from the country’s ancient history. The network of Caesarea activities outside of Israel was code-named the Senate.

  Amit also wanted his own intelligence division. Until recently, the same unit, the Birds, had served both the Shin Bet and the Mossad. Amit now decided that he wanted a separate unit that would work only outside of Israel and only for the Mossad. He co-opted some of the Birds unit’s personnel for a new intelligence unit, which he named Colossus.

  In addition to these bureaucratic changes, under Amit the agency carried out operations that garnered unprecedented amounts of information about the Arab states and their military services. One of the most outstanding of these was Operation Diamond, in which Junction recruited an Iraqi pilot, Munir Redfa, who defected to Israel with his brand-new MiG-21 fighter plane, the most advanced and threatening attack weapon in the hands of the Soviet bloc at the time. The Israeli Air Force was now able to prepare to cope with its most powerful adversary in future aerial combat. The Pentagon was very eager to learn the secrets of the plane, and Amit gave the Americans not just the blueprints for the MiG but the plane itself, fully equipped and with a trained pilot.

  Amit had also assiduously cultivated Israel’s secret relations with Morocco, in line with the “periphery doctrine.” Though Morocco was an Arab country, in close contact with Israel’s main enemies, it also was moderate and had no territorial dispute with Israel. Furthermore, its leader was the relatively pro-Western king Hassan II.

  Morocco received valuable intelligence and technological assistance from Israel, and, in exchange, Hassan allowed Morocco’s Jews to immigrate to Israel, and the Mossad received the right to establish a permanent station in the capital, Rabat, from which it could spy on Arab countries.

  The height of the cooperation came in September 1965, when the king allowed a Mossad team led by Zvi Malchin and Rafi Eitan to bug all the
meeting rooms and private suites of the leaders of the Arab states and their military commanders during an Arab summit in Casablanca. The purpose of the summit was to discuss the establishment of a joint common Arab command in future wars with Israel. But King Hassan’s relations with some of the other Arab rulers were shaky, and he feared that some of them were acting to depose him, so he let the Mossad listen in.

  This gave Israel an unprecedented glimpse of the military and intelligence secrets of its greatest enemies, and of the mindsets of those countries’ leaders. At that summit, commanders of the Arab armies reported that their forces were not prepared for a new war against Israel, information that was the basis of the Israeli military’s supreme confidence when they urged Prime Minister Eshkol to go to war two years later, in June 1967. “This sensational material,” a Mossad report stated, “was one of the highlights of the achievements of Israeli intelligence since its foundation.”

  These successful operations provided the IDF with the critical intelligence it needed to prepare for the next war. But then, at a dizzying pace, one catastrophe after another hit Amit and his organization.

  —

  THE TOP SPY FOR Unit 188, and now Caesarea, was Eli Cohen, who’d penetrated the ruling circles in Damascus and provided the information that enabled the Mossad to locate the Nazi Alois Brunner and send him a letter bomb.

  Cohen was originally assigned to serve as a sleeper agent who, rather than collect and convey information, would become active only if he had to alert Israel that Syria was planning to launch a surprise attack against it.

  However, under pressure from his operators, and having become deeply enmeshed with and overconfident in his own cover story, he started broadcasting messages to his Mossad handlers on a daily basis, using a telegraphic device he kept hidden at his apartment. He reported on secret military installations, Syria’s plot to take control of the region’s water sources (with the assistance of a Saudi contracting firm headed by Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s father), and Syria’s relationship with the Soviet Union, but also on Nazis holed up in Damascus, parliamentary gossip, and accounts of government power struggles. Cohen’s transmission of information of this nature and at this frequency was a serious and unprofessional error, on his own part but also, more important, on the part of his handlers.