Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  “Eli Cohen was one of the people who went through life walking sideways,” said Moti Kfir, who, among other Mossad jobs, served as head of its training program in the early 1960s. “When you are sideways, sometimes you think that no one sees you. But he was wrong. He became too prominent. I told him during training, ‘Never be the life of the party.’ But he did the opposite.”

  The letter bomb sent to Brunner and the lively interest that Cohen showed in other Nazis in talks with top Syrians—along with the fact that he was “in an unusual situation, an immigrant without a job…who was giving parties, mixing with high society,” and “providing his guests and friends entertainment of all kinds”—put the Syrian intelligence services on the alert and led one of his interlocutors to doubt the cover story of Kamal Amin Thabet, a wealthy Syrian merchant who’d returned to his homeland after long years of exile in Buenos Aires.

  In a tragic coincidence for Cohen, during the same period, his transmitter caused interference with broadcasts from the Syrian General Staff HQ, across the street from the luxurious apartment he rented, and in which he held wild parties for Syrian high officials. Puzzled, the Syrians asked GRU, Soviet military intelligence, to investigate. The Russians sent in special prowl cars, which managed to lock into the signals emanating from Cohen’s transmitter during one of his broadcasts.

  Cohen was arrested, brutally tortured, quickly tried, and sentenced to death. He was hanged in public in the central square of Damascus on May 18. His body was left dangling on the gallows, draped in a white sheet bearing the text of his death sentence, as a message to the State of Israel.

  The man who had recruited, trained, and operated Cohen, Gedaliah Khalaf, later said, “I looked at him, at my Eli, on Syrian television, and I saw in his face the diabolical torments he had undergone. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to scream, to do something, to take a pistol and break into the Mezzeh prison, to bang my head against the wall until it broke, until we could save him. And they killed him and we could do nothing but stand there and watch.”

  Amit’s Mossad, so freshly confident, was humiliated, impotent. Worse, the Mossad was exposed. The Syrians had tortured Cohen so severely—yanking out his fingernails, electrifying his testicles—that he’d broken. He revealed the secret communication codes and deciphered two hundred messages that he’d sent and the Syrians had picked up but hadn’t been able to read, and he told them what he knew about Israeli intelligence’s recruitment, training, and cover-building methods.

  Shortly after Cohen was caught, Caesarea was hit by another disaster. Wolfgang Lotz, the Caesarea spy in Cairo’s high society, a key element in the intelligence gathering for the attempts to kill the German scientists in Egypt, was also uncovered, on February 10, 1965. His downfall also came from excessive activity, overconfidence in his cover story, and a number of crude errors that he and his handlers made.

  The only thing that saved Lotz from suffering the same fate as Eli Cohen was the intervention of the BND, the German espionage service, which responded to Israel’s request and told the Egyptians that Lotz was also working for them. Lotz and his wife, Waltraud, were spared the gallows and sentenced to life in prison. (They were later released in a prisoner exchange following the Six-Day War, in 1967.) But this was another hard blow for the Mossad. For fear of further losses, Yosef Yariv ordered his other spies, whose training and cover stories had cost many years of effort, to come home. Caesarea, barely out of its infancy, was nearly in ruins.

  Prime Minister Eshkol regarded the downfall of the two spies as a national disaster. But despite the bad state the Mossad was in, Eshkol decided to approve a special targeted killing mission by Caesarea in Uruguay anyway. Two months prior, a conference attended by representatives of the various intelligence agencies had been held to discuss the state of the hunt for Nazis, a matter that was not high on the list of priorities. Raphi Medan, deputy chief of the Amal unit, which handled the issue, surveyed the possible targets for assassination on the list from which the name of Otto Skorzeny had just been erased. When he came to the name of Herbert Cukurs, a Latvian Nazi war criminal who, as an aviator, had volunteered to assist the SS and the Gestapo, and began describing his horrific acts, a loud thud was heard. The head of AMAN, the Military Intelligence Directorate, Major General Aharon Yariv, had collapsed, and it took some time before he came to. Cukurs, it emerged, had burned alive some of Yariv’s relatives and friends.

  After the conference, Amit, who was very close to Yariv and deeply affected by the incident, went to see Prime Minister Eshkol and received permission to have Cukurs eliminated.

  Cukurs had killed Jews for sport. He had gunned them down on city streets after telling them to run for their lives. He had locked Jews in synagogues he then set on fire, drinking whisky as he listened to the screams. Holocaust survivors called him the Butcher of Riga, and his name came up frequently at the Nuremberg war crimes trials as directly involved in the murder of some fifteen thousand Jews, and indirectly in the killing of twenty thousand more. But after the war, he had managed to escape and find refuge in Brazil, where he developed a tourism business, surrounding himself with security guards for fear of the same fate that befell Eichmann.

  Yaakov Meidad, a Caesarea operative who spoke Spanish and German, posed as an Austrian businessman seeking openings in the tourism industry in South America and managed to persuade Cukurs to go to Uruguay to meet a group of developers at a luxurious mansion outside Montevideo. At the mansion, three assassins would lie in wait. The plan was for Meidad to enter first, followed by Cukurs. One of the assassins would shove him inside and close the door behind him. Then, when the Mossad team was out of the line of fire, he would shoot him.

  The job, however, did not go as smoothly as planned. Cukurs was alert and feared a trap. The moment he entered, he grasped what was happening and made a break for it. Yariv tried to get a stranglehold on him as another Israeli dragged him inside. “The fact that Cukurs was frightened to death,” said Meidad, “and had lived in dread of this moment for twenty years gave him superhuman strength. He managed to knock the guy down. He grabbed the doorknob and, had it not been for the three of us, including me, holding the door shut, he would have been able to get out.”

  Cukurs bit hard into one of Yariv’s fingers, cutting off the tip, which remained in his mouth. Yariv screamed in pain and had to loosen his grip on Cukurs’s neck. He almost broke free, but at the last moment one of the hit men, Ze’ev Amit (a cousin of the Mossad director), who had not been able to fire because of the danger to his comrades, picked up a hammer and smashed it into Cukurs’s head again and again until he passed out. Then the third assassin, Eliezer Sodit-Sharon, formerly the chief hit man for the Irgun, fired two shots into the mass murderer, assuring that he was dead.

  The operatives put the body into a suitcase, which they left in the mansion, and added on top a “verdict,” a sheet of paper inscribed with the words “In consideration of his personal responsibility for the murder of 30,000 Jews with horrible brutality, the condemned man has been executed. [Signed] Those Who Will Never Forget.”

  Inside the Mossad, the operation was officially deemed a success, but the truth was that the unprofessional implementation could easily have led to disaster. Either way, Yariv was left with half a finger. The man who had crushed Cukurs’s head with a hammer, Ze’ev Amit, suffered from horrific nightmares for the rest of his life, haunted by the trauma of the murder.

  —

  THE NEXT DISASTER ALMOST cost Prime Minister Eshkol and Director Amit their jobs. On September 30, 1965, one day after the Mossad received the vitally important tapes from the Arab summit, one of the commanders of the Moroccan intelligence service, Ahmed Dlimi, contacted the Mossad and made it clear that the Moroccans wanted the debt for this valuable information repaid as soon as possible. In the intelligence world, there are no free gifts.

  Amit reported to Eshkol, “On the one hand they�
�ve given us these tapes, but on the other, they’ve said ‘Give!’ They want something very simple. There’s this goy, Ben Barka, who’s in the opposition to the king…and the king has given an order to wipe him out. They’ve come to us and said, ‘You’re great killers…Do it!’ ”

  The opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka had been exiled from Morocco at the beginning of the 1960s and later sentenced to death in absentia. Moroccan intelligence tried to locate him, but Ben Barka was careful to conceal his location, moving from place to place, using pseudonyms. The heads of the Moroccan secret services asked the Mossad to help find, trap, and kill him.

  “We faced a dilemma,” Amit recalled. “Either help and get drawn in, or refuse and endanger the national achievements of the highest order.”

  Years later, Amit tried to paint a picture of himself having chosen “to walk between the raindrops” and not to directly abet the killing but “to incorporate it [the aid to the Moroccans] into our regular joint activities with them.” But a close look at Mossad internal cables and records shows that the organization was deeply involved.

  Caesarea and Colossus helped the Moroccans pinpoint the kiosk in Geneva to which Ben Barka had his magazines mailed, enabling them to place him under surveillance. Later, they proposed a plan whereby Ben Barka would be lured to Paris by a man posing as a documentary filmmaker fascinated by the Moroccan exile’s life story and interested in making a film about it. The Mossad supplied the Moroccans with safe houses in Paris, vehicles, fake passports, and two different kinds of poison with which to kill him, as well as shovels and “something to disguise the traces.”

  When Ben Barka came to Paris on October 29, 1965, the Moroccans kidnapped him, with the help of corrupt French police officers. He was taken to an empty Mossad safe house, where the Moroccans began brutally interrogating him. He died not long afterward from asphyxiation, after repeatedly being submerged in a bath of filthy water.

  Mossad operatives were not involved or present when the killing took place, but they took it upon themselves to handle the corpse, a joint team from Caesarea and Colossus removing it to the nearby Saint-Germain forest. They dug a deep hole in the ground and buried the body, after which they scattered chemical powder, which was designed to consume the body and is particularly active when it comes into contact with water. Heavy rain fell almost immediately, so there was probably not much left of Ben Barka shortly afterward. What was left, according to some of the Israelis involved, was moved again and today lies beneath the road to the recently constructed ultramodern Louis Vuitton Foundation, or even under the building itself.

  Amit had promised Eshkol, “I won’t take any steps without telling you,” but then told him about only part of the truth, and only after the fact. On November 25, 1965, Amit told Eshkol, “Everything is fine.”

  In truth, however, everything was not fine. The fact that Ben Barka had disappeared in Paris and that the heads of Moroccan intelligence and French mercenaries were involved exploded into the French media with a great bang, and stayed in the headlines for a long time. President Charles de Gaulle disbanded his intelligence services and prosecuted some of those involved. When King Hassan refused to hand over the heads of his spy agencies to stand trial, de Gaulle angrily cut off diplomatic relations with Morocco.

  The fallout from the operation has lasted for decades and left a dark shadow on relations between Morocco and France, where there is still an investigating magistrate in charge of the case. The probes raised suspicions against Mossad personnel, too, and all those involved left Paris in a hurry. For many years they remained at risk of facing trial.

  Isser Harel was serving at the time as Eshkol’s adviser on intelligence. Bitter and frustrated over the way he had been ousted from the directorship of the Mossad, and envious of the successful Amit, Harel got hold of the pertinent documents on the Ben Barka affair and went to war against Amit.

  In a lengthy report he submitted to the prime minister, he declared, “The Mossad, and through it the state, were engaged in various actions connected to a political assassination, in which Israel not only had no interest, but should not have, I believe, from a moral, public, and international perspective, been involved at all.”

  Harel demanded that Eshkol fire Amit and send a personal emissary to tell the truth to de Gaulle. Eshkol refused, and Harel accused the prime minister of becoming involved in the murder himself and demanded that he resign forthwith. He threatened Eshkol, saying that “the echoes of the affair will come to the attention of the public and the entire party [Labor] will be tainted with the shame.”

  When that didn’t work, he leaked the gist of the story to a sensationalist yellow weekly, and when the censor blocked the publication, he informed high-ranking party members of the details and urged them to rebel against Eshkol’s leadership. These members then tried to persuade Golda Meir to lead a coup against Eshkol. Meir agreed that Amit must go, but she drew the line at ousting the prime minister. “I should topple Eshkol, and take his place?” she asked the conspirators, with the pathos for which she was famous. “I would rather throw myself into the sea.”

  When Harel’s vitriolic attacks did not subside, Eshkol and Amit decided to fight back, combating extortion with counter-extortion. Amit told his close associates, “Harel will not drop the subject of his own accord…unless it is hinted to him that in his past there is enough material to undermine his claim that he is ‘the moral guardian’ of the Mossad.”

  And, indeed, there was enough material. Amit had Alexander Yisraeli’s file brought back up from the archives. Yisraeli was the naval officer who had sold secrets to Egypt in 1954 and then was abducted, with the intent of bringing him to trial, though he died in transit of an overdose of sedatives. Harel had ordered his body to be thrown into the sea and for his family to be told he’d settled in South America.

  Amit gave Yisraeli’s file to a veteran of the Mossad who despised Harel, was friendly with Amit, and knew about the affair. That person summoned Harel for a meeting. “What do you think would happen if this affair became public?” the man asked Harel. “Don’t you think such a serious matter would require a thorough examination and an intense investigation? Of course, we will try to keep the story quiet, but we are not the only ones who know it, and it’s outrageous what comes to the attention of journalists these days.”

  Harel understood the situation. Shortly afterward, he resigned.

  For Amit, the main lesson of the affair was that “we must never get involved in carrying out sensitive tasks of others in which we do not have a direct interest, especially not assassinations. We must kill someone only if he is threatening Israel’s interests, and the execution—only blue and white,” a reference to the colors of the Israeli flag, by which he meant “only by Israelis.”

  —

  ALL THESE CATASTROPHES LEFT the agency, and particularly Caesarea, its spearhead, bruised and confused. Amit set up a number of inquiry panels to try to analyze what had gone wrong.

  The predominant figure conducting these inquiries was Michael “Mike” Harari. When their work was completed, Amit named Harari the deputy head of Caesarea. Harari served in this position for five years, first under Yosef Yariv and then under Zvi Aharoni, but in practice he was the living spirit of the division and, in effect, commanded it. In 1970, he was made head of Caesarea, a position he held for ten years. The fifteen years during which he led the division were the most important and turbulent in its history. Harari was nicknamed Caesar and became the figure with the most profound influence on the world of the Mossad’s special operations.

  Harari was born in Tel Aviv in 1927. “Two events shaped my life,” he said. In 1936, while still a child, he witnessed the violent riots by Palestine’s Arabs against the Jews and the British, which later became known as the Palestinian Revolt. “I saw the rioting mob and a burned-out British jeep with the charred body of the sergeant still gripping the steering wheel.�
�� When he saw Arabs and Jews fighting, he says, he did not hold back, but went into a nearby store and chose what looked like the best weapon—a hefty pick handle—and went to join the battle against the Arabs.

  The second defining experience occurred in 1942, when he went down to play in the street and arrived on the scene a few minutes after officers of the British police’s CID had shot dead Avraham Stern, the commander of the extremist Jewish underground group Lehi. “I saw them bringing the body down. Then I went upstairs. I was a boy, and no one stopped me. I went into the apartment and saw the closet he had hidden in….These things affect you.”

  In 1943, he lied about his age to join the Palmach, the secret army of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. “It was underground. It was secret, it intrigued me.” He took part in many actions, including the sabotage of railroad lines and bridges, attacks on British police stations, and intelligence collecting. He was arrested several times by the CID.

  After World War II, when the Haganah command learned that Harari spoke a few languages, he was sent to Europe, to help with the transportation of the surviving Jewish refugees to Israel. He was involved in the secret acquisition of ships and the complicated logistics involved in moving these illegal immigrants through the ruins of Europe to the boats, then smuggling them into Palestine under the noses of the British. “That was the period during which I created for myself the criteria and the methods for covert activities abroad, the tools that I used later on in the Mossad.”