Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  Without a blink, Isser pulled out his diplomatic passport, issued in his real name, and handed it to Ruth Ben-David.

  His men were dumbfounded. Has he gone mad? To give her his name and passport—that was a tremendous risk! Isser, however, felt that only if he showed her he was sincere and had confidence in her did he have a chance of success.

  For a long moment Ruth gazed at the seal of Israel embossed on the passport. She bit her lips till drops of blood popped on her mouth. “I can’t take it anymore,” she murmured. “I am going to break down . . .”

  Then, suddenly, she raised her head. “The child is with the Gertner family, one twenty-six Penn Street, Brooklyn, New York. They call him Yankele.”

  Isser jumped to his feet. “As soon as we get the child, you’ll be free.”

  He left the room.

  A feverish exchange of telegrams alerted Jerusalem, then New York and Washington. Isser called Israel Gur-Arie, the security officer of the Israeli diplomatic missions in North America. Gur-Arie, who was based in New York, checked the Brooklyn address; he cabled back that the address was correct and that the Gertner family lived in a district largely populated by Satmar Hassidim. Jerusalem dispatched a cable to Avraham Harman, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, instructing him to contact the FBI and ask them to find the child and deliver him to Israel.

  Gur-Arie himself called his counterpart at the FBI and gave him all the details—“what the child eats, what he wears,” et cetera. The FBI agent answered: “If you know so much about him, go get him yourself.” Gur-Arie replied: “Give me the authorization.” The FBI agent refused.

  Disquieting telegrams began pouring into Isser’s headquarters. The Americans are hesitating, Gur-Arie and the Israeli ambassador reported. They ask, are you absolutely certain that the child is at that address? What would happen if we raided that house and didn’t find the child? The FBI hinted that their reticence was due to the upcoming congressional elections. The Satmar sect controlled almost one hundred thousand votes, and the administration didn’t want to risk alienating them.

  In Chantilly, Isser was losing patience. At midnight, he picked up the phone. “Get me Harman in Washington,” he ordered.

  When the connection was established, he was blunt. “Harman,” he said, “this is Isser Harel. I want you to get in touch with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, immediately, and tell him in my name that the FBI should get the boy at once.”

  Harman was stunned. “Isser, how can you talk like that?” He hinted that the American services might be monitoring their conversation.

  “So much the better,” Isser said. “I am not talking only to you.” He hoped that the Americans were listening in, and his firm stand would rouse them to action.

  Harman kept hesitating and tried to warn Isser about possible diplomatic complications.

  “I didn’t ask your opinion,” Isser snapped. “Tell them that if they don’t act immediately, they will be held responsible for anything that happens.”

  A few hours later, Isser was called to the telephone. It was New York. The consulate officials informed him that Robert Kennedy had taken immediate action. A team of FBI agents, accompanied by the Israeli security officer, had gone to Brooklyn. The child was indeed found and taken to a safe place. It was Yossele.

  A young reporter named Elie Wiesel (the future Nobel Prize winner) called Gur-Arie. “I heard that you found the child.” Gur-Arie, who had been sworn to secrecy, firmly denied. Wiesel didn’t forgive him for years.

  The Fourth of July 1962 was a national holiday in Israel as well, as on that day the plane carrying Yossele home landed at Lod Airport. The press enthusiastically praised the dedicated efficiency of the secret service. Israel was fast becoming the only country in the world where that shadow organization was loved and admired by the whole nation. A well-known Israeli lawyer, Shlomo Cohen Zidon, wrote a letter of thanks to Ben-Gurion for finding the child. Ben-Gurion wrote back: “You should thank our secret services and mostly their head, who spent days and nights on that mission, and didn’t rest, even when his assistants almost gave up, till he found the child and pulled him out of his hideout, which was not easy either.”

  While all of Israel was celebrating Yossele’s rescue, Isser was in Paris, where his men threw a modest party for him. One of the agents raised his glass “to the child returned to his fatherland, to the iron-willed man who found him, to the state that knows so well to protect its citizens.” Another agent presented Isser with a stuffed toy tiger cub as a souvenir of the operation; his colleagues shipped to his home in Tel Aviv “Yossele’s bed,” on which he had passed so many sleepless nights.

  Now that the boy had been found, the whole truth came to light.

  It had all started with a telegram.

  In the spring of 1960, while Yossele was being clandestinely shuttled from one yeshiva to another in Israel, Ruth Ben-David received a telegram from her friend Rabbi Meizish: “Come immediately to Jerusalem, I have a good match for you.” When Ruth arrived, she found out that the “match” was actually a secret mission: to smuggle Yossele out of Israel.

  Ruth returned to France, altered her passport, changing the name of her son from Claude to Claudine and his date of birth from 1945 to 1953. She then changed her clothes and her name, becoming Madeleine Ferraille. She flew to Genoa and bought a passage on a ship that sailed to Israel carrying passengers and new immigrants.

  On Genoa’s dock she began to play, as if by chance, with the eight-year-old daughter of a family of immigrants. When the boarding begun and the immigrants were struggling with their packages and suitcases, the charming Madeleine took the little girl by the hand and led her up to the ship’s deck. The Italian immigration officers checked her passport and noted that she had got on board with her little girl. In Israel she repeated the same procedure and the Israeli immigration duly noted that she had come out of the boat with her little daughter.

  A few days later, Madeleine Ferraille boarded a plane at Lod Airport with her “daughter Claudine,” who was none other than Yossele Schuchmacher, wearing a neat girl’s dress and patent-leather pumps.

  Yossele spent almost two years in ultra-Orthodox boarding schools in Switzerland and France. But when the search for Yossele in Israel reached a larger scale, Madeleine showed up at the boarding school in Meaux, where the child was hidden now under the guise of “Menachem, an orphan of Swiss parentage.”

  She dressed him in girl’s clothes once again and flew with him to America. There she was helped by the head of the Satmar sect, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, who directed a milkman named Gertner to take “Yankele” to his home and pass him off as a cousin from Argentina who had come for a long visit.

  The Mossad experts realized that the ultra-Orthodox clandestine network spread all over America and Europe was comparable to the secret organizations of the world’s best intelligence services. And, most of all, they were amazed by Ruth Ben-David. She stuck to the rules of conspiracy: she never had a permanent address, carried all her important papers in her handbag, changed identities as easily as one changes one’s clothes. The lovely Frenchwoman was the Mata Hari of the Orthodox world.

  But while all of Israel was rejoicing over the return of Yossele to his parents, Ruth Ben-David felt broken and vanquished. “I am guilty,” she said to her friends, sobbing. “I betrayed our cause. I can never forgive myself. I had a precious treasure entrusted to me, and I could not keep it.”

  Yet Madeleine Ferraille/Ruth Ben-David—had so admirably demonstrated all the qualities necessary for a secret agent that Isser Harel decided to offer her a job at the Mossad. But he was too late. Ruth returned to Jerusalem and vanished in the ultra-Orthodox world; three years later, she married Rabbi Amram Blau, the seventy-two-year-old head of the most fanatical of all sects, Neturei Karta.

  Isser Harel and Yossele Schuchmacher met only nine years later, when one of the authors of this book threw a party in Isser’s honor and invited Yossele. Yossele—now a private first class in a tank div
ision—shook hands with Isser and declared: “I am deeply touched. Isser Harel has been the most important person in my life. Without him I would not be here among you.”

  Chapter Eight

  A Nazi Hero at the Service of the Mossad

  On a stifling hot day in August 1963, two men entered the offices of an engineering company in Madrid and asked to meet the owner, an Austrian by the name of Otto Skorzeny. They introduced themselves to Skorzeny as NATO intelligence officers and told him they had come on the recommendation of his estranged wife. They had for him an offer he couldn’t refuse . . .

  Very soon, the respectable businessman realized that his visitors knew all about him and his past. During World War II, SS officer Skorzeny had been one of the great heroes—if not the greatest—of Nazi Germany. A tall, charismatic athlete, his face scarred in a fencing duel, he had become a daredevil commando officer who carried out spectacular operations. On September 12, 1943, he had landed, with a paratrooper battalion carried by gliders, on top of the Gran Sasso, the highest peak in the Italian Apennines, and stormed the Campo Imperator Hotel, where former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had been jailed by a new, anti-Nazi Italian government. SS Captain Skorzeny rescued Mussolini and brought him to a grateful Hitler, who showered Skorzeny with medals and promotions. In the Battle of the Bulge, in late 1944, Skorzeny—now a Waffen SS colonel—snuck through the front lines with two dozen of his men, dressed as American soldiers, and caused disorder and confusion in the Allied ranks. His operations earned him the reputation of “the most dangerous man in Europe.” Found not guilty at the Dachau trials after the war, he moved to Spain where he enjoyed the protection of Fascist dictator Franco, and established his company.

  His visitors that day in 1963 didn’t waste time on small talk. “We are not exactly from NATO,” one of them admitted in perfect German. “Actually, we belong to the Israeli secret services.” The two men were Rafi Eitan and the head of the Mossad station in Germany, Avraham Ahituv.

  Skorzeny paled. Barely a year ago, the Israelis had hanged Adolf Eichmann. Were they after him now? He had been cleared at the war trials, but some claimed that he had taken part in burning Jewish synagogues during Kristallnacht, in November 1938.

  But the short man sitting in front of him dispelled his fears. “We need your help,” he said. “We know you have good connections in Egypt.” He then proceeded to tell the SS colonel why the Jewish state needed his assistance.

  On July 21, 1962, only two weeks after the triumphant return of Yossele to Israel, Egypt amazed the world by launching four missiles. Two were of the Al-Zafir (The Victor) type, with a range of 175 miles, and two of the Al-Qahir (The Conqueror) type, with a range of 350 miles. The huge missiles, draped in Egypt’s flags, were proudly paraded in the streets of Cairo on Revolution Day, July 23. President Gamal Abdel Nasser boasted to an ecstatic crowd that his missiles were capable of hitting any target “south of Beirut.”

  South of Beirut, Israel’s leaders were seized with astonishment and anxiety. Nasser’s missiles could indeed hit any target in Israel. That came as a complete surprise to Israel, and in the corridors of power angry words were addressed to Isser Harel. While Nasser was building his deadly rockets, the critics said, Little Isser was busy chasing Yossele. While terrible dangers threatened the very existence of the Jewish state, Isser’s best agents were running from one yeshiva to another, disguised as ultra-Orthodox Jews. A worried Ben-Gurion summoned Isser Harel, who promised to get all the information about the Egyptian project as soon as possible. Back at his headquarters, Isser sent his best men on a mission, and activated his moles and informants in Egypt. And indeed, on August 16, less than a month after the launching of the four missiles, he came back to Ben-Gurion with a detailed report.

  The missiles were being built by German scientists, Isser reported.

  In 1959, Nasser had decided to establish a secret arsenal of unconventional weapons. He had appointed General Mahmoud Khalil, a former Air Force Intelligence commander, head of the Bureau for Special Military Programs, to develop these ultrasecret modern weapons—jet fighters, rockets, and missiles, as well as chemical and radioactive substances. The bureau was allotted a huge budget.

  Khalil’s first task was to find the men to make these weapons a reality. And he knew where to look.

  His agents started to recruit hundreds of German experts and scientists, most of whom had been employed in the rocket and aviation research institutes and testing grounds of Nazi Germany. More than three hundred Germans, tempted by high salaries, bonuses, and myriad privileges, clandestinely trickled into Egypt, and helped Nasser build three secret installations.

  The first was Factory 36, where genius aircraft builder Willy Messerschmitt was assembling an Egyptian jet fighter. Messerschmitt was the father of the deadly fighter planes of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi air force, during World War II. Mahmoud Khalil had signed a contract with him on November 29, 1959.

  In the second plant, known by the code 135, an engineer named Ferdinand Brandner was building jet engines for Messerschmitt’s aircraft. Brandner had spent several years in Russia; after his return to Germany, Khalil had got in touch with him with the help of Dr. Eckart, a director of Daimler-Benz.

  But the most secret was Factory 333, hidden in a remote area in the desert. There, Hitler’s former wunderkinds now built Nasser’s wonder weapons, the intermediate-range missiles.

  According to Isser’s sources, the Egyptian project had shifted to high gear in December 1960. That month, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft had photographed a huge building site in Dimona, Israel, that seemed to be a nuclear reactor. The world press announced the discovery with banner headlines; nobody believed Israel’s stilted statements that the structure was a textile factory. Egypt and several other Arab nations issued furious threats against Israel. But threats were not enough, and Egypt hoped to neutralize Israel’s secret nuclear project by developing its own unconventional weapons.

  The head of the German rocket scientists in Egypt was Professor Eugen Sänger, the director of the Institute of Research on Jet Propulsion in Stuttgart. After the war, Sänger had spent a few years in France, where he built the Veronique rocket, a mediocre replica of the German V-2 rocket. He came to Egypt with his assistants—Professor Paul Goerke, an electronics and guidance expert, and Wolfgang Pilz, formerly an engineer at the Peenemünde installation, where the brilliant Wernher von Braun had developed Nazi Germany’s V-2 rockets. Another guidance and control expert closely collaborating with his colleagues in Egypt was Dr. Hans Kleinwachter, whose lab for developing missile guidance systems was in the picturesque German city of Lorrach, close to the Swiss border. The chemistry department was headed by Dr. Ermin Dadieu, a former SS officer. The Germans and the Egyptians established several front companies—“Intra,” “Intra-Handel,” “Patwag,” and “Linda”—that purchased parts and materials for the missile project. The administrative director of “Intra-Handel” was Dr. Heinz Krug, who also managed the Institute for Jet Propulsion in Stuttgart. Hassan Kamil, an Egyptian millionaire living in Switzerland, was also enlisted as a façade and liaison man. With his help, the Egyptians established two dummy companies in Switzerland, MECO (Mechanical Corporation) and MTP (Motors, Turbines, and Pumps), whose task was to acquire basic materials, electrical apparatuses, and precision tools; they also recruited specialists and experts. The three directors of these companies were Messerschmitt, Brandner, and Kamil.

  In 1961, Sänger and many hundreds of engineers, technicians, and local Egyptian employees had started building the Egyptian missiles. But at the end of that year, the German government discovered the secret connection between the Egyptian project and the Institute for Jet Propulsion in Stuttgart. The German authorities forced Sänger to resign, return to Germany, and cease all activity. Professor Pilz succeeded him as head of the Egyptian project.

  By July 1962, Factory 333 produced thirty missiles. Four of them were launched with great fanfare before a select crowd of government g
uests and journalists; twenty others (some of them dummies), draped with the Egyptian flag, were paraded through Cairo’s streets.

  When Isser Harel came to Ben-Gurion in August, he produced a letter from Pilz to Kamil Azzab, the Egyptian director of 333, which Rafi Eitan and his men had succeeded in copying. It was a request for 3,700,000 Swiss francs for machine parts and other equipment needed for building five hundred missiles of Type 2 and four hundred missiles of Type 5.

  Nine hundred missiles! Isser’s report caused deep anxiety in the defense community. The Israeli experts were certain that the Egyptians had no intention of loading the missiles’ warheads with conventional explosives; they wouldn’t have spent millions of dollars building them merely for the missiles to carry a half-ton of dynamite. A bomber could do that with more precision. It was clear that Egypt would load the warheads with atomic bombs or some other substance forbidden by international law, such as poison gas, bacterial cultures, or deadly radioactive waste.

  According to Isser, the German scientists were working on a devious plan to destroy Israel: they were developing doomsday weapons, huge missiles, radioactive warheads that could “kill any living thing” and poison the air in Israel for many years; they were even working on death rays and other kinds of hellish contraptions.

  “We took them too seriously,” General Zvi Zur, the chief of staff at the time, admitted later. “Our scientists were amateurs and didn’t know how to handle the information.” Still, the Israelis discovered the Achilles’ heel of the Egyptian project—the Germans hadn’t succeeded yet in developing a proper guidance system to direct the missiles to their targets. As long as that obstacle wasn’t overcome, the missiles couldn’t be used.

  Isser Harel was no longer the same man his people knew and admired. Since Eichmann’s capture, he had undergone a profound change. This coolheaded man, who was known for his nerves of steel, now regarded Germany as the eternal enemy of Israel and the Jewish people. He staunchly believed that the current German government was supporting the scientists in Egypt and secretly helping them in their efforts to destroy Israel. The ramsad asked Ben-Gurion to alert Germany’s chancellor Konrad Adenauer and demand that he act immediately to stop the scientists’ activities. Ben-Gurion refused. Quite recently, Germany had given Israel a huge loan of $500 million to develop the Negev desert; Ben-Gurion and Adenauer had established personal relations of trust and mutual respect; Adenauer and his minister of defense Franz Josef Strauss supplied Israel with huge quantities of modern weapons worth hundreds of millions of dollars—tanks, cannons, helicopters, aircraft—all of this for free, in a secret effort to atone for the Holocaust and Germany’s crimes against the Jewish people. Ben-Gurion trusted the current German government, and didn’t want to jeopardize Israel’s relations with it by hurling accusations and demands to intervene in the Egyptian crisis. He instructed Deputy Minister of Defense Shimon Peres to write a personal letter to Strauss and discreetly ask for his help.