Kunzle flew to Montevideo, and a few days later, Cukurs joined him. But the Latvian’s suspicions had not faded away; he had brought his camera. As he came out of the plane in Montevideo airport, he saw Kunzle, who was waiting for him. Cukurs took out his camera and snapped several photos of Kunzle, catching him by surprise. His friend, his partner, and his funder had become in Cukurs’s eyes the major suspect in a plot to assassinate him.
In the meantime, Kunzle had rented a big American car. He was quite embarrassed by its color—shocking pink—but that was the only car available at the rental agency. He also had reserved rooms for both of them in the best hotel in town, the Victoria Plaza. They spent a few days in Montevideo, looking for a building that could serve as headquarters for Kunzle’s company. They didn’t find a place, but enjoyed a dreamlike vacation. Again, Kunzle invited Cukurs to the best restaurants, took him to nightclubs, on sightseeing tours, to the casino, where he shared his winnings with his guest. Cukurs was delighted. Finally they parted, and Kunzle left for Europe, after promising Cukurs he would be back in a few months to continue developing their project. Cukurs went back to São Paulo, but told his wife that in Montevideo somebody had been following him, so now he had to stay alert and be ready to defend himself.
In Paris, Kunzle again met Yariv and his friends, and they immediately started to prepare the operation. It was decided that Cukurs would be executed in Montevideo, for a few reasons: in Brazil, Cukurs was protected by the local police, and that could create some problems; in Brazil, the large Jewish community was vulnerable to attacks by neo-Nazis or Germans seeking revenge; and finally, Brazil still had the death penalty, and if a hit team was caught and tried, they could be killed.
The hit team consisted of five agents and was headed by Yoske Yariv himself. One of the agents was Ze’ev Amit (Slutzky), a cousin of the ramsad, Meir Amit; the other members were Kunzle, Arye Cohen (not his real name), and Eliezer Sudit (Sharon), who also got an Austrian passport in the name of Oswald Taussig.
The team members arrived in Montevideo in February 1965. Oswald Taussig rented a green Volkswagen; he also rented a small house, the Casa Cubertini, on Cartagena Street, in the Carrasco neighborhood. At the last moment, Yariv charged him with a chilling task: to buy a large trunk, like the travel trunks that were used in the nineteenth century. The trunk would be used as a makeshift coffin for the Nazi’s body when the operation was over.
Kunzle invited Cukurs to Montevideo again.
On February 15, 1965, Cukurs went to police headquarters and was received by an officer, Alcido Cintra Bueno Filho. “I am a businessman,” the Latvian said. “For several years I’ve been under the protection of the Brazilian police, because I have good reason to fear for my life. Now a European business partner is asking me to travel to Montevideo to meet him. What do you think, can I travel to Uruguay? Isn’t it risky?”
“Don’t go!” the officer firmly said. “Here you live in peace because we protect you. But don’t forget—the moment you leave Brazil, you aren’t protected anymore. You expose yourself to your enemies. And if you’ve got enemies, I assume that they haven’t forgotten you.”
Cukurs thought awhile, seemed to hesitate, but finally got up and said: “I was always a brave man. I am not afraid. I know how to defend my life. I always carry a gun. And believe me—in spite of all the years that have passed, I am still a fine shot.”
Kunzle met Cukurs in Montevideo on February 23. The trap was set. Kunzle drove Cukurs in a rented black Volkswagen toward the Casa Cubertini, where the hit team was waiting. On the way, they stopped several times “to check” some other houses that could serve as an office for the company. Finally, they reached the Casa Cubertini. They saw some men at work, repairing the neighboring house. Taussig’s green car, also a Volkswagen, was parked by the house. Kunzle turned off the engine, got out of the car, and walked purposefully toward the door. Cukurs followed him. Kunzle opened the door and saw a terrifying sight: in the dark house, the members of the hit team stood by the walls, wearing only their drawers. They knew they couldn’t overcome Cukurs without a bloody fight, and had undressed so their clothes wouldn’t be soiled by his blood. There was something appalling in that sight of a group of people in drawers, waiting in the dark for their victim.
Kunzle moved aside and Cukurs entered the house. As soon as he stepped in, Kunzle slammed the door behind him. Three men leaped on Cukurs. Ze’ev Amit tried to grab him by the throat, as he had been trained in Paris. The others jumped him from both sides.
The Latvian fought back. He succeeded in shaking off his attackers and made for the door. He yanked the door handle, then tried to draw the gun he was carrying in his pocket, while shouting in German: “Lassen Sie Mich sprechen!” (“Let me speak!”)
During the fight, Yariv tried to cover Cukurs’s mouth with his hand, to prevent him from shouting. Cukurs fiercely bit his hand and almost tore off one of Yariv’s fingers. Yariv cried in pain. At that moment, Amit grabbed a heavy construction hammer and landed a blow on Cukurs’s head. Blood spurted from the wound. The bodies of the attackers and their victim turned into a convulsing heap on the floor, while Cukurs desperately tried to draw his gun. It was a matter of seconds. Arye pressed his gun to Cukurs’s head and fired twice. The silencer muffled the sound of the shots.
Cukurs’s body collapsed. His blood flowed on his clothes and the floor tiles. The hit team members were covered with blood.
Oswald Taussig hurried to the yard and turned on the main water pipe. His friends washed the blood off their bodies, then cleaned the floor and the walls; yet some large bloodstains remained on the house tiles.
One of the members of the hit team claimed afterward that their intention had been to capture Cukurs alive and make him stand for an improvised court-martial before executing him. But flawed planning or a gross underestimation of the Latvian’s physical strength turned the mission into a repulsive bloodbath that was unplanned and unnecessary. The Mossad agent had rented the house on Cartagena Street at the very last moment; the travel trunk was bought at the last moment as well. Instead of jumping their victim in their drawers, the Mossad agents could have shot him right away. But, as some of the hit team members told us, the mission was accomplished.
The agents placed Cukurs’s body in the trunk, to make the police believe that they intended to abduct him and smuggle him out of Uruguay. Then they left a typewritten letter in English on the body, which had been prepared beforehand: “Considering the gravity of the crimes of which Herberts Cukurs was accused, notably his personal responsibility in the murder of thirty thousand men, women, and children, and considering the terrible cruelty shown by Herberts Cukurs in carrying out his crimes, we condemned the said Cukurs to death. The accused was executed on February 23, 1965, by ‘those who will never forget.’ ”
The team left the building and departed in the two rented Volkswagens. In the neighboring house, the workmen kept pounding and hammering; they had not heard a thing. Yariv suffered terrible pain in his hand; till his death, he wouldn’t be able to properly use one of his fingers. Taussig and Kunzle returned the cars and left their hotels; the entire team left Montevideo and went back by complex routes to Europe and to Israel. Ze’ev Amit returned to Paris “wounded in his body and hurt in his soul.” Terrible nightmares haunted him for many months and he couldn’t overcome his shock and pain.
When all the hit team members had left Latin America, a Mossad agent called the news agencies in Germany and reported the execution of a Nazi criminal in Montevideo by “those who will never forget.”
The reporters who got the message discarded it right away, believing it was a prank. Seeing that nothing happened, the Mossad agents prepared a much more detailed and credible message and dispatched it to the news agencies and to a reporter in a Montevideo newspaper, who alerted the police. On March 8, more than ten days after Cukurs was killed, the police finally arrived at Casa Cubertini.
The next day, the world press announced, in banner headli
nes, the discovery of Cukurs’s body in an empty house in Montevideo. In the media reports, two names were singled out as suspects in the killing: Anton Kunzle and Oswald Taussig. A few days later, a Rio de Janeiro weekly published a huge photo of Anton Kunzle that had been taken by Cukurs. The magazine called Kunzle “the smiling Austrian.” The photo was reproduced on the front page of the Israel newspaper Maariv. Some friends of the Mossad agent immediately identified Anton Kunzle.
After a few more days, a letter arrived to Cukurs’s house. It was a rather poor effort by Anton Kunzle to cover his tracks.
My dear Herberts,
With God’s help and that of some of our compatriots, I have safely reached Chile. I am now resting after a tiring journey, and I am sure that you, too, will very soon be back home. Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that we were followed by two people, a man and a woman. We must be very careful and take every precaution. As I’ve always said, you are running a great risk in working and traveling under your own name. It could be disastrous for us, and also lead to my real identity being discovered.
So I hope that the complications in Uruguay have taught you a lesson for the future, and that you’ll be more prudent now. If you notice anything suspicious in or around your house, remember the advice I gave you: go and hide among Von Leeds’s men (a Nazi leader who had escaped to Cairo with a group of German exiles) for a year or two, until the question of an amnesty is settled.
When you get this letter, reply to the address you know of, in Santiago, Chile.
Yours, Anton K.
The letter, of course, did not fool anybody. Cukurs’s wife, Milda, was adamant: Kunzle was the murderer.
Most of the participants in the Cukurs killing are dead. Ze’ev Amit, whom the authors of this book knew well, was killed in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Their mission paid off. The parliaments of Germany and Austria rejected the statute of limitation on the Nazi crimes.
Years later, former ramsad Isser Harel called one of the authors of this book and told him that a good friend of his wanted to meet. He didn’t give any details, just an address in North Tel Aviv. The author found there a neat little house. A sturdy, bald man wearing glasses opened the door. The author recognized him right away.
He said to the man: “Guten Abend, Herr Kunzle.”
Chapter Twelve
The Quest for the Red Prince
On September 5, 1972, at four thirty A.M., eight armed terrorists wearing ski masks broke into the apartment of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics. They killed Moshe Weinberg, the coach of the wrestling team, who tried to bar their way, and Joe Romano, a weight-lifting champion. A few athletes, awakened by the shouts and the gunfire, escaped by jumping out the windows; nine were taken hostage by the terrorists.
The German police arrived, followed by reporters, photographers, and television crews that covered the drama unfolding in the Olympic Village. For the first time in history, the whole world watched a murderous terrorist attack in live broadcast on its television screens. So, too, did Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, who was awakened by her military adjutant. Golda felt trapped: the attack happened in a friendly country and the responsibility for rescuing the hostages fell on Germany’s shoulders. The authorities of the State of Bavaria, where the attack had occurred, politely rejected Israel’s suggestion to send over Sayeret Matkal, the best Israeli commando unit. You have nothing to worry about, the Germans said to the Israeli representatives, we shall free all the hostages. But Germany lacked the experience, the creativity, and the courage to face a deadly, cunning terrorist organization. After an exhausting negotiation between the terrorists and the German authorities, which lasted a whole day, the terrorists and the hostages were driven to Fürstenfeldbruck Airport, outside Munich. There, the Germans had promised the terrorists, they would board a plane that would take them to the destination of their choice. But the police actually had laid a childish and amateurish trap at the airport. They had hauled an empty and unmanned Lufthansa aircraft to the center of the airport. Incompetent sharpshooters had been placed on the roofs. The terrorists’ leader came to inspect the plane. That plane, with no air crew, its engines cold, was going to take off in a few minutes? The terrorists right away realized they were being deceived; they opened fire and threw hand grenades. During the ensuing shoot-out with the police, they murdered all the hostages. A German police officer was also killed, as well as five of the eight terrorists (the other three would be captured, but released shortly afterward, following the hijacking of a Lufthansa aircraft by the terrorist organization). Israeli general Zvi Zamir, who had recently replaced Meir Amit as ramsad, helplessly watched the bloody drama from the control tower. He had been sent to Munich by Prime Minister Golda Meir, but had no right to interfere with the German operation. His hosts kept assuring him that their plan was excellent, and he just had to watch and see. What the ramsad saw was the massacre of the Israeli athletes. He now realized that Israel had a new enemy: a terrorist organization that called itself “Black September.”
Black September. That was how the Palestinian terrorists had renamed September 1970, the month when King Hussein of Jordan had massacred thousands of them in his kingdom. In the years that had passed since the 1967 Six-Day War, the terrorists gradually had gained control over large chunks of Jordanian territory and many neighborhoods in the capital, Amman; towns and villages along the Israeli border became their exclusive bases and they would wander in their streets with their weapons. They rejected King Hussein’s authority and step by step had become the real masters of Jordan. The king knew this—but didn’t do anything. In one of his visits to an army camp, he saw a brassiere flying like a flag from a tank antenna. “What’s this?” he angrily inquired.
“This means that we are women,” the male tank commander replied. “You don’t let us fight.”
Finally, Hussein could take that no more. He could not continue burying his head in the sand like an ostrich while his kingdom was slipping through his fingers. On September 17, 1970, the king unleashed his army against the terrorist bases and camps. It was a terrible massacre. Terrorists were shot in the streets, hunted, captured, and executed without trial. Some of them found shelter in the Palestinian refugee camps, but the Jordanian artillery shelled the camps without a shadow of remorse, killing thousands. Scores of panicked terrorists crossed the Jordan River and surrendered to the Israeli Army. They preferred to rot in Israeli prisons than die by Jordanian guns. During the massacre, most of the surviving terrorists escaped to Syria and Lebanon. Until this very day, the number of dead terrorists in Black September remains unknown; the figures are between two thousand and seven thousand people.
Yasser Arafat, chief of Fatah, the major Palestinian terrorist organization, became obsessed with revenge. He created, inside the Fatah, a secret inner organization, an underground within an underground. The regular Fatah members and commanders didn’t even know of its existence. He called it “Black September.” This organization did not comply with the “respectable” lines of conduct that Arafat now tried to impose on his group in order to achieve international recognition and sympathy. It was to be a cruel, unrestrained group that would attack the “enemies of the Palestinian people” in every possible way, without mercy. Formally, Black September did not exist, and Arafat would deny any connection to it, but secretly he was its creator and leader. He appointed Abu Yussef, one of the senior Fatah commanders, as the head of Black September; as chief of operations, he selected Ali Hassan Salameh, a young man with fanatic views but no less brave or smart. Ali was the son of Hassan Salameh, who had been the last supreme commander of the Palestinian forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Hassan Salameh had been killed in battle, and his son Ali had vowed to continue his father’s struggle.
Black September’s first operations didn’t worry Israel too much, as they were mostly directed against Jordan. The terrorists bombed the Rome offices of the Jordanian national airline; attacked the Jordanian embassy in Paris with Molot
ov cocktails; hijacked a Jordanian airliner to Libya; sabotaged the Jordanian embassy in Berne, an electronics plant in Germany, and oil reservoirs in Hamburg and Rotterdam; in the cellar of a house in Bonn, they murdered five Jordanian secret agents. In their most appalling operation, they murdered former Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Al-Tal in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton. One of the assassins crouched over the body and lapped his victim’s blood.
With Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the terrorists now took upon themselves to continue the war against the Jewish state. They hijacked aircraft, crossed Israel’s borders, and assassinated civilians, planted bombs and explosive charges in the big cities. The Shabak and the Mossad had to fight a new enemy now, penetrate the terrorist organizations, foil their plans, and arrest their activists. Fatah was the major organization Israel had to confront now; Black September was not.
But Black September soon crossed the limits it had originally set to its activities and started acting against Western nations—first and foremost, against Israel.
The Munich massacre was their first, bloody assault.
And that was how Ali Hassan Salameh earned his nickname. He was the brains behind the Munich operation. The rumors about his obsession with killing and blood spread among the terrorists, and they started calling Hassan Salameh’s son the “Red Prince.”
In early October 1972, two retired generals asked to meet with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who had replaced Levi Eshkol after his sudden death in 1969. They were the new ramsad, Zvi Zamir, and the prime minister’s adviser on counterterrorism, former Aman chief Aharon Yariv.
Golda Meir had been utterly traumatized by “Munich night,” when the Israeli athletes had been murdered. “Once again, bound and tied Jews are being murdered on German soil,” she had said. Golda was a strong, tough woman; it was clear that she wouldn’t let the Munich massacre go without punishment.
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