Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  Worse, the German scientists developing the Egyptian missiles that could destroy Israel weren’t obscure technicians. They were some of the Nazi regime’s most senior engineers, men who’d worked during the war at the research base at Peenemünde, a peninsula on the Baltic coast where the Third Reich’s most advanced weaponry was developed. They helped build the V-1—the flying bomb that terrorized England—and the V-2 ballistic missile, which the Germans had used to destroy huge sections of Antwerp and London and which served as the prototype for today’s long-range surface-to-surface missiles.

  “I felt helpless,” said Asher Ben-Natan, the director general of the Defense Ministry, “as if the sky were falling on our heads. Ben-Gurion again and again spoke of the nightmare that kept him awake at night—that he, the first prime minister, had brought the surviving Jews of Europe to the State of Israel, only for them here, in their own country, to undergo a second Holocaust.”

  The Mossad itself, in a top-secret internal inquiry into the affair conducted in 1982, summed it up like this: “It was one of the most important and traumatic events in the history of the Israeli intelligence community, of the type that leads to a chain reaction that engenders extreme actions.”

  And indeed, the reactions were extreme.

  —

  HAREL PLACED THE ENTIRE Mossad on emergency footing. An atmosphere of crisis swept through every corridor of the agency, reflected in the internal cables of those months. “We are interested in obtaining [intelligence] material, whatever may happen,” the HQ in Tel Aviv cabled Mossad stations in Europe in August 1962. “If a German turns up who knows something about this and is not prepared to cooperate, we are ready to take him by force and to get him to talk. Please take note of this because we must get information at any cost.”

  Mossad operatives immediately began breaking into Egyptian diplomatic embassies and consulates in several European capitals to photograph documents. They were also able to recruit a Swiss employee at the Zurich office of EgyptAir—a company that occasionally served as cover for Nasser’s intelligence agencies. The Swiss employee allowed Mossad operatives to take the mailbags at night, twice a week, to a safe house. They were opened, their contents were photocopied, and then they were closed again by experts who left no sign they’d been tampered with, then returned to the airline office. After a relatively short period, the Mossad had a preliminary understanding of the Egyptian missile project and its heads.

  The project had been initiated by two internationally known scientists, Dr. Eugen Sänger and Wolfgang Pilz. During the war, they had played key roles at Peenemünde Army Research Center. In 1954, they joined the Research Institute of Jet Propulsion Physics, in Stuttgart. Sänger headed this prestigious body. Pilz and two other veteran Wehrmacht specialists, Dr. Paul Goercke and Dr. Hans Krug, were heads of departments. But this group, feeling underemployed and underutilized in postwar Germany, approached the Egyptian regime in 1959 and offered to recruit and lead a group of scientists to develop long-range surface-to-surface rockets. Nasser readily agreed and appointed one of his closest military advisers, General ’Isam al-Din Mahmoud Khalil, former director of air force intelligence and the chief of the Egyptian Army’s R&D, to coordinate the program. Khalil set up a compartmentalized system, separate from the rest of the Egyptian Army, for the German scientists, who first arrived in Egypt for a visit in April 1960.

  In late 1961, Sänger, Pilz, and Goercke relocated to Egypt and recruited about thirty-five highly experienced German scientists and technicians to join them. The facilities in Egypt contained test fields, laboratories, and luxurious living quarters for the German expats, who enjoyed excellent conditions and huge salaries. Krug, however, remained in Germany, where he set up a company called Intra Commercial, which was in fact the group’s European front.

  Almost as soon as the Mossad had gained a basic grasp of the situation, however, more bad news arrived. On August 16, 1962, a grave-faced Isser Harel came to see Ben-Gurion, bringing with him a document from the Egyptian intelligence mailbags that had been photocopied two days before in Zurich.

  The Israelis were in shock. The document was an order written in 1962 by Pilz, to the project managers in Egypt, and it included itemization of the materials that needed to be acquired in Europe for the manufacture of nine hundred missiles. This was an enormous number. After its interception, according to a Mossad internal report, the organization was hit by “an atmosphere of near panic.” Worse still, the document raised the fear among Israeli experts that the Egyptians’ true aim was to arm the missiles with radioactive and chemical warheads.

  Ben-Gurion summoned urgent conferences at the highest level.

  Harel had a plan, of sorts.

  The intelligence collected so far by the Mossad revealed an Achilles’ heel in the missile project: The guidance systems were lagging so far behind as to be borderline nonfunctional, which meant that the missiles could not go into mass production. As long as this was the case, Egypt would need the German scientists. Without them, the project would collapse. Harel’s plan, then, was to kidnap or to eliminate the Germans.

  Toward the end of August, Harel went to Europe to put his plan into action. The weather was turning cold, heralding the coldest winter the area had known in many years. After all efforts to locate Pilz had failed, Harel decided to act against Krug.

  On Monday, September 10, at 5:30 P.M., a man who introduced himself as Saleh Qaher phoned Krug’s home in Munich. He said he was speaking on behalf of Colonel Said Nadim, chief aide to General Mahmoud Khalil, and that Nadim had to meet Krug “right away, on an important matter.” Saleh added, in the friendliest of tones, that Nadim, whom Krug knew well, sent his regards and was waiting for Krug at the Ambassador Hotel in Munich. The matter at hand, Saleh said, was a deal that would make a tidy profit for Krug. It was impossible to discuss it at the Intra office because of its special nature.

  Krug didn’t see this as unusual, and he accepted the invitation. Saleh was none other than an old Mossad hand, Oded. Born in Iraq, he had been active in the Zionist underground there, fleeing the country in 1949 after almost being caught. He’d gone to regular schools in Baghdad, with Muslims, and could easily pass for an Arab. For years, he served the Mossad in an operational capacity against Arab targets.

  Krug met Oded in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. “We, Colonel Nadim and I, need you for an important job,” he said.

  The next day, Oded went to the Intra offices to pick Krug up and take him to meet Nadim at a villa outside the city. “I came in a taxi, and Krug was happy to see me and introduced me to the company’s employees. He never suspected for a moment that I wasn’t who I said I was. There was good chemistry between us. In the Mercedes, on the way to the address I’d given him, I flattered Krug and told him how we, in Egyptian intelligence, appreciate his services and contribution. He spoke mainly about the new Mercedes he just bought.”

  The two arrived at the house where Krug believed Nadim was waiting for him. They got out of the car. A woman opened the front door, and Krug went in. Oded was behind him, and the door closed, with Oded, as planned, remaining outside.

  Three other operatives were waiting inside the room. They stunned Krug with a few blows, gagged him, and tied him up. When he came to, he was examined by a French Jewish doctor recruited by the team. He thought Krug was suffering from slight shock and therefore recommended not giving him sedation shots. A German-speaking Mossad operative told him, “You are a prisoner. Do exactly what we say or we’ll finish you off.” Krug promised to obey, and he was placed in a secret compartment built into one of the vehicles, a Volkswagen camper, and the whole squad, including Isser Harel himself, who was present throughout, set out for the French border in that car and two others. On the way they stopped in a forest, and Harel told Krug that they were about to cross the border and that if he made a sound, the driver of the car would activate a mechanism that would pump a lethal amount
of poison gas into the compartment.

  When they reached Marseille, a heavily sedated Krug was placed on an El Al plane flying Jewish North African immigrants to Israel. The Mossad handlers told the French authorities he was a sick immigrant.

  At the same time, the Mossad launched a wide-ranging disinformation operation, with a man resembling Krug and carrying documents in his name traveling around South America, leaving a paper trail that indicated Krug had simply grabbed the money and run away from Egypt and his collaborators. Simultaneously, the Mossad leaked disinformation to the media saying that Krug had quarreled with General Khalil and his people and had apparently been abducted and murdered by them.

  In Israel, Krug was imprisoned in a secret Mossad installation and subjected to harsh interrogation. At first he remained silent, but soon he began cooperating, and over the course of several months he “yielded much fruit,” according to a Mossad report. “The man had a good memory and he knew all of the organizational-administrative details of the missile project.” The documents that were in his briefcase were also useful. The report concluded, “This data made it possible to build up an intelligence encyclopedia.”

  Krug even volunteered to go back to Munich and work as a Mossad agent there. Eventually, though, after it seemed to the interrogators that Krug had told them everything he knew, the Mossad pondered what to do with him. It was clear that complying with his offer to go back to Munich would be very dangerous—Krug could betray his new controllers, go to the police, and tell them how the Israelis had abducted a German citizen on German soil. Harel chose the easier way out. He ordered S.G., one of his men, to take Krug to a deserted spot north of Tel Aviv and shoot him. An air force plane picked the body up and dumped it into the sea.

  The success of the Krug operation spurred Ben-Gurion to give a green light to more and more targeted killing operations. He approved the use of Military Intelligence (AMAN) Unit 188, a secret operational outfit that put Israeli soldiers under false cover deep inside enemy countries. The unit’s command was located in the Sarona compound in Tel Aviv, not far from Ben-Gurion’s office, and it had a training facility on the beach in north Tel Aviv, adjoining Natan Rotberg’s special demolitions lab.

  Isser Harel resented Unit 188. Since the mid-1950s he had been trying to persuade Ben-Gurion to transfer it to the Mossad, or at least to put him in charge of it, but with the army vehemently opposed, Ben-Gurion turned him down.

  The head of AMAN, Major General Meir Amit, didn’t believe that the German scientists were as grave a threat to Israel as Harel did. However, because of the interorganizational rivalry with the Mossad, he demanded that his Unit 188 be permitted to act against them, because, as he put it, “We must not ignore it. We must nip this matter in the bud.” Thus, intense competition over who would kill more Germans began between Unit 188 and the Mossad.

  During that time, 188 had a veteran operative under deep cover in Egypt. Wolfgang Lotz was the perfect mole—the son of a gentile father and a Jewish mother, he was uncircumcised and looked like a typical German. He built up a cover story as a former Wehrmacht officer in Rommel’s Afrika Korps who had become a horse breeder and returned to Egypt to start a stud farm.

  Within a short time, Lotz, a gifted actor, had become an integral part of the growing German social circle in Cairo. He supplied 188 with many details about the missile projects and its personnel. He could not, however, take it upon himself to eliminate them in actions that would require his direct participation, for fear that he would be exposed. The head of Unit 188, Yosef Yariv, reached the conclusion that the best way to do away with the German scientists would be to use letter and parcel bombs.

  Yariv ordered Natan Rotberg to start preparing the bombs. As it happened, Rotberg was working on a new type of explosive: thin, flexible Detasheet, “sheets of explosive material, developed for civilian purposes, which were meant to fuse two pieces of steel when they went off” and would allow him to make more compact charges. “We had to develop a system that could be kept unarmed and safe during all the shuffling that a letter goes through in the mail system, and then go off at the right time,” Rotberg explained. “The envelope’s mechanism thus worked in such a way that the bomb was armed not when it was opened, which would make the whole thing very explosive, but only when the contents were drawn out.” The R&D was done in collaboration with French intelligence, in exchange for information conveyed by Lotz about the activities of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) underground in Cairo. Unit 188 also helped the French smuggle explosives into Cairo to be used in assassinating FLN members there.

  The first target to be sent one of the new letter bombs was Alois Brunner, an absconded Nazi war criminal who had been a deputy of Adolph Eichmann and served as commander of a concentration camp in France, sending 130,000 Jews to their deaths. Unit 188 located him in Damascus, where he’d been living for eight years under an assumed name. The Arab countries gave asylum to more than a few Nazi war criminals, and in exchange they received various services. Brunner helped train the interrogation and torture units of the Syrian secret services.

  He was found with the help of Eli Cohen, one of the unit’s top agents, who was active inside the higher echelons of the Syrian defense establishment. After Ben-Gurion gave his approval for the elimination of Brunner, Yariv decided to try out one of Rotberg’s Detasheet devices on the Nazi. “We sent him a little gift,” said Rotberg.

  On September 13, 1962, Brunner received a large envelope in Damascus. It exploded after he opened it. He suffered severe facial injuries and lost his left eye, but survived.

  Still, encouraged by having gotten the bomb delivered to the target, Unit 188 was eager to use the same method against the German scientists. The Mossad objected. As Rafi Eitan explained, “I oppose any action that I don’t control. The mailman can open the envelope, a child can open the envelope. Who does things like that?”

  And getting to the Germans in Egypt turned out to be a very complicated matter, because they didn’t receive their mail directly. Egyptian intelligence collected all of the mail for the project and its personnel at the offices of EgyptAir, where it was then sent on to Cairo. Thus, it was decided to break into the airline office during the night and place the envelopes into the mailbags.

  Using a new method for opening locks with a sophisticated master key developed in the Mossad’s workshops, Mossad operatives who were assisting Unit 188 gained entry to the Frankfurt offices of EgyptAir on November 16.

  The break-in specialist was half-hidden behind a woman operative as they leaned together against the door like a couple of lovers. The team entered the office but failed to find the mailbag. The next day, they tried again. While they were busy with the door, the janitor made an appearance, totally inebriated. There were no women with the team this time, so two of the men pretended to be homosexuals making out, and they managed to escape without arousing the suspicion of the drunken janitor. The next night, another attempt was made, and this time it went smoothly. The pouch of mail to be sent to Egypt was on one of the desks. The team inserted the booby-trapped envelopes into the bags.

  Pilz had been selected as the prime target. The intelligence gathered about him indicated that he was divorcing his wife so he could wed his secretary, Hannelore Wende. The wife lived in Berlin, but she had hired a lawyer from Hamburg. The letter bomb targeting Pilz was thus designed to look as if it had come from that lawyer, with his logo and address appearing on the back. “The planners of the project assumed that such a personal item of mail wouldn’t be opened by Wende, and that she would give it to Pilz himself,” said the final report on the operation.

  But the planners were wrong. Wende, who received the letter on November 27, presumably thought that it concerned her life as much as Pilz’s. She opened it and it exploded in her hands, blowing off some of her fingers, blinding her in one eye, damaging the other, and blowing some of her teeth out of her gums. The Egy
ptian authorities immediately realized what was going on and located the other booby-trapped mail items with X-ray machines, then handed them over to be defused and probed by specialists from Soviet intelligence in Cairo. The Cairo blasts frightened the scientists and their families but didn’t make any of them give up their cushy, well-paid jobs. Instead, Egyptian intelligence hired the services of an expert German security officer, a former SS man by the name of Hermann Adolf Vallentin. He visited the Intra offices and the project’s various suppliers, advising them on security precautions, on replacing the locks on their doors, and on securing their mail deliveries. He also began probing the backgrounds of certain employees.

  The next target on Harel’s hit list was Dr. Hans Kleinwächter and his laboratory in the town of Lorch, which had been hired to develop a guidance system for the missiles. Harel sent the Birds (Tziporim)—the Shin Bet’s operational unit, which was also used by the Mossad—to Europe with orders to start planning Operation Hedgehog against Kleinwächter. Harel’s orders were straightforward: “Kleinwächter is to be abducted and brought to Israel, or if that doesn’t work, kill him.”

  Harel himself set up his headquarters in the French city of Mulhouse, to his increasing chagrin.

  Birds commander Rafi Eitan recalls: “It’s the middle of the winter, horrible snow, bone-chilling cold, twenty-something degrees below zero outside. Isser is furious, sitting in some boarding house in France, beyond the Rhine. He shows me some pictures and says, ‘This is the target—go kill him.’ ”

  The Birds operatives were exhausted after the innumerable operations connected with the German scientists that they had been assigned to in the previous months and the support they had been giving to Unit 188. Eventually Eitan told Harel that in his opinion the circumstances were not ripe for a targeted killing. “We needed to wait a bit and create a trap of our own, not just shoot people in the street. ‘Give me a month,’ I told him. ‘I’ll carry out the mission and no one will know that I was even here.’ ”