Roger Howard - Operation Damocles: Israels Secret War Against Hitlers Scientists, 1951-1967

OPERATION DAMOCLES

ISRAELS SECRET WAR AGAINST

HITLERS SCIENTISTS, 19151967

ROGER HOWARD

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

CHAPTER ONE

Striking the Sword

D uring the bitterly cold night of February 12, 1963, three men sat huddled in their car, parked just off a main street, and waited patiently and silently for any sign of movement in the building opposite. They had started their vigil in the late afternoon, and each freezing minute of the long subsequent hours had been one of extreme discomfort as well as unrelenting tedium and considerable tension. But any minute now, they kept telling themselves, their elusive prey would finally break cover and they could spring into action.

All three men were specially trained to deal with such demanding situations, and highly experienced at doing so. For all were agents of the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad, and each had been handpicked by the organizations European operations chief, Yitzhak Shamir, to undertake the most audacious and risky type of overseas operationthe assassination of a foreign national.

Their target was a forty-eight-year-old German scientist named Dr. Hans Kleinwachter. He had arrived back in West Germany from Egypt shortly before and was busy working at his laboratory in his hometown, Loerrach, close to the Swiss border. He expected to return to Egypt just weeks later, though he was blissfully unaware that others, who had been monitoring his movements for some months from afar, had different plans.

That night, though Harel was far away at his desk in Tel Aviv, he knew exactly what his agents were enduring as they waited for the precise moment to strike, and he was eagerly awaiting news of the operation. He had personally accompanied a team of assassins just a few nights earlier, also spending several hours in a stationary car, wrapped in a thick overcoat and a blanket alongside another of Shamirs trained killers, outside Kleinwachters nearby home. That night had ended in disappointment when the German scientist had failed to appear; but now, at last, Harel thought Kleinwachter was finally in Mossads sights.

Suddenly, around nine oclock, there was a sign of movement as the building plunged into darkness and a figure headed toward the car. After hours of empty waiting, a carefully rehearsed action plan sprang into life.

Instead of following the car, the Mossad agents now headed off ahead of Kleinwachter, knowing exactly which route their prey would be taking to get home. They drove for a few miles and then, just a short distance from his house, they pulled up in a narrow lane and waited. In the distance they could see the front lights of the scientists car, which was moving quite quickly, and just as he came around a corner, they pulled their vehicle in front and braked sharply, forcing him to make an emergency stop.

One of the agents coolly got out of the car and walked toward Kleinwachter, who was stunned and shocked by such drama. Where is the home of Dr. Schenker? the Israeli agent cried out. Without waiting for a response, he suddenly produced a gun with a silencer and opened fire. There was a crash as the bullet shattered the windshield and then got deflected and stuck in the scientists thick woolen muffler. The assassin fired again but his weapon jammed, giving Kleinwachter time to reach for his own revolver, which he kept under the dashboard, as he tried to steady his shaking hands and return fire: a veteran of the Russian front during the Second World War, when he had served as a major in the German Armys Signal Corps, he had become well accustomed to difficult and stressful situations. But the would-be assassin was already running back to the waiting car, which sped off just seconds later. Kleinwachter had narrowly survived, even if from that moment on, he, like all the other scientists who were working on behalf of the Egyptians, could never relax again as long as they continued to involve themselves in a project that Mossad and the Israeli government so strongly disapproved of.

Back home, the shaken scientist was trying hard to calm his nerves when the phone rang. The caller, who spoke in French, did not give his name but had a simple and chilling message. Those who feed on Jews, he stated curtly, choke on them. The mysterious caller then hung up.

Kleinwachter immediately called the police, who later discovered the car abandoned just a few hundred yards from the scene of the attack. Inside, they discovered a passport in the name of the head of the Egyptian secret service, Ali Samir, which the assassins had left in a vain attempt to pin the blame on others. It was a quite unconvincing stratagem, though, because at the time of the attack Samir was in Cairo, where he was being interviewed by a West German journalist. No one who followed the case had any doubt about who was really behind it.

Months before, Harel had implemented a ruthless and daring plan to intimidateor, if necessary, liquidatea number of West German scientists who were deemed to have been instrumental in helping the Egyptian leader, Pres. Gamal Abdel Nasser, to develop long-range missiles that were capable of striking the Jewish state. If the missiles were fitted with ordinary explosives, then the repercussions for Israels security would be serious enough, estimated some of the defense chiefs in Tel Aviv. But if the Egyptians used chemical, radiological, or even nuclear warheads, then the impact of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would of course be calamitous and conceivably even inflict a second Holocaust. By using brute force against Kleinwachter, the Mossad chief hoped to eliminate a key contributor to the missile programthe German scientist was a highly respected electronics expertand also to deter some of the scientists who were either already in Egypt or else contemplating going there. This was the central motive of his campaign, code-named Operation Damocles, which he had initiated the previous summer. There are people who are marked to die, as Harel had commented chillingly.

But the use of such brutal methods was not just a breach of West German domestic law and of international law. It also raised a difficult conundrum for Israels policy makers. For even if, in Israels preferred scenario, the use or threat of violence did succeed in undermining Nassers military program, how could that outcome be balanced against the obvious downside of such an approach? If Mossad was caught carrying out the assassination, or even if it simply got the blame, then wouldnt Israels relations with West Germany, and perhaps much of the wider Western world, be gravely imperiled? Israel was notoriously indifferent to international law and to the United Nations, but could it risk acquiring a reputation as a country that dispatched assassination or murder squads to eliminate its perceived enemies? Did it risk becoming labeled a terrorist state, or were its actions just a legitimate form of self-defense? Such a label would be damaging enough for any country but was particularly awkward for Israel in 1963, when the leadership in Tel Aviv was working hard to establish full diplomatic relations with West Germany and desperately needed its military and economic support.

Over the weeks that followed, the Israeli dilemma became unmistakably apparent. On the one hand, Dr. Kleinwachter admitted in an interview with an American journalist that he was fearful of another assassination attempt and for that reason was reluctant to move back to Egypt, where he could have made a more powerful contribution to the missile program. But on the other hand, he emphasized that he would not be bullied out of doing what he wanted to do and would therefore continue to work for the Egyptians. The Kleinwachter assassination bid was just one contributing factor in the sudden collapse of German-Israeli relations, but the diplomatic crisis illustrated how much Israel had to lose if it forfeited the goodwill of the Bonn government.