“Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.”
A few months ago, on the way home from the university, I found a folder with this motto in my mailbox, the motto of the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency. It was a drab-looking government envelope, the sort one might expect to receive from the municipality or the tax authorities. For me, however, it was supposed to contain the answer to a riddle I had pondered for almost four years. Since I began my work on the book “Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War,” I was fascinated, yet troubled, by persistent rumors that the Israeli Mossad worked with former Nazis, among them war criminals, in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Rumors on this murky subject had in fact been circulating for years. In 1967, the Polish culture minister, Kazimierz Rusinek, declared that “it is no secret, that many Nazi criminals serve the Israeli state and live in its territory. I cannot give you a precise number, but I’m certain that more than [one] thousand professionals of the Nazi Wehrmacht serve as military advisers to the Israeli Army.” This communist propaganda was of course overblown. There were not “one thousand” former Nazis working with Israel, not hundreds and not even dozens. But were there, at least, several?
Later, reporters, not all of them hostile to Israel, mentioned specifically one name: Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favorite commando leader. Did Skorzeny, in fact, cooperate with the Mossad in the 1960s, and for how long? And if so, why? Why did Israeli intelligence leaders, some of them Holocaust survivors, agree to bond with him? That was the question that the drab-looking Mossad envelope was supposed to answer.
Hellbound and Down 