The Mossad’s breakthrough in the spring of 1962 did not come a moment too soon. For over a year their efforts to penetrate Mengele’s family’s clannish circle in Europe had come to nothing. But in South America many weeks of observing one of the first Nazis to befriend Mengele when he arrived in 1949 had begun to pay off. In Willem Antonius Maria Sassen, a wartime SS officer and member of the Abwehr, the Mossad detected an opportunity not to be missed.
Sassen was well known to the Israelis because just prior to the kidnapping he had recorded a voluminous set of taped interviews of Adolf Eichmann. Not privy to the closely guarded secrets of the Final Solution, Sassen had always doubted that millions died in the concentration camps. As a neo-Nazi propagandist, he believed a firsthand account from Eichmann would set the record straight. When Sassen finally succeeded in persuading Eichmann to talk, he could not believe his ears. Once Eichmann started, he could not stop. Far from dismissing the so-called Jewish Lie, he was supremely proud of what he had done. By the time he was captured by the Israelis, Eichmann had recorded sixty-seven tapes. Even Sassen flinched at some of Eichmann’s shameless boasts. “I must say I regret nothing,” he recorded on one tape. “It would be too early to pretend that I had turned suddenly from a Saul to a Paul. No, I must say, truthfully, that if we had killed all 10 million Jews that Himmler’s statistician [Dr. Richard Korherr] had listed in 1933, I would say, ‘Good, we have destroyed an enemy.’ ”1
For Israel’s attorney general, Gideon Hausner, the tapes would have clinched the case against Eichmann, who was then awaiting trial in Jerusalem. However, although Sassen had sold the magazine rights for the tape material to Time-Life, he made that sale and the sale of other rights conditional on the original material not being given to the Israelis. Hausner was thus deprived of a vital weapon in his armory of evidence against Eichmann, which was what Sassen had intended.
Yet it was clear that a fundamental shift in Sassen’s views had taken place. Caught off guard, he had been confronted by the awful truth about the Holocaust. Sassen had heard it from the “horse’s mouth.” The Mossad decided to turn this to their advantage in the Mengele case, gambling that Sassen was now vulnerable to another dose of the truth. It would be wrong to suggest that Sassen had undergone a complete change of heart. Although a complex man, he was still a Nazi ideologue in most respects and retained absolute faith in the integrity and honor of the SS. Since Sassen had faced one historical truth, the Mossad believed the time was right to give him a long hard look at another.
Mossad agents flew to Uruguay to meet Sassen. Patiently, they educated him about the unspeakable crimes in Mengele’s past. After many hours, the approach seemed to be paying off. Zvi Aharoni flew from his Paris headquarters to meet Sassen and made one of the most bizarre recruiting pitches in the annals of espionage. Sassen emerged shaken, convinced that Mengele had sullied the honor of the SS, that band of noble fighting men. “We got him to a certain pitch,” said one agent, “then Aharoni came in. He talked to him for eleven hours. He showed him some documents. After that Sassen said he would try to help us.” Although it was important, Aharoni’s persuasive manner was not the only factor. The Israelis also undertook to pay Sassen handsomely. His fee was 
5,000 a month.
Sassen, now cooperating with the Mossad, soon discovered that Mengele had indeed fled Paraguay and was living near São Paulo, although he did not know the address. Sassen also learned the name of the man who was protecting Mengele in Brazil. It was Wolfgang Gerhard. “Gerhard was supposed to be Mengele’s link to the outside world,” said Aharoni. “What I especially liked about this information was that it checked with information we had had from two other sources.”2
Aharoni kept watch on Gerhard and followed him wherever and whenever he moved. One day Gerhard drove out of town. About twenty-five miles from São Paulo, Aharoni’s quarry turned right, off the road to Curitiba onto a dirt track. Aharoni explained what followed:
I couldn’t possibly have followed him up so I had to drive on. We did all sorts of jobs to try and find out where the road led to. We also brought a guy over from a kibbutz, who looked like a local guy and spoke fluent Portuguese. He even went barefoot to look the part. It was an area that was partially wooded and we eventually discovered it led to three or four farmhouses. You couldn’t sit there all day long with binoculars so we had to think of something else, but our options were rather limited. One Sunday we decided to have a picnic there, me and two of our local guys. I was determined to do what I could. We had followed so many leads and they hadn’t got anywhere. But at last it seemed as if we might be making progress.3
While Aharoni and his men were eating their sandwiches, they saw three men approaching on foot, toward the direction of the farmhouses. One was a European, and by his side were two Brazilians. Before Aharoni had time to grab his camera and sneak a snapshot, the trio was almost upon them. Aharoni recalls:
I thought the man may well be Mengele. In fact I was sure of it. Our information was so good. I said nothing because I didn’t want to talk, so the other two guys did the talking. They just chatted away. The man I thought was Mengele didn’t talk, though he didn’t seem at all worried about us. They stayed talking about five minutes, so I got a good look at his face. He had a moustache, he was the right height. There was a striking similarity with the photographs we had. The two boys with him weren’t armed. They looked, well, tough. Local toughs.4
Aharoni watched the trio walk off and saw them enter the nearest farmhouse. The next stage was to get photo confirmation, and if that checked out, to draw up a kidnap plan. “I thought, ‘Right, this is it, but I can’t work alone,’ ” said Aharoni, “so I went back to Europe to make a start on the details of the operation.”
Aharoni arrived at his Paris headquarters in June. “I was very excited and full of hope. Mengele was my one ambition then,” he said. “I didn’t know who Mengele was when we got Eichmann, but I had done a lot of reading since then.” But Aharoni was in for a surprise. When he walked into the Mossad’s Paris bureau, he found Harel there too—totally immersed in a manhunt of a completely different kind:
I went into Isser’s office and tried to explain that I thought we had at last found Mengele. But before I could go any further he said, “Don’t bother about Mengele now. I’ve got someone coming in from London tonight that I want you to interrogate.” That was it. That was all Isser said. It was the end of the Mengele case. Having been a soldier I had learned to take orders, so I did what I was told. Isser was in no mind to argue. He was in a state of nervous tension.5
The case that was absorbing Harel’s attention involved a religious kidnapping. For two years the issue had been moving Israel to the brink of a holy civil war.
In I960 Yosselle Schumacher, an eight-year-old boy, had disappeared and was thought to have been smuggled out of Israel. One of the main suspects was Yosselle’s own grandfather, who feared that the boy’s parents, disillusioned with Israel, might take him back to their native Russia, where he would not be raised as an Orthodox Jew. The grandfather, Nahman Shtarkes, held a deep loathing for the Soviet Union, having spent the war years in the Gulag, where he lost an eye and saw his youngest son murdered by a gang of Jew-baiting Russians. He was also a member of the ultra-orthodox sect known as the Hassidim of Breslau.
The whole family—Nahman, his daughter, Ida, her husband, Alter, and their two children, Zina and Yosselle—emigrated to Israel from Poland in 1957. But Ida and Alter soon found it hard to make ends meet, and Yosselle was sent to live with his grandfather while they sought to improve their fortunes. It was while the family was divided that Nahman learned his daughter was considering going back to Russia. Nahman believed it his sacred duty to save the boy’s soul.
When Yosselle’s parents realized their boy was missing, they called in the police, who arrested Nahman. The chief rabbi of Jerusalem urged full support for Nahman. The supreme court called him a criminal. It was Orthodox versus non-Orthodox. A decade into its fragile new life, the State of Israel was being torn apart.
Into this simmering feud stepped Isser Harel. He took the supreme court’s view that a serious crime had been committed and that the parents’ rights had been outrageously abused. The Mossad, he said, had a duty to find the boy, reunite him with his parents, and heal the country’s wounds. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion agreed. It was not the first time Harel had acted as keeper of the state’s conscience. But this time some people thought that he had gone too far.
Several of Harel’s senior staff argued that finding the boy was a matter for the police. Harel did not agree. And to underline his point, he devoted much manpower and money to the hunt, code-named Operation Tiger. It was a challenging assignment to penetrate the Mafia-like secrecy of this most secret of Orthodox sects. As with the Eichmann search, Harel approached the task with crusading zeal; and as with Eichmann he succeeded, running the child to the ground in New York, displaying his masterly skills of instinctive intelligence and operational planning.6
According to Zvi Aharoni, however, Harel abandoned the hunt for Mengele after he became obsessed with Operation Tiger. Harel vehemently rejects the charge, claiming that in October 1962—three months after Yosselle Schumacher was found—he sent agents back to Brazil to develop Aharoni’s lead that Mengele was hiding on the farm twenty-five miles from Sao Paulo. Harel said:
There were quite important signs that he had stayed or was staying there. But we did not succeed in confirming that he was there. And we certainly had not succeeded in identifying him. After weeks of many dangerous attempts, we came to the conclusion that there was no point in going on.7
Harel said there was one overriding reason why the farmhouse outside Sao Paulo could not be investigated further: it was guarded by armed men—just as he had claimed about the Krug farmhouse in Paraguay.
We couldn’t take him by force any more than we could in Paraguay. There were armed guards at the Brazilian place and there were dogs, too, I think.8
Harel’s suggestion of armed protection or guard dogs was dismissed by Zvi Aharoni and other agents on the hunt:
I certainly do not recall any reports at the time of guns or dogs guarding Krug’s farm. When we were in Brazil we never saw armed guards or dogs either. All we ever saw there were the couple of young toughs who walked up to us with the man I believe was Mengele.9
The war of words between Harel and Aharoni, once the best of friends, left them bitter enemies. Today they no longer speak to each other.
Aharoni deeply regrets that he did not use his senior position to persuade Harel to devote more resources to his Brazilian lead:
Looking back I have the feeling that if Israel is to blame for not doing more to bring Mengele to trial, I am as much to blame as anyone. As operational head of the case, I was in a position to demand that more should have been done and I did not. When Isser took me off the operation I did not question his decision at the time. I suppose I behaved too much like a soldier obeying orders.10
The main source of Aharoni’s anger against his former close friend is Harel’s historical analysis of the Mengele hunt:
Isser says there were dogs and guns and that’s why we couldn’t get him. I say there were no dogs or guns and we could have got him. Where Isser gets dogs and guns from I have no idea. But if he’s going to talk and write about historical events as important as this, he should stick to the facts. And the unpalatable fact is that Isser and I—both of us—could have pursued Mengele more forcefully. He was obsessed with Schumacher at the time. I should have pressed him to give Mengele as high a priority.11
Harel insists that his recollection of reports of guns and dogs is accurate and he roundly denies ever easing up on the hunt for Mengele. He also says that after the team he sent in October failed to confirm Mengele’s presence at the farmhouse, he decided to go back to “the Nazi agent [Sassen] so that with our guidance and help he would supply us with more information from his sources.”12
What is undeniable is that by late November 1962, Harel had ruled out a commando operation for the foreseeable future. It is also true that by that time Harel was fighting for his survival as chief of the Mossad.
Within days of the resolution of the Schumacher case, Harel was drawn into a second major operation, to counter what appeared to be the greatest threat to the security of Israel since its birth—ex-Nazi rocket scientists developing missiles for Israel’s neighbor, Egypt. What made matters worse was that this new project brought with it a challenge to Harel’s job from General Meir Amit, chief of military intelligence, a tough soldier with a distinguished career.
Only days after Yosselle Schumacher returned to Tel Aviv, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, successfully test-launched four rockets with ranges up to 350 miles. He boasted that they could destroy any target “south of Beirut.” Matters came to a head after the rockets were paraded in the streets of Cairo, and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion was shocked to discover that the Mossad files were empty. Following this humiliating spectacle, Meir Amit fired a deadly broadside at Harel:
What are we spending our intelligence budget on if we get our information from a public speech of Gamal Nasser? All we need for that is a public radio.13
Harel was severely embarrassed. Never had there been such a challenge to his competence. He immediately established a new department to gather intelligence on the state of Nasser’s rocket research. But Amit recommended that his own military intelligence staff make a separate assessment. He complained to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion that Harel had neglected the rockets at the expense of less important but more attention-getting projects, such as hunting for Adolf Eichmann and Yosselle Schumacher. Amit believed that as the head of the principal foreign-intelligence-gathering organization, and with limited resources, Harel had his priorities dangerously wrong.
Harel now had two major projects underway. Both cases involved Nazis, but one was an incontrovertible threat to the very existence of the State. It was this dilemma, according to those who support Zvi Aharoni’s version of events, that prevented Harel from reviving a full-scale hunt for Mengele. The crux of their argument is that Harel should never have allowed himself to be caught unaware by Nasser’s rockets, clearly of more immediate concern than Mengele. They contend that all his energy was devoted to finding Yosselle Schumacher when he should have been keeping one eye on Nasser’s German scientists and also sustaining the Mengele hunt. Faced with the competing issues of Mengele and Schumacher, Harel had seemed unable to delegate authority. “Isser’s problem was that he could only focus on one thing at a time,” said one senior Mossad agent who knew Harel well. “He was very good on the ground and everybody had a lot of respect for him. But he was a one-issue man. He had tunnel vision.” By the time the Schumacher case was over, Harel had to pay dearly for his oversight concerning the rocket scientists. Perhaps if earlier and more reliable rocket intelligence had been available, more money and manpower could have been released for the Mengele hunt. The argument is a compelling one. But explanations with the benefit of hindsight almost always are.
Whatever administrative shortcomings Harel might have had, it is only fair to note that no Mossad chief has been so publicly passionate about the justice, purpose, and duty of Israel to bring Nazi mass murderers to trial. Perhaps it is in that light that his denial of abandoning the Mengele hunt should be judged:
After our disappointment [in Brazil] I came to the conclusion that we had to reach Mengele in other ways, more sophisticated ways. I started preparing plans for such ways and preparing the groundwork for a new strategy. But while doing so I resigned.14
Harel resigned in April 1963, because the trust between him and his prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had broken down. This crisis followed Operation Damocles, a letter-bomb campaign against those rocket scientists who had not heeded Harel’s anonymous letters warning them to return to Germany. Letter bombs were also sent to the Munich offices of the main Egyptian purchasing agency for the rocket program. Five people were killed, one seriously injured. There were also several failed assassination attempts.
Matters came to a head after a Mossad agent was arrested by Swiss police on suspicion of attempted murder. Furious that the Germans should seek his agent’s extradition, Harel attempted to rally cabinet support to ask German chancellor Konrad Adenauer to withdraw the extradition request. But Ben-Gurion refused. Harel, he believed, was behaving irrationally. He thought that such a move would damage Israel’s delicate new relationship with Bonn, and he knew the chancellor could not interfere with the due process of law.15
There was another factor. An updated assessment from military intelligence, under General Amit, suggested that Harel was now overreacting to the danger posed by the Nazi rockets. Amit’s considered judgment was that Nasser had a long way to go before he could build an atomic bomb. And the rockets were much less sophisticated than claimed by Nasser’s first bellicose announcement. Amit’s agents discovered that research on a reliable rocket guidance system was still in its infancy.
The thrust of Amit’s review, now playing down the rocket threat, maneuvered Harel onto the defensive. It was not an enjoyable position for a man who once counted on his prime minister’s complete trust. So Harel went onto the offensive, accusing Amit of being complacent over Israel’s security and implying that Ben-Gurion was being duped by the Germans in his quest for realpolitik. Had Bonn genuinely wanted to restore meaningful diplomatic relations, he argued, more pressure would have been put on the rocket scientists to disengage from their murderous work with Nasser. “If that is what you believe,” Ben-Gurion told Harel, “then I just tell you that I have no faith in the source of your information or the information itself.” Such a lack of confidence meant that Harel had no choice but to resign.16
Whatever plans Harel might have had for reviving Operation Mengele died with his resignation. “I have often been asked,” he said, “what I most regretted about going, and I have always replied that more than anything, I regret not getting that abominable man.”17
Harel’s successor was General Meir Amit. His policy was very clear: the Mossad should devote virtually its entire effort to guaranteeing Israel’s future. Faced with the assembled might of the Arab states, the Mossad did not have the resources to resurrect the past. Nazi criminals would be pursued only if solid evidence was presented to the Mossad. Although under General Amit a watching brief was kept on Mengele until the late 1960s, he was no longer a high-priority target. Given future events, it was not a policy that could be seriously challenged. Amit did not know it then, but he was preparing for the 1967 Six Day War. Certainly he has never doubted the wisdom of that fundamental policy change:
I was not happy with the flow of information on matters that we needed to know about. I came to the conclusion that the information did not flow because the organization was engaging in other things. I think I was right then and I think that I am still right today.18
The question that will never be satisfactorily resolved is: just how near did the Israelis come to kidnapping Mengele on the farm twenty-five miles from Sao Paulo? Were they, as Harel said, not that close? Or was Mengele, as Zvi Aharoni claimed, within their grasp?
Aharoni admitted he did not have conclusive proof that the man he saw on the dirt track near Sao Paulo in 1962 was Josef Mengele. But three vital facts now suggest that Aharoni may well have been right. Early in 1962, Mengele was staying with Wolfgang Gerhard while he made the final arrangements for Mengele’s move to join the Stammers in Nova Europa. The Mossad’s informant, SS man Willem Sassen, was also correct in naming Wolfgang Gerhard as Mengele’s protector. Finally, the photographs of Mengele taken during the 1960s—released in 1985—have reinforced Aharoni’s belief that the man he saw was indeed his quarry.
One senior Mossad agent on the Mengele hunt recalled that it was Aharoni who finally obtained conclusive evidence of Adolf Eichmann’s hideout in Buenos Aires. “Zvi would eventually have found Mengele,” the agent said. “It was just a question of time. If we had one more year, we’d have got him. Just one more year, and we’d have had him in Israel, and he would have hanged.”19