Israeli cabinet minister and former Mossad commander Rafi Eitan has told how Israel almost caught Josef Mengele.
The Mossad spy agency cancelled at the last minute a plan to capture notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in Argentina in 1960, a former top commander told AFP on Monday.
Rafi Eitan, who is now an Israeli cabinet minister, said the Mossad tracked down Mengele in Buenos Aires while planning the May 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust.
“Mengele was living in Buenos Aires at the same time as Eichmann. We discovered Eichmann first and we later found Mengele,” Eitan told AFP.
The Mossad agents in Argentina headed by Eitan knew Mengele’s address and had taken pictures that determined “beyond any doubt” the identity of the former Nazi who had escaped to south America under a new name after World War II.
Several days after Eichmann was snatched and put in hiding in Argentina before being secretly transported to Israel, then-Mossad chief Issar Harel quickly put forward plans to catch Mengele, Eitan said.
“I opposed the plan and said that the two operations should not be carried out together because of the risk of losing Eichmann and because we did not have sufficient knowledge for the Mengele mission,” he said.
Harel agreed to scrap the plan until after Eichmann was brought to Israel, and both the Mossad chief and Eitan intended to return to capture the Angel of Death, said Eitan, now 82.
But after the successful capture of Eichmann was made public, the mission was aborted.
In other spy news, former spy and author Roald Dahl almost caught syphilis.
Update: Speaking of Roald Dahl, did you know he was an anti-Semitic Wonka?
Mr. Dahl, well known for his children’s books, as well as writings dealing with the dark, bizarre side of human nature, such as “Tales of the Unexpected,” had his own dark and unexpected side: he was a blatant and admitted anti-Semite.
In 1983, the British periodical Literary Review published a book review by Mr. Dahl in which he referred to “those powerful American Jewish bankers” and charged that the United States Government was “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there.”
Later that same year, defending these outrageous statements, Mr. Dahl stated in an interview that was published in the British magazine New Statesman:
“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
The British poet Stephen Spender and the historian Paul Johnson protested Mr. Dahl’s anti-Semitic outburst, while in this country The New Republic (Oct. 31, 1983) referred to his Literary Review comments as the “ugliest piece of anti-Semitism to appear in a respectable setting for a long time.” But Mr. Dahl was not finished.
This year, Mr. Dahl told the British newspaper The Independent, “I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic.” He also asserted that certain alleged Israeli military activity in Lebanon “was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned . . . there aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere.”
All of which serves to remind us that talent is no guarantee of wisdom. Praise for Mr. Dahl as a writer must not obscure the fact that he was also a bigot. ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN National Director, B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League New York, Nov. 27, 1990
