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An internationally acclaimed aviation pioneer, Herbert Cukurs,
running a hydroplanes rental company out of Sao Paolo, Brazil,
liked his new customer: an Austrian businessman, who asked for a
short sightseeing flight. The pilot had no idea that his customer
was not Austrian but a top agent in the Israeli Mossad, working
under cover to set the trap for Cukurs - a criminal personally
responsible for the murder of over 30,000 innocent Jews. This was
the beginning of the 'war of wits' between the Nazi war criminal
and the German-born Israeli (both of whose parents had perished in
Nazi death camps). It was a unique duel, played out in the Sao
Paolo residence of the Cukurs family, in the jungles of Brazil, by
the lagoon of Porto Alegre and on the beautiful beaches of Punta
del Este. In this unique book a former senior Mossad agent
describes an operation carried out in 1964-65 to identify, locate
and execute the notorious Nazi war criminal Herbert Cukurs, who was
personally responsible for the murder of over 30,000 Latvian Jews.
The main part of the operation was undertaken almost
single-handedly by 'Anton Kuenzle'. identity as a successful
businessman and offering Cukurs a lucrative deal to entice him away
from his secure life in Brazil to a trap laid for him in Uruguay.
There Cukurs met his fate at the hands of a Mossad hit team.
In 1977, Israel's Mossad spy agency was given an assignment far
different from its usual cloak and dagger activities. It was
ordered by then Prime Minister Menachem Begin to rescue thousands
of Ethiopian Jewish refugees in Sudan and deliver them to me in the
Jewish state. No stranger to action in enemy countries, the agency
established a covert forward base in a deserted holiday village in
Sudan, and deployed a handful of operatives to launch and oversee
the exodus of the refugees to the Promised Land, by sea and by air,
in the early 1980s. Gad Shimron, the author of this book, was one
of their number. First published in Hebrew in 1998, this updated
English version of the book offers a thrilling firsthand account of
how the operation was put in place, and how the Mossad team in
Sudan brought it off, despite great personal risk, running a
partying vacation spot for wealthy tourists by day as they stole
through the Sudanese desert to rescue desperate refugees by night.
The book sheds light on American involvement in the latter stages
of the operation, when the White House facilitated an airlift of
Ethiopian Jews and the CIA station in Khartoum sheltered the last
Mossad operatives, on the run from Libyan secret service agents,
and spirited them out of Sudan in special boxes labelled Diplomatic
Mail. Enhanced by Gad Shimron's wide-ranging historical
observations and his crisp, incisive prose, this is at once an
entertaining read and a powerful tale of idealistic heroism.
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