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.