Rafi Eitan
Israel's Mossad missed at least two chances
to capture Nazi fugitive Dr Josef Mengele,
who sent hundreds of thousands of Jews,
and possibly over a million, to their deaths at
Auschwitz, a former agent said Tuesday.
Rafi Eitan, who commanded the audacious
capture in 1960 of top Nazi Adolf Eichmann
in Argentina, said that during the hunt he
and his team discovered Mengele's hideout.
"At the same time as we caught Eichmann,
Mengele was living in Buenos Aires. We found
his apartment
and kept it under observation,"
he told Israeli public radio as the spy agency
declassified its file
on operations against
the man known to prisoners as the "Angel of Death".
Josef Mengele
Eitan, 90, said that while the Mossad had Eichmann in a safe house ahead of smuggling
him out of Buenos Aires in an El Al plane, the agency's chief, Isser Harel, wanted them
to move against Mengele as well, but he argued against the plan.
"I didn't want to carry out two operations at the same time because we had one successful
operation in the bag, and in my experience if you try to carry out another one you put them
both at risk," Eitan said.
As a compromise he stayed on in Argentina to keep tabs on Mengele, while his teammates
took Eichmann, the main architect of the Nazi Holocaust, back to Israel, where he was
later tried and hanged.
"Mengele wasn't at home and the neighbors said he would be back in a week,"
Eitan continued.
"We waited a week but in the meantime his (Eichmann's) capture was announced to
the world and Mengele never returned to his apartment in Buenos Aires."
The Mossad team missed him again when he was spotted in Brazil, Eitan added.
"At the end of 1962 Mengele was positively identified at a farm near Sao Paulo."
But Mossad Chief Isser Harel resigned early the next year and his successors did not
approve an operation against Mengele as they had other priorities around the world, he said.
Yediot Ahronot's Ronen Bergman told Israeli army radio in an interview that the Mossad files revealed some embarrassing slips, such as operatives looking for Mengele "for a large part of the time in Paraguay when in fact he wasn't there," but actually in Brazil.
He wrote in the paper that there was also a costly 1983 operation in West Berlin to bug and follow Mendel's son Rolf in the hope that he would lead agents to his father.
The Mossad also deployed an "intelligent and attractive" female agent posing as a private secretary to try and get close to Rolf and pry information from him, he wrote, but without success.
He quoted the Mossad archive as listing another plan, not implemented, where a caller claiming to be a close friend of Mengele would call Rolf and tell him that his father was gravely ill and he should go to him at once.
Unknown to the Mossad, Josef Mengele had died in a drowning accident in Brazil in 1979.
His death was only confirmed in 1985, after his body was exhumed.
(Source : ARUTZ SHEVA)
