By September 1962, Mossad director Isser Harel was convinced that Israel was facing extinction. President Nasser of Egypt had unveiled two new ballistic missiles in a massive Cairo military parade, and the terrifying truth was that he had recruited former Nazi scientists to build them. These were men who had worked on Hitler’s V2 rockets, and now they were designing weapons capable of hitting Israeli cities. The threat was even worse than rockets.
A spy, an Austrian scientist named Dr. Otto Joklik, had secretly contacted the Israelis in a crisis of conscience. He revealed that Nasser planned to arm these missiles with chemical weapons, biological agents, and most terrifying of all, radioactive waste. Israeli intelligence soon confirmed the report when they discovered that Cairo had purchased radioactive cobalt in quantities twenty-five times greater than any medical need.
Harel went straight to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. He insisted that Mossad launch an immediate campaign against the German and Austrian scientists working for Egypt. These weren’t just any scientists. Many were former members of the SS or had worked on the V2 program that had terrorized London.
Without them, the Egyptian rocket program would collapse, and Nasser’s nightmare plan would die. But there was a serious problem. West Germany was secretly supplying Israel with weapons, including tanks that were badly needed. If Israel started murdering German citizens, even former Nazis, the flow of arms could stop.
The argument split the Israeli government. Foreign Minister Golda Meir and Harel pushed for action. Shimon Peres and the army warned against it. Ben-Gurion made a compromise.
He told Harel to run a discreet campaign, intimidation only, to scare the scientists into quitting. Harel, however, did far more than that. He launched Operation Damocles. The first victim was Heinz Krug, a German lawyer and former V2 team member working as the director of an Egyptian front company in Munich.
Krug simply vanished. No one knows exactly what happened, but rumors said he was either executed by former SS commando Otto Skorzeny, who had become a Mossad agent, or kidnapped, tortured for information, and killed in Israel. Either way, he was gone. The attacks escalated quickly.
In Cairo, a parcel bomb exploded in the office of Dr. Wolfgang Pilz, another former V2 scientist. It blinded his secretary who opened it. Another parcel bomb was sent to the Heliopolis rocket factory and killed five Egyptian technicians.
A parcel sent to a German scientist failed to detonate and was defused. In the West German town of Lörrach, a gunman fired at a professor working on missile guidance electronics, then sped away before being caught. In February 1963, another former V2 scientist, Hans Kleinwächter, narrowly survived an assassination attempt when the weapon malfunctioned. Then Mossad agents went after Dr.
Paul J. Görcke, a scientist working on the guidance systems. He was in Egypt, but his daughter lived in Switzerland. Two Israeli agents approached her, threatening or coercing her, the details remain murky.
She called the Swiss police and they arrested the agents. The investigation revealed their involvement in the kidnapping of Heinz Krug. The story broke, and Operation Damocles was exposed to the world. The fallout was immediate and enormous.
Israel was deeply embarrassed on the international stage. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, furious at how far Harel had gone, ordered the operation stopped. Harel resigned in protest, but he got what he wanted. The campaign of fear had worked.
By the end of 1963, most of the German and Austrian scientists had fled the Egyptian program. The rockets sat unfinished, unguided, and useless. Nasser’s plans for missiles filled with plague or radioactive waste were stalled forever. He would later receive Scud B rockets from the Soviet Union, but he never fulfilled his promise to fire weapons of mass destruction at Israel.
For Israel, it was a secret victory, one of the most dangerous plots against its sovereignty ever uncovered, and it had been dismantled by a handful of men willing to do whatever it took.
