Rise and Kill First | Mossad
55:14 Share

Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. Then he tells me that in 1982, early 1983, the Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon ordered the Air Force to take out a commercial airline with hundreds of passengers on board above the ocean in order to kill Yasser Arafat, the chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization that was on board. This is True Spies. Episode 71, Rise and Kill First.

This story begins in an ordinary commercial building, early in 2010. And it is ordinary. There's no facade, no hidden depths. Welcome to the tasteful, well-appointed offices of Penguin Random House, the world's largest book publisher. Today, the company's editor-in-chief has a meeting penciled in with a best-selling author in their non-fiction stable. He's also one of Israel's best-known investigative journalists. ♪

My name is Ronan Bergman. I'm an Israeli journalist. I work for the New York Times and Yediot HaKhonot, Israel's biggest daily. Ronan Bergman, like many journalists, has a pet subject. I have been writing on Israeli intelligence almost since I started writing. Now, the publisher calls on Ronan to write a book that only he can write.

I was asked by Penguin Random House to write the secret history of the Mossad and its use of targeted assassination as the main weapon. I happily accepted. But this is no ordinary book. To write it, Ronan had to track down members of one of the world's most effective secret services, the Mossad. More than that, he had to get them to talk.

There is, I think, two active military censor that is able to scream pre-publication anything that is published on any kind of topic related to national security. And until the late 60s, it was even forbidden to say the name or to acknowledge the existence of the Mossad.

It's a mission that tested the limits of Ronan's resources as a journalist. I told Random House, you can write in the contract, it will take me a year. This timescale proved to be optimistic. They said, maybe we should write a year and a half so you will not be in reach of the contract. I said, well, you can write whatever you like. It's still going to take me a year. I'm very, very precise and I know how long things take me to write. And they said, OK, fine.

They did not comply with what I said and they wrote a year and a half. I came to speak with 1,000 interviewees. All of them spoke with no permission. All of them spoke with no guidance or restrictions from the intelligence community.

And after that, I was six years delayed. The book was published in 2018 under the title Rise and Kill First, The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. But what's in a name?

One of the only people who were privy to read the millions of words of transcripts from all those 1,000 interviews that I have conducted. He said, you know, Ronan, there is a sentence in the book that is a sentence in the transcripts that many of your different interviewers keep on repeating. It's a quote from the Babylonian Talmud where they say, whoever comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.

"Hakam lehorgecha, hashkem lehorgu." And this sentence was used by those interviewers not in order to impress me with their knowledge of Jewish scripture. They wanted to explain their mindset when taking those responsibilities, when conducting those operations way beyond enemy lines.

including the use of ethically and legally and morally questionable weapons, like tortures, like infiltrating databases, like targeted assassination. Is it legally and morally justified to kill people without a trial? And the use of that sentence is their answer. I'm not saying if it's true or not. I'm saying this was the answer that they have been given

"Whenever comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." This quote would have been close to the hearts of Israel's first leaders. The country declared independence in 1948, only a few years after the end of the Second World War. Each country, each nation, each people work and carve their future based on their history. And the history of the Jews is the Holocaust.

My parents, both of them Holocaust survivors, came from Europe after the Second World War. They joined the Jews who were already in Palestine. And I think that the lessons that they drew from the Holocaust, if to summarize them, were that one, there will always be someone out there who is after us to kill us, to complete the final solution, to perform a second annihilation.

At the time of its founding, the young country was beset on all sides by its enemies in the Arab world. Its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, realized that in the absence of a powerful army, Israel would need to rely on covert methods to survive. So from early on,

Three weeks after the country was established, David Ben-Gurion established the Israeli intelligence community, which is more or less as the intelligence community that we know today. The Mossad working outside the foreign intelligence agency.

The Shin Bet, the general security agency working inside Israel, so sort of equivalent combination between MI5 and the FBI. And military intelligence or Aman, helping the military conducting its operations. Each Israeli agency has its opposite numbers all over the world.

But look more closely at their operational strategies and you'll see that they're rare beasts in the world of secret intelligence. Unlike most of the intelligence communities in the world, at least in the West, the Mossad and the other intelligence agencies are not just bringing their intelligence, but also translating that intelligence, the same information that they collect, to pinpoint operations,

way beyond enemy lines, in order to divert, distort, destruct, prevent any kind of hostile operation against Israel. Now, I don't want to spoil or to disappoint any of the listeners to this podcast, but there is no James Bond. James Bond is a movie about

And there is no double O program at MI6. MI6 does not do assassinations. And Mossad is one of those very few intelligence agencies that is involved with actual operations. So when you think about the Mossad, think of an intelligence organization with the international reach of the CIA, coupled with the training and firepower of SEAL Team 6.

It's made up of men and women who will take decisive and sometimes preemptive action against Israel's enemies.

The Magna Carta, the list of targets for Mossad, is not just defending the state of Israel, its borders and its citizens, but it's to defend Israeli citizens all over the world, wherever they are. But not just Israeli citizens, also Jews. The Mossad is the defender of Jews all over the world, even if they are not Israeli citizens. The machinations of the Mossad...

which translates literally to "the institute" have been the defining obsession of Ronin's professional life.

And it started early. Okay. Israel is a small country and everybody knows someone in the intelligence agencies or in the high rank officer. So I think when I was in the Boy Scouts, the woman or the young teenager that was our guide, someone came to me one day and said, you know, your Boy Scout guide, her father is a Mossad agent.

And of course, once I knew that, I looked at her in a very different way. And I know that one day her father came to pick her up, take her home or somewhere. And I got a very good look in his face and I was slightly disappointed. He looked like everybody else. I think this was one of my first lessons.

to understand that the real world of intelligence, the real world of Israeli intelligence is not less interesting or more interesting than the world of intelligence that we see in the movies or in TV series. And this was by no means his last brush with the Mossad. Ronan is not a spy, but he came pretty close. In 1997-98, I did my legal internship with the Attorney General.

after finishing my first degree in law. When I finished the internship and passed the bar exam, so becoming a lawyer in Israel, I was approached by the Mossad. I had a relative who served there and he suggested that I start the screening process

to become a Mossad operative. In the end, Ronin declined the offer. The Mossad's strict working environment wasn't quite to his taste. Instead, he ended up following his passion for a different kind of intelligence gathering: journalism. I have been a journalist since I was 15, well, even earlier, since I was 12, for youth papers. And then when finishing my obligatory military service, I joined Haaretz, the Israeli equivalent to the New York Times,

And there, from very early on, I decided to cover and write extensively on first of the Israeli intelligence services and then on national security and intelligence in the Middle East. But Rona's relationship with Israel's intelligence community hasn't always been harmonious.

In one of the attempts of the Mossad to smear me, they spread a rumor after one of my very critical stories criticizing the Mossad and its chief at that time. This was in 2005. Mayor Dagan was the chief and I published a story criticizing him and his leadership. Dagan spread a story. Oh, he got the Mossad employees gathered and he said...

You know why Ronan Bergman is writing all those things against us? It's not because he has true facts against the Mossad or against me. This is because he was a cadet in the Mossad. And close to the end of the course, he failed and didn't finish the course. So he has a grudge against us. And this is why he's doing that.

Those people know how to create a rumor that would harm your prestige. And when the time came to write Rise and Kill First, the secretive organs of the Israeli intelligence community mobilized against him once again. As early as June 2010, so only three months after starting to negotiate the book with Random House, Mossad already was running secret meetings how to prevent me from writing the book.

During the process of working on the book, the chief of staff was asking the attorney general to prosecute me for treason. They were trying to prevent me from getting access to sources, threatening myself, threatening sources. My phone was bugged. My emails were hacked. In some cases, evidence were presented to court in cases of prosecuting my sources.

of files that were taken from my computer. So it was clear that my computer was either hacked or that people were actually approaching the computer and being able to copy material from it. Even so, Ronin doesn't condemn the Mossad outright. Just its approach to transparency, revealing its secrets has become more than a journalist's beat. It's a moral stance.

I do believe that Israel enjoys one of the best intelligence communities in the world. But in contradiction to that, the inspection and oversight mechanism that the state instituted to supervise the intelligence community, to make sure that the spies are not going beyond the borders, to make sure that its agents and chiefs are complying with ethics and with democracy, are very weak.

In this situation, we journalists and historians have an obligation, almost a sacred obligation, to make sure that those spies who are working in order to keep Israel safe are also keeping Israel, as we say, the only democracy in the Middle East. Ronan has spent his career building a network of contacts within the Israeli intelligence community. And before he began writing, he already had hours of interviews on record.

So why did this book take the best part of a decade to write? I decided to completely disregard everything that was written on Israeli intelligence that far because it was unreferenced, with no footnotes, with no attribution to sources.

all anonymous. Remember, if Ronan's going to write this controversial book, he needs to back up his claims. I decided to put all of that aside and starting from the beginning, go back to interview everybody, even in cases where everything allegedly was already known and hoping that while doing that, first, I'll get the facts right. And second, hopefully, we'll get some new scoops. And

And that turned out to be a bombshell. That was a goldmine. - Rona's meticulous approach paid off in spades. Not only did he uncover new details about missions that he'd already researched,

But he also encountered entirely new information. Information that he could scarcely believe had been kept from the public for so many years. I was taught for the eight years of writing this book, the most severe lesson of humility. I thought that there couldn't be an important event in the history of Israeli intelligence that I didn't know about. How wrong I was.

Ronan remembers one of the first true bombshells he uncovered during his research. In 2012, I was sitting with a high-rank Air Force officer and we were discussing all sorts of operations and at a certain point he said, "Ronan, you know what? You have gained my trust."

and I'm going to tell you the most secretive story in the history of Israeli Air Force. But he said, you need to promise me before that you will comply with one condition that I have to publish it. Ronan leaned in. This sounded promising. Of course, I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, because I wanted to hear the story. And he said, my condition is that after I tell you this, you will go to Israel

another officer, very high rank officer at the Israeli Air Force. And only if he tells you the story and only if he tells the story on the record, then I am allowing you to publish it. A journalist, especially one as invested in ethical concerns as Ronan, takes these promises seriously. Put yourself in his shoes for a moment. Would you want this kind of responsibility? The kind of knowledge that requires top level clearance before it sees the light of day?

And if you're forced to take it off the record, keep it to yourself, well, could you look yourself in the eye? Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work,

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s,

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.

And I said, "Yeah, sure." I said, "No, promise me that if he does not, you will never, you will bury the secret, you will never tell the story." And I said, "Okay, sure." - Whatever Ronan was expecting to hear next, it wasn't this.

Then he tells me that in 1982, early 1983, the Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon ordered the Air Force to take out a commercial airline with hundreds of passengers on board above the ocean in order to kill Yasser Arafat, the chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization that was on board. Ronan was practically dumbstruck. But at the same time, his instincts told him that this was a once-in-a-lifetime scoop.

The Air Force officer continued. And that the Supreme Command of the Air Force rebelled against the Minister of Defense. They jammed the communication, disrupt the operation in order to make it impossible. And they decided among themselves that they will prevent Israel from being stained forever with this war crime and prevented that from happening.

The Israeli state had almost downed a commercial airliner in the pursuit of one high-value target. Only an insurrection from the inside had averted a disastrous loss of civilian life. Hundreds of people and military intelligence and the air force were aware and participated in that. Nothing was ever published.

And I already saw the chapter. I already wrote it in my head when he spoke. Because I realized, of course, the gravity of such a drama. The order and then, of course, the rebellion from the FOs. But when he was done, he said, you promised me. You go to the other officer. And only if he tells you that on the record with the permission to use his name, you will be able to promise me. And I said, but how can I convince him? Ah, now that's the million-dollar question, isn't it?

Even at a remove of some 30 years, this information could be damaging to the Israeli government. Why would anyone talk about it on the record? That other officer that you mentioned, he's the old type, the old guard. He will never speak with me. He hates journalists. And so the source says, I don't care. You promised me. With a heavy heart, Ronan went to visit the senior officer who he hoped would grant him permission to publish the story.

He wasn't expecting this encounter to go his way, but nonetheless, he had to try. So I went to the other officer and I tried to go and speak with him. I didn't say what I want to speak about, but I tried to approach that area in time and operations from that direction and the other. And at a certain point, that second officer said, Ronan, why exactly did you come here? Why are you here? What are you trying to ask me?

So then I asked him specifically, was there an operation to take out commercial airline? You've tried the softly, softly approach, but now you've been forced to show your hand. This could end in one of two ways, win or lose. But it's not up to you. It's up to him. All you can do is watch as he makes his decision. And then his gaze changed. And again, this was 2012, talking about 1982.

And he looked at me and he said, "You know what? For 30 years I have been waiting for someone to come and ask me this question. Wait here." The officer rose and walked to the other end of the room. He moved a chair and then a cupboard, revealing a safe. He opened the safe and he came back with the whole log and all the different documents of that operation and gave them to me and said,

These were waiting here for you. Bingo. And the detailed account of those days in the underground subterranean bunker of the Air Force under Tel Aviv, the details are coming from those documents that he held in his safe. And so sometimes those people, those sources, interviews were waiting for someone to ask. Sometimes the burden of history weighs heavily enough

that it only takes the slightest push to get a source to talk. But not everyone that Ronan spoke to gave up their secrets as easily. Mossad, those people are the case officers and the operatives. They are trained in the art of recruiting agents, of turning them against their country, their organizations, their friends, their comrades. And in short, they are the masters of making people talk.

And now you have those masters in front of you and you need to do to them what they have been doing to people all of their lives. You need to profile the profiler. You need to be the case officer of the case officer. If you've heard this podcast before, you'll know what Ronan is talking about. The long, slow work of a case officer grooming an asset, building trust, learning what makes them tick,

and gently squeezing them for intel. Fortunately, he's been doing what he does for a while now. Ronan spent years cultivating his sources in the world of Israeli intelligence. And of course, every asset is different. Their interests, their backgrounds, their passions, they all vary. Keeping track of them and adapting your approach to fit is a job in itself. But when he's at a loss, when every avenue is exhausted, Ronan has a trump card to play.

When I brought the manuscript to Random House, the editors there, they were amazed that people were willing to speak, most of them on the record. None of them with any authority to do so, on any consent from Israeli administration. And they asked me, how did you convince them to talk? And I said, you know, not all of them agreed, but when a source agrees,

Our interviewee was not very enthusiastic to speak. I did to her or him the one thing that makes Israelis more angry, more furious, more ballistic than anything else. I coincidentally, while speaking, I told him that someone else took credit for his operation.

That usually did the magic. There is nothing that Israelis hate more from being what is called in Hebrew, sucker, a file. That's the highest degree of a sucker. If someone took credit for their operation, so they usually say, oh, he said he did that. He was in Syria that night. No, I was there. And now we will tell you the truth. That usually happens.

opened them up and gave me what I wanted. When in doubt, go for the ego. Which brings us to our next point. Using a spy's own tradecraft against them is one thing, but you need to make sure that you're not being manipulated in kind. After all, sources aren't just sources, they're people with their own agendas. And they know that a journalist in search of a scoop might be susceptible to misinformation.

In one of my encounters with a high-rank Mossad official not long ago, he said to me, you know, Ronan, you really did a good job with me. I'm your best agent. I'm your best source. And I said to him, yeah, sure, of course, this is the trick that you all learn in the second class, the second lesson in the academy class.

in the course of case officer to tell to someone that you just recruited, that in fact he recruited you, so to lower his defenses. And you need to be very much aware that they might manipulate you with this information. And always have that in the back of your mind. So if you're dealing with spies,

slippery characters at the best of times, how do you make sure your facts are straight? Try to bridge that fear that you are the victim of misinformation or disinformation or lack of information by corroborating as many sources as possible, by trying to differentiate what sort of interests those people have and always, but always suspect them and not be enchanted

but the fact that you are exposed to those most secretive operations and that you are privy to know the most secretive information in the history of your country. Just look at the facts and try to understand and make sure that they're accurate. For civilians, the world of espionage is undoubtedly exciting. The opportunity to enter that world, even tangentially, is tempting.

may be tempting enough to make a person careless. But as an intelligence gatherer, be that a journalist, a detective or spy, the unsexy business of objectivity, sourcing and research is the key to real success. Sometimes that can mean interviewing several people about the same sequence of events. That was the case for another highly classified episode in the Mossad's history, which Ronan managed to eke out from a variety of sources.

So the first person who told me about this was Rafi Eitan. But then I interviewed, I think, another maybe 20 people connected. And more important than that, I was able to recruit a source

who was able to bring me the secret, top, top, top secret dossier, a special research that the Mossad History Division wrote about the affair with all the original documents. This is an operation that occupied most of the Mossad from 1962 until 1966. This story begins in the early 60s. At the time, Israel's main opponent in the Arab world was President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

And in 1962 Mossad in its maybe best of times after capturing Eichmann and do some other very successful operation. Mossad was shocked. The Israeli citizens were shocked when Nasser paraded in the streets of Cairo

A fleet of missile surface-to-surface long-range ballistic missiles with which he said he's going to destroy Israel? This on its own would have been bad enough. But it gets worse. The Mossad discovered that the people who built the missiles were none other than the German scientists who had worked on the deadly V1 and V2 rockets during the Second World War.

They offered the lucrative tradecraft to Nasser and said, we can build you a fleet of missiles that are capable of reaching Israel and are capable of being armed with a nuclear warhead. And now imagine the extent of hysteria in Israel.

When in 1962, Israel, before the Six-Day War, so with very, very small self-confidence, before having a nuclear arsenal of its own, with the streets of Israel filled with Holocaust survivors, and now learning that scientists who used to work for the SS-run factory in Penemunda used to work for Hitler and now working for the new Hitler, as Ben-Gurion used to call him.

President Nasser of Egypt. As the Mossad saw it, if there was ever a moment to rise up and kill first, this was it. Just 17 years after the fall of Nazi Germany, the young state of Israel could be facing a second nuclear holocaust. But simply assassinating the scientists would prove harder than they had anticipated. After trying to kill some of those scientists and failing, Ben-Gurion fired the chief of Mossad

and then had to resign himself because of the catastrophe, the political catastrophe that followed the revelation of those missiles and scientists in Egypt. Clearly, a new approach was in order. He stepped down, a new prime minister and a new chief of Mossad. And the new chief of Mossad, Beir Amit, called for the cessation of assassination and said, listen, before we kill anyone more,

We need to understand what exactly is happening among the Nazi German scientists in Egypt. We need to recruit one of them. But how do you recruit a Nazi when you are a Mossad officer? How indeed. Fortunately, the Mossad had no shortage of young men with big ideas. One day, a young case officer of the Mossad called Rafi Eitan, he was commanding the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann.

He came to Mossad chief office and said, chief, I think I have an idea, but it has a little difficulty. Now, when you step into the Mossad chief office discussing the most crucial existential threat to your country and you say, I have a little problem, it means that it's everything but little.

So Mossad chief, amused, said, "Okay, what's your idea?" Rafi Eitan's idea had a name: Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny was a former SS officer, one of Hitler's personal favorites. He'd led a number of high-profile special operations against the Allies during the war. Now, Eitan was suggesting recruiting Skorzeny as an asset for the Israeli government. This was, you'll note, problematic.

Nonetheless, the young officer continued. He's not a scientist himself, but he is very close to those former colleagues from the times of the SS. And I think if we recruit him, we will be able to get to them.

But there's a little problem. Mossad chief said, yes, what is the problem? He said, this guy, Otto Skorzeny, he's an avid anti-Semitic. He was running the SS battalion during Kristallnacht in Vienna, a true Nazi. And he's very rich, so he doesn't need money. And so Mossad chief asked Rafi Eitan, and you think that you will be able to recruit this Otto? So Eitan said, yes, I think I have the way to get to him.

Mossad is very famous in giving very long leash to those crazy ideas of young people. So Mossad chief said to Eitan, you know what? Fine with me. You go and try and play your games. But look at me. You will be able to recruit Otto Skorzeny, the general of the SS, the former commander of special operation of Hitler, when I'll have hair growing up in the palm of my hand. Luckily, Rafi Eitan liked to challenge. Now, long story short,

A lot of details and a long recruitment series of one person lead to the other. But at the end of the day, the Mossad ended up with meeting with the wife of Otto Skorzeny, Countess Ilsa von Finkelstein. Skorzeny's wife, Countess von Finkelstein, was a dubious character in her own right.

She was the niece of the Treasury Secretary for Hitler. She was selling arms and forged documents to Nazi fugitives.

And there was another important thing to know about the Countess. Also, Mossad learned that she and her husband, Skorzeny, were having something I think is named today as "open marriage." An open marriage for the uninitiated is a union in which both husband and wife are able to take alternative lovers. For Nazis, Mr. and Mrs. Otto Skorzeny were surprisingly open-minded in this respect.

The Mossad saw an opportunity in this thoroughly modern arrangement. So Mossad operative, who is described in Mossad dossier as young, tall, charismatic, with a known influence on women at a certain age. Very unpolitically correct. But this is how they wrote it. Approached the Countess, Elisabeth von Finkenschein, and the urban legend in Mossad,

was that he spent a long night with her and, how would I describe it? He sacrificed himself.

The young man in question, the honeypot if you will, was another Rafi, Rafi Medan. Ronan met with Medan as part of his research on this story. He said, "Rafi, you know that the legend in the dossier, in the description of the operation, it just says that he spent a long night with the Countess. But the legend is that you shut your eyes, you thought of the Queen and you did what you needed to be done in order to recruit the Countess."

And Rafi looked at me and smiled. He was already 94 when I interviewed him. He passed away with advanced Parkinson's. But he looked at me and smiled and said, Ronan,

You know, there are questions that gentlemen should not answer, and with all due respect, gentlemen should not ask. But if you already ask, let me tell you that it was a very long and nice and enjoyable night. Shortly after Rafi Medan's evening with the Countess von Finkenstein, Medan had managed to persuade his new lover to arrange a meeting between her Nazi husband and a friend from the Israeli Defense Ministry.

You might find Medan's forthrightness surprising, but there's something you should bear in mind. In 1960, just a few short years before this operation began, Mossad operatives had tracked down and captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. In 1962, he was hanged after standing trial in Israel. And if the Israelis could get Eichmann, hidden half a world away in Argentina, then they could get anyone, anywhere.

best perhaps to cooperate. Rafi Maidan and the Countess traveled together to Madrid to meet with Otto Skorzeny, the special operation chief for Hitler, and are joined by another case officer of the Mossad. And then happens, I think, the most dramatic moment in the history of their organization when the Mossad is able to recruit the special operation commander for Hitler and they use it while not using

using any kind of false identity, of a cover story. They understand that if they would say that they are NATO officers, this is a trained intelligence officer, he would call the bluff in the middle. They said that they are from the Mossad. They said that they want to recruit him. They said they want to make him a Mossad agent. Like his wife before him, Otto Skorzeny decided to work with the Israelis, although perhaps not quite as enthusiastically.

And he agreed not because of money, but because they could offer him something that nobody else could. Life without fear. And in exchange for his services, he received money, but more important, a new Austrian passport and a letter of immunity from the Prime Minister of Israel, promising him that Mossad will stop chasing him and will not harm him or his family. In exchange of that,

He became, I think, the most valuable asset in that decade, working for the Mossad, the most important agent. And he solved the problem of the German scientists working in Egypt without the need to fire even one more single shot. Skorzeny used his former status as an arch-Nazi to seed rumors among the German scientists in Egypt that he was working to establish a secretive Fourth Reich.

Many of the scientists, still bound by the oaths they had taken during the war, were taken in. Intimate details about their professional and personal lives were then passed on to the Mossad, who used them to intimidate the scientists. Soon, the Egyptian rocket program began to crumble from the inside. Eventually, Israel was able to lean on the West German government to end the involvement of German citizens entirely. They were infiltrated.

And they were convinced to go back to Germany after Shimon Peres, the Israeli Deputy Minister of Defense, agreed with the German prominent politician Franz Josef Strauss that each scientist who came back to Germany will enjoy a special stipend for the rest of his life. In both of the previously classified stories we've heard in this episode, a solution has been reached without bloodshed.

Targeted assassination proved to be flawed or ineffective. But Ronan believes that during the last decade, the institute has been behind a series of operations targeting Iranian nuclear scientists. This isn't history. This is contemporary politics. When they commissioned the first operation to try and kill Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the professor for nuclear physics and the top professor

nuclear scientist of the Iranian atomic project, a young woman, an intelligence officer, stood up at the headquarters of Mossad and said, you know, we are discussing the killing of this scientist. My father, she said, works for the Israeli Atomic Energy Committee, very senior official there. And if we determine that Israel is entitled to kill Mokhsan Fakhri Zadeh,

then the meaning of that is that my father is also a legitimate target of Iran. And if we kill him, that could legitimize killing my father. And from an ethical point of view, what's the difference? So killing scientists is always the hardest challenge.

Israel's actions against Iran scientists were allegedly put on hold after the US and Iran signed the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That's the Iran nuclear deal to you and me. However, Ronan believes that the Mossad followed through on an earlier plan to eliminate Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a senior official in the Iranian nuclear program, on November 27, 2020.

Fakhrizadeh was moving with a heavily armed convoy through a small village outside of Tehran, the Iranian capital. Sniper machine gun opened fire from a vehicle station just by the main road.

and was able to take out Fakhrizadeh alone, just him, his wife, all the bodyguards or the stray dog that ran around, none of them was even scratched. Only him was killed and Iran believes, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard claim that it was not humans who killed him, but it was a killer robot.

In this instance, "killer robot" means "satellite-controlled machine gun turret", which sounds a little less far-fetched. Ronin thinks that the Revolutionary Guard might be onto something. And I said to someone speaking about this operation not long ago, I said, "You know, those Revolutionary Guards, they are lying all the time." Including inventing stories about me, telling that because they don't understand how a journalist can be independent.

and always a journalist writing on intelligence according to the way they see the world has to be part of the intelligence. So claiming that I am part of the Mossad. But I said, you know, because they are lying all the time, nobody believes them. And in this one specific, like a jammed watch that tells the true time twice a day, one incident when they are telling the truth and nobody believes them. This is a story yet to be

revealed in details. And I hope that it's not long before we are able to do so. Israel planned and executed the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who since a decade was the second most guarded person in Iran after the Supreme Leader Khamenei, because the Iranians figured out that the Israelis are still after him to kill him. Right now, Ronan Bergman is probably the world's leading expert on the subject of targeted assassination.

He's interviewed hundreds of former operatives, devoured thousands of pages of research. Even so, his feelings on the topic are best described as mixed. Two questions I have in mind that summarize most of the dilemmas here. One, is it effective? Does the world become a better place the day after? And second, is it legally and morally justified? And so when it comes to the first question,

Is it effective? Then I have clear evidence on many cases in many eras in history when the use of targeted assassination brought solution to challenges, severe challenges to Israel national security and the stability of the region. And just imagine, not that I like, and I know that professional historians are always against playing the game,

the games of counterfactual history. But let's say that von Stauffenberg was accurate in where he put the bomb and killed Hitler. Wouldn't that shorten the war? Wouldn't killing Saddam Hussein save the world from some of the atrocities that he has been conducting? And when it comes to legality and ethics and morality, I must say that I do not accept

any kind of acceptance of collateral damage. I think that if you are aiming to kill an enemy, then you need to make sure that only the enemy is killed and you do not risk any citizens. But when discussing the morality of killing an enemy that you cannot arrest, then I understand the difficulty.

I understand the challenge. You have a person who recruits terrorists to go and perform suicide bombing in your country. He is in a foreign country. You cannot arrest him. And if you send a battalion of tanks to arrest him, he will run away. And in the way, many civilians of both sides will be killed. So the only way is either to accept what he's doing or to kill him.

then what do you do? You accept that he will continue to recruit poor people and send them to explode themselves in kindergartens or shopping malls or about buses. And then even those people who object targeted killing, and I respect that, and I understand that you, you know, the claim that democracy cannot do things like that, and it cannot rule a verdict of a person without a trial, a death verdict. But when you ask them, okay, so what do you do instead?

They say, no, no, but the country cannot kill anyone. I say, okay, but what do you do? We understand what you want to do. But let's say that you are the prime minister of Israel and you need to make a call. What to do with that perpetrator? What do you do with this recruiter of suicide bombers? Then they usually get stuck. Are you convinced? Where do you stand? How far do your democratic ideals go before they meet the demands of grim practicality?

You can learn about more episodes in the Mossad's checkered history and the ethical dilemmas they pose in Ronan's book, Rise and Kill First. I'm Vanessa Kirby. Here's a taste of next week's encounter with true spies.