Operation Damocles
OPERATION DAMOCLES
In the early 1960s, Mossad chief Isser Harel set out to wreck Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rocket program after Egypt recruited German engineers—some of them veterans of Hitler’s V-2 work—to build missiles that could hit Israel from launch sites located the deep inside Egypt’s western desert. Harel, apparently, brought in Otto Skorzeny, a former SS commando turned US mercenary — a man dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe” by British intelligence during the Second World War.
From this unholy alliance of Zionism and Nazism came Operation Damocles — a program of late-night phone call threats, intimidation of women and children, letter bombs … and the murder of German arms broker Heinz Krug along a remote forest track outside Munich.
Nasser’s missile program died in the sand thanks to Operation Damocles, but this is one of the coldest bargains in the history of the Israeli state: Zionist spies and an unrepentant Nazi hitman, working the same dirty trade to keep David Ben-Gurion’s dream a Greater Israel from ever meeting its match.