Mossad’s Nazi Commando: The Shocking True Story of Otto Skorzeny and Israel’s Secret War Against Egypt’s Rocket Program

The Mossad's Most Dangerous Secret: They Hired a Nazi to Hunt Nazis. In 1962, Israel's spy agency made a deal with the devil, and it almost destroyed the country. The Operation That Should Not Have Happened On a sweltering July morning in 1962, four Egyptian rockets streaked into the sky over the Libyan Desert. Two days later, twenty more rolled through Cairo on transporters, past a quarter-million cheering Egyptians and the cameras of the world's press. President Nasser declared that his missiles could strike "any target south of Beirut." A line that included every Jewish city in Israel. Inside the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, Director Isser Harel read the cables and made a decision that would end his career, topple a prime minister, and force Israel to confront a moral question it had never expected to face: How far is too far when the alternative is annihilation? A Story Hidden for Sixty Years The German engineers building Nasser's rockets were not abstractions. They had names. They had Peenemünde pedigrees. They had built the V-2s that fell on London. Now, in 1962, they were in Egypt, drawing salaries that dwarfed what postwar Bonn could offer them, designing weapons aimed at the world's only Jewish state. Harel sent his operatives into the field with letter bombs, kidnap teams, and a recruitment list of former Nazis willing to inform on their old comrades for a price. At the top of that list was Otto Skorzeny. Hitler's favorite commando. The man who rescued Mussolini from a mountaintop prison. The SS lieutenant colonel who had impersonated American officers behind Allied lines during the Battle of the Bulge. By 1962 he was running a consultancy in Madrid, untouchable behind Franco's protection, and on Simon Wiesenthal's wanted list. The Mossad approached him in a Madrid bar. He pulled a gun. They told him who they were. He listened. What Really Happened The disappearance of Heinz Krug from a Munich street on a September afternoon in 1962, and the two competing accounts of how he died The parcel bombs mailed to Cairo on November 27 that maimed an innocent secretary and killed five Egyptians at a post office The shooting attempt in a quiet Lörrach driveway that left a bullet lodged in a Sudeten German engineer's scarf The Basel sting that arrested two Israeli operatives at a luxury hotel and detonated the entire operation in headlines from Tel Aviv to Bonn The cabinet meeting of March 25, 1963, when Ben-Gurion and Harel sat down for the last time The funeral in Madrid on August 7, 1975, where a retired Mossad officer hid his face in the corner while old SS comrades sang Hitler's favorite songs over Otto Skorzeny's coffin A True Story Better Than Any Thriller This is not a novel. Every name is real. Every date is documented. Every operation took place exactly as described in the surviving record, and where the record is contested between major historians, both versions are presented honestly. But it reads like a thriller because the truth was always more extraordinary than fiction. The campaign that began with a parade ended with the quiet collapse of Egypt's missile dreams, but not before it nearly broke the agency that ran it. Read the Operation the Mossad Tried to Forget