The acclaimed Israeli intelligence agency Mossad missed at least two promising opportunities to capture the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz, claimed a former Mossad operative last week.
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Rafi Eitan, who commanded the daring operation to capture Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, stated that he and his team discovered Mengele’s hideout during the hunt for Nazi war criminals.
– At the same time we were capturing Eichmann, we discovered that Mengele was living in Buenos Aires. We found his apartment and put it under surveillance, Eitan told Israeli public radio after Mossad declassified the operations to track down the man known to Auschwitz inmates as the “Angel of Death.”
As the chief physician in that camp, Mengele “sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers with a mere wave of his hand,” the daily Yediot Aharanot reported, citing declassified materials.
– He also conducted shocking ‘medical’ experiments on camp inmates, the paper adds.
Eitan, now 90 years old, recounts how Mossad abducted Eichmann and kept him in a safe house before smuggling him out of Buenos Aires on an El Al flight, adding that the then-head of Mossad, Issar Harel, wanted to simultaneously ‘grab’ Mengele as well. Eitan opposed this.
– I did not want to conduct two operations at the same time because we were already successfully concluding one. In my experience, if you try to conduct a second operation simultaneously, you risk both, Eitan said.
As a compromise, he stayed in Argentina to monitor Mengele while the architect of the Holocaust, Eichmann, was taken to Israel where he was sentenced to death and hanged.
Mengele was not in the Argentine capital at that time, but was expected to return from a trip in a week.
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– We waited for him, but in the meantime, the news about Eichmann spread around the world and Mengele never returned to his apartment in Buenos Aires, Eitan adds.
According to him, the Mossad team lost track of Mengele even after he was discovered in Brazil.
– Mengele was positively identified at a farm near Sao Paulo at the end of 1962, but Harel left the agency at the beginning of the following year, and his successor did not give the green light for an operation against Mengele because the agency had other priorities in the world, Eitan explained.
Yediot Aharonoth writes that Mossad documents reveal some oversights, noting that Mengele’s operatives mainly searched for him in Paraguay, even though he was in Brazil.
It also recalls a very expensive operation to wiretap and track Mengele’s son Rolf in West Berlin in 1983, hoping that he would lead them to his father. An attractive female agent was also engaged in this operation, attempting to get close to Rolf as a private secretary, but she was unsuccessful.
Mossad did not know that Mengele was already dead at that time. He suffered a stroke while swimming off the Brazilian coast and drowned in 1979. His death was confirmed only in 1985, after the exhumation of his body.
