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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Israeli Mossad spymaster Rafi Eitan reveals his exploits - review |
| 2022-12-24 |
| [JP] The late Rafi Eitan was — as the title Capturing Eichmann: The Memoir of a Mossad Spymaster suggests — an intelligence operative, a maverick with a finger in many pies. Working on this account until a few days before his death in 2019, this posthumous publication relates many fascinating episodes in his life: how he killed two German Templars who wanted to return to their farms in British-controlled Palestine after World War II; suggested to David Ben-Gurion about the stuffing of ballot boxes with fake votes during the 1955 election; and worked with SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny, who had released Benito Mussolini from captivity in 1943 and supported the fascist Arrow Cross in Hungary. He comments that in the course of his work, he had "no hesitation about employing Nazis to ensure the security of Israel." Eitan’s odyssey is a mirror image of the history of the state. His father fought in Trotsky’s Red Army, while he himself was a member of the Palmah, operating against Fawzi al-Qawuqji and participating in the Battle of Malikiya during the War of Independence. Eitan was involved in the arrests of Aharon Cohen, Kurt Sitte and Israel Beer, all accused of being engaged in Soviet espionage. He believed that the Americans were fighting "a futile war" in Vietnam and attempted to explore contacts with the Chinese leadership through the good offices of Morris Cohen, a one-time consultant to Mao’s intelligence services and representative of British companies in China. He came to know Markus Wolf, the partly Jewish head of the Stasi in Communist East Germany, and regarded president Jimmy Carter’s unwillingness to intervene in Iran to stop the ascent of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamists as "one of the most serious and tragic mistakes since World War II." |
| Posted by:Besoeker |