Bollyn's 9/11 Israel Connection Censored In Trump's Jewish Zionist New York As 'Anti-Semitic' - Bollyn Once Married To Israeli Woman

The fact that his first wife was Israeli, as Bollyn tells(Israeli english newpaper Haaretz), adds an ironic twist to Bollyn’s demonization of Jews.(Or demonstrates the truth should be more important than whether you are  Jewish or non-Jewish
just as Jewish Zionist elites' collusion with Germany's NaZis 
should not be hidden from history as it has been due to ongoing legacy of power of heirs to those NAZI Jews.)


The truth is that everything Bollyn has said can be verified which is why his Zionist critics are so outraged and Zionist NY Times and other Israeli City of London controlled television and news media all censored mention of Israelis guarding Logan Airport Boston on September 11,2001 much less that the Israeli CEO of ICTS International that allowed the planes alleged by U.S.government to take off and hit he WTC was a convicted in Israel money launderer ,Menachem Atzmon,with friends and crime partners at the highest level of Israeli government - i.e. ex PM Ehud Olmert,Bibi Netanyahu,et.al. :

My Open Letter to President-elect Trump... - Christopher Bollyn ...

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=605238719656506&id...

My Open Letter to President-elect Trump Dear Reader, With the election of Donald Trump we are clearly approaching a critical transition in American...

List of Articles - Christopher Bollyn

www.bollyn.com/list-of-articles/

Bollyn's Open Letter to President-elect Trump, 11.11.2016. The Computer Crimes of 9/11: How Critical U.S. Airport Computers Were Compromised with Israeli ...

Bollyn's 9/11 Israel Connection Censored In Trump's Jewish Zionist New York


http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/americas/1.740915

Christopher Bollyn speaking at Brooklyn Commons. September 2016. Debra Nussbaum Cohen

DiscoverBrooklynAssaultZionismShimon Peres
NEW YORK – Christopher Bollyn has the smooth good looks and calm demeanor of a small-market news anchor. But what he claims — that American Zionists and Israelis were behind the terror attacks on September 11, 2001 — is leading to stormy reactions in Brooklyn and beyond.
Bollyn’s 2012 self-published book about the “truth” of September 11, 2001 states, “the ‘false flag’ terrorism of 9/11 is a monstrous Jewish-Zionist crime of our time.” He has attended Holocaust denial conferences in the U.S. and Russia, according to the ADL, and appeared on David Duke’s radio show.

The fact that his first wife was Israeli, as Bollyn tells Haaretz, adds an ironic twist to Bollyn’s demonization of Jews.


read more: http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/americas/1.740915


In the back room of The Brooklyn Commons Wednesday night Bollyn, speaking to perhaps two dozen people, spent more than two hours carefully linking together pieces of a story which, he believes, illustrate a plot orchestrated by Israel and her supporters in order to bring to life a war on terror. Their ultimate goal? To “Balkanize” countries like Syria and Iraq “to reduce the Middle East to a patchwork of ethnic states which are weak and powerless,” he said in his talk. The end game, he said, is “the establishment of Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entirety of 'Eretz Yisrael.'”
“The Zionist war agenda waged by the U.S. was the primary reason for 9/11,” he said in the presentation, which was twice interrupted by protestors who came from outside, where about a dozen people stood holding placards and occasionally chanting. Eventually the police were called.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/americas/1.740915


Bollyn “has explicit anti-Semitic comments on his website. To make a blanket statement that the Jews are pulling the strings is classic European anti-Semitism and it shakes me to the core,” Woolf told Haaretz. “When you see anti-Semitism in the left it’s really hard.”
Ennen, the longtime owner of the space in the heart of downtown Brooklyn’s cultural district, was involved in a 9/11 ‘truther’ conference several years ago, she confirmed to Haaretz. “As far as I’m concerned there should be some freedom of speech about 9/11,” Ennen told Haaretz. “I don’t know who was behind it. All I know is that I don’t believe the government version.”
skip - Protesters expelled from Brooklyn Commons event with Christopher Bollyn

Protesters expelled from Brooklyn Commons event with Christopher Bollyn
“This isn’t about freedom of speech at all,” Woolf responded. “This is about hate speech.”
Bollyn has, since being arrested in Illinois in 2007 and found guilty of misdemeanor aggravated assault and resisting arrest — which he says was ordered by Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff who is, of course, Jewish — lived in Sweden with his wife and their children, ages 18 and 21, he told Haaretz in an interview before the talk.
His first marriage was to an Israeli woman he met at Kibbutz Afikim in the late 1970s, when he volunteered there as the pool lifeguard after traveling to Israel to take a break from trekking in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria — places where it snows in winter — and the idea of picking oranges in Israel was appealing, he tells Haaretz.
In his presentation Wednesday night, Bollyn went through a lengthy slide show purporting to link together everyone from Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu to World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein, filmmaker Arnon Milchan, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein (who presided over 9/11 lawsuits) and, like any good conspiracy theorist, the Rothschild banking family.

Christopher Bollyn speaking at Brooklyn Commons. September 2016. Debra Nussbaum Cohen
In one slide, for example, he superimposed an image of Shimon Peres over the outline of a black-hooded man wielding a Kalashnikov automatic rifle. “Frighten the West,” it says, purporting to quote from a 1955 book by then-PM Moshe Sharett (who despised Peres).
“We are kept in a constant state of fear to keep us supporting the war on terror,” said Bollyn.
It was in Israel that he first experienced racism, he told Haaretz. He was living with his then-wife in her grandmother’s apartment in Jerusalem when relatives called, questioning why she was living with a “sheigitz,” who was at the time her husband. They were a couple from the late 1970s until they divorced in 1985, two years after a city hall wedding in Puerto Rico, Bollyn said.
Bollyn, who speaks rudimentary Hebrew, told Haaretz, “The root word of sheigeitz is something so foul it cannot be touched. To call somebody who is not of your race or religion foul, this is racism.”
When he went to get his tourist visa extended in Tiberias “they automatically stamped my visa with a beit, while my Jewish friends got an A, an aleph,” he told Haaretz, which for him confirmed Jewish and Israeli racism. “Discriminating by race is anathema to me.”
While Bollyn has heretofore not been a major player in the alt right sphere, he pops up every year or two in the weeks leading up to 9/11. His supporters have been targeting left-wing venues in the apparent belief that this might be fertile ground for his views.
But every space booked by an intermediary canceled Bollyn’s use of the space as soon as their owners became aware of his beliefs. A Unitarian church in Hartford, CT., and bookstore-café in Washington, D.C., as well as a beer garden in Texas are among those which this week barred him from speaking.
A palm reader and psychic named Cat McGuire rented space at the West-Park Presbyterian Church for a Bollyn presentation this Friday night on the Upper West Side.
The small congregation, which hosts arts organizations and rents space to other groups about 100 times a year, didn’t think much of it until the pastor saw flyers promising Bollyn would speak about “the Zionist cabal” behind September 11th’s destruction.
On Tuesday the church canceled the rental contract. “The event was presented to us without full disclosure” when McGuire rented the space, Rev. Robert Brashear told Haaretz. “Reading the advertisement we concluded their activities are clearly anti-Semitic…we can’t let that go forward.”
McGuire did not respond to phone messages and emails from Haaretz.
But once informed the rental had been jettisoned McGuire emailed the church. “I do hope the church does not come down on the side of censorship. Charges of anti-Semitism and hate speech will most assuredly be hurled, but we went with Presbyterians because you support the BDS movement,” McGuire wrote. “As such, we felt surely you would recognize such bullying tactics for what they are: the silencing of free speech and right to assembly,” she wrote.
West-Park Church has taken no position on BDS, or Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, said Brashear. Its denomination, The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), voted in 2014 to divest from companies that benefit from the occupation, a move it confirmed in June with a vote expanding that position.
West-Park has a long history of progressive activism. It was the first mainline church in the country to grant LGBTQ people full rights and participation, in 1978, said Brashear, and regularly hosts Palestine solidarity events, most of which are screenings of films made by Israeli filmmakers.
The single venue to keep Bollyn’s talk on the calendar was The Brooklyn Commons, which houses several leftist organizations, including The Marxist Education Project and radio station WBAI. The tenant organizations issued a statement on Monday, saying, “We reject the anti-Semitic politics of Christopher Bollyn…such politics should have no place in leftist spaces.”
The political left has a problem with anti-Semitism in its midst, say some, and appears often unwilling to address it.
“Anti-Semitism is often the glue that holds unlikely political bedfellows together, and can create a bridge linking the far left and radical right,” said Spencer Sunshine, a researcher on extremist political movements and expert on left wing anti-Semitism, who was among the protestors Wednesday night.
Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, a left-wing political organizing group in New York, as well as the New York chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-BDS organization, separately urged The Brooklyn Commons to cancel Bollyn’s appearance.


read more: http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/americas/1.740915

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http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.711115

The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman
Otto Skorzeny, one of the Mossad’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorites.

On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.
The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.
HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.
We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.

But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.
We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.

Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.711115



But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”

Otto Skorzeny with the liberated Mussolini – 12 September 1943.Wikimedia Commons /Toni Schneiders
Key to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night, telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.
Krug, as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.
During the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.
According to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic missile program for that Arab country.
In the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.
The threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962.
It was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.

Otto Skorzeny (2nd from left), 3 October 1943.Wikimedia Commons
On the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources, Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.
Skorzeny, then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.
The colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”
Krug contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain — could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.
The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.
After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.
The troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel, continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.

Otto Skorzeny (left) and Adrian von Fölkersam (right) in Budapest, 16 October 1944.Wikimedia Commons
Israel’s motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.
The Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies: Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career in Brussels in 1990. Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.
To get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is what seemed necessary.
But why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?
He was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless, bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war, and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.
He joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard force.
Skorzeny, in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France. His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS, after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party and its genocidal plan.

Otto Skorzeny in Pomerania visiting the 500th SS Parachute Battalion, February 1945.Wikimedia Commons
His most famous and daring mission was in September 1943: leading commandos who flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.
This was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.
In September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally, was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged, Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that point.
Also in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own lines.
The bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property — plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military strategist.
There was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the American military authorities who held him for a third year after his acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.
Skorzeny’s escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the missile program and employing German experts.

Otto Skorzeny Waiting in a cell as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, 24 November 1945.Wikimedia Commons
In Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.
Mossad officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.
The Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and perished.
Like many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name, and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force. The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s intelligence chief.
Raanan’s unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare, attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.
The Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan” if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie, playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.
Internal Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty, vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a couples game.
One evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome — though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented finance minister.
They had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just survived a harrowing street robbery.
They spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were, respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his “helper,” Anke.
There were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”
The young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”
“Or maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”
Anke spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”
After a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed information and would pay him handsomely.
Hitler’s favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”
The Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.
The Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”
Skorzeny finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man concealed his disgust.
“I knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said, with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover story.”
The next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler, Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by name as “a war criminal.”
Raanan, as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust survivor.”
Naturally, many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.
The new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis, he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their addresses.
Skorzeny also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.
Raanan continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.
Eitan was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States government.
Surprisingly flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.
“Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.
Ahituv, who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many secrets and often conducted joint projects with the Mossad.
The Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal— declaring that his name had been cleared.
Skorzeny continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists worked.
The campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they were immediately set free.
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.
Harel submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it. The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit, moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.
Amit did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official. Nothing ever came of it.
Skorzeny never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.
He also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful and alive through killing and fear.
It is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry for his actions during World War II.
He may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.
He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.
There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.
The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.
Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” (Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at feedback@forward.com

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