Operation Damocles

This is the story of how, 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 once dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe”. From there came late-night threats, intimidation, letter bombs … and a murder 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, working the same dirty trade to keep a Greater Israel from ever meeting its match.

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