Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

“That must have been what my mother meant,” he said at length.

Hoffmann grunted. “Probably.”

“I still want to find that bastard.”

“Leave it alone, Miller. Drop it. No one will thank you.”

“That’s not the only reason, is it? The public reaction. There’s another reason, isn’t there?”

Hoffmann eyed him keenly through the cigar smoke. “Yes,” he said shortly.

“Are you afraid of them-still?” asked Miller.

Hoffmann shook his head. “No. I just don’t go looking for trouble, that’s all.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Have you ever heard of a man called Hans Habe?” asked Hoffmann.

“The novelist? Yes, what about him?”

“He used to run a magazine in Munich once. Back in the early fifties. A good one too-he was a damn good reporter, like you. Echo of the Week, it was called. He hated the Nazis, so he ran a series of expos6s of former SS men living in freedom in Munich.”

“What happened to him?”

“To him, nothing. One day he got more mail than usual. Half the letters were from his advertisers, withdrawing their custom. Another was from his bank, asking him to drop around. When he did, he was told the bank was foreclosing on the overdraft, as of that minute. Within a week the magazine was out of business. Now he writes novels, good ones too. But he doesn’t run a magazine anymore.”

“So what do the rest of us do? Keep running scared?”

Hoffmann jerked his cigar out of his mouth. “I don’t have to take that from you, Miller,” he said, his eyes snapping. “I hated the bastards then and I hate them now. But I know my readers. And they don’t want to know about Eduard Roschmann.”

“All right. I’m sorry. But I’m still going to cover it.”

“You know, Miller, if I didn’t know you, I’d think there was something personal behind it. Never let journalism get personal. It’s bad for reporting, and it’s bad for the reporter. Anyway, how are you going to finance yourself?”

“I’ve got some savings,” Miller rose to go.

“Best of luck,” said Hoffmann, rising and coming around the desk. “I tell you what I’ll do. The day Roschmann is arrested and imprisoned by the West German police, I’ll commission you to cover the story. That’s straight news, so it’s public property. If I decide not to print, I’ll buy it out of my pocket.

That’s as far as I’ll go. But while you’re digging for him, you’re not carrying the letterhead of my magazine around as your authority.” Miller nodded. “I’ll be back,” he said.

WEDNESDAY MORNING was also the time of the week when the heads of the five branches of the Israeli Intelligence apparent met for their informal weekly discussion.

In most countries the rivalry between the various separate Intelligence services is legendary. In Russia the KGB hates the guts of the GRU; in America the FBI will not cooperate with the CIA. The British Security Service regards Scotland Yard’s Special Branch as a crowd of flat-footed coppers, and there are so many crooks in the French SDECE that experts wonder whether the French Intelligence service is part of the government or the underworld.

But Israel is fortunate. Once a week the chiefs of the five branches meet for a friendly chat without interdepartmental friction. It is one of the dividends of being a nation surrounded by enemies. At these meetings coffee and soft drinks are passed around, those present use first names to each other, the atmosphere is relaxed, and more work gets done than could be effected by a torrent of written memoranda.

It was to this meeting that the Controller of the Mossad and chief of the joint five branches of Israeli Intelligence, General Meir Arnit, was traveling on the morning of December 4. Beyond the windows of his long black chauffeur-driven limousine a fine dawn was beaming down on the whitewashed sprawl of Tel Aviv. But the general’s mood failed to match it. He was a deeply worried man.

The cause of his worry was a piece of information that had reached him in the small hours of the morning.

A small fragment of knowledge to be added to the immense file in the archives, but vital, for the file into which that dispatch from one of his agents in Cairo would be added was the file on the rockets of Helwan.

The forty-two-year-old general’s poker face betrayed nothing of his feelings as the car swung around the Circus and headed toward the northern suburbs of the capital. He leaned back on the upholstery of his seat and considered the long history of those rockets being built north of Cairo, which had already cost several men their lives and had cost his predecessor, General Issar Harel, his job….

During the course of 1961, long before Nasser’s two rockets went on public display in the streets of Cairo, the Israeli Mossad had learned of their existence. From the moment the first dispatch came through from Egypt, it bad kept Factory 333 under constant surveillance.

It was perfectly well aware of the large-scale recruitment by the Egyptians, through the good offices of the Odessa, of German scientists to work on the rockets of Helwan. It was a serious matter then; it became infinitely more serious in the spring of 1962.

In May that year Heinz Krug, the German recruiter of the scientists, first made approaches to the Austrian physicist Dr. Otto Yoklek in Vienna. Instead of allowing himself to be recruited, the Austrian professor made contact with the Israelis. What he had to say electrified Tel Aviv. He told the agent of the Mossad who was sent to interview him that the Egyptians intended to arm their rockets with warheads containing irradiated nuclear waste and cultures of bubonic plague.

So important was the news that the Controller of the Mossad, General Issar Harel, the man who had personally escorted the kidnapped Adolf Eichmann back from Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv, Pew to Vienna to talk to Yoklek himself. He was convinced the professor was right, a conviction corroborated by the news that the Cairo government had just purchased through a firm in Zurich a quantity of radioactive cobalt equivalent to twenty-five times Egypt’s possible requirement for medical purposes.

On his return from Vienna, Issar Harel went to see Premier David Ben-Gurion and urged that he be allowed to begin a campaign of reprisals against the German scientists who were either working in Egypt or about to go there.

The old Premier was in a quandary. On the one hand he realized the hideous danger the new rockets and their genocidal warheads presented to his people; on the other, he recognized the value of the German tanks and guns due to arrive at any moment. Israeli reprisals on the streets of Germany might just be enough to persuade Chancellor Adenauer to listen to his Foreign Ministry faction and shut off the arms deal.

Inside the Tel Aviv cabinet there was a split developing similar to the split inside the Bonn cabinet over the arms sales. Issar Harel and the Foreign Minister, Madame Golda Meir, were in favor of a tough policy against the German scientists; Shimon Peres and the Army were terrified by the thought they might lose their precious German tanks. Ben-Gurion was tom between the two.

He hit on a compromise; he authorized Harel to undertake a muted, discreet campaign to discourage German scientists from going to Cairo to help Nasser build his rockets. But Harel, with his burning gut-hatred of Germany and all things German, went beyond his brief.

On September 11, 1962, Heinz Krug disappeared. He had dined the previous evening with Dr. Kleinwachter, the rocket-propulsion expert he was trying to recruit, and an unidentified Egyptian. On the morning of the eleventh, Krug’s car was found abandoned close to his home in a suburb of Munich. His wife immediately claimed he had been kidnapped by Israeli agents, but the Munich police found not a trace of Krug or of evidence as to his kidnapers.