Danielle Pletka
On Sept. 11, 1962, German rocket scientist Heinz Krug disappeared from his office in Munich, never to be seen again. Like several other veterans of the Nazi missile program, Krug was working for the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose nation had already fought two wars with the young state of Israel. The backstory is long and complicated—involving Benito Mussolini, Eva Perón, and hidden Nazi gold—but the short version is that the Mossad, Israel’s chief intelligence agency, recruited a Nazi once close to Adolf Hitler to knock Krug off.
But, although it might have been Israel’s most film noir-worthy tale of assassination, it certainly wasn’t its last. This year, in late May and June, seven individuals affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including two colonels, were killed in separate incidents. Iran, unsurprisingly, has fingered the Mossad in most of the deaths.
Assassination has long been a vital tool in Israel’s arsenal. Just as Israel was emerging as a state in 1948, United Nations negotiator Folke Bernadotte was killed by members of the Lehi gang, which included a man who would later become an Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. (Bernadotte was promoting alternatives to the U.N. partition plan that Lehi feared might gain traction.)
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