Mossad agent who masterminded the daring operation to seize the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from the streets of Argentina
With his leading involvement in two of the most daring Nazi-hunting missions carried out by Mossad, Yaakov Meidad was one of the Israeli secret service’s most successful operatives. Balding, and with a slight paunch, Meidad cut more of a George Smiley figure than that of a James Bond, although his exploits were indeed like something from one of the most exciting of thrillers.
Meidad’s most renowned mission was the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann off the streets of Buenos Aires in 1960. It was Meidad’s job to rent two apartments that were to be used as safe houses, as well as the hiring of suitably large cars that could transport the Mossad team and their victim around the Argentine capital. Finding such vehicles was no easy task, although the resourceful Meidad managed to rent a Chevrolet that was destined for the breaker’s yard for the huge sum of $5,000 — some $35,000 today.
Eichmann had earlier been identified with the aid of an old SS photograph by another Mossad agent, Zvi Aharoni (obituary, July 11, 2012). After Eichmann was snatched, Meidad was one of the agents who had to guard the former Nazi while the team waited to take their prize to Israel. Meidad later recalled how their captive was a “small nervous man”, whose physical presence somehow did not measure up to the enormity of his crimes.
Before the team left Buenos Aires, Meidad told the operation’s leader, Isser Harel, that the Chevrolet should be returned to the garage so that the State of Israel should have its deposit refunded. A reluctant Harel agreed, and Meidad took back the car and got back the money.
Meidad very nearly did not make it on to the El Al Bristol Britannia that flew Eichmann and the kidnap team out of Argentina. His hire car burst into flames en route to the airport, and he had to catch a taxi instead. He was the last person to board the plane, which eventually landed in Israel on the morning of May 22.
At 4pm the following afternoon, the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben- Gurion, informed the Israeli parliament and the world that “Israeli security forces” had located Eichmann, and that he was under arrest in Israel. Naturally, the identity of Meidad and all those who were involved was kept secret for years.
Yaakov Meidad was born in 1919 in Breslau in Germany –— now Wroclaw in Poland. His father was a doctor who had won the Iron Cross in the First World War, and his mother was a language teacher who passed on her linguistic skills to her only child. These would prove invaluable for Meidad in his career as a spy. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Meidad’s parents sent him to Palestine, where, at the age of 17, Meidad joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground army, and he enrolled in that organisation’s secret officers’ course.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Meidad was said to have been the first Jew in Palestine to volunteer to serve in the British Army, in which he served with distinction. Both his parents were murdered in the Holocaust. After the creation of the State of Israel, Meidad served in the Israeli Defence Forces as an artillery officer, and he fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After serving in several more military posts, he joined Mossad in 1955, where his languages, easy-going manner, military experience and unremarkable appearance quickly saw him rise through the ranks.
Although the Eichmann kidnap was the most famous operation in which Meidad was involved, his leading role in the assassination in Montevideo in February 1965 of the Latvian war criminal Herberts Cukurs would prove to be his most remarkable.
Posing as an Austrian businessman called Anton Kuenzle, Meidad had pretended to befriend Cukurs since the previous September. Cukurs was running a seaplane joyride business on the shores of an artificial lake near São Paulo, although the business was barely surviving, and the promises made by “Kuenzle” of exciting new money-making opportunities seemed to eradicate Cukurs’s natural suspicion of strangers. The Latvian had every reason to be cautious. His name had been mentioned during the Eichmann trial, in which it was revealed how Cukurs — nicknamed the “Hangman of Riga” — had collaborated with the Nazi death squads, and had personally killed Jewish women and children.
Over the next few months, Cukurs and “Kuenzle” formed a friendship and a nascent business partnership, during which Cukurs tested the shooting ability of Meidad, whose cover story claimed that he had served in the Wehrmacht during the war. Meidad passed the test, although he would later recount how he was more worried that Cukurs would spot the fact he was circumcised during a roadside rest break on a long car journey. Fortunately, Cukurs did not appear to notice.
By the New Year of 1965, Meidad had sufficiently gained the trust of Cukurs to entice him to Montevideo under the pretext of establishing a business in the Uruguayan capital. At the beginning of February, Meidad cabled for a four-strong Mossad hit team to fly to South America to join him and within a few days a small house some 100 metres from the sea was chosen as the place for the Mossad execution.
Cukurs arrived in Montevideo on Air France flight 083 on the morning of February 23, where he was greeted by Meidad and then driven in a black VW Beetle to the prospective “office”. Meidad got out the car, and bid a wary Cukurs to follow him up the garden path.
After the two men entered the house, Cukurs was jumped on by the Mossad agents, who were dressed only in their underpants in order to avoid staining their clothes with blood. Although the plan had been to overpower the Latvian and make him face a form of trial before killing him, Cukurs put up such a tremendous fight that he was shot twice in the head during the struggle. It is not known who pulled the trigger, and Meidad never revealed it.
Cukurs was packed into a trunk, and the Mossad agents quickly left the country. After his body was discovered, Cukurs’s family was convinced that the mysterious “Kuenzle” was responsible, and Meidad’s face was splashed in newspapers across the world.
Safely hidden back in Israel, neither the press nor police found Meidad, who would never admit publicly to his role until he published his memoir — under the name of Kuenzle — in Hebrew 15 years ago. The book was eventually published in English in 2004, to surprisingly little attention.
After his retirement from Mossad, Meidad took up the study of psychology in 1977. In February this year, he was able to attend the opening of the exhibition of the Eichmann kidnap at the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where, despite being in a very weakened state, he managed to smile.
Yaakov Meidad, soldier and spy, was born in 1919. He died on June 30, 2012, aged 93
Áðèòàíñêèé ïðåäñòàâèòåëü ïðè ÍÀÒÎ è àâòîð áèîãðàôèé Áðóêà è Ðîììåëÿ
UK Military Representative to Nato and prolific writer of military history and biography as well as novels
David Fraser was a man of incisive mind. Highly articulate, he wrote with a swift lucidity, making him as formidable a staff officer as he was an able commander. His pungent comments on the views of others could be discomforting — not for nothing was he known as “Fraser the Razor” — but his penetrating analyses of the controversial military issues of the day were usually welcomed. When he wished, he could display great charm and no mean wit.
David William Fraser was the son of Brigadier the Hon William Fraser, DSO, MC, Grenadier Guards, the younger son of the 18th Lord Saltoun, Chief of Clan Fraser. He was descended from a long line of eminent soldiers. His great-great-grandfather, the 16th Lord Saltoun, served in the First Foot Guards and commanded the Light Companies at Waterloo; the 17th Lord served in the 28th Foot, the Gloucesters, and the 18th in the Grenadiers. His mother was Pamela Maude, widow of Major W. La T. Congreve, VC, DSO, MC, who won his posthumous VC at Longueval in July 1916, serving with the Rifle Brigade.
Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Fraser was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in 1941. He served in the 2nd Armoured Battalion in the Guards Armoured Division in the North West European Campaign from Normandy to the Baltic, 1944-45. Later, from 1960 to 1962, he commanded the 1st Battalion, taking them to the Cameroons in 1961 during a plebiscite to decide the UN-Trustee territories’ structure on independence. The southern part of West (British) Cameroon chose to join the French Cameroon Republic with which it had little in common. Fraser was said to have reassured the local headmen in his area that all would be well, as the union of England and Scotland was not going too badly!
He established his credentials as an all arms commander when commanding 19th Infantry Brigade of the UK-based Strategic Reserve from 1963 to 1965. His headquarters and selected units were sent to North Borneo during Indonesia’s “confrontation” with Malaysia and deployed to the Sibu district, on the Rajang river, a densely forested region previously only thinly protected. His first senior staff appointment was as Director of Defence Plans (Army) in the Ministry of Defence from 1966 to 1969 during the critical years of Denis Healey’s rolling Defence Reviews, when the final withdrawal from East of Suez was being decided and the Services reshaped for a predominantly European role.
After commanding the 4th Armoured Division in the British Army of the Rhine, where his German helped to establish close relations with his Bundeswehr colleagues and the local people, he returned to the Ministry of Defence in 1971 as Assistant Chief of Defence Staff (Policy), serving Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter (later Lord) Hill-Norton, Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). On promotion to lieutenant-general two years later, he joined the Army Board as Vice-Chief of the General Staff to deal with the 1975 Defence Review, when all three Services were faced with yet more drastic cuts.
He and the CDS, General Sir Michael (later Field Marshal Lord) Carver, decided that the Army’s field command structure, swollen by the introduction of sophisticated systems of communication and their attendant operators and vehicles, should be dramatically reduced by the elimination of the brigade level of command in the British Army of the Rhine. It was a potentially bold reform based on a concept used by Rommel in the Western Desert, where regimental commanders had controlled groups of all arms tailored to the operations in hand.
The three divisions in Germany and HQ 3rd Division from England were reorganised into four small armoured divisions, intending that the functions of the former brigades be undertaken by ad hoc “task forces” grouped from tank, infantry and artillery units within each division to deal with immediate operational demands, as they arose. The experiment failed because it was not radical enough. To match the model Rommel had used, the British regimental structure would also have had to be changed to one of large regiments with headquarters capable of controlling units of all the fighting arms and their immediate logistic support. While feasible — with monumental upheaval — in the Army of the Rhine, such a structure would not have permitted routine interchange with units of the rest of the Army designed for rapid piecemeal deployments to meet emergencies elsewhere.
Within the limited scope of reform undertaken in Germany, spans of command proved too wide and unmanageable. Nevertheless, when brigades were reintroduced a few years later, they were given smaller, more easily redeployable headquarters and spans of command did not shrink back completely to those of the pre-Fraser period. Had the Fraser concept been a success, he would have had a strong claim to the post of Chief of the General Staff. As it was, his final years in the Army were spent as United Kingdom Military Representative to Nato from 1975 to 1977 and as Commandant of the Royal College of Defence Studies in Belgrave Square in 1978-80. His political sensitivity, intellectual breadth, command of languages and imposing presence made him ideally suited to both assignments.
On retirement from the Army in 1980, he undertook the task of completing the biography of Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, begun by Sir Arthur Bryant. This was followed by his highly regarded And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War, and a social history, The Christian Watt Papers, before turning to a successful series of ten historically based novels, including A Kiss For the Enemy, The Dragon’s Teeth, A Candle for Judas, The Pain of Winning and then, on return to history, Knight’s Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, which appeared in 1993. Subsequently, he published biographies of William Douglas Home and Frederick the Great, this last being acknowledged as probably his finest work. His memoirs, Wars and Shadows, published in 2002, reveal a man more sensitive than his public persona, devoted to his parents for their individualism and care for him, to the Scotland of his boyhood and the friends of his youth killed in the war.
He was appointed OBE following his battalion command in 1962, knighted KCB in 1973 and advanced to GCB on leaving the Army in 1980. He was an ADC General to the Queen, 1977-80 and Colonel of the Royal Hampshire Regiment, 1981-87. He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire in 1982 and served as Vice-Lord Lieutenant of the county, 1988-96.
His first marriage, in 1947, to Anne Balfour, by whom he had a daughter, was dissolved. His second in 1957 was to Julia de La Hey. He is survived by his second wife and the daughter of his first marriage and two sons and two daughters of his second.
General Sir David Fraser, GCB, OBE, UK Military Representative to Nato, 1975-77, was born on December 30, 1920. He died on July 15, 2012, aged 91
Admiral Sir David Williams
Ãëàâíîêîìàíäóþùèé Õîóì Êîììàíä è ãóáåðíàòîð Ãèáðàëòàðà
Sailor of calm and imposing presence who was commander in chief of Naval Home Command and Governor-General of Gibraltar
Held in great affection by all who served with him, David Williams was possessed of a magisterial dignity and presence, an imperturbable manner, an acute mind, an absence of pomposity and a dry wit. He was a career gunnery specialist and innumerable lesser mortals on parade have a memory of this imposing figure, resplendent in the shiny knee-length patent leather gaiters privileged to be worn by the “Commander (G)”, progressing regally towards that hallowed terrain, the parade ground of HMS Excellent, the Portsmouth gunnery school and fount of the Navy’s spit-and-polish smartness, precision of drill and loud voice of command. “Even trees got out of his way,” records an observer.
He was at sea throughout the Second World War. From August 1939 he served as a midshipman in the light cruiser Emerald on the Northern Patrol, blockading Germany’s remaining merchantmen. By November 1940 he was in the destroyer Jaguar escorting convoys to Malta; the ship also took part in the Battle of Cape Spartivento against the Italian Navy as well as capturing French merchant shipping off Oran. Williams was noted as having “acquitted himself well in action”.
After a brief interlude of professional courses in Britain, Sub-Lieutenant Williams was appointed to the battlecruiser Renown in October 1941 and remained in her until May 1944 during which period this celebrated ship covered four Russian convoys, was the “Force H” flagship and escorted two convoys flying off Spitfire fighters to Malta.
In November 1942 Renown took part in the Allied invasion of North Africa and subsequently carried Winston Churchill home after the “Quadrant” planning conference in Quebec. In December 1943 Renown joined Admiral Somerville’s Indian Ocean fleet and assisted in carrier aircraft attacks on Japanese installations at Sabang and Soerabaya.
On departure to the destroyers Paladin and Nizam, Williams was adjudged an “outstanding officer”. Noted for his zeal, he rose to be second-in-command of the Nizam and was present at the final attacks on the Japanese mainland before the atom bombs concluded the war.
After the year-long gunnery specialisation course in 1946, Williams served in the Mediterranean as flotilla gunnery officer and spent two years working for the Ministry of Supply on the development of guided weapons. When gunnery officer of the newly built destroyer Diamond he was promoted very early to commander and his association with weapon development continued as the trials officer in the cruiser Cumberland, then devoted to guided missile system firings.
His tour as Commander (G) at HMS Excellent was enlivened by the celebrated “elephant on parade” event. A graduating class of newly qualified young gunnery officers sacrilegiously decided to cheer up the passing-out parade by marching in hollow square around an elephant that had been smuggled on to the premises and duly decked out with white canvas gaiters. Commander (G) greeted this blasphemy with obligatory fury but those who knew him well detected a twinkle.
He was promoted to captain in 1960 after tours as second-in-command of the cruiser Sheffield. It was a successful commission, and was followed by command of the frigate Jewel in the Dartmouth Training Squadron.
A course at the US Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, was followed by the post of naval assistant to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Caspar John, “a hard man to serve”, followed by command of the large guided missile destroyer Devonshire in the Far East.
His next appointment, as director of the Plans division in the Admiralty, was highly significant. The Plans division led for the naval staff in matters of policy, managing the interface between what the Navy believes it needs to fulfil the demands of successive governments and what funding the politicians are prepared to provide. Williams’s tour as director ran from January 1966 to February 1968 and encompassed what was jocularly described as “four defence reviews” and was without doubt the most traumatic period suffered by the Navy since the Korean War. Although the capability would continue as far as possible into the 1970s, the Defence Secretary Denis Healey’s White Paper of February 1966 abolished fixed-wing carrier aviation, causing shock waves throughout the Navy. Trumpeted by the Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Healey as a blueprint for the next 30 years, it would soon be seen as yet another futile short-term attempt to make inadequate resources cover overambitious commitments.
With Williams as a member, a Future Fleet Working Party was set up by the then First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Varyl Begg, to reassess the role and structure of the Navy without its carriers. As the Foreign Office could produce no statement of the future shape of British interests, the working party had to make its own assessments. Despite arguments about whether the “through-deck cruiser” Invincible-class VSTOL (vertical and/or short take-off and landing) and helicopter ships were “carriers” and therefore flouted the dictated policy, the working party’s recommendations stood the tests of time, its members achieving high rank and maintaining a continuity of policy for the next two decades.
The shadow of Vietnam, lack of confidence in sterling, the successful completion of the “Confrontation” against Indonesia, British inconsequentiality during the Arab-Israeli conflict of June 1967 and a tendency in government to undervalue residual colonial commitments were some of the factors leading to a series of agonised reassessments culminating in a statement by Harold Wilson on January 16, 1968 (known as “Black Tuesday” in the Ministry of Defence), announcing yet further defence cuts and, apart from Hong Kong, that all forces would be gone from east of Suez by the end of 1971.
Such a radical departure from Britain’s historic role presented a huge challenge to the naval staff. How could a substantial Navy now be justified? However, developments in Nato strategy and the increasing power of the Soviet fleet enabled an undeniable case for a strong eastern Atlantic presence.
One of Williams’s staff officers reported: “His foresight had ensured that the Navy’s role in Nato affairs was well entrenched by January 1968 while ensuring enough flexibility for limited operations outside the Nato area. It was not only his judgment and sense of purpose that kept us going but his wry humour. The Navy was lucky to have him there at such a time.”
While spearheading European Nato’s maritime strategy, in subsequent decades the Navy conducted many operations outside the Nato area of which the Falklands was the most significant.
Williams was next appointed to command the naval college at Dartmouth, he and his wife Philippa (“Pippa”) forming warm relationships with local people. It was a period of change for officer recruiting and training with the introduction of university graduate entries, and Williams led a complex establishment with effortless charm.
He was promoted rear-admiral in 1970 and appointed second-in-command of the Far East Fleet until the last days of the validity of the Anglo-Malaysian Defence Agreement in October 1971 and the final reduction of Britain’s presence in the Far East theatre. Promoted vice-admiral in April 1972, Williams was appointed director-general of naval manpower and training during a period of closure of smaller, remoter training establishments and the concentration of the remainder, allied to a perennial shortage of manpower to meet the naval task.
As a full admiral, Second Sea Lord and chief of naval personnel from 1974 to 1976, Willliams continued to manage the manpower issues of the day — insufficient officer recruitment, pay, turbulence and family separation.
His final tour was CinC Naval Home Command, overseeing most of the land-based activities in Britain. He was appointed KCB in 1975 and GCB in 1977, retiring in 1979.
He was appointed Governor- General and C-in-C of Gibraltar from 1982 to 1985, a period of ameliorating relationships with Spain, culminating in the opening of the border.
Among his numerous charitable activities in later life were presidency of the Ex-Servicemen’s Mental Welfare Society, chair of the council, Missions to Seamen from 1979 to 1991, member and vice-chair of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 1980-89, and member of the Museum and Galleries Commission, 1987-93.
A keen yachtsman, he was elected to the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1971 and, as a long-term native of the Dart river, raced his boat in successive Dartmouth regattas for 25 years.
He is survived by his wife, Philippa, whom he married in 1947, and their two sons.
Admiral Sir David Williams, GCB, C-in-C Naval Home Command, 1977-79, and Governor-General and C-in-C Gibraltar, 1982-85, was born on October 22, 1921. He died on July 16, 2012, aged 90