The September 21, 1962 date is notable. It is likely that the meeting took place in that month, an eventful month for Skorzeny. On September 11, 1962, a German scientist named Heinz Krug vanished after a day spent at his office. Krug was one of many former Nazi rocket scientists who were working for Nasser's Egypt. In 2016, the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz reported "that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt."
According to Dan Raviv and Yossi Melmanm, the authors of the article,
[T]he 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. 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.
As detailed by Professor Chris Simpson in
Blowback: America's Recruitment Of Nazis And Its Effects On The Cold War, Skorzeny was assisted in a mysterious jailbreak before he could be tried for war crimes. He was then used by the CIA to get close to the Egyptian insurgent officers led by Gamal Nasser. Allen Dulles tasked the Nazi spymaster Reinhard Gehlen with helping the Egyptian officers on intelligence and security matters. Gehlen then deployed Otto Skorzeny to assist Nasser and company. According to Raviv and Melmanm
it was years later---in early 1962---that Mossad recruited Skorzeny.
During the strange evening when he was recruited, Skorzeny became suspicious about two new friends that he and his wife (the niece of
Hjalmar Schacht, aka "
Hitler's banker") had met in a bar in Madrid. Surmising that they were not who they claimed to be, Skorzeny pulled a gun on them and said, "I know who you are, and I know why you're here. You are Mossad, and you've come to kill me." The Israeli spies explained that they were not there to kill him, but that if he killed them, Mossad would send spies who would indeed kill him. However,
they merely needed Skorzeny to do some jobs for Mossad. In exchange, they agreed to have Skorzeny's name removed from an Israeli list of Nazi war criminals.
This was how a Nazi assassin went from being a war criminal awaiting trial, to being a CIA asset, to being a Mossad agent, to killing a German scientist at the behest of Israel, to finally having a friendly chat with a high-ranking, right-wing US Air Force officer about how President Kennedy was a disaster for giving too much away to black people and for not recognizing the supremacy of the West over the East.
