The Bomb in the Basement by Michael Karpin

Author:Michael Karpin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Otto Joklik also joined the Israeli effort. On March 2, 1963, Joklik and Mossad operative Joseph Ben-Gal were sent to Basel, Switzerland, to warn Hans and Heidi, the children of Paul-Jens Goercke, a German expert in electronic guidance systems employed at Factory 333. The two men met Heidi Goercke at the Drei Könige Hotel and urged her to persuade her father to get out of Egypt. 5 If he refused, they told her, he could expect “serious problems.” The Swiss police recorded the conversation and that evening they arrested Joklik and Ben-Gal. Within hours, the German police requested their extradition on suspicion of participation in the abortive assassination attempt against Kleinwachter.

A few days later, the story broke in the media and it soon became an international affair. Ben-Gurion was annoyed that Harel had not informed him in advance that the Mossad intended to carry out an operation in Switzerland. The prime minister urgently summoned the spy chief to a meeting at the hotel in Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, where he was vacationing; Ben-Gurion rebuked Harel and served him with a written instruction: “From now on no action that is not in accordance with the law of the country where the action will be carried out will be taken by the personnel you are responsible for without my knowledge and total agreement, and you will not speak to any person, with no exception, about the above-mentioned matter [the arrest of the two agents in Switzerland] without my knowledge and prior agreement.”

Harel himself was in a frenzy, and on that very same evening he broke Ben-Gurion’s orders. In coordination with Foreign Minister Meir he called a meeting in Tel Aviv of the editors of Israeli newspapers, and informed them not only about the secret circumstances that led to the arrest of Joklik and Ben-Gal in Basel, but also what the Mossad had uncovered in Egypt and in Germany. The work that the German scientists were doing in Egypt constituted an existential threat to Israel, Harel told the editors, and the German government was aware of it and yet refused to act. At the same time, Mossad staffers briefed three Israeli journalists in Jerusalem, and they were then sent to Germany whence they filed stories to their papers containing the information that had been leaked to them. (Military censorship would have prevented the publication of the material had it been filed in Israel.) The affair and the public storm around it ballooned, and not without good reason. According to the head of the Mossad, this was an existential security matter of the highest degree. In Israel and across the world there were sensational headlines along the lines of “Nazis in Egypt Develop Atomic, Chemical and Biological Weapons to Use Against Israel,” or “Egyptian Missiles to Be Armed with Radioactive Material,” and “Egypt Arms Bombs with Nuclear Waste.”

The media storm forced the government to make a statement in Knesset that reflected the Meir-Harel hysteria more than Ben-Gurion’s calmer approach, after which an angry debate ensued.

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