The Good Assassin: How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia

by Stephan Talty

Overview

Inspiration for the hit new podcast "Hunting the Butcher"

The untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice—a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.

Before World War II, Herbert Cukurs was a famous figure in his small Latvian city, the “Charles Lindbergh of his country”. But he was soon better known as the Butcher of Latvia, a man who murdered some thirty thousand Jews. By 1965, a statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes threatened to expire, potentially absolving ex-Nazis like Cukurs of their crimes. Jacob Medad, the misfit Mossad agent who had previously kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, knew if Cukurs was not captured soon, he may never be brought to justice. In a thrilling undercover operation, Medad traveled to Cukurs’ new home in Brazil in an elaborate disguise, befriended him, and earned his trust, while negotiations to extend Nazi innocence neared a boiling point.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780358522478
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	391,087
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Stephan Talty is a critic and journalist who has contributed numerous pieces on race and American culture to publications such as the New York Times Magazine, Vibe, George, Chicago Review, the Irish Times, and Playboy. Originally from Buffalo, New York, he now lives in Brooklyn.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue: The Apartment on the Avenue de Versailles

MIO WALKED INTO THE LOBBY of the building on the Avenue de Versailles and called out “Bonjour!” to the concierge through her tiny window. Not waiting for a response, he went quickly up the marble stairs. Puffing by now—he was a bit out of shape—he reached the wooden door of Yariv’s apartment and pressed the bell. He was confident he hadn’t been followed; he’d stopped in front of the gigantic Radio France building a few blocks away to check for tails. It would have been unfortunate to bring one to a meeting with Yariv, who was touchy about such things.
     The door opened and Yosef Yariv, the head of Caesarea, the special operations arm of Mossad, nodded at Mio. With his honking beak of a nose and thick pelt of unruly hair, the forty-year-old Yariv resembled a predatory desert bird. Now his piercing blue-gray eyes studied his friend.
     “I’m glad you made it,” he said.
     Mio said nothing, only nodded and walked past. Yariv locked the door, then turned. “From this moment onwards,” he said, “your name is Anton Kuenzle. You’d better start getting used to it.” Mio showed no reaction; he was an introvert, raised in Germany as a Jew in the early thirties, which encouraged, if not required, certain kinds of masks to be worn. And besides, it was Mio’s stock-in-trade to become different people, sometimes for a few days, other times for much longer. Inside Mossad, where he was one of the great, perhaps the greatest, undercover operatives, he was known as “the man with the hundred identities.” Back home in Israel, his family lived in a house that sat behind a steel gate, through which the agency sent a car every time he was leaving on an assignment. His son would later say that when the car drove off if you woke Mio in the middle of the night, he would immediately begin speaking in the language of his false persona. On those days when he was driven to the airport, he never looked back to wave to his children because, in his mind, he had no children.
     The two walked ahead into a small guest room. Another operative—Mio called him Michael, though that wasn’t his real name—sat at a small table with cups and saucers and a pot filled with coffee. A “fairly thin” file sat next to the cups. Mio nodded at Michael and took one of the empty chairs. Yariv followed suit. He looked at the other two, his eyes cool.
     “You must be wondering why I summoned you here,” he said.
     The two men said nothing.
     “Well, it all begins with the final confirmation we received about a Nazi war criminal who lives in one of the South American countries.”
     Michael looked at Mio, who glanced back, remaining silent. Yariv explained that in eight months, on May 8, 1965, the world would mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. German politicians and ordinary citizens were calling for an end to the hunt for Nazi war criminals and for a statute of limitations to be applied to their crimes. Mio didn’t react, but, as someone who avidly read the newspapers, he must have seen the headlines. Germany was preparing to enforce an 1871 law that mandated a twenty-year limit on murder prosecutions. Two other amnesties, for assault and for manslaughter, had gone into effect in 1955 and 1960 with little protest around the world. Charging any Nazi officer or soldier with those crimes was now forbidden inside Germany. But soon the killers themselves, the very worst of the worst, the men and women who’d physically pulled the triggers on the machine guns and the rifles and the pistols and smashed in the heads and strangled and bludgeoned their portion of the six million, could emerge from their hiding places and walk free in the sun. It seemed utterly fantastic, but there it was.
     The statute, Yariv said, was popular in West Germany. Every poll showed solid majorities in favor of it, and the governing party, the Christian Democratic Union, had thrown its weight behind the law. Only the Bundestag, the feisty German parliament, could delay the amnesty by passing a bill that would push the deadline a few years into the future, allowing the remaining unindicted National Socialist murderers to be found and prosecuted for at least a short time longer. But Yariv told Mio and Michael that Israeli leaders were increasingly pessimistic about this possibility. “The chances of accepting this proposal are small . . . There is no guarantee that the politicians are prepared to extend the Statute of Limitations, not by four years, not by ten years, and, for that matter, most probably not at all.”
     Mio noticed his friend’s voice starting to rise in the quiet room, though his face showed no change in expression. “It is absolutely inconceivable,” Yariv said, “that tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, who never paid for their heinous crimes, should now be able to crawl out of their hiding holes and spend the rest of their lives in peace and tranquility . . . It’s been only twenty years since the release of the survivors of the death camps, and we owe it to them, and to the six million who did not survive and are unable to avenge themselves—we must thwart this shameful process.”
     Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol and his intelligence chiefs had secretly decided on a mission. A killing was required, a certain kind of killing that would reveal the Nazi monsters who’d escaped punishment and publicize the nature of their crimes. Unlike Mossad’s kidnapping and subsequent execution of Adolf Eichmann four years earlier, there would be no trial, no lawyers or judges, no legal niceties, no essays by Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker. And the operation had to be completed before the vote in the German parliament, currently scheduled for sometime in the spring.
     “The Nazi whose turn has come,” Yariv said, “is Herbert Cukurs.”
     It was a Latvian name; Yariv pronounced the “C” in “Cukurs” correctly, like “Ts,” TSOO-krz. (It means “sugar.”) At a conference of Israeli intelligence chiefs in January, the names of potential assassination targets had been read out. When the speaker came to Cukurs, one of the men in the room collapsed. It was Major General Aharon Yariv—no relation to Yosef Yariv—head of the country’s Military Intelligence Directorate. Cukurs had murdered several of Yariv’s loved ones and friends during the war; his reaction was one reason why the Latvian’s name had been chosen.
     Mio had never heard of Cukurs, and he showed no emotion at the idea of ending his life. “Outwardly,” he said, “I kept a poker face.” If he was chilly in his personal life—and he was, to his children’s eternal regret—he was even more clinical when working. A quickening of the breath, a raised eyebrow, would for him have been a breach of professional ethics. But inside, he was deeply stirred. His mother and father, a German patriot and a recipient of the Iron Cross for bravery in World War I, who’d believed that they’d be saved until almost the very end, had been murdered at Auschwitz and the “model” camp of Theresienstadt. Despite his outward calm, when Mio heard the Nazi’s name, he said, “I felt my heart and my adrenaline level skyrocket suddenly.”
     “We are not dealing here with a desk murderer like Eichmann,” Yariv went on. “[Cukurs] is personally responsible for the annihilation of at least 30,000 Jews in Riga.” And unlike more famous men like Dr. Josef Mengele, whom Mossad had been unable to find despite two decades of searching, Cukurs’ whereabouts had been confirmed. He was living in a small house in São Paulo surrounded by guard dogs and a barbed wire fence. Yariv looked at Mio. “I propose that you . . . go to Brazil disguised as an Austrian businessman under the name of Anton Kuenzle.” Under this light cover, he would find the Nazi, befriend him, infiltrate his circle, and arrange his death. The execution would then be announced to the world, and (Mossad hoped) the news stories about the savage killer, his grateful victims, and his faceless assassins—forced to act as the authorities in Berlin and other European capitals dawdled—might just convince the Germans that going ahead with the amnesty was an impossibility. “I’m well aware that this is no simple task,” Yariv said. “You will face a criminal who is, according to our reports, cunning, mistrustful, ruthless and dangerous, and is always prepared for the worst.”
     Michael began leafing through the file that sat on the table. “Will Mio actually operate alone,” he said, “or will we send a small stalking and protection unit with him?”
     For the first time that morning, Mio spoke up. “I prefer to work alone,” he said. “Me against the target.”
     Yariv nodded, then gestured to the file, a handful of pages in a manila folder that barely rose above the lacquered surface of the table. The slimness of the file was significant for reasons that only those intimate with the history of the Latvian Shoah would understand. It was so thin because so few Jews had been left alive to speak about Herbert Cukurs. Inside the folder were perhaps half a dozen testimonies—the exact number isn’t known—that traced Cukurs’ actions during the war, painstakingly collected from eyewitnesses living in several countries during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some of the accounts were barbaric, others oddly moving. In one story, Cukurs speaks to a young girl in Yiddish; they have a short, pleasant conversation before the Latvian, for no apparent reason, pulls out his Russian handgun and executes her in cold blood. In another, he saves a woman he knew to be Jewish, at considerable risk to his own life. The collection, in fact, added up to a curiously fractal, incomplete portrait of Herbert Cukurs, whose life had been larger and stranger than Mio could imagine at that moment; it would take many years and the survival of one obsessed young Jewish woman to tell it in full. “Overall, I must say he is a fascinating historical figure,” one survivor later wrote, “full of tremendous contradictions.” Though they could not have known it that morning in Paris, the Israelis had chosen for elimination a symbol of the Shoah whose life would speak to the motivations of those accomplices in eastern Europe who had carried it out.
     With the preliminary details settled, Mio and Michael began sorting through the pages; they each picked up a selection and began to read. The white china cups, the husky September light streaming through the window, a blurred car horn from the street below, the loveliness of a fall afternoon in the Sixteenth Arrondissement faded from their thoughts as the testimonies inside ushered them to the city of Riga in the black year of 1939.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Apartment on the Avenue de Versailles ix

Part 1 The Aktions

1 The Club on Skolas Street 3

2 Zelma 15

3 First Night 22

4 Gogol Street 34

5 19 Waldemars 47

6 The Moscow Suburb 56

7 November 30 64

8 The Valley of the Dead 74

Part 2 Those Who Will Never Forget

9 A Latvian in Rio 87

10 "The Epitome of Humanity" 95

11 Anton Kuenzle 104

12 The Merciless One 112

13 The Late One 122

14 First Contact 127

15 The Campaign 135

16 "Our Own Thomas Edison" 140

17 The Plantation 145

18 Paranoia 156

19 The Sabras 167

20 "Certain Categories of Murder" 174

21 The Camera 182

22 "To Live With a Few Murderers" 188

23 The House on Colombia Street 199

24 The Wait 209

25 An Offer 215

26 The Legislator 221

27 The Asylum 235

28 The Trial 249

Acknowledgments 261

Notes 263

Photo Credits 286

Index 287

Editorial Reviews

What a wonderful book. Stephan Talty’s fast-paced account of how Herbert Cukurs, the Latvian aviator turned Nazi war criminal, was eventually brought to justice by Mossad operatives is as gripping as any novel. Hard as it is to read the details of Cukurs’ horrific crimes, the outcome is both moving and uplifting, with the Latvian’s demise helping to bring other perpetrators of genocide to justice. Talty is at the top of his game.”—Saul David, author of Operation Thunderbolt and The Force   “Part Holocaust history, part detective case, part spy operation, The Good Assassin is an enthralling book. Stephan Talty paints vivid, often chilling, portraits of its vengeful hero, Mossad agent Jacob Medad, and the war criminal Herbert Cukurs he pursued to the bitter end. It’s a stunning, you-are-there kind of read.”—Neal Bascomb, New York Times bestselling author of Hunting Eichmann and Faster   “Stephan Talty’s The Good Assassin is a gripping chronicle of one of the most brilliant operations launched against an escaped Nazi war criminal, and a fitting memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Latvia and to the brave Israelis who traveled halfway around the world to punish one of the key perpetrators of those crimes. At a time when Latvian ultranationalists are trying to rehabilitate Cukurs as a national hero, Talty explains why such a step would be a grave miscarriage of justice.”—Dr. Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal Center   “Stephan Talty masterfully recounts how the Holocaust engulfed the Jews of Latvia and how the architect of that genocide was hunted to his death by Israeli spies. It’s a page-turning account of a little-known episode of the Shoah and how justice was brought to one of its key perpetrators.” —Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden and Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos “Stephan Talty has crafted a fast-paced account of an overlooked part of the Holocaust—and its broader impact on the postwar hunt for its perpetrators.” —Bill Geroux, author of The Ghost Ships of Archangel and The Mathews Men   “Talty efficiently mines archival records for vivid details and tracks the complexities of Medad’s undercover mission with flair. The result is a captivating and gruesome real-life spy thriller.”—Publishers Weekly “Compelling . . . Talty remains true to his technique, delivering thoroughly researched, engrossing nonfiction in a thrillerlike narrative style . . . As anti-Semitism surges once again, this page-turning history reminds us of the sanguinary consequences of unchecked hatred.”—Kirkus Reviews “Thrilling . . . A fast-paced, recommended work that enthralls, edifies, and reveals the disturbing extent to which Latvians and others participated in genocide.”—Library Journal “The author brings his usual attention to detail, excellent research, terrific storytelling, passion, and dedication to this suspenseful recounting of a shadowy facet of the Holocaust, which continues to haunt the world.”—Booklist   —

From the Publisher

01/20/2020

Journalist Talty (Saving Bravo) revisits the 1965 assassination of Latvian war criminal Herbert Cukurs by Israeli secret agents in this brisk and dramatic history. Soon after German forces pushed the Soviet Army out of Latvia in 1941, Cukurs, a renowned aviator, became second-in-command of the Arajs Commandos, volunteer paramilitaries who assisted the S.S. in carrying out mass killings. Eyewitnesses describe Cukurs murdering women and young children, and supervising the liquidation of the Riga Ghetto, which sent nearly 30,000 Jews to their deaths. In 1946, he fled to Brazil and started a successful boat rental and sightseeing business. Despite lobbying by Latvian Holocaust survivors and Brazilian Jews, local police refused to take action against Cukurs, and by 1965 the statute of limitations for prosecuting Nazi war criminals was set to expire in West Germany. In a plan approved by the Israeli prime minister, Mossad agent Jacob Medad, who’d helped to capture Adolf Eichmann, disguised himself as an Austrian businessman, befriended Cukurs, and brought him to Uruguay, where a team of assassins killed him. According to Talty, international publicity over the case helped push German legislators to extend the statute of limitations (it was formally abolished in 1979). Talty efficiently mines archival records for vivid details and tracks the complexities of Medad’s undercover mission with flair. The result is a captivating and gruesome real-life spy thriller. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

02/01/2020

In this thrilling account, Talty (A Captain's Duty) tells parallel stories of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Jewish college student Zelma Shepshelovich survived the massacre of Latvian Jews in 1941, and also Herberts Cukurs, a Latvian aviator, Nazi collaborator, and mass murderer who fled to Brazil after World War II. In Brazil, whose right-wing government sympathized with Nazi fugitives, Cukurs ran his own business until revenge caught up with him. Israeli secret agent Yaakov "Moi" Meidad posed as an Austrian investor, lured Cukurs to a safehouse in a neighboring country, and shot him dead after a struggle. The assassination of the "Butcher of Riga" reminded the world that many killers had escaped justice. That same year of 1965, under intense pressure by Western democracies as well as Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman, the German parliament grudgingly voted to extend the statute of limitations on Holocaust-era crimes, enabling prosecutors to indict hundreds of Nazi war criminals. Bloodbaths, spy games, and personalities—fiery Zelma, reserved Meidad, scrappy Tuviah, paranoid Cukurs—are recounted vividly but not exploited for shock value. VERDICT A fast-paced, recommended work that enthralls, edifies, and reveals the disturbing extent to which Latvians and others participated in genocide.—Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

Library Journal

2020-01-19
The compelling story of the pursuit of a man responsible for the murders of at least 30,000 Latvian Jews during World War II.

Talty, whose bestselling books include The Black Hand and A Captain’s Duty (which was made into the Oscar-winning Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips), remains true to his technique, delivering thoroughly researched, engrossing nonfiction in a thrillerlike narrative style. The author has several stories to tell, including that of Latvian murderer Herbert Cukurs, who transformed from a heroic civil aviator to a brutal executioner; the Holocaust in Latvia in general; Zelma Shepshelovich, a young Jewish woman who managed to escape capture and deportation; a Mossad agent called Mio, who endeared himself to Cukurs before leading him to his death in a house in Uruguay; the battle against granting amnesty to Nazis some years after the war; and Nazi hunters Tuviah Friedman and Simon Wiesenthal. Talty weaves these stories throughout the text, creating a rich narrative fabric, and the tension increases substantially when Mio finds Cukurs, who is suspicious and cautious, in Brazil and convinces the murderer that he is looking to get involved in business deals with him. The intense climax of the action (the death of Cukurs) occurs more than 40 pages before the end of the text; the final pages deal with the immediate and later after-stories of the principal characters. The author reveals both the profound darkness of the time period and the slender rays of hope that occasionally split it. The Holocaust accounts—degradations, torture, murder, etc.—are difficult to read yet nonetheless important. “Cukurs was hardly unique; there were many men like him in Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and elsewhere,” writes Talty. “But in his local context, he was the leading monster.”

As anti-Semitism surges once again, this page-turning history reminds us of the sanguinary consequences of unchecked hatred.

Kirkus Reviews