“I might have thought about Mengele for 10 minutes,” said Meir Amit, the celebrated chief of Israel's Mossad from 1963 to 1968.
Amit, who died in Israel a week ago at 88, had made the admission to me in a 1985 telephone conversation, when I was researching a biography on the Angel of Death, Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele.
That a former Mossad chief was so blunt in having little interest in capturing a war criminal charged with personally selecting 400,000 victims to go to their deaths in Auschwitz's gas chambers, and for brutal medical experiments he did on twins there, was initially startling. But the more we talked, the easier it was to understand why Amit did not mind being known as the Israeli spy chief who let Mengele get away.
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