Operation Damocles: Israel's Secret War Against Hitler's Scientists, 1951-1967
In the 1950s, employment at home was difficult to find for German aerospace engineers. Prospects were brighter in France, the U.S., and, albeit involuntarily, the USSR. Some found jobs in an Egyptian military program to develop jet warplanes and ballistic missiles, a story that British journalist Howard recounts from an espionage angle. Although the program was ultimately an utter failure, its engagement of German rocket scientists with Nazi pasts alarmed, to say the least, Israeli intelligence chiefs. Against the backdrop of Egyptian-Israeli conflict through the mid-1960s, Brown describes the organizers of the Egyptian program, its German recruits, and the weapons they built, which Egyptian leader Nasser displayed in propaganda events. The Israelis tasked their agents in Europe and Egypt to disrupt the program, an operation that forms Brown’s central narrative. As he tells things, Operation Damocles failed. The Egyptian program collapsed from its technical problems, not from anything achieved by Mossad agents, whose mistakes led to their arrests in Germany and Egypt. Embroidering this episode with the craft and occasional ruthlessness of espionage, Brown will interest readers of intelligence history. --Gilbert Taylor