8. The Ticking Clock

The spy was happy to be back home, but his mission wasn’t complete. The final act was still to take place in Uruguay. So in the Mossad apartment in the heart of Paris, the kill team started to plan the assassination. They were going ahead with the plan. The debate in the German Parliament was coming up in a few months. They all hoped a successful mission would influence it.  QUESTIONS? Are you curious about something you’ve heard on “Hunting the Butcher” and want to know more? Email us. Record yourself asking your question, include your name and where you’re from, and we’ll try to answer your question on a future episode. Email your question to: huntingthebutcher@diversionpodcasts.com There was a lot of work to do. The Mossad boss Yosef Yariv had collected all the documents the spy had sent from the field, including maps of Montevideo and São Paolo, information on hotels and renting cars. He’d written down what they'd to get through passport control and what problems the other team members might face. But they still didn’t have a place where the assassination could be carried out. They didn’t even know how it was going to be carried out.  Mossad wanted everyone to suspect that Israel had carried out the killing but it didn’t want any of its agents to get caught. What they were doing wasn’t legal. Cukurs wasn’t going to get a trial or have a lawyer, like Adolf Eichmann had got after Mossad kidnapped him. They didn’t want Mossad to be the story. They wanted Cukurs to be the story.  So the team members had to carry out the killing, gather their belongings, and head to the airport. They had to get on the plane and get safely back to Europe before Cukurs’ body was discovered. That influenced how the assassination would be carried out. It couldn’t be public. It couldn’t be loud. And the body had to be left out of sight, so that someone didn’t stumble on it and raise the alarm before the agents had left the country. The team members were almost done with their training in Krav Maga, the Israeli fighting system. Imi