GOOD ASSASSIN

Sub-titled 'How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia'. The story starts in Riga with the rounding up of Jews, first into the ghetto and then to their brutal deaths. Central to the whole operation was Herbert Cukurs, who before the war had achieved hero status as an aviator flying a plane he had constructed himself. With the German occupation of Latvia, the synagogue on Gogol Street was burnt down, and herding into the ghetto began, where Jews had little food and no work. Births were forbidden in the ghetto and babies had to be killed. Zelma Shepshelovich was saved by a Latvian, Nank, who hid her in his flat. Cukurs prowled at night raping women and slaughtered Jews with his own hands in the massacre of 19 Waldemars Street. Zelma was raped there, and she was the only woman who survived, saved by the intervention of her former nanny. After the war, when the Russians returned to the city, Zelma's testimony was important for the prosecution of the Nazi butchers and for providing evidence against Cukurs in particular. Somehow at the end of the war Cukurs escaped to Rio de Janeiro, and as the year 1965 approached he would be subject to a statute of limitation, meaning he could no longer be prosecuted. At this point Mossad stepped in and a brave agent, Jacob Medad, codenamed Mio, took on the persona of an Austrian businessman and set out for Rio to gain Cukurs's confidence. He grew a beard and got himself some glasses, and his attention to detail was such that they were not plain glasses but had lens curvature like a genuine pair. He could take no chances of being spotted as a fake. The second half of the book tells the story of how he gained Cukurs's confidence and delivered him to Mossad operatives. 304pp, photos.