Chapter 3

A Small Town in Germany

In the secret service world, all things are possible and nothing is what it seems. It is a looking glass world, as John le Carré has said, where conventional morality has no meaning and all customary values can be overturned. Provided that exposure and public embarrassment can be avoided, the most implausible friendship can be struck, no matter how contrary they run to acknowledged international alliances.

Yet if anyone had suggested in 1945 that one of the most valuable allies of the future state of Israel would be West Germany, that would have been hard to swallow, even on the far side of the looking glass. But when Israel sought the means to build nuclear weapons, two of the men she relied on most were Germans, both of whom had fought for Hitler’s Reich in the Second World War. Since the war, they had re-established themselves by dint of hard work, and, occasionally, bizarre business deals. They had formed a partnership which by chance had placed them in a pivotal position to help Israel achieve her nuclear ambitions. In such circumstances it was understandable that the horrors of the past could be forgotten.

The senior partner, at least in terms of age, was Herbert Scharf. In his eighties, and despite a recent heart attack, Scharf is a tall, handsome man with a magnificent Aryan head set squarely on broad shoulders. In 1945 his physical strength, together with undoubted determination, were almost all he had to equip him for a new start.

For Scharf, the war ended disconcertingly. Like many other career officers in the German army, he was far from being a committed Nazi. But he had accepted Hitler as his fuehrer, and spent the war attached to the headquarters of the general staff of the Wehrmacht, doing what he saw to be his duty. Germany’s defeat left him in uncomfortable limbo. The victorious Allies disbanded the German armed forces and the only career Scharf had known was abruptly ended. Scharf was more fortunate than some of his brother officers who found themselves held in Allied prison camps – but barely. Approaching the age of fifty, he was homeless and unemployed, and had neither money nor prospects. He decided to leave Germany, not as a fugitive, but as one of the dispossessed.

Scharf choose to look for a new start in the Horn of Africa, in the former Italian colony of Eritrea. In 1945 it was in chaos. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had used Eritrea as his base for the invasion of Ethiopia and Somaliland in 1936, and for the next five years Eritrea formed part of the new territory which Mussolini grandly named Italian East Africa. In 1941 British forces advancing from the Sudan routed the Italians and Eritrea was administered by the British army until the end of the war. Then its fate was left to the Allies’ military control, composed of Russia, the United States, France and Britain, which failed to reach any decision. *

*Eventually the United Nations was called upon to decide Eritrea’s fate. It prevaricated until 1952 when Eritrea was unwillingly federated with the Ethiopia of Emperor Haile Selassie. The consequence of that decision was to be the bloody war that raged in Ethiopia through 1976, 1977 and 1978.

The confusion and uncertainty that resulted made Eritrea the perfect place for an unemployed German officer to seek refuge and a new career.

Scharf headed for Eritrea’s capital, Asmara. Its cool position, perched on the eastern edge of the Hamasen, Plateau at 7,800 feet, made it a tolerable place to live, and on clear days you could see across to the Red Sea, forty miles away. Scharf began trading in costume jewellery and semi-precious stones: business was done in the restaurants and bars of Asmara’s European zone. (There were also ‘native’ zones but Europeans hardly ever needed to visit them.) There were plenty of other like-minded free-wheeling businessmen with whom Scharf could drink coffee and talk endlessly about the opportunities opening up. Scharf met a Frenchman named Marcel who told him about algin, a chemical obtained from seaweed and becoming widely used in the food, cosmetic, pharmaceutical and textile industries. Marcel has introduced him to the dyestuff business. Scharf started selling algin that was produced by a Casablanca company named Chimagar and dyestuffs supplied by a French company, Francolor.

By 1948 these various endeavours had given Scharf the start he wanted. Business horizons in Eritrea were limited, so Scharf collected his savings and returned to Germany.

He chose to settle in Wiesbaden, an unhurried residential town on the north bank of the Rhine, twenty miles west of Frankfurt. Under the Allies’ share-out of occupied Germany. Wiesbaden fell under US military control. Scharf soon founded his own company: ‘Herbert G. Scharf, Chemisch-Technische Zentrale’, which occupied the ground floor of a modest building at 30, Hildastrasse. Scharf, who confined himself to selling other companies’ products, became a sales agent for the General Dyestuff Company and the General Aniline & Film Corporation of the United States. His Asmara contacts remained useful, too: he continued to sell dyestuffs for Francolor and aligns for Chimagar.

The new business did well. But Scharf was left feeling unsatisfied. He wanted to be a manufacturer in his own right, but he recognized that he lacked the technical know-how. In 1950 he met a man who possessed some of the necessary qualifications, and, more important, an abundance of ambition. His name was Herbert Schulzen.

Boyishly good-looking, with a shock of dark hair hanging low across his forehead, Schulzen was a textile engineer who worked at that time for a chemical company named Benckiser in Ludwigshaven, a town on the west bank of the Rhine some fifty miles south of Wiesbaden. By chance, Scharf also sometimes worked for Benckiser, acting as a freelance sales agent for some of the company’s products, and it was at Benckiser’s offices that the two happened to meet. Even though Scharf was nearly thirty years older than Schulzen, the two soon became friends. Scharf was attracted by Schulzen’s enthusiasm and expertise. Perhaps regarding the younger man as his protégé, Scharf suggested they join forces in the hope of one day starting their own manufacturing company. Schulzen left Benckiser; the two men started selling together; and the partnership that was eventually to prove so vital in the Plumbat story was formed.

Scharf and Schulzen were an apt team. Scharf was an earnest, dependable man; Schulzen provided the counterpoint with his quick-witted and extrovert nature. In contrast with Scharf’s wartime service at general staff headquarters, Schulzen had spent his war in action with the Luftwaffe. He had gone into battle at the age of twenty, flying against Russian tanks on the eastern front. Somewhat surprised at coming through that experience unscathed, he was transferred from his fighter squadron to the Army Cooperation Flight Training centre in Pomerania. There he became one of the earliest jet pilots, learning to fly Messerschmitt 262s. Hitler had intended to use 262 in high-speed bombing raids on England but the plan was thwarted by a lack of fuel. It was just as well for Schulzen because the 262 was never technically an entirely happy aircraft. ‘Thank God we never went into battle with them,’ Schulzen said in retrospect. For him the end of the war was slightly less catastrophic than it had been for Scharf. Schulzen’s father worked in the textile industry and he was able to find his son an opening.

From the start, Scharf’s partnership with Schulzen flourished. Continuing to sell on behalf of other companies, they steadily built up their business. Schulzen’s experience of the textile trade helped him to establish some useful – and significant – agency agreements. (One was with an Italian company which dealt in dyes for textiles. Named SAICA, that company was also destined to play a curious but important role in the Plumbat affair.)

The two men’s ambition to become manufacturers in their own right grew stronger and in the early 1950’s the time seemed ripe. West Germany was reorganizing from the chaos of defeat. The country was beginning to get back on its feet economically, markets were expanding for every product imaginable, and the door was wide open for ideas and enterprise. It is said in Wiesbaden that the man who came up with the best idea for Scharf and Schulzen was an ambitious young entrepreneur named Ingo Trepel, today a major West German industrialist. At that time he too was just starting in business, as a manufacturer of simple hydraulic lifting equipment.

One evening in 1951, Trepel and Schulzen were having a drink together in Wiesbaden’s Parisiana Bar, now a down-at-the-heels strip club, but then an elegant revue bar. Schulzen asked Trepel if he could think of anything he and Scharf might manufacture – always bearing in mind their very limited capital. Trepel did not claim to have any original ideas. But he did point out that the workmen he employed used one barrel of industrial soap each week to clean the grease off their hands. Perhaps an opening lay there? Schulzen and Scharf embraced the idea enthusiastically. They found premises on the ground floor of 54 Am Schlosspark, Wiesbaden, in the same building, off a cobblestone courtyard, where Trepel had his business. On April 10, 1952, Scharf and Schulzen registered their new company. In memory of the fresh start Scharf had won in Eritrea, it was named Asmara.

Wiesbaden may at first have seemed an unlikely place to make and market industrial soap. One of the oldest spas in Germany, with twenty-seven hot springs, its tourist attractions also included well-ordered promenades and parks, a casino, and locally-made champagne. But in the 1950’s a considerable industrial zone, with iron foundries, metal and concrete works, chemical and textile plants, was growing on Wiesbaden’s outskirts. There Asmara found plenty of customers.

It began, by all accounts, in hand-to-mouth fashion. Asmara mixed one load of soap and sold it, and with the proceeds bought the ingredients for the next load. But in time Asmara began adding to its range of products. First there was Handwaschpaste, a concentrated soap in paste form, sold to housewives with the claim that it was ‘neutral, mild, kind to the skin and hygienic’. Then came Waschkonzentrat, a truly remarkable concoction. According to Asmara’s brochure, this ‘combination of modern synthetics’ could clean anything from the naked lady who appeared on the brochure’s cover to aluminium, men’s suits, overalls, asphalt, cars, bathtubs, printing presses, gears, hair, dogs, linoleum, furniture, carpets, horses and much more besides.

The advantage of Waschkonzentrat from Asmara’s point of view was that like the company’s other products, it was easy and cheap to manufacture. Asmara simply bought the ingredients, mixed them together and packaged the result.

But Scharf and Schulzen were now nurturing ambitions that went far beyond this humble enterprise. Ringing Wiesbaden at that time were several important United States military bases, including the headquarters of the United States Air Force in Europe. These bases generally got all their supplies, except for some fresh foods, from the US. (It was a policy which helped the US balance of payments, and also avoided over-inflating local economies.) But military procurement departments were permitted to buy locally if a manufacturer could offer a product at a cheaper price than an American supplier. That was the vast and lucrative market that Scharf and Schulzen now cast a longing look at: even a small order, in US terms, would give a gigantic boost to Asmara’s fortunes.

It was not an easy market to break into. But in 1961 Scharf and Schulzen hired two salesmen with persuasive reputations. One was a suave, personable man named Wilhelm Bargon, said to be very effective at breaking down the resistance of secretaries in outer offices. The other was Herbert Lettko, a chemist by training, who had already won entrée to the US bases around Wiesbaden through his sheer and dogged persistence: “The sort of guy,” as one of his friends put it, “who if you say no to him and lock the door, he comes in through the back. If you throw him out the back, he’ll come in through the window.”

They were a formidable pair, and were soon selling Asmara’s products to US bases. For good measure they penetrated the procurement office of the West German army, and before long Asmara was firmly in the ring of companies that thrive on military patronage.

In all honesty, it was not a very sophisticated business. There is the fairly typical story of one German dealer who won a highly profitable contract to supply the US Air Force with petroleum ether, commonly used as a cleaning solvent. The Air Force insisted, in its contract, that the ether be supplied in plastic containers which it had already bought from another supplier. The dealer pointed out that these very expensive containers would almost certainly be eaten away by the petroleum ether, which would become contaminated in the process. His advice was ignored. He carried out the contract to the letter, buying a large quantity of the solvent, bottling it in the containers which the Air Force supplied, and adding his own fancy label. The containers and the label cost five times as much as the ether, which soon become contaminated exactly as predicted and had to be thrown away.

Asmara’s own military deals were mostly of a similar nature. Once it too won a large rebottling contract, agreeing to supply chloramines, a mild disinfectant, in small containers. Asmara had to rent a barn to carry out the operation. Again, the cost of the containers and the label far exceeded the cost of the contents.

Asmara’s military sales had not yet managed to transform it into the substantial German company Scharf and Schulzen so desired. But in 1962 Herbert Scharf returned from a business trip to Paris, convinced that he had stumbled across the answer. While he was waiting at Orly Airport, a plane had arrived after somehow becoming contaminated by radioactivity. Scharf had watched the plane being washed down with generous amounts of chemical foam.

In Wiesbaden, Scharf assembled Schulzen and the two salesmen Lettko and Bargon and asked: “What is decontamination?” No one present knew, but that did not deter Scharf, who announced, “We are into decontamination – that’s our business now.” There remained the small problem of finding out exactly how to make decontaminants, but that was solved when Asmara acquired several Russian textbooks on chemical and atomic warfare from East Germany. There in black and white were chapters on decontamination, including the formulas for making creams and ointments to offer some protection against nerve gas, blister gas, and radioactive fallout.

With these formulas as its starting point, Asmara went into the business of manufacturing decontaminants. Within eighteen months, it had captured its first big order from the German Defence Ministry worth about half-a-million dollars.

Schulzen in particular become something of an expert on the subject. He distinguished himself by writing an article on ‘Chemical Sabotage Poisons’ for a civil defence magazine and was able to allude to his impressive contacts by thanking, at the end of his article, Herr Ludwig Scheichl of the German Defence Ministry for ‘the numerous suggestions and the support rendered.’ Schulzen also told his friends that he had become a consultant on chemical warfare to NATO. Meanwhile, Asmara was developing a range of personal decontamination sets which it sold to the armies of several countries.

Thus, by the mid-1960’s Asmara Chemie had won itself a tidy niche in the defence market, and had built up a useful range of industrial and military contacts. But as a company it was still small enough to remain flexible and versatile. It was at this point that Asmara, and the ambitious Herbert Schulzen, came to the attention of Israel.

When Israel was born in 1948 it would have been unthinkable to most of its citizens that the new state should cultivate the friendship of men like Herbert Schulzen. He was German, he had served the Third Reich and he stood on the wrong side of the widest river of blood in history. The public reaction to the first tentative encounters between Germany and Israel demonstrated the problems their leaders would have to surmount. In 1952 the mere suggestion that German and Jew might sit at the same table to negotiate compensation for the six million victims of the holocaust brought battle scenes to the streets of Jerusalem. For hours crowds stoned the Knesset while inside the chamber members made the pretence of continuing the debate with tears pouring down their cheeks from the tear gas that drifted in through the broken windows.

Eventually Israel agreed to accept three billion Deutsch marks in reparation. Israel’s dire economic needs had made some such accord inevitable. Even so most Israelis could not forget the past, would not forgive it. After he had played the music of Richard Strauss in public, an Israeli violinist was stabbed in the street. When the first prominent West Germans visited Israel there were demonstrations and further emotional debate in the Knesset. And twice Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was forced to resign, bringing down his government with him, in consequence of his belief that Israel must, without forgetting the past, build some kind of future with Germany.

Yet by the early 1960’s Herbert Schulzen, and Germans like him, were not merely acceptable allies; they were sought after.

Part of the explanation for this remarkable change in Israeli attitudes lay, of course, in the simple passage of time which healed the wounds if not the scars. Increasing numbers of West Germans were allowed to visit Israel: first, there were carefully-screened tourists; next young Germans who went with unassailable sincerity to expiate their parents’ crimes by working in kibbutzim. And then came the agony of the long, drawn-out trial of Adolf Eichmann, with its testimony, provided by 100 witnesses, to the utter depravity of Hitler’s Nazis, which acted as a kind of catharsis. The memories remained, but for most the torment was gone.

In this milder climate, the backgrounds of men like Schulzen became less significant barriers to friendship. And if this natural healing process needed any impetus, it came when Israel saw yet again the fragile nature of the bonds of official alliances.

In 1959, with Mossad’s help, Israel began to explore the possibility of obtaining military aid from West Germany. The moves were conducted in conditions of utmost secrecy. This time it was West Germany who had most to lose: one false step could wreck her relations with the Arab nations of the Middle East. Late that year Israel’s Defence Minister Shimon Peres paid a clandestine visit to his West German counterpart Franz Josef Strauss. Peres flew to Paris where he rented the smallest car he could find and drove through ice and fog to Strauss’ home south of Nuremberg. There Peres told Strauss that Israel needed Germany’s help. The United States was giving Israel money; France was selling Israel arms; ‘Germany,’ Peres said, ‘would be taking a far-sighted step in building bridges to the past if she would help with arms without requiring either money or anything else in exchange.’ Strauss, who said he was concerned about a possible ‘back door’ Soviet attack on Europe via the Middle East, was sympathetic. In February 1960 the deal was sealed in an equally top-secret meeting between West Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israel’s Prime minister David Ben-Gurion in New York.

Soon Germany was supplying Israel with small arms, ammunition, helicopters, training equipment, and spare parts. By the end of 1963 Germany had agreed to supply tanks and the two countries were discussing some small submarines Israel said she wanted. But in March 1964 came disaster: The Arabs found out. Such had been the secrecy surrounding the arms transactions that several West German ambassadors were trapped into denying the first reports of the deal, honestly believing them to be false. They soon had to retract. The consequences for Germany’s middle East policy were catastrophic, as many of the Arab states broke off diplomatic relations with Bonn and threatened to recognize East Germany into the bargain.

West Germany told Israel the arms supplies must end. To compensate, Germany gave Israel money and formal diplomatic recognition. Shimon Peres was moved to point out, in some bitterness, that neither cash nor the presence of a West German ambassador in Israel would offer much protection against Arab bombs and missiles.

The lesson of that disappointment was, once again, crystal clear: to survive, Israel must continue to cultivate friends who would not, like governments, be easily swayed by the shifts of international politics.

Making contacts with individuals, groups, organizations and companies throughout the world has become a national cause in which every Israeli and every Jew can participate. Occasionally, Mossad itself plays an active role. For example, when West Germany reneged on its military aid agreement and refused to supply some second-hand tanks it had promised. Mossad found an Italian company willing to buy them ‘for overhaul.’ The tanks made the briefest of visits to the Italian factory, and were then shipped secretly to Israel.

More often Mossad simply monitors the progress of likely-looking relationships with foreigners, storing information in its computerized files in Tel Aviv until Israel requires a suitable friend to fulfil one of its special needs. The motivation of these friends is varied: ideology, either political or religious, sympathy or guilt; or less prosaic forces such as self-interest or money.

There are many ironies in the Plumbat story. One of the greatest is the probability that Herbert Schulzen’s relationship with Israel came about as a result of injuries he sustained while fighting for the Third Reich.

Schulzen’s wartime career as a Luftwaffe pilot had met an abrupt and painful end in a field in Denmark in 1945. After taking off from an airfield near Flensburg on the German-Danish border he lost a brief encounter with a Royal Canadian Air Force Mosquito. In the consequent crash landing he suffered a serious head injury and his wound troubled him increasingly over the years. Finally, in 1964, he was advised to undergo major surgery, and it was while he was convalescing that the first approaches were made to him on Israel’s behalf.

Who spotted Schulzen is uncertain, but there is a remarkable coincidence which suggests that it may have been Dan Aerbel, the Mossad agent who was arrested after the Lillehammer murder in July 1973. The documentary evidence proves only that Aerbel became involved in Operation Plumbat towards the end. But it was in 1964 that Aerbel was recruited by Mossad – and he spent a great deal of that year in Wiesbaden. Using the cover of a furniture salesman, Aerbel visited the US military bases around Wiesbaden with which Schulzen’s Asmara was doing an increasing amount of business. Part of Aerbel’s job was, undoubtedly, finding likely ‘friends’ for Israel and Schulzen would have seemed a promising prospect: he had good contacts in the industrial and military fields; he was highly ambitious: and he was a partner in a company that was modest enough in size to be extremely flexible. There was the added factor that Schulzen would probably welcome, as part of his convalescence, a relaxing stay in a Mediterranean climate.

In any event, Schulzen was invited to Israel, ostensibly by a Tel Aviv company whose activities included manufacturing furniture. His visit was convivial. He made many friends, who jokingly nicknamed him ‘the Nazi pilot,’ and he was shown around the prestigious Weizmann Research Institute at Rehovot. When he returned to Wiesbaden, fully recovered from his operation, he brought back warm memories and a picture book of Israel, fondly inscribed by one of his new acquaintances.

It was not long before Schulzen’s visit brought Asmara tangible rewards in the form of orders from Israeli companies. Sometimes they came direct; sometimes they were channelled through other German companies, other friends of Israel, to which Asmara paid a commission. It was totally straightforward commerce, with Asmara providing such items as large quantities of Tuftophil K, a special chemical softener used in textile manufacture.

But Asmara’s name had now gone down in Mossad’s files to await the day when Israel might have more urgent needs than textile softeners to fulfil. That day was not long in coming.

The June war of 1967 left Israel facing embargoes, some official, some not, on many of the vital supplies she depended upon. She now turned to some of her private friends who might be willing to help bridge the gaps.

As it happened, June 1967 also saw some significant changes at Asmara. Herbert Scharf, approaching seventy, decided formally to surrender some of the responsibility for running the company, and thus give Schulzen more control. On 19 June the company’s three directors – Scharf, his wife, and Schulzen – awarded Schulzen ‘sole powers of representation,’ which, in plain language, gave him the power to make deals on Asmara’s behalf. And it was shortly after this alteration that the company’s business with Israel took on a distinctly military hue.

First Asmara supplied 300 of its personal decontamination sets to the Israeli army. Next it attempted to provide advanced aerial photography equipment. Ernst Richartz, a writer from the Wiesbaden area who sometimes dabbled in buying and selling, was asked to go to Schulzen’s home in Hettehain. Only a village really, Hettenhain is tucked away amidst pine forested hills northwest of Wiesbaden. Schulzen’s well-appointed home, built on the side of one of those hills, is surrounded by a tall, solid wooden fence to keep out prying eyes. Richartz was admitted and asked to take a seat by the small swimming pool that occupied nearly the whole front garden. Schulzen asked him whether he could help Asmara acquire some infra-red aerial cameras, a subject Richartz knew something about. The deal came to nothing in the end but Richartz was left in no doubt that Asmara was deeply entwined with Israel.

And then came the biggest, the most spectacular deal of all. Asmara agreed to act as the ‘front company’ in the acquisition of 200 tons of uranium. Schulzen was jubilant. It was by far the largest order Asmara had been involved in, and he could not resist boasting about it. Early in 1968 he bumped into Herbert Lettko, the persistent salesman, in Wiesbaden. Lettko had left Asmara by then to set up his own company but the two men had just pulled off a major deal with Israel. He told Lettko that the deal involved urea. Lettko though that Schulzen was referring to a compound used as a fertilizer. It was only later that he realized that this was a somewhat laborious joke which depended on the similarity between urea and uran – the German word for uranium.

Chapter 4

A Valuable Commodity