S1-E01: The Spy & The Murderer

It would be an adventure. But then I realized I'd make a pretty terrible spy. First of all, I'm not really good at keeping secrets. I'm not especially good under pressure either, And some of the questionable things that the CIA had done around the world, Yeah, that played a role too. So instead, I joined the Miami Herald newspaper and became a journalist. Years later, I ended up writing about spies, even a couple of books. I loved their world.

The idea of one man or one woman playing this invisible role in history and doing it with a kind of flare. Espionage is important, but it's also just cool. So in this book, I was reading about Massad a few years ago. The author mentioned in operation I'd never heard about. It was unlike any of the missions I had studied in a few important ways. My first thought was,

this is weird. I was immediately hooked. I think it's fair to say that in the history of espionage, this case of the undercover agent and the man known as the book Ture of Latvia is unique. It still has all the things that fascinate me about spies, the tradecraft, letters in invisible ink, intrigue in places around the world, in this case Paris, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Montevideo, Uruguay, and

Rio de Janeiro. There were recondissions, disguises, fake passports, shooting contests, a kill team training in a specially martial arts called krav magaw. There was a body and a leather trunk, and a drug that one agent takes so he doesn't sweat and appear nervous. There's a psychiatrist who tries to psychoanalyze Nazis Hitler even makes an appearance. But there are even otter things too. What makes this story so different, first of all, is that it's about an assassination plot,

which are usually bad things. When I think of assassinations. I think of some awful moments history. I think about Lee Harvey Oswald and Deely Plaza in Dallas, President of the United States, and as he turned left, two or three shots rang up Sir Han, Sir Hand and Robert Kennedy lying in a pool of blood. Martin Good. I think about Jeans Ray and Martin Luther King Jr. On

the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Memphis. I have some very sad news for all of you, and that is that Martin Luther King and was shot and was killed tonight and the start of World War One when an assassin killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But this was something different. This was the story of the spy was going to try and kill someone for a very good reason, to prevent crimes against humanity, and to close the chapter on

something that happened in the spy's own life. This mission was personal, at least the agent who was the lead operative. His name was Mio. Again, this is unique. Spy missions are never personal. They're not supposed to be. They're supposed to be clinical, unemotional. This operation was like that for some of its architects. But it wasn't like that at all for MEO. It also had a target who had

first read seems completely evil. His name was Herbert Suckers, and he betrayed people who had once spend his friends and neighbors. He led them to their desks at gunpoint and sometimes killed them point blank. The machine gun he had on his hands the blood of literally thousands of innocent victims. These were people, some of whom had really admired Herbert Suckers, thought of him as a hero, which,

oddly enough, he'd once been. All of this is wrapped up in World War Two and the Holocaust and genocide law. The effects of the mission are still with us today. It's had this secret impact on our lives that nobody really knows about. I couldn't get this story out of my head, so I wrote a book about it. It's called The Good Assassin. After the book was published in two thousand nine, honestly, I thought I was done with

the whole thing. It's spent two years looking into the mission, traveling to Israel, interviewing MASSAD agents, pouring through archives in Latvia and Brazil and Israel, totally immersing myself. I was done with it. What else was there to say. Apparently something Because I kept thinking about the main characters. I had questions about them, puzzles I hadn't been able to solve in the book. But I just couldn't get out

of my head. And my book had brought people out of the woodwork were contacting me, giving me new information, things I'd never heard before. But we're slowly helping me to peel away the layers and get closer to the core of this story. At first, I thought, forget it. No way am I going back to all that. The Nazis crimes were so horrible. I didn't want to revisit them. I didn't want to wait through all that violence again.

But after a few months I changed my mind. Maybe I could solve those puzzles that were still bothering me, put them to rest. I realized I had to try, So that's why I'm here doing this podcast. I'm glad actually, because the story of the Hunt for the Butcher of Latvia wasn't what I thought it was. It was even stranger than I had first imagined. What I found surprised me. So let me tell you about the spy. His real name was Yakov, my dad, but everyone called him Mio.

And there are a few things you should know about Mio right off the bat. First of all, he was Jewish. He'd grown up in Germany in the thirties as Hitler was just beginning to gain power. As a young boy, Mio so Nazis marching in the streets. He listened as his teachers began repeating Hitler's lies. It seemed to him that violence was in the air. The mission in Brazil and later Puruguay was so personal for me, or because of his childhood, because of his background. That's Gad Shimron.

He's a former Massad agent who knew me. Oh well. I met him in Tel Aviv when I went to research this story. No, I mean he was born in so that's called What's up time. It was a German town to a very German Jewish family. I mean, his father was a very famous doctor, wearing the iron cross of the Germany Burial Army and for his gallant service in the First World War as a medical officer on the front Light and his parents regarden themselves as pure Germans,

Jewish Germans, but Germans. And when the Nazis came to Barrow in thirty three, and the father said, nothing he's going to happen to me, because I'm what they call it German front kempt further, which means frontline soldier, and he felt, you know that in the it's a wave of anti Semitism, but it will it will die away,

and nothing will happen me. On the other hand, as a teenager he went to school, he was exposed to the terrible expressions of anti Semitism and investigations of Jews, and he came to his parses said I'm not going to stay here, I'm going away. So Mea was worried. He didn't want to be in Germany anymore. He saw bad things coming. He asked his parents if he could leave, and finally, when he become a teenager, they let him

go to Palestine, which would later become Israel. Then they managed to arrange for him a scholarship in a very good and famous high school in Haifa, and Mio went away at the age of what he was fourteen maybe fifteen, went away from his family alone to a new country with a new language, with a new atmosphere and friends, etcetera. And he grew up in this and h then the Second World broke out, so Mio spent the years before

World War Two safe and sound. When the war came, he volunteered for the British Army and saw some action, but he never made it back to Germany. His parents sent me a postcards letting in know they were okay. They were still in Germany, hoping for the best. But then the postcard stopped and Meal knew that something had gone terribly wrong. And all his correspondence and the vacation this family was cut off, but totally, and only later after the war he learned that his parents were both

of them were burned in Nazi concentration camps. And it's true that you know the Nazist game his father the honor of because it was iron cross the front. Kemper the game in the honor of being on the last transports being sent from breast Law to the concentration camps. I think in night Meal always regretted not being able to help his mother and father escape. He had nightmares

about them. He was a private guy, so it's not like he would tell you about it, but that feeling of not being there when his parents needed him most, it never left him. After his military career was over. Mea was recruited by Massad, these really spy agency. He was a patriot, so he agreed to join. I'm Steven Talty and this is good assassin's hunting the butcher. So he's the first months to find and not being put forward trial, the second thought, most to find, and lastly

and healing. We must swoll was this shameful causes the end of a trail of blood and horror, the end of a man whose name will be written in it for me Episode one, The Spy and the Murderer. The second thing you should know about Meo was that he didn't look like a spy. I mean he really didn't. At the time our story takes place the mid sixties, he was in his forties. He was overweight, he was balden ing. He looked maybe like an accountant or a vice president of a bank. And when he spoke, his

voice was a little high. He was shy, and he found it hard to talk to people. If you got to look at him, you wouldn't be impressed. Even Mio's son told me that when I met him in Israel, he'd walk right past my father. He said, I never think twice about at it. In the early sixties, MASSAD was just beginning to gain a reputation around the world.

Its operatives were tough, physically fit, methodical. Some of their missions were controversial, and they remained controversial today, but very few people doubted that their agents were among the best in the world lethal when they had to be. That wasn't meo, It just wasn't a skill set. His skill set was looking boring anonymous. When he assumed a false identity for a mission, that became his real identity. Mia was known for diving into his cover stories with conviction.

That was a little scary. His son told me that when Mio left on a mission, he wasn't their father anymore. He become this different person. That Meal was a legend. Here's get him wrong again, Gad. He looks like a spy. He's tall, lean, handsome. If he played a secret agent in a movie, you'd believe it. In our conversation, Gad stressed one thing about me, how he could disappear into a character. He had this special characteristic of being able to dive into the person he was supposed to be

for this mission, which is not that easy. You know, people don't understand how difficult it is to really ignurse in yourself all the necessary characteristics for playing the new person you are using for the operation and neo. First of all, he was, of course it was very intelligent. He knew how to improvise what was a good actor. But also he had a very good cosmopolitan European background, which man. He spoke German fluently, of course, very well English,

very well French. And they say that he for many years he held the Mossade record for a false stolen acquired identities. That he had more than a hundred sixty different identities during this time. That she's quite a number. Some agents hate going undercover. Pretending to be someone else can get stressful, especially when one slip could lead to disaster, even death. But Meal actually seemed to look forward to

these kinds of missions. He liked becoming other people. This is what Meal had to say about playing a role. We've had an actor read me as parts, but these are direct quotes in his own words. In my daily life, I was quiet, introverted man, not particularly bushy or demanding. It's a minute I on the two K a mission I would become different person. I felt confident, even assertive, and had the capacity to strike up conversations and gain

the trust of people that I met. So Meo didn't look like a spy, but he was really good at the work. By the sixties, Mio had made himself into one of the best undercover ages in the world, but he still had a lot of guilt about what happened to his mother and father. He left them at the key moment, the pain lingered, and that's what makes the next part so hard to believe. Imagine your Meo and

one day Massad calls you into a meeting. You don't know what it's about, but it turns out they have a mission for you, a chance to get justice for your mother and father and for the other six million Jews murdered during the war. The mission is simple, to arrange the death of one man, a Nazi killer named Herbert Zuckers. Zukers had been an aviation hero before the war. People called him the Latvian Lindburgh. In his own way, he was just as unusual as Mio was. There's a catch,

of course. The mission isn't going to be easy. The man you're going after is suspicious, like really suspicious. He sees assassins around every corner. It's going to be dangerous. It's possible that you might not come back. But it really is a once in a lifetime chance, something that many of us perhaps dream of writing the wrongs of the past, a chance in a way, at redemption. So

bo I was pretty confident. I understood him. Who doesn't want a second chance to make things right with your loved ones, not to mention the larger picture getting justice for the six million. But even after spending all those months doing the research for my book, I still didn't get the other main character, Herbert Sukers. Yes, he had

colluded with the Nazis and committed horrible war crimes. But why had he changed from this respected pilot would traveled to Palestine and even praise what he observed there to this monster? What had driven him to transform, to betray so many of his countrymen? And importantly, why did Sukers have supporters around the world even today? Why did some people believe he was innocent? They were certainly critics of Assad that said they were wrong to have gone after him.

Sucers was a puzzle, a dark, twisted puzzle, and I had to figure him out. So let me tell you about that meeting where Mio learned about the operation, the meeting that changed Meal's life. Of course, spy missions are secret, that's kind of the point. But in looking into this operation I found something odd. Years afterwards, Mio talked publicly about it. Massad must have given their permission. How he

convinced them to do that, I have no idea. It's very rare for any spy agency, let alone Massad, to sign off on an agent telling their secrets. But you'll hear his words and that of the other agents, and even the target. We've got an actress to read some of their words where recordings aren't available for once, you'll get to hear the inside story of a spy mission from beginning to end. So it's September one, nineteen sixty four, Paris, where Mio lives. The meeting is set for that morning.

September is a great time to be in France. It's cool and everyone has just returned from their August holiday, so everyone has a little color. He refreshed. Meo walked the streets on his way to the meeting. He was enjoying the day. He was also looking for tales during the Cold War Paris wasn't the favorite city for spies. That was probably Berlin. The city was still populated by operatives from many different agencies, and Mio had to make

sure none of them was following him. Neo stopped in front of the Radio France building checked out the pedestrians people lingering on steps. When he was satisfied that he wasn't being tailed, he started walking again. He found the building he was looking for. He was on the Avenue day Verside, a beautiful boulevard, one of the city's richest neighborhoods. He ducked into the lobby, waved at the concierge, and went up to the apartment where his boss was waiting.

Joseph your Ree met him at the door. Uri was the head of Massad's Special operations unit code named Cesarea. Caesaria still exists today. It's an elite undercover unit that plants agents in foreign countries. It sends its men on sabotage missions, and it plans and carries out targeted killings of those that Israel considers to be its enemies. It's secret and what it does is highly classified. Youri was a charming guy, very loyal. He had lots of friends.

He was popular inside Massad. He knew how to work a room. Nea was the opposite. He was an outsider at the agency and it bothered him. When he opened the door, he read said something strange. From this moment onwards. Your name is Anton Kunzla with a battle style to getting used to it. Neo didn't say anything. As I mentioned before, he was a quiet guy. He walked into the room and saw another agent, Michael not his real name, sitting at a small table. He nodded to Michael sat

down towards some coffee. You, Reid followed. The three sipped the coffee before getting down to business. You reeve got it started. You must be wondering why I summoned you him and in such a heavy we have received final confirmation about the Nazi woe criminal who lives in one of the South American countries. Israel had decided to hunt down one of the Holocaust's most savage killers. The target was Herbert Suckers. He was a Latvian in the small

country that sits between Russia and Germany. I'll tell you more about Sukers in the next episode. But even though he became a war criminal, He'd led a fascinating life before World War Two. He'd been a world class aviator, the Latvian Lindbergh. He'd flown aircraft he'd built himself through sand and snowstorms all the way to the East coast of Africa, Japan, the Middle East. He was brave, adventurous. But that was before the war. When the Germans invaded,

Zukers had changed. According to Massad, he'd become a beast, a mass murderer. He helped Hitler's forces killed thirty thousand Jewish men, women and children, and actions that wiped out over of Latvia's Jews. The survivors gave him a name after the war, the Butcher of Latvia, and Massad had decided to hunt him down. There was another reason for

the mission, which I'll get into a little later. It's something that I found almost unbelievable, a part of history that seems so bizarre to me that it couldn't have been ill. But in nineteen sixty four, the Israelis decided that Herbert Sukers had to die. Your Reef gave MEO a little background on the butcher. He fled to Brazil ninety six after the war ended, with his wife and children, and one unexpected guest I'll tell you about later. Your reef told the two agents that the butcher was living

in a house sal Paulo. You know, a small boat rental business. The cater to the locals and to tourists. Meal listened to your reef talk. He looked calm. You always looked calm. But he wasn't calm. He was thinking about the past. I felt my health race and my adrenaline level skyrocket. Suddenly, so many different thoughts ran through

my mind. I released a deep breath. Having been born in Germany and having lost both parents in the Holocaust, I needed no lengthy, detailed explanations of that terrible time. My father, a well known doctor in our hometown, served during the First World War as a medical officer in the Prussian Army, and for his service in the cruel battles of Balato on the Western Front, he was awarded the Iron Cross. This fact did not stop the Nazis

from sending him to his death entat concentration camp. My mother was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered as part of what the Nazis and their battles turned the final solution to the Jewish problem. For me, Oh, this would be a mission unlike any of the others had gone on. This was personal. He knew that MISSAD didn't carry out many operations against escape war criminals. Israel was only sixteen years old at the time, and there are

other things to worry about, mainly its own survival. The agency didn't have time to settle old scores. In fact, this would be the first time we know about that. His spies were going to set out to kill a Nazi war criminal at a Fike men they kidnapped, but Sucers they were determined to kill you. Reeve added some more details. Sucers was six or four years old, but he was still a powerful guy, built like a tank.

You reve described him to the two men. You will face a criminal who is, according to our boats, miss dustful, ruthless and dangerous, and he's always prepelled for the worst. That was true, as Mio would later find out, Sucers imagine Jewish agents around every corner. To carry out the mission, Neo had to get close to this guy to form a real relationship, maybe even a friendship. This was deeply painful for him. The butcher was exactly the kind of

man who forced his parents to the concentration camps. But why didn't sad mates man dead? There were thousands of ex Nazis walking around Europe South America. Why zookers and why now you read got to that you wanted Meo and Michael to know the reason that the butcher had to die. At that particular time, he started talking about

an anniversary that was approaching in about eight months. On May eight, the world will mount the twenty years since the victory of the Nazi Germany, and there are already voices and not in Germany alone, would say that it is time to look forward, to do a line under the events of the past, to forget the Nazis and to apply the statute of limitations to the crimes. That

was the real reason for the mission. It turns out that in the German government had decided that all cases of murder would be given a twenty year statute of limitations. If you killed someone, state would have twenty years to open a case against you. If they didn't, you were free forever. You couldn't be indicted, you couldn't be prosecuted,

and you couldn't go to jail. Of course, in the government had no idea that someone named Hitler would be born in Austria and that the Holocaust would happen, and that six million Jews and millions of other victims would be murdered by their successors. They couldn't imagine something like

the Third Reich was beyond them. The kinds of murders they imagined were the kind we know today, crimes of passion, one person killing another person, not of greed or momentary rage or whatever, what you might call a garden variety murder, not Auschwitz m But by nineteen sixty four, the Germans had grown tired of hearing about the war. There had been the Nuremberg trials in and there had been others since then. The guilty had been punished. In their view,

people wanted to move on. Opinion polls showed that fifty seven percent of Germans were in favor of the Statute of Limitations. All it had to do was pass the German Parliament and it would become law. But Israel's leaders were determined that this would not happen. They protested to the German government, but that really went nowhere. You Reef told me that they believed the statute was going to pass,

and that meant two things. Any escape Nazi hiding in Europe or in South America, and some people believe there were thousands of them, would go free. They could never be brought to trial. This included the worst of the worst, the actual killers who shot us at the pits and put them into the gas chambers. I found this whole backstory to be a little surreal. Honestly, I had no idea that Germany's leaders had ever thought about doing this.

It seemed incredible to me that they seriously considered giving an amnesty to mass killers. But they did. And Massad and many others suspected that if the statute passed, it would be a signal to start winding down the trials of the Nazi war criminals who had been indicted. It would be the end of the hunt for those responsible Germany. They just wanted to forget. They wanted the guilt and the stories of what happened at the camps to be over. So this is why Israel had come up with the mission.

Your reefs started talking about the statute and he got a little emotional. It is absolutely inconceivable that tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals who never paid for the Reinos crimes should now be able to call out of their hiding holes and spend their best of their lives in peace and tranquility. It's been only twenty years since the release of the survivors of the Death Games, and we owe it to them and to the six million who did not survive and are unable to avenge themselves.

We must thwart this shameful process of the Statute of Limitations. Hi, this is Stephen Talty, host of Good Assassins Hunting the Butcher. The folks that help me bring you the show, Diversion Podcasts, have just launched another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called Backstaged The Devil in Metal, a deep dive into the history of metal music, filled with never before heard interviews and stories from some of the biggest names of music, including Black Sabbath to this priest, Ben Helen,

and many others. It's outrageous, raw and surprising at times. Backstage The Devil in Medal is out now. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, I Hired Radio app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You've obviously felt the mission was justified, but he admitted it was something of a long shot. First, Mio had to get to Zukers, this ex soldier who went around armed and on the lookout for exactly what meal was a MASSAD agent to trust him. Second,

get him out of Brazil. Third, he had to get him to Chile or Uruguay on some pretext and lead him into a trap where the killed team was waiting. Finally, the entire team had to get out of the country without getting caught. After Zukers was dead, Massad would announce it to the world, reminding everyone, particularly people in Germany, that these kinds of Nazi monsters were still out there.

The agency had to do this before the Statute of Limitations came up for debate the German Parliament the following March. That gave them about six months, and then they had a hope that the publicity and the shocking crimes that the butcher had committed would convince enough German legislators that the amnesty could not happen. The Statute of Limentations would be voted down. That was the end game. It was a pretty long string of things to happen in a row.

If the chain was broken, at any point the operation would fail, but it was the best idea that Massad had. If we're succeed in the operation we are now preparing, will once again put the feel of death into the hearts of tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals. We'll do everything in our power to make the rest of their lives miserable. They will feel their own shadow, they will not dare to leave their homes, and they will have continuous night mills of anonymous assassins, the offspring of

of innocent victims seeking their revenge. This was interesting to me. You Reeve was saying that even if Massad carried out the mission and the Germans still went ahead with the statute, the death of Herbert Sucres would have meaning because it would serve as a warning any Nazi killers could never be sure they would be safe again. So it would be a kind of life sentence of fear, of waiting for the knock on the door. But that was a pale imitation of what the survivors and millions of other

people around the world really wanted, true justice. The men went over some other details you Reeve talked about suckers crimes. I'll get to those things in episode two, because we actually have the testimonies of survivors describing what they saw, and I'd like you to hear them. You Reeve didn't mention one more thing. He pointed out that there was a difference between other Nazi fugitives like Ada Aikman and people like Herbert Sukers. Aikman was one of the masterminds

of the Holocaust, but he never shot anyone. He had gone to visit concentration camps, but he kept his distance from the victims. He didn't have actual blood on his hands. But Sucris was at the opposite end of that spectrum. According to your reeve, he shot women and children, among other things. We are dealing here with the despicable saddist who actually enjoyed torturing his victims and meldling innocent people.

And this Sokos as the ROOTSBA to give interviews to Brazilian magazines and claimed that he is innocent, that he has no idea what anyone would want with him, and after telling everyone about his innocence, he prays his s S uniform with great pride before the Commons. This is true, and it's one of the crazy details that drew me to this story. Most Scape war criminals changed their names when they fled to South America or other countries. Herbert

Sucers didn't. He not only arrived in Brazil under his own name, he actually sought out Jewish leaders in Rio, told them how he'd saved some of their people during the war. We'll get to that part. But I couldn't believe it when I first heard it. Every other Nazi on the run I've ever heard about had assumed a false identity. Joseph Mengela went by the name Wolfgang Gerhardt. Aikman had called himself Ricardo Clement when he was living

in Argentina. It was common sense if you were one of the most wanted men in the world, the first thing you did was find a new identity. But the butcher apparently didn't do that. Could he have been so delusional or so self confident that he hadn't even bothered to get a fake passport? It seemed incredible to me. So the butcher wasn't only guilty in the eyes of Israel's leaders. He was laughing at them, taunting the survivors. Why would seekers do that? Some of his supporters actually

pointed to this fact to prove his innocence. Why would a guilty man keep his own name if he'd done such terrible things. At this point, it seemed to me that Sucers was either innocent or mentally unstable in some way. Maybe the risk taking that had made him into the Latvian Lindbergh had also made him reckless later in life. I just didn't know. There was one other reason I found later on that Suckers had been chosen as the

Massad's target. Months before Mio went to that Paris apartment, a meeting had been held in Israel the leaders of the various intelligence agencies. The subject was Nazi officers who still remained at large. During the meeting, someone read out the list of escape criminals. When he got to Herbert Suckers, the head of the country's military intelligence Directorate collapsed. His name was a Haran Yariev. He wasn't in a relation

to Joseph your Reeve, Mio's boss. It turned out that this man's family had lived in Latvia when the war came, and the butcher had helped murder them. This personal reaction helped move Suker's name to the top of the list. He was a mass killer. He apparently had no remorse, His whereabouts were publicly known, and he had killed the loved ones of someone high up in the Israeli government. He was perfect in a way. Zukers would be the

representative of all the Holocaust killers. The meeting in Paris was coming to an end, but before the three men went their separate ways, there was one last question they had to decide. Would Mio go on the mission alone? For would Massad send a small stocking and protection unit with him. Mio spoke up immediately, I prefer to work alone. I'd rather work without tales or protection. My god feeling tells me, said, such an operation can be carried out

only alone, me against the target. Mio would later say a big team could have endangered the mission. Suckers was paranoid. Why give him a reason to believe he was being followed by a bunch of dark haired men who just might turn out to be Israelis. There was probably another reason, as I later found out, but I'll save that for another episode. When Mio was actually in South America. The last thing you reeve did wu show MEO the files

on Sukers. It was, I wrote in my book a thin stack of pages, thin due to the fact that so few Jews had been left alive to speak about Herbert Suckers. These pages represented about half a dozen testimonies. The exact number isn't known. The tray Suckers crimes during the war collected from eyewitnesses during the late nineteen forties and early fifties. Some of these accounts were barbaric, others oddly moving. In one story, Zuker speaks to a young

girl in Yiddish. They have a short pleasant conversation before Zukers, for no apparent reason, pulls out his handgun and executes her in cold blood. In another account, Zucker saves a woman that he knew to be Jewish, risking his own life to do so. This collection of testimonies added up to a curiously fractured, incomplete portrait of Herbert Suckers, whose life had been larger and stranger than NEO could have

ever imagined at that first meeting. It would take many years and the survival of one obsessed Jewish woman to tell it in full. One survivor later wrote, Zuckers is a fascinating historical figure full of tremendous contradictions. Before they left, the three Massad agents agreed on a code name for Zukers. They would be sending telegrams and letters with invisible link and you Reave ordered that the butcher's real name not

be used in any of them. If some of their correspondents was discovered, he could be tipped off and the mission would be over. So they chose a substitute would refer to him as the late one, as in the deceased. Was there a little joke? After that the meeting broke up. Mio strolled back to his apartment in Paris, where his family was living at the time. He had to tell his wife they'd be moving again in case Mio was caught in Brazil and exposed as a spy. Massad wanted

his family to change apartments. It was for their own safety. His wife had been through this before. Being in Massad meant that he'd often be gone from months at a time. He missed birthdays anniversaries was part of the job. So that was the mission. Mia was to travel to Brazil impersonating an Austrian businessman named Anton kunz La. There he would get to know Herbert Sukers. How Yurev didn't say

that would be up to Mio. He then had to get the butcher to leave the country and travel to another part of South America where the other team members would be waiting. Reason it had to be another country was blowback. If Israel assassinated the butcher in Brazil, there were thousands of Jews living there who might suffer the consequences threats, bombings, whatever. And if the Brazilian police caught Meo or one of the other agents, that would be

a disaster too. It was a right wing military government who knew what they might do. They might hang Meo or put him in jail for decades. Either of those would be an embarrassment for Israel. They didn't want that to happen. Meanwhile, six thousand miles away, Herbert Sucres was tending to his boats and a small marina on a man made lake in South Pawlo. Winter in the Southern Hemisphere was almost over. He was hoping the summer would make him some money. He had no idea who Mio

was or that the Massad was after him. But the butcher did know one thing, or he believed it. He leave that his victims had not forgotten him. Four years before, Sod had kidnapped Adolph Eichmann and Argentina put him on trial. I mean, who escaped the normery more trials by playing no, South America receives justice and the hands and the people who will be unabled. The kidnapping had scared Sukers. He put a barbed wire around his house, bought a German

shepherd to patrol it. He assembled the collection of guns to protect himself. He's basically living inside a fortress. But Seekers went further. He went to the Brazilian intelligence agency to appeal for protection. They were called DPS, and they had a bad reputation for kidnapping and killing anyone who posed the military regime. After his visit, Brazil issued a warning to anyone that might think of kidnapping Seekers. This

would not be tolerated. They were talking to Israel. Your reeve had warned me Oh that his target was on guard. In fact, it went way by on that. At one point before the operation began, Suckers had promised his family that he was ready if the MSSAD comes after me. He told them, I will die before I let them win. Meo had been warned, but he really had no idea of who he was actually going up against. Good assassins. Hunting the Butcher is a production of Diversion Podcasts in

association with I Heart Radio. This season is written and hosted by Stephen Tulti, produced and directed by Scott Waxman and Jacob Bronstein. Executive producers Scott Waxman and Mark Francis. Story editing by Jacob Bronstein, with editorial direction from Scott Waxman and Mongesh At ticket Or Editing, mixing and sound designed by Mark Francis with the voices of Armory Angele, Andrew Polk, Steve Rautman, and Stefan Drudnitsky. Theme music by

Tyler Cash. Archival research by Adam Shapiro. Special thanks to Oran Rosenbaum at U t A