In an interview on Nazi Hunters

Your next book is The House on Garibaldi Street.

Isser Harel was head of Mossad [the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations] in the early 1950s when Mossad found, from the stories of a half-blind German Jew, that Adolf Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires. Mossad went to have a look at the house and decided there was no way he lives in this little bungalow. But the half-blind Jew, Lothar Hermann, persists, and Mossad eventually collected enough information to say that he in fact is living in this crappy little house – actually, another crappy little house – in Buenos Aires, and they staged their audacious, cack-handed, brilliant kidnap of Eichmann off the street in Buenos Aires and took him back to Israel to face trial, and he was hanged in 1962. People say that Harel is trying to exculpate himself for dragging his feet on Eichmann, but in the early 1950s Israel had enough enemies on its doorstep to be worrying about Eichmann and it was not easy for them to mount this operation. The idea that they could have done it straight away at that time is just silly. In any case, Eichmann wasn’t a household name until after his trial, so it wasn’t as if this was a big Nazi name then. This book shows that Simon Wiesenthal, despite his claims, was not involved in the kidnap or search to the extent that he says he was.

Since he turned up on trial in Israel, wasn’t it pretty obvious it was Mossad who kidnapped him?

No. There were a lot of private Nazi hunters at the time and Mossad denied it for ages.

Why so down on Simon Wiesenthal?

Because he’s a liar. He’s just not this secular saint that everyone says he is. His memoirs all contradict each other and are at odds with the rest of the evidence. The Wiesenthal Centre claims 1,100 Nazi scalps, but the true figure is about ten. The Centre bought his name in the 1970s and is basically an Israeli brand builder fighting anti-Semitism. But Garibaldi Street is the book to read about Nazi hunting.