Yaakov (Mayo) Meidad, widely considered one of the best to had served in Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, died last weekend at the age of 93, the Yediot Aharonot daily reported Monday.
Former Mossad chiefs and many of its past and present agents attended the funeral, held at an undisclosed location in central Israel on Sunday.
Associates of the German-born Meidad, who attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Israeli army and was one of the founding members of its Artillery Corps, said he took part in hundreds of operations during the course of his 25-year spy career, opting to remain in the shadows long after he officially retired from the agency.
The bulk of the operations Meidad was involved in, or commanded, are a closely-guarded secret, but he was mostly revered for spearheading an operation to assassinate Herbert Cukurs, a senior member of the notorious Arajs Kommando who oversaw the murder of some 30,000 Latvian Jews in 1941 and fled to Brazil in the aftermath of World War II.
Masquerading as a Dutch businessman under the alias "Anton Kunzle," Meidad lured Cukurs to travel to Uruguay in February 1965 under the fake pretense of starting a joint aviation venture.
Cukurs, infamously known as the "Butcher of Riga," was invited to a house in a remote suburb of the capital Montevideo, where Mossad agents shot him in the head with a silenced pistol after a violent struggle. Authorities found the body in a suitcase which carried a note signed "Those who do not forget."
Meidad was also a member of the Mossad team that captured Adolf Eichmann, the SS chieftain, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1960. Eichmann, who oversaw the logistics of the deportation of Eastern European Jews to extermination camps during the Holocaust, was drugged and placed on an El Al flight to Israel, where he was sentenced to death by hanging two years later.
Former colleagues of Meidad disclosed that he never assumed a forged identity twice.
"He had a tremendous ability to convince and always remembered the details of every cover story he sold to people he was in contact with," one of them told Yediot Aharonot.
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