At 9 A.M. on February 27, 1965, Oded Gur-Arie left his home on Pierre Guerin Street in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of Paris. As he did every Saturday, he walked the 150 or so meters to the local kiosk to buy the International Herald Tribune. "I took the paper and started to walk home," Gur-Arie recalls, "and as always, I glanced at the main headline." The headline reported that six West Germans had disappeared in Egypt, among them Wolfgang Lotz and his wife, Waltraud. Gur-Arie, who was then 15, was Lotz's son. The headline knocked him for a double loop. First, "because I knew Dad was a spy and it was obvious to me that he hadn't 'disappeared,' but had been caught by the Egyptians. I was sure they would discover that he was an Israeli, and that would be the end of the story."

Meaning?

Gur-Arie: "That they would kill him."

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The second shock came, he says, "when I asked myself who this Waltraud was. His wife? My mother was his wife! How could he have another wife? And what was I going to tell my mother in a few minutes? I understood that the story was getting complicated."

For 42 years Gur-Arie kept to himself the complications he encountered in his formative years. He never spoke publicly about what he went through. The story of his father, Wolfgang Lotz - he Hebraized his name to Ze'ev Gur-Arie - who was an Israeli spy in Egypt, has been told many times. Lotz himself wrote a book about it. The story of "the champagne spy" and "the spy on the horse," as he was dubbed, became one of the legends of the Israeli intelligence community. But now the story is being told from a completely different angle - from the viewpoint of the spy's teenage son - and the result is less than flattering to both the memory of the famous spy and to his handlers in the Mossad espionage agency. Oded Gur-Arie goes public on these pages and is interviewed for the first time about his suffering and about how his father betrayed him and his mother.

Gur-Arie, a professor of business administration and a businessman who lives in the United States, agreed to cooperate with Nadav Schirman, director of the film "The Champagne Spy," which will be screened in competition at DocAviv, the Ninth Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, on March 17 and again on the 24th. In the film, and in this interview, Gur-Arie reveals his feelings as an adolescent who finds out from a newspaper not only that his father faces possible execution for spying, but that he is leading a double life in his personal relations as well.

It was not the typical double life that characterizes the shadowy world of espionage. Of course, Lotz had to conceal his true identity from the Egyptians in order to work as a spy. But contrary to all his instructions and to all accepted practice, he duped his handlers in the Mossad and he duped his family. He hid from his son and from his legal wife the fact that he had married another woman, too. While his son, Oded, and his wife, Rivka, were living in Paris, blindly worshiping the father-husband who was risking his life in Cairo in the service of Israel, Lotz established a parallel family with Waltraud, a young German woman. He also deceived her by not revealing that he was married and had a son.

Which of the two items you read in the newspaper that day was harder to digest: the arrest or the betrayal of you and your mother?

"I didn't compare them. Both items struck me simultaneously with the same intensity. I went upstairs and into the apartment. I told my mother that Dad had disappeared in Cairo. She grabbed the paper and read the report quickly. She remained unruffled and went to the phone. She called our liaison in the Mossad, Aryeh Sivan.

"Apparently because it was Shabbat, the Mossad people hadn't woken up that morning," he remarks caustically. "At that moment they didn't know that Dad had been arrested. I imagine that within minutes all the Mossad agents in Europe rushed out to buy the Herald Tribune in order to be updated. The fact that the Mossad didn't know that Dad had been caught and that they heard it from my mother, who heard it from me after I had read about it in the paper, was another breaking point for me. Dad had instilled tremendous confidence in me and in Mom. He gave us the feeling that he knew everything, that he would always know how to get by and that we needn't worry. And also that behind him was an organization and a system that knew what they were doing and would look after him should the need arise. Until then I was certain that the Mossad was omnipotent, that they had resources and that they always knew everything. As a youngster, the events came as a great disappointment to me."

Cover story

Oded Gur-Arie was born in 1949 in Jerusalem and attended school in Givatayim. In 1960 he and his family moved to Paris. For reasons of operational and family convenience, the French capital was chosen as Lotz's operational base. The Mossad's European headquarters were in Paris, and it was from there that Wolfgang Lotz set out for and returned from his missions in Egypt; it was there that he met his handlers for debriefings and spent his vacations with his family.

Lotz was born in Berlin in 1921. His father, a theater manager, was not Jewish and did not have his son circumcised, a fact that would later aid him in his work. When Lotz was two years old, his father committed suicide, leaving his Jewish wife Lena, an actress, to raise their son alone. After the Nazis came to power, in January 1933, mother and son immigrated to Palestine. Lotz went to school in the Ben Shemen Youth Village, served in the British police force, and in World War II volunteered for service in the British Army. Taking advantage of his fluency in German, the British assigned him to an intelligence unit in Egypt to interrogate prisoners of war.

His participation in the interrogation of German soldiers who were taken captive in the Western Desert campaign would later help Lotz create a credible cover story for his espionage mission. During his military service in Egypt he became fluent in English and also learned a little Arabic. Later on he transferred to the Jewish Brigade and was awarded the rank of sergeant major.

During his service in Egypt, Lotz met Rivka Merkes, a switchboard operator at British Army headquarters in Cairo. The two became a couple and in 1946, after returning to Palestine, they were married. They settled in Haifa, where she worked in the customs department and he at the oil refineries. Lotz fought in the War of Independence and afterward served as an infantry officer in the Golani Brigade. Oded was born in August 1949. In 1952, Lotz Hebraized his name to Ze'ev Gur-Arie, after his brother-in-law, Arie, an intelligence officer, who was killed in action. (Ze'ev is Hebrew for wolf.)

Lotz left the army in 1958 with the rank of captain. The family was now living in Jaffa, where Lotz opened a book publishing and distribution company together with the writer and translator Eliezer Carmi. However, the business floundered. Lotz couldn't find a direction in life. The family's anchor was Rivka. "Mother worked all along, first in the Lapidot Company and then as a switchboard operator at Haaretz," Gur-Arie relates.

At one point, Lotz offered his services to the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) Intelligence Department (the forerunner of Military Intelligence, or MI). A Shin Bet security agent, who interviewed him in this regard, wrote that Lotz "is interested in work that will give him satisfaction for a year or two in a target country." Another recommendation came from Avraham (Avrum) Shalom, at the time a member of the Shin Bet's operations unit (which was then also run by the Mossad) and later the head of the Shin Bet. Shalom's wife was a relative of Lotz.

"Avrum's recommendation was qualified," Gur-Arie relates. "He thought that Dad was not suited for long-term intelligence activity. He went through interviews and a few tests, and was hired."

'Sense of family'

In the Mossad he was known affectionately as "Wolfie" and codenamed "Shimshon" (Samson). He underwent a battery of tests, or "stations" - psychological, psychiatric, graphological - and field operations. One of the testers wrote: "Seems to have poor ability to withstand torture ... Self-loving type and looks after himself too much to be able to stand up to suffering. Vulnerable to pain and threats ... Problems in overcoming passion for women and wine."

However, the other opinions were favorable, and Lotz was accepted for the mission. "He had nerves of steel," his handler, Yaakov Nahmias, says in the film. "He was capable of looking the Angel of Death in the eye and drinking a toast with him."

Lotz became a "warning agent" - one who infiltrates a target country for a lengthy period. His mission: to achieve a status that would enable him to obtain information and warn about the host country's intentions to go to war with Israel. He was schooled in the art of spying in a villa in Ramat Chen by Moti Kfir, afterward the head of the Mossad's training department. Kfir taught him the basics of intelligence: how to carry out and how to evade surveillance, use of codes, communications, preparation of reports and so forth.

Lotz was assigned to Unit 131, a top-secret unit that operated deep-cover agents in the target countries - Egypt, Syria and Jordan - that posed a war threat. The unit, under the command of Yoske Yariv, was then part of MI. In 1963, when Lotz was already active in Egypt, Unit 131 became part of the Mossad. The background to this development was the replacement of Mossad head Isser Harel by MI director Meir Amit. Amit brought in his people, including Unit 131, which in the Mossad was codenamed "Caesarea" and became the espionage agency's flagship unit. Its agents - Israeli and other Jews - are called "fighters."

Lotz's cover story was that he had been a Wehrmacht officer and had fought under Rommel in the Western Desert. After the war he immigrated to Australia and had become rich from breeding horses. He had come to Egypt in order to establish a large ranch for the same purpose.

At a memorial evening organized by the Mossad after Lotz's death, in 1993, Yariv related that "Wolfie" had been apprehensive that his British Army service in Egypt would be his undoing. "I suggested that he go to Libya for a warm-up visit. In the end he went to Damascus for three weeks and to Cairo for five weeks to scout around and learn about Arabian horses. When he got back he was brimming with confidence."

The operational order from June 1960, along with other documents, including his contract, are preserved in Lotz's personal file in the Mossad archive. The contract stipulated that he would be employed for five years with the option of an extension or cancellation, upon a month's notification. In addition to his salary, he received an expense account of $350 a month plus one pound sterling per day, as compensation for residing in an "enemy country."

At the end of 1960 the Gur-Arie family moved to Paris. "I was a boy of 12," Oded relates. "I was told that we would be in Paris for five years as envoys of the Defense Ministry and that Dad would be going on long trips, but I didn't know exactly what he would be doing. It was all very pleasant. There was a sense of family: the apartment in an old building, with a wooden floor that creaked as though it were saying hello, the outings with the whole family in the city and in the countryside."

Lotz began his mission at the beginning of 1961. He established a horse ranch outside Cairo, which became a magnet for senior army and police officers and for the city's German community. He ingratiated himself with the Germans, acquired friends in the Egyptian army and police, and was a star at social events. One of his close friends was a senior police officer named General Gurab, to whom Lotz gave gifts after every trip to Europe.

Gur-Arie: "One time, Dad bought him a washing machine. When his ship drew close to the port, a police boat drew up alongside it, and the washing machine was lowered onto it without going through customs." This connection also made it possible for the Israeli spy to smuggle in a radio transmitter for sending messages to his handlers, which he hid in a drawer in his apartment. In Europe, his usual route took him from Paris to Munich, from there to Italy and then by ship to Egypt. On these trips he met with his handlers, initially Nahmias and afterward Sivan. On one occasion he took his son to a meeting with Sivan in a Paris cafe, and it was there that Oded first realized that his father was a spy.

The Mossad finds out

In January 1961, about a year after being sent to Egypt, Lotz met Waltraud Neumann on a train in Europe. He was 41, she was 30. He introduced himself as a millionaire who had made his fortune breeding horses in Australia and was now based in Cairo. Waltraud afterward told a friend that she had met "the man of her dreams" and that in one of their first meetings he drank Champagne from her shoe.

Waltraud Neumann was born in 1930 in eastern Germany. Her father belonged to the Jehovah's Witnesses, who were persecuted by the Nazis. As a teenager, at the end of World War II, she was raped, either by a Soviet soldier or a German priest. Years later, when she was arrested in Egypt along with Lotz, she was incarcerated in a women's prison in a cell with Marcelle Ninio, who had been convicted as part of the Israeli sabotage ring a decade earlier. Ninio afterward related that Waltraud suffered from nightmares in which the rapist appeared with a crucifix that lay on her chest.

After the war, the Neumanns moved to West Germany. Waltraud learned about the hotel business in Switzerland and went to Los Angeles with high hopes of finding a job, but her dreams were soon shattered. While working as a hotel chambermaid she fell in love with a man who broke her heart and turned out to be a con man. After sailing back to Europe, she met Lotz while traveling to Germany by train. Two weeks later they were married and she accompanied him to Cairo. He did not tell her that he was an Israeli or that he was married and the father of a son. Nor did he reveal his bigamy to his original family or to the Mossad.

The Mossad learned of it by chance. "One day we got a letter from him," Yoske Yariv related. "The envelope had a black lining, to prevent others from reading it. The letter referred to a previous correspondence between Wolfie and an Italian count from Rome, from whom he wanted to buy horses for the ranch. We noticed that the lining, which was a bit torn, contained an incomplete address, from which we were able to identify the words 'Mrs. and Mr. Lotz.'"

The Mossad immediately summoned "Shimshon" to Israel to explain. In the meeting, Yariv asked, as though offhandedly, "How's the wife?" Lotz replied quickly, "Fine, thanks." Yariv said that Lotz was prone to conceal things and was not always completely forthcoming, but when presented with the facts he immediately confirmed them. This pattern repeated itself now as well. Seemingly, his violation of procedures should have obliged his handlers to abort the operation and bring Lotz back to Israel, but "Shimshon" was a successful spy and the Mossad didn't want to lose him. It was decided to leave things as they were - and not to tell Rivka about her husband's bigamy. Lotz told Waltraud that he was a spy but not that he was working for Israel. She agreed to cooperate with him and, as Yariv noted, "was an extraordinary success, who helped him in his work."

"It was a cardinal mistake," Avraham Shalom, the former Shin Bet head, says in the film, "to let him live a true double life. His personality thus became even more fragmented, with two families, one in Paris and the other in Cairo."

New mission

In May 1963, Lotz's operational order was modified. "In addition to early warning," the new order stated, "you are to get close to the circle of scientists consisting of Paul Goercke, Wolfgang Pilz and Hans Kleinwachter. The goal is to liquidate them." In the late 1950s, Egypt's military industries began recruiting German scientists, engineers and technicians, most of whom had worked for the Nazi war machine, to aid in the development of advanced weapons systems, particularly missiles and nonconventional warheads. Israel's military and political leadership became hysterical. The feeling was that the German experts were out to complete Hitler's unfinished project. Mossad chief Isser Harel was particularly outraged.

The Mossad began sending threatening letters to the scientists and dispatching envoys to meet with them and their families, in an effort to persuade them to sever their ties with Egypt. When this tactic failed, a campaign of terror was launched. The Mossad sent booby-trapped letters aimed at assassinating some of the Germans. The letters were signed by an organization called The Gideonites, a fictitious group invented by the Mossad.

"Shimshon," as usual, carried out his mission proficiently. His handlers sent him explosives hidden in Yardley soaps. Lotz inserted the materials and the trigger mechanism into envelopes, which he sent from Cairo to the scientists. Unfortunately, one of the envelopes was opened by the secretary of the missile scientist Pilz, and the explosion left her blind. According to Avraham Shalom, it was a mistake to change Lotz's mission and have him carry out assassinations instead of remaining a warning agent. In February 1965, the Lotzes, returning from a visit to Marsah Matruh, near the Libyan border, found policemen outside their home. A search turned up the hidden radio transmitter. Four others, none of whom knew anything about their deeds, were arrested with them: Waltraud's parents, who were on a visit, and the representative of a German firm and his wife; three of them, including Waltraud's parents, were released, and the fourth was tried and acquitted. Waltraud was subjected to brutal torture. Lotz's trial lasted just two days and was in part broadcast on Egyptian television. He was sentenced to life imprisonment; Waltraud to three years.

Immediately upon Lotz's arrest, Mossad head Meir Amit contacted General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of the West German intelligence apparatus, and told him about the arrest of the Israeli fighter. Gehlen acceded to Amit's request that he take the Israeli spy under his wing and present him to the Egyptian authorities as his man in Cairo. To prevent the possibility that someone in Israel would recognize Lotz and blab about it, the Mossad obtained equipment to jam the reception of Egyptian television broadcasts in Israel during the trial. It turned out that the Egyptians, too, preferred to portray Lotz as a German spy. An Egyptian intelligence officer, Colonel Mahmoud Khalil, who was in charge of Egypt's armament project, confirmed this in a conversation with the German consul general in Cairo. In the film the former consul quotes the Egyptian officer as saying it was convenient for Egypt to depict Lotz as a German agent.

To this day, the Mossad does not know for certain how "Shimshon" was discovered. There are several theories, including one - which Yariv did not rule out - that he was caught by accident. According to this account, the policemen who met Lotz at his home did not know he was a spy, but had come to place him under preventive arrest, as they did with most of the West Germans living in Egypt, because of the visit of East German President Walter Ulbricht. Yariv theorizes that Lotz, who did not know about the Ulbricht visit, thought mistakenly that the policemen knew he was a spy. Accordingly, as a pedantic yekke (Jew of German origin) he led them to the transmitter and confessed, though he stuck to his cover story.

'Terrible meeting'

After Lotz's arrest, Rivka and Oded returned to Israel. The Lotzes were released in the prisoner exchange that followed the 1967 Six-Day War (together with the surviving members of the Israeli sabotage ring), thanks to the insistence of Mossad chief Amit. It was only on the plane from Cairo, on the way to freedom, that "Wolfie" mustered the courage to tell Waltraud about his double marital life - and did so in a letter.

"I have never read a love letter like that," Oded Gur-Arie says emotionally. "Not in novels, not in movies and not in life. He wrote how much he loves her, but also about Rivka, and about me."

Lotz was flown to Munich and from there to a debriefing in Brussels with Yoske Yariv and another Mossad man; the Mossad suspected that the Egyptians might have turned him into a double agent. That suspicion turned out to be groundless. Lotz wrote another letter of explanation, no less moving, to Oded. "It was a personal letter, in which he wrote that he was thrilled at the idea of meeting me, but also that he would not be able to continue his life with Mom."

Rivka Gur-Arie's feelings ran high as she impatiently awaited her husband's return. She even bought a new suit for the occasion. No one told her, or even so much as hinted, that her husband had no intention of resuming his life with her. Finally, at the last minute, Avraham Shalom and his wife came to her apartment in Ramat Aviv and told her that it would be best if she did not go to the airport.

"On the evening after Dad landed, a Mossad car came and took me to Avrum's house in Tzahala [a Tel Aviv suburb]. Dad stood there, waiting for me. Without Waltraud. We embraced and kissed, and there were tears, but I did not feel any intimacy. Then he came home and said hello to Mom."

What did he say to her?

"I don't remember. I only remember that it was a terrible meeting."

Was your mother angry with the Mossad?

"Yes. I'm not sure she actually believed that the Mossad had arranged the meeting with Waltraud and the marriage, but she thought they knew about it in advance or after the fact, and that Yoske Yariv decided that it would strengthen his cover story."

Why do you think they didn't inform you and your mother?

"Let's try to think like them. My father and Eli Cohen [an Israeli spy in Syria, who was caught and hanged] were wonderful agents. It was a success story. And there is a group of people, the handlers, who made a career and were promoted because of what my father and Eli Cohen did. So why not keep the operation going? Why tell things that might spoil it?"

How did it affect your mother's life?


"She had periods of deep depression, and that was only natural. Her husband had been caught and there was also the story of the other woman, and all this when she also had me, an adolescent, to raise, and she had to lead a normal life and couldn't talk to anyone about the story. The only person she could talk to was her brother, Nahman Gur-Arie, who worked in the Shin Bet; he died about two months ago. She remained hurt by the Mossad's behavior. My mother felt that she had been deceived by the whole world around her: her husband, the Mossad, the wives of the Mossad men, her best friends."

Did you also feel that the Mossad had betrayed you and your mother?

"I have no complaints against the Mossad. The people who worked with us, with the family, were perfectly fine. They devoted themselves heart and soul. We came back to Israel. The Mossad helped Mom find a job in the Tourism Ministry. She received Dad's salary. But, of course, in retrospect I think things could have been done differently, and better. When Dad was caught and we came back to Israel, they didn't give me any help and didn't take any interest in me. They were very good on the logistical side, but no one looked after me. As a boy, I had no one to talk to about the whole situation, and no one in the Mossad thought that maybe I needed to open up and let everything out. But it wasn't just me they didn't take care of - it was Mother, too."

How would you describe your father?

"He was a very complex person. When I was a boy I thought he was larger than life. But in his last years he was smaller than life. My father hurt a great many people, even those he loved. He hurt my mother. He hurt me. He hurt Waltraud. There was an element of the adventurer in him. He was a combination of adventurer and a lot of Zionism. He believed in the mission and in what he did. He truly thought that the German scientists were a danger to Israel."

No forgiveness

After high school, Oded Gur-Arie volunteered for the Haruv commando unit in the army, then worked as a security guard for El Al and fought as a reservist officer in the Yom Kippur War. After the war, he and two friends went to the United States to pursue their studies. He studied statistics and business administration at the University of Alabama, obtained a doctoral degree, taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and eventually left academic life for the business world. He and his partners founded the Domino's Pizza chain in Israel and later sold it for a handsome profit. He is now a businessman and consultant, married with four children, and living in Ann Arbor.

The Mossad helped Lotz rehabilitate himself, a process that included the establishment of a horse ranch in Ganot, a moshav near Tel Aviv. For a few years he was a national hero and bon vivant. He received honor and acclaim, was invited to receptions and parties, and tried to maintain a far higher standard of living than was possible on his Mossad pension. His business collapsed and his condition deteriorated even further after the premature death of Waltraud, in 1971, as a result of the torture she underwent in the Cairo prison. Her death, Oded says, utterly broke his father's heart. A few years later he got married for a third time, to Naomi. Together they went to the United States in order to realize his dream of producing a film about his life. But that dream was also not realized.

Lotz entered into a business partnership with an advertising agency in Seattle, but his partner swindled him. Broke, he returned to Germany. He applied for a job as a croupier in a casino, but was turned down because of his age. Finally, he found work as a salesman in the fishing department of a department-store chain. German tabloids discovered his presence and began to hound him. He was fired from his job and returned to Israel. He was consumed by shame over his failure. At the end of the 1970s, when he received an offer from a German publisher to write his autobiography, he packed his few belongings again and went to Germany.

For a time he lived on the advances he received from his publisher, from lectures and from fees he received for interviews. But those sources of income dried up, too. Naomi left him and returned to Israel after discovering that he was having an affair with another woman, Irma Arduff, who would become his fourth wife. Until his death, in 1993, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence, borrowing money he could never pay back. After his death, Oded, with the help of the Mossad, had his body flown back from Germany for burial in Israel.

Are you still angry at the Mossad?

"Personally, I forgive them. But for what they did to my mother, I cannot forgive them. I don't have the tools to forgive. Only she could have forgiven them, and she didn't."