A US aircraft with Uruguayan Pilots: Was Uruguay used as the base for an undercover U.S. operation?

Gaby Weber

It is not really the task for a journalist to discover, 47 years later, the author of a kidnapping. It should be sufficient to gather the facts that prove that the official version cannot be true. And this is proven: that the official version of Mossad about their kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from Argentina is not the truth. So, this begs a big question: if it was not Mossad, who? How did Eichman really get to Israel ?

Let us start from three solid points:

1. The El Al aircraft with Eichmann on board landed in Israel on the 22nd of May 1960, at 7.35 am. Probably Eichmann, organizer of the Holocaust, did not enter the Israeli aircraft voluntarily.
   
2. The El Al aircraft left Buenos Aires from the Ezeiza airport at midnight on the 20th of May.
   
3. The 'Bristol Britannia' of El Al had to have made at least two stop-overs for fuel, one in Dakar ( Africa ), that was acknowledged, and a second, earlier one, hidden by Israeli authorities.

There is strong evidence that Eichmann traveled voluntarily to Uruguay to conduct important negotiations. Once in Uruguay , he was told that there is a detention order against him and that from now on, he would no longer be a free man. Ten days later, he was put onboard the El Al airplane, in that stopover at the airport in Laguna del Sauce at Punta del Este. The evidences:

• According to certificates of the Migration Administration, William Mosetti, general director of Mercedes Benz Argentina , former U.S. intelligence officer and probably participant in the transfer of Eichmann to Israel , traveled several times, in the preparation period to Punta del Este (archives of Argentinean Direction for Migration, 1960)
  
• On the 11th of May Eichmann told his wife before he left home that he had an important date outside of Buenos Aires and if he did not return, she should inform his comrades at Mercedes Benz. When he did not come back, they started an immediate search in the morning of 12 May. (Memorandum of Daimler-director and former SS officer Hanns Martin Schleyer, dated 30th Mai 60, archives DaimlerChrysler, Stuttgart )
  
• Eichmann/ alias Klement did not leave Argentina legally. His name does not appear on any passenger list. (Archives of Argentinean Direction for Migration)
  
• On the 11th of May 1960 there is only one no commercial aircraft leaving Uruguay towards Buenos Aires , a Piper Apache aircraft. (Ministry of Internal Affairs, Uruguay )
  
• This aircraft had a U.S. registration number and the man who bought this Piper on 28th February 1956 was US millionaire H.L. Brown (information of US Federal Aviation Administration under FOIA).
  
• H.L. Brown lived in Texas , but he had an office in Montevideo on Rincón street , in the building "Artigas" that belonged to him. For years the office of the U.S. Consulate was also located in the same building. The aircraft, registered in the U.S. , had been operating since 1957 in Uruguay , so it had to possess a special permit. The son and the son-in-law of H.L. Brown were living in Montevideo . And, coincidentally, this son-in-law worked until 1942, when he left to serve in World War II, in the legal department of Standard Oil of New Jersey and was their representative in Venezuela .
  
• This Piper aircraft was seen on 11th May at a local airport in Eichmann's neighborhood, and from there it started its way back to Uruguay . It must have landed in Punta del Este (Laguna del Sauce or Jahuel), because it did not land at any of the other airports in Uruguay - Carrasco, Carmelo, and Melilla . (Ministry of Internal Affairs, Uruguay ). Later, it will appear again in Montevideo , where finally it will be nationalized in April 61. (National Direction for Air traffic, Uruguay )
  
• The registers of the Uruguayan Migration Agency, where all entries and exits of passengers are noted , are clean and detailed, also the registers of Punta del Este are well kept from 1959 on. But in these big books is a hole between the 1st April of 1960 and 1961. "Very strange" - so was the comment of Minister José Díaz who opened the archives of his ministry to me. He is one of the traditional leaders of the Uruguayan Socialist Party, as is President Tabaré Vázquez. On the 8th of March 2007, one day before the visit of U.S. President George W. Bush to Uruguay , Díaz was dismissed. Also "very strange" .
  
• According to the flight plan, in that Piper flight from Uruguay to Buenos Aires on the 11th of May were the pilot, Enrique Frois, the co pilot ,J.A. B,. and a passenger, Daniel Ferres - all Uruguayans. Ferres was a rice dealer and a friend of Brown, owner of the aircraft. And many years later, the guerrilla group MLN-Tupamaros wanted to kidnap Ferres. The pilot Frois (dead as well as Ferres) ran an aircraft- taxi firm in Montevideo . He was known among his colleagues as somebody involved in the "dead flights" during the military dictatorship, transporting children between Argentina and Uruguay .
  
• The co pilot JAB does not admit his participation in that flight of the 11th of May, as indicated in the flight plan. But he admits that he joined the Uruguayan Air force in 1948 and that he received special training with the US Air force in Alabama in 1955. On the 22nd of April 1960 he was promoted to the General Staff of the Air Force, less than three weeks before Eichmanns disappearance from Argentina . In November 1960 he was forced into "obligatory retirement".

Were the Uruguayans, a nation with a strong anti fascist tradition, convinced by the argument that they were participating in an anti-Nazi operation, pulling a war criminal out of his safe haven in Argentina ?

Maybe this was the motivation of the co pilot. I had several conversations with him and he appears to be a man with democratic convictions. He was fired from his job in 1973, during the military coup, because of his trade union activities. Then he worked some years with Frois, until he knew that his firm was involved in illegal flight for repression. JAB knew that Piper Apache aircraft well ("a shit", una porqueria, because it had too many additional devices and was too heavy for the two motors).

Did the Uruguayan government, at that time made up of conservative parties, asked itself why this operation was apparently planned by U.S. citizens with close connection to U.S. governmental offices and to the oil industry?

I asked the Uruguayan Ministry of Defense, Mrs. Azucena Berruti, a former activist of the Human Rights movement, about possible participation of members of the Uruguayan Air Force in the Eichmann operation and I passed her the documents. I also asked President Tabaré Vázquez if his small country was used as a basis for foreign forces. I received no answer.

These are facts. Everybody can build their own opinion.

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