On a September day in , a thin man with a small mustache walked into a post office in Damascus to pick up a parcel addressed to Georg Fischer.
Few people knew that Fischer, an ill-tempered Austrian weapons merchant, was actually the S. When Brunner opened the package, it exploded, killing two postal workers and blinding him in the left eye.
The Israeli spy was later caught, tortured, and executed; Brunner lived openly in Damascus for the next several decades, in the third-floor apartment of 7 Rue Haddad. France sentenced Brunner to death in absentia. Israel tried to kill him a second time, but the bomb took only some fingers. Brunner told a German magazine that his chief regret was not having killed more Jews.
For the next fifteen years, Nazi hunters assumed that Brunner was hidden away on Rue Haddad, perhaps even past his hundredth birthday. But no one saw him, so no one knew for sure. In Syrian detention centers, their techniques are used to this day. Among the practitioners was Khaled al-Halabi, a Syrian Army officer who was assigned to the intelligence services in By his own account, he was a reluctant spyβhe wanted to remain a soldier.
Nevertheless, he served for the next twelve years, ascending through the ranks. When Syria erupted in revolution, in , Assad and his deputies blamed the protests on outside forces.
