// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
In 1962, Egypt's Missile Program Lost Its Key Scientist Without a Trace
On July 21, 1962, a crowd of journalists gathered in a bleak stretch of desert near Wadi El Natrun, an ancient valley in Egypt. That day Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president and military dictator, was determined to prove to the world that his country was a military superpower. Blasting dust everywhere, four surface-to-surface rockets shot off into the skies one after another and fell into the Mediterranean, shocking the media. Afterward, the Egyptian government celebrated with rallies, fireworks, and a plane that rained candy over Cairo as state-owned radio declared the nation had entered the “missile age” after a long effort to build up its long-range firepower.
The balance of power shifted in the Middle East overnight, sparking an arms race between Egypt and Israel, and exposing shadowy networks of former Nazi intelligence officers and rocket technicians selling their services to the highest bidder. Caught in a fierce crossfire between Israel, Egypt, and West Germany, one Nazi rocket scientist disappeared into thin air—crippling a rocket program and stumping historians for decades.
According to Michael Neufeld, PhD, former senior curator in the space history department of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Egypt’s pursuit of Nazi rocket scientists was par for the course in a global arms race taking place at the time.
“Missile technology was spreading around the world after World War II and the Germans were only a small part of that,” Neufeld says. “Egypt wanted to threaten Israel, notably in the wake of the 1956 attack on the Suez Canal by Israel, Britain, and France. The context for Nasser’s interest in missiles is the Arab world's hostility to Israel that ultimately led to the 1967 and 1973 wars.”
Being that powerful rockets were a natural goal for any aspiring world leader during the Cold War, Nasser—a professional soldier who swept away Egypt’s old political norms with a revolution—had big ambitions. However, he faced several pressing obstacles. Egypt lacked the large-scale factory horsepower to produce rockets. Nasser’s prime option at the time was a rather run-down facility in Heliopolis called Factory 333, a former British hospital converted into an aircraft engine factory. Despite its shortcomings, the factory would become the central node in Egypt’s missile development program.
Another enormous problem was that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was willing to assist Nasser in developing weapons. Never one to be put off by setbacks, Nasser decided to recruit the original pioneers of missile technology—the Germans. He approached West German Cold War spy chief Reinhard Gehlen, who ran the Gehlen Organization, an intelligence agency staffed in large part by former Nazi and SS officers. According to author and former intelligence analyst Owen L. Sirrs’s book Nasser and the Missile Age in the Middle East, Gehlen connected Nasser with the famous Nazi military commando officer Otto Skorzeny.
Skorzeny, an Austrian, achieved fame for his expertise in daring operations behind enemy lines during World War II. Talented at intelligence gathering and speaking different languages, the charismatic Skorzeny successfully pulled off one of the world’s most incredible prison breaks when he snatched Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from a mountain fortress and delivered him safely to Adolf Hitler in 1943. According to Sirrs, Skorzeny trained commandos for Nasser in Egypt for about a year before leaving—only to later reappear as a phantom in rumors about the disappearance of one of Nasser’s leading rocket scientists.
Skorzeny wasn’t the only Nazi who sought new opportunities in Egypt. A group of former Nazi rocket scientists (who refused to work for either the Allies or the Soviet Union after designing weapons for Hitler) arrived in Egypt in the early 1960s to help with Nasser’s missile program. Among them were Wolfgang Pilz, who helped design self-guided V-1 “flying bombs,” and Eugen Sänger, a roc