Prologue: The Apartment on the Avenue de Versailles
Part One: The Aktions
The Club on Skolas Street
Zelma
First Night
Gogol Street
19 Waldemars
The Moscow Suburb
November 30
The Valley of the Dead
Part Two: Those Who Will Never Forget
A Latvian in Rio
“The Epitome of Humanity”
Anton Kuenzle
The Merciless One
The Late One
First Contact
The Campaign
“Our Own Thomas Edison”
The Plantation
Photographs
Paranoia
The Sabras
“Certain Categories of Murder”
The Camera
“To Live With a Few Murderers”
The House on Colombia Street
The Wait
An Offer
The Legislator
The Asylum
The Trial
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Credits
Index
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright No 2020 by Stephan Talty
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Talty, Stephan, author.
Title: The good assassin : how a Mossad agent and a band of survivors hunted down the Butcher of Latvia / Stephan Talty.
Other titles: How a Mossad agent and a band of survivors hunted down the Butcher of Latvia
Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027262 (print) | LCCN 2019027263 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328613080 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328618856 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027262
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027263
Cover design by Mark R. Robinson
Cover photograph courtesy of the National Library of Latvia
Author photograph No Nathacha Vilceus
v2.0420
For Karen, Suraiya, and Aman
Prologue
The Apartment on the Avenue de Versailles
MIO WALKED INTO THE LOBBY of the building on the Avenue de Versailles and called out “Bonjour!” to the concierge through her tiny window. Not waiting for a response, he went quickly up the marble stairs. Puffing by now—he was a bit out of shape—he reached the wooden door of Yariv’s apartment and pressed the bell. He was confident he hadn’t been followed; he’d stopped in front of the gigantic Radio France building a few blocks away to check for tails. It would have been unfortunate to bring one to a meeting with Yariv, who was touchy about such things.
The door opened and Yosef Yariv, the head of Caesarea, the special operations arm of Mossad, nodded at Mio. With his honking beak of a nose and thick pelt of unruly hair, the forty-year-old Yariv resembled a predatory desert bird. Now his piercing blue-gray eyes studied his friend.
“I’m glad you made it,” he said.
Mio said nothing, only nodded and walked past. Yariv locked the door, then turned. “From this moment onwards,” he said, “your name is Anton Kuenzle. You’d better start getting used to it.” Mio showed no reaction; he was an introvert, raised in Germany as a Jew in the early thirties, which encouraged, if not required, certain kinds of masks to be worn. And besides, it was Mio’s stock-in-trade to become different people, sometimes for a few days, other times for much longer. Inside Mossad, where he was one of the great, perhaps the greatest, undercover operatives, he was known as “the man with the hundred identities.” Back home in Israel, his family lived in a house that sat behind a steel gate, through which the agency sent a car every time he was leaving on an assignment. His son would later say that when the car drove off and they heard the loud clang as the gate swung closed behind it, they knew their father had already transformed into another person. Calling it a cover identity wasn’t quite right; when Mio assumed a new persona, it didn’t cover anything, let alone his real personality. It was his real personality, for exactly the length of time he was required to inhabit it. A fellow Mossad agent once claimed, “I swear to God,” if you woke Mio in the middle of the night, he would immediately begin speaking in the language of his false persona. On those days when he was driven to the airport, he never looked back to wave to his children because, in his mind, he had no children.
The two walked ahead into a small guest room. Another operative—Mio called him Michael, though that wasn’t his real name—sat at a small table with cups and saucers and a pot filled with coffee. A “fairly thin” file sat next to the cups. Mio nodded at Michael and took one of the empty chairs. Yariv followed suit. He looked at the other two, his eyes cool.
“You must be wondering why I summoned you here,” he said.
The two men said nothing.
“Well, it all begins with the final confirmation we received about a Nazi war criminal who lives in one of the South American countries.”
Michael looked at Mio, who glanced back, remaining silent. Yariv explained that in eight months, on May 8, 1965, the world would mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. German politicians and ordinary citizens were calling for an end to the hunt for Nazi war criminals and for a statute of limitations to be applied to their crimes. Mio didn’t react, but, as someone who avidly read the newspapers, he must have seen the headlines. Germany was preparing to enforce an 1871 law that mandated a twenty-year limit on murder prosecutions. Two other amnesties, for assault and for manslaughter, had gone into effect in 1955 and 1960 with little protest around the world. Charging any Nazi officer or soldier with those crimes was now forbidden inside Germany. But soon the killers themselves, the very worst of the worst, the men and women who’d physically pulled the triggers on the machine guns and the rifles and the pistols and smashed in the heads and strangled and bludgeoned their portion of the six million, could emerge from their hiding places and walk free in the sun. It seemed utterly fantastic, but there it was.
The statute, Yariv said, was popular in West Germany. Every poll showed solid majorities in favor of it, and the governing party, the Christian Democratic Union, had thrown its weight behind the law. Only the Bundestag, the feisty German parliament, could delay the amnesty by passing a bill that would push the deadline a few years into the future, allowing the remaining unindicted National Socialist murderers to be found and prosecuted for at least a short time longer. But Yariv told Mio and Michael that Israeli leaders were increasingly pessimistic about this possibility. “The chances of accepting this proposal are small . . . There is no guarantee that the politicians are prepared to extend the Statute of Limitations, not by four years, not by ten years, and, for that matter, most probably not at all.”
Mio noticed his friend’s voice starting to rise in the quiet room, though his face showed no change in expression. “It is absolutely inconceivable,” Yariv said, “that tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, who never paid for their heinous crimes, should now be able to crawl out of their hiding holes and spend the rest of their lives in peace and tranquility . . . It’s been only twenty years since the release of the survivors of the death camps, and we owe it to them, and to the six million who did not survive and are unable to avenge themselves—we must thwart this shameful process.”
Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol and his intelligence chiefs had secretly decided on a mission. A killing was required, a certain kind of killing that would reveal the Nazi monsters who’d escaped punishment and publicize the nature of their crimes. Unlike Mossad’s kidnapping and subsequent execution of Adolf Eichmann four years earlier, there would be no trial, no lawyers or judges, no legal niceties, no essays by Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker. And the operation had to be completed before the vote in the German parliament, currently scheduled for sometime in the spring.
“The Nazi whose turn has come,” Yariv said, “is Herbert Cukurs.”
It was a Latvian name; Yariv pronounced the “C” in “Cukurs” correctly, like “Ts,” TSOO-krz. (It means “sugar.”) At a conference of Israeli intelligence chiefs in January, the names of potential assassination targets had been read out. When the speaker came to Cukurs, one of the men in the room collapsed. It was Major General Aharon Yariv—no relation to Yosef Yariv—head of the country’s Military Intelligence Directorate. Cukurs had murdered several of Yariv’s loved ones and friends during the war; his reaction was one reason why the Latvian’s name had been chosen.
Mio had never heard of Cukurs, and he showed no emotion at the idea of ending his life. “Outwardly,” he said, “I kept a poker face.” If he was chilly in his personal life—and he was, to his children’s eternal regret—he was even more clinical when working. A quickening of the breath, a raised eyebrow, would for him have been a breach of professional ethics. But inside, he was deeply stirred. His mother and father, a German patriot and a recipient of the Iron Cross for bravery in World War I, who’d believed that they’d be saved until almost the very end, had been murdered at Auschwitz and the “model” camp of Theresienstadt. Despite his outward calm, when Mio heard the Nazi’s name, he said, “I felt my heart and my adrenaline level skyrocket suddenly.”
“We are not dealing here with a desk murderer like Eichmann,” Yariv went on. “[Cukurs] is personally responsible for the annihilation of at least 30,000 Jews in Riga.” And unlike more famous men like Dr. Josef Mengele, whom Mossad had been unable to find despite two decades of searching, Cukurs’ whereabouts had been confirmed. He was living in a small house in São Paulo surrounded by guard dogs and a barbed wire fence. Yariv looked at Mio. “I propose that you . . . go to Brazil disguised as an Austrian businessman under the name of Anton Kuenzle.” Under this light cover, he would find the Nazi, befriend him, infiltrate his circle, and arrange his death. The execution would then be announced to the world, and (Mossad hoped) the news stories about the savage killer, his grateful victims, and his faceless assassins—forced to act as the authorities in Berlin and other European capitals dawdled—might just convince the Germans that going ahead with the amnesty was an impossibility. “I’m well aware that this is no simple task,” Yariv said. “You will face a criminal who is, according to our reports, cunning, mistrustful, ruthless and dangerous, and is always prepared for the worst.”
Michael began leafing through the file that sat on the table. “Will Mio actually operate alone,” he said, “or will we send a small stalking and protection unit with him?”
For the first time that morning, Mio spoke up. “I prefer to work alone,” he said. “Me against the target.”
Yariv nodded, then gestured to the file, a handful of pages in a manila folder that barely rose above the lacquered surface of the table. The slimness of the file was significant for reasons that only those intimate with the history of the Latvian Shoah would understand. It was so thin because so few Jews had been left alive to speak about Herbert Cukurs. Inside the folder were perhaps half a dozen testimonies—the exact number isn’t known—that traced Cukurs’ actions during the war, painstakingly collected from eyewitnesses living in several countries during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some of the accounts were barbaric, others oddly moving. In one story, Cukurs speaks to a young girl in Yiddish; they have a short, pleasant conversation before the Latvian, for no apparent reason, pulls out his Russian handgun and executes her in cold blood. In another, he saves a woman he knew to be Jewish, at considerable risk to his own life. The collection, in fact, added up to a curiously fractal, incomplete portrait of Herbert Cukurs, whose life had been larger and stranger than Mio could imagine at that moment; it would take many years and the survival of one obsessed young Jewish woman to tell it in full. “Overall, I must say he is a fascinating historical figure,” one survivor later wrote, “full of tremendous contradictions.” Though they could not have known it that morning in Paris, the Israelis had chosen for elimination a symbol of the Shoah whose life would speak to the motivations of those accomplices in eastern Europe who had carried it out.
With the preliminary details settled, Mio and Michael began sorting through the pages; they each picked up a selection and began to read. The white china cups, the husky September light streaming through the window, a blurred car horn from the street below, the loveliness of a fall afternoon in the Sixteenth Arrondissement faded from their thoughts as the testimonies inside ushered them to the city of Riga in the black year of 1939.
Part One
The Aktions
One
The Club on Skolas Street
THE DOUBLE WOODEN DOORS of the building at 6 Skolas Street, tucked into a thick archway topped by garlands cut into white stone, stood open, and the lights inside glowed as the crowd streamed in out of the blade-sharp December cold, the men dressed in fedoras and dark suits with generously cut lapels, white shirts, and dark ties, the women in simple hand-sewn dresses or Paris frocks, a few in fur coats, glossy and rich to the touch. The building, Riga’s Jewish Club, was well known to almost everyone in attendance that winter night. Who among them hadn’t come here before to see a play on a crisp fall evening, or to sink into the music of a quartet playing Schubert and forget the fast-arriving December dusks? Who hadn’t been dragged here for a second cousin’s wedding, where the sound of the violin bounced off the marble floor and it was wall-to-wall aunts and uncles wherever you looked? Or who hadn’t simply come, on a stifling Sunday afternoon during the summer, to take a Yiddish novel down from the library shelves and quietly while away the afternoon?
But that night in 1939, the crowd wasn’t there for another Orthodox wedding or a local rabbi’s speech on the meaning of Purim. It was a rather special night. A world-renowned Latvian aviator, in fact the only world-renowned Latvian aviator, had come to talk to the audience members about Palestine—and not just the idea of Palestine, which was something Riga’s Jews had debated endlessly, to the point of grim exhaustion, but the place itself, its odors and its aquifers, its sunburned pioneers. Riga was home to many, often feuding persuasions of Jews: there were the Zionists, the revisionist Zionists, the socialist Zionists, the Bundists, the followers of the Mizrachi Party, the ultra-Orthodox, and the communists, to name just a few. Representatives of most of the factions were at 6 Skolas Street that night; a sort of truce prevailed. “The entire Jewish elite gathered,” said one young man in attendance. The black-bordered advertisements that ran in Riga’s newspapers the week before had featured the speaker’s name prominently: Herbert Cukurs.
Almost anyone who lived in Riga and was even marginally acquainted with what was going on in the world would have been familiar with the name. Cukurs was known as “the Latvian Lindbergh,” and though some Latvians, as occupants of a small country with an often tragic history, tended to exaggerate the accomplishments of their native sons, his wasn’t such a case. As famous as Lindbergh was in America, Cukurs was equally lionized in Latvia and in certain other quarters of Europe. His accomplishments were as solid and familiar as the stone cladding of the building the Jews stood in.
The audience members made their way into the auditorium and took their seats, voices thrumming against the paneled walls topped by wooden cutouts of Greek urns overflowing with vines. Up above, latecomers flowed into the balcony. Hundreds of tickets had been sold for the night’s presentation, and the hall was approaching capacity. There was a stage at the far end and a wooden lectern with a reading board tilted upward; behind it sat a large white screen. The seats slanted down toward the lectern, affording everyone a decent view. The eyes of the Jewish men and women focused on the broad-shouldered thirty-nine-year-old aviator sitting on the stage, his pomaded dark brown hair flashing under the lights when he turned his head to talk to the men on either side of him.
At the appointed time, the aviator was introduced; he stood and strode toward the lectern. Among the pale, shy Latvians, often described as the introverts of Europe, here was a man who practically beamed out rays of physical confidence. He was thick-chested, robust through the legs, and crudely handsome, with a broad face that narrowed toward the chin, a Roman emperor’s nose dipping hawkishly above the lips, and intelligent blue-gray eyes below dark eyebrows. His gleaming hair was cut short at the sides, longer on top, with a part on the center-left, in the dashing style of Clark Gable. There was nothing fine-boned or melancholy about Herbert Cukurs; he looked thoughtful but tough. He was both of those things.
The aviator may have been the most admired man in the country at that moment, but many audience members understood he wasn’t a simple proposition vis-à-vis the Jews. Cukurs was known as a nationalist to the bone, and among his friends and associates, dark comments about Yiddish speakers were almost de rigueur. “As was the custom among military circles, he also made the occasional anti-Semitic remark,” wrote one Jew many years later. “But this was nothing extraordinary.” Anti-Semitic humor was in the air in Riga, as it was everywhere in eastern Europe. What could you do? “He was not really considered a Jew-hater,” the man continued. “The opposite was true, since he was often seen in Riga’s cafes in the company of Jewish intellectuals.”
The famous pilot had grown up in the western city of Liepāja in a Christian farming family with four sons, whose father had eventually sold his acreage, moved to town, and opened a machine shop. The family worked hard and treated their employees fairly, including the Jewish apprentices whom they often hired. “Jānis Cukurs and his wife were decent, honest folks,” said one of the apprentices, Meir Deutsch. “They even had a warm attitude toward the Jews.” At the time, Jews were restricted from working in certain jobs: at the universities, in Latvian-owned factories, in city administration, and on the police force (which hired only one token Jew). As employers, the Cukurses were fairly liberal for the era.
Herbert was always different from his three brothers, and always wished to be different. He was naturally rebellious, following orders with difficulty or not at all. He was also, in the local parlance, “sky-crazy”—that is, infatuated with flying. At age twenty, the strapping, athletic Cukurs joined the struggling Air Force of the newly independent Latvia, when all the pilots had to command were antique, worn-out German and British planes that “would not take off until the last dust was blown off the engines.” Aviation was frequently a lethal business in 1920, and Latvia’s brutal winters made it even more so, as the frigid air tended to freeze oil lines and motors. (In December and January, the locals say, “the frost bites so hard that a hare’s eyes jump out of their sockets.”) Many times, Cukurs would have to wrestle a plane with a sputtering engine down from the sky and land it, at least once on the frozen surface of Stropi Lake.
Despite the risk, the “young hothead from Liepāja” grew fond of dreaming up wild stunts. He would take to the skies in the aircraft he’d built himself out of scrap parts and perform barrel rolls, zooming upside down over Riga or Liepāja to impress the local girls. His plane “spun like a leaf released into the wind, then threw itself downwards like an arrow above the heads of the spectators.” When he wasn’t flying, Cukurs was fond of parading through the streets of Liepāja with his plane, its wings removed to fit through the narrow lanes. (A town official finally put a stop to this.) But he was also very good at what he did. While he was in the Latvian Air Force, the young Cukurs would sweep over the local fields, practicing bombing runs that required him to drop dummy explosives as close to the wooden targets as possible. The results were recorded by an Air Force photographer for future study. It was said that after all the pilots had completed their runs, the more senior officers in the squadron would quietly sidle up to the cameraman and ask him if he might “correct” the results, as Cukurs’ bombs always seemed to land closer to the targets than theirs.
Cukurs was a dreamer, impetuous, physically fearless, difficult to control, hardworking, and fantastically ambitious. He seemed to feel that Latvia, which he loved, was too small for him; he’d been born for the world. In 1924, he left the Air Force, some said because of problems with his eyesight, while others reported he was forced to depart after a stunt where he flew under a local bridge, leaving only three feet between his tires and the surface of the water. He took a job as a truck driver and began designing what he hoped would be a revolutionary one-seater plane. With no money to spare for new parts, he picked flight instruments from scrap dealers’ bins and restored them as best he could. With his young wife, Milda, he spread lacquer over the wooden planks, hammered them together, glued the wing ribs, and machined the fittings. When an Air Force aviator or private pilot crashed around Riga, Cukurs would race to the scene, pluck the canvas off the small nails that attached it to the aircraft’s frame, and bundle it into his truck. He would bring the canvas home, cut it to size, and spread it across the skeletal fuselage of the plane he had deemed the C3 (the “C,” of course, for Cukurs). His dream plane slowly took shape over years of backbreaking work. To earn money, he moonlighted on construction sites; “with bloody hands [he] lifted the big sharp fragments of blown-up stones into the truck, rolled cement barrels and loaded rails from sunrise to sunset.” There were rumors that Cukurs occasionally earned even more cash “in a not entirely legitimate way”—by smuggling cases of illegal liquor.
In 1933, two Latvian pilots, Nikolajs Pulins and Rudolf Celms, announced they were going to fly the 4,700 miles from Riga to The Gambia, the tiny African nation tucked into the coast of Senegal in West Africa. The Gambia had played a part in national lore since Duke Jacob of Courland, whose lands later formed part of Latvia, established a mercantile colony there during the seventeenth century. For a brief time, the duke and his subjects boasted their own miniature African empire. The colony had long since disappeared, taken over by the British, but a vestigial memory of its existence remained lodged in the Latvian imagination. As Germany had ruled over what would later become Namibia and the USSR claimed its many satellites, so Latvia—tiny, insignificant Latvia!—had once been daring enough to plant a flag below the equator. So when the pilots announced that they were going to fly to The Gambia, it caused “thrills and expectations among the people.”
But the next month, bad news. The explorers’ plane had crashed in Germany, only a few days into the journey. The mission was over.
In stepped Cukurs. The thirty-three-year-old aviator announced he would pick up the gauntlet and fly to The Gambia, hopscotching south and west aboard the open-cockpit aircraft he’d built out of cast-off and salvaged parts. He would even name the aircraft The Duchess of Courland, in honor of the former ruler. The young flier hurried to finish his plane, which lacked even that most basic component: an engine. He scoured the countryside for a sturdy motor he could afford and eventually found an outmoded 80-horsepower Renault, built in 1916, that was available for scrap prices. It wasn’t exactly a state-of-the-art power plant; this particular model was so old that the only other one of its kind was sitting in a French aviation museum. Cukurs purchased the antique and winched it into the engine compartment, then bolted it to its moorings. He was ready to take flight.
Almost nobody, however, cared. The airfield he took off from was practically deserted; only Cukurs’ wife and son, the head of the Latvian Aviation Union, and an anonymous bystander saw The Duchess of Courland lift into the sky on the afternoon of August 28, 1933. The pilot, dressed in warm flying gear and wearing goggles, gained altitude, waved to the tiny figures from his open cockpit, then turned the nose of the plane south.
The journey began badly. Cukurs nearly collided with a plane in a fog bank above Paris, then came under attack from a French antiaircraft battery near Poitiers. (He had accidentally flown over a practice range for artillerymen, who lobbed explosive shells toward his cockpit.) French aviators were so impressed by his skill and daring that after he landed, they dressed him in one of their flight suits and carried him on their shoulders to a nearby bar to get drunk. Over Barcelona, one of the plane’s cylinders failed, then another. The plane dove toward the sea, “the engine jumping and jerking like crazy, the frame seemingly broken.” Cukurs spotted a dry riverbed and pushed the nose toward it. The wheels caught on impact and the plane flipped over, trapping Cukurs beneath the fuselage as the fumes from leaking oil slowly overcame him. He lay there for some time, until a soldier shook him awake and pulled him out from underneath the Duchess. In the sky again over Málaga, the propeller froze, and the plane lost power. Cukurs glided between two crags and put the plane down in a garden.
But these were trifles compared with what faced him when he reached Africa. As he flew over Casablanca, Arab tribesmen fired their rifles at his plane, and the wind spun the ocean into a froth, “everything boiling like a pot of witches.” As he crossed the Sahara, the oil pressure gauge dropped to zero, and the Renault engine struggled to keep its cylinders from seizing up. When he landed at Dakar, the last stop before his final destination, the British consul informed him that, regrettably, there was no airfield in all of The Gambia for him to land on; if he insisted on flying there, he would most likely end up running out of gas and crashing into the jungle, where he would certainly be eaten by cannibals. A French official happened by and informed Cukurs that he’d heard there was, in fact, an aerodrome somewhere near the Gambian capital of Bathurst. What to do?
“Let’s take the risk!” Cukurs cried. He gripped the propeller of the Duchess, spun it until the engine sputtered to life, then took off.
Hours later, as Cukurs searched the leafy canopy beneath him, the mouth of the Gambia River came swimming into view, then the modest capital, which he circled three times as he looked for a landing spot. Nothing. Only swamps and curling tributaries, the water glinting through the dark canopy. Cukurs crossed back and forth but saw not a single place where he could set the plane down. Finally, after venturing eight miles out from the capital, he spotted an aerodrome; low on gas, he settled The Duchess of Courland down on the airstrip.
The news of Cukurs’ arrival electrified capitals from Riga to Rome; it was the kind of between-the-wars adventure that made a person proud to be a European. “What has been held impossible has been achieved!” crowed the head of the Latvian Aviation Union. The hothead from Liepāja had put his country on the world map, and Latvians were over the moon. Donations poured in for a new engine to replace the dilapidated old Renault that had powered the Duchess to Africa. It was even said that every Latvian mother now considered Cukurs to be an honorary son.
Cukurs knew nothing of this at first. He was sleeping on the streets in Bathurst, hoping that the reports he’d heard of man-eating leopards were unfounded and experiencing the first debilitating symptoms of malaria. Nonetheless, he was having a marvelous time. Wherever he went, Cukurs projected a devil-may-care insouciance that earned him the admiration of journalists and government officials alike. When he landed in Japan on a later journey, he “commanded great applause and . . . began making himself delightful to all around him. ‘Oh, the object of my flight?’ he quipped to a reporter. ‘Nothing particularly profound. Attracted by the mystery of the East, I wish to wander around the strange regions I longed to see for so long.’” During another trip, as he was about to set off on a tiger hunt, a correspondent asked if he thought the sport dangerous. “Of course, the tiger may eat me,” Cukurs replied. “I wish him bon-appetit.”
The British, who controlled The Gambia, were less than thrilled by the arrival of this charming interloper. Perhaps they were put off by Cukurs’ unusual habit of treating the native people like human beings. Despite being told that if he ventured outside the main cities, he’d be killed by headhunters, the flier made sure to approach the locals with respect. “I’m winning the sympathy of the black people,” he wrote, “as I’m probably the first European to treat them as equals, to address them as ‘Mister’ instead of whistling at them.” This sentiment seemed to strike a chord with the two million Latvians, whose country had been brutally raked over by wars and occupied by Germany and Russia in turn before gaining its independence in 1918. Latvians knew what it meant to be colonized through terror.
Cukurs flew back to Latvia, enduring typhoons, malaria, and the incessant chattering of two young monkeys, Gao and Timbuktu, a gift from French aviators that he kept with him in the cockpit. He set a new speed record between the desolate landing strip known as Bidon V and the Algerian town of Reggane. Over North Africa, frigid gales tossed the craft back and forth until he had to bite the fingers of his right hand to keep them from freezing. He ran into thick curtains of airborne sand above the Sahara, then billowing snowstorms. “The mountain peaks are covered so deep that roofs are all that is visible of houses,” he wrote in his typically evocative prose. With the plane pointed north, the engine spewed oil at an alarming rate. Yet another sandstorm spun out a series of tornadoes, one of which tore at the plane’s canvas wings before Cukurs managed to land near a military outpost. On the ground, the fierce winds threatened to pull the aircraft apart. As the Duchess bucked and twisted on its wheels, Cukurs jumped out of the cockpit, sealed up the exhaust pipe with rags, then threw his body on the rear fuselage to keep the plane from being thrashed to pieces. He was left bruised and exhausted, his mouth and goggles packed with sand.
Nine months after leaving Latvia, the aviator spotted the airfield in Liepāja, where thousands of people cheered and waved as he motored his plane down from the clear sky, guided to the runway by three roaring bonfires. When he put the Duchess down, the crowd, wild with joy, lifted him from the cockpit and carried him around the airfield on their shoulders. On national radio, the minister of war announced that Cukurs was being promoted to captain “for spreading the name of tiny Latvia far and wide.” The government granted him an estate in the parish of Bukaiši; he was also awarded the Harmon Trophy, given annually to the world’s outstanding aviator, and inducted into the Order of Santos Dumont, an honor bestowed only on the world’s top pilots.