Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who gained worldwide fame as a one-man Nazi-hunting operation, was in fact frequently on the payroll of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, a new biography says.

IBNA: According to news, the assertion, based on documents and interviews with three people said to be Wiesenthal's Mossad handlers, punctures a widely held belief that he operated a lone quest to bring war criminals to justice. Wiesenthal died in 2005 at the age of 96 in Vienna. 

"This requires us to adjust in some small way our view of history," said Tom Segev, author of Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, which is being published by Doubleday this week in the U.S. 

Segev, an Israeli historian and columnist for the newspaper Haaretz , said he had been given unfettered access to Wiesenthal's papers – 300,000 of them, previously closed to the public – by Wiesenthal's daughter, Paulinka Kreisberg.
The Mossad financed Wiesenthal's first office in Vienna in 1960, paid him a monthly salary and provided him with an Israeli passport, the book says. 

His main task was to help locate Nazi criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, and to provide information on the activities of former Nazis in Arab countries, the book says. Eichmann was captured in Argentina in 1960.

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