In 1964, West Germany was considering adopting a statute of limitations on war crimes, meaning that, if passed, any living Nazi war criminals not yet caught could never be brought to justice.

For the Mossad, Israel’s nascent secret service, this was unacceptable. The world needed a reminder that these beasts were still at large — and that murdering a major Nazi war criminal would be the most effective reminder possible.

The ensuing game of cat and mouse with Herberts Cukurs, a Latvian Nazi known as “The Butcher of Riga,” is just one of the many fascinating escapades retold in “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service” (Ecco), a new book by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal, which depicts the agency’s real-life missions with all the suspense of a James Bond film.

To bring down Cukurs, a monster so brutal he was known to have “smashed babies’ heads on the city walls,” Mossad sent an agent to Brazil, where Cukurs now resided.

The agent posed as a successful Austrian businessman named Anton Kunzle. He established his credentials with leaders in the Brazilian tourism industry, then approached Cukurs, who owed a shoddy business flying tourists around in his seaplane and was in dire financial straits. After hiring Cukurs for a flight, the two discussed a new tourism business that Kunzle hoped to start, and he “hinted that Cukurs could perhaps join their group.”

What followed was the development of a mutually wary friendship in which the agent baited his prey with talk of opportunity, while wondering if he wasn’t leading himself into a deadly trap.

At one point, Cukurs invited Kunzle to spend the night with him touring his farms in the country. The agent agreed but “stopped at a hardware store and bought a switchblade” just in case.

They trudged up a mountain on the way to the farm, and Cukurs suddenly produced a semiautomatic rifle. As Kunzle prepared for the worst, Cukurs said, “What about a shooting contest?” and engaged his new friend in target practice.

Later, they traveled to another of Cukurs’ farms, this one in a thicker, denser forest. As they walked, the heel of Kunzle’s shoe came loose, and a nail punctured his foot. He was kneeled, bleeding and in pain, when “Cukurs bent over him and drew his gun,” and he was convinced that “the Latvian would shoot him as a dog.” Instead, Cukurs handed him the gun. “Use the butt,” he said. “Hammer it down.”

Kunzle continued gaining Cukurs’ trust, until the day he lured him to a house where a Mossad death squad lay in wait. Kunzle opened the door and was met with “a terrifying sight: In the dark house, the members of the hit team stood by the walls, wearing only their drawers. They knew they couldn’t overcome Cukurs without a bloody fight, and had undressed so their clothes wouldn’t be soiled by his blood.”

The Mossad had bought a steamer trunk, which they put Cukurs’ body in, and left it behind for authorities to find. Pictures of the box in the media had the desired effect — any consideration of a statute of limitations in Germany was dropped.

During one operation, the Mossad killed the leader of Islamic Jihad in Malta, when a motorcycle stopped next to him on the street and “fired six bullets at him from close range.” The shooter then “ran to a nearby alley, where his partner was waiting on a motorcycle, engine running.” They then “darted toward the nearby beach and jumped aboard a speedboat that took them to a freighter,” and that brought them safely home.

During another, an intelligence operative named Mordechai Ben-Porat, on the verge of capture in Iraq, escaped by slipping through a cut hole in an airport fence and boarded a plane as it taxied up the runway.

“The plane gathered speed, its rear door slid back, 10 feet above ground, and a dangling rope appeared,” the authors write. “Coming out of the dark, Ben-Porat darted toward the plane, grabbed the rope and was hauled into the aircraft, which immediately took off.”

Mossad’s operations often required a combination of coordination, disguise and outright violence.

In the late 1950s, the organization learned that top Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had escaped after the war, was living in a “decrepit shack” in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement. Since the war, he had worked on a rabbit farm and in a fruit-juice cannery and even “tried opening a laundry in Buenos Aires with two other Nazis” before finding steady work as a foreman for Mercedes-Benz.

A Mossad agent, posing as a representative from an American sewing-machine manufacturer, bought the house across the street from Eichmann’s. As he discussed the purchase with the home’s owner, he “kept pressing a button concealed in the handle of a small case he was carrying,” which took pictures of Eichmann’s home via hidden camera.

A 12-member operational team, including several Holocaust survivors, established Eichmann’s daily routine, including how he returned home at 7:40 every evening on the #203 bus, emerging from the vehicle onto a dark street.

A plan was established to have two cars parked along the roadside, with agents working under the hood of one. As Eichmann emerged from the bus and walked up the road, one of the agents working on the car said, “Momentito, Senor.” Eichmann reached for what turned out to be a flashlight, but the agents, thinking it might be a gun, pounced. The agent who spoke “leaped on [Eichmann] and threw him on the dirt on the roadside.” The famed Nazi “let out a loud, shrill shout,” and several more men were quickly on him, grabbing his head, covering his mouth and throwing him onto the rear floor of the car.

While the Mossad had achieved part of its goal, it still faced the challenge of getting Eichmann out of the country without incurring the wrath of Argentinian authorities.

The agents had been given instructions that if their hideout was discovered, Eichmann should be “rushed to the secret chamber inside the house” unless a search was attempted, at which time he should be “whisked out of the house by a side exit that had been specifically set for such an emergency.”

To whichever officer accompanied him, this instruction had also been left.

“If the police find the hideout and break in, handcuff yourself to him and throw away the keys, so they won’t be able to tear you away from him. Tell them that you’re Israeli and together with your friends you have captured the world’s most hated criminal, Adolf Eichmann, in order to bring him to trial.”

A special El Al flight was scheduled to fly to Argentina for a celebration of the country’s 150th anniversary, and it was arranged that Eichmann would be flown to Israeli, under great secrecy, on the return flight. Unfortunately for the agents, that flight was 10 days away — which gave them 10 days in the presence of the monster who, for some of them, was responsible for killing their families. And as he was their prisoner, the care required was often intimate.

“They couldn’t give him a razor, so they shaved him; they couldn’t leave him alone for a second, lest he commit suicide; they had to be with him even when he went to the toilet,” the authors write, noting that the agent who had to cook his meals refused to wash his dishes after he ate from them.

The plan was set to bring a drugged Eichmann on the plane in an El Al uniform, holding documents as an El Al navigator. When go-time approached, the Nazi mastermind was washed, shaved and clothed, and a doctor injected him with a drug that left him conscious but unable to speak.

When they reached the airport, Eichmann was walked onto the plane and sat in a first-class window seat. After a nerve-wracking delay following boarding, the plane took off without incident and brought them to Israel, where he was placed on trial, found guilty and hanged.

The book depicts how the Mossad uses all manner of spy-film-like tactics to protect their country. In their ongoing battle to keep Iran from building nuclear weapons, they have sabotaged centrifuges so that their activation button caused them to explode and “established Eastern European front companies” that sold Iran defective insulation, rendering new centrifuges useless.

In January 2010, an advisor to Iran’s nuclear program was “killed by an explosive charge, concealed in a motorcycle parked by his car,” leaving his body “blown to pieces.” Later that year, the head of Iran’s nuclear project was riding in his car when a motorcycle suddenly appeared. “As he passed the car,” the authors write, “the helmeted motorcyclist attached a device to the car’s rear windshield. Seconds later, the device exploded, killing the 45-year-old physicist and wounding his wife.”

One top Palestinian terrorist, a candy lover, was killed by the gift of a box of Godiva chocolates that had been injected with a “deadly biological poison.” Another terrorist was assassinated while surrounded by guests at his own beach party when Mossad sharpshooters swam to shore from about a mile into the water, shot him in the head from 150 yards away, then disappeared into the night.

Elaborate disguises and disinformation are also frequent tactics. On a mission to kill a noted terrorist in 1973, one male agent “put on women’s clothes, assuming the appearance of a voluptuous brunette; in his brassiere, he concealed several explosive charges.” That agent later evaded suspicion from passing police by appearing to “tenderly embrace” another agent. This amorous cross-dresser was future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

And during one long-running mission to rescue Ethopian Jews and move them to Israel, the Mossad leased a beach resort in Sudan and ran it as an active sports vacation complex to provide cover — until they realized it wasn’t safe, and the resort filled with scuba-diving tourists awoke one morning to find the entire foreign-born staff had deserted them, leaving word that their money would be refunded.

Sometimes their weapon of choice was the promise of sex.

When an Israeli nuclear technician named Mordechai Vanunu sold photos of the country’s nuclear operation to an English newspaper, capturing him became problematic. Due to a recent diplomatic incident with England, the Israeli’s were reluctant to carry out an operation on English soil. But in tailing Vanunu, they made an important determination: the technician was lonely.

Soon after, he met a beautiful blonde who “looked very much like Farrah Fawcett” and was quickly smitten. After a whirlwind few days, the woman refused to sleep with him in London but said they should instead make love at her sister’s place in Rome.

Blinded by her affection, he didn’t think twice. The couple flew to Rome, where Vanunu was promptly taken by the Mossad and brought to Israel to stand trial.

As the organization was charged with serving not just Israel but the Jewish people, some of their missions seemed beyond the scope of a traditional spy agency. In the early 1970s, Mossad agents found themselves smuggling young Jewish women out of oppressive Syria, since all the able Jewish men had already escaped, leaving the girls with no hope of finding husbands.

Despite the risk of certain torture and death if caught, Mossad agents smuggled about 120 young Jews out of the country in 20 operations.

Years later, one of the agents involved attended a wedding and recognized the bride as one of the young women he helped rescue. When he asked if she had come from Syria, the woman rushed him in an embrace.

“It was you,” she said. “You took me out of there!”

“This moment,” the agent later said, “was worth all the risks we took.”