The Nazi Hunters (23 page)

Wiesenthal reported that he hired two photographers equipped with telephoto lenses to snap pictures of the mourners at the father’s funeral. They included Eichmann’s brothers, and one of them, Otto, bore a striking resemblance to Adolf. Wiesenthal claimed that this explained the repeated
alleged sightings of Adolf in Europe over the years. According to his account, he gave the photos to two Israeli agents who were dispatched to collect them and rushed to deliver them to their bosses. “Anyone with Otto Eichmann’s photograph in his hands would be able to identify Adolf Eichmann—even if he now called himself Ricardo Klement,” Wiesenthal wrote.

Harel and other critics of Wiesenthal would dismiss much of his account later, arguing that Wiesenthal was hyping his role and even making up parts of his story. The meeting with the two Israeli agents that Wiesenthal described in his memoirs “
never happened,” Harel insisted. Instead, Wiesenthal sent the photos to the Israeli embassy in Vienna, the Mossad chief added. No one “got excited over these photographs” since they were not that significant.
But Aharoni, who afterward expressed as much admiration for Wiesenthal as contempt for Harel, credited the Nazi hunter in Austria with providing “an important piece of information.”

Whatever the accuracy of those differing versions of events, there was no doubt that the growing evidence indicated that the Israelis were on the right trail and closing in on their target. But Harel and Eitan, the man he had designated to lead the operation on the ground, knew that they had to work out what they would do with Eichmann to get him out of the country before they could kidnap him. That meant arranging a safe house to hold the prisoner, and then the transport to Israel.

Harel took charge of making arrangements for the preferred option: flying Eichmann out. But El Al, the Israeli airline, had no flights to Argentina at that time, so they needed to find a pretext to send a special plane. Fortuitously, Argentina was planning to commemorate the 150th anniversary of its independence in late May, and Israel was invited to send its representatives to the celebrations. Harel suggested to the Foreign Ministry that the delegation should fly to Buenos Aires in a special plane, and he worked directly with El Al’s executives to ensure that he had the airline’s full cooperation. They even allowed the Mossad chief to approve the crew that would be selected for the flight.

While Harel handled the flight arrangements, Eitan looked into a backup plan: the much less desirable option of a lengthy journey by sea.
He got in touch with the chairman of Zim, the Israeli shipping lines, which had two refrigerated ships at the time. As Eitan pointed out with a laugh, they were used to transport kosher beef from Argentina to Israel. Working with the captain of one of those ships, Eitan arranged for the preparation of a special compartment that would have served as Eichmann’s floating temporary prison if the flight had not worked out for any reason. In other words, he would have been smuggled out with a regular shipment of kosher beef.

After two weeks in Israel, a period when Harel prepared the team members who would soon make their way to Argentina using a variety of passports and cover stories, Aharoni landed back in Buenos Aires on April 24.
He was no longer posing as an Israeli diplomat but as a German businessman, with a new passport, a new mustache, and new clothes.
One of the first to follow was Avraham Shalom, Eitan’s deputy for the operation. Landing in Israel after a lengthy mission in Asia, Shalom was instructed to immediately report to Harel. The Mossad chief told him he wanted him to meet up with Aharoni, check out everything about the purported sightings of Eichmann and his family on Garibaldi Street, and send a coded signal if he felt certain that they had the right man in their sights.

Shalom was an experienced agent but, for whatever reason, he nearly blew his cover a couple of times. After reaching Paris on the first leg of his journey, he picked up a German passport with new identity papers. In transit in Lisbon, he and other passengers were required to hand in their passports and then to ask for them back when they were ready to board their next flight—in his case, the flight to Buenos Aires. Shalom forgot his fake name and had to reach behind a startled airport official to point to the passport which he recognized only by its color. When he finally reached his hotel in Buenos Aires and had to register at the desk of his hotel, his mind went blank again for a long moment. Shalom claimed that he was not excited by the whole notion of Nazi hunting, but his emotions must have been churning much more than he let on.

When Aharoni took Shalom to see Garibaldi Street, Shalom was favorably impressed. It was “not a real street,” he recalled. “It was a footpath
for cars. It was an ideal place for an operation—no electricity, few people.” The only lights came from the occasional passing car. By then, the Israelis were no longer startled by the notion that the once powerful Eichmann lived in such humble surroundings. By the time more members of the team arrived, Aharoni had confirmed that they were tracking the right man. They also observed his daily routine from a safe distance. They watched him walk to a bus stop to travel to a Mercedes factory every morning, and return by bus to the stop right at the corner of his street at the same time every evening. From there, Eichmann had a very short walk to his house.

Peter Malkin, an especially strong member of the team, was given the assignment of grabbing Eichmann first. “
Never before in my career had I been even a little frightened,” he recalled. “Now I was terrified of failure.” But Eitan, who was one of the last to arrive, concurred with Shalom that the conditions were promising. “
From the very beginning when I analyzed the situation, the area, the house, the surroundings, I was sure that there was no reason we would fail,” he insisted.

Looking back at that momentous gathering of the team of agents in Buenos Aires, Eitan nonetheless admitted that there was always the possibility of something going wrong. Good cars were hard to get in Buenos Aires, and the beat-up vehicles the team had rented broke down often; there was always the possibility, too, that some slip by one of the Israelis could arouse suspicion. Harel, who also flew to Argentina but stayed in downtown Buenos Aires to monitor the action from a short distance, had given Eitan a pair of open handcuffs, keeping the key for himself. If the Argentine police should catch up with them after they seized Eichmann, he instructed Eitan, he had to be sure to handcuff his hand to Eichmann’s. Then he would tell the police to bring both of them to the Israeli ambassador.

Eitan took the handcuffs. But keeping this from Harel, he and Aharoni agreed that if the operation really went wrong, they would kill Eichmann. That would not even require a weapon, he pointed out. In fact, along with the others on the mission, he would not be carrying a gun, figuring that
this could only get them into deeper trouble if they were caught. “The easy way to kill someone with your hands is to break his neck,” he said.

• • •

On the evening of May 10, the day before the scheduled operation, Harel gathered the whole team for a final briefing. At this point, everyone knew their assignments, and a total of seven safe houses and apartments were prepared, primarily to provide alternatives for where to hold the captive until he could be smuggled out of the country, but also for members of the team. Those who had been staying in hotels had already been told to check out and move to one of the safe houses. The Mossad chief did not want everyone checking out from hotels on the day of the kidnapping, which could tip off the police about their identities.

Since those logistics were taken care of, Harel devoted most of his briefing to the bigger picture. “I strove to impress upon the men the unique moral and historical significance of what they were doing,” he recalled. “They were chosen by destiny . . . to guarantee that one of the worst criminals of all time . . . would be made to stand trial in Jerusalem.”

“For the first time in history the Jews would judge their assassins,” he continued, “and for the first time the world would hear, and the young generation in Israel would hear, the full story of the edict of annihilation against an entire people.” He impressed upon them the importance of a successful outcome. The methods they were about to employ were regrettable, he added, “but there was no way of serving morality and justice other than through this specific operation.”

Then he sounded the inevitable cautionary note. If they were caught, Harel said, they should admit that they were Israelis, but they should also assert that they undertook this action on their own initiative. They were not to admit that this was an official Israeli action.

Harel believed, and he was sure most members of his team believed, that they would succeed. But it was normal for everyone to think about the other possibility. One of the agents asked bluntly: “How long do you think we’ll have to sit in prison if we’re caught?”

The Mossad chief was equally blunt in his reply: “A good few years.”

The team deployed two cars for the operation, which was timed to intercept Eichmann when he normally got off the bus from work, which they had established was 7:40 in the evening. Aharoni drove the first car, which also contained Eitan, an agent named Moshe Tavor, and Malkin, the designated man to seize Eichmann. Harel was particularly attentive to Malkin’s role. “
I’m warning you—no bodily harm,” he instructed him. “Not a scratch.”

Malkin, who was a master of disguises, put on a wig and wore dark clothes. He also had a pair of fur-lined gloves. Since it was winter in Argentina, this hardly looked unusual. “The gloves of course would help with the cold, but that is not the main reason I bought them,” he noted. “The thought of placing my bare hand over the mouth that had ordered the death of millions, of feeling the hot breath and the saliva on my skin, filled me with an overwhelming sense of revulsion.” Malkin, like so many other members of the team, had lost several family members during the Holocaust.

Shalom, Eitan’s deputy, was in the second car with other agents.
They were parked about thirty yards away, with the hood up as if they were doing some repairs. As soon as they spotted Eichmann, they were supposed to turn on their bright lights, blinding Eichmann so he wouldn’t see the first car just up ahead.

Eichmann normally followed the same routine every day, but on that evening he did not get off the bus the Israelis were waiting for. By eight when he still hadn’t arrived, Aharoni whispered to Eitan: “Do we leave or continue to wait?” Eitan replied that they should wait, but he, too, was calculating they could not do so much longer. Although it was dark, the two parked cars risked attracting attention.

Shalom had gotten out of the second car and about 8:05 he spotted Eichmann in the evening darkness. He rushed back to the car, another agent quickly slammed the hood down, and Shalom flashed the headlights. In the first car, Aharoni saw Eichmann clearly through his binoculars. Leaning out the window, he warned the waiting Malkin: “He has a hand in his pocket. Watch out for a weapon.”

As Eichmann turned the corner from the bus stop and walked directly
by their car, Malkin turned around and blocked his path. “
Un momentito, señor,” he said, using the phrase he had been practicing for weeks. Eichmann stopped abruptly, and Malkin took advantage of that instant to lunge for him. The problem was that, because of Aharoni’s warning, he grabbed for his right hand instead of his throat and the two men tumbled into a ditch.

Eichmann began screaming. “This turned a well-planned and carefully exercised operation into an unholy mess,” Aharoni reported later. He gunned the engine to drown out the screams, while Eitan and Tavor jumped out of the car to help. Malkin grabbed Eichmann by his legs while the two others took him by his arms, quickly pulling him into the car through the back door. They put him on the floor between the front and the back seats, where they had placed blankets both so that he would not be injured and to cover him. Eichmann’s head was pressed against Eitan’s knees, and Malkin sat on the other side. Their captive had no weapon.

Aharoni delivered a sharp order to Eichmann in German: “If you don’t keep still, you’ll be shot.” Malkin still had his hand on his mouth beneath the blanket, but when Eichmann nodded, signaling he understood, he took it off. They then drove in silence. Eitan and Malkin shook hands. Eichmann, who was now outfitted in thick goggles so he could not see anything, lay completely still.

On their way to the main safe house, they stopped to switch license plates. They briefly lost the second car that was supposed to be with them, but it soon reappeared and followed them to the designated villa, where other members of the team were anxiously waiting.

The Israelis walked Eichmann to the small second-floor room prepared for him, and put him on an iron bed, shackling one of his legs to its heavy frame. They undressed him and a member of the team who was a doctor examined his mouth to make sure he did not have any poison. The prisoner protested that after all this time as a free man he was not taking such precautions, but the doctor still removed his false teeth to be sure and then inspected the rest of his body. Eitan, Shalom, Malkin, and Aharoni were all in the room, watching while the doctor checked
his armpit where normally SS officers had a tattoo with their blood type. Instead, Eichmann only had a small scar, which later he admitted was the result of his efforts to burn away the tattoo with a cigarette when he had been detained by the Americans at the end of the war. His captors had failed to realize his true identity then.

Given his experience as an interrogator in the British Army, Aharoni was tasked with getting the prisoner to admit his identity this time. He had studied Eichmann’s file that Fritz Bauer had shared with the Israelis, and he was ready to keep asking as many questions as needed to force a confession. His normal style was to ask them slowly and repeatedly. “He was a very boring interrogator,” Shalom recalled with a smile. “You could go out of your mind until you heard his next word. He was a very smart chap. He’d ask you the same question ten times.”