Get Eichmann – Israel’s Hunt For a Nazi War Criminal - Part 2

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

You are listening to Part 2 of a three-part series on the pursuit, capture and trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

As we move into this next phase of the story, in which Israeli spies play such a critical and central role, I think it’s time to finally address the elephant in the room; the unspoken, uncomfortable reality creeping at the edges of this topic.

I want to make it very clear that this series is not an attempt to lionize, glorify, or uncritically celebrate Israel and its intelligence service Mossad. In the 7 decades since the events we are discussing took place, the Israeli government, and by extension Mossad, has done some very questionable things – things that would likely shock and outrage some of the Israelis in this story. Not all, of course – but certainly some.

It is one of history’s most tragic and bitter ironies that Israel, a nation founded in the aftermath of an unspeakable genocide, has often failed to absorb the lessons of what can happen when we start putting up barbed wire fences, classifying people in rigid ethnic taxonomies, and chasing an unattainable ideal of nationalistic purity.

The history of Israel and Palestine, of course, has been one long tale of atrocity and counter-atrocity. Old vendettas and generational grievances that have calcified into a geopolitical Gordian Knot. One that apparently remains, to this day, beyond the capabilities of any government, any organization, any advocacy group to solve. For 100 years, some of the smartest people on the planet have been working tirelessly to reconcile the differences between Palestinians, Israelis, and the neighboring Arab nations. And for 100 years, they have failed.

To put it plainly, I am painfully aware that any topic involving Israel comes with a lot of baggage. It has and continues to be a controversial, emotionally charged space, but as always, I will do my best to tackle this thing with sensitivity, nuance and care. I may not do everything perfectly, I may make choices that you disagree with, but please rest assured, I’m coming at this thing from a place of good faith and an earnest love for the history.

On a surface level, it’s very easy to misinterpret the hunt for Adolf Eichmann as a struggle between good and evil. It has all the comforting beats of a Hollywood blockbuster. A swastika-sporting mass-murderer versus a daring/courageous team of secret agents. But the truth, as always, is so much more complex than that. Opposing evil people does not automatically make us good; Suffering a terrible injustice does not automatically make us righteous. And punishing someone who is wrong, does not automatically make us right.  

One of the big recurring themes of this story, as I see it, is the concept of flawed, incomplete, or compromised justice.

Just as the Nuremberg Tribunal did not fully succeed in finding and punishing every Nazi within its jurisdiction; just as the tribunal’s hangman, Sergeant John C. Woods, did not escape accusations of botching the subsequent executions, just as West Germany struggled to eradicate ex-Nazis from the halls of its government, the Israeli mission / operation to hold Adolf Eichmann accountable is another case of a moral mission placed in imperfect hands.

When American and British intelligence services would not lift a finger to pursue Nazi war criminals, when the West German bureaucracy could not be trusted with the information, Attorney General Fritz Bauer was forced to turn to the only government who would actually do something about Eichmann. Israel was, in his view, a last resort. And even still, as we saw last episode, it took a lot of convincing to get Mossad on board. But without the Israeli operation we’re about to discuss, it’s entirely possible and very probable that Adolf Eichmann would have lived out his days in a sunny Argentinian suburb, playing his violin and bouncing grandchildren on his knee.

It all raises the uncomfortable question: is flawed justice better than no justice at all?

So, with all that in mind, let’s dive in to the next stage of our journey. But before we do, let’s / I want to take a few minutes to briefly recap the events of last episode, so all that information is fresh in our heads.

Last time, in Part 1, we opened with an execution. Well, ten executions, to be exact.

After defeating Nazi Germany in May of 1945, the Allied Powers convened an International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to indict, try and convict 24 high-ranking officials of Hitler’s Third Reich. It was during the Nuremberg Trials that Allied investigators first caught the scent of a certain SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann.

Discussed at length in the testimony of fellow SS officers Dieter Wisliceny and Rudolf Hoss, Eichmann was identified as an operational linchpin of the Final Solution, which earned him a one-way ticket to the top of the war criminal registry. But by the spring of 1946, Eichmann’s trail had turned ice-cold. Despite exhaustive search efforts by Allied investigators, Eichmann was never found, and when 10 Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg in October of ’46, the elusive Obersturmbannfuhrer was not among them.

Distracted by rising tensions with the Soviet Union and anxious to put the Nazi era behind them, Allied investigators shoved Eichmann’s file in a drawer, where it sat more-or-less gathering dust for the next decade.

But then, in 1957, a breakthrough in the Eichmann case occurred.

In West Germany, a Jewish attorney named Fritz Bauer received a letter from a man in Argentina, claiming that Eichmann was hiding in Buenos Aires under the alias “Ricardo Klement.” For years, Bauer had been trying to prosecute Nazis who had evaded justice and slipped back into German/ polite society; but his efforts were constantly undermined or sabotaged by ex-Nazis working in the West German government. Invigorated by the prospect of catching Adolf Eichmann, but well aware that he could not do so through official government channels, Bauer secretly turned to the Israelis for help. In the fall of 1957, Eichmann’s case file landed on the desk of Isser Harel, the chief of Mossad.

Like many people in the intelligence community, Harel was a skeptic by nature. He distrusted leads/information that seemed too good to be true. Adolf Eichmann, commonly referred to as the ‘number one enemy of the Jews”, was not the kind of target that just drops into one’s lap. Trophy fish, after all, do not jump into the boat. Nevertheless, Harel indulged Bauer’s curiosity and sent a Mossad operative to Buenos Aires to follow up on the lead, a little house at 4261 Chacabuco Street  - And just a quick note on that address: Last episode I accidentally read it “4621”,  so apologies for that. May not seem like a big deal, but that is exactly the kind of mistake that can sink a covert operation; I mean, imagine if Fritz Bauer had given them the wrong address!]

[Well anyway] The Mossad agent was not impressed with what he found at Chacabuco Street, and after a cursory, half-hearted investigation, reported back to Tel Aviv that there was no way Eichmann could be living in such shabby surroundings.

Fritz Bauer was adamant, however, and insisted that Mossad keep pulling at the thread. When Mossad made further inquiries into Bauer’s source in Buenos Aires, a blind German Jew named Lothar Hermann, it only deepened their misgivings about the lead. Isser Harel, convinced that the Argentinian tip was a nowhere road, chose to pull the plug and ignore any angry calls from West Germany. But Fritz Bauer did not give up easily; when he received a second piece of evidence that confirmed Eichmann’s location and alias, the attorney general hopped a flight to Tel Aviv and practically kicked down Harel’s door. Now will you investigate?, he demanded. Is this not enough evidence for you?

Infuriated at Mossad’s lack of initiative and determined to force their hand, Bauer threatened to open extradition proceedings with the Argentinian government. The attorney general was well aware that doing so would likely result in Eichmann being tipped off by his friends in the West German and Argentinian consulates, but if Mossad would not act, he had no other option available to him. It’s your choice, Bauer was saying. Go to Argentina and capture him, or… watch him disappear for good. Your call.  [But I have to do something]

In later years, Isser Harel would claim that he had believed the Lothar Hermann tip all along, and was simply biding his time and waiting for the right opportunity. A brazen attempt at saving face if ever there was one.

But in the end, Harel wised up and chose the option that would most benefit his agency. He promised to assemble a team of Mossad operatives and investigate the lead personally. If this “Ricardo Klement” really was in Buenos Aires, and he really was Adolf Eichmann, the wayward SS officer would be found, captured, and God-willing, hanged by an Israeli court. Thanks for the tip, Mr. Bauer, we’ll take it from here.

And that, folks, is where we left off last time.

This time, in Part 2, we’re going to follow Harel’s team to Buenos Aires in their search for the mysterious Ricardo Klement. And only time will tell if Fritz Bauer’s hunch is going to bear fruit.

But before we do any of that, it’s time we found out how Adolf Eichmann got to Argentina in the first place. How he became Ricardo Klement. It begins, oddly enough, with a case of mistaken identity, and a cold-blooded murder.

Welcome to Get Eichmann: Israel’s Hunt For A Nazi War Criminal – Part 2.

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It’s the spring of 1946.

One year after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and the end of World War II.  

We’re on the outskirts of a village in Austria - a tiny mountain town, cradled in the shadow of the Alps. This cluster of cottages and ski chalets, huddled together at the edge of an immense pine forest, is so small you’d be hard-pressed to find it on a map.

But tonight, this village holds the potential for historical significance.

As the sun retreats behind the mountains, and nightfall settles over the cottages, a U.S. Army Jeep quietly approaches the town. In this part of Austria, deep in the American Occupation Zone, Army jeeps are not an uncommon sight. A symbol of order and stability in the chaotic, post-war reality. But this particular Army jeep is not like the others. And its occupants are not here with peaceful intentions.

At the edge of town, the vehicle rolls to a stop. The ignition is switched off, the headlights dim, and five men in British Army uniforms quietly leap out of the Jeep. No one speaks; and no one needs to. They’ve memorized the plan to the letter.

Disengaging the safety catches on their STEN submachine guns, the men leave the Jeep behind and proceed on foot towards a two-story cottage at the edge of town. In the front yard, three large dogs are dozing, but as the men approach, their canine senses are flooded with strange and unwelcome smells. They pad forward, yellow teeth bared in a low growl. But the squad of uniformed men is prepared for such an obstacle; one of them tosses a cheap cut of meat at the dogs’ feet. Minutes later, all three dogs are dead; after a brief fit of convulsions and tremors, the poisoned meat has done its work.

Heads nod. Hands signal. The way is clear. Stepping over the dead dogs, the five uniformed men arrive at the front door to the cottage. They are nervous and excited, their breath visible as rapid puffs of smoke.

Despite their attire, these armed men are not with the British Army. Despite their vehicle, they are not with the American Army - or any other army for that matter. They are Jewish vigilantes in disguise, independent Nazi hunters, who have taken it upon themselves to comb the Occupation Zones for war criminals in hiding. And tonight, they have located one of the worst Nazis of all.

Tonight, they are going to kill Adolf Eichmann.

Just on the other side of the door, the architect of the Final Solution is waiting, blissfully unaware that this is his last night on Earth. The Nazi hunters take a moment to steady themselves, then kick open the door and storm through the rectangle of light.

Inside, four men are sitting around a dinner table, frozen mid-bite as a squad of armed intruders bursts into their kitchen. The Nazi hunters do not announce who they are; they don’t scream or shout or threaten. They simply tell the four men to stand up from the dinner table and keep your hands where we can see them. The men obey.

The hunters whisper quietly among themselves. According to their information, to the tips, evidence and surveillance they have gathered over the course of several weeks, there is a strong probability that one of these four men is Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann’s relatives have been seen visiting this house, including his wife and brother. Strong indicators if ever there were any. Unfortunately, the hunters don’t have a photograph of the Oberstrurmbannfuhrer, but they do have a physical description lifted from Allied files. As written in Eichmann’s CIC profile:

Age: Approximately 40

Height: 5’8”

Weight: 154 pounds

Build: Gaunt, sinewy Hair: Thinning on top, dark blond

Eyes: Blue-gray

Face: Prominent features, beak nose

Posture: Erect, military, mountaineer’s gait

Dialect: Speaks Austrian accent, strident, hoarse, unmodulated voice, always loud Other identifying marks: Usually carries a walking stick. Motions are strikingly nervous; while talking, he has a nervous cough, a twitch in one corner of the mouth, closes one eye.

After scanning the four men for a brief moment, one of the hunters raises an accusatory finger. “You,” he spits in German, “Come here.” / “C’mere”

Neil Bascomb describes what happened next:

“Me?” one of the men replied, trembling. Two men dragged him out of the house, while the others kept their guns on the ones around the table. Once clear of the chalet, one of the two men knocked their prisoner out with a blow to the back of his head. They carried him back to their jeep and drove several miles into the pine forest. Tossed out of the jeep into the mud, the prisoner came to.

The leader of the group climbed out of the jeep and stood over him. “We are Jews, Adolf Eichmann. We’ve got a big score to settle with you.” [The prisoner pleaded] “I swear to you by my wife and children, by the memory of my mother, that I am not Adolf Eichmann. He was a killer. I was only a soldier. You are good people,” he pleaded. “Show me mercy.”

“You know how much mercy you showed to the Jewish people.” / “How much mercy did you show the Jewish people?, the leader asks.

The prisoner confessed that he had been part of the Einsatzgruppen and that he had killed some Jews, but only because he had been ordered to do so. He begged them to believe him, telling him that the wife and brother of Eichmann were friends of the chalet’s owner. After a few moments, his torrent of words slowed, and he said, “All you can do is kill me.” [With that] The avengers fired several rounds of bullets into his chest. They cursed his very existence, then buried him in an unmarked grave.

And with that, the job is done. A few questions, the staccato crack of a submachine gun, and it’s over. As the sunlight peaks over the Alps, tumbling down the mountains like an avalanche of gold, the hunters wash the blood from their disguises, hop in their Jeep and depart, confident that they have killed Adolf Eichmann and avenged the millions of Jews he helped to murder.

Of course, they have done no such thing.

The prisoner had been telling the truth. He was, in fact, just a random German soldier, who by some unlucky cosmic lottery, happened to look very much like Adolf Eichmann. But the real Eichmann was not in that house. He wasn’t in that village or that Occupation Zone; In fact, he was not even in Austria at all.

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The real Adolf Eichmann was 450 miles away in Northern Germany, far from Jewish avengers and their self-righteous remonstrations. That morning, while the luckless German soldier started decomposing in his unmarked grave, the real Eichmann woke up in a different tiny town, at the edge of a different pine forest, under a completely different name. Here, in the small lumber village of Everson, near Hanover, he is Otto. Mr. Otto Heninger - pleased to meet you.  

To the occupants of Everson – population triple digits, even on holidays - Otto Henninger is the nice man who chops trees, raises chickens, and plays violin for the children. His Mozart and Wagner are really quite good. Yes, in every way except the one that matters, “Adolf Eichmann” is dead and gone. That identity no longer has any use for Otto. In Germany, the name Eichmann is a liability, a veritable death sentence. So, like a viper shedding its skin, he has left it behind - a papery husk to rustle in the wind and drive his pursuers insane.

But becoming Otto Heninger was no easy task.

Acquiring a convincing alias is not like slipping on a new pair of pants.

A year earlier, in the spring of 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann was beginning to think that there might not be a bright future in the Nazi party. Not for him, and not for anybody.  Since the 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which he and 14 others had aligned on the when, where and how of the Final Solution, the fortunes of the Third Reich had taken quite a turn. Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia had backfired disastrously, draining the resources of an already over-extended German Army. To make matters worse, the vulgar Americans and their squat little tanks had crept up the Italian boot like a star-spangled case of gangrene, depriving Hitler of a valuable ally. When the Allied armies stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944 and subsequently liberated France, the writing was on the wall: Nazi Germany was going to lose and lose hard. It was only a matter of time.

Like so many high-ranking Nazis in the twilight days of the war, with the Russians and Americans squeezing Germany from East and West like an iron vise, Eichmann had one thing and one thing only on his mind:

Escape.

He left from Berlin on April 13^th, 1945, charging hard and fast toward the Czechoslovakian border in an armored staff car. No valets or chauffeurs this time. Those luxurious days are long gone. Although he had orders from SS Director Heinrich Himmler in his coat pocket – some business about transferring a small group of Jews from this area to that area – Eichmann’s thoughts were by now preoccupied with his own survival.

In Berlin, just days before his departure, he had ridiculed SS colleagues who were in the process of forging passports and fabricating new identities. “I don’t need those papers,” Eichmann said, affectionately patting the pistol on his hip, “Look here: This is my passport. When I see no other way out, this is my last resort. I have no need for anything else.”

It was all his SS compatriots could do not to sigh in admiration. “If we had 50 Eichmanns,” one swooned, “we would have won the war.”

But despite the tough talk and posturing, Eichmann had no intention of throwing himself atop Hitler’s funeral pyre. He would not eat a bullet / blow his brains out like the Fuhrer, or swallow cyanide like Goebbels, or die in the one of the suicidal charges mounted by the many child soldiers left defending Germany. When given the opportunity, Eichmann slipped out of Berlin like cat through the door - just before the jaws of the Russian bear snapped shut and the Red Army commenced its final assault on the city.

Adolf Eichmann had spent years studying the Jewish people and their silly superstitions; As he zipped down the thin corridor of territory between the two encroaching allies, Americans to the west and Soviets to the east, the story of Moses and the Red Sea might’ve come to mind.

From Berlin, he drove south to Prague. From Prague, he went to Austria. At each stage of his journey, demoralizing new details reached his ears. “The Russians have broken through,” one distraught SS contact told him, “There’s nothing left in Berlin.”  

In a daze, Eichmann realized that the Third Reich was collapsing all around him. It was like the end of the world.

In the second week of May, while organizing a small resistance force in the Austrian Alps, the final gut punch landed. Eichmann learned that Adolf Hitler was indeed dead, Berlin had fallen to the Red Army, and the war in Europe was officially over. After just 12 years and three months of existence, the Thousand Year Reich was gone.

Eichmann’ first reaction was a sense of nauseating aimlessness. For a man so accustomed to giving and receiving orders, the Obersturmbannfuhrer was now a man without a mission; faced, in his own words, with a “leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult—in brief, a life never known before lay before me.”

But Eichmann knew that he wouldn’t have any sort of life at all if he didn’t move fast. The victorious Allies, enraged by what they had found in the concentration camps, were closing in. As Bascomb writes:

“Once the peace was secured, the Allies rapidly occupied Germany. Martial law was imposed, checkpoints were established at bridges and road intersections, curfews and blackouts were set, roving patrols were sent out, and Wehrmacht soldiers were interned in POW camps. The aim was to secure the country, to prevent the development of an organized underground resistance, and to provide routine policing to restore public order without delay. Allied headquarters issued directives to every army group in every sector to arrest and question any Nazi Party members, starting with Hitler’s inner circle and continuing all the way down to local group leaders; members of the SD, Gestapo, and other branches of the SS; and high officials from the police, Wehrmacht, Hitler Youth, and propaganda ministry, among many others. The Allied leaders meant to pin Germany down and to remove every last trace of the Nazi state.”

Eichmann moved quickly to discard all traces of his rank and SS affiliations. He swapped his Gestapo grey for Luftwaffe blue, ditched his pistol in favor of a dingy machine gun, and attempted to burn off his SS tattoo with a lit cigarette. Satisfied with the transformative effects, Eichmann trudged north into the snowy valleys of Austria in a desperate search for shelter.

Unfortunately for him, he found it.

Shelter came in the form not of German compatriots but an American Army patrol, combing the  Bavarian frontier. Wisely, Eichmann did not resist; he was disarmed, arrested, and taken into Allied custody. The American patrol, however, did not know who or what they had. To their tired eyes, this guy was just another nameless German soldier wandering in the post-war pandemonium. At the prisoner-of-war camp he was subsequently dumped in, Eichmann adopted his first of many aliases, giving the Allied interrogators a fake name and a fake rank.

“Lieutenant Otto Eckmann”, he called himself.

“It was a name close enough to his own that he would answer to it even if distracted,” writes Bascomb, “Also, if someone he knew did call out his real name, it might not arouse the suspicion of the guards.”

When push came to shove, concealing his identity proved to be relatively easy / a fairly straightforward proposition  for Eichmann. As Bascomb continues:

“The Allies had proved more than capable of rounding up tens of thousands of suspects in their automatic arrest categories. They had been photographed and interrogated, and their physical characteristics had been noted. But without a coordinated, fully staffed center for this information, neither Eichmann nor the others who lied about their identities could be exposed in a POW system with more than two hundred American camps in Germany.”

As Bettina Stangneth observes: “Proving anyone’s identity was nearly impossible.”

And so, Eichmann simply dissolved into the background, one man amongst thousands; remaining in American custody for several months. And he might’ve stayed there indefinitely, submerged in a protective sea of anonymous German faces. As Harry Stein writes:

“In the astonishingly chaotic days and weeks following the collapse of the Third Reich, with the occupying forces struggling to impose some semblance of order on devastated central Europe, with hunger rampant and untold thousands of refugees on the move, it would seem to have been a relatively simple matter for a man to disappear.”

But then, the Nuremberg Trials began.

Over and over again, Eichmann was mentioned, by name, in sworn testimony. In short order, he was labeled a wanted war criminal. Well, Lieutenant “Otto Eckmann” realized it was only a matter of time before the Allied investigators found out who he really was, tracked him down this specific prisoner-of-war camp, and put him on trial with the rest of the bigwigs at Nuremberg.

He was not going to let that happen.

So, in January of 1946, Otto Eckmann disappeared from the POW camp in southern Germany. No one missed him, no one mourned him; To the Americans, he just another German spilling through the sieve. Good riddance, they thought, if they thought anything about it at all.

Three months later, a man named Otto Heninger arrived in the small town of Eversen in Northern Germany, wearing a second-hand Wehrmacht coat and a friendly, hire-me smile. He applied for a job as a lumberjack with the local woodcutting company and was accepted without incident. All his papers were in order, all his references checked out.  Adolf Eichmann was dead.[long live] Otto Heninger was alive, well, and gainfully employed.

For the next four years, Eichmann quietly lived and worked in the seclusion of the North German forests. No one in the town ever suspected he was anything more than a soft-spoken lumberjack who played the violin uncommonly well and was good with kids. And yet, Eichmann could not seem to rest easy in his new identity. He was deep in the forest, but he wasn’t out of the woods. The former Obersturmbannfuhrer chafed against his new life like an itchy, ill-fitting uniform. No matter how safe he seemed, no matter how protected, Eichmann lived in constant fear that he would be discovered:

“In the years I spent underground, living as a ‘mole,’ it became second nature to me, whenever I saw a new face, to ask myself a few questions, like: Do you know this face? Does this person look like he has seen you before? Is he trying to recall when he might have met you? And during these years, the fear never left me that somebody could come up behind me and suddenly cry: ‘Eichmann!’ 

If he was every truly going to be at peace, he needed to get out of Germany. Out of Europe entirely. Somewhere he could start over and build a new life without constantly looking over his shoulder. Thankfully, just such a promised land existed: The South American nation of Argentina.

ARGENTINA

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As Bascomb writes:

“Eight times the size of Germany, Argentina stretched from the dry, windswept lands of the south, close enough to Antarctica to suffer its icy blasts, all the way to the tropical jungles of the north. To its west, the Andes rose like a leviathan, many of the peaks reaching over 20,000 feet. And to the east was the Atlantic Ocean and 2,500 miles of coastline. The heart of the country, its Pampas, or fertile grasslands, provided sustenance for its 22 million people. In these plains, one travel writer wrote, “the distances from house to house are too great for the barking of dogs even on the stillest night, a country in which the cocks crow only twice because there is no answer . . . It is the country in which the green goes on and on like water, and the gulls follow the plows as seagulls follow ships.” These empty spaces contrasted sharply with the sprawling, seventy-square-mile metropolis of Buenos Aires, where more than a third of all Argentines lived.”

At first blush, a South American country 7,000 miles away might seem like an odd choice of sanctuary for a war criminal in hiding. But as it happened, the balmy Argentinian climate was very hospitable to former Nazis.

Descendants of the steel-plated conquistadors who had sailed from Spain in the early 1500s, 20^th century Argentinian leaders saw themselves, according to historian Uki Goñi, as “standing at the helm of a predominantly white, Catholic, Hispanic nation unjustly forced to share borders with its mixed-race neighbors in South America.”

When the Argentinian elite looked across the ocean for kindred spirits, only Nazi Germany seemed to share its appreciation for racial purity and martial prowess. At the speed-dating table of international politics, Germany and Argentina just sort of clicked; the chemistry was instant and undeniable. That natural affinity was bolstered by the presence of a large German immigrant population in Buenos Aires.

When World War II ended in disaster for the Nazis, the Argentinian junta, led by the military dictator Juan Peron (P-E-R-O-N), was disgusted by the humiliation of Germany at the hands of the Allies. The Nuremberg Trials were especially galling, a “outrage that history will not forgive,” Peron called it. As the dictator elaborated some years later:

‘In Nuremberg at that time something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity. ‘I became certain that the Argentine people also considered the Nuremberg process a disgrace, unworthy of the victors, who behaved as if they hadn’t been victorious. Now we realize that they [the Allies] deserved to lose the war.

Sadly, Argentina could not win the war for Germany, but it could open its arms and provide a safe haven for the poor, misunderstood acolytes of Aryan supremacy. In the years immediately following World War II, it became the Argentinian government’s intention, as one historian put it, to:

”rescue as many Nazis as possible from the war crimes trials in Europe.”

Of course it was not only sympathy, but self-interest that motivated the Argentinians. The Nazi regime harbored some of the finest scientific and technological minds in the world. Why should they swing from the gallows when their knowledge could be applied to new, more profitable ventures? Germany’s loss could be Argentina’s gain. As Bettina Stangneth explains:

“Argentina had an interest in German professionals who could help to drive forward the transformation of an agrarian country into an industrialized nation, and assisting their escape seemed like a solid investment.”

To do this, the Argentinian government established a secret underground smuggling network, which stretched from Buenos Aires all the way to Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. Through these ‘ratlines” as they were called, “thousands of former Nazi officials – some of them major criminals, others passive accomplices to crime -  were clandestinely provided with aliases, travel documents, money, lodging and a ticket to South America.” according to historian Uki Goñi.

But none of this would have been possible had it not been for the timely assistance of a very rich, very powerful, and wholly unexpected partner in this illegal operation. In their darkest hour, the fleeing Nazis required a little divine intervention. As Goñi writes:

“It was only the Catholic Church that was able to braid the strands of such a gargantuan endeavor.”

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Yes, you heard that correctly. The Catholic Church, self-designated arbiters of worldly morality, participated in a “massive evacuation of war criminals from Europe”.

Now to be fair to the Vatican and the 1.4 billion people that venerate it, no organization is a monolith – not even the Catholic Church. It would be more accurate to say that “members’” of the Catholic Church helped in the illegal enterprise. But these clergymen were not provincial outliers or small-time priests. These were Cardinals, Bishops, – extremely powerful and influential members of the Vatican, some of whom reported directly to the Pope, Pious the XII(12th)

Now whether the Holy Father himself knew about th Church’s sponsorship and trafficking of war criminals to Argentina is still a matter of fierce debate.

What matters is they did it.

And they did it very well.

As an American CIA assessment from the time put it:

‘In those Latin American countries where the Church is a controlling or dominating factor, the Vatican has brought pressure to bear which has resulted in the foreign missions of those countries taking an attitude almost favouring the entry into their country of former Nazi and former Fascists or other political groups […] The justification of the Vatican for its participation in this illegal traffic is simply the propagation of the faith. It is the Vatican’s desire to assist any person, regardless of nationality or political beliefs, as long as that person can prove himself to be a Catholic. This of course from the practical point of view is a dangerous practice.”

The United States government wasn’t taking issue on moral grounds, of course; they wanted those Nazi fugitives for themselves, intellectual fuel for their rocket development programs in competition with the Soviet Union. As American intelligence saw it, any Nazi that slipped through the net was an asset potentially lost to the Communist bloq.

The Vatican, meanwhile, had no moral qualms about its participation in these ratlines. To the contrary, they saw it as their Christian duty. As one Bishop and Nazi sympathizer, Alois (Ah-Lo-Ees) Hudal, explained:

I’m a priest, not a policeman. My mission as a Christian during those difficult years was to save anybody who could be saved and to help people without the means to leave Rome, where they would have been in danger.”

Well, this was music to the ears of hundreds of former Nazis and fascist collaborators, who took advantage of this secret alliance between the Argentinian government and the Catholic Church. And one of the recipients of their Christian charity was our old buddy, Adolf Eichmann. Or I should say, “Otto Heninger”.

While hiding as a lumberjack in Northern Germany, Eichmann managed to get in touch with this network. As he recalled:

‘I heard of the existence of some organizations which had helped others leave Germany. In early 1950 I established contact with one of these organizations.’

Eichmann’s desire to leave Europe for the welcoming shores of South America, triggered an elaborate and well-oiled system for fabricating fake identities.

It began in Buenos Aires, where the Argentinian Immigration Office authorized a landing permit under a false name; in Eichmann’s case, a “Mr. Ricardo Klement.” Confirmation of this permit’s approval was wired to the Argentinian consulate in Italy, where the freshly printed travel document was issued to a network operative, who met Eichmann in Switzerland and placed it in his hand. Armed with this permit, Eichmann was now Ricardo Klement, and when he presented himself to the Red Cross authority to apply for an international passport, he received it that very day. Ricardo Klement was photographed, fingerprinted, and awarded with the appropriate travel documents. From there, he was shepherded to the Argentinian consulate in Genoa (jen-o-wah), Italy, where he received his entry visa and underwent a routine medical examination.

It all sounds very complicated – and it was – but that was exactly the point. The Vatican and the Argentinian government were methodically laundering Eichmann’s identity through layer after layer after layer of procedural legitimacy. In theory, the tedious trail of paperwork would frustrate any attempts by international authorities to question its authenticity.

And it worked like a charm. “Everything had been arranged”, writes Bascomb.

On July 17^th, 1950, the newly christened Ricardo Klement stepped onto a boat anchored in Genoa harbor, the passenger ship Giovanna C, bound for Buenos Aires.

The irony of an SS officer fleeing Europe aboard a ship, much like Jewish refugees had been forced to do in the 1930s, was not lost on Eichmann. He chuckled years later, “Once it was Jews, now it was Eichmann!” Nevertheless, his sense of relief was almost immeasurable:

“When the ship left, the harbor at Genoa, I felt like a hunted deer that has finally managed to shake off its pursuer. I was overcome by a wave of the sense of freedom.”

Two weeks later, after an uncomfortable journey across the Atlantic, Eichmann arrived in the harbor of Buenos Aires, with a new name, a new backstory, and a new lease on life. During the oceanic journey, he had meticulously memorized every facet of his new identity, bracing for a rigorous interrogation at Argentinian customs. As Bascomb writes:

“Running over the details of his new identity in his mind, he prepared himself to answer any of the officer’s questions. Name? Ricardo Klement. Date of birth? May 23, 1913. Mother’s name? Anna. Marital status? Single. Profession? Mechanic. Born? Bolzano, Italy. First language? German. Do you read and write? Yes. Religion? Catholic. Reason for emigrating? To find work. Where are you staying? Hotel Buenos Aires. There was no need to rehearse. His passport was stamped without any interrogation, and the officer waved Eichmann into his new country.”

And just like that, Adolf Eichmann began his new life in Argentina.

But 10 years later, in the spring of 1960, a very different sort of visitor arrives in Buenos Aires.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of tourists and business travelers, eight men quietly pass through Argentinian customs. Not all at once of course. They arrive separately, and secretly, their real identities obscured beneath a façade of counterfeit documents, expensive wigs, and dark sunglasses. Like Ricardo Klement, their passports are also fake, their identities fabricated. On paper, they hail from all across Europe: Paris, Prague, London and Rome. A panoply of European heritage. But their real port of call, their real home…is the nation of Israel.

10 years after Adolf Eichmann passed safely into Argentina, an 8-man team of agents from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, pass through the very same customs office. After months of planning and tracking, they have come to find Eichmann and extract some long-overdue justice. Their orders are simple and concise. Capture Eichmann, smuggle him out of Argentina, and bring him back to Jerusalem to stand trial for his crimes against the Jewish people.

And despite the innumerable challenges of such a delicate operation, they are to take him alive.

Well, “preferably alive”, as the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, instructed Mossad Chief Isser Harel.

One way or another, Adolf Eichmann’s time is up.  

--- MUSIC BREAK ----

THE DRIVER IS RED

It’s the morning of April 3^rd, 1960.

Four months after Fritz Bauer’s ultimatum to Isser Harel.

We’re in Argentina, in a remote patch of land on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

To call this place the middle of nowhere would be a charitable assessment. This isn’t the middle of anything. This is the edge of nowhere. “The area was level and almost completely featureless,” writes Neil Bascomb, “It was poor, sparsely populated […] without telephone or electrical lines.”

The houses in this isolated stretch of South America have no running water, no central heating, no utilities of any kind. Proof that human beings will put up four walls just about anywhere. But there is one public utility that stretches all the way out to this backcountry: The Buenos Aires public transit system. Every morning, a beat-up city bus rumbles through the area, picking up locals for their commute into town; and every evening at exactly 7:40PM, it drops them back off at a station near Garibaldi Street. That’s G-A-R-I-B-A-L-D-I.

Aside from the public bus, it’s pretty rare to see any other motor vehicles this far out in the country. But today, under the blazing Argentinian sun, a dinged-up Ford pickup truck is discreetly parked beneath a nearby railway bridge. To any curious pedestrian, the truck appears empty; just an abandoned vehicle that someone parked and left behind. Who knows - maybe they ran out of gas.

But the Ford pickup is not empty. Hidden underneath a heavy tarp in the bed of the truck, a lean, 39-year-old man is lying on his stomach, peering out of a small hole with a pair of binoculars. He has been in this position for hours, enduring the claustrophobic heat of the tarp, the stir-crazy cramps in his back and legs, and a persistent itch on his upper lip. But for a trained Mossad operative like Zvi Aharoni, a little discomfort is a small price to pay for a successful stakeout.

Zvi Aharoni is an Israeli spy.

That’s Z-V-I (Zvi), A-H-A-R-O-N-I (Aharoni).

Aharoni is in Argentina for one reason and one reason alone: track down “Ricardo Klement” and confirm 100% that he is Adolf Eichmann. Without such a confirmation, any operation to capture Eichmann cannot move forward. The chief, Isser Harel, was very clear on that.

Mossad had never been timid about extrajudicial operations, of course; throughout the 1950s, they planted bombs in West Bank villages, and abducted Jewish defectors from European capitals, but accidentally kidnapping an innocent man on South American soil would be an international embarrassment that Isser Harel cannot afford. So, Zvi Aharoni has been sent ahead of the main team to confirm Eichmann’s identity with the naked eye.

But so far, finding “Ricardo Klement” has not been an easy task.  

When Aharoni arrived in Argentina four weeks earlier on March 1^st , 1960, he did so undercover, posing as a visiting member of the Israeli foreign ministry. Just another a harmless diplomatic tourist who barely spoke Spanish, passing through for a few weeks of pointless meetings and too many Fernet cocktails. With a gruff nod and a heavy thud of a passport stamp, the Argentinian guards waved him through customs without incident.

And then, Aharoni went to work.

The information Mossad had received from Fritz Bauer was sparse, but specific. Eichmann was living at 4261 Chacabuco Street in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement. He lived there with his wife Vera, and his young son Ricardo Junior; His three older sons, Dieter, Horst, and Nick, were all grown up but still lived close by. With the exception of Adolf himself, all members of the family bizarrely chose to still use the surname Eichmann. Germanic genius at work, Aharoni mused. What he later called a “capital mistake” on Eichmann’s part.

And as he closed in on his target, Aharoni could take comfort in the fact that he was not alone out here in the diplomatic wilderness. As Bascomb writes:

“In every country, Aharoni knew, there were Jewish volunteers, known as sayanim, who were available to assist Mossad agents, whether it was with surveillance, transport, safe houses, or medical aid, or simply by standing on a corner and waiting for a messenger. They did not require compensation, and they knew not to ask questions or to utter a word about what they had done. Without them, the small Israeli secret service would not have had anything like the reach it actually had. Aharoni would need their help.”

In cooperation with one of these local allies, Aharoni procured a vehicle, which he drove straight away to Chacabuco Street, only to discover that the house at 4261 was completely, totally… empty. Nothing but hooks in the wall and weeds in the garden. Ricardo Klement doesn’t live there anymore, the neighbors explained. He recently moved away and left no forwarding address.

Sitting in the car down the street from 4261, Aharoni’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel. Great – a dead end on day one. Worst case scenario, Adolf Eichmann had been spooked by the inquisitive visit from Lothar Hermann’s daughter back in 1957 and went underground again. He might be in another hemisphere by now, safely cocooned in some new alias.

Where are you now, Adolf? Paraguay? Poland? Two houses down? Where were you, I wonder, in 1938, while my mother was dragging me by the hand, getting us out of Berlin two weeks before Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass? What were you doing in 1943, when I volunteered for the British Army in Palestine and fought Germans from Cairo to Italy. How many members of my extended family – all dead now – did you personally deport to the camps? The arid silence of Chacabuco Street offered Aharoni no answers to these questions, just the buzzsaw scream of droning cicadas. 

Mossad, unfortunately, was back to square one. But for Zvi Aharoni this was not a problem – merely a delay. He was an interrogator by trade; during his 10 years in Mossad’s investigations branch, he’d spent most of his time breaking into other men’s minds, peeling back their lies one layer at a time. In short, he knew the value of patience and persistence.

With a tire squeal and whiff of burnt rubber, Aharoni’s car peeled away from Chacabuco Street in search of fresh clues. Over the next few weeks, the Mossad agent pieced together the whereabouts of Ricardo Klement like scraps of a torn-up photograph.

Using a network of discreet intermediaries who spoke Spanish fluently, Aharoni interviewed neighbors, laborers, and civic workers. A conversation with a carpenter led to mechanic’s shop. A conversation with the mechanic led to a bus route heading out of the city. And the bus route led to an isolated stretch of land on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Posing as an American industrial developer, Aharoni visited local government offices and made inquiries about land records for the area: the names of every family, in every house. And after a little digging, wouldn’t you know it - one of those houses was registered to a “Mrs. Veronica Eichmann”.

With a relentless, feline patience, Aharoni narrowed the aperture of his search; until, on March 12^th, 1960, he looked through his binoculars at a depressing little domicile on Garibaldi Street, about an hour outside Buenos Aires.

“It was,” writes Bascomb, “a one-story brick house with a large wooden door and tiny windows. The masonry was unrendered and the roof flat [..] Apart from a cottage twenty yards up the street, there was not another place within a couple of hundred yards. The house looked more like a provincial jail than a home, an impression reinforced by the barred windows and the low brick wall and chicken wire fence surrounding the property. A wooden shed in the corner of the barren yard could have been an isolation cell.”

This is it, Aharoni assured himself.

Every piece of evidence he had gathered indicated that Adolf Eichmann and his family had moved from Chacabuco Street into this sad little house at the edge of nowhere. Supposedly, Eichmann, tired of paying rent at the Chacabuco House and wanting property of his own, had purchased this parcel of land and built the new house with his own two hands.  Oh Adolf, Aharoni must’ve thought, how far you’ve fallen from limousines, leather coats and champagne parties in Prague. You might’ve been the architect of Final Solution, but you aren’t much of an architect.

Convinced he had located Eichmann, but still requiring visual confirmation, Aharoni sent a coded telegram / message back to Isser Harel in Tel Aviv. “THE DRIVER IS RED”, it said. Which was code for “Klement is likely Eichmann”.

Once he had located the house on Garibaldi Street, Aharoni settled in and hunkered down, hoping to catch a glimpse of the former SS officer in the flesh.

In his novel The Russia House, the author John le Carre wrote that: “Spying is waiting. Spying is worrying. Spying is being yourself, only more so.” During his first few weeks in Argentina, Zvi Aharoni had done plenty of all three. He had endured the crushing monotony of stakeouts, the endless hours watching the same street, the same house, the same door. He had lied to strangers, while pretending to be their friend. He had laid awake at night, unfurling catastrophic scenarios in his stopwatch mind. But a few days later, on March 19^th, 1960, his patience was rewarded.

“On this day,” Aharoni wrote later, “I saw him for the first time.”

While slowly driving past the house on Garibaldi Street in a rented car, the Mossad agent got a good long look at a man hanging up clothes in the front yard. According to Bascomb:

“The man was at least fifty years old. He had a thin build and was probably between five feet seven and five feet nine inches tall. He was balding and had a high, sloped forehead.”

Zvi Aharoni had studied the photographs in Eichmann’s file a thousand times. He knew every curve of the man’s face by heart. Every wrinkle and hair, every angle from chin to cheekbone. After glimpsing the man from his passing car, Aharoni’s pupils dilated and his pulse quickened. That was him. As sure as God made Adam, Ricardo Klement was Adolf Eichmann. That evening, Aharoni sent a cable back to Israel. “THE DRIVER IS BLACK”, it said. Which was code for “Klement is Eichmann.”

Six time zones away, phones started ringing in Tel Aviv, Jaffa and Jerusalem, and a Mossad team began assembling for an imminent capture operation.

Aharoni was absolutely positive that the man he’d seen was Adolf Eichmann; but still, he could not leave anything to chance. Cavalier spy craft might work in an Ian Fleming novel, but in the real world, you don’t leave until you get the receipts. Aharoni knew that his word alone would not be enough for Isser Harel. Even here, he could feel the Chief’s eyes boring into the back of his head. Before Aharoni could go home, he had one last thing to do. He needed to get a clear photograph of Ricardo Klement. As Aharoni recalled:

“I knew I could not return to Tel Aviv without a conclusive answer. Yes or No. A ‘maybe’ or ‘possibly’ were not enough.”

Somehow, he needed to get up close and personal.

Throughout the history of modern espionage, spies have managed to fit cameras into all kinds of objects. Buttons, umbrellas, cigarette cartons – if it was commonplace, inconspicuous, and big enough to accommodate a lens and a shutter, the enterprising agents of the Cold War found a way to squeeze a camera inside.

To capture clear shots of Eichmann, Zvi Aharoni decided to use a briefcase camera. To the untrained eye, it was just a normal leather briefcase. Something any businessman or traveler would carry. But this particular briefcase contained, according to Neal Bascomb, “a lens which pointed out of a hole in one side and a small button by the handle released the shutter.”

Aharoni had the necessary equipment, but he also had a bit of a problem. He couldn’t just walk up to Eichmann’s house, knock on the door, and ask him to stand very still and look right here into the briefcase, please? As Aharoni remembered:

“Unfortunately, I was unable to do the job myself. To get a real good, up-close shot from the briefcase camera, I needed to be near the subject, speaking to him. My Spanish was not good enough for this. Therefore, I had no choice but to rely on local helpers.”

So, on the afternoon of April 3^rd, 1960, Aharoni hid beneath the tarp in the back of his Ford pickup, and peered through binoculars as a local helper named Rendi (R-E-N-D-I) marched up to the Eichmann house, briefcase in hand.

As Rendi approached the property line, Aharoni’s anxiety flared. “It is not easy to use a briefcase camera”, the spy recalled. All morning he had drilled Rendi on how to operate the device. Shutter speed, distance, light, exposure. Profile shots are imperative, Rendi. Do not angle the briefcase too low or else you’ll crop his face out of the shot. And remember, do not look down at the briefcase when you activate the shutter.

Shortly after Rendi approached the house, the man who might be Adolf Eichmann met him at the fence. Under the tarp, 75 yards away, Aharoni’s face was slick with sweat. He could not hear anything they were saying, but at the first sign of conflict or aggressive body language, he was prepared to leap out of the truck and rescue his brave volunteer. Thankfully, no such heroics were necessary. After about 2-3 minutes, Rendi turned around, left the property and boarded a bus back to Buenos Aires. “Everything went according to plan,” remembered Aharoni.

Later, at their rendezvous in the city, Rendi returned the briefcase to Aharoni, and the Mossad spy arranged to have the film developed. Three days later, Aharoni nervously removed the prints from the packet, and spread them out on the table in his hotel. “When I saw the pictures, my fears evaporated. Without prior experience, Rendi had managed to take four fantastic shots of Eichmann from every possible angle. […]  My mission was concluded. I could now return to Tel Aviv. “

On April 8^th, 1960, Aharoni took a taxi to the Buenos Aires airport and checked in to a transatlantic flight back to Israel, with a brief layover in Paris. After a long night of bad sleep on a cheap Parisian mattress, Aharoni boarded his second plane, and prepared to go home to Tel Aviv. The flight filled up quickly, rows upon rows of passengers from all over the world. But then, Aharoni caught sight of an unexpected, but familiar, face.

Isser Harel – all five-feet-two-inches of him – came ambling down the aisle, and plopped down in the seat next to Aharoni.  The Chief didn’t say a word, just stared straight ahead and smiled politely at the curvy flight attendants. Aharoni chewed his lip. All his years in Mossad, all his years as an interrogator and spy….and only Isser Harel was still capable of surprising him. / He was everywhere, and nowhere, full of tricks and tradecraft. Our very own Israeli Napoleon, burning alive with rage and ambition. Once the plane had lifted off the runway, Harel broke his priestly silence and muttered a question in Hebrew:

“Are you absolutely sure this is our man?”

Even now, the Chief was skeptical; distrustful of a truth this big. Discreetly, Aharoni reached into his pocket, and pulled out a thin strip of cellulose. A negative. Aharoni tried to sound as cool and calm as the Boss:

            “I have not the slightest doubt. Here’s the picture.”

Harel studied the photograph for the briefest moment, then handed it back. For all his faults, for all his shortcomings, Harel trusted his agents. He stretched back in his seat and spread the pages of an in-flight magazine.

            “In that case, we will go and get him.”

Aharoni exhaled, paused, then ventured a question. As he recalled years later:

“I could not help myself, I had to ask him. “Will I be a part of the team for the main operation? Harel laughed. “Have you any reason not to take part? We need you. I have already told Rafi to include you as the member of the team.”

Approval from a man like Harel was more than affirmation. It was oxygen.  Aharoni leaned back his seat.

“That made me feel very happy.”

----- MUSIC BREAK -------

THE TEAM

It’s late April, 1960.

About two weeks after Zvi Aharoni returned to Israel with the photographs of Adolf Eichmann.

We’re in the city of Tel Aviv, at the old stone house that serves as the humble headquarters of Mossad.

On this warm spring afternoon, Director Isser Harel is sitting behind a plain wooden desk, in his plain-furnished office. There are no decorations, no posters on the wall, no family photos. This is the streamlined, spartan workspace of someone who does not believe in the concept of personal comfort. In the ashtray, cigarette butts are piled up like spent bullets, remnants of midnight battles against deadlines, budgetary constraints, and myriad other operational complexities.

Harel’s office may not be lavish, but he does enjoy one luxury that many of his counterparts in America, Britain, and even the Soviet Union do not: Complete lack of oversight or accountability to the Israeli public. As journalist Ronan Bergman writes:

“Israeli intelligence from the outset occupied a shadow realm, one adjacent to yet separate from the country’s democratic institutions. The activities of the [Israeli] intelligence community—most of it (Shin Bet and the Mossad) under the direct command of the prime minister (David Ben-Gurion)—took place without any effective supervision by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, or by any other independent external body.”

[…]“Mentioning the name Mossad in public was prohibited until the 1960s. Because their existence could not be acknowledged, Ben-Gurion prevented the creation of a legal basis for those same agencies’ operations. No law laid out their goals, roles, missions, powers, or budgets or the relations between them.

“In this shadow realm, “state security” was used to justify a large number of actions and operations that, in the visible world, would have been subject to criminal prosecution and long prison terms: constant surveillance of citizens because of their ethnic or political affiliations; interrogation methods that included prolonged detention without judicial sanction, and torture; perjury in the courts and concealment of the truth from counsel and judges.”

In short, Mossad had carte blanche to operate any time, any where, any way they saw fit. To sabotage and surveil, to abduct and assassinate, to do anything and everything in the name of making the world safer for Israelis. Or at least more dangerous for their enemies, anyway / Jewish Israelis anyway. And today, Harel is very grateful for that long leash; because the operation they are about to embark upon – kidnapping an Argentinian citizen from his home and transporting him to face justice in a country in which he has never lived – is extremely illegal. But ‘extremely illegal’ is Isser Harel’s specialty. When dealing with monsters like Adolf Eichmann, he would argue, sometimes a little illegality is exactly what the doctor ordered. Besides, Mossad had already been given an effective green light from the highest legal authority in Israel. As Bascomb writes:

“The two top lawyers of the Israeli government gave their approval. Although abducting Eichmann would violate Argentine sovereignty, this was solely an issue of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In their view, it did not affect Israeli jurisdiction to prosecute Eichmann, because, they believed, Germany was never going to pursue extradition seriously, let alone hold a trial. With their legal consent secured, nothing stood in the way of the operation moving to the next stage.”

As Harel finishes reading a file on his desk, he looks up at the 7 men assembled in his office, waiting obediently/silently for him to speak. This is the team, the group of Mossad agents that will shortly be deployed to Argentina to capture Adolf Eichmann and bring him back to Israel.

“It was a good team,” writes Neil Bascomb, “Each member had almost a decade of experience in Israeli intelligence services. They spoke a wide range of languages—key to keeping their cover. […] They knew one another extremely well and had worked together on numerous assignments. They understood one another’s strengths and weaknesses, could communicate without speaking, and, most important, had absolute trust in one another.”

The team was also bound together in a shared hatred of their target. As a key member of the operation recalled, “except for one, every one of us had lost immediate family in the camps.”

But these men were not just selected for their fervor, or the depth of their animus. Each of them possesses a unique skillset and specialization that will be vital to the success of the mission. Like contrasting colors brought together in a fashionable outfit, each one is stronger for the others’ presence. For the last 3 weeks, Isser Harel has been meticulously vetting and hand-picking his pack of hunting hounds; and now he is ready to set them loose.

A quick camera-pan around the room reveals a team of many talents.

[ and meet the members of this operation.]

The very first thing the Mossad agents would have to do, was get into Argentina undetected, without arousing the suspicions of the local authorities. To do this, they could not enter the country using their real identities. Thankfully, they have an expert document and passport forger, a man named Shalom Dani. As Bascomb writes:

“Dani had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp by fashioning a pass out of toilet paper, and they would need his exceptional skills for all the forged passports, driver’s licenses, and other identification documents they would require.”

Once they had passed safely through customs, the team would need to navigate a city, culture, and language that was more-or-less completely alien to them. For that, they had a man named Ephraim Ilani.

Ilani possessed a “encyclopedic knowledge of Buenos Aires and fluency in Spanish,” according to Bascomb, “[…] he could brief them on local customs, including everything from how to rent a car or a safe house to normal behavior at cafés and hotels, traffic conditions, airport procedures, and styles of dress.”

That was all well and good, but a spy cannot rely on fashion and forgeries alone for protection. If the Team ran into any trouble, either from local police, gangs, or the Eichmann boys themselves, they needed muscle. They needed men who knew how to fight, disarm, and if necessary – kill. For that, they had Moshe Tabor. As Bascomb writes:

“Tabor was not only a strongman—his hands were the size of baseball mitts—but also a technical master who could create suitcases with false bottoms, overhaul a car engine, fix a submachine gun, pick any lock, and build a safe room that would never be discovered. [In the early post-war years,] Tabor had “joined avenger groups operating in Germany and Austria, and he had hunted down, interrogated, and then killed numerous SS men.”

Moshe Tabor and another strongman, Peter Malkin, would be responsible for physically subduing Eichmann once they’d worked out when and where to abduct him.

Once they had him, the captive Eichmann would be taken to a safe house and subjected to a rigorous interrogation. The idea was to extract a written confession that Ricardo Klement was indeed Adolf Eichmann. This would make things much easier for the prosecutors in Jerusalem.

To get past Eichmann’s mental defenses, to earn his trust, soothe his fears, and gain his cooperation, they would need a very skilled interrogator. Thankfully, they had one. Our old friend, Zvi Aharoni - the agent who had tracked Eichmann down, confirmed his identity, and secured clear photographs of the former SS officer – was also an interrogation specialist. When the time came, Aharoni would crack Eichmann’s mind like a vault.  

To orchestrate all these moving parts and direct the mission on the ground in Buenos Aires, Isser Harel has chosen a man named Rafi Eitan as Team Leader, an experienced and ruthless covert operative who has killed more than a few people for the Israeli cause. Rounding out the team, and serving as Rafi Eitan’s deputy, was a man named Avraham Shalom. The 8^th  and final member of the team, Yaakov Gat, was already in Argentina making preliminary arrangements for their arrival.

These 8 men - Aharoni, Malkin, Dani, Tabor, Ilani, Eitan, Shalom and Gat – formed the core members of the Mossad team. There would be other specialists who provided assistance at various stages of the operation, but these were the main guys. They were young; they were experienced; and they were very, very motivated. They were also understandably nervous. This would easily be the most elaborate mission any of them had ever undertaken.

“It was essentially three operations rolled into one,” writes Bascomb, “They needed to capture Eichmann alive, without being seen or followed. Then they would have to keep him in a secure location, avoiding detection, for an indeterminate period of time, until the plans for the third part of the mission fell into place—smuggling Eichmann out of Argentina in complete secrecy. Nobody could know who had taken him until he was in an Israeli prison and Harel’s people all were safe.”

Such a complex operation carried significant risks, of course. Not only for the team’s personal safety, but for Mossad’s reputation, and the international standing of their country. As Bascomb writes:

There were] many challenges they would face […] First, the mission would occur almost nine thousand miles away in a country few of his agents knew and whose language even fewer of them spoke. Second, the environment would be hostile. […] There were many within the halls of power—whether civil or military—who were at best antagonistic to Israel and Jews. In January 1960, there had been an outbreak of attacks on Jewish synagogues, clubs, and homes, just as there had been in Europe. The city also had a large German community, including some former Nazis, who would add to the danger. Third, at such a distance, Harel’s agents would not have easy, quick communication with Tel Aviv. They would be traveling under false identities, completely alone and without official cover, unable to call on local support because of the mission’s secrecy. Fourth, if they were discovered, they faced imprisonment—or worse—for violating Argentine sovereignty. Israel would incur no end of international political problems, and the black mark against the Mossad would inhibit its activities elsewhere. Fifth, their target was a former seasoned officer in one of the most deadly security forces in history. Eichmann had intimate knowledge of surveillance and operational tactics, and he knew how to defend himself. During the war, he had been very careful about his security and had never moved around unarmed. Fifteen years may have passed since peace had been brokered with Germany, but Eichmann had spent that time in hiding, and for him the need to stay vigilant remained.”

And so, in the 3^rd week of April, all members of the Mossad team have gathered here, in Isser Harel’s office, for one last meeting before they deploy to Argentina. Despite his small stature, the force of the Director’s personality towers over everyone in the room. He is the Chief. The Boss. They will follow him to Argentina or hell itself – whichever has the shortest layover. Harel is the maestro of this clandestine symphony. Everyone has their instrument. They have their sheet music. All that’s left to do, is play.

And although he is not the sentimental type, Harel knows the value of a good pep talk. Before the team departs for Buenos Aires, he leaves them with a few words:

“I want to begin by speaking to you from my heart. This is a national mission of the first degree. It is not an ordinary capture operation, but the capture of a hideous Nazi criminal, the most horrible enemy of the Jewish people. We are not performing this operation as adventurers but as representatives of the Jewish people and the state of Israel. Our objective is to bring Eichmann back safely, fully in good health, so he can be put to trial. “There might well be difficult repercussions. We know this. We have not only the right but also the moral duty to bring this man to trial. You must remember this throughout the weeks ahead. You are guardian angels of justice, the emissaries of the Jewish people. […]

Suddenly, Harel slams his fist down onto the wooden table. If the men in the room were not so accustomed to gunshots, they might’ve flinched or jumped.

 “We will bring Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem,” Harel continues, “and perhaps the world will be reminded of its responsibilities. It will be recognized that, as a people, we never forgot. Our memory reaches back through recorded history. The memory book lies open, and the hand still writes.”

And with that, like a passing thunderstorm, Harel’s show of emotion dissipates, and he is the ice-cold Chief yet again. A few minutes later, the team departed the old stone house, and over the next few days, they all arrived in Argentina on separate flights, by separate routes, with separate responsibilities.

As the sun sets over Tel Aviv, Harel’s mind indulges in a brief flicker of selfish optimism. The risks of failure were great, but the potential rewards were incalculable. Intoxicating, even. As Gordon Thomas writes, a successful mission would “place Mossad at the forefront of the global intelligence community. No other service had dared to attempt such an operation.”

Isser Harel, director of the most feared intelligence agency on earth. Ooh. He liked the sound of that. Snapping out his ambitious daydream, Harel switches off the lights and shuts his office door. No time to dally, after all.  

He has a flight to catch.

--- MUSIC BREAK ------

THE GRAB

It’s the night of May 11^th, 1960.

About 7 o’clock PM.

It’s been two weeks since the 8-man Mossad team first arrived in Argentina. 

We’re in the passenger seat of black Buick limousine, driving carefully through the streets of Buenos Aires. Outside the car’s thick glass windows, the city’s mood is jubilant and energetic.

The 150^th anniversary of Argentina’s independence is just two weeks away, and preparations for a historic celebration are in full swing. Military vehicles are being polished for a huge parade, bars are being stocked with every liquor imaginable, and hotels are being cleaned to accommodate distinguished guests from all over the world.

But the mood inside this car is very different. In here, in this pocket universe of four doors and an engine, no one speaks, and no one smiles. The four men in this car are completely focused on the task ahead of them. It is not an exaggeration to say that tonight is the most important night of their lives. And what happens in the next 45 minutes may very well alter the course of history.

At the wheel, driving the car, is Zvi Aharoni. His leather driving gloves creak softly as he turns onto a highway heading out of the city. Sitting beside him is Rafi Eitan, the team leader. Moshe Tabor and Peter Malkin, the strongmen and operational muscle, are looming in the backseat like twin gargoyles. Four other members of the team are following close behind in a second car, a black Chevrolet. Driving with a grandmotherly adherence to local traffic laws, Aharoni is careful not to draw any attention to the vehicle. Because tonight is the night.

In less than an hour, if all goes well, they will have taken Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, into their custody.

On the other side of Buenos Aires, at a Mercedes-Benz factory in the industrial district, “Ricardo Klement” is just clocking out of work. Since he arrived in Argentina back in 1950, Klement (nee Eichmann) has held a number of odd jobs, none of them particularly lucrative or glamorous – chicken farmer, land surveyor – but employment at the auto factory, helpfully arranged by a former SS contact, is the best job Ricardo has procured thus far. As Bascomb writes:

“At the plant, he clocked in like everyone else and put on a pair of dark blue Mercedes-Benz overalls to keep from dirtying his pants and shirt. As foreman, he spent the morning walking the assembly line, inspecting the work in progress. When the 12:30 P.M. whistle blew, Eichmann took his lunch break, alone, at the same restaurant a block away from the plant at which he ate every working day. An hour later, he returned to work exactly on time and finished out his shift. Typically, he left the plant in time to catch the 6:15 bus back to the Saavedra Bridge, but that evening he had a short trade union meeting to attend. Otherwise, it was just another day.”

Truth be told, Ricardo likes working at the factory. He appreciates the order of it, the rigid military efficiency of the assembly line. Raw material goes in, and finished product comes out. Metal is bent, cut, heated and sheered. Paint is applied and chemical polish is sprayed. All of it done by men who understand the virtue of working diligently for a larger goal they cannot see. Men who understand how to follow instructions without thought, question or reflection.

It reminds Ricardo of a better time. A time when he had not been a mere foreman, but a celebrated Obersturmbannfuher conducting his very own symphony of factory precision. But his raw material had been people. His product, peace and security for the Reich. His tools were not steel and paint and polish, but railway networks and deportation papers and carbon monoxide gas.

But, he sighs to himself, those days are over. That man, Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, no longer exists. Only Ricardo Klement remains. He should be thankful, he supposes. Thankful to be alive, walking free in the post-war world. Maybe someday, if the tide ever turns in Germany, he could return to his homeland. He could take his rightful place in the leadership of a revived Nazi party, with quieter methods and less overt intentions. Maybe someday, Adolf Eichmann will rise from the dead.

Ricardo’s thoughts are interrupted by the sharp hiss of an arriving city bus. After a long day on the factory floor, it’s time to go home. But what Ricardo does not know, is that he will never step foot in his house again.

Twenty miles away, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Zvi Aharoni turns off the highway and onto Garibaldi Street. After two weeks of rigorous, daily surveillance, he knows these country roads like the lines of his own face. If pressed, every man on the Mossad team could draw a perfect map of the area. Day after day after day, they have drilled it into their heads. Not only have they memorized the geography, they have memorized Adolf Eichmann’ daily routine, down to the minute.

“Every night was the same,” writes Neal Bascomb, “At 7:40 P.M., bus 203 stopped at the kiosk on the narrow highway 110 yards from the corner of Garibaldi Street; the man exited the bus; another passenger, a woman, also exited at the same stop. They separated. Sometimes the man stopped at the kiosk for a pack of cigarettes, but this never took more than a minute. Then he crossed the street and walked toward his house. If a car approached, he turned on his flashlight—one end red, the other white—to signal his presence. When he reached his property, he circled the house once before entering, as if checking that all was secure. Inside, he greeted his wife and young son, lit a few additional kerosene lamps, and then sat down for dinner. He was a man of precise routines and schedules. His predictability made him vulnerable.”

Kidnapping a man from his own street is no easy feat. So many things can go wrong, and go wrong quickly. What if he fights, what if he screams, what if someone sees and calls the police? With all those dangers in mind, the Mossad team decided that the best opportunity to snatch Adolf Eichmann was in the narrow window of time when he was walking the 100 meter distance from the bus stop back to his house.

A week earlier, in their Buenos Aires safe house, a plan had taken shape. Initially, Aharoni had suggested that they position the strongmen, Moshe Tabor and Peter Malkin, in the field next to Eichmann’s house. When Eichmann walked by, they would jump from their hiding spots, subdue him, and two cars would swiftly pick them up. Peter Malkin, the muscle, rejected this idea immediately. Zvi Aharoni was a fine spy and a skilled interrogator, no one was denying that, but he was ignoring certain operational realities. First of all, Malkin pointed out, what hiding spot?

The area surrounding Garibaldi Street was, in Bascomb’s words a “flat, treeless plain”. There were no corners to hide behind, no alcoves to lurk in. Even in the darkness, Eichmann would see them coming from a mile away. No, Malkin argued, we need a plausible reason for our cars to be on that exact road at that exact time. What if… we park one car on the road leading to his house, and put the hood up, as if we’ve broken down in the middle of nowhere? Argentinian cars are shit; we all know this; most of them are falling apart. Eichmann might be surprised that a random car is on his road, but a breakdown will not seem overly suspicious. The second car will be parked nearby, with its headlights on, effectively blinding Eichmann and reducing his ability to discern our faces as he approaches. Then, when he gets close enough, we grab him, stuff him in the car, and get the fuck out of there.

Malkin’s plan wasn’t perfect, but Aharoni acknowledged that it was “the lesser evil compared to any other variation.”

And now, sitting in the car on Garibaldi Street on the night on May 11^th, Aharoni prays that everything goes right. He checks his watch. It’s 7:25 PM. According to the bus schedule, Eichmann will be arriving in exactly 15 minutes. In the backseat, Peter Malkin cracks his knuckles and pulls on a pair of heavy gloves. The thought of directly touching Adolf Eichmann’s skin is physically repulsive to him.

A few miles away, on the bus from Buenos Aires, Ricardo Klement stares silently out the window, looking at his own reflection in the black mirror of the glass. A storm is gathering on the horizon. He can hear the roll of thunder and see the occasional crack of lightning in the distance. Beneath his button-down shirt, his stomach churns and gurgles. It’s been a long day at the factory; He hopes Vera has something tasty in the oven.

Back at Garibaldi Street, Zvi Aharoni looks at his watch again. It’s 7:39pm. One more minute to go. Outside the car, Moshe Tabor and Peter Malkin are huddled over the raised hood of the Buick, pretending to work on the engine. And as 7:39 becomes 7:40, the Mossad agents hold their breath, waiting for Bus 203 to arrive. But to their confusion and alarm, the bus doesn’t show up. 7:41, 7:42, 7:43 and the bus is still not here. Then, to their relief, at 7:44, the bus turns onto the street.

“The lights from the bus cut through the night,” writes Bascomb, “but instead of stopping opposite the kiosk, the bus kept going past the second capture car and underneath the railway embankment, and then it was gone. It had not even slowed down near its usual stop. Instantly, a rush of doubt overcame the team. Had Eichmann altered his schedule or gone on vacation? Had he simply returned early from work? Or, worst of all, had he learned of their presence and fled from Buenos Aires?”

In the front seat of the Buick, Aharoni turns to Rafi Eitan, the team leader. “Do we take off, or wait?” It was a valid question. Every extra minute the cars stayed loitering on the street, the more suspicious they would look. The lights of the Eichmann house were on, and silhouettes were passing in the windows. Vera was making dinner. Dieter or Nick might even be inside. This was getting risky. Rafi Eitan hisses an answer to Aharoni’s question. “No. We stay.”

At 8:05 PM, after twenty torturous minutes, another city bus turns onto the road and lurches to a halt. Inside the bus, Ricardo Klement rises from his seat, nods at the driver, and steps out into the crisp night air. The storm is closer now, the wind is whipping, the thunder is booming, but still no rain. With a tired sigh, Ricardo pulls his coat tighter and begins the short walk back to his house.

Suddenly, a black car parked down the road turns on its headlights, flooding the street with a sharp, blinding beam. What’s this joker doing? Ricardo wonders. Bit late for loitering on the street. Annoyed, Ricardo turns onto Garibaldi Street. Despite the bright headlights from the vehicle on his right, Ricardo sees another parked car, a Buick, silhouetted against the warm glow from his house. The hood is up and a pair of men are hunched over it, tinkering with the engine. Bad time to break down, he thinks, in the middle of a thunderstorm.

As the distance between Ricardo and the car narrows, a looming shape rises from the darkness. A man – a big man -  is approaching him, probably to ask for help with the car. Not on your life buddy Ricardo thinks,– I’ve had a long day, and I’m ready to be home. The shape gets closer, and closer, and then it speaks:

“Un momentito, senor.”

“Just a moment, sir.”

Only seven syllables, but from the second he hears them, Ricardo’s survival instincts light up like a switchboard. The voice sounds wrong. It sounds nervous, hostile, excited, panicked – all at once. Ricardo’s eyes widen, and he takes a step back, but before he can turn to run, the man’s gloved hand shoots out and clamps down on his right arm. The momentum sends Ricardo tumbling to the ground, rolling into the ditch next to the road. Covered in thick mud, Ricardo is kicking, thrashing, punching, scratching -  but the other man is a giant - a golem. A hand wraps around Ricardo’s throat and squeezes. Escaping its grasp for a moment, Ricardo screams as loud as he can, he shrieks and wails and howls. If Dieter or Nick can hear him, they will come and help. Through the commotion, Ricardo hears the engine of the nearby car roar and rev; they are pressing down the gas pedal, he realizes, to drown out my screams. Suddenly, another pair of hands yanks his legs forward. An oily leather glove clamps down on his mouth, and he is dragged out of the ditch and thrown like a sack into the backseat of the Buick.  

Then the car is driving, peeling away from Garibaldi Street, vanishing into the night with a crack of thunder. A face comes very close to Ricardo and growls in his ear, in German:

“Sit still and nothing will happen to you. If you resist, we will shoot you. Do you understand?”

Ricardo is too scared to respond. Too scared to even think. He says nothing. 

Again, the voice is in his ear, this time in Spanish, shouting:

“Can you hear me? Do you understand me? What language do you speak?”

"¿Qué idioma hablas?"

Through the blinding, animal panic, a flame of understanding lights up Ricardo’s mind. Jews. These men are Jews. They found me. Somehow, after all these years, they found me. And now, they’re going to kill me. He takes a deep breath and responds in German:

“I have already accepted my fate.”

Suddenly, the men in the car are shaking hands. There is an air of relief and celebration. Then, without a word of warning, a pair of thick goggles, covered with adhesive tape, are pulled roughly over Ricardo’s face, completely obscuring his vision. Under the crushing immensity of the fear, the adrenaline saturating his senses, and the complete absence of visual stimuli, Adolf Eichmann’s mind goes black.

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

THE PRISONER

With a sudden spasm of panic, Adolf Eichmann jerks awake.

For the briefest moment, he thinks that it might all have been just a bad dream. The black car, the lightning, the giant’s hands around his neck and the hot breath in his ear.

But those hopes shatter quickly. When Eichmann opens his eyes, he cannot see. He feels the rubber straps of the taped-up goggles digging into his scalp. He feels the chain around his leg, and the spongy mattress beneath his body.

With a sickening feeling, Eichmann realizes he does not know what time it is. It could be the middle of the day, or the dead of night. It could be Tuesday or Saturday or judgement day for all he knows. Linear time seems to have melted away. Who knows how long he’s been chained up in the dark.

Like a polaroid slowly developing, memories of the last few days, start to sharpen.

After they’d grabbed him – whoever “they” were exactly – the car had driven around for almost an hour, only stopping twice. From what Eichmann could hear from the floor of the backseat, his captors seemed to be changing the license plates of the vehicle, probably to confuse or shake off any pursuers. This precaution almost amused Eichmann. No one is coming for me. There is no squadron of former SS commandos knocking on doors in Buenos Aires. I am alone. Utterly and completely alone.

Well, not exactly alone. There was of course, the Voice. All these scary men, and only one is allowed to talk to me. That’s smart on their part. If I happen to escape or get away, the less I know about them, the better. 

After an hour of driving, the car had stopped, strong hands had hauled him out of the vehicle, and guided him across a tile floor, into what he assumed was a makeshift cell. They sat him down on the mattress, and stripped off his muddy clothes. Then he felt hands. Fingers in his mouth, probing for cyanide capsules. Gloved digits jabbing at his scars, scribbling in notebooks. Maybe this is what all those Jewish deportees felt like, reduced to their underwear at the camps. At least they had their families with them.

Then, the Voice spoke. The interrogator, Eichmann assumed. 

“What is your name?” the Voice said.

“Ricardo Klement,” Eichmann answered.

“What was your previous name?” the Voice asked.

“Otto Heninger,” Eichmann responded. For a moment, he almost missed those quiet trees in Northern Germany. His days as a simple lumberjack. Maybe he never should have left.

Like a biblical flood, the Voice riddled his brain with questions at machine-gun speed.

How tall are you? What is your shoe size? When was your third son born? What is his name? What size shirt do you wear? Eichmann’s mind reeled. Then the Voice asked a more important question:

“What was the number of your membership card in the National Socialist Party?”

Adolf Eichmann knows that they have him. There is no point in lying. If he lies, they’ll just torture him. Break his kneecaps with a hammer; pull out his fingernails with plyers. If he is going to die, let it be without pain. He raises his chin and answers, “889895”

A pause; A scratch of a pen; then a follow-up question.

“What was your number in the SS”.

“45326”.

“Under what name were your born?”

The prisoner’s shoulders fall, and he responds:

“Adolf Eichmann.”

A crushing silence fell over the room. The interrogator, the Voice, says nothing. For all Eichmann knows, they might have a gun pointed at his head. For all he knows, they might fire in the next second. In desperation, he speaks:

“You can quite easily understand that I’m agitated. I would like to ask for a little wine, if it’s possible—red wine—to help me control my emotions.”

“We will bring you something to drink.” The Voice replies, not unkindly.

Emboldened, Eichmann continues talking:

“As soon as you told me to keep quiet, there in the car, I knew I was in the hands of Israelis. “I know Hebrew. I learned it from Rabbi Leo Baeck. Sh’ma Yisrael, Ha’Shem Elokeinu—”

The voice snaps angrily, and tells him to shut the fuck up. A moment later, the door slams shut, and Eichmann is alone in the dark.

Outside the makeshift cell, on the other side of the door, Zvi Aharoni smiles broadly at the other members of the team. Hands are shaken, and congratulations are exchanged. We got him. As Aharoni remembered: “We had come out of the tunnel “Bright sunshine.” Flush with the thrill of success, the Mossad team allows themselves a brief moment of decompression. They successfully captured the Adolf Eichmann. “We were happy,” recalled Aharoni. But then, someone asks a question, breaking the levity.

Where are his glasses?

Heads turn, eyes squint. What do you mean, someone asks nervously.

When he got off the bus, he was wearing glasses. He’s not wearing them now. They’re not in the car. Tell me we didn’t leave behind his glasses for his wife and sons to find outside their house. That is clear evidence that he’s been taken, not missing, taken. That realization deflates the celebratory atmosphere. 

EXFIL

The next day, May 12^th, 1960, a café in Buenos Aires opens its doors. The patio is swept. Table umbrellas are opened, and coffee machines begin to percolate. As the sun breaks over a new day in the Argentinian capitol, a waiter walks briskly to a table with a steaming cup of black coffee, and sets it down in front of Isser Harel, chief of Mossad.

Harel is what you might call a “hands-on” intelligence director. Rather than waiting for a phone to ring in Tel Aviv, he has chosen to personally come to Argentina to oversee the mission to capture Adolf Eichmann. It was a huge risk of course; As Bascomb writes:

“Having any intelligence agent caught on foreign soil was a problem; having the chief of Israel’s security services caught would be a disaster.”

But the line between disaster and success is thin enough to slice a pomegranate/grape, and Harel is willing to risk international embarrassment to effectively micromanage this Nazi-hunting safari. This successful Nazi-hunting safari, he should say. As of 8:55 PM yesterday evening, Harel has been informed, Eichmann was safely in Israeli hands. The Mossad team has imprisoned him in a safehouse in the city, and Zvi Aharoni’s multi-step interrogation is already underway.

Harel takes a sip of his coffee. Beneath the sweetness of the sugar, a bitterness begins to rise. Getting Eichmann was the easy part. Getting him out of Argentina, is another matter entirely. The exfiltration of their Mossad team and their vert special package will take some significant sleight of hand.

Thankfully, Harel has been working on this particular problem for weeks.

Mossad had crossed an ocean to apprehend Eichmann; and they would have to cross an ocean to get him back to Israel. This left only two possibilities. They could transport their captive by air or by sea. The latter option presented…challenges. As Bascomb writes:

“Chartering a special ship would require a sixty-day roundtrip journey with multiple stops—too slow and too risky given the need to anchor in foreign ports. If their kidnapping was exposed before they returned to Israel, the ship would be an easy target. That left air travel.”

Putting Eichmann on a plane was the preferred option, but they couldn’t just walk him through security, buy him a good book to pass the time, and sit down in coach. They needed to be on an airline they could control, with a flight crew that was fully aware of their cargo, that would be arriving and leaving in exactly the right time frame, all while raising minimal suspicion from the Argentinian government. A tall order for any transatlantic flight. But fate, it seems, has seen fit to smile on Isser Harel’s operation.

In less than two weeks, On May 25th, 1960, Argentina will be celebrating the 150^th anniversary of its colonial rebellion and subsequent independence from Spain. There will be champagne toasts and tank parades. Dignitaries and diplomats from all over the world have been invited, including…. a delegation from Israel. To ferry its political representatives to South America, the Israeli airline El Al (E-L, A-L) would be making its first ever transatlantic flight to Buenos Aires.

In Isser Harel’s view, it is the perfect cover. As one historian wrote:

“The El Al aircraft, with its all-Israeli crew, provided the means by which Eichmann could be smuggled out of the country under the very noses of the Argentine authorities.

It was perfect plan, with an imperfect time table. Due to logistical delays, the El Al flight would not be arriving until May 20^th. That means that the Mossad team would have to keep Eichmann hidden and under guard for nine days and ten nights. It was a pressure keenly felt back at the safehouse. Rafi Eitan, the team leader, had imposed stringent controls on Eichmann’s enclosure. As Bascomb writes:

Eitan had already instituted a twenty-four-hour watch in rotating three-hour shifts. He wanted a guard in the room with Eichmann at all times. He wanted the door always open, the light always on, and he planned on sleeping in the adjoining room, just in case. What was more, he wanted the goggles to remain over the prisoner’s eyes until he was in Israel. This not only reduced his chances of escape, but also, if he somehow did manage to get away, he would not be able to identify them. Eitan figured that their prisoner was already crafting a plan for how to get out of the house.

And then, the exhausted / restless Mossad team acknowledged, there was the problem of the missing glasses. In the scuffle on Garibaldi Street, Eichmann’s glasses had fallen off. They were probably half buried in the mud or laying on the asphalt. When Eichmann’s family realized that he had not come home, they would search the area, and find the glasses and know that he was *taken*; not missing or out drinking – taken. Then they would file a police report, and Eichmann’s former SS contacts in Buenos Aires would start looking for him. They’d ask neighbors about any suspicious cars in the area. About make and model and license plate numbers.

In short, the clock was ticking.

The longer the Mossad team stayed in Buenos Aires with their captive, the greater their risk of exposure and discovery. With that threat looming, certain contingencies had been agreed upon. If the Argentinian police kicked down the door, Rafi Eitan planned to handcuff himself to Eichmann and demand to see their superior officer. It would be an international scandal for Israel, but it would at least reveal that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina and subject him to legal scrutiny. If it was not the police who came, but Eichmann’s sons or his ex-Nazi compatriots, the strongman Moshe Tabor was prepared to lock himself in the room with Eichmann and strangle him to death. He would not mind one more SS life on his conscience. In fact, it would be a pleasure. Yes, One way or another, Adolf Eichmann was going to face justice.

There was, however, one silver lining to the El Al flight delay. It allowed plenty of time for Zvi Aharoni to continue his interrogation [of the prisoner / of Eichmann]

INTERROGATION

In the days since he had been taken, Eichmann had started behaving in a way astonished his Israeli captors. As Bascomb writes:

He was obedient to the point of subservience. When they had brought him to the bathroom for the first time, he had asked permission before having a bowel movement. When finished, he had asked if he could have some toilet paper. Tabor was reminded of German prisoners after the war who would polish the heads of nails when ordered to do so without so much as a mutter of protest. Eichmann was also clearly too scared to attempt any resistance. When told to stand, he would obey but would tremble uncontrollably.

Earlier that afternoon, when they had brought him out for some exercise, he had asked if they were taking him outside to kill him. Their assurances to the contrary did little to relax him. Now that it was clear that Eichmann was no threat either to them personally or as an escape risk, they were overwhelmed with disgust at having to be so close to him. This was the man who had driven many in their own families to their deaths. They had to feed him, to dress him, to shave him, to accompany him to the bathroom, and to tend to his every discomfort. It would have been easier had they felt only hatred toward him, but unexpectedly, he looked and acted too pathetic and sheepish to inspire that emotion.

They were contemptuous of his presence, especially when they considered those they had lost because of his actions. But most of all, they were burdened by other unsettling emotions, namely their frustrating inability to reconcile the pitiful nature of their prisoner with the fact that he had been responsible for the deaths of so many Jews. This conflict cast a pall over the house.

The only person who was allowed to talk to Eichmann during this prolonged period was Zvi Aharoni, and the interrogator intended to get the most of that time. Aharoni, according to Bettina Stangneth, was often referred to as Mossad’s “grand inquisitor.”

But unlike the Catholic turnscrews of old, who had stretched Spanish Jews over the rack, Aharoni preferred not to use physical violence. His was a more subtle art. Conversation and questions and comforting indulgences are more effective than any blade or car battery. Words were a wedge, to peel back the mental defenses like a psychological epidermis, and to probe the beating organs of thought inside. You don’t need to hurt people to get them to talk, at least not physically. To get the truth, you don’t need to pull out fingernails or smash bones with a hammer. You just need patience and the right words. With the right words, you can split a man up the middle and watch all his secrets tumble steaming to the ground. 

Over the course of their conversations, Aharoni got Eichmann to tell him his entire post-war story. How he had slipped away from the American POW camp. How he had hidden in the woods for four years, working as a lumberjack. How he had contacted the underground SS network – the ratline - and received a new identity from the Argentinian government with the cooperation of Swiss authorities, and the Catholic church.

But then, Aharoni remembered, “I asked him a question one day that threw him completely off-balance. I asked him whether he was prepared to come to Israel and face a judge for his crimes. His initial reaction was violent and negative. “I have not committed any crimes and I’m not prepared to go anywhere with you.”

“Think about it,” I said to him, “We have plenty of time.” The following day I repeated my question. He told me that he had laid awake for half the night and thought about it. “And what do you think now? I wanted to know. Hesitantly and choosing his words carefully, he replied in a very low voice, almost in a whisper, “I am prepared to face a court and I will prove to the whole world that I only obeyed orders and never committed any crimes. But not in Israel. I do not owe Israel anything. If at all, I owe an accounting to Germany and Argentina, where I am a citizen. I am prepared to face court in one of these two countries.”

Aharoni laughed bitterly, almost angrily:

“You can’t be serious. You insult my intelligence. You know very well that we can never accept such a suggestion. 15 years after the war neither of these two countries has the slightest interest in a court case against you. Your suggestion sounds like a direct refusal.”

“How about Austria?” He interrupted me, “My family lives in Austria and I lived there myself for many years.”

“Stop insulting me,” Aharoni snapped, “It will either be in Israel or not at all. Either you agree or you refuse. But do not try and cloud the issue. Think about it carefully.We have lots of time. You should not gain any false impressions. It will be a fair trial before the world and the media. You may choose your own defense lawyer. If you have committed no wrong, you have nothing to fear. Think about it.”

The next day, a chastened Eichmann said he would willingly come to Israel to face judgement. Aharoni promptly asked for a written statement, and the former Obersturmbannfurher agreed. His goggles were removed and he was given a pen. Tte statement read:

“I, Adolf Eichmann declare here with my own free well: Since my true identity is now known I recognize there was no sense in attempting to evade justice any longer. I declare myself willing to go to Israel and face proceedings there before a competent court. I am making this declaration of my own free well. No promises were made to me nor was I threatened in anyway. I wish finally to find peace of mind again.”

Zvi Aharoni took the pen from Eichmann’s hand, capped it, and shut the door behind himg. The SS Colonel had been captured, interrogated, and broken.

Now all that was left to do, was get him out of Argentina.

----- MUSIC BREAK ----

THE DOCTOR

It’s December of 1954.

Six years before the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann.

We’re in downtown Paris / We are in Paris – the so-called “city of lights”. And tonight, just a few weeks before Christmas, the city is working hard to earn that well-worn moniker. As the sun goes down, neon lights flicker and blaze to life. Cinemas and cafes and night clubs wink seductively at passing pedestrians, while the improvisational rhythms of jazz trumpets fight for supremacy against cheerful yuletide bells. And above it all, burning like a spear tip over the skyline, is the famous Eiffel Tower, which the world pretends to love and the French pretend to hate.

Walking briskly through this well-lit wonderland, his coat pulled tight against the Christmas chill, new shoes rasping against the sidewalk, is a man named Alexander Ibor. (I-B-O-R) Casting a nervous glance over his shoulder, Ibor stops for a quick smoke. He inhales the nicotine like a shipwrecked man gulping down freshwater. The cigarettes are French, but Ibor is not. In fact, he is very, very far from home.

Ibor is an Israeli citizen. Well, was an Israeli citizen. After what he has done – the state secrets he has stolen and sold - he can never set foot in Israel again. Until very recently, Ibor was a captain in the Israeli Navy, a position that granted him access to all kinds of classified information – locations of military bases, prototype plans for electronic jamming equipment. The kind of information that doesn’t just get left on the office printer. Unfortunately, the Israeli Navy’s trust in Ibor was misplaced, and in November of 1954, the captain disappeared from Israel with a folder of top-secret military documents.

Traveling on a fake passport, Ibor fled to the Italian city of Rome, where he marched into the Egyptian embassy and asked Israel’s greatest military rival if they might be interested in purchasing some state secrets. The betrayal wasn’t ideological, of course. It was just business. Ibor was up to his eyeballs in debt, and he was willing to betray his country to avoid facing financial ruin. The Egyptians, for their part, didn’t care about the “why” so much as the “what”. They smiled, offered him a chair, and paid in cash.

Flush with funds, Ibor fled to Vienna, then hopped a plane to Paris. And now he believes, or at least hopes, that he is home-free. Beyond the reach of any angry Israelis. He knows his former country is small, stretched thin and distracted by regional conflicts. They will not bother tracking him here. Measured against the relative value of what he stole, pursuing him would be a waste of resources.

As Ibor sucks his cigarette down to the filter, he feels someone’s presence next to him. A little too close, a little too far, that liminal strangeness that sometimes occurs in public interactions. He looks over and sees a girl. A pretty girl. A very pretty girl. Dark eyes, dark hair, and who-knows-what surprises beneath her winter coat. Nothing like the tired, pregnant wife Ibor left back in Israel. The girl asks if he might have a spare cigarette. Ibor, gentlemen and self-styled ladies’ man that he is, says something clever and offers her a smoke. She takes it, and asks for a light. Before he can retrieve the zippo from his pocket, Ibor suddenly feels strong hands on his shoulders, a pistol pressed against his spine, and a voice that whispers Hebrew is his ear, “Please don’t resist, Alex. It’s time to go home.”

An hour later, Alexander Ibor is confined to small room in a Mossad safehouse in Paris.

Isser Harel had found him.

The capture of Alexander Ibor was one of Mossad’s very first kidnap operations. It was also one of its most embarrassing and disastrous. After they’d snatched Ibor from Paris, the exfiltration plan was simple and straightforward. The prisoner would be restrained, sedated, and put into a wooden shipping crate. That crate would be loaded on to an Israeli air force plane, and the traitor would be shipped back to Israel like a piece of wayward cargo.

A key part of the plan was to keep Ibor properly sedated for the entire duration of the flight. To do that, Mossad recruited a civilian doctor, a young Israeli anesthesiologist named Yonah Elian. That’s E-L-I-A-N. In 1954, Elian was one of the most respected doctors at his hospital, renowned for his compassion, precision and steady hands. He was also a patriot; and when Isser Harel and Mossad came calling, hoping to retain the doctor’s medical expertise for a job that might test his Hippocratic Oath a bit, Elian stifled his doubts and agreed.

Dr. Elian joined the capture team in Paris, and prior to the flight that would take them all back to Israel, he injected Ibor with a precisely measured sedative. It was something he’d done a million times at the hospital for various surgeries and medical procedures, even on patients as delicate as newborn babies, but as the Mossad agents packed the unconscious defector into a crate and loaded him onto a plane, the good doctor felt a twinge of unease.

And sure enough, those worries turned out to be well-founded.

When they unloaded the crate on the Tel Aviv tarmac, Alexander Ibor was dead. The freezing temperatures in the cargo hold, combined with rapid changes in air pressure, induced an accidental overdose of the sedative. Ibor’s heart had stopped somewhere over the Mediterranean. Two hours later, Isser Harel arrived at the airport. When faced with a crisis, the director of Mossad was notoriously clear-headed and unsentimental. He gave the team very specific instructions. Put Alexander Ibor’s body back on the plane, fly out to the ocean, and “dump him”. Mossad was a young intelligence agency, and they could not survive an operational failure/ scandal of this magnitude. When the team raised questions about Ibor’s wife and children, Harel scoffed. The family would not be told. They would never be told.  For all they knew, Alexander Ibor had left them and never returned. As Ronen Bergman writes:

“Harel, who was very embarrassed that an operation of his had ended in the death of a Jew, ordered that all the records on the case be secreted deep in one of the Mossad’s safes.’

Those files were not unearthed until 2006.

Well, in the aftermath of the failed Ibor operation, Dr. Yonah Elian was wracked with guilt. He had not just bent his Hippocratic Oath; he had broken it. He had killed a man. Malpractice, manslaughter, murder. Whatever you wanted to call it, the guilt of that overdose gnawed at Elian for years. When he returned to his duties at the hospital, he was reasonably certain that he would never hear from Mossad again.

THE NEEDLE

But then, six years, later in the spring of 1960, Dr. Elian heard a knock on his door. When he opened it, his eyes had to fall a few inches to meet the gaze of Isser Harel. Placing his hand on the doctor’s shoulder, the director of Mossad explained that there were no hard feelings about the 1954 job. Accidents happen, and Alexander Ibor was no angel. In fact, Harel smiled, I have a new assignment for you. A chance for you to redeem yourself and serve your country. But this time, doc, I need you to get that dosage right.

An overdose is too good a death for Adolf Eichmann.

As Elian’s mind reeled, Harel explained that this was not a joke or a test. We have an opportunity to capture the Adolf Eichmann – the man who helped killed six million of our people. And if all goes well, he is going to stand trial, Dr. Elian. Right here in Israel.  But we can’t do it without your help. We need you. So what do you say, doctor? Will you do one more small favor for your country?

On May 20^th, 1960 – six years after the botched kidnapping in Paris – Dr. Yonah Elian is at the Mossad safe house in Buenos Aires, filling a small syringe with a precise measurement of a barbiturate sedative. He has been here, with the Mossad team, for the past 12 days, arriving just 72 hours before the team successfully abducted Eichmann from Garibaldi Street. Isser Harel was adamant that if anything went wrong – if Eichmann hurt a member of the team or himself – a doctor needed to be on hand to administer treatment. Public hospitals were obviously not an option.

Thankfully, no life-saving measures have been necessary. During his nine days of captivity, Adolf Eichmann has been as docile as a sheared lamb – a far cry from the terrifying SS officer that lived rent-free in the minds of Jews across the world.

But now, Dr. Elian’s big moment has arrived. The real reason he has been brought halfway across the world.  It is time to sedate Adolf Eichmann and transport him to the airport for exfiltration back to Israel.

Trips to the airport are nerve-wracking even at the best of times, but on May 20^th, 1960, the Mossad team had a particularly rough travel day ahead of them. Argentina’s 150^th anniversary celebrations, while providing convincing cover for the El Al airplane’s presence, also presented a number of security challenges. As Bascomb writes:

“…The whole of Buenos Aires was bustling in anticipation of the anniversary celebrations. Flags flew from every window, people filled the streets and cafés, and tango music played in the public squares. Soldiers and police were stationed everywhere as well, stopping cars and checking documents. The [Mossad] agents knew that bringing Eichmann to the airport under these conditions was a huge risk. In case they were searched, their prisoner would need to be incapacitated, and his papers would have to be in perfect order.”

In short, dragging a heavily-sedated Eichmann through multiple rings of airport security was too dangerous. Even while drugged, he might scream for help, he might arouse the suspicion of the police, he might even attempt to escape. No, the Mossad team needed to bypass security entirely. And there’s only one kind of person that can move freely through a heavily guarded airport with minimal scrutiny: Pilots and airline personnel.

Isser Harel, Zvi Aharoni, Dr. Elian, and the rest of the exfil team decided that the only way to pull this thing off was to disguise Eichmann and themselves as members of the flight crew from the Israeli airline, El Al. This would allow them to circumvent normal security procedures and take their prisoner directly to the plane, which was already fueled up and waiting at an isolated hangar away from the central terminal. The goal was to be wheels up by midnight.

To reinforce the fiction, a fake passport had been forged for Eichmann, using “a multitude of colored pens and pencils, inks, dyes, small brushes, X-Acto knives, clumps of wax, a hot plate, seals, cameras, film, bottles of photographic developer, and a small store’s worth of paper in every color, stock, and weight,” according to Neal Bascomb.

As an extra precaution, Mossad’s expert in disguises, the strongman Peter Malkin, transformed the former SS officer into an aging Israeli flight attendant. As Bascomb continues:

“Malkin dyed Eichmann’s hair gray and applied makeup to his face, aging him further by drawing lines on his forehead and around his mouth and shadowing the skin underneath his eyes. He glued a shaggy mustache onto Eichmann’s top lip. Then he dressed Eichmann in a crisp white shirt, blue pants, polished shoes, and an El Al cap with a blue Star of David on the front.”

As he stood in his makeshift cell at around 9pm on May 20^th, 1960, Adolf Eichmann was in uniform for the first time in 15 years. The pilot’s cap, which bore an eerie resemblance to an SS officer’s cap, sent a particular chill down the team’s spine. As Peter Malkin observed:

“All he needed was his riding crop, and he might have been on an inspection of Auschwitz.”

When Eichmann asked for a jacket to complete the ensemble, Zvi Aharoni shook his head. Unfortunately, the agent explained, we need free and easy access to your arm. At that moment, Dr. Yonah Elian approached with an injection needle, filled with a powerful sedative. At the sight of it, Eichmann paled. This was not a thin, hypodermic syringe you might see in a modern hospital. This needle was massive. It looked more like something you’d use to inject a turkey with marinade on Thanksgiving. Eichmann begged them not to administer the sedative.

“It isn’t necessary to give me an injection. I won’t utter a sound. I promise.”

Zvi Aharoni shook his head:

“You have a very long journey ahead of you. The medication will help you to overcome all the strain.”

With that, Aharoni nodded to Dr. Elian. He inserted the needle into a vein, pushed down the plunger, and a potent barbiturate flooded into Eichmann’s bloodstream. The effect was powerful and instantaneous. Eichmann’s eyelids fluttered, and his breathing slowed. The drug rendered him pliable and obedient, but still conscious and able to walk. Dr. Elian left the needle sticking in Eichmann’s arm, and rigged a long tube and plunger to it, so that he could immediately administer additional doses as needed. Unlike Paris 1954, this time, the doctor would not leave his patient’s side. If anyone at the airport asked, Eichmann was just a member of the El Al flight crew who had drank too much the night before and bumped his head.

Dr. Elian checked Eichmann’s pulse, then turned to Zvi Aharoni:

“We are ready to travel.”

With the prisoner was properly sedated, Aharoni looked around the room at the other members of the Mossad exfil team. After ten days laying low, after three months of planning, after 15 years of searching, it was time to close the book on Adolf Eichmann. It was time to go the airport. As they loaded him into the car shortly before midnight, Eichmann began to mumble, lost in the pleasant fog of the drugs: “Don’t worry. You can rely on me.”

Zvi Aharoni rolled his eyes, started the ignition, and hit the gas.

A few miles away, the Buenos Aires airport was crawling with security. With so many high-profile guests coming and going for the Anniversary celebrations, the Argentinian police were out in full-force. But security was lightest at the peripheries of the airfield, and there, in a remote hangar, a brand-new Britannia 300 series passenger jet was fueled up and waiting.

Gleaming white, with a bright blue trim and a Star of David painted on the tail, this was the plane that would take Eichmann and his Mossad captors back to Israel.

Around 11pm, a black car approached the hangar. It parked, the doors opened, and three men exited the vehicle. To any security guard or policemen watching them closely, they were just a handful of El Al flight attendants, supporting a colleague who’d had a few too many whiskeys at the airport bar. As Zvi Aharoni remembered:

“Nobody interfered with us. We saw only a few people, because there were no further flights scheduled for that night.”

The Mossad agents and Dr. Elian helped a wobbly Eichmann up the steps to the plane, deposited him in a First-Class seat, and breathed a sigh of relief. In about an hour, the plane would take off, and their mission would be complete. But even now, Zvi Aharoni could not fully relax. As he remembered:

“The hour that followed was by far the most difficult and nerve-racking of the whole operation. We have nothing left to do except wait for takeoff.… Every minute seemed to last for an hour. We were tense and indescribably nervous. Our final success was so close and now we had to sit around here senselessly. As time passed, all sorts of horrific thoughts quite naturally went through our minds.”

But despite Aharoni’s anxieties, no disaster came. No police cars surrounded the aircraft. No security guards came barreling down the aisle. Adolf Eichmann did not fight or scream or try to escape; the feared architect of the Final Solution, with his fake mustache and El Al uniform, dozed quietly in his seat, snoring occasionally.

At four minutes after midnight, the El Al passenger jet accelerated, lifted off the runway, and disappeared into the night sky. On May 22^nd, 1960, the plane touched down in Tel Aviv / Israel, and with that, Mossad’s mission was complete.

As Isser Harel said over the telephone to one of his lieutenants back at Mossad headquarters:

“The monster is in shackles.”

A few days later, after Israel revealed its capture of Adolf Eichmann to the world, Zvi Aharoni was back in his office in the city of Jaffa. And there, he had an interaction that surprised him:

“On the stairs, I ran into one of our secretaries. Without warning, she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks. I was speechless, I hardly knew the girl. Before I could react, I noticed that she was crying. I did not have to ask her why. The girl had lost many relatives in Eichmann’s extermination camps.

It was her way of showing gratitude.”

----- OUTRO -----

Well guys, that’s all the time we have for today.

Next time, in the third and final episode of this series, we will wrap things up with the story of Adolf Eichmann’s criminal reckoning in Israel. It would prove to be, in the words of one historian, “one of the century’s most important trials.”

As tempting as it would have been for Mossad to quietly assassinate Eichmann in Argentina, Israel’s leaders felt that it was important to subject former SS officer to the same rigorous legal proceedings that his fellow Nazis had faced at Nuremberg 14 years earlier.

But as the prosecution would discover, the aging Obersturmbannfuhrer still had a few tricks up his sleeve. As Dr. Elian’s sedative began to wear off, and the gravity of his situation dawned on him, Eichmann realized that the next few months would decide whether he lived or died. He resolved to fight the prosecution in whatever way he could. To lie, obfuscate, and bend the truth around his crimes – anything to avoid the noose that was surely waiting for him in Jerusalem.

Needless to say, we have quite the finale ahead of us.

So, as always, thanks for listening. And I hope you have an awesome day.

This has been Conflicted. I’ll see you next time.

--- END -----