The Nazi Hunters

by Neal Bascomb

  Ben-Gurion had personally informed Eban several days before that the flight was being sent to Argentina to collect Eichmann. None of the others had the slightest idea of the flight’s special purpose. All of the delegation members, including Eban, were scheduled to return to Israel on American civilian airlines — ostensibly because the Britannia was needed back earlier for its regular routes.

  Every effort at secrecy could not keep the crew members from suspecting that there might be more to this flight than the airline had told them. First, there were three men in El Al uniforms whom none of the crew had ever seen before. Second, a number of the El Al employees were used to participating in “monkey business crews,” which assisted the Shin Bet or Mossad on operations. When enough of these special crew members were brought together for a flight, it usually meant there was a hidden agenda.

  After checking the crew roster, Captain Shmuel Wedeles, one of two copilots selected by Tohar for the mission, was sure there was an ulterior motive. A Viennese Jew who, as a child, had seen a mob force an elderly rabbi to eat forbidden pork before setting his beard on fire, Wedeles had escaped alone to Israel; the rest of his family had died in the Holocaust. He had been a member of the Haganah, the paramilitary organization that preceded the Israeli defense forces, and a pilot in the War of Independence. As soon as he saw Yehuda Shimoni on the plane, he asked him bluntly, “Who are they bringing, Mengele or Eichmann?” Josef Mengele was a doctor who performed horrific medical experiments on children in Auschwitz, and he had long been rumored to live in South America. Shimoni denied the implication, but his look of astonishment told Wedeles everything he needed to know.

  The chief purser was also suspicious. When he asked his friend Tohar what was going on, the pilot cryptically said, “You won’t be sorry you’ve been chosen to participate in the flight.”

  Once all the passengers had settled into their places and the crew was ready, loudspeakers in the terminal building and outside on the tarmac boomed in Hebrew and then in English, “Announcing the departure of Flight 601, Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires.” The four turbo-propelled engines hummed to life, and the airplane taxied toward the runway. At exactly 1:05 P.M., the wheels lifted off Israeli soil, and the journey to Argentina began. The plane would stop to refuel in Rome, Italy; Dakar, Senegal; and Recife, Brazil, before flying seven and a half hours south to Buenos Aires. They were scheduled to arrive in Argentina on the afternoon of May 19.

  That night, Nick and Dieter Eichmann broke into a Jewish synagogue in the city, guns at their sides. A former SS officer they knew through their father had tipped them off that he might be in the basement. A search revealed nothing: The synagogue was empty.

  Throughout Buenos Aires, Tacuara members were patrolling on their motorcycles, watching the airport as well as the bus and train stations. They also staked out synagogues and checked the hospitals and morgues in every neighborhood. A heavy police presence for the anniversary celebrations did little to slow their search.

  Nick and Dieter had no idea whether their father was still alive. For all they knew, he might have already been shot, his body buried. His assailants might well be long gone by now. With each passing day, the two brothers grew more and more desperate.

  Some of the young firebrands who were assisting them urged Dieter and Nick to make a bold move if they wanted to have any chance of finding their father. They had no doubt the Israelis were behind the abduction, and they suggested kidnapping the Israeli Ambassador, offering him in trade. If the Israelis refused to negotiate, they could torture their captive until Eichmann was returned. But a former SS officer helping them warned, “Don’t do anything stupid. Stay reasonable. Or you will lose everything — absolutely everything.” They dropped the kidnapping idea and continued with their search.

  “Let me ask you this,” Peter Malkin said to Eichmann in the early morning hours of May 19. “When it was determined that the policy was not to be resettlement but death, how did you feel about that?”

  “There was nothing to be done. The order came from the Führer himself.”

  “But how did you feel?”

  “There was nothing to be done.”

  “I see. So you turned into a killer.”

  “No, that’s not true. I never killed anyone,” Eichmann said. “I was involved in collection and transport.”

  Malkin did not understand how Eichmann could convince himself that he had done nothing wrong.

  Eichmann went on to explain how diligent he had been in making his schedules. Malkin interjected, “You do realize we are talking about innocent people here? Small children? Old men and women?”

  Eichmann showed no emotion, and Malkin understood then that the Nazi did not regret his actions against the Jews.

  Eichmann’s Long Arm, a drawing by Peter Malkin, completed during the time Eichmann was in captivity in Buenos Aires.

  Twelve hours later, when it was Malkin’s watch again, they picked up where they had left off. Eichmann had spoken of his love for red wine, and Malkin thought that it wouldn’t do any harm to give him a glass. The prisoner had been bound to the bed for eight nights straight. Malkin brought in a bottle of wine and a record player that belonged to Yaakov Medad. Malkin poured a glass of wine and placed it in Eichmann’s hands.

  The prisoner drained his glass. Malkin sipped at his wine. He put a record on the turntable and then lit a cigarette for Eichmann. Flamenco music filled the small, stuffy room. Eichmann drew deeply on the cigarette until it was almost at its butt.

  “Don’t burn your fingers,” Malkin warned.

  “Why are you doing this for me?” Eichmann asked, more at ease than any time since his arrival at the house.

  “I don’t know,” Malkin said. “I felt it was something I wanted to do for you.”

  Eichmann nodded, silent.

  Malkin remembered the statement that Aharoni had been trying to get Eichmann to sign. This might be their opportunity.

  “Eichmann, I think you are mistaken about not signing the papers to go to Jerusalem,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go. Why can’t I go to Germany?”

  “I’m not going to force you to do it. If I were you, though, I would sign the papers, and I will tell you why. It’s the only time in your life that you will have the opportunity to say what you think. And you will stand there in Jerusalem and tell the whole world what you think was right, in your own words.”

  Eichmann drained his second glass of wine. He might be warming to the idea, Malkin thought. Then Eichmann asked to be allowed to stand and remove his goggles. Malkin agreed. Eichmann had already seen his face the night of the capture. A second time made no difference. Still, as he helped Eichmann up and lifted the goggles from his face, the agent kept a close watch on his prisoner. This might be a trick, an attempt to escape.

  At last Eichmann said, “Where is the paper?”

  Malkin passed it to him, along with a pen. Eichmann read the draft, then, leaning on the night table, he copied out his statement in neat German.

  I, the undersigned, Adolf Eichmann, declare of my own free will that, since my true identity has been discovered, I realize that it is futile for me to attempt to go on evading justice. I state that I am prepared to travel to Israel to stand trial in that country before a competent court. I understand that I shall receive legal aid, and I shall endeavor to give a straightforward account of the facts of my last years of service in Germany so that a true picture of the facts may be passed on to future generations. I make this declaration of my own free will. I have been promised nothing, nor have any threats been made against me. I wish at last to achieve inner peace. As I am unable to remember all the details and am confused about certain facts, I ask to be granted assistance in my endeavors to establish the truth by being given access to documents and evidence.

  When he had finished, Eichmann drew back from the table. “What date should I put, yesterday’s or today’s?”

  “Just leave it May 1960.”

  He signed: “Ad
olf Eichmann, Buenos Aires, May 1960.”

  “You’ve done a very good thing. You won’t regret it,” Malkin said. He gave Eichmann another cigarette. When he finished smoking it, the agent refastened the goggles over his prisoner’s eyes.

  Footsteps charged down the hall, and Yaakov Medad burst into the room. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled, looking at the wine, the record player, and the cigarettes. “Throwing a party for this murderer?”

  Malkin tried to explain, but Medad was furious, his face crimson. “You amuse him with my music? This butcher of my family?”

  Eitan and Gat rushed to the room, fearing their prisoner might be trying to escape. Malkin tried to justify himself, showing the signed statement, but they were more worried about calming Medad then haranguing Malkin for disobeying orders. Eventually, everyone settled down, and Tabor relieved Malkin of his watch. As Malkin headed down the hall, Rafi Eitan stopped him long enough to say, “Good work.”

  Shmuel Wedeles pointed the plane down through the clouds over the South Atlantic and toward the Brazilian coast. Fifteen minutes later, they reached the radio beacon of Campina Grande, eighty nautical miles from Recife, the altimeters showing they were now at 10,000 feet. Wedeles shifted onto a southeast course toward the airport. Then he radioed air-traffic control.

  “Recife Control, this is El Al 4X-AGD from Dakar to Recife, heading 135, altitude 7,500, descending, estimating Recife on the hour.”

  “Roger, El Al,” the controller returned. “Maintain course. Report when reaching 2,000.”

  At an altitude of 4,000 feet, the plane had yet to descend out of the clouds. In a few minutes, they would land at the airport. Forty nautical miles away, they reached 2,000 feet. Wedeles was preparing to radio air-traffic control with their position when they finally cleared the clouds.

  Straight ahead he saw an expanse of green. The plane was heading into a forest! Wedeles yanked back on the stick, bringing up the nose of the plane. At the same time, he jammed the engine throttles forward, increasing speed so as to prevent the aircraft from stalling.

  The plane leveled off just above the treetops. Everyone in the flight cabin stared out the window as they flew less than a wingspan over the forest.

  “My God, the Brazilians think and talk meters, not feet!” a cockpit crew member said. The Israelis measured altitude in feet, as was usual in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa, but the Brazilians measured it in meters, which were more than three times as long. When Wedeles reported that they were at 2,000 (feet), the Brazilians thought they were at the equivalent of 6,500 feet. If the cloud base had been 100 feet lower, they would have crashed straight into the trees.

  Ten minutes later, at 7:05 A.M., the plane landed safely. But the Israelis’ troubles were only beginning. Zvi Tohar wanted to depart from Recife as soon as they had refueled and cleaned the plane — an hour at most. To his surprise, when they taxied toward the terminal building, a red-carpet reception awaited them, including a local band and hundreds of onlookers. The airport commander, dressed in a starched uniform crowded with medals, welcomed the “overseas strangers to beautiful Brazil.” Representatives of the local Jewish community celebrated their arrival. After an awkwardly staged reception, the crew and delegation left the plane to stretch their legs and grab a coffee in the terminal building.

  Half an hour later, Shaul Shaul and his fellow navigator, Gady Hassin, tried to enter the control tower to file their flight plan and collect weather reports for the journey to Buenos Aires. A soldier blocked them, angrily barking, “No passage!” Hassin went to get Tohar, but the captain failed to make any headway either. The soldier was clear: “The commandant is asleep. Nobody is to disturb him.”

  Tohar now feared the true purpose of their flight had been exposed. He backed off from the soldier, not wanting to attract any more attention to the El Al crew.

  A waiter from the terminal cafeteria approached the standoff between the soldier and crew. He was in his late twenties and, most likely, a Mossad agent stationed at the airport in case such a situation arose. He spoke briefly with the guard in fluent Portuguese, then told Tohar, “Have patience. I will go into town, and, with any luck, I’ll be back within a half hour with a solution.” He rode away on his bicycle.

  Half an hour later, an elderly man, the secretary of the local Jewish community center, walked into the airport carrying a heavy leather bag. He came straight to the soldier and said that he needed a word with the commandant. The soldier disappeared with the bag, and the commandant himself appeared a few minutes later.

  He cursed the guard before slapping him twice in the face. Then he looked at Tohar like he was an old friend. “Captain, why didn’t you tell me you wanted to talk?”

  With the bribe to the commandant paid, the Israelis filed their flight plan. Three hours after their scheduled departure from Recife, the Britannia moved down the runway and lifted into the sky.

  At 4:05 P.M., the Britannia descended into Buenos Aires and landed on the runway with a screech. A host of diplomats from the Argentine foreign ministry were waiting to greet the plane, along with people from the Israeli embassy and the local Jewish community. The waiting band struck up the Israeli national anthem, “Ha Tikvah” (“The Hope”), and the children present shouted and waved tiny Israeli flags.

  Shortly after the plane’s arrival, Isser Harel met with Tohar and Shimoni near the airport’s Hotel Internacional. Tohar now refused to land in Brazil on the return journey, saying that the Brazilians were not to be trusted. This was all right with Harel, since he wanted to fly straight from Buenos Aires to Dakar anyway to prevent the plane being seized or forced down on South American soil. They would file a false flight plan that still included Recife to throw any pursuers off their trail.

  Harel then detailed the plan to bring Eichmann onto the plane disguised as an El Al crew member. He wanted the plane to depart as early as possible the following day, but Tohar insisted that the crew needed more rest, given the long flight. They were testing the Britannia’s limits as it was; the added risk of an exhausted crew would be inviting disaster. Harel conceded. They would depart close to midnight on May 20.

  Zvi Tohar headed to the Hotel Internacional to relay the orders to his crew. He gathered the other two pilots, Azriel Ronen and Wedeles; the navigators, Shaul and Hassin; and the flight engineers, Oved Kabiri and Shimon Blanc (a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp), together in his suite. This was the team responsible for getting the plane safely back to Israel, and Tohar felt they should know the purpose of the flight.

  He told them about Eichmann and that they were going to fly nonstop from Buenos Aires to Dakar to avoid any chance of being compromised. He asked his navigators to chart a route and his flight engineers to ensure that the plane was capable of it. The crew soberly disbanded and went to try to get as much rest as they could.

  On May 20, the day of Eichmann’s planned departure, the agents prepared to bring their mission to a close. Those who weren’t busy with guard duty went over their new identities or worked on returning the safe houses to their original condition. Early in the afternoon, Zvi Aharoni put on a suit and tie and flagged a taxi to the Israeli embassy. There, “Yossef” provided him with a new Chevrolet limousine with diplomatic plates to take Eichmann to the airport. He also gave him a diplomatic passport, which identified Aharoni as a member of the South American desk of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and an international driver’s license.

  At Maoz, Shalom Dani rushed to finish the last of Eichmann’s documents. He even created an official medical certificate from a local hospital stating that “Zichroni” had suffered a head trauma in an accident but was cleared to fly. Dr. Elian had put Eichmann on a strict diet to reduce the risk of any complications from the sedatives he planned to give him.

  Moshe Tabor spent most of the day at the airport. Klein had arranged for the El Al plane to be parked at the Aerolíneas Argentinas hangar, away from the main terminal. After inspecting the Britannia with
the two mechanics, Tabor set about preparing a secret compartment where they could hide Eichmann if the plane was searched. He built a hinged false wall in front of one of the lavatories in the first-class cabin. When he was finished, no one would guess that there was ever a bathroom in that part of the plane.

  Avraham Shalom was also at the airport, ensuring that the guards he had befriended over the past week had not been moved to different posts and that they knew he would be coming in and out of the gate throughout the day. He reconnoitered the roads from Tira one last time, finding no new checkpoints along the routes he had chosen.

  Isser Harel set up his headquarters at an airport terminal restaurant. The restaurant was always crowded, the conversation and clanking dishes deafening, and people were constantly milling in and out of its doors. Harel could stay there for hours, meeting all his operatives for their briefings, without anybody giving him so much as a second glance. With the plane scheduled to depart at midnight, he knew it would be a long evening.

  At 7:30 P.M., Shalom and Aharoni arrived in the smoky, cacophonous restaurant. They told Harel the team was ready for the transfer to the airport. Having received confirmation from Klein that the plane and El Al crew were also ready, Harel gave the green light.

  At the safe house, the team finished the last of their preparations for departure. Those traveling with Eichmann to the airport dressed in El Al uniforms and packed their belongings. After Dr. Elian gave the prisoner a thorough physical examination, Peter 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 thick mustache onto Eichmann’s top lip. Then he dressed him in a starched white shirt, blue pants, polished shoes, and an El Al cap with a blue Star of David on the front.

  By the time Malkin finished his work, Aharoni had arrived with Yoel Goren, one of the Mossad operatives who had come on the El Al flight. Goren was the agent who, more than two years before, had investigated the house in Olivos and stated it was impossible Eichmann lived in such a shabby place. Nonetheless, he was an obvious asset in this part of the operation because of his fluent Spanish and knowledge of Buenos Aires.