Mossad

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  Nick freely shared his views with Sylvia, but never invited her to his home. Even after her family left Buenos Aires and they exchanged letters, he withheld his home address, and had her write to him at a friend’s address.

  This odd behavior triggered Lothar Hermann’s suspicions that Nick could be Eichmann’s son. He traveled with his daughter to Buenos Aires and took a bus to Olivos. Sylvia, with the help of some friends, found Nick Eichmann’s address, and even managed to enter the house on Calle Chacabuco. But Nick wasn’t home. There she met a balding man who wore spectacles and sported a thin mustache; he told her he was Nick’s father.

  Hermann now told Hoffstetter that he would agree to go again to Buenos Aires with Sylvia, to help pursue this investigation. Sylvia was needed to accompany her blind father everywhere, and to write and read his correspondence. Hoffstetter gave him a list of items he needed for the definitive identification of Eichmann: his photograph, present name, workplace, official documents about him, and his fingerprints. Hoffstetter and Hermann then established a secure system for corresponding, and Hoffstetter gave Hermann some money for expenses. Finally, he took a postcard out of his pocket and tore it in two. He gave one half to Hermann. “If somebody brings to you the other half,” he said, “you can tell him everything. He will be one of us.”

  Hoffstetter left them, returned to Israel, and reported to Isser.

  A few months later, Hermann’s report arrived at Mossad headquarters. He reported with enthusiasm that he had found out everything about Eichmann. The house on Calle Chacabuco had been built by an Austrian, Francisco Schmidt, ten years earlier. Schmidt had rented the house to two families: Daguto and Klement. Hermann emphatically claimed that Schmidt was Eichmann. He believed that Daguto and Klement only served as a cover for the real Eichmann.

  Isser asked his agent in Argentina to verify Hermann’s report. The man cabled back: “There is no doubt that Francisco Schmidt is not Eichmann. He does not live and has never lived in the house on Calle Chacabuco.”

  Isser concluded that Hermann was not reliable, and decided to end the investigation.

  THE MISTAKE

  Isser’s decision was a huge mistake and it could have ruined Israel’s opportunity to capture Eichmann. One couldn’t help but wonder about the incompetence that plagued the early stages of the operation. How could a covert, complex investigation have been entrusted to an elderly, blind, and unskilled man? How could the Mossad have taken seriously his mistaken identification of Eichmann? How could Isser have ignored the fact that Sylvia had visited Calle Chacabuco and met Nick Eichmann’s father? Instead of sending to Buenos Aires a professional investigator who could have checked the identities of the two tenants and the landlord, Isser simply walked away. This grave error, in particular, was unlike Isser.

  A year and a half later, Fritz Bauer came to Israel. He didn’t want to meet Isser Harel, whom he blamed for having failed to capture Eichmann. He went and met directly with Attorney General Haim Cohen, in Jerusalem. He let his anger explode when he described to Cohen the lame handling of this investigation by the Mossad.

  Haim Cohen summoned Isser and Zvi Aharoni, the Shabak chief investigator, to Jerusalem. Bauer was waiting in his office and accused Harel of botching the investigation. He also threatened that if the Mossad was unable to carry out the mission, he would have no choice but ask the German authorities to take it on. But it was not his threat that persuaded Harel to reopen the case. It was a new piece of information that Bauer had brought with him: two words that appeared to solve the mystery. Eichmann’s fictitious name in Argentina, Bauer revealed, was Ricardo Klement.

  All at once, Isser realized where he had gone wrong, and where his men had erred. Eichmann actually was one of the tenants on Calle Chacabuco. Only not Schmidt—it was Klement.

  Hermann’s daughter had indeed dated Eichmann’s son, and the Eichmann family did live on Calle Chacabuco. But Hermann didn’t know that Eichmann had changed his name to Klement, and instead had mistakenly pointed him out as Francisco Schmidt. If Isser had done his job and sent skilled agents to investigate Hermann’s story, he would long ago have discovered Eichmann’s true identity.

  Isser now suggested to Cohen and Bauer that Zvi Aharoni be put in charge of the investigation. Aharoni was a tall, lean man with a clear forehead, a square mustache, and a razor-sharp mind. A German Jew himself, he was personally close to Cohen—but less so with Isser. Aharoni was still angry that, in 1958, when he had come to Buenos Aires on another case, Isser hadn’t tasked him with checking out the Hermann testimony. But that had to be forgotten. Today Isser badly needed Aharoni’s expertise.

  And so, in February 1960, Aharoni landed in Buenos Aires. He asked a friend, a local Jew, to have a look at the house on Calle Chacabuco. The man came back upset. The house was empty, he reported. A few painters and masons were refurbishing one of the two apartments—in fact, the former flat of the Klements. But they had left; destination unknown. Aharoni now had to devise a way to trace Klement without raising suspicion.

  In early March, a young Argentinean in a bellboy’s uniform came to the house on Calle Chacabuco. He was carrying a small, gift-wrapped package addressed to Nicholas Klement. It contained an expensive lighter and a perfumed card with a short inscription: “Dear Nick, greetings for your birthday.” It looked like a birthday present sent by a woman who wanted to remain anonymous.

  The messenger entered the flat, where a few painters were working, and asked for the Klement family, but most of the workers had no idea who the Klements were. One of the painters, though, told the bellboy he thought they had moved to the San Fernando neighborhood, on the other side of Buenos Aires. He then led the bellboy to a nearby workshop, where Nick Eichmann’s brother worked. He was a blond man named Dieter; but though his manners were pleasant, he refused to disclose the Klements’ new address. Nevertheless, the talkative Dieter told the bellboy that his father was temporarily working in the faraway city of Tucumán.

  The bellboy returned to Calle Chacabuco and kept pestering the painters with incessant questions. Finally he got to a man who vaguely recalled a new address for the Klements. “You should take the train down to San Fernando station,” he said. “Then you’ll take bus 203 and get off at Avijenda. Across the street you’ll see a kiosk. On its right, a bit apart from the other houses, you’ll see a small brick house. That’s the Klement home.”

  The delighted messenger hurried back and reported to Aharoni. The next day Aharoni took the train to San Fernando, followed the painter’s instructions, and found the house at once. At the nearby kiosk he stopped and inquired about the name of the street.

  “Calle Garibaldi,” the old vendor told him.

  The investigation was back on track.

  CALLE GARIBALDI

  In mid-March, Aharoni put on a business suit and headed to a house on Calle Garibaldi, across the street from the Klement home. “I represent an American company,” he said to the woman who opened the door. “We manufacture sewing machines and we are looking to build a factory in this area. We would like to buy your house.” And then he added, pointing at the Klement home: “And that house as well. Would you like to sell?”

  While chatting with the woman, Aharoni kept pressing a button concealed in the handle of a small case he was carrying. It activated a hidden camera that took pictures of the Klement house from various angles.

  The next day Aharoni checked the city archives, and found that the lot on which the Klement home sat belonged to Ms. Vera Liebl de Eichmann, proof that Vera hadn’t married again, and, following Argentinean custom, she had registered the deed in both her maiden and married names. Ricardo Klement apparently chose not to be mentioned in official documents.

  Aharoni returned to Calle Garibaldi several times, on foot, by private car or small truck, and took photos of the house, Vera, and of the little boy he saw playing in the yard. He did not see Klement, but he decided to wait for a special date: March 21. Aharoni’s file indicated that this would be the tw
enty-fifth wedding anniversary of Adolf Eichmann and Vera Liebl. He expected Eichmann would return from Tucumán, to celebrate this with his family.

  On March 21, Aharoni returned there with his camera. In the courtyard, he saw a thin, balding man of average height, with a thin mouth, a big nose, and a mustache; he was wearing spectacles. These features all matched the description in his intelligence file.

  Eichmann.

  In Israel, Isser drove to Ben-Gurion’s house. “We have located Eichmann in Argentina,” he said. “I think we can capture him and bring him to Israel.”

  Ben-Gurion immediately responded. “Bring him dead or alive,” he said. He thought for a moment and added: “It would be better to bring him alive. This will be very important for our youth.”

  THE ADVANCE TEAM ARRIVES

  Isser formed the operational team. All of its twelve members were volunteers. Some were Holocaust survivors, with concentration camp numbers tattooed on their forearms. The core of the team was the operational unit of the security services. At its head were the two top agents of the Shabak. Rafi Eitan was appointed commander. At his side was Zvi Malkin, whom Eitan described as “brave, physically strong, and endowed with tactical creativity.” A balding man with bushy eyebrows, strong jaw, and deep, melancholy eyes, he was known as the best spy-catcher of the Shabak. He never carried a gun (“one may be tempted to use it”), he relied on “common sense, inventiveness, and improvisation” and had unmasked several top Soviet agents. He’d spent some of his childhood in Poland, and immigrated with his family to Israel after a bloody pogrom in the village of Grasnik Lubelski. Only his sister Fruma and her family had stayed behind; all of them and Zvi’s other relatives perished in the Holocaust. He grew up in Haifa and fought in the Independence War. Among his many talents were painting, writing “compulsively,” and acting. During a stay in New York he had become close with Lee Strasberg, founder of the Actors Studio, and had learned a lot from him about acting. “In many of the Mossad operations in which I participated,” he later said, “I played as if I were on stage, using disguises and makeup. In other operations I felt as if I was directing a play. I wrote out my operational orders like screenplays.”

  Another team member was Vienna-born Avraham (Avrum) Shalom, a stocky, tight-lipped man who was Eitan’s deputy, and a future Shabak director. Some of the others were Yaacov Gat, a discreet Paris-based field operative; Moshe Tavor, a former soldier in the British Army and a member of the secret “Avengers” group, which hunted Nazi criminals at the end of the war, some of whom he had personally killed; and quiet, self-effacing Shalom Danny, a talented painter and “a genius” in document forging. Some claimed that he had escaped a Nazi concentration camp by forging an authorization on toilet paper.

  Most of the men were married, with families.

  The team was also well-composed professionally. Efraim Ilani knew Argentina well and was familiar with the streets of Buenos Aires. He was a skilled locksmith, a man of great physical strength, and an agent with a very “honest” face who could inspire trust in anyone. Yehudith Nissiyahu, a religious woman and the best female agent in the Mossad, also volunteered. Yehudith was quiet, shy, unobtrusive, rather overweight and plain. She was married to a Labor Party activist, Mordechai Nissiyahu. She hosted one of the authors of this book several times, and there was nothing in her behavior that appeared out of the ordinary.

  Dr. Yona Elian, a physician who had participated in several Mossad operations in the past, would be there to assist in bringing Eichmann back to Israel. Zvi Aharoni, the investigator, also joined. But the first volunteer to join the team was Isser himself. He loved to lead his men in dangerous operations abroad. But this time, he knew that in the course of taking action, immediate decisions at the top level would need to be made. And this could also have far-reaching political consequences. It was therefore crucial that the Israelis be led by someone who could make political decisions if necessary. Isser felt he had to assume command.

  At the end of April, an advance team of four agents entered Argentina from different directions. They smuggled essential equipment into the country: walkie-talkies, electronic tools and instruments, medical supplies, and also a part of Shalom Danny’s ambulant lab, equipped to produce passports, documents, and affidavits.

  They rented an apartment in Buenos Aires (code-named “the Castle”), where several team members would live and work, and stocked it with food. The following day the four rented a car and drove to San Fernando, arriving there at seven forty P.M.

  Darkness had fallen and they got a big surprise. While driving slowly on route 202, they suddenly saw, walking directly toward them, Ricardo Klement! He paid them no attention, simply turned and entered his house.

  The agents concluded that Klement probably came home every evening at approximately this same time, and his capture could be carried out on the same deserted dark stretch between the bus station and his home.

  That night, they wired Israel, in code: “Operation feasible.”

  A PLANE FOR ABBA EBAN

  Isser felt he was in luck. He learned that on May 20 Argentina would celebrate the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of its independence. High-ranking delegations would be coming from all over the world to participate in the festivities. An Israeli delegation headed by Minister of Education Abba Eban would also come. Abba Eban was happy to learn that El Al would be putting at his disposal a special plane—a Britannia “Whispering Giant.” Nobody told Eban that the real reason for El Al’s generosity was Operation Eichmann.

  Flight 601 to Buenos Aires had been scheduled for May 11. The plane crew was carefully selected and Isser had revealed the secret only to two of El Al’s senior officials, Mordechai Ben-Ari and Efraim Ben-Artzi. The pilot, Zvi Tohar, was advised to take a qualified mechanic with him, in case the plane suddenly had to take off without the assistance of an Argentinean land crew.

  On May 1, at dawn, Isser landed in Buenos Aires with a European passport. A freezing wind swept the airport runways. In Argentina, it was almost winter. Eight days later, on the evening of May 9, several Israelis slipped into a tall new apartment building in Buenos Aires. They went up to an apartment that had been rented a few days earlier (code-named “Heights”). All members of the operational unit were present. Earlier, they had settled in various hotels around town. The last to enter was Isser; for the first time, “the twelve” were together.

  Since coming to Argentina, Isser had established an ingenious mode of communication with his team: in his pocket, he carried a list of three hundred cafés in Buenos Aires, with their addresses and their hours of operation. Every morning he would set out on a walking tour, going between these cafés, following an itinerary and a timetable he had designated beforehand. This way his men knew exactly where he could be found at every moment of the day. The one big inconvenience in this system was the gallons of strong Argentinean coffee that the ramsad had to absorb in these daily circuits. From the cafés Isser directed the preparations for the abduction.

  These were days of feverish activity: bringing and setting up equipment needed for keeping a prisoner; renting cars for surveillance and for the capture, renting additional apartments and secluded villas out of town, where Eichmann would be held. The most important villa (“The Base”) was on the way to the airport. It was rented by two Mossad agents posing as tourists. One of them was Yaacov Meidad (Mio), a stocky, German-born man who had lost his parents in the Holocaust and fought in the British Army during the war. The woman who played the role of his companion was Yehudith Nissiyahu. Within the villa the agents built a hiding place for Eichmann and his guard, if the local police were ever to investigate. A second flat was prepared as an alternative.

  The plan now was for Eichmann to be captured on May 10, the plane to arrive on May 11, and on May 12, to set off for Israel.

  But a last-moment change screwed up the plan. Because of the great number of visitors coming for the anniversary celebrations, the Protocol Department of the Argentinean Ministry of
Foreign Affairs informed the Israeli delegation that they would have to delay their arrival until May 19, at two P.M. For Isser that meant either delaying Eichmann’s capture till May 19—or executing the plan on May 10 and then waiting in hiding with their captive for nine or ten days. That could be very risky, especially if, at his family’s request, an intensive search was organized for the missing Eichmann. There was a real danger that Eichmann and his Israeli abductors might be found by the police.

  Despite reservations, Isser decided to move ahead as originally planned; but because of his people’s fatigue, he decided to push it back one day. D-day was set for May 11, and H-hour for 7:40 P.M.

  The operational plan was now laid out and ready in minute detail: Eichmann returned from work every evening at seven forty P.M. He got off bus 203 at the kiosk and walked home along Calle Garibaldi. The street was dark, traffic was sparse. The operation would be carried out by agents in two cars: one team for the abduction, another for security and protection. The first car would be parked at the roadside with its hood raised, and the agents would appear to be repairing it. When Eichmann passed by them, they would jump him, overpower him, and throw him into the car. It would then at once dart forward, with the other car following. The doctor would travel in the second car, to be close by in case the captive needed to be drugged.

  Isser, in a strict tone, gave precise orders. “If you run into any kind of trouble,” he said, “you do not let go of Eichmann even if you’re stopped. If the police arrest you, say that you are Israelis, acting on your own, to bring this Nazi criminal to justice.” All those who escape arrest, he added, leave the country according to the current plan.