He also instructed Meidad and Yehudith Nissiyahu to move into the villa and act like a couple of tourists. “Every so often come out and make yourselves comfortable on the lawn with snacks and newspapers.”
All the other agents were ordered to leave their hotels and move to the designated safe houses.
COUNTDOWN
May 11, morning.
The operational unit completed its preparations. Even before H-hour, the men had started covering their tracks. Most of the rented vehicles were returned. All members of the group had their disguises in place—makeup, false mustaches, beards, and wigs. Each got new documents that suited their new faces. The twelve who had arrived in Buenos Aires a few days back—who walked the streets, rented cars and apartments, checked into hotels, surveyed the house on Calle Garibaldi—vanished; twelve others, looking different, carrying different documents with different names, took their place.
Isser, too, left his hotel, checked his luggage at the railroad station, and returned to the city. Today, as every day, he would keep moving between the cafés. His movements today were in a business and entertainment area, where the cafés were at barely a five-minute walk from one to the next.
1:00 P.M.—Isser, Rafi Eitan, and a few of the lead operatives met for a final briefing in a big restaurant in the city center. All around them, merry Argentineans laughed, drank, and devoured local grilled meats. At 2:00 P.M., the team dispersed.
2:30 P.M.—In a large midtown parking garage, the agents took the capture car that had been there for a few days, and drove it to “the Base.” The second car set off from another garage.
3:30 P.M.—The two cars were stationed by “the Base,” ready to move.
4:30 P.M.—Last briefing in “the Base.” The operational unit guys changed clothes, took their papers, and prepared to leave.
6:30 P.M.—The two cars departed. Four agents were in the capture car: Zvi Aharoni as the driver; Rafi Eitan, the commander; Moshe Tavor and Zvi Malkin. Three more agents were in the second car: Avraham Shalom, Yaacov Gat, and Dr. Elian, who carried a case with drugs, instruments, and sedatives.
The cars arrived separately and met at a crossroads, not far from the Klement house. The agents checked the area and established that there were no checkpoints or police forces nearby.
7:35 P.M.—The two cars parked on Calle Garibaldi. Thick darkness had settled over the place already. The capture car, a black Chevrolet sedan, was parked at the sidewalk, turned toward the Klement house. Two agents got out and raised the hood; Aharoni remained at the wheel, and the fourth man crouched inside the car, watching the spot where Eichmann was expected to emerge from the dark. One of the men put on thin gloves, in case he had to touch Eichmann; the very thought of touching him filled him with disgust. Across the street was the second car, a black Buick. Two agents got out and busied themselves around the car. The third remained in the driver’s seat, ready to turn on his lights and blind Klement as he approached. The trap was set.
But Klement didn’t show.
7:40 P.M.—Bus 203 stopped at the corner, but nobody got out.
7:50 P.M.—Two more buses came, one after the other. Klement was in neither. Anxiety swelled through the agents. What had happened? Had he changed his habits? Did he smell danger and flee?
8:00 P.M.—At an earlier briefing, Isser had told the group that if Klement didn’t show by eight, they were to abort and leave. Rafi Eitan, though, decided to wait until eight thirty.
8:05 P.M.—Another bus stopped at the corner. At first the Israelis saw nothing. But Avrum Shalom, who was in the second team, suddenly discerned a silhouette coming along Calle Garibaldi. Klement! He turned on his lights, aiming a blinding beam at the approaching figure.
Ricardo Klement was walking toward his house. The dazzling lights struck him in the face and he averted his eyes. He kept walking. He noticed a car by the side of the road—probably engine trouble—and a few people beside it. At that moment, a man by the Chevrolet turned to him. “Momentito, señor” (Just a moment), he said. It was Zvi Malkin, using the only two words he knew in Spanish.
Klement reached for the flashlight in his pocket, one he often used in this dark part of the street. Then it all happened with lightning speed. Malkin feared Klement was drawing a gun. He leaped on Klement and threw him on the dirt at the roadside. Klement let out a loud, shrill shout. From the car, another man, and another, sprung on him. Strong arms took hold of his head and covered his mouth. They pulled him into the back of the car and laid him, stunned, on its floor. The driver started the car and it darted forward. Barely half a minute had passed between the moment Klement appeared and the car’s departure.
Seconds later, the other car took off and followed.
Agile hands quickly tied Klement’s hands and feet. And somebody stuck a rag in his mouth. His glasses were removed and replaced by opaque black spectacles. A voice barked in German, close to his ear: “One move and you’re dead!” He obeyed; for the entire trip he didn’t budge. Meanwhile, two hands slipped under his clothes and felt his skin. Rafi Eitan’s hands were searching for his scars—one under the left armpit, one on the right side of his belly. Eitan looked at Malkin, and nodded. They shook hands. Eichmann was in their grasp.
Eitan thought he had his feelings under control. But then he suddenly realized that he was humming the song of the Jewish partisans in the war against the Nazis, and repeating the refrain: “We are here! We are here!”
The car was moving very fast, then suddenly stopped, its engine still running. Klement could not know that it was for a train barrier. The two capture cars had to wait long minutes while an endless freight train passed. This felt to the agents like the most critical moment in the entire operation. Their cars were surrounded by other cars, all waiting for the barrier to be raised. Outside voices could be heard, but Klement didn’t dare move. None of the Argentineans alongside them noticed anything strange lying on the car’s floor. Minutes later, the barrier was raised and the cars all smoothly moved forward.
20:55 P.M.—The two cars came to a stop in the driveway of “the Base.” Klement, trudging like a blind man between his captors, was ushered into the house. He did not object when the men holding him started undressing him. They demanded in German that he open his mouth. He obeyed. They checked inside it, searching for a poison capsule perhaps lodged between his teeth. Still wearing opaque glasses, he didn’t see a thing, but felt hands checking his body again and touching his scars. An expert hand slipped under his left armpit and touched the tiny scar that remained, when, a few years ago, he had tried to remove the small tattoo of his blood type, customary among SS officers.
Suddenly a voice rang out in German.
“The size of your hat . . . your shoes . . . date of birth . . . father’s name . . . mother’s name . . .”
Like a robot, he answered in German. Even when they asked, “What is the number of your Nazi Party card? Your number in the SS?” he couldn’t stay silent.
45326. And another number, 63752.
“Your name?”
“Ricardo Klement.”
“Your name?” the voice repeated.
He shivered. “Otto Heninger.”
“Your name?”
“Adolf Eichmann.”
A silence settled around him. He broke it. “I am Adolf Eichmann,” he repeated. “I know that I am in the hands of the Israelis. I also know some Hebrew, I studied with a rabbi in Warsaw . . .”
He recalled some verses of the Bible and started reciting them, trying to speak the Hebrew words with the proper pronunciation.
No one else spoke.
The Israeli boys stared at him, stupefied.
A MESSENGER TO SDEH BOKER
Isser was moving from one café to another. It was late at night when he entered another café and slumped in a chair facing the door. Suddenly he saw two of his men at the entrance. He jumped up. “We got him,” Aharoni said, beaming. “He’s been definitely identified and he’s confessed that he is Adolf Eich
mann.”
Isser shook their hands and they left. Now he had to go back to the railroad station, pick up his suitcase, and check into a new hotel under his new identity, as if he had just arrived in Buenos Aires. The night air was cool and crisp and he decided to walk. He had been running a slight fever and suffering from a cold, but now he felt wonderful. He walked, alone in the dark, enjoying the cool night air and feeling uplifted—the kind of intoxication he would never forget.
The next day a car stopped by a wooden cabin in kibbutz Sdeh Boker. A thin man, wearing glasses, came out of the car, showed his ID to the guards, and entered Ben-Gurion’s study. This was Yaacov Caroz, Isser’s close aide.
“Isser sent me,” he said. “We got a cable from him. Eichmann is in our hands.”
The Old Man was silent. Then he asked: “When is Isser coming back? I need him.”
Looking at the distraught faces of his men, Isser realized how Eichmann’s very presence in their company was depressing them. The German monster was next to them, now, separated by only a thin wall—and that unnerved these tough people and filled them with disgust. They couldn’t get used to looking after a man who, in their eyes, was the symbol of Evil; who, for many of them, had been the murderer of their closest relatives—fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, all vanished in the crematoriums. And taking care of Eichmann meant tending to his needs twenty-four hours a day. They couldn’t give him a razor, so they shaved him; they couldn’t leave him alone for a second, lest he commit suicide; they had to be with him even when he went to the toilet. Yehudith Nissiyahu cooked and served Eichmann’s meals, but refused to wash the dishes from which he ate. Her repulsion for him overwhelmed her. Zvi Malkin, sitting in a corner, fought his disgust by drawing sketches of Eichmann on an old copy of A Guide to South America. The guards, who changed every twenty-four hours, were totally stressed out, and Isser felt he had to give each of them a day’s leave. Let them walk about Buenos Aires, he thought, taste the bustling life of this big city, and for a few hours forget the obscene reality at “the Base.”
These were becoming the ten longest days of their lives—hiding themselves in a foreign country, and living in fear of a tiny mistake that could trigger a police raid and an international scandal.
PLANNING THE ESCAPE
Eichmann sat in a bare room, with no windows, illuminated day and night by a lone bulb. He was obedient and readily fulfilled his guards’ instructions. It seemed as if he had resigned himself to his fate. The only one who spoke with him was Aharoni, who interrogated him about his life prior to his capture. Eichmann answered all the questions. He told Aharoni that after Germany’s defeat in May 1945, he had assumed the identity of a Luftwaffe private, Adolf Karl Barth. He later posed as a lieutenant in the Twenty-second Waffen-SS Cavalry Division, Otto Eckmann, and was incarcerated in a POW camp. At the end of that year, when his name was introduced in the Nuremberg trials of the top Nazis, he escaped from the camp. As Otto Heninger, he hid until 1950 in Zelle in Lower Saxony and that same year escaped to Argentina, via Italy, using one of the escape routes of Nazi criminals.
Nine years had passed since he disembarked in Argentina, dressed in a white shirt, bow tie, and winter coat, wearing sunglasses and sporting a pencil-thin mustache. He spent four months with friends in the Jurmann pension in a Buenos Aires suburb and four more months at the home of a German contact named Rippler. Only then did he risk moving around alone and left Buenos Aires for Tucumán, a small town about six hundred miles away. There he was employed by Capri, a little-known construction company, said to be a cover company whose mission was to supply fugitive Nazis with jobs.
On April 4, 1952, Eichmann received his Argentinean ID card in the name of Ricardo Klement, born in Bolzano, Italy, unmarried, mechanic by profession.
A year before, in early 1951, Eichmann, using a false name, had sent a letter to his wife in Austria. He informed her that “the uncle of her children, the man she believed dead, actually was alive and well.” Vera Liebl immediately recognized his handwriting and told her sons that Uncle Ricardo, their dead father’s cousin, had invited them to join him in Argentina.
She obtained a legal passport for herself and for her children. The secret Nazi machine kicked into feverish action and took care of blurring and erasing Vera’s tracks. When Israeli secret agents finally got their hands on the “Vera Liebl” file in the Austrian archives, what they found was an empty folder the contents of which had seemingly evaporated.
In June 1952, Vera Liebl and her three sons, Horst, Dieter, and Klaus vanished from their home in Austria. In early July they surfaced briefly in Genoa, and on July 28 they came ashore in Buenos Aires. On August 15, they got off the train in the dusty Tucumán station.
“Vera Eichmann,” Moshe Pearlman wrote in his book, “still carried in her memory the picture of the dashing Nazi officer, who looked so impressive in his dress uniform and shining boots. But the man who waited for her on the Tucumán platform was a middle-aged man, modestly dressed, his face pale and wrinkled, his expression depressed and his walk slow. This was her Adolf.”
Eichmann the Terrible had become unrecognizable. He had gotten thin and was balding, his cheeks were sunken and his face had lost the air of arrogance that had been so characteristic of him. He appeared resigned and anxious; only his thin lips still suggested cruelty and malice.
In 1953, Capri went bankrupt and Eichmann had to search for a job. First he tried opening a laundry in Buenos Aires with two other Nazis, then worked on a rabbit farm, and later in a fruit-juice cannery. Finally, with the help of another secret Nazi organization, Ricardo Klement was appointed a foreman at the Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Suárez. By then he had started believing that he would end his life peacefully. Until May 11, 1960.
Meanwhile, Eichmann’s sons searched for him in hospitals, morgues, and police stations; they turned for help to the Fascist-Peronist youth organization Tacuara, which joined the search. But Eichmann’s sons soon concluded that the Israelis must have captured their father. They then tried but failed to convince the pro-Nazi organizations to take some drastic action, perhaps kidnap the Israeli ambassador and hold him until their father was released; but the Argentineans refused.
Isser instructed his men about what to do if the hideout was located by the police. If they raid “the Base,” Isser said, Eichmann should be rushed to the secret chamber that had been prepared inside the house. If the police set out to do a thorough search, Eichmann was to be whisked out of the house by a side exit that had been specifically set for such an emergency. Several agents were to escape with Eichmann, while the others were to do anything possible to hinder the search, despite the risks that might involve.
To whoever would be with Eichmann, Isser said, “If the police find the hideout and break in, handcuff yourself to him and throw away the keys, so they won’t be able to tear you away from him. Tell them that you’re Israeli, and together with your friends you have captured the world’s most hated criminal, Adolf Eichmann, in order to bring him to trial. Then give the police my real name—Isser Harel—as well as my false identity, and the name of the hotel where I am staying. If they get hold of you and of Eichmann—I’m to be arrested as well.”
A few days later, Eichmann agreed to sign a document, stipulating that he was willing to be taken to Israel and put on trial there. It read:
I, the undersigned Adolf Eichmann, of my own free will hereby declare: now that my real identity has been discovered, I recognize that there is no further use in trying to evade the course of justice. I agree to be taken to Israel and stand trial before a qualified tribunal. It is understood that I shall be given the assistance of an advocate and that I shall be permitted to lay before the court, without travesty of the facts, an account of the last years of my service in Germany, so that a truthful description of those events may be passed on to the future generations. I am making this declaration of my own accord. Nothing has been promised to me and I have not been threatened. My desire is to find inne
r peace at last.
As I am unable to remember all the details, and may become confused when stating the facts, I ask that the relevant documents and testimonies be placed at my disposal to help me in my efforts to establish the truth.
Adolf Eichmann, Buenos Aires, May 1960.
This declaration, of course, had no legal validity.
THE PLANE ARRIVES
May 18, 1960, 11:00 A.M.
A formal ceremony took place at Lod International Airport near Tel Aviv. Many high-ranking personalities, including the chief of staff General Laskov, the director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Argentinean ambassador to Israel, came to see off the impressive delegation to Argentina, for the one hundred fiftieth anniversary celebration. The El Al “Whispering Giant” took off, also carrying some regular passengers, bound for stopovers along the way.
Few of the passengers noticed that in Rome three more civilians came aboard. After a couple of hours, these new passengers had become El Al crew members and were moving in the aisles in El Al uniforms. Actually, they were Mossad agents en route to assist their colleagues in Buenos Aires. One of them was Yehuda Carmel, a bald fellow with a prominent nose and a thin mustache. He was not very happy about this trip. He knew he had been chosen not because of his talents but because of his outward appearance. A few days earlier he had been called to his boss’s office, where he saw two photos on the desk—his own and one of an unknown man. They looked very similar. When he was told that the unknown man was Adolf Eichmann, he shuddered. He was even more shocked when he was told that he had been chosen to serve as Eichmann’s double. Isser’s plan was to bring Carmel to Argentina as an El Al crew member, to take his uniform and documents, and then use these to get a drugged Eichmann on the plane. Carmel carried an Israeli passport in the name of Ze’ev Zichroni.
Isser had also prepared a backup plan. He summoned, with the help of a go-between, a young kibbutz member, Meir Bar-Hon, who was visiting relatives in Buenos Aires. Meir was asked to come to Bar Gloria on Bartolome Mitre Avenue, where two men were waiting for him: Isser and Dr. Elian. Isser instructed him: “When you return to your relatives’ home, call a doctor and tell him that you were in a car accident, and that you suffer from dizziness, nausea, and general weakness. The doctor will likely conclude that you suffer from a concussion and will put you in a hospital. On May 19, in the morning, you’ll tell him that you feel much better and you’ll ask to go home. You’ll be discharged and the hospital will provide you with a document certifying you have been treated for a concussion.”
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