Spies Against Armageddon

by Dan Raviv

  Because of the operational, political, and even personal complexities, the Memuneh himself flew to Paris to set up a staging post for the abduction. Then Harel went on to Argentina to take complete and personal responsibility.

  The Mossad’s finest forger went to Europe, where he prepared false passports and other documents for the operatives. They made their way to Buenos Aires on separate flights, under names that would never again be used. The forger also flew on to Argentina, with all his special pens and papers, to provide fresh identities for all the Israelis and for Eichmann himself so he could be smuggled out.

  At least half a dozen “safe houses” and even more cars were rented in Buenos Aires, in a potential logistical nightmare that was handled with impressive ease.

  One member of the team was Moshe Tavor, a genius at logistics who had ice water running through his veins. Born as Moshe Karpovich in Lithuania in 1917, he was taken by his family to Palestine long before the rise of Nazi Germany. He eagerly volunteered for the British army’s Jewish Brigade, and he fought in Libya and then in Italy—proud to be killing Nazis.

  After the end of World War II, with just over half a dozen friends—including some who later would join Israeli intelligence—Karpovich/Tavor hunted down German officers who had run ghetto round-ups, deportation trains, and death camps.

  Tavor and his buddies, acting on information from Holocaust survivors, would stage a rudimentary trial for the Nazi in an isolated field; Tavor then would strangle the man.

  Interviewed at age 89, he explained that such killings did not bother him in the slightest. Tavor was chosen as the executioner because of his strong hands, he said, and shooting the Nazi would have left a lot of blood—and that would have led to investigations. The bodies were dropped into lakes.

  In Argentina, Tavor—who had become the Mossad’s finest safecracker, literally able to open any lock at all—built a metal cart where a folded-up Adolf Eichmann could be secreted. Tavor also prepared secret rooms in the rented safe houses: to store weapons, and to hold Eichmann after capturing him.

  Tavor, whose real life was stranger than any Hollywood scriptwriter could imagine, also installed a rotating license plate panel on one of his team’s cars—several years before the James Bond movie Goldfinger had a similar gimmick—so that the vehicle’s identity tag could instantly be changed if the Israelis were spotted.

  One side of the panel had a local Buenos Aires license plate. The other had a diplomatic plate, with a number indicating that the car belonged to the embassy of another South American country. The Israelis did flip the plate numbers a few times when they had to pass police roadblocks. “The policeman on duty,” Rafi Eitan recalled decades later, “would salute us and let us go on.”

  Some team members also carried forged diplomatic documents that named them as envoys of that same country.

  A female operative was chosen for the traditional role of “housewife,” to buy groceries, cook the food, and tidy the residence where the Nazi would be held. She was Yehudit Nessyahu, born in Holland in 1925: highly intelligent, fluent in several languages, described as forgettably plain-looking, and a veteran of clandestine work smuggling Jews out of Morocco. She would rise to be the highest ranking woman in the Mossad, its director of personnel. After her retirement at age 51, she would study law, head the Israeli writers’ association, and assiduously avoid cameras for fear that a single snapshot of her could endanger her contacts and agents from many missions abroad.

  As a religious woman, Nessyahu prepared only kosher food during the Argentina mission—even for the notorious Nazi. She was disturbed by the fact that she would be nourishing a mass murderer and enemy of the Jewish people.

  The honor of physically tackling and grabbing Eichmann on May 11, 1960, went to Rafi Eitan and Avraham Shalom, who would become agency chiefs in the decades to come, along with Malkin—the inventor of the Comb surveillance system.

  They tossed the Nazi onto the back seat of their car. The man who posed as Ricardo Klement did not put up a struggle and readily admitted that he was Eichmann.

  The abduction had been timed to coincide with the official visit of an Israeli delegation to Argentina, where many foreign guests were taking part in celebrations of the country’s 150th year of independence from Spain. An El Al airliner would fly the delegates in on May 19 and would be returning to Tel Aviv late the next night.

  Harel and members of his team said later that their most difficult task was feeding and caring for Eichmann for nine days while waiting for their flight to Israel. They interrogated the prisoner and at times simply stared at him in wonderment over how ordinary the personification of evil could appear. The balding man who depended on eyeglasses for his reading meekly signed a statement agreeing to be tried in an Israeli court.

  It was chilling, however, for the kidnappers to hear Eichmann switch from German to a prayer in Hebrew, the Shma, which had been recited by Jews as they walked to their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

  According to Harel, Eichmann “told us he was a great friend of the Jews. We were furious. Some of my people started to forget their orders not to touch him. They wanted to kill him. But they didn’t, and he started to beg for small favors.” The captive also said he would reveal all of Hitler’s secrets if the Israelis would spare his life. Harel responded with a promise that Eichmann would get the best lawyer available to defend him at a trial in Jerusalem.

  Harel spent little time in the safe house where Eichmann was chained to a bed. The Memuneh instead perfected a secure spycraft technique that could be called the roving headquarters. He told his senior operatives where they could find him at certain hours of the day, and he walked from café to café in the Parisian-style Argentine capital. No stranger was likely to remember seeing him in any particular location.

  Sacrificing caution for the sake of on-the-spot control, Harel set up his command post on May 20 in a cafeteria at Ezeiza Airport. He sat at a table with his forger, checking and distributing the identity documents his operatives would need to make a safe and unimpeachable departure from Buenos Aires.

  At the safe house, Eichmann and the men who would accompany him were dressed in El Al airline uniforms. The Mossad’s chief forger had prepared an Israeli passport, with the name Ze’ev Zichroni, for the VIP prisoner.

  A doctor working for Shin Bet—Yonah Elian—the same anesthesiologist who inadvertently overdosed Alexander Israel, whose corpse was then thrown out of an airplane in 1954—did a fine job this time. Elian kept topping off the dose by injecting Eichmann with sedatives. When moving day arrived, the Nazi was transformed into a very sleepy man who could barely walk.

  An exhausted or drunk crew member appeared normal to airport officials, late at night, and Eichmann and others in the “El Al” group strolled out of the terminal and onto the Israeli airliner that supposedly had waited there to fly Israeli dignitaries home from the Argentine celebrations.

  The genuine El Al pilot was not told about his infamous passenger until after takeoff from Buenos Aires in the first minutes of May 21, and on Harel’s recommendation a refueling stop was scheduled in the most out-of-the-way city imaginable. It took every last drop of aviation fuel to reach Dakar, Senegal, but no one in western Africa was making any inquiries about a missing German-Argentinian man.

  The special flight carrying the Nazi to meet Jewish justice arrived in Tel Aviv on the morning of May 22.

  Ben-Gurion took the rare step of publicly hailing the intelligence community the next day, when the prime minister announced in the Knesset that “the security services of Israel found Adolf Eichmann and ... he will shortly be brought to trial in Israel.” The parliament’s applause was unanimous.

  The judicial proceedings began nearly a year later, on April 11, 1961, with the fullest international press and television coverage that the world of that time could muster. The defendant—dubbed “the man in the glass booth”—listened to witnesses who heartrend
ingly described his crimes and those of the entire Nazi killing machine. Eichmann claimed he was only following orders as a patriotic German, but he was convicted of crimes against humanity.

  He was hanged in Ramle Prison on May 31, 1962—the only defendant put to death by Israel’s judicial system.

  Eichmann’s abduction and the massive public acclaim enjoyed by Israel’s intelligence community were surely Harel’s finest hour. Until his death in 2003, he had the pleasure of being hailed as “the man who captured Eichmann.” The Memuneh’s boldest operation was also a pure example of humint—the human intelligence skills at which Israel excelled, in this case without any technological gadgets beyond a rotating car license plate.

  Harel would later be criticized for grabbing the glory for himself, notably in his best-selling book, The House on Garibaldi Street. The critics included some members of the kidnap squad, above all Zvi Aharoni—who later wrote his own book, Operation Eichmann, and claimed that Harel had to be pushed into ordering the mission.

  Every person involved in the caper seemed to have his own unique memory of who had the good ideas, who had the bad ones, who actually tackled the Nazi, and who got him to confess.

  Zvi Malkin, later a New York-based painter and writer, also put his version in a book, Eichmann in My Hands, which mentioned a tragicomedy of errors in the months and years before the Nazi was caught.

  The Mossad’s leading kidnap artist, Rafi Eitan, after he became a garrulous member of parliament in Israel, enjoyed retelling how he had jumped on the war criminal.

  Yehudit Nessyahu, the leading female on the team, was among the very few who adhered to their pledge of lifelong secrecy.

  Only with the passage of decades did the mixed Mossad-Shin Bet squad tell how close it may have come to capturing an even more notorious Nazi—the death camp doctor Josef Mengele. Malkin wrote that he pressed Eichmann for information by demanding, “Tell us where your friend Mengele is. You must know where he lives.” But Eichmann insisted that he did not know. Malkin had to tell Harel, “I tried everything. I believe that he has no idea where Mengele is, or that he is not willing to say a thing.”

  According to Harel, the medical war criminal moved to Paraguay and later to Brazil.

  Some Mossad veterans, however, would complain later that Harel had not taken all the Mengele-related clues seriously. Yet, the attempts to capture him continued. When the Brazilian authorities reported in 1985, after years of rumors, that the Nazi doctor had drowned, the Mossad secretly sent a pathologist to examine the skeleton and confirm that the target atop the manhunt list could be crossed off once and for all.

  The list contained the names of 10 notorious Nazis. Among others, the Israelis searched for Hitler’s senior aide, Martin Bormann, and for Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller.

  Also on the list was Léon Degrelle. A Belgian, Degrelle became an officer in the Waffen SS—the Nazi Party’s military unit fighting on the Russian front.

  Degrelle, after the war, was a fairly prominent neo-Nazi given shelter by Spain’s Fascist government of Francisco Franco. A former Shin Bet man, Zwy (Zvi) Aldouby—hoping for both glory and money—hatched his own plot to capture Degrelle. Aldouby hired a few French mercenaries and approached Yigal Mossinson, a famous Israeli novelist and playwright—giving him the impression that a kidnap mission similar to the Eichmann operation had been authorized by the government.

  Hoping eventually to sell the tale as a film script—and having received an advance payment from a major magazine—the oddly concocted team went into action in Spain. They followed Degrelle to his villa near Seville and started to plan his abduction.

  After several reconnaissance trips, Aldouby, one French partner, and Mossinson were arrested while crossing from France into Spain on July 14, 1961, for the actual kidnap.

  Aldouby and the Frenchman were locked up by the Spanish police, who tortured them and sentenced them to seven years in prison. Mossinson was far luckier—released after just a few hours. Years later, he would be told that because Ben-Gurion liked his writing, The Old Man had phoned Generalissimo Franco and urged him, “Don’t touch Mossinson. Please release him.”

  The next big manhunt after Eichmann was actually a ridiculous boyhunt. Israeli intelligence scoured the globe for a 10-year-old nicknamed Yossele. In late 1959, Yosef Schumacher had been abducted from Israel by his own grandfather, an ultra-Orthodox Jew who feared that the boy’s parents were giving him a secular education.

  Newspaper editorials were making fun of Ben-Gurion for failing to get the boy back to his mother, and Harel—out of loyalty to the prime minister—vowed to track down the child.

  Senior operatives were ordered to drop their other projects, and the entire Shin Bet-Mossad operations team tracked the boy to an apartment in Brooklyn in July 1962.

  Word was flashed to the FBI, and Yossele was returned triumphantly to his parents in Israel. It may seem silly, but the secret services were warmly thanked again, and Israel’s clandestine defenders basked in the praise.

  Harel, however, was developing fresh obsessions, aimed at anti-Semites and anyone who might seek to destroy the Jewish state. The Memuneh specifically began to focus, in the early 1960s, on the ominous arrival of German rocket scientists in Egypt.

  President Nasser was hiring the Germans to help him develop ground-to-ground missiles that could be used in a future war against Israel. Harel genuinely saw this as Germans again making a major effort to exterminate Jews.

  The Memuneh ordered the start of what he termed Operation Damocles, which would effectively place a sword over the head of every German scientist working for the Egyptians.

  Harel’s operatives sent booby-trapped letters to the German scientists involved in Nasser’s missile project and to their families. Envelopes rigged with explosives were mailed by Israeli agents who were undercover in Egypt on completely separate missions. Harel was willing to put them at risk.

  These attacks were coordinated by Yitzhak Yezernitzki, who—before independence in 1948—had been head of the violent and ultra-nationalistic Lehi, or Stern Gang. He later changed his name to Yitzhak Shamir, and in the mid-1980s he would become Israel’s prime minister. Short, stocky, and mustached, Shamir operated from Paris, under diplomatic cover, running the Mossad’s European operations department.

  Back in 1955, Harel had persuaded Ben-Gurion to recruit the most talented members of the former Lehi underground—despite a history of enmity between the right-wingers and the prime minister.

  It was a clever move. The former Stern Gangsters needed no basic training. They knew how to set bombs and how to kill. It was no coincidence, however, that they were employed by the Mossad—and not Shin Bet. Despite his newfound openness, Harel still did not trust them fully; he preferred to see them stationed abroad, shadowing or killing the state’s enemies far away without wielding weapons and power within Israel.

  One exception was Yehoshua Cohen, who in 1948 had been involved in the Stern Gang’s murder of a Swedish mediator for the United Nations, Folke Bernadotte. Cohen was assigned to be Ben-Gurion’s bodyguard, apparently in the belief that an assassin would know how to outwit assassins—and VIP protection was a Shin Bet function.

  German scientists toiling for Egypt’s Nasser were often targeted in Europe, where it was generally easier to get to them. This campaign in the early 1960s would set a strong precedent, and not only for spilling blood to affect the behavior of enemies and third parties. These attacks also cemented the Mossad’s image as a daring, ruthless, and vindictive spy agency with no parallel.

  Certainly more than other Western intelligence operatives, Israel’s secret agents were willing to pursue and assassinate targets almost anywhere—if the mission was deemed to be achievable and Israel’s political leaders decided that the target deserved the death penalty.

  The world, in the decades that followed, would read mostly unconfirmable reports of similar operations: against Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s, Iraqi nuclear technicians in the 1980s,
and Iranian nuclear scientists at the volatile dawn of the 21st century.

  A high-priority example in 1963 was Hans Kleinwachter, a German electronics expert who had worked on Hitler’s V2 rockets and now was employed by Egypt. Two Mossad assassins waited for Kleinwachter’s car near his house in a small German village on a freezing February night. They opened fire with at least one silencer-equipped pistol, but the bullet failed to penetrate the scientist’s windshield. A more powerful submachine gun hidden under a blanket jammed.

  The two luckless Israelis quickly drove away, together with Isser Harel himself. The Memuneh took such a personal interest in the campaign against these Germans that he was on the scene of several attacks.

  The sum total of the Israeli violence was a few injuries and much intimidation. The injured, however, included some of Harel’s operatives: One Mossad man lost his vision when a bomb he was preparing exploded.

  Harel felt his campaign could succeed, but his relations with Ben-Gurion became extremely strained because the prime minister kept urging him not to annoy the West German government. In effect, Ben-Gurion was saying, “Hands off the Germans.”

  Harel, keeping up his efforts to compel the scientists to leave Egypt, managed to recruit one. Otto Joklik, who was actually Austrian, was a rocket scientist with big ideas and a huge appetite for money. He persuaded Egypt to pay him for advice on building a high-energy cobalt bomb, although he barely did any work on it during his time in Cairo. And then he sold his services to the Mossad.

  Joklik was Harel’s man on the inside, and after leaving Egypt he flew to Israel to deliver a complete briefing on the clandestine missile project. Joklik warned that the Egyptians were making progress toward the highly dangerous goal of an “ABC” strike force. The initials stood for atomic-biological-chemical, and such weapons of mass destruction could be in warheads atop German-designed missiles. The Austrian’s tale dovetailed neatly with Harel’s fears.