by Neal Bascomb
Harel had also taken steps to keep Eichmann unaware of the hunt for him in Buenos Aires, particularly after the potentially disastrous announcements by Tuviah Friedman in the press. First, on his advice, Bauer held a press conference in Frankfurt and declared that his office was seriously investigating the presence of Eichmann in Kuwait, saying he had a tip that the fugitive Nazi was in the employment of a sheik and serving as "an influential middleman between German and Kuwaiti companies." Coincidentally, this declaration was made the day before the wave of anti-Semitic attacks. Second, Harel arranged through Bauer for Schüle to contact Friedman once again, urging him to cease his public campaign for a reward for Eichmann. "Please make sure no publications, no speeches, and no proceedings of any kind are conducted in connection with the Eichmann case," Schüle wrote. Third, the Mossad chief used his influence to put an end to a separate investigation by a local Jewish organization in Buenos Aires that had interviewed Lothar Hermann about the contents of his letter to Tuviah Friedman. Fourth, Harel quashed a request by a Knesset member to David Ben-Gurion on December 25 to "take suitable measures in order to bring about Eichmann's apprehension and punishment" by asking the legislator to withdraw his request, because any reply would impair their efforts.
At the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting, Harel was equally obtuse, but he assured those in attendance, "I am planning an action that, if successful, could mean a death blow to this outburst of neo-Nazism." Now that he was completely behind the mission and had the sanction of the prime minister, he would see this action through to the end.
12
ON MARCH 1, 1960, Zvi Aharoni presented himself to immigration control at Ezeiza Airport, an hour outside Buenos Aires. His Israeli diplomatic papers identified him as Mr. Rodan, a staff member of the Foreign Ministry. He explained in his rough Spanish that he had traveled to Argentina to investigate reports of an outbreak of anti-Semitism in South America. The guard eyed the passport and then its holder.
Aharoni had the kind of long, sober face that made it difficult to divine his thoughts, an advantage in his interrogation work. Those who knew him said that he saw the world as being streaked with tragedy. Over the course of his thirty-eight years, he had tricked death numerous times, and every time he had wondered why he had survived while others had not.
Two weeks before Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Hitler's thugs ransacked Jewish shops and homes throughout Germany, Aharoni left Berlin with his mother and younger brother to immigrate to Palestine. Every other member of his family was killed in the Holocaust.
Living on a kibbutz in the hills of lower Galilee, the youth learned to speak Hebrew, ride a horse, and fire a rifle, and he came to know intimately what it was like to sit in the pitch-darkness and wait for an attack. For most of the next ten years, he carried a gun, serving first as a guard at the kibbutz and then as a member of the Jewish Settlement Police. In 1943, he joined the British army. His unit was stationed in Cairo, then in Italy, where he interrogated high-ranking German prisoners. At war's end, his attempt at civilian life was thwarted by the 1948 War of Independence, in which he saw heavy fighting. Numerous times he faced certain death: ambushed in broad daylight outside the kibbutz; caught in an attack by a U-boat at sea; surrounded by Arabs, alone on a hilltop in Palestine, protected by a single rock, which was gradually being chipped away by bullets; retrieving a two-inch mortar in an open field under constant gunfire; finding an unex-ploded shell inches from his feet. Each time he had lived, while those fighting alongside him had not.
By the summer of 1949, now a captain and company commander in charge of two hundred men, Aharoni found himself facing a new enemy: typhoid. In the hospital, life slowly drained from him. He was so sick that his wife, whom he had met at the kibbutz, could not even ask him what they should name their newborn son. Once again he survived, but he was too weak to rejoin the army. By happenstance, he ran into someone with whom he had served in Italy, who suggested that he join the Israeli security services. One of their former commanders was deputy chief of the Shin Bet. Before long, Aharoni found himself sitting across from Isser Harel at a Jaffa café. Harel asked him a few questions about his past, then asked what Aharoni thought about the violent, right-wing dissident groups, such as the Irgun. From Harel's tone, Aharoni knew enough to answer, "I am absolutely against them." Two days later, he was invited to join the Shin Bet as one of two men responsible for interrogations. In the following years, he built up the Shin Bet investigations branch, trained numerous new recruits, and attained the rank of division head, just below the deputy chief of the entire organization.
Now, newly arrived in Argentina, Aharoni was operating as a Mossad agent for the first time—a far cry from his usual line of work. Harel, who had waited for him to finish another assignment before sending him to Buenos Aires, hoped that the interrogator's relentless, unemotional determination would lead him to Eichmann. At passport control, Aharoni passed his first test when the guard stamped his documents, allowing him to enter without inspecting the sealed diplomatic pouch under his arm. That pouch contained everything the Israelis knew about Eichmann, including the most recent intelligence from Bauer, which had taken several weeks for them to obtain covertly.
Waiting outside the airport in the sweltering heat was "Yossef," the security officer at the Israeli embassy, with whom Aharoni had worked for several years in Tel Aviv. On the ride into the city, Aharoni stared vacantly at the thick rows of trees lining both sides of the highway, knowing well that he would soon have to take some risks to prove for certain that Klement was Eichmann. Another "maybe" in the file would be useless. Harel needed a definitive answer before he could launch a mission. Given how long their target had lived freely in Argentina, Aharoni hoped that Eichmann had grown less suspicious and would not flee at the slightest feeling that someone was observing him.
Yossef brought Aharoni to the Israeli embassy—he was the only person there who knew the true purpose of Aharoni's visit. Aharoni locked his Eichmann files in a safe; after long study, he knew most of the facts by heart. Later, Yossef drove him to his hotel. On the way, Aharoni detailed to him the kind of help he would need, particularly since he was alone, unfamiliar with the city, and had a poor grasp of Spanish. 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.
Two days later, Aharoni drove slowly down Chacabuco Street in a rented Fiat. "Roberto," a twenty-year-old Argentine student with a black pencil mustache, sat next to him holding a street map. Having volunteered for other operations in the past, Roberto kept his inquiries to a minimum.
As they drove past 4261 Chacabuco, Aharoni glanced at the small house with its unkempt garden. He stopped a few blocks away on a side street, pondering how he could get a good look at whoever lived in the house. He fished a postcard of a tropical island, which he had picked up at the airport, out of his pocket and told Roberto to write on the back, "Have just returned. Best regards, George," along with a fictitious name and address. Aharoni told him to jot the name Dagosto (a variation of Dagoto, the name Lothar Hermann had found one of the electric meters at 4261 Chacabuco registered to) and 4263 Chacabuco in the sender box. The address did not exist, but the card would provide Roberto with an excuse to ask neighbors if they knew the sender. Because the postcard lacked a stamp and postmark, Aharoni warned the youth not to allow anyone a close inspection.
Roberto ventured off while Aharoni waited in the car. Two years had passed since Sylvia Hermann had walked down this street. The Nazi fugitive might well have switched neighborhoods, and if he had, he would be very difficult to find in a city of mo
re than 5 million people spread across seventy-one square miles. For all Aharoni knew, Eichmann might have moved to another city, country, or continent.
Twenty minutes later, Roberto reappeared, hurrying back to the car. He waved the postcard and smiled, then climbed into the passenger's seat. He had spoken to a young girl outside the house about the Dagosto family and had peered, undetected, through the windows of 4261 Chacabuco. Nobody in the neighborhood was named Dagosto, but the house was empty, and Roberto had glimpsed some painters working inside. Klement no longer lived at the address. Worse, he had probably vacated the premises very recently. If Aharoni had not been delayed in Israel on that other job, he would have arrived before Klement had moved. Now he needed a new plan.
Across the globe, Mossad operative Yaakov Gat was in a village in West Germany waiting for the return of his partner, Michael Bloch. Harel had recruited the two men to investigate the Eichmann and Liebl families. Bloch, who spoke fluent German, was spending the morning at the local café, chatting casually with villagers to see if they knew anything about Eichmann's family. Every attempt to speak to Vera Eichmann's sister Eva, to see if she knew where Vera lived, had been met by the same wall of silence that Gat had encountered over the previous six weeks with the other members of the family. This was revealing in itself, indicating that the family had something to hide.
Forty years old, tall and slender as a reed, Gat was a Shin Bet agent based at the embassy in Paris. He was in charge of finding East German, Hungarian, and KGB spies who were passing intelligence to Egypt. He was also a leading representative of the Mossad in Europe. Given that Harel ran both organizations, the lines between the two were often blurred. Born in Transylvania, Gat had a personal stake in the operation to find Eichmann. He and his immediate family had survived the Nazis by moving away from the region, annexed to Hungary in 1940, but many in his extended family, including half of his father's family, had remained behind and been sent to extermination camps by Eichmann. At the war's end, Gat had left for Palestine but had been captured and detained in a British camp for illegal émigrés in Cyprus until the state of Israel was declared. Gat's paratrooper cousin advised him that his agile mind and preternatural calm would serve the security services well. He was willing to take a job with them as long as he never had to wear a uniform, as recollections of the fascist Romanian soldiers were still distasteful to him. He underwent a five-week training program, learning self-defense and how to pick locks, open envelopes, handle a camera, break a tail, and surveil a target, among other skills. Then he was sent out into the field to actually learn how to be an operative.
When Bloch returned, he told Gat about a chat he had had at the café. According to the postman, Vera and her three sons had stayed in the town in the early 1950s and then one day had disappeared. No letters had ever come from her, and nothing had been seen or heard of her since. It was the kind of thing a postman in a small town noticed, yet another sliver of information casting doubt on the story that Vera had remarried and moved away, which was the only story her family had offered over the years.
Gat and Bloch took a train to Vienna and, as soon as they arrived, sent their report to Harel. As always, Gat included the facts they had learned. His boss did not want interpretation.
The two also had arranged to meet Simon Wiesenthal, who had something to show them. The independent Nazi-hunter was working for a Jewish organization that offered vocational training to immigrants to ease their assimilation. Gat had contacted Wiesenthal at the beginning of the investigation, knowing of his interest in Eichmann. Gat had sworn Wiesenthal to secrecy, but he had kept quiet about the Argentine operation all the same, explaining only that they were following up leads on the Nazi's family. Wiesenthal had offered his help, mentioning that the previous April, he had seen an obituary for Eichmann's stepmother and that the names listed in the obituary had included a Vera Eichmann. This seemed strange, because a woman who remarried usually took her new husband's name. Wiesenthal had helped Gat and Bloch track down several Eichmann family members and had attempted to find out more about the passports given to Vera and her sons in 1952. The passport file had disappeared from the German consulate in Graz, however, raising more suspicions. Like Tuviah Friedman, Wiesenthal had urged the Israeli government to offer a sizable reward for any information on Eichmann's whereabouts.
At his apartment, Wiesenthal spread out five photographs on the table in front of him and invited the two Israelis to examine them. One was the picture of Eichmann taken in the late 1930s that Diamant had found in Maria Mösenbacher's possession. The other four were of his brothers. A few weeks before, Wiesenthal had arranged to have their photos taken at the funeral of their father in Linz. "This must be how he looks now," Wiesenthal said, knowing that Gat wanted to get his hands on a recent photograph of Eichmann. "Probably closest to his brother Otto. All the brothers have the same facial expression. Look at the mouth, the corners of the mouth, the chin, the form of the skull."
"Fantastic," Bloch said, nodding his head.
Gat asked if they might take the photos with them. Wiesenthal gladly gave them copies.
It was clear to Gat and Bloch that Vera and her sons had left Austria without a hint of their destination and that eight years later, they still wanted nobody to know where they were. Unless she had remarried some other war criminal, Vera must be with Eichmann.
Gat wanted to cut off contact with Wiesenthal, despite his ongoing desire to be of help. Through a source, Gat had learned that Wiesenthal had indiscreetly mentioned in conversation that the Israelis were eager to find Eichmann. Furthermore, Gat was weary of Wiesenthal's questions about payment for his assistance in the investigation. No doubt this would not have been an issue had Wiesenthal known that the Israelis were not just fishing for information but had already dispatched an Israeli agent to Buenos Aires to find him.
On March 4, "Juan," a cherubic eighteen-year-old Argentine who had a permanent smile, entered the gate at 4261 Chacabuco Street. In his hand, he carried an exquisitely wrapped box containing an expensive cigarette lighter. It was addressed to Nikolas Klement, Vicente López, 4261 Chacabuco. Slipped under the ribbon was a note written in flowery script by an embassy secretary: "For my friend Nicki, in friendship, on his birthday."
Juan had instructions from a Mr. Rodan, whom he had just met, to go to the Vicente López address to find out where "Nick Klement" had moved. His cover was that he had a gift to deliver. If asked where the gift came from, Juan was to say that his friend worked as a bellboy at an upscale Buenos Aires hotel, and a young lady had given him a sizable tip to deliver this package. Since his friend was busy, Juan was doing him a favor. Under no circumstances, Mr. Rodan stressed, was Juan to go to the new address. If he got into any trouble, a "friend" would be waiting four blocks away. Then Mr. Rodan wished him good luck.
Unable to find a bell at the gate, Juan shouted out for Nick Klement. The doors and windows to the house were wide open. When nobody answered, he ventured into the yard and around to the back of the house, where a man and a woman were emptying out a brick shack.
"Excuse me please," Juan said. "But do you know whether Mr. Klement lives here?"
"You mean the Germans?" the man asked.
"I don't know."
"Do you mean the one with the three grown sons and the little boy?"
"I don't know," Juan said innocently. Truly, he had no idea.
"Those people used to live here, but now they have moved. Maybe fifteen to twenty days ago." The man suggested that Juan speak to one of the men working in the house and led him inside.
Juan spotted a carpenter in his early fifties and showed him the card and gift. "Can you tell me where I can find him?" Juan asked. "I have to deliver it personally."
The carpenter, who spoke Spanish with a thick European accent, mentioned that the family had moved to a neighborhood called San Fernando, but he did not know exactly where. Helpfully, he offered to take Juan to where one of Klement's sons worked, just a block away. As th
ey approached an automobile mechanic's garage on the next corner, the carpenter pointed out a Motoneta moped that he said belonged to Klement's son. Juan got a good look at the vehicle. Then the carpenter called out, "Dito!" A young man of about nineteen, wearing oil-stained overalls, came over.
"This guy would like to speak to your father," the carpenter told the young man.
Juan did not know whether he was looking for the father or the son, only Nick Klement. He explained the purpose of his visit and that he had just learned that Klement had moved. Dito confirmed this curtly.
"Where have you moved?" Juan asked.
"To Don Torcuato."
Juan hesitatingly offered to give Dito the package to pass on to his father, Mr. Klement, saying that he was doing a favor for his bellboy friend.
"I'd like to know from whom you got that," Dito said.
Juan explained that he did not know the name or anything else about the young lady who had given his friend the package to deliver. Then he asked if he could just have Mr. Klement's address in order to deliver the package himself. Dito refused, saying the area had no street addresses. At last Dito agreed to take the package. Sensing that he had pressed enough, Juan left the garage.
Listening to Juan's report, Aharoni grew excited and thanked him for a job well done. Not only was the trail not dead; they might even have found one of the fugitive Nazi's sons. He was also personally encouraged that his gambit to deliver the lighter had worked. He had reckoned that people would be more forthcoming with information if they thought they were doing Nick a favor. Aharoni had learned from the file that Nick's birthday was March 3. Now he knew for certain that a German family named Klement had lived at the Chacabuco address until only a few weeks ago. They had four sons, one of whom was roughly the same age and had a similar-sounding name to Dieter Eichmann, born March 29, 1942.