Hunting Eichmann

by Neal Bascomb

  "Pleased to see you! Come, sit here!" Ilani said joyfully in English, rising from his seat.

  "How are you?" Gat asked brightly in the same language, projecting his voice. "I've come straight from the airport. I was pretty sure I wouldn't find you still here."

  "Let's sit for a while."

  Later, they spoke quietly in Hebrew, then left the café to visit the safe house. The next day, Aharoni met them in a similar manner at a restaurant. Since he had left Buenos Aires in early April, he had let his hair grow out and now sported a mustache in an effort not to be recognized by anyone he had had contact with before. Avraham Shalom was expected next.

  Shalom, who had traveled with a forged German passport, stepped under the awning outside the Lancaster Hotel on Avenida Córdoba, within walking distance of the Plaza San Martín in central Buenos Aires. Entering the lobby, he thought he might have been in London, given the oak bar and the aristocratic portraits on the wall. Shalom was used to staying in fleabags—a staple of Harel's thrifty travel policies—but he was playing the part of a businessman, and the hotel suited this role. He wasn't going to complain.

  Like his colleagues, Shalom had taken a roundabout route to Buenos Aires. He had flown to Rome under one passport, switching it for another at the Israeli embassy. Then he had traveled by train to Paris, where Shalom Dani had passed him an authentic German passport whose name Dani had carefully changed by a few letters to create a new identity. Shalom had then flown to Lisbon, surrendering his passport to the Portuguese authorities until he was ready to board his plane to Buenos Aires. Inexplicably, he had forgotten his assumed name when the policeman had asked for it so that he could return the passport. Usually, Shalom used some kind of mnemonic device, relating syllables or letters of the first name with the last, but this time his mind had gone blank. Luckily, he had spotted his green passport in the pile and pointed to it, saying confidently, "That one's mine." The policeman had handed it to him without a second thought.

  This blunder had soon been followed by another, when he saw the team's frontman, Yaakov Medad, boarding the same flight, something that most definitely was not supposed to happen. If either of their passports was recognized as a fake, the authorities would reexamine all of the passengers' papers. Again, disaster had been avoided, and Shalom and Medad had made a special effort not to so much as glance at each other during the long flight.

  A third bad omen came when Shalom handed over his passport at the Lancaster reception desk. The receptionist, a man in his early fifties, took one look at his papers and said, "Compatriot. You're from Hamburg. I'm from Hamburg."

  Shalom felt his heart fall into his shoes. He spoke with an Austrian accent and dialect, and the attendant, whose age and nationality were consistent with the possibility that he was a former Nazi, would know that he did not speak like a German from the north.

  Hoping to put him off, Shalom said that he was actually from a small town outside the city. Remarkably, the receptionist replied that he was from the same place. Shalom was astounded. What were the chances? He made haste with the hotel forms, took the keys to his room, and walked away, certain that he had made a dubious impression. He planned on switching hotels the next day, just in case.

  He had little time to worry, as he had to leave the hotel straightaway in order to make his 6:00 P.M. rendezvous at the corner of Avenida Santa Fe and Avenida Callao, roughly a twenty-block walk due west through the bustling downtown. He arrived at the same moment as Aharoni and Gat.

  "What do you want to do, Avrum?" Aharoni asked after very few pleasantries.

  Shalom was the advance team's leader, charged by Harel with answering one important question: should the mission go forward? The Mossad chief did not give him any guidance as to what this meant. They had worked together far too long for that to be necessary. Shalom understood that he needed to shadow Eichmann, check out his movements, and see whether there was a suitable location for his capture. At this point, they had only the surveillance reports from Aharoni, and, although Shalom and Aharoni had known each other for years, they had never worked together on a job.

  "Let's go to his house," Shalom decided. There was no reason to delay.

  "It'll be dark," Aharoni said.

  "We'll go."

  Aharoni led them to his rented car and drove the hour and a half out of the city to San Fernando at the height of rush-hour traffic. By the time they reached their destination, the sun had set completely, and a slight mist hung in the cool evening air. The lack of streetlights in the area was proof of its isolation. As they passed underneath the railway embankment on Route 202, heading toward the kiosk and bus stop, Shalom saw small, alternating red and white lights up ahead and to his right. Soon he realized it was someone walking with a double-headed flashlight. When the car's headlights illuminated the man's face, Shalom instantly recognized Eichmann.

  "That's him! That's the man," Shalom whispered as the car passed Eichmann.

  An excited Aharoni stepped on the brake and pulled off to the right, as if he expected Shalom and Gat to jump out and grab Eichmann.

  "Stop that! Drive away!" Shalom said harshly. "He'll think that something's wrong."

  Aharoni lifted his foot from the brake and steered the car straight, too horrified at his mistake to utter a word. Gat watched from the back seat, hoping that Eichmann would not turn around to see what had caused the car to slow down and veer right. Thankfully, he did not.

  They drove a little farther down Route 202.

  "Go after him and see if it's him," Shalom instructed Gat. Aharoni stopped long enough to allow Gat to jump out. Gat crossed the street, keeping one hundred yards between himself and the man. The lights from the car disappeared, and it was almost completely dark. Gat watched the red and white lights move sharply to the left; that must be the side street Garibaldi. He followed and saw the man walk twenty yards farther before turning toward the pillbox of a house. It matched the photographs Aharoni had taken.

  A half-hour later, Aharoni picked up Gat on the other side of the embankment.

  "Eichmann," he said simply. He was elated that they had found him on the first night.

  Shalom was sure that he had already seen enough to report back to Harel. It was a Tuesday, and Eichmann was probably returning from work, having taken the bus. If this was the case, it was possible that he returned home at a predictable time every day. He walked along an empty street to a house in an unlit, isolated neighborhood. It could not be better, Shalom thought, despite his policy never to be too confident.

  Early the next morning, April 27, Shalom met with Ilani, the only team member working out of the embassy. He passed him a single code word to send to Tel Aviv: CARROT. The mission should move forward.

  Later that day, Harel received the message. He called Eitan, giving him the go-ahead for the rest of the team to travel to Buenos Aires. He was scheduled to leave himself in seventy-two hours, and he still needed to complete the plans for smuggling Eichmann out of Argentina.

  Harel had already finalized the date when the special El Al flight would leave Tel Aviv: May 11. This suited the Foreign Ministry delegation, who would arrive a week before the anniversary celebrations in Argentina, and it met with El Al's scheduling demands. In addition, and importantly, the date provided the most operational flexibility. They needed to limit the window of time between when Eichmann was captured and when the plane left. The longer the team needed to hide the Nazi, the greater the odds of discovery, particularly if a search for Eichmann was launched. At most, they had a seven-day time frame before the plane needed to return to Israel. Any longer, and the plane's presence would attract attention. In the best-case scenario, they would capture Eichmann, secure him in a safe house for a day, and then fly him out of Argentina the next day. To add to the flight's cover story, the press was informed early of the diplomatic visit, and tickets were even put on sale to the public for those seats not taken by the delegation.

  The main risk of staging the operation in the days befo
re the anniversary was that security within Buenos Aires and at the airport would be at a heightened state of alert. In particular, his team would need to be sure to avoid random roadblocks at their two greatest moments of exposure: first, when bringing Eichmann to the safe house right after his capture and second, when transporting him from the safe house to the airport and into the plane. However, the advantages of the flight's cover story far outweighed these risks.

  Now that the mission had begun in earnest, Harel hurried to coordinate the transport element, knowing that he would have to rely on El Al employees—civilians all—to execute it. There were scores of what would normally be mundane logistical details: arranging the crew, the flight plan, passenger bookings, fuel, airplane service, landing clearances, and telex communications with Argentina. But these were far from mundane on this occasion, because El Al had never flown to Buenos Aires before. Nothing could be allowed to delay the plane. Some of those same El Al personnel would be needed to help survey the airport and to provide cover for getting Eichmann onto the plane. Most dangerously, every precaution would have to be taken so that the return flight was not stopped, redirected, or, in the worst case, forced down should it be learned that Eichmann was on board. If this were to happen, it would require extraordinary measures on the part of those chosen to fly and navigate the plane, and the whole crew would be at risk. Finally, everybody selected to be involved in the flight had to be able to be trusted to remain absolutely silent.

  Harel dispatched Yehuda Shimoni to spearhead the team's activities in Buenos Aires. The following day, Harel met with the chief pilot, Zvi Tohar, and the two men charged with selecting and vetting the crew, Adi Peleg and Baruch Tirosh. Harel knew El Al security officer Peleg and head of crew assignments Tirosh well. They had worked in the security services before joining the airline. He did not know the tall captain with the trim mustache and stiff bearing of an English gentleman so well. But Tohar had come highly recommended by El Al.

  A German Jew, he had escaped to Britain during World War II and volunteered for pilot school with the RAF. After the war, he had immigrated to Israel, flying hundreds of missions during the struggle for Israeli independence, many of them bringing supplies and ammunition into besieged settlements around Jerusalem under heavy Arab fire. He had joined El Al in the early 1950s, when there had been only a few Israeli pilots, most of the rest being foreigners who had volunteered for the Israeli air force during the War of Independence. In 1953, Tohar had become the first Israeli El Al captain, and since then he had shown his flying skills and levelheadedness as captain of numerous proving flights for new El Al planes.

  "Look, friends, this is the situation," Harel began, gravely serious. "We have a flight to carry an Israeli delegation to the Argentine anniversary. On the return journey, we will be bringing Adolf Eichmann back with us."

  The three men remained silent as the Mossad chief outlined the broad strokes of what he envisioned. He wanted only Israelis to be selected for the flight, cabin, and ground crews. They were to be trustworthy and extremely capable. Every technical detail was to be attended to with extra care. The flight crew would also need to be prepared to take off quickly from Buenos Aires and, potentially, to make evasive maneuvers.

  "What do you have to say about this?" Harel asked.

  Tirosh was eager to affirm that they could handle the assignment, although they would need two full crews, given the distances of the flights. He also offered ideas on how they could throw off pursuers by filing a false flight plan for the return journey. Peleg was noticeably moved by the prospect of the mission. Shortly after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, his father, a successful merchant, had been beaten and forced to drink liters of castor oil. Soon after that, he had died of a heart attack. Unlike his two colleagues, Tohar was reserved, stating that he "appreciated the importance of the affair." Nonetheless, Harel sensed an eagerness from the pilot to be part of the operation.

  Before the meeting ended, Harel stressed that he wanted to limit the number of stops on the flight back from Buenos Aires. The normal flight required three intermediate stops for refueling—for example, Recife, Brazil; Dakar, Senegal; and Rome, Italy—before reaching Israel. This provided too many opportunities for the plane to be seized.

  "Will you be able to manage with only one stop?" Harel asked Tohar.

  The captain understood the abilities as well as the limitations of the new Britannia 300 series, the most advanced planes with the longest range in the El Al fleet. In December 1957, he had flown the Britannia's proving flight from New York to Tel Aviv, a 5,760-mile journey, the longest distance ever traveled nonstop by a commercial plane.

  "It is a very long flight," Tohar said. "Let me check it out."

  Before concluding the meeting, Harel insisted that the three breathe not a word about the flight's secret purpose. Nobody else needed to know until they had Eichmann safely on board and had cleared Argentine airspace. For all intents and purposes, it was a diplomatic flight, nothing else.

  "See you again in Buenos Aires," Harel said, as he shook each man's hand.

  Two hours later, Tohar rang the Mossad chief to tell him that a flight with only one stop in Dakar was doable at a level of risk that he was willing to take. But there were no guarantees. At some point over the Atlantic Ocean, they would pass the point of no return.

  Lying flat on their stomachs at the top of the railway embankment, their faces inches from the tracks, Shalom and Aharoni trained their field glasses on Route 202 and on the house seventy-five yards away. It was their third night of surveillance, and they awaited Eichmann's return home. Their lookout post required them to stretch out on rocks and railroad ties, exposed to the unpredictable April downpours. Overgrown grass and weeds along the embankment offered some cover. As often as every five minutes, a train came down the tracks leading to and from Buenos Aires. First the rails vibrated, then a light approached, then the train passed with an earsplitting screech and boom, emitting a cloud of sooty smoke.

  They had no trouble getting out of the way in time, and the discomfort was a negligible concern, but the lights from the trains presented a risk that they might be spotted by someone in the neighborhood. Still, the site, fifteen feet above the surrounding terrain, was the best place for surveillance.

  After the 7:30 train passed, they kept an even more careful watch. On the previous two nights, at 7:40, the green and yellow bus 203 carrying Eichmann had stopped at the kiosk. Lights appeared on the road. Aharoni checked his watch: 7:38. He shared a look with Shalom. They had their target's schedule down. Their operation depended on his adherence to it.

  Eichmann and a woman descended from the bus, then split apart. After the bus moved away, Eichmann turned on his flashlight, walking slowly, head down, toward his house. Shalom had been struck by Eichmann's pathetic existence, living in such a shabby neighborhood without electricity or water, dressed like a simple factory worker in threadbare clothes. Given the power he had once held, it was hard for Shalom to believe that this was the same man—even though he had studied Aharoni's reports in Tel Aviv himself. As on the previous two nights, Eichmann circled his house before entering. Initially, the Mossad agents had thought that he was making sure nobody was lurking about. Then they had realized that Eichmann was merely checking on his vegetable patch.

  Shalom and Aharoni watched the house for a few more minutes, then scrambled down the embankment. Gat picked them up on the road at the prearranged time, and they returned to the safe house, which they had dubbed Maoz (stronghold), to review the day's activities and to plan for the next day. They had spent the morning reconnoitering Buenos Aires harbor, just in case the plan with the El Al plane fell through. It was clear to all of them that they needed to spend much more time at the harbor in order to figure out the best way to get Eichmann out by boat. More pressing was their search for suitable safe houses.

  In addition to Maoz, a grand second-floor apartment in an exclusive neighborhood where they could meet and hunker down if the opera
tion was exposed, they needed to rent another safe house to hold Eichmann until they moved him out of the country. Such a place had many requirements. It had to be a large house in a fairly wealthy area so that several expensive cars could be seen coming and going without attracting attention. It had to be private, therefore freestanding, and preferably with a fenced garden and an attached garage so that they could bring the prisoner directly into the house without anyone catching sight of him. The location had to be remote, but not too far from either San Fernando or the airport, and accessible by a variety of routes. There could be no caretaker on the premises.

  Yaakov Medad reported that he had leads on two houses in San Fernando, as well as several others elsewhere. They decided to split into two teams and to spend all of the next day checking out the addresses. If none was suitable, Medad would need to try Ilani's contacts in Buenos Aires before turning to real estate agents or random newspaper listings. In the best-case scenario, they would rent their house from a local Jew, explaining that they wanted to use it for the Israeli delegation coming for the anniversary celebrations. If circumstances demanded, they could call on their landlord to turn a blind eye. Following Harel's operational philosophy, they planned everything based on the worst-case scenario.

  The men did not finish their discussion until midnight. Then they left Maoz and returned to their hotels, collapsing exhausted into their beds.

  In New York, Yosef Klein could not fathom why El Al headquarters wanted him to be in Argentina—or why it had to be immediately. The young station manager already had all he could handle running the airline's activities in New York. What did they want with him in South America, where he had no experience? But that was what the telex message detailed in its shorthand: "Go to Buenos Aires. Meet up with Yehuda Shimoni. Arrive by May 3." There had to be some mistake. He telexed back: "There is probably some error. What do I have to do with Argentina?"