by Isser Harel
Arye was one of the few who alighted. Technical service and refueling were carried out under his supervision. On his instructions, a little more than the standard amount of fuel was squeezed into the tanks.
Leo Barkai, the steward, also left the plane to buy provisions and supplies. He tried to get his shopping done as quickly as possible to advance the time of take-off. The pilots went up to the control tower to arrange the flight plan.
All the others stayed on the plane. The men in first class were told to pretend to sleep again. This time I joined them, to keep an eye on the situation in case of an official inspection.
Eichmann didn’t go to sleep, but he behaved impeccably. He sat in absolute silence as two Frenchmen walked past him, made a cursory inspection of the first-class toilets, and went back the way they had come. They were from the airport health department and were the only government officials who boarded the plane.
An hour later the doors were closed, the engines were started, and the aircraft moved down the runway. And then we were over Dakar, our nose pointed toward Tel Aviv.
28
THE PLANE climbed to a great height. In their quest to do the seemingly impossible – fly a Britannia nonstop from Dakar to Lydda – the captains had two needs: altitude and a favorable wind.
The bulletins from the pilots’ cabin were good; the weather was turning out just as they wished and there was every prospect of a tail wind. During this part of the journey Vedeles piloted the plane while Tohar took a rest. I slept most of the time, so I didn’t know until later about the improvement that had taken place. At the beginning of this stage of the flight the pilots still had in mind a possible refueling at Rome or Cyprus, but as we passed over the Straits of Gibraltar the tail wind grew stronger and there was no further doubt that the fuel in our tanks would be enough to take us to Lydda.
It was dawn when I woke up. We were flying over the Mediterranean, rapidly approaching the shores of Israel. The tail wind had blown all night and the outlook remained favorable.
I washed, shaved, and changed my clothes, and felt more refreshed than I had felt for a long time. I gave the men their instructions for the final phase of the operation. As soon as the plane landed, I told them, Eichmann would be handed over to the operations group who would in turn deliver him to the legal authorities of the state. At that point our mission would be accomplished. I took the opportunity during those last few moments to thank my companions for their devotion and resourcefulness at every stage of the operation, which applied equally to all the members of the task force.
Israel’s coastline was already visible through the windows, and no more heart-warming sight could be imagined. The aircraft had covered the immense distance between Dakar and Lydda in eleven and a half hours. As the wheels touched down on the runway a load lifted from my shoulders. I went into the cockpit, shook hands with the captains and their aides, and thanked them and the crew for their zealous assistance, for the quick and easy flight, and for their cordiality to me and my men.
Before alighting, I went back into the first-class compartment. I thought Eichmann was looking paler than before. He sensed the activity and bustle around him, and his whole body was shaking.
I said good-by to his escorts, including the doctor, and told them to hand Eichmann over to Moshe Drori, who, I noticed, was already standing beside the plane.
It was Sunday, May 22, 1960, and I had been absent from Israel for twenty-three days.
Moshe Drori drove to the airport with several men. He had been advised by the airline that the plane was due to arrive that morning, but until he heard the good news from me he wasn’t sure if Eichmann was really on it. I instructed him to receive Eichmann into his custody, to take care that strict secrecy was preserved, and not to give his prisoner any chance of attempting suicide. I told him he must keep Eichmann under safe arrest until I let him know when to hand him over to the Inspector-General of Police.
I telephoned my wife to tell her I had just arrived and hoped to be home in the afternoon. She didn’t sound surprised and didn’t ask where I had been.
I then called the two men who would be responsible for guarding and protecting Eichmann until he was put into the hands of the police. I warned them to pay strict attention to every detail of transporting and guarding him. I asked what arrangements they had made for his temporary imprisonment; what they told me sounded satisfactory. Finally, I re-emphasized that they were personally answerable for the prisoner’s safety.
They drove Eichmann to his secret place of temporary imprisonment, where he was to stay until he could be handed over to the police. They decided not to reveal the prisoner’s true identity to the men appointed to guard him. They were well aware that they could rely completely on the guards’ efficiency and dedication, but they were wary of the reaction, for the guards themselves were survivors of the death camps. The story they told was that their prisoner was a dangerous spy and must be closely watched. This precaution had to be taken, particularly since they would be taking turns at guard duty inside the cell twenty-four hours a day.
When the identity of the ‘spy’ was eventually disclosed to them, they felt cheated.
It was nine-fifteen when I completed all the arrangements at the airport. It was now time to go to Jerusalem to inform the Prime Minister that Eichmann was in Israel. I told Yaki, who had been waiting for me at the airport for three-quarters of an hour, that he must get me to the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem by ten o’clock, when the Cabinet met for its weekly session. I was afraid that if I arrived late and the meeting had already started, I wouldn’t be able to call Ben-Gurion out without attracting the attention of too many people.
All the way there I kept urging Yaki to drive faster, faster -and he delivered me to Ben-Gurion’s office at ten minutes to ten. The Prime Minister’s Political Secretary, Yitzhak Navon, needed no preambles or explanations – he realized I wouldn’t be disturbing the Prime Minister a few minutes before a Cabinet meeting if it weren’t urgent and important. Within a few seconds I was sitting in Ben-Gurion’s office. He was surprised to see me and asked when I had returned. I told him I had arrived in Israel two hours earlier and had brought him a present. He looked at me in astonishment. This was quite different from the way I usually spoke to him.
I laughed, and said, ‘I have brought Adolf Eichmann with me. For two hours now he has been on Israeli soil, and if you authorize it he will be handed over to the Israeli police.’
He didn’t reply at once. Though he had been told that Eichmann had been traced, he hadn’t, it seemed, quite grasped the full significance of the event until that moment when I brought him the news that Eichmann was in Israel.
‘Is his identity no longer in doubt?’ he asked.
‘There is no doubt,’ I said. His family had also been identified with complete certainty. His sons still called themselves Eichmann. There were various identifying marks on his body which proved undeniably that he was Eichmann. And when he was interrogated he mentioned certain things that only Eichmann could have known.
The Prime Minister was convinced. Nevertheless, he requested that before any official steps were taken the prisoner should be identified by one or two people who had previously known Eichmann. He authorized me to deliver the prisoner into the hands of the Inspector-General of Police, and – immediately after the identification – to have him brought before a judge for the warrant of detention to be issued.
From the Prime Minister’s office I went to see my daughter. Yaki called her away from her work, and soon we were standing and talking outside.
She asked a little agitatedly, ‘Where were you?’
My answer was, ‘Somewhere,’ and she didn’t ask any more.
Yaki was uncharacteristically excited on the drive back to Tel Aviv and never stopped asking questions. What he wanted to know most of all was what would happen when the secret was made public.
He drove me to my office, and a little later Ankor arrived to report on Eichmann�
�s transfer to his temporary place of imprisonment. The task force doctor stayed with him until he was taken into the cell, examined him again, and pronounced him fit. Drori checked the guard and security arrangements and found everything in order. I told him to go to the Inspector-General of Police, Yosef Nahmias, and inform him that Eichmann was in our hands and that, on instructions from the Prime Minister, he was to be handed over to the police to be taken before a judge for the warrant of detention.
Nahmias was stunned. He summoned the head of the Police Administration Department and asked Drori to repeat what he had said. It was finally decided that the next morning Ankor would pick Nahmias up and drive him to the temporary jail; they would take with them a judge to issue the warrant of detention on the spot. That way both secrecy and security could be preserved.
Haggai was in Haifa that morning, appearing as a witness in District Court. He returned to Tel Aviv in the afternoon and came straight to my office. I had in the meantime received a message from the Prime Minister that he wanted to announce the criminal’s capture to the Knesset as soon as a positive identification had been made, so my conversation with Haggai turned on two topics: the text of the Prime Minister’s statement in the Knesset and someone to make the identification.
Haggai suggested Moshe Agami of Kfar Giladi, who had been the Jewish Agency representative in Vienna and had met Eichmann in 1938. Benno Cohen’s name was also mentioned again. We decided to get both of them in to identify Eichmann, Agami first. It had to be done rapidly, since there were by now quite a few people who knew about Eichmann’s capture and arrival in Israel, and the news was no doubt spreading in ever-widening circles.
Haggai was prepared to go to Kfar Giladi, but was only too happy when he heard that Moshe Agami was in Tel Aviv that day. He arranged to meet him right away at Café Lidiya in Masaryk Square. There he told him the story of our operation and about the necessity for a personal identification of Eichmann. Agami was tremendously excited. At Haggai’s request, he described the circumstances of his two meetings with Eichmann.
Both meetings took place in October 1938, when, as the Jewish Agency representative in Vienna, he went to see Eichmann about the organization for the training of Jewish youth in preparation for emigration to. Israel. Eichmann’s offices at the time were in the Rothschild mansion. When Agami was taken into his office, a fairly long room, Eichmann received him with unconcealed arrogance. He was dressed in SS uniform and made Agami stand at attention three or four yards away from him. He asked him who he was and demanded that the training program be handed to him within forty-eight hours. The interview lasted five or ten minutes. Two days later Agami brought him the program and Eichmann warned him that he must stick to preparatory training and not indulge in anything else. He concluded by ordering him to report regularly to an SS officer whose name – as far as he could remember – was Gunther.
Since Agami might not be able to identify Eichmann after so many years, Haggai suggested that he talk about the two meetings and, during the course of the conversation, deliberately distort some of the names they had mentioned at the time, in the hope that Eichmann would correct him.
Haggai then drove Agami to the temporary prison, where he was first given the opportunity of observing Eichmann through a small peephole in the door. Agami said he couldn’t identify the man that way. Then he was taken into the room and joined soon afterward by Haggai. This time Eichmann wasn’t wearing glasses. Agami introduced himself as Moshe Auerbach – his former name – and asked Eichmann if he remembered him as the Jewish Agency representative who had come to his office in 1938. Eichmann said that without his glasses he couldn’t recognize anybody. When his glasses were brought to him, he stared at Agami and eventually said he didn’t remember him. Then they spoke about the Vienna of 1938 and their two meetings, and Agami – following Haggai’s suggestion – garbled the names of some of the people Eichmann had known at the time. Eichmann not only corrected him but, as they went on talking, even reminded him of some of the details of the meetings.
Now there was no further doubt in Agami’s mind that the man before him was Adolf Eichmann – no other person could have known what they talked about when they were alone in 1938.
Haggai telephoned me forthwith at my home to give me the positive results of the identification. He also tried to get hold of Benno Cohen but couldn’t reach him that day.
That evening I advised the Prime Minister that one of the people who had known Eichmann before the war had identified him.
We had another debt of honor to pay before the official announcement was made of Eichmann’s capture and transfer to Israel. Since February 1960 Fritz Bauer had been told nothing about the progress of our operation. He had on many occasions questioned his Israeli contact, Chaim Yitzhaki, about developments, but Chaim could tell him nothing.
Now I asked that a cable be sent immediately to Cologne, telling Chaim to await an urgent message from Drori the next morning, May 23.1 wanted Bauer to learn about Eichmann’s capture before the rest of the world heard it from the lips of the Prime Minister of Israel. Yet I was afraid to send the message any earlier than two hours ahead of the official announcement, for fear that the news might leak.
When the Prime Minister received the results of the identification, he decided to make his announcement in the Knesset the following day, at four in the afternoon. The second cable to Cologne was sent the night before.
When the first cable came Chaim realized that the message for Bauer concerned Eichmann and that we must have succeeded in capturing him. He immediately got in touch with Bauer and asked if they could meet in the city the following morning. Bauer was all keyed up and wanted to know what was happening, but Chaim would say nothing except that he thought he might have some good news for him.
Drori’s cable arrived at nine-fifteen in the morning. It said that Eichmann was in Israel and that Chaim must tell Bauer about it at two o’clock sharp. By the time Chaim deciphered the message it was already nine forty-five, and he telephoned Bauer at once and made an appointment to meet him at a restaurant at one o’clock. He went straight out to his car and drove at a good speed toward the center of the city. As he entered the city limits, he had a blowout and the car went into a skid – only by a miracle was a serious accident averted. Chaim was struggling to change the tire, but fortunately for him a passing Dutch motorist stopped and helped him.
It was one-thirty before he reached the restaurant. Bauer had worked himself up into a fever of anticipation mingled with anxiety about Chaim’s tardiness. Chaim didn’t even wash his hands, filthy as they were from changing the tire. He hurried straight to Bauer’s table and burst out with the news that Eichmann had been caught and in a few hours the Prime Minister would be announcing it in the Knesset.
With tears in his eyes, Bauer flung his arms around Chaim and kissed him. He asked him what he would drink in honor of the occasion and was most disappointed when he received the typical Israeli reply: soda. A few minutes later he excused himself, saying he had a telephone call to make. He explained that he considered it his duty to pass on the good news to the man he had confided in from the start. Chaim begged him to be careful not to mention names on the telephone until the official Israeli announcement was made.
The righteous German who was kept all the time informed on the connection between Bauer and Israel over Eichmann was none other than the Prime Minister of Hessen, Georg-August Zinn,
29
THE REAR PARTY of the task force was out of Argentina before Ben-Gurion’s official announcement gave the Argentine authorities their first intimation of what had happened. As soon as our plane took off, Rafi and Avrum drove back to Tira. Dina and Eli had been waiting there, growing more and more impatient as the minutes ticked by – it was two in the morning before they got back, four hours after the Eichmann convoy had left the safe house.
Rafi and Avrum gave their friends a full report on the final stage of the operation, and all four of them settled back to enjoy the
wonderful feeling of relief: at last they were rid of the oppressive burden of taking care of Eichmann. They discussed Yitzhak’s adventure with much laughter and cheer, and decided that the way he boarded the plane almost straight from the taxi fitted in perfectly with the image he had created while in Argentina: the spoiled rich man’s son, with unlimited money to spend, always renting villas and cars, treated with such deference that even the plane wouldn’t leave until he turned up.
They got up early in the morning to finish their final assignments. It was only now, as they carried out their last inspection of the villa to make sure they had forgotten nothing, that they realized just how much they had been longing for this moment.
When Tira was completely cleared they drove to Buenos Aires, to the safe house Ramim, where Shalom Dani and Ilani were staying. Barhon, who had been held there the day before, was given back his papers in the middle of the night – now restored to their original state by Shalom – and had left Argentina very early in the morning. Ilani was due to leave that night and during the day had to turn in the keys to all the apartments and houses they had rented. Dina and Shalom booked seats on a plane to Montevideo the following morning, May 22.
Rafi, Avrum, and Eli bought train tickets to Chile. Rafi and Avrum didn’t want to travel by air, as they had been seen a lot at the airport during the last few days. Getting berths in a sleeping compartment, they soon found out, was a matter of luck, since bookings were usually made two months in advance. However, the travel agent told to try at the railway station because there were sometimes last-minute cancellations. Avrum was, that way, fortunate enough to get three berths for the forty-hour journey.
It had been weeks since any of them had eaten a meal under pleasant and comfortable conditions, so they decided to celebrate the tough assignment and their farewell from Argentina with a lavish meal at a good restaurant. The waiters didn’t know why the party was in such high spirits but they were also soon infected by the merriment and put themselves out to please their customers. The only thing that upset them was that the lady wouldn’t touch any of the delicacies they heaped on the table. They didn’t know, of course, that she observed kashruth.