Hunting Eichmann (24 page)

Aharoni delivered the news to Harel, who then sent him and Amos Manor, the forty-three-year-old Shin Bet director, to Jerusalem. There they met with Haim Cohen and Pinhas Rosen, the Israeli minister of justice, to present their evidence that Klement and Eichmann were the same person and to receive legal advice as to whether the operation should go forward. The two top lawyers of the Israeli government gave their approval. Although abducting Eichmann would violate Argentine sovereignty, this was solely an issue of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In their view, it did not affect I sraeli jurisdiction to prosecute Eichmann, because, they believed, Germany was never going to pursue extradition seriously, let alone hold a trial.

With their legal consent secured, nothing stood in the way of the operation moving to the next stage.

At Mossad headquarters, the staff was busy preparing for the task force's journey to and stay in Argentina. Given the nature of the assignment and the number of agents involved, this was a complicated endeavor. All of the agents needed to travel on separate flights, departing from different locations, with forged passports and an array of visas. It was imperative that no agent be tied to another or tracked back to Israel. Further, some of the agents would need to travel out of Buenos Aires with different passports from the ones with which they arrived.

First, each agent had to leave Tel Aviv under one identity. When the agents arrived at their first destination outside Israel, they would be met by Israeli operatives and given new tickets and new identities. These identities needed to match their particular language abilities. One could not give an Italian passport to someone who did not speak Italian. Fluency was not necessary, particularly when one had what Avraham Shalom liked to call "personality." Several of the agents spoke German, others French and English; they also spoke a hodgepodge of other languages.

Travel visas were another challenge, since the Argentine consulate in each country required character references and health documentation. Most of these needed to be forged, and already Mossad and Shin Bet staff were being sent to Paris to undergo inoculations and medical examinations so that their stamped approvals could then be altered and pasted into the passports of the Mossad agents. A couple of agents would bypass this process by being booked into Latin American tours that spent a few days in Buenos Aires (which did not require references or exams), but they would require alternative passports to leave the country. In any event, all of the agents needed at least one completely different set of papers in case the operation was compromised.

Once an agent arrived in Buenos Aires, he would have two rendezvous times—one in the morning, one in the afternoon—at different locations in order to meet with one or more members of the team who were already in the city. No two agents could stay at the same hotel, and any equipment that could not be bought in Argentina without raising suspicions had to be transported by diplomatic pouch in advance. Some of the items that Eitan had already requested included handcuffs, hidden cameras, sedation drugs, miniature drills and woodworking tools, lock picks, field glasses, pocket flashlights, a forgery kit, and a makeup kit with false teeth and wigs. The sizable amount of money needed for the operation—for renting cars and safe houses, for example—was also transported in diplomatic pouches.

For all these preparations, Harel created a veritable travel agency, and his staff began filling a telephone directory-size book with the matrix of identities, flights, and scheduled meeting points. The simplest error could result in disaster.

Early in the morning of April 16, Peter Malkin strode through the tangled streets of Jaffa's old quarter. The Shin Bet agent had the broad shoulders of a linebacker and a head shaped like a bowling ball. His expressive, youthful face switched easily from a pensive scowl to almost clownish mirth. The day before, he had returned from concluding an investigation into an outbreak of terrorist activity in Nazareth and had met with Eitan. His chief of operations had pointed to Buenos Aires on a map, saying, "We're going to bring Adolf Eichmann to trial in Jerusalem. And you're going to capture him, Peter." What Eitan didn't tell him was that it had taken some effort to convince Isser Harel to include him on the team.

Malkin entered the Shin Bet building and went straight to another meeting with Eitan. They were not alone. Most of the team set for Buenos Aires was gathered for the first time. Malkin felt that they were looking at one another in a new way, as if they were measuring each man to see whether he was up to such a monumental mission.

"Well," Eitan said, easing the tension, "you've all slept on it. Any bright ideas?"

Malkin was reassured that Harel would be on hand in Argentina during the operation and doubly so that Eitan was handling the tactical plans. The two were dramatically different leaders. Harel focused on compartmentalization and rarely took advice from others, his ideas set in his mind before he revealed a mission. In contrast, Eitan brought everyone into the fold and sought their ideas before he decided a course of action.

"We'd just better hope that this man Klement stays put," Avraham Shalom said.

"That's out of our control," Eitan countered. "Why don't we take a look at what we've got."

The shades were drawn on the balcony that overlooked the harbor, and Moshe Tabor turned on the slide projector. Aharoni walked them through a comparison of the photographs of Eichmann in his thirties wearing his SS uniform and the shots he had obtained in Argentina.

Malkin was wary of the Shin Bet interrogator's inclusion in the operation, particularly after hearing about how many risks—careless, in Malkin's view—he had taken to identify the man. Still, the results of his dogged efforts were undeniable. "Run two of them together," Malkin suggested, not sure they were the same man.

Tabor arranged two slides in the projector and put them up on the blank wall. If they were both Eichmann, Malkin was shocked at how haggard and aged the Nazi had become since the end of the war. "It's not easy to tell, is it?"

Aharoni explained the results of the criminal identification unit's work.

"We can't be 100 percent sure until we've got him," Eitan said.

"Once we're sure," Tabor growled, the massive, six-foot-two-inch frame in dark silhouette at the back of the room, "why don't we kill the bastard on the spot?"

"We all share that feeling, I'm sure," Eitan said.

Tabor shook his big, clean-shaven head. "What chance did he give those people at the camps? I saw them, the ones that survived. What kind of consideration did he show them?"

Nobody in the room knew the typically reserved giant as well as Malkin. He and Tabor had recently spent several months together in West Germany on a surveillance operation of scientists who were helping the Egyptians with their missile technology. There the thirty-seven-year-old Tabor had told Malkin about his large Lithuanian family, which had been killed during the Holocaust, and about the extermination camps he had seen at the war's end as part of the Jewish Brigade. Revolted and enraged, Tabor had joined avenger groups operating in Germany and Austria, and he had hunted down, interrogated, and then killed numerous SS men. Tabor had been in his early twenties at the time. There was no question in any of the team members' minds that he would gladly kill Eichmann if given the chance.

Eitan dismissed Tabor's suggestion again, and the matter was dropped. Over the next few hours, and during several follow-up meetings, the team ironed out the operational details. They made adjustments to their cover stories, what equipment they would need, and where they would stay. Ephraim Ilani returned from Argentina to brief them on local customs, including everything from how to rent a car or a safe house to normal behavior at cafés and hotels, traffic conditions, airport procedures, and styles of dress. Since only he and Aharoni had been to Buenos Aires, this was key information. He also detailed the intensive police presence on the streets, particularly with the March crackdown on Peronist terrorist groups in the wake of a series of bombings in the capital.

Most of the time, however, was spent planning how and where they would seize Eichmann. Aharoni showed them his surveillance photographs, along with his sketches of the house and important landmarks (the kiosk, the railway embankment, neighboring houses, and roads). They settled on three different capture methods, knowing that they would decide on one after they had checked out the scene for themselves. The first was snatching him while he was away from the house, perhaps while in the city or before he boarded his bus to return from his job (although they still did not know where this was). The second was a commando raid on his house at night, taking him from his bed. The third focused on seizing him on the street near his house, a possibility given the desolate neighborhood. The timing depended on how they would smuggle Eichmann out of Argentina; Harel was putting together this part of the operation himself.

Each night, Malkin returned to his Tel Aviv apartment alone and read, then reread the Eichmann file. He found himself beginning to fear this individual who had once commanded so much authority and who had executed his plans with such demonic intensity. Malkin knew that the team was relying on him to be the one to physically grab their target, because of his strength and speed, and he began to doubt his ability. Anything could go wrong. He might make a simple mistake that would jeopardize the operation, or a policeman could chance by and catch him in the act. For the first time in his thirty-three years, many spent in dangerous situations, Malkin felt a profound fear of failure.

Malkin was eleven when the war in Europe began, and he immediately joined the Haganah. He had always been a restless youth, spending most of his time in the alleyways of Haifa, roaming the city with a band of other kids, stealing from shops, and then escaping over the ancient walls or down into cellars. The Jewish defense force focused his energies, training him as a courier, teaching him how to hide messages on his person and then conceal them in the crevices of walls. Later, Malkin graduated to breaking into safes and stealing weapons from British police stations at night. In 1947, he enrolled in a Haganah explosives course, learning how to construct makeshift bombs, set booby traps, clear mines, and blow up bridges, all of which were useful when the War of Independence broke out. He joined the Shin Bet after the war, explaining to his recruiters that he had applied because he liked adventure. His patriotism, he imagined, would have been assumed.

Malkin's first commissions were to travel to embassies to train their personnel on the detection of letter bombs. He began to receive occasional counterintelligence assignments and discovered that he had a facility for surveillance and disguise to add to his skills with explosives and lock picking. If he was far away from whomever he was watching, he could easily change his appearance—by walking in a suit for a while, then adding an overcoat and a hat in one hand, then wearing the hat, then ditching the coat and adding an umbrella. If he was closer to his target, he would change his face, wearing a mustache, glasses, false teeth, or a wig. Often he posed as an artist, an easy disguise given his talent for painting.

Beyond focusing on Malkin's various skills and his natural physical strength (which even the giant Tabor humbly acknowledged), Shalom had convinced Harel to use him—despite his habit of bucking authority and his lack of language skills—because he had an extraordinary operational mind. When Malkin looked at a plan, he always found ways to improve it. He saw his work as a game—a serious game, of course, but one that he enjoyed trying to master.

This mission was different, however, and Malkin could not help but think of his older sister Fruma, who had stayed behind in Poland in 1933 when the rest of his family had immigrated to Palestine. She had had a husband and three children of her own. They had all perished in the Holocaust, a tragedy that had destroyed Malkin's father and his younger brother, both of whom had died within a few years of learning of her fate. Malkin himself had forced her memory out of his mind for more than a decade because it was too painful. He could not help thinking of Fruma as he read the Eichmann file.

To distract himself from painful memories and his fear of failure, Malkin focused his every waking moment on the mission ahead, examining the smallest details of the operation and his role in it. He spent hours crafting different disguises for himself and the team and many more practicing the exact moves needed to grab Eichmann. He did much of this at the gym, but he also practiced on his Shin Bet colleagues at work, grabbing them without warning from behind and cutting off their ability to scream. Nobody asked what had come over him—partly because they were used to his antics—but instead just gave him a wider berth in the hallways. Apart from the operations team, only Amos Manor, the Shin Bet director, whose long, energetic stride made him a difficult catch for Malkin, knew why he was practicing his repertoire. Just before Malkin left for Argentina, Manor pulled him aside.

Manor had questioned Harel on the wisdom of diverting many of his top agents—not to mention other resources—to a mission that did little to protect Israel from its many security challenges. Nevertheless, he had provided Harel with everything he needed. Malkin and Manor briefly discussed the operations he was leaving behind. Then Manor, who was the only member of his Hungarian family to have survived Auschwitz, wrapped an arm around his agent's shoulders and said, "Do me one favor. Give his neck an extra little squeeze for me."

The conversation reminded Malkin once again that he absolutely had to succeed.

With the capture plans developing well, Harel needed to devise a way to get Eichmann back to Israel. There were only two options, of course: by air or by ship. His head of administration reported that the latter option had to be ruled out. In the coming month, no Israeli merchant ship or cruise vessel was scheduled to visit South America. Changing course for any of them involved too many complications. Chartering a special ship would require a sixty-day roundtrip journey with multiple stops—too slow and too risky given the need to anchor in foreign ports. If their kidnapping was exposed before they returned to Israel, the ship would be an easy target.