Hunting Eichmann (25 page)

That left air travel. In December 1959, soon after Bauer had come to Israel, Harel had spoken to the manager of El Al, Yehuda Shimoni, about the possibility of sending one of their planes to Argentina. At the time, El Al, the only Israeli civilian airline, did not fly to South America. Shimoni assured Harel, whom he had known well for many years, that technically they were able to fly to Buenos Aires and that they might be able to stage a flight as a test run for future routes to South America. Harel was concerned that a "test run" was a dubious cover and said no more about it.

This would not be the first time El Al had been enlisted in service to the Israeli state, or for covert operations. In September 1948, the civilian airline had been hastily created to transport the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, from Geneva to the newly declared independent state. Because a military flight had been prohibited, the Israelis had transformed a four-engine C-54 military transport, which the Haganah had used to airlift arms from Czechoslovakia, into a civilian plane. They had painted the blue and white Israeli flag on the tail; slapped the name of the new company, El Al ("to the skies"), on the side; outfitted additional fuel tanks to allow a nonstop flight; and furnished the fuselage with seating for the passengers. In fact, Shimoni had been the navigator on that first flight. Since then, the airline had been used in operations to airlift Jewish refugees, sometimes covertly, from Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. There had been other missions, too—particularly when a long-range airplane was needed—and some of the El Al pilots, navigators, and engineers who were routinely recruited for the flights even had a name for themselves: "the monkey business crews."

Now that commandeering an airplane was deemed to be necessary, Harel reopened his talks with El Al. Fortune shone on him when he learned that Argentina was celebrating its 150th anniversary of independence from Spain in late May and that official delegations from around the world had been invited to attend—including one from Israel. It was the ideal cover for an El Al plane. He immediately scheduled meetings with the airline's directors and the Foreign Ministry to arrange for a special flight.

Once this was settled, Harel busied himself with the hundreds of other operational details filling his head. He kept track of all his thoughts by writing notes on little scraps of paper, which mounted up on his desk. Eitan kept him informed of the team's progress, and they decided to split the members' arrival into two stages. Avraham Shalom would lead the first contingent, to confirm that the operation remained a possibility and to obtain safe houses and map out routes to and from Garibaldi Street. Harel personally recruited Yaakov Medad to be the frontman for the operation—the one who arranged for the cars, safe houses, and anything else the agents needed that required presenting papers and being in the public eye. Medad, a Mossad operative, was well suited for the job. Although he was not so gifted with operational or technical abilities, he was able to assume a range of identities—and to switch back and forth between them at a moment's notice—better than anyone Harel had ever known. He took to accents easily, remembered background information to the letter, and, most significantly, had the kind of unassuming, innocent looks that won a stranger's trust in an instant. In Argentina, he would play the scion on vacation, frivolously throwing his family's money around town. Harel also considered bringing on a woman to act as Medad's wife, but he decided to wait until the entire team was in Argentina to see whether this was necessary.

A week before the first team member was set to leave Tel Aviv, Mordechai Ben-Ari, the deputy director of El Al, came to meet with Harel at his office. The Mossad chief requested the use of one of El Al's Britannia airplanes to bring an Israeli delegation to Argentina for the anniversary celebrations. He also wanted to oversee the crew's selection and asked that Yehuda Shimoni be made available to him for all the arrangements. Ben-Ari explained that this would disrupt their regular flights and cost the company a sizable amount of money, but it was possible. Still, he needed approval from his boss.

Two days later, he received final approval, and the Foreign Ministry, under Golda Meir, who had known of the search for Eichmann since it had begun, gave its assent as well.

On April 18, Harel sat down with Shimoni. Tall with broad shoulders and salt-and-pepper hair, Shimoni was a Dutch Jew who had served as a navigator with the British Royal Air Force (RAF) during the war and had then immigrated to Palestine, where he had joined the ragtag Israeli air force in the fight for independence. When Harel told him the purpose of the mission, Shimoni, whose parents, brothers, and sister had all died in Nazi camps, promised to do everything in his power to help. He suggested Yosef Klein to help organize the flight in Buenos Aires. He proceeded to explain exactly why Klein, the manager of El Al's station at New York's Idlewild Airport, was ideal for the assignment.

"Okay, everyone, let's talk," Harel said, seating himself at the desk in his office. His secretary stubbed out her cigarette, leaving one last trail of smoke to dissipate into the air, and placed a stenographer's pad on her lap.

The small office was crowded with the key members of the Eichmann operation: Rafi Eitan, Avraham Shalom, Zvi Aharoni, Peter Malkin, Ephraim Ilani, Shalom Dani, and Moshe Tabor. Only Yaakov Gat, who was traveling straight to Argentina from Paris, was absent. There was tension in the room, and even Tabor, who was not one for appearances, had worn a starched khaki uniform.

"I want to begin by speaking to you from my heart," Harel said, after taking a deep breath. "This is a national mission of the first degree. It is not an ordinary capture operation, but the capture of a hideous Nazi criminal, the most horrible enemy of the Jewish people. We are not performing this operation as adventurers but as representatives of the Jewish people and the state of Israel. Our objective is to bring Eichmann back safely, fully in good health, so he can be put to trial.

"There might well be difficult repercussions. We know this. We have not only the right but also the moral duty to bring this man to trial. You must remember this throughout the weeks ahead. You are guardian angels of justice, the emissaries of the Jewish people."

The men looked at one another as he spoke. They knew that Harel had dedicated his life to Israel and that everything he did was a matter of principle. He often instilled in his people the same sense of purpose, reminding them before a job that their success would serve a higher purpose. It was this passion that motivated his agents to work for him, despite the risk to their lives, the long periods away from their families, the low pay, the endless hours, and the isolation they felt at not being able to share what they did with those closest to them. But on this day, Harel was particularly fervent and eloquent, and the effect was profound.

"We will bring Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem," Harel said, striking the table, "and perhaps the world will be reminded of its responsibilities. It will be recognized that, as a people, we
never
forgot. Our memory reaches back through recorded history. The memory book lies open, and the hand still writes."

He turned to Eitan.

"Are your people ready?" he asked, his tone cool, no longer layered with feeling.

"All ready," Eitan replied.

16

ON APRIL
24, Yaakov Gat arrived at Ezeiza Airport. Wearing an immaculately cut suit and a thin tie and carrying a briefcase, he stepped onto the portable staircase that had been rolled to the plane's side and into the harsh glare of the Argentine sun. Gat failed to notice the photographer who had already snapped several pictures of him before he reached the tarmac.

He easily managed passport control, his lack of Spanish not a problem. Instead of taking a taxi, whose driver might later remember where he had dropped off his passenger, he boarded a bus outside the terminal. He was scheduled to meet with Ilani in a couple of hours.

Gat took a seat close to the doorway, as was his habit—just in case of a problem. The bus to the city center was filled to capacity, but there was still no sign of the driver. A policeman was walking around the front of the bus. After ten minutes, Gat began to worry. After twenty, he was convinced that something was terribly wrong.

Suddenly, two men rushed onto the bus, blocking his escape. Gat recognized one of them as the driver because of his uniform. The other placed himself directly in front of Gat and rattled off some Spanish. The Israeli went cold, not understanding what was happening. Then the man showed him a photograph of himself in profile coming off the plane. A rush of panicked questions passed through his mind. Did the Argentine police know who he was? Had they been tipped off? Did they know his passport was fake? Was he about to be detained?

Before he could react, the man had turned to the next passenger and presented him with a freshly developed picture of himself as well. It dawned on Gat that he was a photographer, hoping to cash in on some tourist business. He obviously had a relationship with the driver and the police to hold the bus until he developed his photos. When the man came back around to Gat, he gladly paid for the picture and then eased back in his seat. If he had made a run for it and had been caught, he might have compromised the mission. Such were the dangers, even from the most harmless of incidents.

At five minutes to eleven, he arrived at a café with marble floors and high ceilings in the center of Buenos Aires. As he passed through the revolving doors, he noticed Ephraim Ilani waiting for him, a cup of coffee in his hand and a pipe in his mouth. Since arriving two days before, Ilani had rented an apartment and had stocked it with canned food and some camp beds. Twice a day, he waited at a prearranged street corner, restaurant, or café—a different rendezvous point each time to avoid suspicion—expecting to meet with one of the members of the operations team. As a precaution, he was not informed as to who would arrive or on what day. For the usually gregarious Ilani, passing this much time alone was a dreary chore.

"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.