Spies Against Armageddon (13 page)

At his trial, it emerged that he had been spying on Israel’s atomic energy commission. By coincidence or not, Sitta was arrested just two days before Israel’s experimental nuclear reactor at Nahal Sorek became operational. Israeli analysts compared his activities with those of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States and Klaus Fuchs in Britain, who betrayed those countries’ atomic secrets to the Soviet bloc.

Sitta was sentenced to five years in prison, but Israel—to head off any embarrassment—quickly paroled him to start a new academic life in West Germany. Senior Israelis said the Czech was only a small fish who dabbled in spying, and Harel insisted that Israel was not badly damaged.

The Comb paid off yet again, in March 1961, when agents spotted Viktor Sokolov, a senior Soviet spy operating under diplomatic cover in Tel Aviv, meeting with an Israeli they thought they recognized. It turned out to be Israel Be’er, a close advisor to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion.

Harel said that he had long suspected Be’er, who was a member of the left-wing Mapam party. Harel found it odd that Be’er kept trying to strike up a friendship with West Germany’s BND and its chief, General Reinhard Gehlen.

Gehlen—a consistent friend of Israeli intelligence—stood at the center of the East-versus-West struggle for Europe. The German general had run spies in the Soviet Union during World War II, and now he was reactivating his espionage network in Russia. The Soviets were desperate to find out what Gehlen knew and what he was doing. Be’er—a senior Israeli who could gain the German’s trust—might have had a chance of finding out for his true masters in the KGB.

Be’er denied everything stubbornly for days, but Shin Bet interrogators caught him in the kind of little lie that unravels whole cloths of untruth. Be’er claimed that the night he was spotted with the Russian intelligence agent Sokolov, he was actually out purchasing Cinzano, an imported drink he was crazy about, at one of Israel’s first supermarkets. Investigators confronted him with the fact that Cinzano was not sold in that store at all. Tripped up by a tiny detail, Be’er broke down.

In the interrogation and in court, Be’er admitted that he had invented his past. He had never received a doctorate in history, as he boasted, nor had he fought in the Spanish civil war. Confusion over who he really was deepened when, in prison, he renounced his courtroom confession and claimed his original autobiography was true.

Even without knowing his real name and background, the Israeli judges found the evidence against Be’er to be incontrovertible, and the Tel Aviv court had ample reason to sentence him to 15 years in prison for espionage. Until his dying day in prison in 1966, he insisted that he was no spy but a genuine patriot seeking only to make Israel non-aligned rather than pro-Western.

The Soviet espionage machine was gargantuan and persistent—forcing Harel to juggle a variety of counterespionage challenges—and these distractions may help explain why Harel ignored an important tip about a top Nazi war criminal. But the case he neglected, for over two years, was that of Adolf Eichmann, and capturing him would become one of the hallmark achievements in the history of Israeli intelligence.

In late 1957 Fritz Bauer, a Jewish lawyer who was the attorney general of the state of Hesse in West Germany, sent a letter to his Israeli counterpart that said Eichmann had been located—living in Argentina. Bauer later was able to supply Eichmann’s false name, Ricardo Klement.

Harel sent an agent to Buenos Aires to see the poor suburb where Eichmann was supposedly living, but no definite evidence could be found. The Memuneh and his new operations team could have done a lot more if he really wanted to, but the efforts were only half-hearted.

Chasing Nazis was not a high priority for Harel. Still, every Israeli felt that his nation had a historic responsibility to seek justice for the six million Jews who had been murdered by Nazi Germany. Two of the biggest names on an informal “most wanted list” for Israel were Eichmann, considered the architect of Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” for the “Jewish problem”; and Josef Mengele, the German physician who tortured concentration camp prisoners in the name of ghastly experimentation.

Bauer, the German prosecutor, certainly felt motivated to stay on Eichmann’s trail. He flew to Israel and complained to the Ministry of Justice that no one was acting on his information. Bauer provided the name of his source, and Harel sent another Israeli operative to follow up.

The tipster turned out to be a half-Jewish blind man, who had fled Germany to Argentina in 1938. His daughter was dating Nicholas Eichmann, who kept spouting anti-Semitic opinions and remained vague about his parents and his home address. Could young Eichmann be the notorious mass murderer’s son?

Yes, indeed. The blind man saw things more clearly than the Mossad, which had not bothered to check fully the lead to the Eichmann family’s front door.

Simon Wiesenthal, who would gain fame as a solitary, obsessive Nazi-hunter, also sent Israel many tips about Eichmann’s whereabouts. Only in 2010, five years after Wiesenthal’s death at age 96, was it revealed that he had been working for the Mossad for many decades—as something between a sayan and a paid agent. Assigned the code name Theocrat, Wiesenthal received a small monthly retainer from the Mossad, which helped him set up his research center in Vienna.

Harel did not like Wiesenthal, however, so at times Mossad operatives would be in touch with the Nazi-hunter without telling their boss.

Information about Eichmann was beginning to feel compelling, and, under pressure from Israel’s attorney general around the beginning of 1960, Harel decided to move. He sent more men, this time, to Argentina, and they found the German calling himself Klement. He did, indeed, resemble the elusive Eichmann.

Harel informed Ben-Gurion, who had returned to the post of prime minister, and the Old Man immediately gave approval to kidnap Eichmann so he could be put on trial. He was to be brought to Israel—dead or alive, but very preferably alive. Ben-Gurion said it would be a lesson for the world.

Sixty-seven men and women, from both the Mossad and Shin Bet, were chosen for the kidnap team, including support and surveillance roles. No one would be compelled to take part; all would have to volunteer, and they all did. Almost all had lost relatives in the Holocaust and hated Eichmann. Harel cautioned them to control their emotions.

Because of the operational, political, and even personal complexities, the Memuneh himself flew to Paris to set up a staging post for the abduction. Then Harel went on to Argentina to take complete and personal responsibility.

The Mossad’s finest forger went to Europe, where he prepared false passports and other documents for the operatives. They made their way to Buenos Aires on separate flights, under names that would never again be used. The forger also flew on to Argentina, with all his special pens and papers, to provide fresh identities for all the Israelis and for Eichmann himself so he could be smuggled out.

At least half a dozen “safe houses” and even more cars were rented in Buenos Aires, in a potential logistical nightmare that was handled with impressive ease.

One member of the team was Moshe Tavor, a genius at logistics who had ice water running through his veins. Born as Moshe Karpovich in Lithuania in 1917, he was taken by his family to Palestine long before the rise of Nazi Germany. He eagerly volunteered for the British army’s Jewish Brigade, and he fought in Libya and then in Italy—proud to be killing Nazis.

After the end of World War II, with just over half a dozen friends—including some who later would join Israeli intelligence—Karpovich/Tavor hunted down German officers who had run ghetto round-ups, deportation trains, and death camps.

Tavor and his buddies, acting on information from Holocaust survivors, would stage a rudimentary trial for the Nazi in an isolated field; Tavor then would strangle the man.

Interviewed at age 89, he explained that such killings did not bother him in the slightest. Tavor was chosen as the executioner because of his strong hands, he said, and shooting the Nazi would have left a lot of blood—and that would have led to investigations. The bodies were dropped into lakes.

In Argentina, Tavor—who had become the Mossad’s finest safecracker, literally able to open any lock at all—built a metal cart where a folded-up Adolf Eichmann could be secreted. Tavor also prepared secret rooms in the rented safe houses: to store weapons, and to hold Eichmann after capturing him.

Tavor, whose real life was stranger than any Hollywood scriptwriter could imagine, also installed a rotating license plate panel on one of his team’s cars—several years before the James Bond movie
Goldfinger
had a similar gimmick—so that the vehicle’s identity tag could instantly be changed if the Israelis were spotted.

One side of the panel had a local Buenos Aires license plate. The other had a diplomatic plate, with a number indicating that the car belonged to the embassy of another South American country. The Israelis did flip the plate numbers a few times when they had to pass police roadblocks. “The policeman on duty,” Rafi Eitan recalled decades later, “would salute us and let us go on.”

Some team members also carried forged diplomatic documents that named them as envoys of that same country.

A female operative was chosen for the traditional role of “housewife,” to buy groceries, cook the food, and tidy the residence where the Nazi would be held. She was Yehudit Nessyahu, born in Holland in 1925: highly intelligent, fluent in several languages, described as forgettably plain-looking, and a veteran of clandestine work smuggling Jews out of Morocco. She would rise to be the highest ranking woman in the Mossad, its director of personnel. After her retirement at age 51, she would study law, head the Israeli writers’ association, and assiduously avoid cameras for fear that a single snapshot of her could endanger her contacts and agents from many missions abroad.

As a religious woman, Nessyahu prepared only kosher food during the Argentina mission—even for the notorious Nazi. She was disturbed by the fact that she would be nourishing a mass murderer and enemy of the Jewish people.

The honor of physically tackling and grabbing Eichmann on May 11, 1960, went to Rafi Eitan and Avraham Shalom, who would become agency chiefs in the decades to come, along with Malkin—the inventor of the Comb surveillance system.

They tossed the Nazi onto the back seat of their car. The man who posed as Ricardo Klement did not put up a struggle and readily admitted that he was Eichmann.

The abduction had been timed to coincide with the official visit of an Israeli delegation to Argentina, where many foreign guests were taking part in celebrations of the country’s 150th year of independence from Spain. An El Al airliner would fly the delegates in on May 19 and would be returning to Tel Aviv late the next night.

Harel and members of his team said later that their most difficult task was feeding and caring for Eichmann for nine days while waiting for their flight to Israel. They interrogated the prisoner and at times simply stared at him in wonderment over how ordinary the personification of evil could appear. The balding man who depended on eyeglasses for his reading meekly signed a statement agreeing to be tried in an Israeli court.

It was chilling, however, for the kidnappers to hear Eichmann switch from German to a prayer in Hebrew, the
Shma
, which had been recited by Jews as they walked to their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

According to Harel, Eichmann “told us he was a great friend of the Jews. We were furious. Some of my people started to forget their orders not to touch him. They wanted to kill him. But they didn’t, and he started to beg for small favors.” The captive also said he would reveal all of Hitler’s secrets if the Israelis would spare his life. Harel responded with a promise that Eichmann would get the best lawyer available to defend him at a trial in Jerusalem.

Harel spent little time in the safe house where Eichmann was chained to a bed. The Memuneh instead perfected a secure spycraft technique that could be called the roving headquarters. He told his senior operatives where they could find him at certain hours of the day, and he walked from café to café in the Parisian-style Argentine capital. No stranger was likely to remember seeing him in any particular location.

Sacrificing caution for the sake of on-the-spot control, Harel set up his command post on May 20 in a cafeteria at Ezeiza Airport. He sat at a table with his forger, checking and distributing the identity documents his operatives would need to make a safe and unimpeachable departure from Buenos Aires.

At the safe house, Eichmann and the men who would accompany him were dressed in El Al airline uniforms. The Mossad’s chief forger had prepared an Israeli passport, with the name Ze’ev Zichroni, for the VIP prisoner.

A doctor working for Shin Bet—Yonah Elian—the same anesthesiologist who inadvertently overdosed Alexander Israel, whose corpse was then thrown out of an airplane in 1954—did a fine job this time. Elian kept topping off the dose by injecting Eichmann with sedatives. When moving day arrived, the Nazi was transformed into a very sleepy man who could barely walk.

An exhausted or drunk crew member appeared normal to airport officials, late at night, and Eichmann and others in the “El Al” group strolled out of the terminal and onto the Israeli airliner that supposedly had waited there to fly Israeli dignitaries home from the Argentine celebrations.

The genuine El Al pilot was not told about his infamous passenger until after takeoff from Buenos Aires in the first minutes of May 21, and on Harel’s recommendation a refueling stop was scheduled in the most out-of-the-way city imaginable. It took every last drop of aviation fuel to reach Dakar, Senegal, but no one in western Africa was making any inquiries about a missing German-Argentinian man.

The special flight carrying the Nazi to meet Jewish justice arrived in Tel Aviv on the morning of May 22.

Ben-Gurion took the rare step of publicly hailing the intelligence community the next day, when the prime minister announced in the Knesset that “the security services of Israel found Adolf Eichmann and ... he will shortly be brought to trial in Israel.” The parliament’s applause was unanimous.