Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

El Al, the national airline, had specially purchased from the Mossad slush fund a Britannia aircraft for the long flight to Argentina. Rafi Eitan remarked:

“We just sent someone to England to buy one. He handed over the money and we had our plane. Officially the flight to Argentina was to carry an Israeli delegation to attend Argentina’s one hundred fiftieth independence day celebrations. None of the delegates knew why we were going with them or that we had constructed a cell in the back of the aircraft to hold Eichmann.”

Rafi Eitan and his team arrived in Buenos Aires on May Day 1960. They moved into one of seven safe houses a Mossad advance man had rented. One had been given the Hebrew code name Maoz, or “Stronghold.” The apartment would act as the base for the operation. Another safe house was designated Tira, or “Palace,” and was intended as a holding place for Eichmann after his capture. The other houses were in case Eichmann had to be moved under the pressure of an expected police hunt. A dozen cars had also been leased for the operation.

With everything in place, Rafi Eitan’s manner became settled and determined. Any doubts of failure had lifted; the prospect of action had replaced the tension of waiting. For three days he and the team conducted a discreet surveillance on how Adolf Eichmann, who had once been chauffeured everywhere in a Mercedes limousine, now traveled by bus and alighted on the corner of Garibaldi Street in a suburb on the outskirts of the city, as punctual as he had once been in signing the consignment orders for the death camps.

On the night of May 10, 1960, Rafi Eitan chose for the snatch a driver and two others to subdue Eichmann once he was in the car. One of the men had been trained to overpower a target on the street. Rafi Eitan would sit beside the driver, “ready to help in any way I could.”

The operation was set for the following evening. At 8:00 P.M. on May 11, the team’s car drove into Garibaldi Street.

There was no tension. Everyone was long past that. No one spoke. There was nothing to say. Rafi Eitan looked at his watch: 8:03. They drove up and down the empty street. 8:04. Several buses came and went. At 8:05, another bus came. They saw Eichmann alight. To Rafi Eitan, “he looked a little tired, perhaps how he looked after another day of sending my people to the death camps.

“The street was still empty. Behind me I heard our specialist snatchman open the car door. We drove up just behind Eichmann. He was walking quite quickly, as if he wanted to get home for his dinner. I could hear the specialist breathing steadily, the way he had been taught to do in training. He had got the snatch down to twelve seconds. Out of the door, grab him around the neck, drag him back into the car. Out, grab, back.”

The car came alongside Eichmann. He half turned, gave a puzzled look at the sight of the specialist coming out of the car. Then the man tripped on a loose shoelace, almost stumbling to the ground. For a moment Rafi Eitan was too stunned to move. He had come halfway across the world to catch the man who had been instrumental in sending six million Jews to their deaths and they were just about to lose him because a shoelace had not been properly tied. Eichmann was starting to walk quickly away. Rafi Eitan leaped from the car.

“I grabbed him by the neck with such force I could see his eyes bulge. A little tighter and I would have choked him to death. The specialist was on his feet holding open the door. I tossed Eichmann onto the backseat. The specialist jumped in, sitting half on top of Eichmann. The whole thing didn’t last more than five seconds.”

From the front seat Rafi Eitan could smell Eichmann’s sour breath as he struggled for air. The specialist worked his jaw up and down. Eichmann grew calmer. He even managed to ask what was the meaning of this outrage.

No one spoke to him. In silence they reached their safe house about three miles away. Rafi Eitan motioned Eichmann to strip naked. He then checked his physical measurements against those from an SS file he had obtained. He was not surprised to see that Eichmann had somehow removed his SS tattoo. But his other measurements all matched the file—the size of his head, the distance from elbow to wrist, from knee to ankle. He had Eichmann chained to a bed. For ten hours he was left in complete silence. Rafi Eitan “wanted to encourage a feeling of hopelessness. Just before dawn, Eichmann was at his lowest mental state. I asked him his name. He gave a Spanish one. I said, no, no, no, your German name. He gave his German alias—the one he had used to flee Germany. I said again, no, no, no, your real name, your SS name. He stretched on the bed as if he wanted to stand to attention and said, loud and clear, ‘Adolf Eichmann.’ I didn’t ask him anything else. I had no need to.”

For the next seven days Eichmann and his captors remained closeted in the house. Still no one spoke to Eichmann. He ate, bathed, and went to the lavatory in complete silence. For Rafi Eitan:

“Keeping silent was more than an operational necessity. We did not want to show Eichmann how nervous we all were. That would have given him hope. And hope makes a desperate person dangerous. I needed him to be as helpless as my own people were when he had sent them in trainloads to the death camps.”

The decision on how to move him from the safe house to the El Al plane waiting to fly the delegation home was filled with its own black humor. First Eichmann was dressed in the spare El Al flight suit Rafi Eitan had brought from Israel. Then he was induced to drink a bottle of whiskey, leaving him in a drunken stupor.

Rafi Eitan and his team dressed in their own flight suits and liberally sprinkled themselves with whiskey. Thrusting a flight hat on Eichmann’s head, and squashing him into the backseat of the car, Rafi Eitan drove to the military air base where the Britannia was waiting, engines running.

At the base gate Argentinian soldiers flagged down the car. In the back Eichmann was snoring. Rafi Eitan recalled:

“The car reeked like a distillery. That was the moment we all earned our Mossad Oscars! We played the drunken Jews who couldn’t handle strong Argentinian liquor. The guards were amused and never gave Eichmann a second look.”

At five minutes past midnight on May 21, 1960, the Britannia took off with Adolf Eichmann still snoring in his cell in the back of the plane.

After a lengthy trial, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity. On the day of his execution, May 31, 1962, Rafi Eitan was in the execution chamber at Ramla Prison: “Eichmann looked at me and said, ‘Your time will come to follow me, Jew,’ and I replied, ‘But not today, Adolf, not today.’ Next moment the trap opened. Eichmann gave a little choking sound. There was the smell of his bowel moving, then just the sound of the stretched rope. A very satisfying sound.”

A special oven had been built to cremate the body. Within hours the ashes were scattered out at sea over a wide area. Ben-Gurion had ordered there must be no trace left to encourage sympathizers to turn Eichmann into a Nazi cult figure. Israel wanted him expunged from the face of the earth. Afterward the oven was dismantled and would never be used again. That evening Rafi Eitan stood on the shore and looked out to sea, feeling totally at peace, “knowing I had finished my assignment. That is always a good feeling.”

As Mossad’s deputy operations chief, Rafi Eitan’s rolling gait continued to take him across Europe to find and execute Arab terrorists. To do so he used remote-controlled bombs; Mossad’s handgun of choice, the Beretta; and where silence was essential, his own bare hands to either garrote a victim with steel wire or deliver a lethal rabbit punch. Always he killed without compunction.