Killing the SS Read online

  At last, two men emerge from the garage. One is a dark-haired man of roughly fifty years, wearing thick glasses. The other is blond and wears blue overalls, looking to be no more than twenty years old.

  Believing the young man to be Dieter Eichmann, Aharoni turns the key in the Fiat’s ignition and slips the car into gear. The two workmen sit one behind the other on a dirty black moped and drive away. The Israeli spy and his assistant follow at a discreet distance as the small motorcycle maneuvers down Avenida Santa Fe toward the section of Buenos Aires known as San Fernando.

  Ten minutes pass.

  Zvi Aharoni has extensive training in surveillance and knows to take care that the driver of the moped does not notice the Fiat traveling a few car lengths back. The Israeli allows a gap to open, sure that so long as he can see the moped there will be little difficulty tracking the vehicle.

  But trouble arises as the road leads into the heart of San Fernando. A long and slow funeral procession meanders through the main square. All traffic comes to a standstill. Aharoni’s Fiat is stuck.

  The small and agile moped, however, has no such problems. Its driver nimbly weaves it through the traffic.

  Forced to stop, Zvi Aharoni and his volunteer assistant can only watch hopelessly as the moped disappears.

  When the traffic clears, the Fiat breaks down. It is towed back to the rental company, where the pursuers are told there are no more cars for rent.

  * * *

  The killer Adolf Eichmann is now just days away from his fifty-fourth birthday, although his Argentinean identity card lists him as seven years younger. He has lived in South America for almost a decade. There is no record of what the former SS-Obersturmbannführer did with the gold and other wealth the SS stole from so many hapless Jews during the war, but he clearly does not possess it now. Since his arrival in Argentina, Eichmann has scraped by on a series of low-paying jobs doing manual labor. In his free time, he plays the violin and has an occasional drink at the ABC with other former Nazis in downtown Buenos Aires. There, Eichmann enjoys a level of notoriety and respect for his wartime atrocities.

  But as time has passed, and many Germans have secretly moved back to Europe, Eichmann’s status has begun to change. He complains about feeling abandoned. His eldest son, Nick, will one day claim that much of this is the work of a fellow notorious war criminal. “Dr. Mengele had spread the word: avoid Eichmann. Getting close to him could be dangerous,” the young Eichmann will bitterly recall.

  Now Mengele is gone, running off to hide in Paraguay, leaving Eichmann as the most wanted SS murderer in Argentina. The tension continues to escalate as prosecution of Nazi war criminals by German authorities like Fritz Bauer has raised awareness about the Holocaust. The West German government is still being secretive about former Nazi war criminals, but it is reluctantly taking steps to find and prosecute men like Eichmann. This is not being done out of a moral imperative but because the Soviet Union has provided East Germany with captured Nazi documents. The West German intelligence community has reason to believe that it is the intention of the East Germans to smear their West German counterparts and in the process portray West Germany as soft on vicious Nazi war criminals.

  In Germany, Adolf Eichmann has been the subject of numerous books and magazine articles. In Argentina, in an attempt to maintain his low profile, Eichmann’s sons are forbidden to talk about their father or the family in public. Adolf Eichmann is known to impulsively throw a hard slap at their cheeks to keep them in line.

  In late 1958, resigned to his dreary life in Argentina and sensing that the statute of limitations on his millions of murders would never expire, Eichmann sought to make a more permanent life for his family. He paid 56,000 pesos for a plot of land on Garibaldi Street in the Buenos Aires suburb of San Fernando.2 Lot no. 14 is a half mile wide by a half mile long. It is isolated, undeveloped, swampy, and has no access to electricity, running water, or sewage lines. But during a short period of unemployment, Eichmann threw himself into building a new home on the site. Working obsessively, he drained the land and constructed an impregnable bunker with walls several feet thick.

  The house was unfinished in March 1959, when Eichmann took a job working in a Mercedes-Benz factory earning 5,500 pesos a month sorting replacement parts in the company warehouse.3 Some of his fellow employees immigrated to Argentina from Germany and Austria after the war. Many were in the SS, but one of the supervisors is a Jew. One female coworker will remember Eichmann as “very polite and pleasant. Every time he saw me, he said hello, and every evening when he left he said, ‘See you tomorrow!’”

  The bus ride to work is two hours each way. Eichmann does not arrive home until 8:00 p.m. most evenings, so he and his sons could only work on developing their new property on the weekends. But just over a year after starting construction, Eichmann is able to move his family the half-dozen miles from Chacabuco Street into the flat-roofed, one-story brick structure. It is not the same luxury to which he grew accustomed during the war, living in villas and luxury hotels, pampered by servants, his every whim attended to. But the door and shutters are made of thick wood, in the Bavarian fashion. Kerosene lamps substitute for electricity, and running water is still nonexistent. The home sits on a small rise, with a front porch and living-room windows specially designed to give Eichmann a clear view hundreds of yards in every direction.

  So it is that Adolf Eichmann hides in plain sight, walking to and from the bus stop each morning. He doesn’t go into the city much, preferring to spend his weekends puttering around the house and playing his violin. To the casual observer, he is nothing more than a middle-aged man determined to live out his life in his new home. Few of his coworkers at Mercedes know his real name or past. Not a single one suspects that he is proud to have been the notorious “Czar of the Jews” who brazenly executed a war within a war, striving to murder as many Jews as possible within German-held territory.

  Now, he is simply Ricardo Klement, the illegitimate son of Anna Klement from Bolzano, Italy; Argentine identity card number 1378538.

  But that figure is a sham. The numerals by which Eichmann is rightly identified are 45,326—the digits designating his Nazi Party membership number.

  He may have a new job, and he may have built a new home, but Adolf Eichmann’s past will have far more bearing on his future. And unbeknownst to the former Obersturmbannführer, those who wish to make him pay for those transgressions are closing in.

  * * *

  It is March 11, three days after Aharoni and Juan got stuck in the funeral procession and lost sight of Dieter Eichmann. The two men have tried unsuccessfully to follow the black moped every night since. Both men are uncertain if they are even tailing the proper individual.

  In a burst of inspiration, Aharoni instructs Juan to pay another visit to 4261 Chacabuco Street. On his last visit, one of the carpenters had let slip the address of Dieter Eichmann’s place of work. Perhaps Juan might get him to elaborate further.

  It is 4:15 in the afternoon as Juan knocks on the door of Eichmann’s former apartment. Just as Sylvia Hermann did so many years ago, he steps inside. A group of workers tell him that the carpenter he is looking for is upstairs.

  “I met him on the second floor where he was presently working,” Juan’s report to the Israeli embassy will read. “I asked him for the new address of the former tenant.”

  The carpenter is a bachelor in his midfifties who speaks with a thick European accent. He tells Juan that he has been to the new Eichmann house, where he did work for which he has not yet been paid. He gives Juan detailed directions, right down to which bus number goes past the house and how many pesos the ticket costs.

  “Are you absolutely certain?” Juan asks.

  “I am,” replies the carpenter.

  This should be the high point of Juan’s short career as a sayan. Yet when he returns to Buenos Aires to brief Aharoni on his new findings, he also brings some disappointing news.

  “What’s the matter?” Aharoni asks. “Co
me on, let’s have a drink.”

  Juan shakes his head.

  “I’m sorry. I have bad news for you,” Juan tells Aharoni. “All our work so far has been in vain. We have been following the wrong man.”

  “What wrong man?” replies Aharoni.

  “Dito,” he begins, referring to Dieter Eichmann in his thick Spanish accent, “is not the man we are looking for.”

  Aharoni refrains from saying anything. He has divulged just a small amount of information to Juan, only enough to move the operation forward in clandestine fashion. He has never uttered the word “Eichmann” to his sayan.

  “His name is not Klement,” Juan tells his spymaster. “It’s Aichmann.”

  Aharoni will later write of that moment. “‘Aichmann’ and ‘Eichmann’ are clearly the same name. It took a great effort for me to remain calm.”

  Instead, the Israeli reassures his young charge. “Don’t worry. You’ve done a fantastic job. Don’t bother about the name. In the end, we’ll get the right man and we will remember how much you helped us. Until then, if you still want to be helpful, don’t talk to a living soul about this.”

  Dismissing Juan, who promises to maintain his silence, Zvi Aharoni hastens back to the embassy. He cables a message back to Tel Aviv. The words are in code, but the subject matter is unmistakable: Adolf Eichmann has been found.

  The address is 14 Garibaldi Street.

  * * *

  It is nearing evening as Zvi Aharoni drives alone down Route 202 in the unincorporated northern suburbs of Buenos Aires. His rented Fiat has been replaced by a station wagon—chosen specifically for its unobtrusive appearance. The area is run-down, even poor, in Aharoni’s estimation. He makes note of the lack of telephone poles and power lines. As he passes by the Eichmann residence, which is set fifty yards back off the road, he notices a short, heavyset woman with black hair standing on the porch. She is shabbily dressed. Zvi Aharoni no longer thinks that Eichmann would never live in such a run-down neighborhood or allow his family to dress in such a disheveled fashion. Without even having to take a second look, he is certain the woman is Vera Eichmann.

  There is no sign of her husband.

  Aharoni drives away, not wishing to draw attention to himself. With Eichmann so close to his grasp, the last thing the spy wishes to do is behave suspiciously and force the Nazi to run.

  Aharoni returns to this sleepy section of town after dark, parking the car and slowly walking through an adjacent field toward the house. He is relieved that he isn’t threatened by any barking dogs. When the day comes to kidnap Eichmann, the Israelis will be able to approach the house without advance warning of their arrival.

  The intricacies of capturing Eichmann and returning him to Israel to trial are many. He is a legal resident of Argentina, making it illegal for the Israelis to kidnap him, no matter how heinous his crimes. Also, no extradition treaty exists between Argentina and Israel. Handing him over to Argentinean authorities would most likely mean that Eichmann would not be prosecuted. And finally, there is no regular air service between Israel and Argentina. Eichmann would have to be smuggled out of the country on board an Israeli freight ship.

  Those details will have to be sorted out in the future. For now, Aharoni simply wants to see Adolf Eichmann in the flesh and ensure that this is the man he is hunting. He walks back to his car in the dead of night and drives away without being detected. Every day thereafter, he returns to Garibaldi Street, becoming more and more familiar with the neighborhood.

  But day after day passes with no sign of the killer.

  Finally, Eichmann appears.

  “Nineteen March,” Aharoni will long remember. “On this day I saw him for the first time.”

  The spy expected to witness a man of monstrous physical proportions. Instead, he is stunned that the SS bureaucrat who murdered millions is thoroughly average—“a man of medium size and build, about fifty years old, with a high forehead and partially bald.”

  Aharoni writes an urgent report back to his superiors in Tel Aviv: “I am of the opinion that we should now begin with the next phase of the operation. I have no doubts that I have seen Eichmann.”

  But just to be sure, Aharoni returns to the Eichmann home and secretly photographs the man living at 14 Garibaldi Street.

  On April 9, 1960, Zvi Aharoni returns to Tel Aviv. Exactly two weeks later, he once again lands in Buenos Aires. This time the spy affects a new look, growing a mustache and letting his hair grow longer while affecting the disguise of a German businessman. He will have no contact with any of the sayanim who helped him on his earlier visit. Indeed, a new level of secrecy is in place. Aharoni will not even be allowed to visit the Israeli embassy or stay in the same hotel as on his last visit. For this time, the spy has not returned to Argentina to track the movements of Adolf Eichmann, and he does not plan on flying home alone when he returns to Israel.

  Zvi Aharoni and the Mossad are here to snatch the Obersturmbannführer. Somehow, someway, they will smuggle him out of Argentina and take him back to Israel to stand trial for his crimes.

  Of course, it is illegal.

  Of course, it must be done.

  11

  MAY 3, 1960

  SAN FERNANDO, ARGENTINA

  AFTERNOON

  Isser Harel sits in the passenger seat of Zvi Aharoni’s rental car. The vehicle is “large, dependable,” in Aharoni’s words, easily capable of carrying several members of the ten-man Mossad hit team that has come to abduct Adolf Eichmann.

  Right now it is just Aharoni and Harel, cruising slowly up and down the many roads on Route 202 leading to the Eichmann compound. The Mossad director is among the last Israeli operatives comprising Operation Eichmann to arrive in South America. Harel will leave the actual surveillance and snatch to the others, instead working logistics behind the scenes. It is a task perhaps as important as the proposed kidnapping itself. The man who once closed the Eichmann case for lack of evidence is now consumed by the small details of making this illegal operation succeed.

  Aharoni points out the railway line whose raised bed offers a hidden place for observation, and the small kiosk where Eichmann steps off bus 203 each night at 7:40. He tells Harel of how Eichmann uses a special two-colored flashlight with red and white beams to guide himself home.

  Isser Harel, the Mossad director who led the capture of Adolf Eichmann

  For Aharoni, this day represents the summation of his work. He is not merely showing Harel the details of Eichmann’s neighborhood but showing off the results of countless hours of investigation. In the top-secret world in which both men live, there are few people with whom Aharoni can share his accomplishments.

  As a final grand gesture, Aharoni turns a corner and deliberately slows his speed. He drives past the house itself, letting Harel take a long look. It is a brazen, though calculated, gesture on Aharoni’s part. It is Tuesday, a working day. Eichmann will not be home for hours. Aharoni is gambling that Vera Eichmann is not as observant as her husband and will not notice the large vehicle driving slowly past the home, nor the two men staring carefully at her residence.

  “I could sense that the cool, impenetrable Harel was deeply impressed,” Aharoni will write of this moment. “However, he did not utter a word, not even when we saw the house from close up.”

  But Isser Harel has also done his part, acquiring many items vital to the actual kidnapping. These include a forgery kit, wigs, makeup, false teeth, pocket cameras, and handcuffs. A doctor has been found to operate as a member of the team, and the proper drugs with which to sedate Eichmann have been placed under his care.

  So it is that the sequence of events vital to kidnapping Adolf Eichmann have fallen into place: Aharoni’s successful identification and confirmation of the Nazi’s location; assemblage of the Operation Eichmann task force; arrival into Argentina; and acquisition of items necessary for the capture.

  In the few short weeks that the team has been in Argentina, they have also rented two safe houses, code names Tira an
d Doron. They have purchased vehicles large enough to stage an abduction, and even fashioned two-sided license plates so that registration numbers can easily be reversed

  “If we succeed,” Isser Harel has commented to one of the operatives, “this will be the first time in history that a court of justice of the Jewish people will judge a man who slaughtered multitudes of Jews. That is why I see in this action a humane and moral significance that cannot be applied to anything we have ever undertaken before.”

  Yet, as vital as each of those actions have been, the next two steps are the most crucial. Harel will meet with members of the team each day to coordinate activities, giving or refusing approval of plans as he sees fit.

  The most important action, of course, is taking physical possession of Eichmann. Even as he drives past the house on Garibaldi Street with Zvi Aharoni, Harel can only guess at how this will take place. He has assigned one of his top operatives, Mossad agent Rafi Eitan, to be in charge of this phase. It was Eitan, the Israeli-born commando who led many famous operations during the nation’s postwar struggle for independence, who saw the need for handcuffs and sedatives to subdue Eichmann.

  But what comes after the kidnapping—should it be successful—will be the most daring action of all. Overpowering, subduing, and imprisoning Adolf Eichmann will mean nothing if the Mossad director cannot find a way to smuggle the Nazi out of Argentina.

  And for that, Isser Harel has a plan.

  * * *

  The distance between Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv is almost eight thousand miles. The Atlantic Ocean, equator, and continent of Africa stand between the two capital cities. Harel has just two options for transporting Adolf Eichmann: ship or plane.