Killing the SS Read online

  The only voice Eichmann has heard since being bundled into the backseat is the fluent German of Zvi Aharoni. Now, the Israeli agent helps guide Eichmann up a back staircase to a second-floor bedroom that has been soundproofed to serve as the Nazi’s prison cell. It will be nine days until the El Al flight departs from Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv. Eichmann will remain in this room the entire time. Such a lengthy imprisonment will give the experienced interrogator Aharoni multiple opportunities to grill Eichmann. There will also be ample time for the Argentinean police to locate the safe house, so the agents are on high alert. In case of such a police intervention, two small hiding places within the house—one in the crawl space beneath the veranda and the other in a storage cavity above the ceiling—have been stuffed with pillows to muffle any sound should Eichmann be hastily relocated.

  In the second-floor bedroom in which Eichmann will spend his final days in Argentina, mattresses cover the windows and thick wool blankets have been nailed to the walls, meaning his screams will go unheard. The room on the second floor is just ten feet by twelve. A single iron bed dominates the center. A table and two small chairs will serve as a point of interrogation and a place to sit for Eichmann’s around-the-clock guards. The cell is never allowed to go dark. Every aspect of the abduction is designed to confuse Eichmann, dulling his senses. The goggles are never removed. The Nazi cannot know the date, the time, or whether it is night or day. He will eat only kosher food—among the items: chicken soup, boiled chicken, omelets, mashed potatoes—all prepared by a Mossad agent whose family was murdered at Eichmann’s behest during the war.

  The Mossad agents standing guard will maintain utter silence. Only Aharoni will communicate with Eichmann. Should the Argentinean police find this safe house, Eichmann will not have seen or heard the voices of his captors and will thus be unable to testify against them.

  Eichmann is stripped. His workman’s clothing and boots are old and frayed. His undergarments are threadbare.

  The team doctor performs a thorough physical examination of Eichmann. The prisoner’s mouth is checked for a cyanide capsule, even though it has been so many years since the war’s end that it would be unlikely for him to still conceal a suicide vial in his teeth. When no poison is discovered, Eichmann’s dentures are removed as an added precaution.

  On the Nazi’s left arm is a cigarette burn; the scar under Eichmann’s armpit covers up his SS blood-type tattoo.

  The Israelis dress Eichmann in pajamas purchased to his measurements. His left ankle is handcuffed to the bed. At 9:15 p.m., little more than an hour since he was snatched, Eichmann’s interrogation begins. Zvi Aharoni’s specialty was never surveillance or driving a getaway car, though he has handled both those aspects of this operation with professional élan. The same cannot be said of interrogation—the art of breaking a man down to extract information is not only Aharoni’s specialty but also a job he enjoys a great deal. In addition to his work during the war, he has spent time in America working with the CIA to learn their interrogation methods. Physical force is not part of Aharoni’s repertoire. Instead, he maneuvers to outwit his subjects, allowing them to ensnare themselves in a circle of lies.

  To prepare for the coming round of questions, and the most important debriefing of his life, Aharoni has read every available file on Eichmann, committing to memory facts and vignettes that will allow him to question the Nazi in a manner suggesting he already knows the answers to the questions he is posing. It is vital that Aharoni convince the prisoner to admit his true identity—flying home to Tel Aviv with the wrong man would make Israel—and Mossad—an international laughingstock.

  “What is your name,” Aharoni begins in fluent German—“Was ist dein name?”

  “Ricardo Klement.” Eichmann shows no sign of fear.

  “Wie würdest du vorher genannt?” Aharoni counters—“What were you called before?”

  “Otto Heninger.”

  “What is your membership number in the NSDAP?”1

  “Eight-nine-nine-eight-nine-five.”

  “What was your number in the SS?”

  “Four-five-three-two-six.”

  “What is your date of birth?” Aharoni continues, noting that each of Eichmann’s answers thus far confirms his true identity.

  “Nineteen March 1906.”

  “Under what name were you born?” Aharoni has come full circle with his questioning but now hesitates. The correct answer will mean he can proceed with a more in-depth line of interrogation about Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust. A false answer means the two men might spend the entire night engaged in a mental chess match.

  After fifteen years of hiding, and spinning elaborate tales to conceal his true identity, the proud Nazi now prefers to tell the truth.

  “Adolf Eichmann.”

  * * *

  Nick Eichmann, the former boyfriend of Sylvia Hermann, is working in an elevator shaft. He is now married to an Argentinean girl and no longer lives at home. It is the morning of May 12, just hours after his father’s kidnapping. Using a screwdriver, the twenty-four-year-old mechanic makes adjustments to the elevator’s control panel. Without warning, his younger brother Dieter steps into the small space.

  “The old man is gone,” eighteen-year-old Dieter says breathlessly.

  The brothers immediately drive toward Garibaldi Street. Along the way, they stop briefly at the home of former SS officer Carlos Fuldner to give him the news. It was Fuldner who arranged their father’s immigration to Argentina. Together, they come up with three possible scenarios to explain the disappearance: Eichmann has been arrested by Argentinean police, perhaps for being drunk in public; Eichmann was injured in an accident and is in a local hospital; or, the Israelis snatched him.

  Two days of fruitless searching of morgues, hospitals, and police stations give them their answer. When the Eichmann boys retrace their father’s likely steps home from the bus station, their attention is drawn to mud and flattened grass alongside the road, indicating some form of struggle. Bending down to inspect the area more carefully, Nick Eichmann finds his father’s eyeglasses in the mud.

  It is the Israelis.

  Now there is urgency: the Eichmann boys must find their father before he can be smuggled out of Argentina.

  * * *

  The wait is agonizing. As he counts down the days to the El Al flight, Isser Harel obsessively scans the newspapers for signs of a manhunt. He is certain that Vera Eichmann became concerned when her husband failed to arrive home but doubts that her first thoughts would be a kidnapping. More likely she would think that he hurt himself in an accident and was in a hospital. He doubts she would go directly to the police. “Was Klement often drunk?” Harel asks himself, placing himself in the mind-set of a police investigator. “Were there fights? Arguments? Was he mixed up with another woman?”

  Harel decides that Vera is not a concern. She would not dare reveal her husband’s true identity or past to local law enforcement, almost surely meaning that her appeal for a search would be ignored. “Like police the world over, they would finally tell her that husbands disappear and return, and all she had to do was wait patiently until homesickness brought him back.”

  Also, should Vera Eichmann foolishly tell officials that her husband is the infamous war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the news would flash around the world in an instant. Rather than rescuing her husband, she would confirm once and for all that he is alive in Argentina.

  No, Harel decides. Vera Eichmann will never go to the police.

  The local Nazi population, however, will do anything within its power to rescue Adolf Eichmann. Indeed, as Isser Harel awaits the arrival of El Al flight 601, a network of former SS agents is taking action. Vera Eichmann and her youngest son Ricardo have been removed from the house on Garibaldi Street and spirited into hiding.

  “Another friend of my father’s, also an SS man, organized an observation network over all the seaports and airports. [There was] no airport, no harbor, no major railway station, no important cros
sroads that was not being watched by our people,” Nick Eichmann will boast to a German journalist five years later.

  Help also comes in the form of the Tacuara, a militant anti-Semitic Argentinean organization. Its members greet one another with the raised arm of a Nazi salute, and worship Adolf Hitler and his Fascist policies. The members are exclusively Catholic and anti-Communist, with the mission of remaking Argentina as a nation “free of politicians, free of demagogues, and of Jews.” They are in alliance with the Arab League of Buenos Aires, a group determined to wipe Israel off the map. Pope Pius in Rome has learned of the hatred spread by the Tacuara group and ordered one Catholic priest to tone down his anti-Semitic rhetoric.

  So it is that Dieter and Nick Eichmann join forces with the SS and Tacuara to find their father. They believe he is being hidden somewhere in Buenos Aires, most likely in the cellar of a synagogue. Existing on just a few hours of sleep every night, they canvas the city in a frantic search. With Buenos Aires already caught up in the 150th anniversary celebration festivities, the aggressive behavior of these passionate young men goes unnoticed.

  “We knew with certainty,” Nick Eichmann will explain years later, “that he had not yet left Argentina.”

  * * *

  It is the evening of May 19, 1960, as the El Al turboprop approaches Buenos Aires’s Ezeiza Airport. “The Whispering Giant,” as flight 601’s Britannia has been nicknamed, flew from Tel Aviv to Rome, then on to Dakar, Senegal, then westward across the Atlantic from Africa to the Brazilian coastal airport at Recife. It is the first time any of the crew has been to South America. The charts for the Britannia aircraft used by chief navigator Shaul Shaul have been purchased in New York City specially for this flight.

  In Recife, the two pilots were given a lesson in the idiosyncrasies of South American bureaucracy during the refueling stop. A short visit turned into a frustrating delay when an air traffic controller refused to recognize their right to fly over Brazilian air space, even though all the proper permits had been arranged. Three hours and a hefty bribe later, the El Al flight lifted into the sky.

  Descending into Buenos Aires, the crew learns a second hard truth about South American thinking. The Argentinean control tower gives them landing instructions in meters instead of feet. Told to level off “when reaching 2,000,” the flight crew is stunned to see clouds at treetop level. Sudden death is just seconds away. The startled pilots quickly pull the nose up to gain altitude, barely averting a crash.

  Thus, as El Al 601 finally lands in Buenos Aires, the drained crew eagerly awaits their mandatory twenty-four-hour rest period. They will need it—as arduous as the flight into Buenos Aires was, the return to Tel Aviv tomorrow night will be even more demanding.

  * * *

  A red carpet is rolled out as Israel’s highest-ranking diplomat steps off the plane. Israeli and Argentinean officials make welcoming speeches. The leaders of local Jewish community organizations wait patiently inside the terminal, eager to greet Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister. None of the diplomats or locals know anything of the Eichmann plot.

  While it is just one day until the final phase of Eichmann’s kidnapping is due to transpire, the planning for the Nazi’s extraction continues at a furious pace. Airport security is the greatest stumbling block, with customs agents bound to ask numerous questions and scrutinize the identities of all travelers. Thus, as the entourage moves from the tarmac into the terminal, the Britannia is towed to the far side of the airfield. The Mossad have specifically requested that the El Al flight be parked near Argentinean airplanes. It is felt that this will lower the level of scrutiny when it comes time to depart.

  Despite the presence of the El Al Britannia aircraft, Zvi Aharoni has not given up on the possibility of utilizing a cargo ship for the evacuation. Pretending to be an avid water-skier, he rented a speedboat and journeys out into the Rio de la Plata estuary, where he sees for himself that an oceanic exchange is very possible. However, there is still the difficulty of diverting a cargo ship from its regularly scheduled route. Indeed, officials at the ZIM line confirm that a vessel will not be passing the South American coast until June at the earliest.

  This is hardly ideal. However, it is the fallback plan should all go wrong with air travel. Eichmann would have to be sequestered in the safe house for at least another month, a situation Aharoni cannot possibly imagine. The Mossad agents already feel like prisoners in Tira. They have passed the time playing chess, reading the few available books, and listening to the radio, but the sheer boredom of guarding Eichmann is wearing them down. The agents shave the Nazi, help him shower and go to the bathroom, and spoon-feed him the kosher meals prepared by the newly arrived female Mossad operative. With every passing day it becomes harder and harder for them to believe this simple man masterminded the deaths of millions or was once arrogant enough to boast to Adolf Hitler that he would present the Führer with a Judenrein (Jew-free) Vienna for his birthday.

  The sooner Eichmann is placed on trial in Tel Aviv, the better. The Mossad agents are chafing at the claustrophobic conditions of the safe house and at being in such daily proximity with a man they revile. With every passing day that he is held in their custody, the notion of waiting another whole month to place him aboard a cargo ship becomes more repugnant.

  A local Jewish carpenter performing yet another sayan function has constructed a special crate for the flight. The box is large enough to hold a man, allowing the Nazi to be secretly loaded on board like a piece of cargo. Four heavy leather straps are screwed to the interior, to which Eichmann’s arms will be bound so he cannot move around. Fifty air holes are drilled into the wood so that the prisoner will not suffocate. To ensure that no airport security guard attempts to open the crate, the words “Diplomatic Post” are stenciled to the outside, granting the package official immunity.

  Simultaneously, an Israeli tourist is confronted by the Mossad at his hotel. He has nothing to do with the Mossad but asks no questions when told that his government would consider it an act of patriotism if he would check himself into a local hospital. Though obviously not injured or ill, the tourist is to feign a concussion from a phantom automobile accident. Just to ensure he plays the part perfectly, the Operation Eichmann team doctor briefs the tourist on the symptoms of a concussion.

  Bound by national duty, the tourist tells the Argentinean doctors about the crash and how he was thrown violently forward, smacking his head on the front seat. He is tested for vertigo. Neurological exams are carried out and his skull is X-rayed.

  Once the patient is admitted to the hospital, the Mossad secures his passport. The agents do not explain why. Nonetheless, the tourist obliges. With the insertion of a new photograph by the Mossad team’s very capable forgers, the passport will soon bear the image of Adolf Eichmann.

  The tourist—whom Harel will give the code name of Rafael Arnon—plays his part in the deception perfectly. He tells the doctors that all normal flights to Europe are fully booked and that he is hoping the El Al plane will have room for a sick Israeli who wants to make it home as soon as possible.

  On the night of May 19, just hours after the El Al flight lands, a member of the Mossad team visits the tourist in the hospital. He instructs the patient to tell the doctors that he has been granted a seat on the return flight to Israel. Upon his release from the hospital, the Mossad will find some other way to get him home to Israel, but his passport now belongs to Adolf Eichmann.

  * * *

  It is not just Adolf Eichmann who needs official clearance to depart Argentina. The Mossad team made their way into the country wearing various disguises and under false identities, traveling on separate flights and arriving through different points of embarkation. Some traveled through Paris, while others made stops around South America before arriving in Buenos Aires. And this is the way they must leave. Only a handful of agents will be on board the El Al flight. The others must make a clandestine exit from Argentina, knowing all the while that they will be hunted should the Eic
hmann kidnapping unravel.

  So it is that the Operation Eichmann team spends its last night in Tira. As the El Al Britannia stands alone on the tarmac, bathed in the white-hot beams of security floodlights, the Operation Eichmann members prepare their new identities and break down the safe house.

  The cover story is that Tira was rented by a husband and wife, so all traces of the prison cell must be dismantled. “A great deal of work also went into restoring the house to its former condition. Everything that was in it when we rented it was put back in place,” Isser Harel will write. “Everything that was added during the tenancy was destroyed … the inspectors worked with exact lists in their hands to make sure they wouldn’t forget the most minute detail.”

  The work continues through the night. By dawn, the plan is ready for execution.

  “It finally came, the twentieth of May,” Harel will write. “The last day, and for me, the longest and most dramatic day of Operation Eichmann.”

  But one unanswered question remains: will Eichmann attempt a last-minute escape?

  14

  MAY 20, 1960

  EZEIZA AIRPORT, BUENOS AIRES

  7:00 P.M.

  Isser Harel sits alone in an airport employee café. The air is thick with cigarette smoke. Outside, the weather is cold and raining. Harel has chosen this location carefully, hoping for a discreet place where he will go unnoticed as he awaits the midnight departure for Tel Aviv. Harel is surrounded by uniformed security guards and mechanics in coveralls, all waiting impatiently for an open seat in this overcrowded hall. It is here that he will meet with members of the Mossad team, who will brief him through the night as the plan unfolds.

  Harel is not just thinking about Adolf Eichmann. He has ordered a group of Mossad agents to comb Buenos Aires for the location of Josef Mengele. It is a risk to divert manpower to that task so late in Operation Eichmann, and the Mossad agents involved are unhappy about the assignment, believing it might doom their carefully designed plan. But it is a gamble Harel is willing to take.