I Captured Adolf Eichmann
by Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein, condensed from Eichmann in My Hands
The Mossad, Israel’s secret service, had spent months setting its trap, tracking its target with painstaking care.
Which route would he take back from work? How likely was he to travel alone? Did he always arrive on time? Now, as night fell on Buenos Aires, agent Peter Malkin stood in the shadows, waiting.
Soon he would face a man whose name was synonymous with Nazism and evil. Under that name millions had been transported to the gas chambers. And under that name Malkin’s own sister had gone to her death. Adolf Eichmann. For years the unrepentant killer had escaped justice. But the moment had come, Malkin promised himself, for Eichmann’s luck to run out. It was Judgment Day.
It had never been a secret that part of our mission at the Mossad was to hunt for Nazi war criminals. A thick file of names—administrators, camp guards, commanders of death squads—was kept constantly updated for our operations. But in 1960, 15 years after the war, I, like so many of my colleagues, forced myself to view the matter realistically.
The trails of many of these killers had grown cold. And it was now the Arabs who threatened Israel’s security. We could not allow ourselves to be obsessed with the search for Hitler’s men; nor could we allocate too many resources to it.
Then in April 1960 came news that would turn my world upside down. Intelligence operatives had confirmed that Adolf Eichmann, the man whose crimes set the standards of Nazi barbarism, was alive and living in Argentina. And I would be joining the team that would actually make the capture.
I sat now in our Tel Aviv office with the three men I would work with most closely: Uzi, my pal; Meir, a mechanical genius; and Swiss-born Aharon, whose responsibility would be logistics and planning. Someone flipped out the lights, and on the screen before us appeared a slide. A head-and-shoulders shot of a man in his mid-30s in full SS regalia, with a sharp nose, thin lips and impassive eyes peering from beneath the shiny black visor. The face was the very image of a Nazi commander—cruel, decisive, utterly sure of himself.
Uzi motioned for the next slide—also taken during the war, but this time unposed and from a distance. The man, wearing a greatcoat and jackboots and holding a riding crop, was looking off to the left.
I knew these likenesses were hard to come by. Eichmann had refused to pose for any photos other than those essential for official purposes—seeing to it that the negatives were destroyed and keeping tabs on every print. Frustrated investigators found that even in group shots he had tried to obscure his face, positioning himself in the last row behind larger men. But he was unmistakable.
Uzi moved on to the next slide: a man of later middle age, balding and hollow cheeked, a pair of spectacles perched on his nose above a thick mustache. The man who called himself Ricardo Klement stood near his home on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, wearing a neat but obviously cheap suit.
“These shots have been examined by our best photo-ID people,” noted Aharon, “and they feel good about them.”
“Obviously there’s a risk,” cut in Uzi. “We can’t be sure it’s Eichmann until we’ve got him.”
There was a long silence. Except for Uzi, every one of us had lost immediate family in the concentration camps. “Once we’re certain,” Meir said, “why don’t we kill the bastard on the spot?”
Uzi nodded. “We all share that feeling, I’m sure.”
Meir shook his head bitterly. “What chance did he give those people?” he demanded. “I saw them, the ones that survived. What kind of consideration did he show them?”
For a long moment, no one made any response.
“Let’s never forget,” said Uzi finally, “that’s part of the difference between him and us.”
I studied the thick Eichmann file in the days that followed and found myself profoundly apprehensive. We would be attempting to kidnap a man on the soil of a friendly country and spirit him abroad without due process. While the morality of our mission was clear, the legality was not. One wrong move, one error in judgment, and there would be an international uproar. All that would be remembered by my colleagues, possibly by the entirety of the Jewish people, was that Adolf Eichmann had been in our grasp and we had let him get away. Never before in my career had I been frightened of an assignment. Now I was terrified.
I reassured myself that the men selected for the capture were as capable a crew as could be assembled. Then, too, there was a final member of the team: the head of our country’s secret service, Isser Harel himself. In spite of the possibility of international repercussions, there was still no way Isser was going to miss this assignment.
Dubbing the operation “Attila,” we put together a plan that was quite simple: we would seize Eichmann at night, in a deserted area, working with as small a crew as possible. He would then be driven to a safe house and kept in a camouflaged room until we could find some way to get him out of the country and back to Israel for trial.
This last element would be especially tricky, and it had yet to be resolved. A return trip from Buenos Aires to Israel by boat would take as long as two months, with several potentially dangerous stops at foreign ports. Getting out by plane was risky since our country had no direct service to Argentina. But Isser reassured us that he was working on a plan.
With so little time, every preparation was vital. I began a crash program in the gym, emphasizing strength and reaction time. I also started work on various disguises for members of the team. If an already wary Eichmann began spotting the same faces in his neighborhood, the operation would be fatally compromised.
And I made my emotional preparation. An effective agent has to work up a powerful dislike for the target. This is not a parlor game he is engaged in. The dislike must be intense, and ideally it should be personal. In this case, it would hardly have seemed to be a problem. Adolf Eichmann was a monster.
And yet, it proved to be not so simple. I’d learned to regard the Holocaust with dispassion, unspeakable horror though it was, refusing to acknowledge my own depth of loss and pain. For the first time I found myself asking, Why hadn’t I listened when my parents talked about my sister, her children, our village? Why hadn’t I been strong enough to stay in the room?
I arrived at my mother’s apartment late one Friday afternoon and told her that I would be leaving on assignment soon. As we spoke, my eyes strayed to the near wall of the living room and a display of family photographs. Though they had been there for years, I’d always avoided looking at them closely. Now I asked if there was an extra of my sister, Fruma, and her two children—all killed in the Holocaust.
Where was I going that had me thinking about my sister, my mother asked. I said nothing. She knew I couldn’t tell her. But later, along with the photo I’d asked for, she brought a stack of Fruma’s letters, tied with a brown ribbon—“now that you’re suddenly so sentimental.”
As I read the letters that night, the memories came in a jumble.
I was only 4½ years old in 1933 when my parents took me and my older brothers, Jacob and Yechiel, and fled Poland for Palestine. My sister, Fruma, was left behind. Permission to settle in Palestine was difficult to obtain, and at 23 Fruma had a husband and children of her own. Somehow she would join us later.
Agent Peter Malkin
Our family settled with almost nothing in a small apartment in Haifa. None of us had anticipated how harsh this new world would be. My father and Yechiel put in backbreaking labor for 15 hours a day, under a brutal sun, hauling sand and breaking stones to make bricks. When I asked my father how we would survive, he said simply, “Don’t worry, Peter. You’re braver than you think.”
I was vaguely aware that whenever my mother had a free hour, she spent it at some immigration office or refugee agency, but to a young boy that was just her routine. How could I know that Fruma’s situation was increasingly desperate? How could I begin to grasp my parents’ apprehension and crushing powerlessness? It was 1938. How could I have known the tragedy we were all about to live?
The next year, as the Germans moved into Poland, we began to hear reports that Jews were being rounded up and sent to mass gathering places. We knew that under these terrible circumstances some were probably dying. But how could we fathom anything more?
At war’s end, there was an eerie silence. All of us waited to hear from loved ones.
Nothing.
Then reports began to come in, followed by the first newsreels from the camps. The enormity of what had occurred began to register. They had been murdered. Not by the thousands or even hundreds but by the millions.
In our house we avoided one another’s eyes. And yet even then my mother did not stop hoping. With so much confusion, there always remained the possibility: maybe one of them had escaped.
Sometimes it happened. Miraculously, someone would appear. The daughter of a couple across the street turned out to have been hidden by Polish peasant neighbors. Letters came—a brother, a cousin, a friend had survived the camps.
But it never happened for us.
It was during that time—as we struggled to come to terms with the loss of so many loved ones—that we first started hearing the name Eichmann. He was the one the survivors talked about, more than Himmler or Goring, more even than Hitler. Newspaper articles appeared. Eyewitness accounts were recorded. In the public mind, he soon took on mythic proportions of evil; a contemporary Satan, the one who had organized it all.
Adolf Eichmann began his spectacular rise to power during the early, heady days of the Third Reich, when anything was possible for an ambitious young man unburdened by conscience.
In just three years’ time, he rose from the modest rank of sergeant to become head of the SS department charged with deporting Jews from recently annexed Austria, rendering it judenrein—Jew-free.
After several months in Czechoslovakia, where he was responsible for Jewish “emigration,” he was moved to Berlin as head of the Jewish section in the Gestapo. By 1941 the files in Eichmann’s headquarters contained the order for the “Final Solution”: the Jewish population was to be physically exterminated.
Shortly after the program began, Eichmann traveled east to witness the action. In Minsk, hundreds of Jews were marched from the city. As Eichmann watched, soldiers ordered them into a long trench, then began moving along the line, firing point-blank into the backs of their heads. “I can still see a woman with a child,” Eichmann would recall later. “She was shot and then the baby in her arms. His brains splattered all around, also over my leather overcoat. My driver helped me remove them.”
The Nazis began to chart the results of the program closely, tabulating numbers in Berlin as the totals ran into the hundreds of thousands, and finally into the millions. But like other Nazi leaders, Eichmann recognized that shooting was inefficient, a frightful waste of ammunition. The process also had a negative impact on the morale of some of the German soldiers. The need for them to be spared all these bloodbaths led to the search for new killing techniques.
In the fall of 1941, Eichmann visited the site chosen for the Belzec camp in Poland. The gas chambers that would be built there could annihilate up to 15,000 people a day. Such camps lent themselves to the merciless deception at which the Nazis had become adept. The newer camps were set up far from population centers, and in some the gas chambers were flanked by flowers or shrubs and disguised as showers.
Quite simply, Eichmann saw his mission—the elimination of Jews from the face of the earth—as a priority at least equal to that of winning the war. Nothing could be allowed to impede it. Even as the war began to go badly, Eichmann opposed deals with outsiders in which Jewish lives were to be ransomed. As the Reich collapsed, he pressed for the destruction of those Jews remaining in the camps.
In early May 1945, as the Allies closed in, Eichmann led a unit into the Austrian Alps to fight on as guerrillas. But almost immediately the men received orders to lay down their arms: Germany had surrendered. Heeding the entreaties of the others, who had no wish to be captured in the presence of so notorious a figure, Eichmann agreed to move off on his own.
They watched him leave, making his way down a mountain trail, carrying a couple of days’ provisions. For years afterward, that was the last the world would know of him.
On the evening of May 3, 1960, Uzi, Meir and I departed for Argentina.
The address we’d been given turned out to be an elegant four-story apartment building in the wealthy quarter, rented by David, Operation Attila’s front man. The kind of safe house we needed—large enough to accommodate our entire contingent and suitably laid out to hide a prisoner—had proved hard to come by. Few owners were willing to lease their properties for just a month or so, as we required.
Even worse, most residences of any size included on-site employees as part of the package. Indeed, a uniformed concierge manned the lobby of the apartment we were in now, making it impossible for us to use it as a permanent hiding place.
Indeed, a uniformed concierge manned the lobby of the apartment we were in now, making it impossible for us to use it as a permanent hiding place.
The automobile situation was almost as desperate. On the trip from the airport, I had noted that most of the cars on the road were at least a decade old; many were bona-fide museum pieces. David would simply have to round up the best models he could, and then we’d rely on Meir’s magic mechanic’s hands.
Isser, who had already arrived, had left word he wanted to see Uzi and me as soon as possible at a café ten minutes away. As we drove over to meet him, I noted heavily armed soldiers and armored personnel carriers at several intersections. We were well aware that Perón sympathizers were attempting to disrupt preparations for Argentina’s upcoming 150th anniversary. The presence of armed soldiers in the streets would not make our task any easier.
Isser wanted us to look over the operational area immediately. So in a few minutes Uzi and I were back in the car, heading northeast on Route 202 toward the suburb of San Fernando, where Eichmann—Ricardo Klement—lived.
As we approached the district, rain fell steadily. Aharon eased the car off the main road, then made a sharp turn onto a side street, weaving his way around the large puddles. It was a poor area, even worse than the photos had shown. The houses were small and ramshackle.
A few minutes later we turned onto a lane parallel to Garibaldi. Aharon killed the engine and we got out, slogging our way through the mud and rain. My suit was soon plastered to my body, and my shoes began to squeak. We made it to the base of a steep hill, then crawled to the top. We were on the railroad embankment. Directly beneath us lay another set of railroad tracks. The setting unnerved me. Eichmann had always considered “collection and transport” to be his field of greatest competence.
Before us was the view we had become so familiar with in photographs: off to the left, Route 202, heavy with traffic; and directly ahead, the Klement home. We knelt on the wooden ties and rested our elbows on the cold tracks. With field glasses, I felt I could touch the house.
I checked my watch. According to the reports, Klement usually appeared between 7:20 and 8 p.m. I turned my glasses toward the highway, nudging Uzi as a brightly lit bus detached itself from the traffic and squealed to a stop. My watch read 7:35.
The bus pulled away, leaving two figures at the curb. One was a woman, the other a man in a hat and trench coat.
“That’s him!” hissed Aharon.
The two separated, the man turning onto Garibaldi Street. It was too dark to make out his features, only that he wore heavy-rimmed glasses.
But there was his walk—purposeful, measured, head erect. Instantly any doubt melted away.
Eichmann!
The following day my surveillance of the target area began in earnest and continued for nearly a week. I walked the street in front of Klement’s house; I rode the dilapidated bus on which Klement traveled to and from his job at a Buenos Aires auto plant.
The point was not only to be familiar with his neighborhood and movements, but to place myself in his shoes. I wanted to know what he would be experiencing immediately before we met.
That evening I returned to San Fernando on my own. When I arrived shortly after 6 p.m., it was already dark. I lay prone atop the railroad embankment and waited. The interior of the house was well lit, and there, playing on the living-room floor, was Klement’s little boy.
A little after 7 p.m. a motorcycle pulled up to the house, and a moment later those inside were joined by a blond man in his late teens. Probably Dieter, one of the older sons. We’d had reports that Dieter owned a motorcycle.
A little past 7:30 the No. 203 bus pulled up to the stop and Klement got off. He was dressed exactly as he’d been the evening before, and he moved toward the house with the same purposeful stride, his hands at his sides.
This last was vital. Even if he was armed, he would not have ready access to the weapon.
He could not have been better suited to our purposes; a man of absolutely rigid habits. On the crucial night, any spontaneity on his part could cause trouble.
I was further pleased to see the light in the house get brighter as soon as he stepped through the door. The same thing had happened the night before; as, I would learn, it did every night—another piece of Klement’s routine.
Now, his hat and coat off, Klement was at the boy’s side. He lifted him in the air and spun him around. Both of them were laughing. It was a universal scene and on any other occasion it would have had me smiling. They moved to the window next. The boy sat on the man’s lap, both of them gazing out.
They stayed as they were, just staring out for a long time, seeming to daydream in unison. Then, off to my right, there came a rumbling noise. Slowly, it began to grow louder. Now the man stirred and pointed. A moment later a freight train appeared, roaring by on the tracks directly below me.
All at once I was hit by an almost indescribable sense of revulsion.
The father was smiling, and his lips were moving. Finger extended, he was helping the child count.
You bastard, I thought. Still the trains!
There was a general relief when David found a new villa in a resort district an hour north of the capital. It had no heat, but was reasonably isolated; the house was surrounded by an eight-foot wall and came free of staff. Meir proposed that a bedroom adjacent to the kitchen be set up for the prisoner. It had only one tiny window and offered easy access to a veranda through which, in the event of trouble, Klement could be hidden or even spirited away.
The villa had a courtyard inside the wall, which provided an ideal spot for Meir to work on the automobiles. With only a few days remaining until the capture, he was concentrating entirely on the two that would see action that night: a gray Chrysler and a black Mercedes. Especially the Mercedes. It was the vehicle in which Attila would travel to captivity.
As the day approached, a dispute arose over the method for the actual capture. The approved plan had been devised by Hans, the agent who had stalked Klement in preceding months.
His plan called for me to be out of sight on Garibaldi Street and to jump Attila on his way from the bus stop to his house, wrestling him to the ground. Meir, who was to hide nearby, would help me hold him. The rest of the team would be waiting around the corner on Route 202 in the two cars. As soon as they saw that we had secured him, they would swing around the corner, pick us up and take off. We would be exposed until then.
“But what,” I asked, “if a policeman happens by or even an ordinary pedestrian?”
“Under no circumstances will you let go of Attila,” Hans told me.
“This isn’t a plan to get Eichmann to Jerusalem,” I retorted. “It’s a plan to land Meir and me in a Buenos Aires jail.”
On the morning of May 10—D-Day was to be May 11—we gathered for a last discussion. Isser, deep in an easy chair, faced the rest of us. His eyes were bloodshot from working nonstop on his plan to get Attila out of Argentina.
It fell to Uzi to describe the opposing plans. I wanted one of the cars, the Mercedes, positioned on Garibaldi Street, hood up as if disabled, so that Attila would pass directly by it en route home. Meir was to be on the street side of the car, obscured by the raised hood, as if working on the engine, while Hans and Uzi stayed hidden within. Strolling in the opposite direction, toward Attila, I would have no apparent connection to the vehicle. When we met, after I had subdued him, Meir would help me get him into the car. The other car would turn onto Garibaldi from 202 and take the lead position to protect us in case of a blockade.
In Hans’s plan, I noted, there were too many imponderables. Aside from our being exposed to passersby, what if those waiting in the cars on 202, blinded by oncoming headlights, failed to make out what was happening? What if a cop, spotting two cars on the side of the highway, stopped to investigate?
Isser studied me intently. “What if Attila panics when he sees the car?” he asked. “What if he runs?” It was a legitimate apprehension.
“If Hans’s plan fails—that’s it, we’ll never have another shot.”
I simply didn’t think it would happen, not to a proud German officer, a creature of habit and routine. “You can’t run away from every suggestion of the unknown,” I said. “It’s impossible to live that way.”
Then I added, “There’s something else. If Hans’s plan fails—that’s it, we’ll never have another shot. With my plan, even if his suspicions are aroused by the car, we simply continue to work on the engine, slam down the hood and drive away. In all likelihood, he figures he was being paranoid, and we try again later.”
Isser pulled himself out of the chair, walked over to me and placed his hands on my shoulders, both a benediction and a warning. “All right. I agree. But, Peter, it’s on your head.”
On May 11, Meir and Uzi were up at dawn to test the cars. When they returned an hour later, Uzi was soaring. “Like we just drove them out of the showrooms!” he announced.
An hour before we were due to leave, I went to my room and lay down on the bed. I tried to think about loved ones at home, about my mother, but everything was pushed aside by a vivid, persistent image: Klement coming toward me in the dark. He was a trained soldier, a man who had survived on instinct for 15 years. The slightest mistake on my part, and he could be off. Or he could take off for no reason at all.
And, too, there remained the terrible question: Was it really Eichmann?
I went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, studying it in the mirror. What does a kidnapper look like? A moment later I pulled on a wig and combed it into place; then I added a pair of glasses. Back in my room I dressed in a blue sweater and black trousers.
I also stuffed a pair of fur-lined leather gloves in my back pocket. They would of course help with the cold, but that was not the reason I brought them. The thought of placing my bare hand over the mouth that had ordered the death of millions, of feeling the hot breath and saliva on my skin, filled me with an overwhelming sense of horror.
It was 6:45 p.m. Time to go.
We were intentionally cutting it close. The 30- to 35-minute ride to San Fernando would leave approximately a quarter-hour before the usual arrival of Attila’s bus; not long enough for a disabled car to arouse suspicion.
We drove in silence, arriving a little past 7:15. Swinging onto Garibaldi, we stopped 20 yards before the Klement house. Ahead, on the shoulder of 202, we could see the Chrysler, its headlights dark.
The street was deserted. The wind had picked up, and every minute or two there was thunder and a flash of lightning, but no rain. Out of the car, I walked back 40 paces, measuring the distance to the spot where I intended to meet him. Then I waited, buffeted by the wind, trying to stay warm. Ten minutes went by. Twenty.
I wandered back to the car. I tapped on the front window. Uzi’s head popped up. A lightning bolt flashed, illuminating his face eerily. “It’s getting late,” I asked. “What do we do?”
“Maybe we missed him.” It was Hans answering. “Maybe he came earlier.”
I shook my head. “No, he’s not here yet. You can tell by the light in the house.”
“Give him 15 more minutes,” Uzi decided.
I stayed by the car for a few minutes. Then off to the left, heading northeast from Buenos Aires, at once familiar and startling, the No. 203 bus came into view.
At that instant, a young man turned up Garibaldi on a bicycle, his overcoat whipping behind him like a cape. Spotting us, he yelled a friendly greeting in Spanish and started pedaling our way. A Good Samaritan!
Leave us alone. The words rang out within. Get away!
Smiling at his approach, Meir simply shook his head and slammed down the hood, giving it an affectionate pat for good measure. Waving, the man passed by and continued around the corner. Instantly, Meir reopened the hood. The bus was at the stop. When it pulled away, there he stood, framed in silhouette by the oncoming headlights.
As he turned onto Garibaldi, I began my leisurely stroll toward him. The lightning was flashing on all sides, the thunder booming. But still no rain. It was Judgment Day.
Burrowed within his coat, his collar upturned, hands in his pockets, leaning into the wind, Attila continued steadily toward me. We were 50 feet apart. I could hear his footfall, regular as the tick of a clock. Would he pause at the sight of the car? No—he didn’t hesitate. Twenty-five feet between us. Fifteen.
“Un momentito, señor.” The simple phrase I had been practicing for weeks.
He stopped. Behind black-rimmed glasses, his eyes met mine. He took a step backward. I leaped at him.
We fell hard to the ground and tumbled into the ditch alongside the walkway. I was on my back in a couple of inches of mud, grasping him with all my strength, one hand around his throat. He was making gurgling noises. As I struggled to my feet, hoisting him with me, I eased my hold.
Suddenly he let out a piercing scream. It was the primal cry of a cornered animal. Tightening my grip, I cut it off. “It will do you no good,” I told him as I dragged him to the car. “This is the end for you.”
Meir appeared. He lifted the feet, and I kept hold of his shoulders and head. The back door swung open, and we stuffed him inside the car.
I slid in after, still holding fast, my hand over his mouth. Meir ran around to the front seat, and Hans put the car into gear. As we lurched forward, we gagged him and covered his eyes with goggles. Then we threw a blanket over Attila, and he lay absolutely still on the floor.
Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the courtyard of the villa. David slammed the gate behind us, rushed up to the car and peered in. “You did it!”
Uzi and I led Attila to his room, trailed by Hans. Shutting the door behind us, we studied the prisoner for the first time. He stood in the center of the room, still in his overcoat, his eyes obscured by the goggles. He was utterly rigid except for his hands, which were opening and closing spasmodically.
Months before, we had obtained a list of Eichmann’s identifying characteristics from the SS files. Hans, whose primary responsibility as interrogator was to make a positive identification, knew them by heart: his height and weight, head circumference and shoe size, scars, dental work, a tattoo under his left arm listing blood type.
“Wie heeissen Sie?” demanded Hans sharply.
“Ricardo Klement,” came the reply. His voice was weak and raspy.
Four times the question was asked and the answer repeated.
Changing to English, Hans snapped, “Take off his coat and shirt.” We removed his coat, shirt, tie and shoes.
Eichmann stood before us, his hands still working. At Hans’s direction, I lifted his left arm. There, where the tattoo with his blood type should have been, was a small scar. Something had been removed. But a scar on his chest was just where the records indicated.
We began silently taking measurements. All three of us buzzed around him with measuring tapes. Everything matched perfectly, except the dental information. The man before us wore dentures.
“Wie heeissen Sie?” Hans demanded again.
“Otto Heninger,” the man said now. It was an alias he’d used after the war. It meant nothing to us.
“Your SS number,” Hans spoke up, “was 45526.”
There was a pause. “No,” he corrected, “45326.”
“Good. Now.” Hans asked his question a last time. “Wie heeissen Sie?”
“Ich bin Adolf Eichmann.”
Peter Z. Malkin joined Israeli intelligence in 1950. For many years under a government order to keep silent about his work, he is now free to tell the story of his part in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. With the exceptions of Peter Malkin and Isser Harel, names of Israeli operatives have been changed for security reasons.
After Eichmann’s capture, Malkin and his team spirited their prisoner out of Argentina on a plane to Israel. Eichmann stood trial, and on December 11, 1961, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people, war crimes and membership in criminal associations. He was hanged on May 31, 1962.
In the spring of 1973, on assignment in Athens, I received a midnight phone call from Aharon. “Your mother is ill,” he told me. “She broke her hip and is in the hospital.”
I was all she had left. Yechiel had died the year before.
“Is it serious?” I asked.
“Peter, at this age you never know.”
I rushed out to the airport. At that hour there were no commercial flights, but I discovered a British Airways cargo plane due to leave shortly for Jerusalem and hastily explained the situation to the captain. He was apologetic, but firm. The policy was no unauthorized personnel on board.
I offered him every reference I could think of. “Please,” I said, “I’m sure they’ll give you the necessary waivers.” At last he agreed.
My wife was waiting for me at Lod Airport, and we raced to the hospital. It was just after dawn, hours before visiting time, and I had to make my own way in.
I located my mother’s room, and as I did, I knew that Aharon had been right to call me. My mother was dying. Her color was bad, her breathing labored. I made my decision then. In almost 15 years, it was the first time I would ignore the Mossad’s gag order.
I knelt beside her bed and took her hand. “Mama,” I whispered. “Mama, it’s me, Peter.”
The elderly lady in the next bed turned toward me. “She doesn’t talk,” she said loudly in Yiddish.
“Mama, I want to tell you something. What I promised, I have done. I captured Eichmann.”
There was no response. “Mama, Fruma was avenged. It was her brother who captured Adolf Eichmann.”
I repeated it.
“Quiet,” said the other lady, “she doesn’t hear.”
But suddenly her hand began to squeeze mine.
“Do you understand, Mama? I captured Eichmann.”
Her eyes were open now. “Yes,” she managed in a whisper. “I understand.”
Originally published in the February 1991 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
Israeli secret agent Peter Malkin died on March 1, 2005, in New York City. He is buried in the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv.