The decision to deploy the limited resources of the Mossad to track down Nazi criminals marked a major departure from its role as Israel’s foreign intelligence-gathering and special missions service. Until the late 1950s, events leading to the Suez crisis and, increasingly, the influence of the Soviet Union had been the Mossad’s chief concern under its resourceful chief, Isser Harel. One of the more spectacular intelligence feats of Harel’s fledgling service was his Moscow resident’s success in “scooping” the Americans and the British by procuring the full text of Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s explosive denunciation of Stalin in February 1956. In Harel’s hands lay one of the West’s most powerful propaganda weapons: Khrushchev, in a three-hour speech, had laid bare the totalitarian savagery of his predecessor at a secret session of the Soviet Communist Party Congress.
The stature of the diminutive Harel, just over five feet tall, was elevated overnight as he brought his prize to Washington to negotiate a deal. Publicly, the Central Intelligence Agency took the credit as news agencies broadcast the leaked text around the world. Membership in the Western Communist Parties was decimated almost overnight. Privately, Harel secured a new intelligence-sharing agreement with the Americans. With it, the Mossad’s now legendary aura of intrigue was born.
Late in 1957, Harel received a telephone call that was soon to give the Mossad’s reputation a public face. Walter Eytan, director general of the ministry of foreign affairs, was on the line from Jerusalem requesting an urgent meeting. It was not a matter that could be discussed on the telephone. That evening the two men met at a café in Ramat Gan, where an emotional Eytan told Harel that the foreign office had received word from West Germany that Adolf Eichmann was alive and that his address in Argentina was known. Later, in his own account of “Operation Eichmann,” Harel wrote that it may have been “instinct” that told him that this time the information was accurate. For most of the 1950s, tips on Eichmann had proved to be wrong; the Israelis did not even have certain proof that Eichmann was alive.
Back in Tel Aviv, Harel spent most of the night reading Eichmann’s file. It revealed how the SS bureaucrat had so zealously administered the destruction of the European Jews. By morning Harel had resolved that “come hell or high water” Eichmann would be caught:
No agency in the entire world, no government, no police, were looking for him to answer for his crimes. People were tired of atrocity stories; their one desire was to dismiss those unspeakable happenings from their minds; they maintained that in any event there was no punishment on earth to fit the perpetrations of outrages of such magnitude, and that they were reconciled to the violation of law and perversion of justice.1
Harel had no difficulty persuading Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that capturing Eichmann was a proper function for the Mossad. A deep and trusting relationship had developed between the two men in the first precarious months of the new State of Israel, when it was under threat from the Arabs outside and from Menachem Begin’s right-wing Irgun Zevai Leumi within. Then in charge of the Department of Internal Affairs, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, Harel had neutralized the factions bent on civil war, both Begin’s group and the remnants of the underground Stern terrorist gang that was opposed to the terms of the UN ceasefire in the first Arab-Israeli war following independence.* He accomplished this by flushing out the Irgun and Stern leaders and their arms dumps. Characteristically of Harel, the operation was carried out with zeal and determination, but not as revenge. The rebels were told, some personally by Harel himself, that the new State of Israel could not and would not tolerate private armies.
Pre-State Israel, then, and its early traumas were in Harel’s bones. He was not a survivor of the Holocaust, but he was very much a State pioneer, a paternalistic keeper of its conscience. And so it followed that to Harel and the men under his command, capturing Eichmann was “a national and humane mission.” Israel, he said, was the only country in the world “determined to leave no legal stone unturned” and by the rules of “law, logic and historical justice was the state most competent to pass judgment.”2
But locating Eichmann precisely, proving his identity, kidnapping him, and spiriting him out of a country thousands of miles away posed enormous logistical problems for the Mossad. And although Harel had succeeded in persuading Ben-Gurion to allocate a generous budget for the Mossad, Operation Eichmann promised to devour a substantial part of it, as Harel himself explained in his autobiographical account of the affair.*
In fact when Nahum Amir,† our “travel agent” in Europe, had told me that by his calculations it would cost a fortune to send a special plane to take Eichmann to Israel, I had said, “to make the investment worthwhile we’ll try to bring Mengele with us as well.”3
Capturing Mengele was not quite the budgetary afterthought that this quotation from Harel’s account implies. As he said later: “I thought it important for Israel to have a Holocaust trial and I very much wanted Mengele there as well. A trial would have allowed the world to explore a truly evil mind.”4 Although the Mossad’s intelligence on Mengele was not as accurate as it was on Eichmann, it was clear from the few scraps they had that the Auschwitz doctor was leading a wholly different lifestyle than that of his murderous counterpart. Mengele lived under his own name (Eichmann used a pseudonym); Mengele’s wife, Martha, was in the telephone book (although at an old address); the Israelis even had some details of Mengele’s business activities. One complication, however, threatened to torpedo both operations. Late in 1959 newspaper stories on Eichmann and Mengele began to appear. Ben-Gurion was asked in the Israeli parliament what steps were being taken to bring Eichmann to trial. Fearing that publicity might alert both men, who knew each other, Harel encouraged false press speculation that Eichmann had been seen in Kuwait.
One of the few men outside Israel who knew the truth was Dr. Fritz Bauer, public prosecutor for the state of Hesse in West Germany. In September 1957 he had sent word to the Israelis that Eichmann had been traced.* The message to Jerusalem was dispatched in the strictest secrecy. Only he and the prime minister for Hesse, August Zinn, were privy to the information. Harel agreed with Bauer that the Bonn government was most unlikely to deal with Eichmann. “Bauer told me that no one else knew,” said Harel. “He said that he didn’t trust the [German] foreign office and he didn’t trust his embassy in Buenos Aires. He said we were the only people who could be relied upon to do anything with the information.”5
Aside from the fact that the West German ambassador in Buenos Aires was Werner Junkers, a wartime foreign office Nazi functionary, Bauer had one other reason for deeply mistrusting his own countrymen: he had been jailed twice by the Nazis, both before and during the war, because he was a Jew. Twice he managed to escape, the second time to Sweden, and on his return vowed he would do all he could to bring men like Mengele and Eichmann to trial.
The source of Bauer’s information on Eichmann was a series of letters from a German Jew named Lothar Hermann, who lived in the remote Argentine town of Coronel Suarez. Harel sent agents out to meet Hermann, and at first he did not impress them as a credible witness. For one thing, he was blind, a condition that did not seem to lend itself to tracking Nazis. But after thorough questioning, the Israelis learned that Hermann’s attractive eighteen-year-old daughter, by an extraordinary coincidence, was being pursued by a young German from Buenos Aires who called himself Nicholas Eichmann.*
As their relationship developed, the young Eichmann boasted to the girl that his father had held an important position during the war and regretted that the Nazis had not managed to wipe out all the Jews. Hermann correctly concluded that his daughter was dating the son of Adolf Eichmann, whose name had often been mentioned in the Argentine press. The Israelis employed Hermann to help them in the investigation, and within several months Hermann reported that he had found where Eichmann lived: 4261 Chacabuco Street, in the Olivos suburb of Buenos Aires. Hermann was convinced that the registered Austrian owner, Francisco Schmidt, was in fact Eichmann. In his first report to Tel Aviv, Hermann “presumed with certainty” that Schmidt and Eichmann were one and the same man. The Israelis took over the investigation, scoured Schmidt’s background, and put him under surveillance. It took one Israeli agent little time to determine that Schmidt could not be Eichmann. Based on this discovery and Hermann’s sometimes dubious claims for expenses, Harel began to lose faith in him. Harel was nothing if not consistent: correct to an almost puritanical degree in his private life, he expected the same high standards from his men, even if they were employed on a freelance basis. In any case, the hunt for Adolf Eichmann temporarily lost its momentum as Harel explained:
These findings damaged Hermann’s trustworthiness irretrievably . . . in August 1958, instructions were given to allow our contact with Hermann to lapse gradually.6
Yet Harel and his agent in the field had made a serious error of judgment. Hermann had in fact been right all along in pinpointing Eichmann’s address; his mistake had been in assuming that the Austrian owner, Schmidt, was Eichmann. From Harel’s own account of Operation Eichmann, it appears that not even the Israelis bothered at this stage to check on the identities of all the occupants of the house. Had they done so, they would have found that there were at least two tenants under the same roof. Hermann had reported to Tel Aviv as early as May 1958 that 4261 Chacabuco Street was split into two units with two electricity meters registered in two names: “Dagoto,” and “Klement” or “Klements.” Harel implicitly blamed Hermann for the oversight because, he said, he had “never even mentioned the possibility that it was one of the tenants of the house—either Dagoto or Klement—who could be Eichmann.” In fact, a more thorough investigation by the Israelis might have put Adolf Eichmann in their hands by late 1958. Then residing openly in Buenos Aires under his own name, moreover, Josef Mengele might well have been part of the roundup. As it was, the Israelis’ failure to keep faith with Hermann and exhaust all possibilities caused a delay of eighteen months; by which time Mengele was spending most of his time in Paraguay.
According to one senior intelligence officer, the Eichmann case was closed. “Harel basically didn’t believe the information that Eichmann was using the name Klement,” he said. The case was reopened by the determined lobbying of Dr. Fritz Bauer, who flew to Jerusalem in December 1959. Bauer angrily complained to Israel’s attorney general, Chaim Cohen, that Jerusalem had not acted on the information he confided to them late in 1957. Bauer said he had just received independent confirmation, from an SS informant, that Eichmann was living under the name Ricardo Klement and that he had fled Europe in 1950 using that alias.7
The attorney general asked Harel to reopen the Eichmann case. Harel responded by “borrowing” Zvi Aharoni, then chief interrogator of Shin Bet, the Israeli FBI. Harel dispatched him to Buenos Aires to check out the Chacabuco Street address for the third time. By a series of ingenious methods, including tailing one of Eichmann’s sons on his motorbike and talking to neighbors without raising the slightest suspicion, Aharoni, with assistance from local Mossad agents, discovered that Eichmann had indeed lived at 4261 Chacabuco Street and had recently moved to a drab single-story stucco house in Garibaldi Street. At some risk, Aharoni’s team snapped several photographs of Eichmann, with a hidden briefcase camera, while talking to him. There was another bonus too. Aharoni discovered that his quarry was a man with a regular job, and settled in his habits. His orderly routine, Aharoni reported back to Tel Aviv, boded well for a successful kidnapping.
Mengele, by contrast, was not a creature of habit. Unknown to the Israelis, sometime late in March or early April I960, Mengele returned from Paraguay to Buenos Aires for one of his periodic reunions with his wife and stepson. Unnerved by news of the German arrest warrant for him, Martha and Karl Heinz had moved into a boardinghouse in the Vicente Lopez district of the city.
Coincidentally, shortly after Mengele’s return to Buenos Aires, Harel decided to give the final go-ahead to Operation Eichmann, and Mengele was also chosen as a target for the Mossad. In April 1960, shortly before Harel’s departure for Buenos Aires to take personal charge of the operation—an unprecedented move for an intelligence chief—he dug out Mengele’s file and wrote down all the crucial information in a code known only to him. It was a wise precaution for Israel’s intelligence chief to take in the event of discovery by the Argentine authorities. Although Harel had resolved to give himself up in such a crisis, he would have had his hands full trying to justify one infringement of Argentine sovereignty, let alone two.
Harel’s plan was to go after Mengele once Eichmann was caught and held in one of the Israelis’ seven safe houses in Buenos Aires, while they waited for the departure of a special El Al Britannia aircraft that would fly their prisoner home. The kidnapping was set for May 11. Harel had won the agreement of the national airline to divert one of its planes in order to bring a delegation of Israeli dignitaries, led by UN representative Abba Eban, to attend Argentina’s celebration of 150 years’ independence. But the aircraft could not arrive before May 19 because the Argentineans could not receive the Israeli delegation before 2 p.m. that day. Harel wanted to get Eichmann out of the country as soon as possible—within thirty-six hours at the outside. Yet that would be too soon for the Israeli delegation’s planned departure. It was decided therefore that the delegation would have to return by scheduled airliner. But there was one complication. Eban had said he wished to travel back on the El Al plane. Since the Eichmann mission was so secret that none of the delegates, including Eban, knew the real reason for the plane’s journey to Buenos Aires, Harel decided that Eban and his colleagues would have to remain in the dark. Eban was therefore told that the reason he and the other diplomats would have to return on another airline was that the airport fees for keeping the El Al plane in Buenos Aires for several days were too high. Since the El Al plane would depart from Buenos Aires on May 20, Harel would have just nine precious days in which to capture Mengele.
On May 11, I960, Adolf Eichmann finished work at 7:10 p.m. at the Mercedes Benz plant, where he was an assembly-line foreman, and boarded the bus home to Garibaldi Street. He left the bus at his usual stop, paying no attention to a nearby car with its hood up. Two men were bent over the engine, apparently encountering mechanical problems. Nor was he unduly concerned by the presence of another car with three men inside, parked thirty yards from the bus stop. As Eichmann walked past the disabled car, the rear doors swung open and four men pounced on him and bundled him inside. The abduction took less than a minute. Eichmann did not offer much resistance. He spoke only six words before being bound and gagged. “I am resigned to my fate,” he replied to Aharoni, who was driving the car and who had warned him not to resist. Eichmann’s eyes were covered with a pair of opaque goggles, and he was shoved onto the car floor. An hour later the Israelis arrived at a safe house code-named “Tira” in the Florencio Varela district of Buenos Aires. With Eichmann safely in Israeli hands, Harel turned his attention to Mengele:
During that unenterprising—though by no means inactive—period preceding the arrival of the plane, with all the preparations for transporting Eichmann at an advanced stage, I decided to do something about Mengele. . . . Everything we knew about this man was written in my notebook, in a personal code which only I could decipher (and even I had some difficulty).8
The task of interrogating Eichmann was given to Aharoni. He spoke fluent German and had spent the last two years of the war interrogating captured German soldiers at the British Eighth Army headquarters in Egypt, Italy, and Austria. In 1949 he had joined Shin Bet and became its chief interrogator.
According to Harel, Mengele was the only subject Eichmann refused to talk about during his interrogation:
I asked Kenet [Harel’s code name for Aharoni] to question Eichmann about Mengele. I told him not to ask if he knew Mengele or where he was hiding, but to tell him that we knew the man was in Buenos Aires and he must give us the exact address.
Eichmann’s response wasn’t very encouraging. He didn’t disclaim acquaintance with Mengele, but he said he didn’t know where he was and had never heard whether he was in Argentina or anywhere else in South America. Eichmann simply refused to say more, and to justify his refusal he told Kenet he didn’t want to betray his friends. I regarded his reply as confirmation of two things: that Mengele was not far away and that he and Eichmann had been in contact.
When Kenet continued to press him, Eichmann brought up another argument in support of his refusal: he was afraid, he said, of what might happen to his wife and children. . . . I told Kenet to promise Eichmann that we would undertake his family’s support if he would give us Mengele’s address. But all our urgings and promises were of no avail.
My impression was that he went into a panic when we demanded Mengele’s location, and I felt that his obduracy stemmed not from any sense of loyalty but from sheer fright.9
Eventually, Eichmann mentioned during the interrogation that Mengele might be found at a boardinghouse that had served as a refuge for several Nazis. It was run by a German woman named Jurmann. In fact Harel had known of this house, but he was excited to hear Eichmann corroborate it. “I was rather astonished that this information was well established,” he said.10 It was an isolated villa located on a narrow lane, surrounded by a white picket fence. To the consternation of Aharoni and several other senior members of the Eichmann task force, Harel decided to mount a surveillance on the house. Aharoni explained:
I don’t think I’d even heard of who Mengele was at that stage. His name hadn’t surfaced in the newspapers and I must admit I was concerned only with getting Eichmann back to Israel. Harel had said nothing about this to us before. When he did, some of us felt that it was too ambitious and that it would risk the success of the Eichmann operation. As soon as Eichmann admitted his name, I personally wanted to get back home. I was very relieved the operation had succeeded so far and I didn’t want anything to happen that might endanger the next stage of getting him out of Argentina. I thought we could always try Mengele another time.11
But Harel would not be dissuaded from making one attempt to capture Mengele. His problem was a shortage of agents. “Of the members of the task force only Menashe might be able to give me part of his time,” he wrote, “. . . and when Shalom Dani heard about the new assignment he demanded that I allow him to take part in it. But these two were not enough—I had to have more, especially people who spoke Spanish.”12
Harel requested the help of a third agent, Meir Lavi, who had acted as liaison man on the night of Eichmann’s abduction. Lavi and his wife had emigrated to Argentina, and Harel considered having them rent a room at Mrs. Jurmann’s boardinghouse. But he abandoned the plan after meeting Lavi because Lavi did not speak Spanish well enough to convince anybody that he was Argentinean. However, Lavi introduced Harel to another Israeli couple, Ada and Binyamin Efrat, who lived in Buenos Aires and who had the qualifications. Harel was impressed:
The following morning, Binyamin Efrat was sitting opposite me in my “on duty” café. One look was enough to tell me that he was the man I wanted. He spoke Spanish fluently and looked exactly like an average Argentinean. He had heard about Mengele but didn’t know much about him. I told him we had information that this sadist was in Buenos Aires and we were trying to locate him. He said he was prepared—without any reservations—to undertake any assignment that he had to with Mengele.13
That evening the Efrats discovered from residents in neighboring villas that the tenants of the boardinghouse were North Americans. The next morning Dani was assigned to watch the house to see if any of the tenants looked German or American. “To lend an air of plausibility,” said Harel, he ordered Dani to go with a woman, so he chose Ada Efrat. They saw no one who resembled Mengele. The next day Lavi and Ada’s husband, Binyamin, took over the surveillance. Lavi had a briefcase camera, and Harel told him to photograph everyone arriving at and leaving the house. But all they saw were children. And although Lavi used the camera, the pictures did not come out clearly. It was therefore impossible to know if Mengele’s stepson, Karl Heinz, was among them. The following morning Binyamin asked the mailman for the address of his “uncle,” a “Dr. Menelle.” He told the mailman he knew “Dr. Menelle” lived in the area, but he did not have his exact address. The mailman told Binyamin that a man by that name had lived at the Jurmann boardinghouse, “until a few weeks ago . . . maybe a month.” But the mailman did not have a forwarding address, nor did the nearby post office. The letters that had come for Mengele had been addressed to him in his real name, but the chief postal clerk told Efrat that he did not have his new address and that all of his letters were being marked “return to sender.”14
Not wanting to admit defeat, Harel decided to pursue one further lead. Word had reached the Israelis about Mengele’s small garage-workshop, where he had employed a handful of people to make machine parts for the textile business as well as furniture and children’s toys. They knew that Mengele had at one time called himself “Gregor.” “There was always the hope that Mengele had not severed his connections with the garage when he moved out of his house a month ago,” said Harel. He briefed Binyamin to check out the garage with the cover story that he represented a big garage and needed a large quantity of left-hand screws, having failed to find any ready-made ones in the shops. At the garage, Binyamin told the secretary that “Mr. Gregor’s” lathes had been recommended to him, and he asked to see him. Harel described the encounter:
The secretary asked him to sit down and left the room. Binyamin heard her talking to somebody outside, though he couldn’t catch the drift of their conversation. She came back, scrutinized him without saying a word, and went out again. Several minutes later, she appeared and told him that they had nobody there by the name of Gregor and they didn’t do lathe work.15
Harel took the secretary’s behavior to mean that she clearly did know a “Mr. Gregor,” otherwise she would have told him immediately she did not know the name. Harel therefore reasoned that Mengele still had some connection with the workshop. Little did he know that Mengele had severed all links with it two years earlier, though the staff had doubtless been briefed not to answer any questions from strangers about “Dr. Gregor.” In any event, Harel’s ignorance was academic. He gave up trying to find Mengele through the workshop because, as he admitted, the only agents he could spare from Operation Eichmann lacked experience in undercover activities:
. . . If we had a team of professionals like the task force at present occupied with Eichmann—who could invest the necessary time, patience and skill. But I had at my disposal—and for a few days only—a handful of people lacking experience in undercover activities. I had no choice but to give up trying to find Mengele that way.16
Instead, Harel drew up a final plan to capture Mengele before May 20, the deadline when the El Al Britannia aircraft had to leave Buenos Aires with Eichmann on board. He urgently cabled Tel Aviv and instructed them to send on the El Al Britannia a team of his own men trained as commandos. His plan was to storm the boardinghouse only hours before the Britannia was due to return to Israel with Eichmann on board:
I was considering a commando operation on the house with the object of checking the identity of all the tenants of the house, and if Mengele was there, just to take him with force. What I had in mind was to bring Mengele to the plane just before takeoff, once Eichmann was safely on board, and to put him on at the last moment.17
Harel dispatched two men to make a final check on the boardinghouse in Vicente Lopez. Binyamin Efrat would pose as a repairman for the water heater, while Meir Lavi would pretend he was delivering a parcel. The “repairman” did manage to gain access and found, as the neighbors had said, that Americans were living at the house—and that there was no sign of Mengele. The “deliveryman” could not find a plausible pretext for going to the house. Instead, he merely telephoned the American manager and questioned her about previous tenants. Harel was furious at this breach of security. Failure to stick to instructions could have warned Mengele, had he been in the house. Efrat’s and Lavi’s results were, Harel said, a bitter disappointment:
Though I knew the prospects of finding Mengele at his old address were pretty poor, I nevertheless hoped that luck might have been on our side. It was hard to reconcile myself to the fact that we missed the opportunity of capturing the murderous doctor by as little as a couple of weeks.18
Harel remains convinced to this day that Mengele had been at the boardinghouse only a matter of weeks before. In fact Mengele had spent most of his time since May 1959 in Paraguay, though he did make occasional visits to Buenos Aires in order to see Martha and Karl Heinz. It may well have been in the aftermath of one of these visits that Harel’s agents picked up clues of his recent presence.
Either way, the Mossad team’s main task had yet to be completed. At 9:30 p.m., the Israelis successfully transported a drugged Adolf Eichmann past the security guards at Ezeiza International Airport and placed him on board the chartered El Al plane.
A crude attempt has since been made to smear the prestige of this classic and daring operation with a set of documents prepared by SIDE, the intelligence organization which reports directly to the president of the Argentine Republic, then Arturo Frondizi. While the documents themselves appear to be genuine, what they report must be in doubt.* SIDE claims that each stage of the Eichmann kidnapping from beginning to end was followed by the Argentine intelligence services, who knew that Mossad agents were operating in Buenos Aires soon after they arrived. They even claim that one intelligence officer witnessed the entire abduction.
The SIDE reports are based partially on a report by the Alien Control office of Coordinacion Federal, the Argentine CIA, which claims to have “detected the presence of Israeli commandos in the Republic of Argentina as early as December 1959.” It says Commander Jorge Messina, chief of the Argentine intelligence service, under direct instructions from President Frondizi ordered all Argentine security services to refrain from interfering with Israeli actions and merely to monitor their conduct. The report claims the greatest contribution to the success of the Eichmann abduction came at Ezeiza Airport when the Israelis attempted to pass the drugged Eichmann off as an ill member of the plane’s crew. Inspector Hector Rodriguez Morgado of the Alien Police is said to have replaced the regular immigration personnel with his own agents and instructed them to let the Israelis pass without incident.
These extraordinary claims should be judged in the light of what must otherwise have been the acute embarrassment of the Argentine intelligence services when at 4 p.m. on May 23, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made one of the most important announcements in the short history of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset:
I have to announce . . . that a short time ago, one of the greatest Nazi war criminals was found by the Israeli security services: Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible, together with the Nazi leaders, for what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”—that is, the extermination of six million Jews of Europe. Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and he will shortly be brought to trial in Israel under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Law of 1950.19
If in fact President Frondizi did go to the extraordinary lengths of personally ordering his intelligence services to stand by while Argentine sovereignty was violated—even to assist at the airport—because he did not wish the Israelis to be hindered in their task, he certainly allowed an elaborate smoke screen to be laid at the United Nations. On June 5, Argentina requested and received an urgent meeting of the Security Council which unanimously voted to condemn Israel for “the violation of the sovereign rights of the Argentine Republic” resulting from the “illicit and clandestine transfer” of Eichmann to Israel. Even countries friendly to Israel were vehement in their criticism. The idea that any Argentine president had greater responsibility to the State of Israel than to the sovereignty of his own country is surely fanciful. The most plausible explanation is that the Argentine intelligence services were so badly caught out that they covered their dereliction by faking their reports after the kidnapping.
The kidnapping provoked a torrent of diplomatic rhetoric about the sanctity of sovereignty and the like. A breach of sovereignty it certainly had been. Yet the bedlam afflicting Argentina’s bureaucracy when West Germany requested Mengele’s extradition just a few weeks later showed that Israel’s mistrust was justified all along. Fueled by Argentina’s spasm of righteous indignation, the Eichmann kidnapping unleashed a wave of anti-Semitism that spread like a brushfire across South America. In the face of the UN furor, there was little Israel could do. Meanwhile, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated, Hebrew schools were set on fire, several Jewish restaurants were machine-gunned, and synagogues were bombed. In Colombia, Nazis held a memorial service for those war criminals executed at Nuremberg. Fascist youth groups held rallies in almost every South American capital. The home of the Israeli ambassador to Montevideo was bombed. A young Jewish woman, Graciella Sirota, believed to be the daughter of the owner of the safe house where Eichmann had been held by the Israelis, was kidnapped, sexually abused, and tortured, a swastika burned into her breast. Another young Jewish girl, Merta Penjerek, suspected of having brought food to the safe house during Eichmann’s detention, was kidnapped and murdered. The noted Jewish scholar Maximo Handel was attacked by a group of Nazi thugs who beat him unconscious and cut swastikas into his body.20 Despite these outbursts of anti-Semitism, Harel pressed on with his attempt to track down Josef Mengele. “Mengele,” he said, “burned like a fire in my bones.”
Back in Tel Aviv, Harel set up a special unit to track down major Nazi criminals, with Mengele heading the list. The headquarters for this operation was the Mossad’s European station in Paris. The man in charge was Eichmann’s formidable interrogator, Zvi Aharoni, who had run him to the ground in Buenos Aires before the kidnap team moved in. Harel had secured Aharoni’s permanent transfer from Shin Bet to the Mossad.
From the spring of 1961 to the end of 1962, several agents from the Eichmann team were sent to Europe and South America. In Europe their assignment was to try to penetrate Mengele’s family circle and shadow his mentor, the Luftwaffe ace Hans Rudel. In South America, the task was to infiltrate Mengele’s Nazi friends. Harel claimed that the attempt to capture Mengele cost more money and manpower than Operation Eichmann. But Harel himself was to pay a heavy price. While he enjoyed the loyalty and respect of the majority of his team, there were those outside the Mossad who believed that its strained resources should have been more profitably used elsewhere. Although Harel did not know it then, his decision to concentrate on finding Nazis at the expense of other pressing tasks marked the beginning of the end of a distinguished career—and the end of the hunt for Mengele.
* Under Menachem Begin the Irgun plotted to keep a large arms consignment designated to be shared with the Israeli regular army. At the last minute Begin changed his mind about sharing the weapons because he regarded the truce terms being negotiated by Ben-Gurion’s government as too favorable to the Arabs. Eventually Begin’s soldiers pledged loyalty to the State but became a forceful political opposition, becoming the modern-day Likud.
The even more extreme Stern gang held out against any peace terms and assassinated a UN mediator on September 4, 1948, after he proposed that Arabs occupy the Negev desert. The assassination provoked Harel’s big roundup.
* The House on Garibaldi Street, London: Andre Deutsch, 1975.
† As with all names of Mossad agents given by Harel on Operation Eichmann, “Nahum Amir” is a pseudonym.
* Nazi-hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Tuvia Friedman have variously claimed credit for pinpointing Eichmann, much to Harel’s irritation.
* His real name was Klaus, but he liked to call himself Nicholas. Eichmann’s two other sons, Horst and Dieter, also used their correct last name. Only Adolf Eichmann used an alias, “Ricardo Klement.”
* Some of the documents were published in Ladislas Farago’s book Aftermath, along with papers he claimed were written by SIDE relating to Bormann and Mengele. On publication of the book, the Argentine government said the Bormann and Mengele papers were fakes but made no reference to those claiming the Mossad team had been detected.