Hunting Eichmann (15 page)

"Thank you, father," Nick said. "I'll see Sylvia to the bus."

As they walked down the street toward the bus station, Sylvia said that she was pleased to have met his family but asked why he had addressed his uncle as his father. Nick dismissed the question, saying it was merely a sign of respect. At the station, she said goodbye, telling him that she could make her own way to meet her father. The farther Nick walked away from her, the safer she felt.

When she met up with her father, she recounted everything that had happened. It was clear to them that the man at the house was Nick Eichmann's father and, given many of the other matching details, none other than the hunted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann himself.

9

ON SEPTEMBER
19, 1957, at a motel on a highway between Frankfurt and Cologne, Fritz Bauer sat down with Felix Shinar, head of the Israel Mission and responsible for overseeing the reparations treaty with West Germany. This provided compensation for the crimes committed against the Jews by the Third Reich. Since the two countries had yet to formalize diplomatic relations, Shinar was the closest individual to an ambassador between them.

Bauer got straight to the point, since he did not want to risk anybody seeing them together at that time. "Eichmann has been traced."

"Adolf Eichmann?" Shinar asked, both shocked and excited at the news. He had been contacted by a rabbi in Frankfurt, who had told him that the attorney general wanted to meet on an important matter, but he had not been told what it was.

"Yes. He's in Argentina."

"What do you intend to do?"

It was a question that Bauer expected and one that he had pondered since receiving word from Lothar Hermann that he was more certain than ever that he had found Eichmann and now had an address for him. Bauer knew well the opposition he faced in going after war criminals in West Germany. Over the years, he had received several threats on his life, and files related to these investigations had mysteriously disappeared from his office. Aside from these personal attacks, there was resistance at the highest government levels against burrowing too deeply into the past. Although Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was untainted by any association with Nazism and had recognized the atrocities committed by Germans with his reparations agreement with Israel, his primary interest was to create a viable democracy, and he often ignored the wartime backgrounds of those within his government if he thought they could assist him.

Many of these individuals were far from being innocent of any crimes. Most prominently, State Secretary Hans Globke had penned the interpretation of the Nuremberg Laws that had stripped German Jews of their citizenship. Bauer detested the fact that Globke held one of the most powerful and influential positions in Bonn. If flushing out Eichmann brought down Globke, this would be an additional benefit. But Globke and others like him had strong motives not to revisit their dark history, making Bauer's attempt to get Eichmann all but impossible through official government channels.

Before making any move, Bauer had consulted with Georg-August Zinn about how best to proceed. Zinn was a high-ranking fellow member of the Social Democratic Party and prime minister of Hesse. Few options were available to them. Neither had the resources or the right to launch his own international investigation. The German Federal Police had responded in the negative to Bauer's request to involve Interpol in a search for Eichmann, explaining that the "political" crimes of the Nazis were beyond Interpol's mandate. Bauer and Zinn feared that if they went to the Adenauer government, either nothing would happen or, worse, someone would tip off Eichmann, and he would disappear for good. By providing intelligence to a foreign country, Bauer was aware that he was committing treason, but he felt that he had no other choice if Eichmann was to be brought to justice. That is why he had called for the meeting with Shinar.

"I'll be perfectly frank with you," Bauer said. "I can't rely on the German Foreign Office. I can't rely on the German embassies in South America. I can't even rely on my own staff. I see no other way but to turn to you. Nobody could be more interested than you in the capture of Eichmann. Obviously I wish to maintain contact with you in connection with the matter, but only if provided the strictest of secrecy."

"Thank you for the great faith you've shown us," Shinar said, the emotion clear in his voice and face. "Israel will never forget what you have done."

Shinar promised to pass on the message to the right people and that they would soon be in contact with Bauer. The two then left the motel separately.

Not far from the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean, in the former German Templar village of Sarona, stood an old stone house with a red tile roof. It looked like any other house in that historic quarter of Tel Aviv, and the people who passed it every day never gave it a second thought. Nor did they pay any special notice to the diminutive man who came and went throughout the day. At five feet two, with a balding pate, jug ears, and small, piercing gray-blue eyes, he sometimes wore the neat, inexpensive suit of a bank teller and other times wore street clothes, his shirt opened to his barrel chest. He walked with a lively step and a straight back, seeming always to have a place to go, but this was not unusual. Israel was a young country populated by many people with a strong sense of purpose. If anyone overheard him speaking, which would occur only if he wanted to be heard or if his subject was not secret, he or she would hear Hebrew spoken with a slight eastern European accent in short, sharp bursts, much like a Kalashnikov. The man was Isser Harel, chief of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and the old stone house was the organization's headquarters.

On a late September day, Harel entered the building and made his way past the few dozen men and women who worked in the warren of rooms. Greeting his two secretaries, who welcomed him warmly, he stepped into his office. The room was furnished with a simple desk and a telephone, a long table for meetings, a plain settee, and a small safe. Harel had just returned from a hastily arranged sit-down at a nearby café in Ramat Gan with Israeli foreign minister Walter Eytan. Eytan had urgent news from Germany that he did not want to share over the telephone: "Adolf Eichmann is alive and his address in Argentina is known."

Harel asked his secretary to get whatever files they had on Eichmann as soon as possible. He knew that Eichmann had played a leading role in the systematic killing of the Jews during World War II and that there had been many rumors as to his whereabouts over the years, but that was about it. The pursuit of war criminals was not one of the many mandates that occupied Harel during his eighteen-hour workdays. He had only one individual on his staff tasked with collecting intelligence on former Nazis, and this was, essentially, an archivist position, filing and cross-referencing information sent from various sources around the world.

The Mossad's lack of activity in this regard reflected the lack of interest within Israeli society in confronting the crimes against the Jewish people. Holocaust survivors, roughly a quarter of the population, rarely spoke of their experiences, both because it was too painful and because they did not want to focus on the past. They had a country to forge. Although Israel had passed a law in 1950 allowing for the prosecution of Nazis and their collaborators, no pressure had been applied by leading government officials to arrest anyone under this law. In fact, the only major trial in Israel related to war crimes had been that of Rezsö Kasztner, an Israeli accused of collaborating with Eichmann in Hungary. The supreme court had eventually ruled that Kasztner had saved Jewish lives rather than aided in their destruction—but not until after he had been assassinated in March 1957. Little mention had been made during the proceedings that Eichmann and his ilk should be the ones on trial.

But the eagerness of the typically taciturn foreign minister had stirred Harel. He knew he was dealing with an unsubstantiated tip in an area that had no relevance to securing Israel, but at least he wanted to take a look at the file. It was in his nature to need to know, a chief reason he became the spymaster of Israel.

Harel was the youngest son of Orthodox Jews from Vitebsk, in central Russia, whose prosperous family business was seized after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Left paupers, the family moved to Latvia, where a young Isser survived his harsh new surroundings on the strength of his fists, a sphinxlike calm, and an omnivorous reading habit—everything from Russian classics to detective stories to Zionist literature. At sixteen, refusing his parents' demands to finish high school, Isser left home to join a collective farm run by Zionists outside Riga. He embraced the lifestyle and the Zionists' ambitions, and a year later, in 1929, when Muslims massacred sixty-seven Jews in Palestine, he decided to emigrate. He obtained a forged identity and traveled with a small gun and a pocketful of bullets. He arrived by ship in Jaffa, the ancient port city at the southern end of Tel Aviv. When British officials searched the passengers for weapons, Harel easily passed inspection, his revolver and ammunition hidden in a hollowed-out loaf of bread.

Harel joined a kibbutz in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, where he cultivated orange trees during the day and slept in a tent at night. Though teased as "Little Isser," he was well respected for his seriousness and strong work ethic. He married, left the kibbutz after five years to start his own orange-packing business, and prospered until World War II. In 1942, he enlisted in the Haganah, fearing that Hitler might attack Palestine.

One of his first jobs was to learn whether a German living in an isolated villa was a Nazi spy. Harel crawled across the grounds at night, broke inside, and went through the house room by room until he discovered a counterfeiting operation in the basement. The guy was a mere criminal. After a stint undercover in the British auxiliary army, which ended when he struck a captain for insulting the Jews, Harel was recruited by the Haganah intelligence service, the Shai.

Operating out of a four-room apartment identified by a sign as the Veterans Counseling Service and located above a flower shop only a stone's throw from the police administration center, Shai agents spied on and thwarted the attempts of the British to defeat the Haganah resistance against the occupation. They ran a network of informants and spies, stole records, tapped phones, decoded messages, and built up weapons caches. Though not as educated, cultured, or smooth as many Shai agents, Harel quickly learned the trade and was charged with hunting down extremist Jewish dissident groups such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang. At first he struggled with the overflow of intelligence, much of which was meaningless, and his bosses worried that he might not be able to handle the job. Soon, however, he learned how to read, interpret, and remember the most important details of an operational file, and he earned a reputation for being a bloodhound. In 1947, Harel was promoted to run Shai operations in Tel Aviv, where he developed an extensive network of Arab informants.

On the eve of May 14, 1948, as the British readied to evacuate Palestine and David Ben-Gurion prepared to announce the creation of an independent Jewish state, Harel was alone among Shai intelligence agents in predicting that the Arab Legion would attack the moment the founding of Israel was declared. It was not a mere suspicion. He had personally carried a message to Ben-Gurion from an informant who had just returned from Jordan: "Abdullah is going to war—that's certain. The tanks are ready to go. The Arab Legion will attack tomorrow." Ben-Gurion sent several army units to establish a defense, thwarting the surprise attack. Harel had attracted the Israeli leader's attention.

Two months later, while Israel was still in the midst of war, Harel joined the other four section heads at Shai headquarters on Ben Yehuda Street to reorganize Israeli intelligence and espionage operations. He was selected to run the Shin Bet, the internal security service, one of the three new divisions. In this role, he won the further notice of Ben-Gurion by breaking up the violent Jewish extremist groups for good. However, Harel's most important job was counterespionage, and he soon became an expert in rooting out Arab and Russian spies. In 1952, this skill proved essential when he took over the Mossad. The Institute for Coordination had been formed only twelve months before to resolve the disarray caused by different, often competing, divisions of the secret service with spying missions abroad. The Mossad's first leader proved incapable of managing the organization, a point that the forty-year-old Harel made bluntly to him: "You ought to re-sign." His first day on the job, Harel met with his beleaguered staff of twelve, who operated out of three small rooms, and said, "The past is over. There will be no more mistakes. We will go forward together. We talk to no one except ourselves." The hunter of spies, who had capitalized on the sloppy and cavalier methods of his targets, was now the master of spies as well, and he brought a disciplined, relentless approach to both roles.

Over the next few years, Harel battled foreign spies and Arab saboteurs in his role as chief of the Shin Bet, while also developing the Mossad by bringing in some of the best agents from the internal security service. He sent Israeli spies to infiltrate other countries throughout the world and established a significant relationship with the CIA. During the 1956 Suez War with Egypt, he used the intelligence he gathered to support the Israeli forces in their attacks, and he also engineered a disinformation campaign that kept the Egyptians from attacking defenseless Israeli cities. He managed a massive illegal immigration of Moroccan Jews during the same period and scored a coup by securing a copy of a secret speech by Nikita Khrushchev, delivered at the Soviet Communist Party Congress, that criticized the brutal regime of Stalin and signaled a softening of Soviet policy. Although the Mossad was still a small, fledgling agency, it was gaining a reputation as an effective, formidable force in intelligence. With his successes at the Shin Bet and Mossad, Harel soon became known as the
Memuneh,
"the one in charge," of Israeli intelligence, answerable only to the prime minister.