by Neal Bascomb
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 Mem
uneh, "the one in charge," of Israeli intelligence, answerable only to the prime minister.
Harel was haunted by what the Nazis had done to the Jewish people. The state of Israel existed in part to make sure the Holocaust was never repeated. But Harel did not delve too far into the history of the genocide, sensing that it was so profoundly evil that it was beyond his ability to understand. Now he sat in silence at his desk and opened the Eichmann dossier. He read transcripts from the Nuremberg trials, captured SS files, testimony from Eichmann's staff members, and numerous reports of Eichmann's whereabouts. Curiously, one report stated that Eichmann had been born in the same village where Harel now had his office. Some of the information was from Yad Vashem, some from Simon Wiesenthal, some from Arthur Pier and his Haganah team—Tuviah Friedman and Manus Diamant. The photograph obtained from Eichmann's mistress was in the dossier. Many of the tips concerning his location came from letters sent to Israeli embassies from people who thought they had seen him.
As dawn broke the next day, Harel turned over the last page in the thick dossier. He was deeply unsettled by the portrait he now had of Adolf Eichmann. Here was a man, Harel surmised, who had assembled the apparatus to kill millions of people, who had separated children from their mothers, driven the elderly on long marches, emptied out whole villages, and sent them all to the gas chambers. All the while, he had been beating his chest in pride for being faithful to the SS oath, a soldier and an idealist. It was clear to Harel that Eichmann had killed without compunction and was an expert in police and intelligence methods. Of this he had no doubt. If Eichmann was still alive, he had managed to elude his pursuers time and again and had removed all traces of his existence over the past dozen years. This new information from Germany, solid as it appeared to be, might be yet another false lead. Nevertheless, given what he now knew about Eichmann, Harel set about finding out if that was the case.
First, Isser Harel wanted to learn what Fritz Bauer knew, how he had come to receive the information, and whether he was a reliable individual with whom to work. Any plan for what they would do if they discovered the war criminal would be premature, but Harel knew one thing for sure: they would require much more than an extradition request to the proper authorities in Argentina to secure Eichmann.
After finding out what he could from Felix Shinar, Harel sent one of his Mossad operatives, Shaul Darom, to sit down with Bauer. On November 6, Darom traveled to Frankfurt and met with the attorney general in his home. Pleased at the rapid Israeli response, Bauer explained that his source was a half Jew living in Argentina who had presented facts about Eichmann that matched known details of his life, particularly regarding his family. The source also provided an address where the family was living with a man of the same age as Eichmann. Given rumors that Vera Eichmann had remarried, Darom questioned whether this individual might be her second husband, a possibility that Bauer accepted but discounted. He had made separate inquiries into Vera's location, sending a police investigator to interview her mother in a town near Heidelberg, Germany. Her mother had stated that she had not heard from Vera since 1953 and that her daughter had married an unknown man and moved to America. Bauer suspected that the mother was lying. He provided Darom with the entire Eichmann file, including a blurry photograph from an SS file. The only thing Bauer held back was his source's identity, wanting to protect Lothar Hermann. All attempts by Darom to persuade Bauer to reveal this information were in vain.
Darom sent a positive report to Harel about Bauer, stating that if he were to paint a portrait of the German lawyer, he would paint him with a book in one hand and a sword in the other. He also explained that Bauer was willing to do whatever it took to get to Eichmann, even at the risk of losing his position, and that his tip seemed solid enough to warrant following up.
Soon after, in January 1958, Harel sent another operative, Yoel Goren, to Buenos Aires to investigate who lived at 4261 Chacabuco Street. Goren had spent several years in South America and spoke fluent Spanish. Harel warned him to be cautious, fearing that the slightest error might announce his presence and send Eichmann fleeing.
Over the next week, Goren made his way several times to Olivos by train from the city center. The part of that neighborhood that was closest to the Río de la Plata featured many grand mansions, the summer escapes of the elite. The farther away from the river he walked, the smaller and more ramshackle the houses became. From the accents he heard on the streets, many of the residents were German, and he even saw swastikas painted on the sides of a few buildings. Chacabuco Street was located on the farthest edge of the district, populated by blue-collar workers who commuted to and from the city. It was an untrafficked, unpaved street, and strangers were eyed with more than a little suspicion. This made surveillance a challenge, but what Goren saw at 4261 Chacabuco convinced him that there was little chance that Adolf Eichmann lived there. A dowdy woman tended a garden the size of a postage stamp, and the house itself was more suited to a single unskilled laborer than the family of a man who had once held a prominent position in the Third Reich. According to what the intelligence community knew, Adolf Eichmann had personally pilfered the fortunes of Europe's most prominent Jewish families, not to mention the limited wealth of thousands of others. There was no way this bon vivant with a taste for the high life could have been reduced to such meager quarters, even in hiding.
Surreptitiously, Goren photographed the home before returning to Tel Aviv to report to Harel that the "wretched little house" on Chacabuco Street could not possibly shelter Adolf Eichmann, nor had he seen anyone resembling his description enter or leave the house while it was under his surveillance. Goren made this declaration a mere two weeks after being assigned the case.
When Shaul Darom next spoke to Fritz Bauer, Bauer revised his impression of the Israelis. Such a short investigation could not hope to discover a man who had eluded capture for more than twelve years. Darom informed the attorney general that Harel could not move forward unless he knew the identity of Bauer's source. They needed to trust each other on this matter as well as every other. Bauer relented, and they agreed that Bauer would write a letter of introduction for his "representative" to meet with Lothar Hermann. Harel did not want any trace of the investigation to lead back to the Israelis, although after Goren's report, he was already becoming skeptical that Eichmann resided at the Chacabuco address.
Harel borrowed the head of criminal investigations of the Tel Aviv police, Ephraim Hofstetter, to pose as Bauer's representative. Harel wanted him to ascertain how exactly Hermann knew about Eichmann, whether he was reliable, and whether he was holding anything back. Further, Hofstetter should find out the identity of the individual who lived at 4261 Chacabuco. The Mossad chief had tremendous faith in Hofstetter, a sober professional with twenty years of police investigative experience. Polish by birth, Hofstetter had lost his parents and sister in the Holocaust, and he knew of Eichmann from following the Kasztner trial. The investigator spoke German fluently and could easily pass as Bauer's emissary.
At the end of February, Hofstetter arrived in Buenos Aires wearing a thick layer of winter clothes, only to discover that he had come at the height of summer. He was greeted outside the long, one-story airport terminal by the laughter of a man with a pale complexion and a bald pink head: Ephraim Ilani, a Mossad agent who specialized in Arab operations and had taken a leave of absence to study the history of Jewish settlements in Argentina. Ilani had helped Goren briefly in his earlier investigation. Harel had ordered Ilani to work much more closely with Hofstetter, who did not speak more than a few words of Spanish. Fluent in the local dialect of Spanish (as well as nine other languages), Ilani knew the country well and had a wide network of friends and contacts in Buenos Aires thanks to his easy humor and gregarious nature.
The two traveled to Coronel Suárez by overnight train. At 9:30 A.M., they stepped onto the platform of a dilapidated station. Apart from a single road bordered on either side by wooden houses, the remote town was little more than a stepping-off poi
nt before the endless grasslands. It was hard to imagine a less obvious place for a clue to Adolf Eichmann's whereabouts.
Ilani inquired around as to how to find the home of Lothar Hermann. The residents and people working in the local businesses were suspicious of the two men, wondering what these foreigners might want with their neighbor. They did not offer to help. At the train station, a taxi driver offered his assistance, but only if they hired him to take them to Hermann's house. As they soon discovered, they could have walked the short distance across the railway tracks. Hofstetter went to the door alone, Ilani staying behind in case there was any trouble. As far as either of them knew, this could be a trap.
When the door opened, Hofstetter introduced himself. "My name is Karl Huppert. I sent you a telegram from Buenos Aires to tell you I was coming."
Hermann gestured for Hofstetter to enter his living room. Hofstetter could not quite place what was wrong with Hermann or the room, but there was something amiss. Aside from a table, a cupboard, and a couple of chairs, the room was bare. Only when he held out his letter of introduction from Bauer and Hermann did not take it did Hofstetter realize that the man was blind. Isser Harel had sent him to investigate a sighting of Adolf Eichmann by a man who could not see.
Hofstetter soon lost his skepticism when Hermann and his wife, who had appeared when called to read the letter, explained in detail how they had first grown suspicious of Nick Eichmann and how their daughter had tracked down his address. Hofstetter found Hermann full of bluster, particularly in regard to his unsubstantiated comments that Eichmann had had plastic surgery and that he had great means at his disposal, but his motives were clear.
"Don't think I started this Eichmann business through any desire to serve Germany," Hermann said. "My only purpose is to even the score with the Nazi criminals who caused me and my family so much agony."
