by Isser Harel
But still the worst part was the terrible condition of the rented cars. We were forced to minimize the risk of breakdowns by buying tires and spare parts for several of our cars, and some we even had overhauled to make them a little more reliable. But we had to take care to conceal the fact that we had made these repairs at our own expense, for this would seem to be very odd behavior indeed to any of the agencies, and they might become suspicious – or at least begin to doubt our sanity.
In the evening Kenet went alone to San Fernando. Since all the others were so overburdened with practical preparations for the operation itself it was difficult to find a second man for the job. Klement again appeared at the regular time and walked along the usual path to his house on Garibaldi Street.
Later, at a session with the operational team, I recapitulated the data we had:
‘We have a pattern covering one portion of Ricardo Klement’s daily life,’ I said. ‘On nine workdays between April 26 and May 6, he was seen returning home at exactly the same time, seven-forty in the evening. Only once did he depart from his usual habit, and even then he was only ten minutes late. In each case he came by bus number 203 from the direction of San Fernando and alighted at the stop near the kiosk on Route 202. From there he walked to the corner, turned into Garibaldi Street, and went into the house. Not once did he change his route from the bus to the house, a distance of over a hundred yards.
‘The whole of that section of the road is thoroughly familiar to the men on surveillance, and it is suitable as the site of the capture. Thus there is no point in looking for other sites, nor any need to continue checking back on Klement’s trail to find out where he starts his homeward journey. It’s better to concentrate on the section known to us and to prepare an operational plan based on this knowledge.’
This approach was accepted unanimously. During our discussion we also decided that if we found nothing better, Down would be used as the primary safe house, and Klement would be taken directly there after the capture, Tira was settled on as the secondary safe house. Ezra and Zev would in the meantime move to Doron, and Ezra would ostensibly be the tenant who was waiting for a party of guests to join him.
One man was still missing from the operational team: the doctor. Like the rest of the team, he went first to Europe, where Zvi Zohar met him and gave him instructions and the necessary papers and flight tickets for his journey. He knew several languages, which made it easy to produce new documentation for him. He took off for South America earlier than originally planned, but a mechanical fault caused a twenty-four-hour delay.
When the doctor arrived at Maoz, the morning of May 7, he was amazed to see Shalom and Zev in their workshops. This wasn’t at all like his mental picture of undercover activities in a foreign country – the men were working as calmly as they might in their own homes.
Rafi, Kenet, and Avrum went out in the afternoon to find easy motor routes from Klement’s house to both Down and Tira. The doctor went along to familiarize himself with the scene of action and with the proposed residence after the capture.
The same morning we rented the two cars to be used in the operation. We sought nice-looking cars, which tend to be less suspicious than dilapidated ones. The cars also had to be large enough to hold all the operators – and Klement – comfortably and securely. Needless to say, we tried to find cars in good mechanical condition so that we could be sure there would be no breakdowns during the operation. Getting the cars was indescribably difficult. After many days of canvassing every car-rental agency in Buenos Aires, we felt like giving up when we chanced upon two cars at once. These were suitable but far from ideal, and as soon as the deal was made we surreptitiously put each into a garage for a thorough overhaul.
The deposits we paid amounted to many thousands of dollars in cash, for the owners, apparently afraid that the peculiar tourists who were so enthusiastic about large shiny automobiles might forget to return them, they raised the amount. We had no choice, we needed transportation – and now we had it.
Yitzhak Nesher found another car in a small garage. It was an old American one, a 1953 model. In spite of its many shortcomings, the owner of the garage hesitated to rent it; he may have been afraid it would be stolen. In reply to Yitzhak’s question as to how much he had to put down as a deposit on the car, the man – obviously trying to get rid of this nuisance of a tourist – mentioned the sum of five thousand dollars. He was flabbergasted when the eccentric tourist returned after a while with a packet of twenty-dollar bills. The incident aroused the man’s suspicions; he drove with Yitzhak to one of the banks, where he submitted the packet of bills for inspection. Yitzhak sat like a cat on hot bricks, waiting for the outcome of the lengthy and scrupulous inspection. Half an hour later the garage owner came out of one of the inner offices of the bank and announced that all was in order.
They returned to the garage, where the owner put the dollars into his iron cashbox. Yitzhak took possession of the ‘old American’ we needed so badly and drove away post-haste. This was to be the capture car.
16
AS THE CRUCIAL day grew nearer, I became increasingly concious of the fact that far too many people were passing through Maoz. The apartment had already served far too long as the center for our undercover activities, and it was more and more difficult to conceal all the products of the technical workshop and documentation plant. We would be in a very tight spot if for some reason a search were sprung on us during any of the periods when the men were working or during planning sessions when maps and lists were strewn all about. Consequently, I decided to reduce the number of visits to a minimum and to move some of the activities to the other safe houses.
May 7 was a Saturday so there were no surveillances in the target area that day. In the evening I called a meeting at Maoz and announced that it was essential for the men to avoid meeting there except when matters concerning documentation and equipment compelled them to appear in person. In every other instance, I said, requests and uncompleted orders would henceforth be passed on by a special liaison man who would be appointed for the purpose. All operational discussion and exercises, I said, would in future take place at Down. Zev Keren would continue to work at Maoz for the time being but would move into Down with Ezra. Only two people would stay on at Maoz: the ‘tenants,’ Efraim Ilani and Shalom Dani.
At that same meeting we resolved that the capture would be carried out on May 10.
From then on we met at various cafés and restaurants. For me this meant a lot of wandering around in the central areas of the city, looking for suitable meeting places. I made lists of the names and addresses of each of my stops for all those who might need to know where I was at any hour of the day.
I would spend the first half of every hour in one of the cafés and use the second half to walk to the next one. If a meeting lasted longer than half an hour I would take a taxi. At restaurants I would spend a full hour and then proceed to the next place by taxi. I tried to work it out for each rendezvous point to be a half-hour walk from the previous one, to allow me time to determine that I wasn’t being shadowed, and to make sure that I wouldn’t be seen for too long in any one neighborhood. With very few exceptions, each meeting place was used only once.
In Argentina the café is something of an institution. Every neighborhood has its own café, with a drinks counter and a large mirror on the wall behind it, and usually old-fashioned, dark-brown furnishings. Many Argentineans love to sit for hours, sipping hot aromatic drinks and chatting with family and friends. It was thus unlikely that our meetings would attract attention, even if a large group of us were to gather around one table.
At many of the cafés in Buenos Aires an opaque glass partition separates the dining room into two sections. The smaller of these sections, marked FAMILIAS (families), is intended not only for families but also for couples and for unescorted women who don’t want to be bothered by men. A man on his own doesn’t usually sit there, just as a woman on her own won’t sit in the larger public section.
I found out a little too late about this particular custom. In my hunt for a quiet corner as far from the entrance as possible, I instinctively chose the FAMILIAS part of the café, which was generally fairly empty even when the larger section was crowded. As a result, it seemed to me that all the people there, including the waiters, kept turning to look at me a little won-deringly, but I thought this must be because I was a foreigner who didn’t understand the language and because I isolated myself in a quiet corner, unusual behavior in a country where everybody is very sociable. However, although my behavior went against convention, no comment was ever made to me. The Argentineans, whose courtesy is almost a reflex, probably realized that my rudeness was inadvertent and would never dream of embarrassing a stranger who wasn’t familiar with their customs.
Though the lease on Down commenced May 8, Zev had moved in the evening before, with some of his equipment. He was now busy preparing the place for a prisoner and making it soundproof and impervious to a police search. The means at his disposal were limited and time was short; but worse, there was the ever-present fear that the watchman-gardener might enter the house unexpectedly in a desire to be helpful. Now and then we would send him on long errands to keep him away from the house. Another restriction was that we dared not to do any obvious damage to the walls or furniture. Here Zev’s resourcefulness stood him in good stead and he always found a solution for every problem. He was actually safeguarding himself to a certain extent, because he was the one elected to stand guard inside the hideout in case of a police search.
In the afternoon Rafi, Avrum, Kenet, and Eli drove to Down, each in a car loaded with equipment and supplies. All but Eli arrived without mishap. They waited some time for him, and when he still didn’t turn up they began to think something had gone wrong and decided to go out and look for him. Avrum checked the roads around Down but saw no sign of his missing friend.
Eli wasn’t very familiar with the road to Down, so it was decided that he should follow Avrum. At one intersection Avrum crossed, but Eli was held up when the light changed to red, and lost him. While trying to catch up with Avrum he made a wrong turning and had to stop at a police roadblock. His first fears were for his friends – he thought they’d been arrested and now he too was going to be caught, but it was too late to make a run for it.
He soon realized, however, that the inspection had nothing to do with him but concerned some local affair. At that time the opponents of the regime in Argentina were engaging in many acts of violence. When his turn came to show his papers, the police found that his driver’s license was torn. There followed a discussion between him and the police inspector in sign language. Eli played the part of an innocent, helpless foreigner with great success and was allowed to proceed. He had to use his natural sense of direction – well developed, fortunately – to find his own way back to Down.
All the members of the task force who would be taking an active part in the capture assembled at Down in the late afternoon. Two possible plans were outlined:
Plan A proposed that the team which was to make the capture would wait for Klement in a car parked on Garibaldi Street about ten yards from where it branched off from Route 202. This vehicle would be facing toward the Klement house. The second car, which would act as escort, was to be parked on Route 202 about thirty yards before the corner of Garibaldi Street. It would face the Garibaldi comer, and during the capture its headlights would be turned on to blind Klement and passing motorists. If there were any complications at all, the men in the second car would rush to the aid of the captors in the first one. After the capture, the second car would follow the first until it was out of the danger area.
While they were discussing Plan A, it struck them that the presence of a car with passengers in it on the road Klement always took when walking from the bus stop to his house was liable to startle and alarm him, and he’d manage somehow to run away under cover of darkness. There were strong grounds for their fears, but Eli took a firm stand. He gave psychological reasons for his insistence on the plan. He maintained that a man who had, over a long period of time, been used to walking along the same paved road to his home wouldn’t lightly change his habits, especially if he was a German with a military background.
He also maintained that if Klement became suspicious his self-respect would make him ashamed to flinch from walking some dozen meters to the safety of his house.
Eli was adamant on the full execution of Plan A, and the others decided to accept it, especially since he was the one who would be making the first assault on Eichmann.
Plan B proposed that the first car would wait on Garibaldi Street facing Route 202, and the second car would park on Route 202. They would park in such a way that the men in either car could view the occupants of the other. The driver of the second car would signal with his headlights as soon as Klement alighted from the bus and started walking along Route 202. Simultaneously, the first car would start moving slowly, so that it could stop beside Klement as soon as he left the main road and turned into Garibaldi Street; the captors would leap out, overpower him, and thrust him into the car. While they were doing this those in the second car would again use their headlights to blind the motorists on the highway. They would then catch up with the first one and escort it to the safe house.
Both plans included the staging of a breakdown as the explanation for parking at the side of the road.
We also sketched three possible withdrawal routes:
a) In the direction of Buenos Aires, along Route 202 by way of the intersection at Route 197 and toward Tira.
b) Along Route 202 toward Bancalari and from there to Tira.
c) Along Route 202, via San Fernando and Vicente López, to Buenos Aires and Down.
It was concluded that if anything went wrong at the moment of capture Klement would be taken to the reserve safe house Ramim. This plan was based on the premise that if the capture was immediately discovered and the captors pursued it would be advisable to shorten the journey and to go deeply underground. We had to bear in mind the possibility of a protracted period of concealment.
During the course of that Sunday, Rafi, Azrum, Eli, Zev, and the doctor practiced overpowering a man with maximum speed and efficiency and minimum force, taking care at the same time to avoid inflicting any injury liable to endanger their own safety or their captive’s well-being. Rafi was aiming for a very high standard of operational efficiency and perfect coordination among the participants, so the exercise was repeated over and over again until he was satisfied with their speed and coordination.
At an evening briefing the capture plans were re-examined and the withdrawal routes rechecked. We repeated all the various contingency plans. At the end of that long and wearying day the operations men came to the conclusion that the capture would have to be put off from May 10 to May 11. Last-minute investigations revealed that certain items of equipment were still lacking and that it would be difficult to finish all the other complicated preparations before May 10. But these weren’t our chief difficulties. The overwhelming problem was that the crushing exertions of the last few days had totally exhausted the men.
The team also decided during that session that Down would not do as a safe house, because there was no way of getting rid of the watchman. If anyone still had hopes of an eleventh-hour solution to this problem, the experience of the past few days had shown that the man simply would not leave the premises. The long distance between the target area and Down could also make the journey from the scene of capture to the safe house extremely risky. All these considerations convinced Rafi and his men that Tira was preferable to Down, even though it had fewer structural advantages.
The operational team’s decisions were subject to my confirmation, and on May 9 they were brought to me for authorization.
At ten o’clock in the morning, at Café Molino, one of the largest cafés in the city, I received three guests – Rafi, Avrum, and Kenet. They wanted to tell me their reasons for suggesting the postponem
ent of the operation, but I told them that one reason was good enough for me – the exhaustion of the operational team. All the same, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. My friends knew my basic attitude: once everything was ready for an operation it should not be postponed even an hour because we could never be sure we weren’t missing a one-time opportunity. In this case, things were different. Operators dare not undertake an action that demands supreme physical and mental exertion without every certainty that they are fit to stand up to it.
I therefore authorized a postponement to May 11 and gave my consent to Tira as the first choice for a safe house.
The race against time started anew. Tira had to be made ready, an emergency hiding place prepared, and all the equipment accumulated at Down transferred there. Every journey from one house to the other meant the loss of several precious hours, but Zev undertook the new assignment with determination. Tira had fewer possibilities than Down, but at least he could work there without having to watch out for prying eyes.
A new obstacle cropped up at the last moment: serious mechanical faults in the second car developed, and we had to put it into a garage to have the gearbox replaced. At the same time we took the opportunity to change the tires which hadn’t been replaced previously. Zev installed the operational equipment in both cars.
In the afternoon Rafi and the doctor reconnoitered the roads between the target area and Tira. On the way Rafi explained various operational details that had a bearing on the doctor’s functions.
Toward evening Rafi, Avrum, and the doctor raced to San Fernando to take a look at Klement for the tenth time, but they were held up by the heavy traffic on the roads and must have just missed him.
The same evening Avrum went on a reconnaissance of San Miguel and found a road linking Route 197 to Tira, a discovery which might prove most useful at the time of withdrawal.
