by Isser Harel
In any event, there was little likelihood that the police would go rushing off on the trail of some casual citizen who hadn’t come home from work at his usual time and had apparently deserted his wife and family. Naturally, they might comply if Mrs. Klement became insistent, or if she hinted that she had grounds for believing that her husband had been kidnapped or was the victim of some other felony. In that case, they would ask her to explain the reasons for her fears, and she would have to disclose that her husband was Adolf Eichmann, a war criminal wanted in several countries, and there was reason to suspect that he had been abducted by Jews or Israelis. The police officers would immediately hand the case over to the highest authorities, and before long the name of Eichmann would become a topic of public discussion all over the world. The upshot of it all would be that Klement would be irrevocably unmasked, and if his captors still had doubts of his true identity they would now have positive confirmation.
I thus reasoned that Vera Eichmann would under no circumstances go to the police before eliminating the possibility of accident or personal involvement; and even then she would first consult all the family friends who knew who Ricardo Klement really was.
I imagined that such friends, and the leaders of the Nazi colony in Argentina, would understand only too well the significance of Klement’s disappearance. Nevertheless, they would also be very careful not to appeal to the authorities or make it public that Ricardo Klement was Adolf Eichmann. It was a near certainty that they would try, by unofficial means and with the help of their own connections, to use their influence with reliable people in the police department and in the government. These might perhaps conduct searches and investigations, but in the most discreet manner. There was no way of initiating a widespread hunt without having to reveal the identity of the person they were hunting for. As a result, their actions would necessarily be far from thorough. Only pure chance, or a serious mistake on our part, could lead them to our men or to Tira.
Consequently, I felt that we were in pretty good shape, in no danger of planned and extensive action by the local authorities or Eichmann’s friends. At the same time, it was clear that the longer we stayed in Buenos Aires the greater the danger, since undercover government agencies might soon join the other searchers. Still, I estimated that for the time being we could put our minds at ease. Of course we continued to scan the local papers every day, but there was nothing pertinent to us.
Years later I received confirmation of my hypothesis about the Eichmann family’s response to the abduction. His eldest son, Nicolas (Klaus), reported the following in an interview with a correspondent of the German weekly Quick:
On May 121 was standing on a roof scaffolding with a screwdriver in my hand when my brother Dieter came running up, out of breath, and said to me: The old man’s vanished!’ The screwdriver dropped from my hand. My first thought was: Israelis! Dieter and I tore through Buenos Aires to San Fernando. On the way we called on an SS officer whose name I can’t divulge. He was Father’s best friend. He told us we must be practical. There are three possibilities: Father has been arrested by the police for some offense or other, for drunkenness perhaps; he has been hurt in an accident and is lying injured in a hospital or lifeless in a mortuary; the third possibility is that he is in the hands of the Israelis.
For two days we searched for him at police stations, hospitals, and mortuaries. In vain, needless to say. And then we understood that he was being held captive. A Peronist youth group put themselves at our disposal. There were times when large parties of men, as many as three hundred on motorcycles, were congregated around the house. We combed every square inch of the ground looking for traces of a scuffle. As each hour passed without bringing results we became more bitter. The wildest deeds were planned during those hours. The leader of the group said: ‘Let’s kidnap the Israeli Ambassador. Let’s take him out of town and torture him until your father comes home.’ The plan was rejected. Someone suggested blowing up the Israeli Embassy. This scheme was also rejected.
There were various reactions in various circles. The ‘big fish’ reacted one way and the ‘small fry’ another. My mother and young brother went to live in a house put at their disposal by a friend of ours, a former SS man. One of Father’s friends, also a former SS member, organized a network of checks at the harbors and airports. There was no harbor, railway station, airport, or important intersection that did not have one of our men stationed there. This was how the ‘small fry’ came forward to help, while the ‘big fish’ simply ran away. Most of them beat an orderly retreat to Uruguay.
Klaus Eichmann embroidered his story with a few romantic details. He said, for instance, that he was obliged to pawn his watch and other personal effects to buy a revolver to protect his mother and young brother against kidnapers; former SS men told the family that their father was being held in a cellar beneath a synagogue; Klaus and Dieter took turns guarding Klement’s house until the Peronist youth group arrived to take over from them. With regard to his father he added:
We knew for certain that he hadn’t yet left Argentina ... we had reliable information. We tried to force our adversaries’ hand. We spread the rumor that Father had been kidnaped by an Israeli army unit. This woke up the Argentine army.
Nicolas went on from there to relate how his father was taken out of Argentina on the plane that brought the Israeli delegation to Argentina’s anniversary celebrations.
We found out about it half an hour too late. Had we known a little earlier we could have prevented the plane from taking off...
Then another mishap occurred. The plane was making an intermediate landing in Brazil... this too we found out too late. Our contact with the Brazilian Security Service wasn’t working properly. Nevertheless, we almost succeeded in obstructing the flight. At Rio a medical team boarded the plane. The doctor noticed that one of the passengers was asleep. It was my father. The doctor asked what was wrong with him. The reply was: ‘He is an Israeli who took ill ...’ The doctor lifted the blanket lying over the man’s knees and saw that he was handcuffed. Without saying a word he walked straight off the plane. The Brazilians held the plane back for hours. Eventually the take-off was authorized by the Brazilian Minister of the Interior, Teixeira Lot.
From this welter of unchecked details and speculation (the plane which brought Eichmann to Israel didn’t land anywhere in Brazil), one fact does emerge: the family had gone to all extremes short of calling in the police.
At Tira, someone stood guard in Eichmann’s room twenty-four hours a day, not for a second did any guard take his eyes off the prisoner. At first the men changed duty every two hours, then later on every three hours. The window of the detention room was covered with a thick blanket, the electric light burned day and night. The door to the next room was always open, and Rafi slept there. At night there were guards in the yard as well. Zev had installed an alarm bell in the detention room, which rang in one of the living rooms, for the guard to call for help or signal a warning.
In the garage a car was kept in constant readiness. Each day the engine was started and the engine and tires inspected. The guards knew what they had to do in case of an alarm: take Eichmann to the garage, put him into the car, and get away as quickly as possible.
The guards were under strict instructions never to talk to Eichmann except with regard to personal requirements, such as eating and bathing. Rafi insisted that this was an indispensable security measure and must be meticulously observed, for he was sure that Eichmann, who had held such a crucial position in Hitler’s Germany, must be a man of unusual craftiness, capable of taking us by surprise with some unexpected stratagem or cunning move.
Rafi was convinced that Eichmann was ceaselessly plotting either to escape or to take his own life, and he believed that the man had many friends in Argentina, especially among the Nazi immigrants, who would spare no effort to rescue him. This assumption created an atmosphere of great tension at Tira, at least during the first few days. The men believed they had to conten
d with a satanic brain, a brain capable of springing a daring surprise on them.
After several days they began to feel simply that they were dealing with an ordinary criminal of no great intellectual powers. At the beginning of his captivity Eichmann quaked every time anything unusual happened. When he was told to stand up he shook like a leaf. The first time they led him into the patio for his daily exercise he was in a state of abject terror, apparently believing they were taking him outside to kill him. During the first few days he was even afraid that his food was poisoned, and at every meal he broke into a cold sweat. For the most part, however, he simply lay on the bed in his pajamas, one leg shackled to the bedstead and his eyes covered by the opaque goggles. He occasionally asked for permission to take the goggles off because they irritated his skin, but he knew we didn’t want him to see the men guarding him and always drew a blanket over his head before removing the goggles. He behaved like a scared, submissive slave whose one aim was to please his new masters.
Still, it wasn’t easy for the men to reconcile the actuality of this wretched prisoner with their image of the superman who wielded the baton in the annihilation of millions of Jews. Where had his power and superiority come from? The elegant uniform and the shining boots? Had he possessed a magic cloak, like Siegfried in the legend of the Niebelungen, that gave him the power to perform superhuman actions?
The men’s feelings of profound loathing for the prisoner produced yet another kind of tension in the safe house. Having to attend to the most intimate needs of the man they found so despicable became progressively more distasteful. Tira became a prison for the guards as well, and they waited impatiently for their release.
Spirits at Tira picked up a bit when Dina arrived. Only Rafi and Eli had ever met her before, but the mere presence of a woman gave everyone the hope that the gloomy atmosphere might be dispelled. They also had great hopes for her cooking, since their experiments in that delicate art hadn’t been too successful. Unfortunately, it didn’t come up to their expectations, but after a few days they had to admit that her culinary efforts were an improvement. At the same time, she gave the place a feeling of domesticity it hadn’t had before. If her dishes were not of a cordon bleu standard, at least they were served nicely and were planned with precision: every evening she prepared a list of what she needed for the next day and Kenet or Avrum did the shopping the following morning. Dina herself got out in the neighborhood only once: when she discovered that she was out of matches, Rafi had to let her go to the nearest shop to buy some.
As an orthodox Jew, Dina had to endure a great deal regarding food. Dietary restrictions prevented her from tasting even what she was cooking, and she ate mostly eggs and bread and drank Coca-Cola. Somebody told Kenet that Dina would starve to death if she didn’t get kosher food, so he bought her some kosher smoked meat – but she wouldn’t eat it with non-kosher utensils. Ezra begged me to order Dina to eat what was in the house, but I could see no justification for exerting my authority in the matter.
During the day Dina was kept busier than any of the other members of the team. She got up very early to prepare breakfast for Eichmann and his guards, and then she was busy washing the dishes and cleaning the house until eleven o’clock, when it was time to start again with lunch and more dishes. In the afternoon everyone ate cakes supplied by Kenet, and for supper they generally made do with something cold.
In accordance with the doctor’s orders, she prepared light meals for Eichmann – chicken soup, boiled chicken, soft-boiled eggs or omelets, mashed potatoes. One of the men took the prisoner’s food to him. After several days, though, it was decided that Eichmann be asked to sign a statement that he was willing to be brought to trial in Israel. Rafi thought that if Eichmann knew there was a woman in the house, heard a female voice, his fears would be lessened and he would be more willing to sign. Dina was told to deliver the captive’s meals to the detention room.
When she saw Eichmann for the first time she was as surprised as all the others. He looked so ordinary that she found it difficult to believe he was the man who had pronounced the death sentence on millions of Jews. The consciousness that it was Eichmann she was feeding filled her with such a sensation of revulsion that she admitted afterward having played with the idea of poisoning him. But Dina, like the others, was perfectly trained in discipline and responsibility. After all, how else would we have gotten this far?
An air of heavy depression gradually descended over Tira. They knew they had to deliver Eichmann in Israel safe and sound and had no option but to take good care of him. But the discrepancy between their actions and the emotions aroused in them by the prisoner gnawed ceaselessly at their minds. The sight of that miserable runt, who had lost every vestige of his former superiority and arrogance the moment he was stripped of his uniform and powers of authority, gave them a feeling of insult and profound scorn. Was this the personification of evil? Was this the tool used by a diabolic government to slaughter millions of innocent people? This nonentity, devoid of human dignity and pride, was this the messenger of death for six million Jews?
20
IKNEW I could leave the guarding of the prisoner in the trained hands of Rafi and turn to the next step in the action – transporting Eichmann from Argentina to Israel. Avrum was made responsible for this stage of the operation and he, with all the men who could be spared for the purpose, set up day and night reconnaissances of the airfield, its surroundings, and the various roads leading to it from Tira. I again got in touch with Yosef Klein, who had in the meantime become so accepted at the airport that he had the run of the place as if he were a veteran worker there.
There were four main categories of information we had to gather in anticipation of the transfer:
a) Exhaustive knowledge of the airport – its workings, its protection, customs inspections, procedures for incoming and outgoing passengers, arrangements for dealing with people coming and going on airport business or for visitors to the areas beyond the customs barrier;
b) Precise details about the plane bringing the Israeli delegation – its time of arrival, the length of its stay at the airfield, procedures for dealing with both the passengers who were brought to Argentina and those who would return to Israel, how to obtain permission to take passengers from Buenos Aires, the arrangements for the sale of tickets if such permission were granted, what sort of people would be allowed on the plane if ordinary passengers were not;
c) The problems involved in transferring Eichmann from the safe house to the airfield – his documentation, his transport, physical and medical matters as well as other preparations needed to keep him safe, precautions in case of police inspection on the roads;
d) Arrangements for cover and for the general behavior of Eichmann and his escorts on the plane to Israel.
I soon formed a complete picture of the whole setup and proceeded to the initial planning.
On May 14 Rafi and Eli appeared at one of our meeting places. (The fact that Rafi could safely leave Tira for a few hours demonstrated that security arrangements there had become more or less routine.) I hadn’t seen either of them since May 11, just before they went on the operation, and I was struck by the great changes in their appearance during those three days. Their faces were grave and Rafi’s expression was clouded, he was evidently troubled. When he started telling me about his problems and anxieties, I realized that this courageous and daring man was bending under the weight of the double responsibility of guarding Eichmann and keeping up the morale of his companions.
That was my first glimpse into the heavy oppression hanging over the guards of our loathsome criminal. I did everything I could to raise the spirits of Rafi and Eli. I fully understood their feelings, I told them, and I was by no means unaware of the mental problems involved in taking care of Eichmann while living under constant tension. I then gave them a review of the situation as I saw it and of the favorable prospects for the ultimate success of the operation. The overriding consideration, I said, was that we must
keep our heads and avoid any mistake liable to lead to our failure.
I think I succeeded in making them feel a bit more cheerful. At the same time, I informed Rafi that, in spite of security restrictions, I wanted to examine Tira myself and intended visiting the safe house very soon.
The idea appealed to him, and late evening of the following day, Sunday, May 15, was set for my visit. If neighbors saw increased activity about the house on a Sunday, I assumed they would regard it as natural. It would therefore be quite in order for all the people directly concerned with that stage of the operation to convene without exciting undue attention.
Finally, Rafi and I decided to prepare temporary documentation for Eichmann. If a surprise police search were organized, he could then be presented as a house guest who had taken ill. Besides, we needed suitable papers for the prisoner in case we had to make a sudden getaway.
And so, on Saturday evening Eli was given a chance to demonstrate his skill at make-up in preparation for the photograph – he created a ‘rejuvenated’ Eichmann. In fact he looked like the pictures taken at the height of his murderous career. As soon as Eli started his ministrations Eichmann went into, a fit of terror and asked if they were going to execute him, but he calmed down when Eli explained what he was doing.
At nightfall Shalom Dani came to the safe house for the first time with all the equipment required for the photographs and the preparation of the documentation. Shalom’s characteristic composure deserted him the minute he crossed the threshold. He was obviously bracing himself for a severe test: not only would he have to come face to face with the destroyer of so many people, but he would also have to scrutinize him closely to choose the best angle for a photograph and to make him look as natural as possible, a prerequisite for foolproof documents. And, who knows, he might even have to act like an ordinary photographer and ask the man to smile for the camera.
