Apropos of nothing that had gone before, Meir Amit added that on his office wall in Damascus, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria only has one picture, a large photograph of the site of Saladin’s victory against the Crusaders in 1187. It had led to the Arab reconquest of Jerusalem.
For Meir Amit, Assad’s fondness for the photograph “has a significance for Israel. He sees us the same way Saladin did—someone to be eventually vanquished. There are many who share that aspiration. Some even purport to be our friends. We have to be especially watchful of them… .”
He stopped, said his good-bye to the curator, and walked back to his car as if he had already said too much; as if what he had said would further energize the whispers beginning to circulate within the Israeli intelligence community. Another crisis in the nowadays uneasy alliance between Mossad and U.S. intelligence was about to surface—with potentially devastating effects for Israel.
Already caught up in the brewing scandal was one of the most colorful and ruthless operatives who had once served under Meir Amit, a man who had already secured his place in history as the capturer of Adolf Eichmann, yet still liked to play with fire.
Wealthy residents in the exclusive suburb of Afeka in the north of Tel Aviv were used to seeing Rafael “Rafi” Eitan, a squat, barrel-chested elderly man, myopic and almost totally deaf in his right ear since fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, return home with pieces of discarded lavatory piping, used bicycle chains, and other assorted metal junk. Wearing a pair of chain-store trousers and shirt, his face covered with a welder’s guard, he fashioned the scrap into surreal sculptures with an acetylene torch.
Some neighbors wondered if it was a means of momentary escape from what he had done. They knew he had killed for his country, not in open battle, but in secret encounters that were part of the ceaseless undercover war Israel waged against the state’s enemies. No neighbor knew exactly how many Rafi Eitan had killed, sometimes with his stubby, powerful hands. All he had told them was: “Whenever I killed I needed to see their eyes, the white of their eyes. Then I was very calm, very focused, thinking only of what I had to do. Then I did it. That was it.” Accompanying the words was an endearing smile some strong men use when seeking the approval of the weak.
Rafi Eitan had for almost a quarter of a century been Mossad’s hands-on deputy director of operations. Not for him a life behind a desk reading reports and sending others to do his bidding. At every opportunity he had gone into the field, traveling the world, jaw thrust forward, driven by a philosophy that he had reduced to one pithy sentence : “If you are not part of the answer, then you are part of the problem.”
There had been no one like him for cold-blooded ruthlessness, cunning, an ability to improvise at ferocious speed, an inborn skill at outwitting even the best-laid plan and tirelessly tracking down a quarry. All those qualities had come together in the one operation that had given him lasting fame—the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who epitomized the full horror of Hitler’s Final Solution.
To his neighbors on Shay Street, Rafi Eitan was a revered figure, the man who had avenged their dead relatives, the onetime guerrilla who had been given the opportunity to remind the world that no living Nazi was safe. They never tired of being invited into his house and listening again to him describe an operation that is still unrivaled in its daring. Surrounded by expensive objets d’art, Rafi Eitan would fold his muscular arms, tilt his square block of a head to one side, and for a moment remain silent, allowing his listeners to carry themselves back in their mind’s eye to that time when, against all odds, Israel had been born. Then, in a powerful voice, an actor’s voice playing all the parts, missing nothing, he began to tell his trusted friends how he had set about capturing Adolf Eichmann. First he set the scene for one of the most dramatic kidnapping stories of all time.
After World War II, tracking down Nazi war criminals was initially done by Holocaust survivors. They called themselves Nokmin, “Avengers.” They didn’t bother with legal trials. They just executed any Nazis they found. Rafi Eitan did not know of a single case where they killed the wrong person. Officially in Israel there was little interest in pursuing war criminals. It was a matter of priorities. As a nation Israel was clinging on by its fingertips, still surrounded by hostile Arab states. It was one day at a time. The country was almost broke. There was no spare cash for resolving the evil of the past.
