“I grabbed him by the neck with such force I could see his eyes bulge. A little tighter and I would have choked him to death. The specialist was on his feet holding open the door. I tossed Eichmann onto the backseat. The specialist jumped in, sitting half on top of Eichmann. The whole thing didn’t last more than five seconds.”
From the front seat Rafi Eitan could smell Eichmann’s sour breath as he struggled for air. The specialist worked his jaw up and down. Eichmann grew calmer. He even managed to ask what was the meaning of this outrage.
No one spoke to him. In silence they reached their safe house about three miles away. Rafi Eitan motioned Eichmann to strip naked. He then checked his physical measurements against those from an SS file he had obtained. He was not surprised to see that Eichmann had somehow removed his SS tattoo. But his other measurements all matched the file—the size of his head, the distance from elbow to wrist, from knee to ankle. He had Eichmann chained to a bed. For ten hours he was left in complete silence. Rafi Eitan “wanted to encourage a feeling of hopelessness. Just before dawn, Eichmann was at his lowest mental state. I asked him his name. He gave a Spanish one. I said, no, no, no, your German name. He gave his German alias—the one he had used to flee Germany. I said again, no, no, no, your real name, your SS name. He stretched on the bed as if he wanted to stand to attention and said, loud and clear, ‘Adolf Eichmann.’ I didn’t ask him anything else. I had no need to.”
For the next seven days Eichmann and his captors remained closeted in the house. Still no one spoke to Eichmann. He ate, bathed, and went to the lavatory in complete silence. For Rafi Eitan:
“Keeping silent was more than an operational necessity. We did not want to show Eichmann how nervous we all were. That would have given him hope. And hope makes a desperate person dangerous. I needed him to be as helpless as my own people were when he had sent them in trainloads to the death camps.”
The decision on how to move him from the safe house to the El Al plane waiting to fly the delegation home was filled with its own black humor. First Eichmann was dressed in the spare El Al flight suit Rafi Eitan had brought from Israel. Then he was induced to drink a bottle of whiskey, leaving him in a drunken stupor.
Rafi Eitan and his team dressed in their own flight suits and liberally sprinkled themselves with whiskey. Thrusting a flight hat on Eichmann’s head, and squashing him into the backseat of the car, Rafi Eitan drove to the military air base where the Britannia was waiting, engines running.
At the base gate Argentinian soldiers flagged down the car. In the back Eichmann was snoring. Rafi Eitan recalled:
“The car reeked like a distillery. That was the moment we all earned our Mossad Oscars! We played the drunken Jews who couldn’t handle strong Argentinian liquor. The guards were amused and never gave Eichmann a second look.”
At five minutes past midnight on May 21, 1960, the Britannia took off with Adolf Eichmann still snoring in his cell in the back of the plane.
After a lengthy trial, Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity. On the day of his execution, May 31, 1962, Rafi Eitan was in the execution chamber at Ramla Prison: “Eichmann looked at me and said, ‘Your time will come to follow me, Jew,’ and I replied, ‘But not today, Adolf, not today.’ Next moment the trap opened. Eichmann gave a little choking sound. There was the smell of his bowel moving, then just the sound of the stretched rope. A very satisfying sound.”
A special oven had been built to cremate the body. Within hours the ashes were scattered out at sea over a wide area. Ben-Gurion had ordered there must be no trace left to encourage sympathizers to turn Eichmann into a Nazi cult figure. Israel wanted him expunged from the face of the earth. Afterward the oven was dismantled and would never be used again. That evening Rafi Eitan stood on the shore and looked out to sea, feeling totally at peace, “knowing I had finished my assignment. That is always a good feeling.”
As Mossad’s deputy operations chief, Rafi Eitan’s rolling gait continued to take him across Europe to find and execute Arab terrorists. To do so he used remote-controlled bombs; Mossad’s handgun of choice, the Beretta; and where silence was essential, his own bare hands to either garrote a victim with steel wire or deliver a lethal rabbit punch. Always he killed without compunction.
When he returned home he stood for hours at his open-air furnace, wreathed in sparks, totally consumed with bending metal to his will. Then he would be off again, on journeys that often required several plane changes before he reached his final destination. For each journey he chose a different nationality and identity, built around the vast number of stolen or perfectly forged passports Mossad had patiently acquired.
