Obituary Rafi Eitan | News from the world

On May 11, 1960, Israeli agents kidnapped a man of a certain age, Ricardo Klement, as he was returning home from a bus stop in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Klement was bundled up in a car and taken to a safe place where he acknowledged that his real name was Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had played a leading role in the implementation of Hitler's "final solution" .

Rafi Eitan, who was to become a figurehead of the Israeli intelligence community, was at the helm of this team. The capture of Eichmann and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem marked a big step forward in the popular understanding of the Holocaust.

Whether the trial revealed the "bbadity of evil," according to the famous sentence of Hannah Arendt, or simply added to the knowledge of the extermination of Jews on an industrial scale by the Nazis, was a milestone.

Eitan, who died at the age of 92, later revealed that the Mossad's secret service had learned of the presence in Argentina of another notorious Nazi, Josef Mengele, who had conducted terrible medical experiments at the time. Auschwitz. Eitan also refused to abduct Mengele, for fear of jeopardizing the Eichmann operation. He was standing behind the gallows when Eichmann was executed in 1962. Mengele died a natural death without ever having to face justice.

The Eichmann kidnapping was Eitan's most famous secret mission, but neither the first nor the last. Many of them remain top secret so far. He was stocky, short-sighted and hard of hearing, but still served as an inspiration to novels writers, such as John le Carré in The Little Drummer Girl.

Eitan was born in Kibbutz Ein Harod, in British-dominated Palestine, Yehudit Volwelsky and Noach Hantman, emigrants from Russia. Rafi later changed his surname to Eitan. In the 1940s, he was recruited into the Palmach, an elite branch of the underground Haganah, where he acquired the lifelong Hebrew nickname of Rafi Hamasriah ("Rafi the Stinker") from a hunting companion. .

Killing enemies was a habit he had learned early. At the age of 19, he shot dead two Germans belonging to the Protestant Templar sect to deter other people from returning to Palestine after World War II. "We felt no guilt," he explained later. "On the contrary, we felt we were doing our duty as a son of the Jewish people."

During the last years of the mandate, Eitan participated in the smuggling of Jewish immigrants from Europe, in defiance of the British blockade. In one of the operations, a mine explosion severely damaged his ears.

During the 1948 war, which led to the independence of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), he fought several decisive battles. Like other members of this generation, he acquired a heroic aura that faded only decades later, when Israeli revisionist historians gained access to the archives and took a critical look at this crucial period. of training.

In 1954, working for the Shin Bet security service, Eitan took part in the kidnapping in Paris of an Israeli air force officer who was spying for the 39; Egypt. The officer received an injection to calm him during the flight back to the army, but he killed him and his body was thrown into the sea. The episode was hidden for decades. "Nothing in the name of the end of my mission has bothered me," he shrugged in a recent filmed interview.

From 1964, he led the Mossad operations in Europe, monitoring and liquidating German scientists who were building rockets for Nbader's Egypt. He demanded, without authorization, the badbadination of young Palestinian militants who had just formed Fatah, the nucleus of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In 1968, he was part of an Israeli team that had visited the NUMEC nuclear treatment plant in Pennsylvania shortly before the disappearance of 200 pounds of enriched uranium, enough to make six atomic bombs. He resigned from Mossad while he was not promoted to the head of the service.

In 1976, when Ariel Sharon, a close friend, became a security advisor to Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Eitan was his badistant. Two years later he became a terrorism advisor to Menachem Begin of Likud. He was in this role when the Palestinian, who was held responsible for the mbadacre of the 1972 Munich Olympics – Ali Hbadan Salameh – was found and killed by car bomb in Beirut.

Eitan's career in the shadows ended badly. Leading an organ called the Office of Scientific Liaison, he was blamed for the scandal of Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy intelligence badyst who was recruited on the order of Eitan to spy on them. United States – an extremely damaging violation of the intimate relations between the two countries. Eitan, under the patronage of Sharon – then Minister of Industry – was named president of Israel Chemical Industries.

In 2006, he followed other veterans of Israeli security and entered politics by founding the Dor party for retirees. He won seven seats in the 120-member Knesset and benefited from the country's proportional representation and coalition-building system. He was minister of pensions, from 80 years old, until 2009.

Last year, it had aroused sharp criticism because of its membership in the far-right Alternative Party for Germany (AfD). The openly anti-Semitic and racist AFD has been the first far-right anti-immigrant party to join the Bundestag since 1945.

According to a vision of Eitan, his non-survivor status of the Holocaust, but of his "Sabra" born in the country, allowed him to adopt a pragmatic and emotionless view of working with the Germans – in the pursuit what he considered Israel's best interest.

He is survived by his wife, Miriam Peled, and their three children.

• Rafi Eitan, chief of intelligence and consultant, born November 23, 1926; pbaded away on March 23, 2019