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Shortly after 8 pm on May 11, 1960, a light man descended from a bus in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. He seemed exhausted, ready to go home and looked puzzled when a car stopped next to him.
The man was Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of Hitler's final solution and one of the most wanted Nazis in the world. Agents from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, were inside the car. Their commander was Rafi Eitan, who became known as one of the most controversial spies in his country, and who died on March 23 at age 92.
"I grabbed him by the neck with such force that I could see his eyes bulging," Eitan recalled years later after meeting Eichmann in an article in Gordon Thomas' book. Gideon's spies: the secret history of Mossad. "A little tighter and I would have strangled him."
The Mossad team transferred Eichmann to a safe place where he was kept for days without speaking. "Keeping silence was more than an operational necessity," said Eitan. "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 when he had sent them on train loads to the death camps. "
To inculcate Eichmann in Israel, the team gave him a bottle of whiskey, disguised him as a drunken air hostess from El Al and took him on a plane . He was tried in Jerusalem, was convicted of his role in the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and was executed in 1962 by hanging.
The trial, narrated in the clbadic book by the theoretician Hannah Arendt "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Bbadity of Evil," drew the attention of the international community to the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Argentina protested against Eichmann's capture as a violation of the country's sovereignty, but in Israel and elsewhere, the operation was hailed as a masterpiece of espionage whose end justified its means abundantly.
Mr. Eitan, who headed the March of the Living in 2007, where hundreds of young Jews from around the world pbaded through Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland. (Andrzej Grygiel / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock)
Eichmann's capture was probably Eitan's most famous venture – and also, he said, one of his easiest. His most controversial action occurred two decades later, when he became the head of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian intelligence badyst for the US Navy, who pleaded guilty in 1986 to selling confidential information to the US Navy. Israel. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison and released on parole in 2015.
The case – which was the only case of an American ever to be sentenced to life for spying on an ally – was subject of fierce controversy on both sides of the international partnership.
In the United States, some observers feared that the actions of Pollard, who was Jewish, feed the questions often raised by anti-Semitic insinuations on the national allegiance of American Jews. In Israel, critics have blamed Eitan for endangering one of Israel's key alliances.
The Israeli government announced that Mr. Eitan had been removed from his intelligence duties after the case. He stated that it was a mistake to cooperate with Pollard but insisted that he had acted with "permission and authority".
"Any intelligence work is a partnership with crime," he told an Israeli television interviewer years later. "Morality is set aside."
[Meir Dagan, long-serving chief of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, dies at 71]
Rafael Hantman was born on 23 November 1926 in the kibbutz of Ein Harod, then under the British mandate of Palestine, where his parents had emigrated from Russia several years before. He later adopted the more Hebrew surname Eitan.
Mr. Eitan's father was a farmer and a poet, according to the Jerusalem Post, and his mother was a social activist. She took her young son to see a movie about a spy from the First World War, leading her to announce: "I want to be a spy like Mata Hari."
He was 12 years old when he joined the Haganah, the paramilitary force that became the Israel Defense Forces after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. As a member of the United States, Palmach's elite unit, he helped guide Jewish refugees to Palestine. During one operation, he swam in the sewers to blow up a British radar station, which earned him the nickname Rafi the Stinker.
Mr. Eitan, who studied at the London School of Economics, went into the intelligence partly because of the injuries and hearing loss that he suffered during the Israeli War of Independence. . He climbed the ladder of Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, before joining Mossad, where he became chief of operations.
According to the press, his other operations included intercepting Soviet spies in the 1950s, disrupting the sale of German weapons to Egypt and planning the 1981 Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor Osirak.
Mr. Eitan has served as a terrorism advisor to Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. After the Pollard case, he was appointed chairman of the public company Israel Chemicals. In the mid-2000s, he entered politics at the head of the Pensioners' Party, known as Gil, and briefly served as Minister of Retiree Affairs.
The Associated Press and Israeli media, including the Times of Israel, announced his death, claiming he had died in a Tel Aviv hospital. The survivors reportedly included his wife and three children.
In a dramatic coda at the most dramatic moment of Mr. Eitan's work, he was present in the execution room when Eichmann was put to death.
"Your time will come to follow me, Jew," he said. "Not today, Adolf, not today," Eitan replied.
"The next moment, the trap opened," Eitan told Gideon's Spies. "Eichmann made a small, muffled sound. There was the smell of his gut moving, and then just the sound of the rope stretched. A very satisfying sound. "
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