The real Odessa: Blind refugee led Israel to Eichmann...

Image via Wikipedia

Blind refugee led Israel to Eichmann

Uki Goni, the Guardian's correspondent in Argentina, reveals in a new book the extraordinary truth behind the Nazi fugitive's capture

• The Guardian, 
• Article history
For more than 40 years the world has believed that it was the Israeli secret service, Mossad, backed up by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, which orchestrated the dramatic capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, which led to his trial and execution. But the truth is far stranger than that. The man who burst the protective bubble around Eichmann, the organiser of the deportation of millions of Jews to Hitler's concentration camps and the most notorious Nazi to gain refuge in Argentina, was not an Israeli super-sleuth but a blind refugee from Nazi persecution who had arrived in Argentina in 1938. Lothar Hermann, who was half Jewish, was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp in 1935-36 for his socialist activities. After the events of Kristallnacht he decided it was time to leave Germany. Some years after his arrival in Buenos Aires he lost his sight as a delayed result of the severe beatings he had received from the Gestapo in Dachau. Hermann, his wife and their beautiful young daughter Sylvia lived in the Olivos area of Buenos Aires as non-Jewish Germans. Sylvia became friendly with the Eichmann sons, in particular the eldest, Klaus, whom she apparently dated. Klaus Eichmann visited Sylvia's home on various occasions, and made strongly anti-semitic remarks, including his regret that the Nazis could not complete the extermination of the Jews, and added that his father had served in the war. Sylvia was never invited to the young man's home and was unaware that his father lived under the alias Klement, as Eichmann had insisted on his sons continuing to bear the real family name. Lost contact Some time later the Hermanns moved to Coronel Suarez, a town 300 miles from Buenos Aires, and lost contact with the Eichmanns. But in 1957 the name of Adolf Eichmann cropped up in newspaper reports of a Nazi trial in Frankfurt. It did not take long for Hermann to figure out that the man being mentioned was in all probability Klaus Eichmann's father. Hermann dutifully sent a letter to the Frankfurt judicial authorities alerting them to Eichmann's presence in Argentina. His letter fell into the hands of Fritz Bauer a state attorney general who later led the groundbreaking Auschwitz trials in 1963. Bauer sent Hermann a description of Eichmann and asked him to find out more details. The blind man and his daughter did as they were asked, travelling to Buenos Aires to try to discover Eichmann's exact address. Sylvia found the house quite quickly. A knock at the door was answered by Klaus's mother. "Is this the Eichmann home?" Sylvia asked. Suddenly a middle-aged man appeared at the door. Sylvia asked if Klaus was home. The man said he was working late. "Are you Herr Eichmann?" Sylvia asked innocently. The man did not answer but finally conceded that he was Klaus's father. Sylvia explained that she was a friend who was looking for him, and then said goodbye. Hermann and his daughter promptly sent off a new letter to Frankfurt positively identifying, according to Bauer's description, the former chief of "Jewish affairs", and giving his address as 4261 Chacabuco Street in Olivos. Bauer knew enough about the Nazi-riddled judicial system of his own country to realise that Eichmann would at once be alerted to any action against him by Germany. So in September 1957 he secretly informed Israel that he had received confidential information stating that Eichmann was living in Argentina. Mossad took a mild interest in Bauer's lead, sending Yoel Goren to Buenos Aires in January 1958. After a quick inspection of the middle-class Olivos neighbourhood he reported that it was impossible for an important Nazi to be living there. Bauer was not ready to give up so easily, however. By revealing Hermann's identity to Mossad he was able to convince the Israelis to send a second mission. An agent called Efraim Hofstetter visited the Hermanns and their daughter in Coronel Suarez. Hermann complained loudly that the information he had provided was sufficient to proceed with Eichmann's arrest, but Hofstetter said he needed more proof, such as a copy of Eichmann's Argentinian ID picture. He left Hermann $130 to cover expenses and gave him a US address to write to from then on. So it was that a blind man living 10 hours by train from Buenos Aires was left with the task of proving Eichmann's identity. It did not intimidate Hermann. He obtained the information that the house on Chacabuco Street was owned by an Austrian called Francisco Schmidt, and for a time he became convinced that Schmidt was Eichmann's alias, and sent off more letters with this mistaken hypothesis to the new address he was given. In Israel, meanwhile, the Mossad chiefs had lost all interest in the lead and the order was given for communication with Hermann to be gradually discontinued. Reward But Hermann was determined. Excited by a $10,000 reward announced in the newspapers by Tuviah Friedman of the Haifa Documentation Centre in Israel, he started letting more people in on his secret. In a letter to Friedman dated October 17 1959 he claimed to possess the "name and exact details" of Eichmann's Argentinian ID papers. On December 29, growing ever more impatient, he met the leader of Argentina's main Jewish organisation. Suddenly the number of people who knew of Eichmann's whereabouts had expanded way beyond a small group of Israeli agents. Still, nothing seemed to be happening. Fearful that his role in Eichmann's eventual capture was being minimised to cut him out of the reward, in March 1960 Hermann wrote an angry letter to Friedman. "It seems that you attach little value to the speedy conclusion of the matter or that you have no interest at all to arrest Eichmann," Hermann fumed. The rest of the story is well known. A special Mossad team was assembled and sent to Buenos Aires to kidnap Eichmann, who had meanwhile moved from middle class Olivos to a small house he had built for himself and his family in the desolate outskirts of San Fernando. Seeking his extradition was ruled out from the very start, after Germany's failed attempt to extradite Josef Mengele. Eichmann was ignominiously snatched on an earth road on May 11 1960 as he returned from work, and taken to a secret hiding place outside Buenos Aires. For 10 days he was kept blindfolded and handcuffed to a bed while Mossad decided how to get him out of Argentina. Finally, on May 21, Eichmann was disguised in the uniform of an El Al flight attendant and was bundled on to a plane to Tel Aviv. On May 23 the Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurian, announced his capture to the world: "Eichmann is already in this country under arrest and will shortly be brought to trial." What he did not add was that a blind man who lived on a meagre pension in the middle of the pampas had achieved what seemed impossible. Not only had he single-handedly located a notorious Nazi criminal, he had also managed to galvanise a lethargic Mossad, which had shown decidedly little interest in pursuing the case. Israel was practically shamed into capturing Eichmann. Eichmann was found guilty in Jerusalem and sentenced to death by hanging. The execution was carried out on May 31 1962. His last words were: "Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them." Hermann's part in Eichmann's capture remained a closely guarded secret until 1971 when the Mossad director Isser Harel revealed it to the Israeli press. From Argentina Hermann began to bombard Friedman with furious letters demanding his reward. Finally, in July 1972, the Israeli prime minister Golda Meier settled the debt. Acknowledgements:  This is an edited extract from The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, by Uki Goni, published by Granta Books at £20 http"//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ODESSA http://greyfalcon.us/The Real Odessa.htm 

Related articles

• Eichmann (variety.com)
• 2 reviews of Adolf Eichmann (rateitall.com)
• Movie Review | 'Eichmann': The Logistician of the Holocaust (movies.nytimes.com)
• Buenos Aires - Buenos Aires, Argentina (travelpod.com)
• Madness in Argentina - Buenos Aires, Argentina (travelpod.com)

The Mossad is not Murder INC...

The Mossad is not Murder INC...

Image via Wikipedia

Last November, a sharp-eyed Israeli woman named Niva Ben-Harush was alarmed to notice a young man attaching something that looked suspiciously like a bomb to the underside of a car in a quiet street near Tel Aviv port. When police arrested him, he claimed to be an agent of the Mossad secret service taking part in a training exercise: his story turned out to be true – though the bomb was a fake.

Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services:
No comment was forthcoming from the Israeli prime minister's office, which formally speaks for – but invariably says nothing about – the country's world-famous espionage organisation. The bungling bomber was just a brief item on that evening's local TV news.

There was, however, a far bigger story – one that echoed across the globe – two years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations.

The Mossad, like other intelligence services, tends to attract attention only when something goes wrong, or when it boasts a spectacular success and wants to send a warning signal to its enemies. Last month's assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai, now at the centre of a white-hot diplomatic row between Israel and Britain, is a curious mixture of both.

With its cloned foreign passports, multiple disguises, state-of-the-art communications and the murder of alleged arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh – one of the few elements of the plot that was not captured on the emirate's CCTV cameras – it is a riveting tale of professional chutzpah, violence and cold calculation. And with the Palestinian Islamist movement now vowing to take revenge, it seems grimly certain that it will bring more bloodshed in its wake.

The images from Dubai follow the biblical injunction (and the Mossad's old motto):"By way of deception thou shalt make war." The agency's job, its website explains more prosaically, is to "collect information, analyse intelligence and perform special covert operations beyond [Israel's] borders."

Founded in 1948 along with the new Jewish state, the Mossad largely stayed in the shadows in its early years. Yitzhak Shamir, a former Stern Gang terrorist and future prime minister, ran operations targeting German scientists who were helping Nasser's Egypt build rockets – foreshadowing later Israeli campaigns to disrupt Iraqi and (continuing) Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear and other weapons.

The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.

It was after that that the service's role expanded to fight the Palestinians, who had been galvanised under Yasser Arafat into resisting Israel in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1970s saw the so-called "war of the spooks" with Mossad officers, operating under diplomatic cover abroad, recruiting and running informants in Fatah and other Palestinian groups. Baruch Cohen, an Arabic speaker on loan to the Mossad from the Shin Bet internal security service, was shot in a Madrid cafe by his own agent. Bassam Abu Sharif, of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was badly disfigured by a Mossad parcel bomb sent to him in Beirut.

Steven Spielberg's 2006 film Munich helped mythologise the Mossad's hunt for the Black September terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Eleven of them were eliminated in killings across Europe, culminating in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, where a Moroccan waiter was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Munich plot's mastermind. Salameh was eventually killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979 – the sort of incident that made Lebanese and Palestinians sit up and notice last year's botched training episode in Tel Aviv.

Some details of the assassination of Mabhouh last month echo elements of the campaign against Black September – which ended with the catastrophic arrest of five Mossad agents. Sylvia Raphael, a South African-born Christian with a Jewish father, spent five years in a Norwegian prison; she may have been among the young Europeans in Israel who were discreetly asked, in nondescript offices in Tel Aviv, if they wished to volunteer for sensitive work involving Israel's security. Other agents who had been exposed had to be recalled, safe houses abandoned, phone numbers changed and operational methods modified.

Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

It has, in addition, suffered occasional blows from its own disgruntled employees. In 1990, a Canadian-born former officer called Victor Ostrovsky blew the whistle on its internal organisation, training and methods, revealing codenames including "Kidon" (bayonet), the unit in charge of assassinations. An official smear campaign failed to stop Ostrovsky's book, so the agency kept quiet when another ostensibly inside account came out in 2007. It described the use of shortwave radios for sending encoded transmissions, operations in Iran for collecting soil samples, and joint operations with the CIA against Hezbollah.

But the worst own goal came in 1997, during Binyamin Netanyahu's first term as prime minister. Mossad agents tried but failed to assassinate Khaled Mash'al – the same Hamas leader who is now warning of retaliation for Mabhouh's murder – by injecting poison into his ear in Amman, Jordan. Using forged Canadian passports, they fled to the Israeli embassy, triggering outrage and a huge diplomatic crisis with Jordan. Danny Yatom, the then Mossad chief, was forced to quit. Ephraim Halevy, a quietly spoken former Londoner, was brought back from retirement to clear up the mess.

The Dubai assassination, however, may yet turn out to be far more damaging – not least because the political and diplomatic context has changed in the last decade. Israel's reputation has suffered an unprecedented battering, reaching a new low during last year's Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. "In the current climate, the traces left behind in Dubai are likely to lead to very serious harm to Israel's international standing," the former diplomat Alon Liel commented yesterday.

Even though Israel is maintaining its traditional policy of "ambiguity" about clandestine operations, refusing to confirm or deny any involvement in Dubai, nobody in the world seems to seriously question it. That includes almost all Israeli commentators, who are bound by the rules of military censorship in a small and talkative country where secrets are often quite widely known.

It would be surprising if a key part of this extraordinary story did not turn out to be the role played by Palestinians. It is still Mossad practice to recruit double agents, just as it was with the PLO back in the 1970s. News of the arrest in Damascus of another senior Hamas operative – though denied by Mash'al – seems to point in this direction. Two other Palestinians extradited from Jordan to Dubai are members of the Hamas armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, suggesting treachery may indeed have been involved. Previous assassinations have involved a Palestinian agent identifying the target.

Yossi Melman, the expert on intelligence for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, worries that, as before the 1973 war, the Israeli government may be getting it wrong by focusing on the wrong enemy – the Palestinians – instead of prioritising Iran and Hizbullah.

"The Mossad is not Murder Inc, like the Mafia; its goal is not to take vengeance on its enemies," he wrote this week. "'Special operations' like the assassination in Dubai – if this indeed was a Mossad operation – have always accounted for a relatively small proportion of its overall activity. Nevertheless, these are the operations that give the organisation its halo, its shining image. This is ultimately liable to blind its own ranks, cause them to become intoxicated by their own success, and thus divert their attention from their primary mission."

From an official Israeli point of view, the Mossad has an important job to do. Its reputation for ruthlessness and cunning remains a powerful asset, prompting what sometimes sounds like grudging admiration as well as loathing in the Arab world – where a predisposition for conspiracy theories boosts the effect of the disinformation and psychological warfare at which the Israelis are said to excel.

The government's official narrative, of course, is that Hamas is a terrorist organisation that pioneered horrific suicide bombings, fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian targets and – despite occasional signs of pragmatism or readiness for a temporary truce or prisoner swap – remains dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. It refuses to admit that its ever-expanding West Bank settlements remains a significant barrier to peace.

In western countries, including Britain, there was widespread anger at the 1,400 Palestinian casualties of the Gaza war. Barack Obama has declared the occupation "intolerable". Netanyahu heads the most rightwing coalition in Israel's history; his famous quip that the Middle East is a "tough neighbourhood" no longer seems to justify playing dirty.

Yet Israelis, and not just those on the right, worry that their very existence as an independent state is being de-legitimised. And, judging by the jobs section of the Mossad website, there are still plenty of opportunities for Israel's wannabe spies: challenging positions are available for researchers, analysts, security officers, codebreakers and other technical work. Speakers of Arabic and Persian are invited to apply to be intelligence officers.The work involves travel abroad and a "young and unconventional" environment.

It is a novelty of this episode that ordinary Israeli citizens are angry that their identities appear to have been stolen by their own government's secret servants – one reason why the Mossad chief Meir Dagan may find his days are numbered. But it is hard not to detect an undercurrent of popular admiration for the killers of Mabhouh. The day after the sensational CCTV images and passport photos were shown, the Israeli tennis champion Shahar Pe'er reached the quarter-finals of a major international competition in the emirate. "Another successful operation in Dubai," the Ynet website headlined its story.

Ofer Kasti, Haaretz's education correspondent, did not have his passport cloned, but he does bear a striking resemblance to the hit-squad member named as Kevin Daveron. "My mum rang and asked gently if I'd been abroad recently," he wrote. "Friends asked me why I hadn't brought back any cigarettes from the duty free shop in Dubai. I thought I sensed admiring glances in the street. 'Well done,' said an elderly woman who came up to me in the supermarket and clapped me the shoulder. 'You showed those Arabs.'"

Ian Black, The Guardian

Related articles by Zemanta

• The truth about the Mossad (guardian.co.uk)
• Mossad forged my passport to carry out 1979 killing, says Briton (guardian.co.uk)
• Assassins in the spotlight (newstatesman.com)
• Mossad's checkered history (cnn.com)
• In Dubai attack, signs of Mossad shadow war (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• In Dubai attack, signs of Mossad shadow war (msnbc.msn.com)