Rafi Eitan, a legendary Israeli Mossad spy who led the capture of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, died on Saturday. He was 92.
Eitan was one of the founders of Israel’s vaunted intelligence community and among its most prominent figures in Israel and abroad.
“Rafi was among the heroes of the intelligence services of the state of Israel on countless missions on behalf of the security of Israel,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “His wisdom, wit and commitment to the people of Israel and our state were without peer.”
The 1960 operation to capture Eichmann in Argentina and bring him to trial in Jerusalem was Mossad’s most historic mission and remains one of the defining episodes in Israel’s history.
His trial brought to life the horrors of the Nazi Final Solution, which followed Eichmann’s blueprint for liquidating the entire Jewish population of Europe. Eichmann was convicted in 1961 of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was hanged the following year — the only time Israel has carried out a death sentence. Known as the “architect of the Holocaust” for his role in co-ordinating the Nazi genocide policy, Eichmann fled Germany after World War II and assumed the name Ricardo Klement in Argentina.
Eitan, who headed the seven-man team on the ground, grabbed Eichmann on the way back to his Buenos Aires home, shoved him into a car and spirited him to a safe house. In the back seat of the car, one agent shoved a gloved hand inside Eichmann’s mouth in case he had a cyanide pill hidden in a tooth, as some former top Nazis were known to have to foil their capture. Eitan identified Eichmann by searching his body for distinctive scars on his arm and stomach. “And once I felt it I was convinced. This is the man — we got Eichmann,” he recalled years later.
Read the article in The Australian (AP).