The Art of Nazi Hunting: How Israel’s Mossad Found Adolf Eichmann
“Operation Finale: The Story of the Capture of Eichmann” is a museum exhibition that chronicles the secret Mossad operation that stalked and captured Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann from his refuge in Buenos Aires, and smuggled him to Israel to stand trial for his role in organizing the Final Solution. Eichmann was the chief logistician of the Holocaust, and the exhibit at the University of Tel Aviv is satisfying in every possible way: Not only seeing justice done, but laying eyes on the homespun artifacts of early spycraft that made it happen, like the stubby metal needle that administered a sedative before the prisoner was led, dressed in the uniform of a flight navigator, up the staircase of the El Al plane that carried him across the Atlantic.
The exhibit, at The Museum of the Jewish People, has it all: The soft leather briefcase with a camera hidden inside, its shutter activated by a button on the bottom pressed by an Israeli agent who pretended to happen by the house on Garibaldi Street on day in 1960, inquiring about investments in the area. Here are the black and white images, captured at an upward angle, of the man calling himself Ricardo Klement: A thing bald figure gesturing with arms akimbo, some quality of arrogance on display along with the actual prints, their negatives, and even the cardboard sleeve of the Buenos Aries photo shop that developed them — “Optica ‘Florida’ Argentina 1960.”
The agents didn’t think it was Eichmann. But their sneaked photos were compared with a civilian portrait and the photo from his SS file - both also on display - by forensic experts who knew what to look at: Ears really don’t change. One expert sketched an oval of a head with 10 points of commonality enumerated on a piece of paper either brown in 1960 or faded since to that shade, like the Mossad file on Eichmann himself, code-named “Dybbuk,” Yiddish for an evil spirit that penetrates the soul.
The 11 agents dispatched to bring Dybbuk to Israel were a mix of Mossad, the intelligence agency that works overseas, and Shabak, Israel’s domestic security office, which had to be called on for help. “Besides being the Eichmann story this is the story of the evolution of the Mossad,” says Avinoam Armoni, chief executive of the museum, known in Israel as Beit Hatfutsot. Mossad — the massive organization whose hand critics see behind many a mysterious death abroad - was not all that back then. Its original mission was mostly getting Jews out of other countries and into newly established Israel.