Israeli Spy Who Captured Holocaust Architect Eichmann Dies At 92

Rafael (Rafi) Eitan, the person most closely associated with the 1960 capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, died in Israel on March 23. He was 92. Born on a kibbutz in 1926, Eitan served as a soldier in the pre-state Palmach, where he participated in several high-profile attacks against British forces, and later in intelligence positions in the nascent Israel Defense Forces. Afterwards, he moved to the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and it was in this position that he was assigned to lead the team that manhandled Eichmann into a car on a Buenos Aires street. Eichmann was spirited out of Argentina, flown to Israel for trial and hanged in 1962. Eitan also held positions in the Mossad, and after leaving to go into business, he was called back to government service as then-prime minister Menachem Begin’s adviser on counter-terrorism. He was soon appointed to head an obscure Defense Ministry department called the Bureau for Scientific Relations, where, using a senior air force officer, he recruited Jonathan Pollard, a civilian analyst for the US Navy, to spy for Israel. Pollard was arrested and in 1987 was sentenced to life in a US federal prison for espionage, being released in 2015. Israel apologized to Washington and claimed that Eitan had been running Pollard as part of a rogue operation, although years later, Eitan claimed that knowledge of the operation had reached the highest levels of government prior to Pollard’s arrest. There are reports, never confirmed, that while he was running Pollard, he was advising MI6, Britain’s external intelligence agency, in its ongoing operations against the Irish Republican Army. After again leaving government service and returning to the private sector, Eitan established and led a political party of pensioners. The party made it into the Knesset in 2006, and he served as minister of pensioner affairs until the next elections, in 2009, when the party failed to pass the electoral threshold. Thereafter, Eitan – a loquacious man with a wry sense of humor – was from time to time consulted by the media for his views on current events.