How I tracked down the man who tracked down Eichmann

This highly valued Mossad operative and Chief of Operations was Polish-born Peter Malkin. In 1960, he was part of a 10-member team who travelled in small groups via Europe to Argentina following a tip that Eichmann had been detected lurking in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Their mission was personally sanctioned by David Ben Gurion.

My introduction to the story of how Eichmann was finally caught started with a telephone call to the Jerusalem apartment where I was based as Middle East correspondent of the Observer.
The voice at the other end identified himself as “Peter” and said he had some paintings that could be of interest to readers.

Intrigued, I asked for and was given an address in nearby Tel Aviv, to where I travelled the following day. What followed next was a treasure trove of surprises. The man who answered the front door was relaxed and kindly looking with thinning hair, about 60 years old. Gently spoken and unobtrusive, he could easily have passed as a friendly bank manager.

He then introduced me to his young wife, wearing a knee- length floral summer dress, who generously announced, “Peter says you are from London, so I have made tea and baked cake with icing because we want you to feel at home.

She stayed in the background while Peter brought out his paintings from Argentina. Realisation dawned on me after he showed a watercolour of his beloved older sister Fruma, killed in a Polish concentration camp, followed by another personal portrait of Eichmann.
“You’re Mossad, aren’t you,” I asked before Peter smiled and nodded, answering, “Yes, but now retired.”

Then for the next six hours, as we drank our tea and finished his wife’s homemade cake, he told me in painstaking detail about his career as a pre-war Haganah resistance fighter, explosives expert, safe breaker, artist and, ultimately, the Mossad agent who grabbed Eichmann by the throat in Buenos Aires.

Eleven days after the kidnapping, a bound, gagged, semi-conscious Eichmann was bundled on to an El Al aircraft and transported to Israel.

The Argentinian airport authorities were told the man on a stretcher was an El Al steward recovering from a hangover.

Once Eichmann was safely on the flight, five members of the team stayed behind in Buenos Aires to tidy up the safe house. Two exited the country by flying to Uruguay.

Others took a train to Chile. Their lasting regret was how they also tried and failed to capture Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death”, who drowned off the Brazilian coast in 1979. “We missed him by a month”, Peter told me. His account of the Eichmann kidnapping was published in the Observer’s magazine and generated massive interest from readers demanding a follow-up. Nothing happened, however, because Peter vanished, never to be seen again. Telephone calls to his number went unanswered and revisiting the Malkins’ Tel Aviv home, a mere 45 minutes drive away from Jerusalem, proved just as unsuccessful.

Their immediate neighbour turned out to be an irate Israeli housewife, who insisted I was confused because the next-door home had been empty for the previous six years.

The mystery deepened in Jerusalem where nobody from the Israeli foreign ministry was available to answer questions about Peter and his family.

Why he disappeared remains a mystery. I thought we had forged a bond but perhaps he revealed too much in those six hours and was concerned for his own security.

Peter Malkin died in 2005 with his obituary published in the New York Times and other newspapers across the world. The film The Man who Captured Eichmann was based on his book Eichmann In My Hands. Another 2018 film, Operation Finale, starring Ben Kingsley as Eichmann, came out in 2018.

Peter’s haunting last words before disappearing are still as relevant today as they were in 1991. Back then in Tel Aviv he told me in his soft-spoken voice that he was only talking to me to safeguard against future Eichmanns. “His war crimes, his against humanity must never be forgotten, if only for the sake of our children, our children’s children and all future generations.”

It is important to preserve an understanding of the particular characteristics of Eichmann’s appalling crimes. Whereas Dr Josef Mengele took a perverse delight in carrying out so-called medical “experiments” on his victims before their inevitable murder, Eichmann’s wickedness was of a different sort: he revelled in the dry, logistical orchestration of cold-blooded, industrial mass murder (which Hannah Arendt famously called the “banality of evil”).
Many, including mothers and children, were simply shot in the back of the head. Others met their end in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka.

Given Peter’s last words, it is hard for me not to think about the Eichmann story in the light of the current war in Ukraine. The invading Russians have not set up gas chambers or similar, and it does not appear that a single Russian politician, administrator or military officer — with the exception of Vladimir Putin himself — can be held responsible as the Eichmann-style “architect” of the death toll that mounts on a daily basis.

However, in other respects, Russia’s tactic of trying to crush Ukraine’s spirit resembles the war strategies of the Nazis.

The cold-blooded executions of civilians and POWs in Bucha, repeated bombings of cities such as Kyiv and Kharkiv and the random killings of civilians elsewhere, all conjure up parallels with Nazi war crimes, if not the Final Solution itself.

Wherever you look, however, the resonances are hard to ignore. One of Russia’s recent targets has been the city of Lviv, once part of Poland and close to the site of the Janowska concentration camp where between 35,000 and 40,000 Soviet and Polish Jews were murdered.

How tragic it would be if the memorial to their deaths now has to be extended to include an additional record of Ukrainians killed by Russian forces in 2022, six decades after Eichmann was finally brought to justice and hanged in Jerusalem.

Shyam Bhatia was the Middle East correspondent for the Observer newspaper between 1987 and 1997