Sixty years ago last month, on the evening of May 23, 1960, the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion made a brief but dramatic announcement to a hastily-summoned session of the Knesset in Jerusalem:
A short time ago, Israeli security services found one of the greatest of the Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible, together with the Nazi leaders, for what they called “the final solution” of the Jewish question, that is, the extermination of six million of the Jews of Europe. Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel under the terms of the law for the trial of Nazis and their collaborators.
In the cabinet meeting immediately preceding this announcement, Ben-Gurion’s ministers had expressed their astonishment and curiosity.
“How, in what way, where?” urged the transport minister, lapsing into Yiddish: “vi makht men dos?” (“How does one do that?”) Ben-Gurion deflected the query: “That is why we have a security service.”
What the prime minister had deliberately refrained from telling his cabinet was that a combined team from the Mossad and the Shin Bet, Israel’s two most secret services, had located Eichmann in a Buenos Aires suburb where he’d been living under a false identity. Nor did he divulge to them that the agents had grabbed Eichmann off a dark street and kept him in a safehouse for nine days. Or that the team had secreted a sedated Eichmann, disguised as an ill-disposed steward, onto an El Al plane bound for Israel.
